Holocaust Day
January 27, 2007
In Berlin, the Greens party laid a wreath at the Pulitzbrücke memorial, with party leader Claudi Roth saying, "we are responsible for battling right-wing extremism, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner attitudes."
Pulitzbrücke was the former railway station used during World War II for the deportation of Berlin's Jews to concentration camps.
Chancellor Angela Merkel urged "all courageous democrats" to fight the rise of the far-right and anti-Semitism in modern Germany as the country remembered the victims of the Holocaust.
A few supporters of the extremist National Democratic Party (NPD) demonstrated outside a meeting of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats in Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border where the chancellor was speaking. "The NPD must be fought by all courageous democrats, and I thank all those who commit themselves to this," Merkel told delegates inside.
The NPD demonstrators were met by a larger number of counter-protesters.
Among other Holocaust memorial activities set to take place around Germany, the government of the state of Saxony Anhalt was holding a ceremony in Salzwedel. The main ceremony in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was set for the town of Malchow.
The prime minister of Brandenburg state, Matthias Platzeck of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), is to attend a ceremony at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site near Oranienburg.
Holocaust Memorial Day will also feature Saturday afternoon in soccer league announcements and in reports by club magazines.
Never Forget
Meanwhile in Brussels, the president of the European parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, said, "We must never forget this abominable and tremendously painful side of this continent's history.
'The crimes committed by the Nazis must be remembered by future generations as a warning against a genocide which should never be repeated," he said.
Pöttering, the newly-elected parliamentary president, added: "On this day, we remember the millions of victims of the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews as well as Roma, Poles, Russians and people of other nationalities.
Continuing the fight against intolerance
"The Holocaust Memorial Day is a day on which we most sharply condemn intolerance and animosity towards other religions and races and every form of anti-Semitism," he said.
The highest measure of political conduct for the European Union is the respect of every person's dignity and human rights throughout the world, Pöttering added.
German Jews start campaign
Germany's Jewish community launched a campaign of full-page newspaper advertisements Saturday to stress the importance of the Holocaust Memorial Day and to attack efforts by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny it.
The advertisements by the Central Council of German Jews warned against the threat emanating from Ahmadinejad, who has stirred controversy with remarks referring to the Holocaust as a "legend."
Ahmadinejad had "many times denied the systematic disfranchisement, deportation and factory-scale annihilation of millions of European Jews," the advertisement said.
It said that the nuclear program pursued by Ahmadinejad and his regime of mullahs posed a "threat not only to the Middle East but the entire world" and demanded that the German government should make no compromises with Iran regarding the issue of atomic weapons.
Holocaust Memorial Day was established in 1996 by former German President Roman Herzog as a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism. The date coincides with the liberation of the biggest concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.