Nazi crimes are part of our identity says Schroeder

Germany will live up to its “moral obligation” to keep alive the memory of the Nazis’ crimes as part of the nation’s identity, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said today.

“There can be no compensation for the scale of the horror, the torture and the suffering that took place in the concentration camps,” Mr Schroeder said in Berlin.

He stressed that the memory of the Nazi genocide “is part of our national identity” and that “remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation. We owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves.”

Mr Schroeder paid tribute to the victims of the Auschwitz death camp, liberated 60 years ago this week, where between one and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews – perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease.

Overall, six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Germany’s national Holocaust memorial is due to open in May next to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as “a signal against forgetting”.

Mr Schroeder also pledged for German leaders to protect the country’s growing Jewish community “with the power of the state against the anti-Semitism of the incorrigible”.

President Horst Koehler will represent Germany on Thursday when world leaders gather at Auschwitz in Poland to mark its liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.