It was with “deep sadness” that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier addressed the hundred Holocaust survivors and more than 40 world leaders and bowed to the memory of the “industrial mass murder of six million Jews, the worst crime of the history of mankind “committed by his countrymen. The speech was given at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem during the ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation from the Auschwitz death camp.
“I wish I could say that we Germans have learned from our history once and for all, but I cannot say it when hate is spreading,” said Steinmeier, the first German president to deliver a speech at Yad Vashem.
“I stand before you and I wish I could say that our memory has made us immune to evil. Yes, we Germans remember it. But sometimes it seems that we understand the past better than the present.”
The German head of state warned of the criminals’ new outfits. “Evil spirits appear today with a new appearance, presenting their anti-Semitism, their nationalism, their authoritarian thinking as an answer for the future – as a new solution to the problems of our time.”
Speaking of the resurgence of hatred, extremism and intolerance, he gave as an example Jewish children who are “spit in the schoolyard” in Germany. He also recalled the anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in the German city of Halle in October. “The words are not the same. The perpetrators are not the same. But it is the same evil.”
“Germany’s historic responsibility will not expire,” he emphasized. “We want to live up to it and they must judge us for that.”
Netanyahu assists batteries
If the theme of the biggest diplomatic meeting ever in Israel was the Holocaust, as well as the resurgence of anti-Semitism, politics ended up taking over the stage, with the Israeli Prime Minister wanting to turn the World Holocaust Forum into an event condemning the Iran’s theocratic regime.
“I invite all governments to unite in the vital effort to confront Iran,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There cannot be another Shoah.”
“We have not yet seen a united and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the only Jewish state.”
On Thursday he said Israel “salutes” Trump “for confronting Tehran tyrants who subjugate their own people and threaten the peace and security of the entire world”.
For Netanyahu if “Auschwitz is the maximum symbol of evil, it is also the maximum symbol of Jewish impotence”. And he said what the main lesson of the Holocaust is: “Israel will do whatever it takes to defend our state, defend our people and defend the future of the Jews”.
The Israeli government opposed the nuclear agreement signed in 2015 between Iran and the five countries with a seat on the UN Security Council, plus Germany. The agreement called for lifting sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limiting uranium enrichment to prevent the regime from making nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu praised Donald Trump for abandoning the agreement in 2018 and for lobbying European powers to follow suit.
In line, US Vice President Mike Pence urged the international community to “stand firm” against Iran, saying it is the only country where Holocaust denial is “state policy”.
For Pence, the Holocaust showed what happens “when the helpless cry out for help and the powerful refuse to respond.” Trump’s deputy – who invited Netanyahu to the White House next week – recalled last year’s visit to Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.
“You can’t walk around the Auschwitz grounds without being overwhelmed with emotion and sadness. You can’t see the piles of shoes, the gas chambers, the crematoriums, without asking, ‘How did you manage?’
Putin defends peace …
Dialogue is what Vladimir Putin proposes. The Russian leader took the opportunity to propose a summit of leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to “defend peace” in the face of global instability. Invited with special honors, the former KGB agent took the stage to try to put his country back in the center of international institutions.
Russia faces international economic sanctions due to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, at war with Kiev. Moscow was also expelled from the group of the most industrialized countries.
“The founding countries of the United Nations, the five states that have a special responsibility to save civilization, can and should be an example,” Putin said at the ceremony. (It should be noted that the People’s Republic of China was not a founding state in the United Nations, having been admitted in 1971 in exchange with the Republic of China, Taiwan).
For Putin, the meeting “would play a big role in seeking collective responses to modern challenges and threats,” he said. The leader suggested that Libya could be on the agenda after the recent peace talks in Moscow and Berlin.
The Russian president “saw a positive reaction” from “several of his colleagues” to his challenge.
… and gets involved in a ‘war’
Putin, who is involved in the war in Syria, said that countries must “do everything to protect and defend peace”. On the Holocaust, “one of the most terrible chapters in the history of mankind”, he pointed out that the crimes of the Nazis, in particular “called the final solution to the Jewish question, is one of the blackest and most shameful pages in modern world history”.
Putin, who has been involved in a dispute with Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda over the historical responsibilities of the peoples and their governments, has again accused others besides the Germans.
“We must not forget that this crime also had accomplices. They were often more cruel than their masters. Death factories and concentration camps were served not only by the Nazis, but also by their accomplices in many European countries.”
Last month, Putin left the Poles in anger after claiming that Poland had conspired with Adolf Hitler and contributed to the outbreak of World War II.
Poland, on the contrary, says that Moscow is rewriting history and trying to forget the non-aggression agreement between Germans and Soviets, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. On Tuesday, the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki accused the USSR of having been a “facilitator” of Nazi Germany.
Putin said the Soviet Union “paid the highest price, more than any other. Twenty-seven million Russians were killed. That’s the price of victory.”
For the Russian president, 40% of Jewish victims of the Holocaust were Soviet citizens, a number that is contested by historians.
Macron Reviews
The French president, who the previous day was involved in a discussion with Israeli security officers, denied any comparison between the Nazi regime and the Iranian one, saying that “the Holocaust cannot be manipulated, nor subject to revisionism or used politically”.
Emmanuel Macron, not to mention Iran, Israel, the United States, or Russia, said that “no one has the right to invoke their dead to justify divisions or contemporary hatred, because everyone who they died obligate us to truth, memory, dialogue and friendship “.
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