Merkel’s ‘shame’ on her first tour of Auschwitz

GERMAN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel voiced a feeling of “deep shame” during her first visit to the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered more than a million people.

She noted that her visit comes amid rising anti-Semitism and historical revisionism and vowed that Germany would not tolerate anti-Semitism.

She said Germany remains committed to remembering the crimes that it committed against Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti (Romany), homosexuals and others.

Speaking to a gathering that included former Auschwitz inmates, she said she felt “deep shame in the face of the barbaric crimes committed by Germans here”.

“Nothing can bring back the people who were murdered here.

“Nothing can reverse the unprecedented crimes committed here.

“These crimes are and will remain part of German history and this history must be told over and over again,” she said.

She called such responsibility a key element in German national identity today.

Ms Merkel brought a donation of 60 million euros which will help conserve the remnants of the site – the barracks, watchtowers and personal items like shoes and suitcases of those killed.

The objects endure as evidence of German atrocities and as one of the world’s most recognisable symbols of humanity’s capacity for evil. But they also are deteriorating under the strain of time and mass tourism, prompting a long-term conservation effort.

Accompanied by Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Ms Merkel began by seeing a crematorium and walked under the gate with the notorious words

Arbeit Macht Frei (“work will set you free,”) where inmates were subjected to either immediate execution, painful scientific experiments or forced labour.

Ms Merkel and Mr Morawiecki went next to the site of executions, where they bowed their heads before two wreaths bearing their nations’ colours.

The stay lasting several hours also included a visit to the conservation laboratory, where old leather shoes were laid out on a table, and a laying of candles at Birkenau, the part of the vast complex where Jews were subjected to mass murder in gas chambers.

The donation to the Auschwitz Foundation comes in addition to 60 million euros that Germany donated when the fund was launched a decade ago. That brings the total German donation to 120 million euros and makes Germany by far the most generous of 38 countries that have contributed.