For the first time since she took office 14 years ago, Angela Merkel visited the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Her trip to Poland and to the former concentration camp comes amid rising anti-Semitic incidents in Germany.
Merkel made the trip to “commemorate the victims of the National Socialist crimes and remember Germany’s everlasting responsibility for the Shoah,” a a German government spokesperson, according to CNN.
During her visit, Merkel commented that the “suffering at Auschwitz was unfathomable.”
“It was a German extermination camp, operated by Germans, and I place value on stressing this fact, it is important that we clearly identify the perpetrators, we Germans owe this to the victims and we owe it to ourselves,” Merkel said.
While in Poland, the chancellor also visited the Birkenau concentration camp, located just a mile from Auschwitz, according to Fox. She was joined by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and President Andrzej Duda.
Merkel took time during her visit to announce that the German government would be providing 60 million euros, or $67 million, to help conserve the memorial, according to NBC. During the event, Bogdan Stanislaw, an Auschwitz survivor, shared his memories of the camp from when he was 12.
“In January 1945 we were rushed to the railway station — I was rushing to the bath holding my mother’s hands. We were asking when will (we) be free?,” he said. “The older inmates would laugh at us and said ‘can you see the chimneys?’ This is the way to get out. There is no other way out.’”
In the years since the end of World War II, only three German chancellors have visited Auschwitz, the first of which was Helmut Schmidt in 1977.
According to Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, the head of the Center for Research on anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin, Merkel’s visit is a statement and is very significant.
“After the attempted mass murder of Jews in Halle all must be done that underlines the determination of the German authorities to combat anti-Semitism practically and symbolically wherever they can,” historian Wolf Kaiser told CNN.