Germans still bear guilt for Holocaust, President Steinmeier says

BERLIN (AA) - Germany’s president said on Monday that his country still bears the guilt for the systematic murder of Jews by the Nazi regime.

“We Germans still bear a share of the guilt that perpetrators, accomplices and supporters of the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews heaped upon themselves,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech marking the 80th anniversary of Nazi deportations of Jews.

The president attended a commemorative event at Berlin's Grunewald train station, where the systematic deportation of the Jewish population started in 1941.

“To this day we feel ashamed that fellow citizens were taken from the heart of society, harassed, deprived of their rights, expropriated – and finally dispatched on a journey to their death,” he told the participants.

Steinmeier said the crime took place before the eyes of everybody, the exclusion and the picking up took place in the course of everyday German life.

“That is the dreadful truth even if the actual murders and eliminations took place in the conquered and occupied territories in the east,” he said.

About six million Jews are believed to have died during the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany.

Steinmeier expressed regret that in today’s Germany many Jews still face anti-Semitism, and he called for a stronger stance against anti-Semitic hate crimes.

“So, on a day like today and in a place like this, we also say: never again must anti-Semitism be allowed to have a place in our society,” he said.

“Never again must anti-Semitic attitudes and actions be allowed to go unfought or unchallenged.”