Conflicts & War

Germans still bear guilt for decisions that led to Holocaust, president says

Berlin, Oct 18 (EFE).- Germans bear with the “guilt” for the decisions that led to the murder of millions of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, president Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Monday to mark the 80th anniversary of the first deportation of Jews from Berlin.

“We Germans still bear the guilt of the perpetrators, collaborators and those that supported the organized killing of Jews in Europe,” he said.

“In all parts of the German Reich, there began in October 1941 the systematic deportation of the Jewish population,” he added at the Grunewald train station.

The first deportation train that left Berlin-Grunewald on 18 October 1941 transported thousands of Jewish children, women and men to the Polish city of Lodz.

It was a prelude to the mass deportation of Europe’s Jews to ghettos and later the concentration and death camps that Germany’s Nazi regime installed across central and eastern Europe.

Steinmeier alluded to the conference of top Nazi leaders where the decision was made to exterminate the Jews and said that an “act of barbarism” was transformed into a “bureaucratic administrative procedure that still leaves us without words.”

“It shows us how many people were involved, how many people knew about it, how many people had to have more than a suspicion about what was going to happen to the Jews, that they were going to be eliminated,” insisted the German president.

An estimated six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.EFE

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