Commemoration of the victims of National Socialism

Today, representatives of city society came together to commemorate the millions of people murdered by the National Socialist regime on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

City Council Chairman Jens Thomas and Lord Mayor Thomas Nitzsche laid a wreath. Here are the words of the Lord Mayor:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

When we came together here a year ago to commemorate the victims of National Socialism, the threat of war in Ukraine was already real. Russia had been deploying its troops on the border with Ukraine for weeks.

But hardly anyone expected that a few days later Russia would launch a war of aggression on a broad front, which has now been going on for almost a year. Since then, Europe has been looking into an abyss that hardly anyone would have thought possible after the end of the Second World War.
The war has so far claimed over 7,000 civilian victims, including around 500 children. Well over 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers have lost their lives, while the number of Russian soldiers killed is close to 100,000, depending on the source. However, it is not important how high the numbers are, but rather that a murderous war is taking place in Europe. There were repeated reports of war crimes that were hardly thought possible.
A few days ago, the German government decided to supply battle tanks to Ukraine in an alliance with its European partners and the USA, in addition to the extensive military and humanitarian aid it has provided to date.
Why am I beginning my speech on "Remembrance Day for the Victims of National Socialism" with this topical reference? My point here is not whether the delivery of the tanks is right or wrong or whether the decision should have been made earlier.
What is important to me is that when weighing up political decisions in Germany, it must always be taken into account that 84 years ago the worst war of the 20th century started on German soil and that the Holocaust was a systematic extermination of human beings on an unprecedented scale.
On the other hand, it was the massive resistance of the Allies, the military resistance, that brought about the collapse of the National Socialist regime. And the question remains unanswered to this day: Could earlier intervention by the Allies and less appeasement policy have prevented the almost indescribable crimes of National Socialism?

Don't get me wrong: this is not about equating Putin's regime with Hitler's, but about reacting appropriately to what is happening in Ukraine today. The German crimes of the 20th century must not be ignored.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The death toll in this camp amounted to around 1.1 million people, approximately one fifth of the total of 5.6 million murdered Jews.
Among those murdered in Auschwitz were around 160,000 non-Jewish victims, mainly Sinti and Roma, Poles and homosexuals. 900,000 people were murdered in gas chambers immediately upon arrival, while a further 200,000 died from illness, malnutrition, abuse, medical experiments or forced labor.
Around 60,000 prisoners were "evacuated" before the Soviet army arrived, i.e. some were shot and most were driven westwards on death marches. The troops encountered around 7,000 living prisoners, many of whom died in the following days and weeks as a result of the concentration camp treatment despite receiving medical care.
Auschwitz became the epitome of industrialized killing, the mass murder of Jews. The Soviet army also liberated the extermination camps Treblinka, Sobidor, Belzec, Chelmmno, Majdanek in what is now Poland and Bronnaya Gora and Maly Trostinez in what is now Belarus. An estimated 1.8 million people died in these camps, most of them Jews. In Treblinka alone, there were at least around 900,000 people.
The human transports in trains rolled eastwards from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy, Norway and Germany.

A third of the dead in the extermination camps, namely in Auschwitz, were killed with hydrogen cyanide, the poison gas of the biocide Zyklon B. In the other extermination camps, the Germans killed with carbon monoxide, engine exhaust fumes.
The numbers mentioned are unimaginable, they are beyond human comprehension. What actually happened there?
Raul Hilberg described what happened in the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau in his standard work "The Extermination of the European Jews":

"After the deportation trains were unloaded, the selection took place; the old, the sick and occasionally small children were already sorted out on the ramp. In the Auschwitz main camp, the old and sick were taken to the gas chambers on trucks, while able-bodied people were first sent to work.
The selection was superficial; those who arrived were herded past the doctor, who pointed in one of two directions: either to the work detail or immediately to the gas chamber. Regular selections also took place in the camps themselves (for example on the roll call area and in the camp hospital).
The men and women assigned to the gas chamber had to undress, whereby the impression was created that the clothes would be returned after the announced communal showering. To deceive them, to avoid panic and to speed up the process, the guards claimed, for example, that they should hurry, otherwise the water in the showers or the soup after the showers would get cold.
The victims discovered in the gas chambers that the supposed showers did not work. After closing the doors, the guards switched off the electric lights.

An SS man wearing a special gas mask opened the lid of the chute in the ceiling and poured Zyklon B pellets onto the floor of the gas chamber. The highly volatile hydrogen cyanide outgassed from the pellets and spread throughout the room.
In a panic, the stronger people pushed down the weaker ones, pushed away from where the pellets had been thrown, stood on people who had fallen over or were lying down in order to reach layers of air free of poison gas. Unconsciousness or death occurred in the first victims near the drop point after about two minutes. The screaming stopped and the dying fell on top of each other, provided there was enough space. After fifteen minutes, everyone in the gas chamber was dead.
The SS let the gas escape and after about half an hour the prisoners' special commando opened the door. The bodies were piled up in a tower, some in a sitting or half-sitting position, with children and elderly people at the bottom.
There was an empty space where the gas had been thrown, as the people had retreated from there. A cluster of people were pressed against the entrance door, which they had tried to open.
The corpses' skin was pink, some of them had foam on their lips or nosebleeds. Some of the corpses were covered in excrement and urine, and some of the pregnant women had given birth. Special Jewish commandos wearing gas masks first had to clear away the corpses at the door to clear the way.
Then they had to hose down the corpses and pull them apart. If the women's hair had not yet been shorn, they now had to cut it and wash it in ammonia solution before packing it up. In all the camps, the body cavities were searched for hidden valuables and the gold teeth were extracted. Finally, the bodies were transported to the crematoria."

Ladies and gentlemen,
As terrible as it is to look back on this past, we also know that this was only part of the Holocaust. At least around 1.3 million Jews died in systematic shootings. Most of them were murdered near their homes in occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and the Soviet Union, today's Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
By the end of 1941, the year of the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, the Germans had murdered around 500,000 Jews in this way, around a fifth of the 2.5 million Soviet Jews in the occupied territories.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews died in other concentration camps, in ghettos and during forced labor.

The "Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism" has been observed as a day of remembrance in Germany since 1996. The commemoration includes all victims of the Nazi regime: Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals, political dissidents, men and women of the resistance, scientists, artists, journalists, prisoners of war and deserters, forced laborers.

When we come together today, there is no one among us who experienced the dictatorship of National Socialism for themselves or was even a victim of this regime. 78 years after the end of the Second World War, the possibility of survivors being able to tell us directly about their experiences is closing. However, there are many individual fates that have been passed down to us that make the suffering that took place accessible and comprehensible, perhaps even understandable. A personal connection can strengthen us against the danger of a repetition of what happened back then and against new, contemporary forms of inhumanity.

Even 78 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp, we still have to deal with anti-Semitism and other forms of group-based misanthropy. Attempts at historical revisionism are latent and radicalization, especially in social media, are an expression of a social climate that creates a breeding ground for violence.

A great deal of commitment is still needed to ensure that the events and crimes of National Socialism and the Second World War are not forgotten. Efforts and awareness are still needed to ensure that we stand up for human rights and human dignity in our daily actions. They are the basis for the peaceful coexistence of mankind. Let us continue to act together!