Who is commemorating what?

The Jews of the German capital had to board the trains of the German Reichsbahn in Berlin-Grunewald and in the Moabit Railway Station before everyone’s eyes. In Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz they were unloaded and gassed. Without the organisation and execution of the genocide by the German state in all its branches, 6 million Jews could not have been murdered throughout Europe by the spring of 1945.

 This is only the half-truth.

The whole truth is that the persecution and extermination of the Jews was not just a matter for the state. “Germany without Jews”, the national program of NSDAP and SS, was only possible because the German “Volksgemeinschaft” enthusiastically, through action and complicity, and passively, by looking the other way and profiting, took care of the murder of the European Jews. Apart from a few – notable – exceptions, the genocide was the concern of the entire German people. State and society were united in anti-Semitism.

Since the proclamation of the day of remembrance by German President Professor Herzog on January 3, 1996, the victims of the Holocaust have been honoured in the German Bundestag every year on January 27 – anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – in accordance with the day of remembrance of the United Nations. In its constitution as a sovereign, the German people should remember the crimes they committed at the time honour the victims and acknowledge the historical responsibility and liability arising from this. So far the expectation.

For us:

Our dead should be kept in our memory forever, kept in our consciousness. זָכוֹר – לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח     We remember. Only those who are finally forgotten have definitely died.

Those who conceived, carried out, supported and covered up the crime, their name and memory shall be blotted out forever. ימח שמם וזכרם. May their name and memory be blotted out.

Prescription of the murder does not exist. Nobody is allowed to forget.

As for forgiveness: only the dead could forgive.

If, in the 80th year of the Wannsee Conference, after all that crime, anti-Semitism continues to grow and thrive in Germany, then this country has a serious endemic problem.