The president of the German parliament called on Germans to actively stand up to all forms of right-wing extremism, speaking on the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"It is these people who set an example and demonstrate courage," Bundestag President Norbert Lammert said in remarks commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Memorial Day falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.
His comments follow a move to set up a parliamentary inquiry into a series of murders of nine foreign immigrants and a policewoman by an underground neo-Nazi gang. This week, a survey conducted in Germany also found that 20 percent of Germans had latent anti-Semitic feelings. "That is 20 percent too many," said Lammert.
The ceremony was also attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff.
Norway on Friday also offered for the first time a long-delayed apology for the country's complicity in the deportation and deaths of Jews during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
A survivor remembers
In a moving speech in the Bundestag, the prominent Polish-born German literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, reminded parliament of the systematic torture and organized mass murder of European Jews launched by Germany under Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.
Reich-Ranicki, who is 91 and frail, grew up in a Jewish family and later survived the Nazi purge of the Warsaw ghetto.
"They had only one goal; they had only one purpose - death," he said referring to Nazi claims at the time that they were simply resettling Jews. » | Author: Gregg Benzow (dpa, AP, AFP) | Editor: Nancy Isenson | Friday, January 27, 2012
