Merkel joins US vets & Jewish survivors marking 70th anniversary of Dachau liberation

WATCH: German Chancellor Merkel says marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, “There were unfathomable horrors everywhere. They all admonish us to never forget. No, we will never forget.”

 

Germans will never forget the “unfathomable horrors” that the Nazis inflicted at the death camps, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and camp survivor Max Mannheimer (in wheelchair) prepare to lay a wreath at Dachau, Sunday – Photo: AP

In a moving speech to 120 elderly survivors from 20 nations and six U.S. soldiers who helped liberate the camp, Merkel said Dachau and other death camps freed near the end of World War II stand as eternal reminders of the Nazi regime’s brutality. Dachau is now a memorial with 800,000 annual visitors.

“These former concentration camps have come into public focus in recent weeks with the passing of the 70th anniversaries of the liberation of one camp after another,” Merkel, who in 2013 became the first German leader to visit Dachau, said in a somber ceremony at the camp.

“There were unfathomable horrors everywhere,” she said. “They all admonish us to never forget. No, we will never forget. We’ll not forget for the sake of the victims, for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations.”

The Nazis set up Dachau in March 1933, weeks after Adolf Hitler took power, to detain political rivals. It became the prototype for a network of camps where six million Jews were murdered, as well as Roma (Gypsies), Russians, Poles and homosexuals.

 

View original Israel Hayom publication at: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=25215

 

Never Forget Never Again