German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday asked for “forgiveness” for the “crimes” of his countrymen, during ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
President Steinmeier, the first German head of state to speak at the monument to the Ghetto Heroes during the anniversary, began his address with a sentence in Yiddish – a language once spoken by Jews in central and eastern Europe “that the Germans wanted to eradicate " - calling for such a disaster never to happen again.
“I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes that Germans committed here,” Steinmeier said.
“The appalling crimes that Germans committed here fill me with deep shame. But at the same time it fills me with gratitude and humility that I can take part in this commemoration as the first German head of state ever,” he stated.
An hour earlier, municipal alarm sirens and church bells in Warsaw marked the start of the commemoration of the uprising, which broke out on April 19, 1943 and was the largest and best-known act of Jewish urban resistance against the Nazis during World War II. During the uprising, hundreds of Jewish fighters attacked the Nazis in order to die with their weapons in their hands rather than in an extermination camp.
Steinmeier, his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog, and Polish Head of State Andrzej Duda laid wreaths in front of the monument, opposite the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, located at the site of many of the clashes during the uprising.
“We must remember," President Herzog said, stressing that the memory of the Shoah was "neither postmodernist nor relative," but one of absolute evil, personified by the Nazis and their helpers, and also one of absolute good, personified him by the victims and fighters.
