Merkel voices feeling of ’deep shame’ at Auschwitz

(6 Dec 2019) German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced a feeling of “deep shame“ during her first-ever visit on Friday to the hallowed grounds of the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered more than a million people. Merkel noted that her visit comes amid rising anti-Semitism and historical revisionism and vowed that Germany would not tolerate anti-Semitism. She said Germany remains committed to remembering the crimes that it committed against Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and others. Speaking to a gathering that included former Auschwitz inmates, she said she felt “deep shame in the face of the barbaric crimes committed by Germans here.“ “To keep alive the memory of the crimes committed, to identify the perpetrators and to commemorate the victims in a dignified manner, that is our German responsibility,“ she said. She called such responsibility a key element in German national identity today.