Jan29,2020:The “evil spirits” of racism and anti-Semitism are re-emerging, the presidents of Germany and Israel warned in Berlin on Wednesday as they marked 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Speaking at a special parliamentary session in the Bundestag, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germans had a responsibility to never forget their Nazi past and to stop hatred from spreading.
“The evil spirits of the past are reappearing today under a new guise,” he said.
“More still, they are presenting their ethno-nationalist, authoritarian thinking as a vision, as a better answer to the questions of our time.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin echoed those concerns in his own speech, warning that the continent was being “visited by ghosts from the past”.
“Ugly and extreme anti-Semitism is hovering over the whole of Europe,” Rivlin told German lawmakers.
Both men were speaking after attending high-profile anniversary events in Jerusalem and at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in recent days.
The solemn occasions were dominated by fresh fears over the safety of Jews in Europe, more than seven decades after the Nazis murdered over six million Jews during World War II.
Sitting in the audience in Berlin were MPs from the far-right AfD party, whose leaders have openly railed against Germany’s remembrance culture and its ongoing atonement for the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Leading AfD lawmaker Alexander Gauland in 2018 described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird shit” in German history.
Quoting Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Steinmeier warned: “It happened, so it can happen again.”
Rivlin was only the second Israeli president to speak at the German parliament’s annual remembrance event, after Shimon Peres in 2010.
