Chancellor Scholz pledged to protect Germany’s Jews on Thursday by commemorating the 85th anniversary of the Nazi pogrom on Kristallnacht, amid a resurgence in anti-Semitic acts since the war between Israel and Hamas.
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The Chancellor launched the promise to “never again” tolerate anti-Semitism, “that is a promise that we must keep now,” in the Beth Zion Synagogue in Berlin, which was devastated by the Nazis on the night of November 9th had been destroyed by October 10, 1938, like many other places of worship, shops and Jewish houses.
It is a promise “on which democratic Germany rests,” the leader added.
The ceremony was attended by almost the entire federal government, the chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany Josef Schuster, 102-year-old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer and relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas since the bloody October 7 attack.
“Any form of anti-Semitism poisons our society. Like now with Islamist demonstrations,” emphasized Olaf Scholz.
And to promise to “prosecute all those who support terrorism and are anti-Semitic.”
The Chancellor also recalled that with the entry into force of the new citizenship law, no person who is suspected of anti-Semitism can be naturalized as a German.
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“Historical responsibility”
At the end of October, the German secret service said it had registered around 1,800 anti-Semitic crimes in the country since the surprise attack by the Islamist movement Hamas on October 7th in Israel.
In Berlin, in the Neukölln district with a large population of Arab and Turkish origins, the Samidoun network, which supposedly supports Palestinian prisoners, distributed pastries after October 7 to celebrate “the victory of the resistance.” Samidoun is now banned in Germany.
The Beth Zion Synagogue, where the ceremony took place, was attacked by Molotov cocktails on October 18, causing no damage or injuries.
“Everyone who lives in our country and everyone who wants to live there must be aware of the responsibility that arises from our history towards the Jews,” emphasized Olaf Scholz in a barely veiled allusion to the migrants who recently came to Germany.
More than a million of them came from the Middle East during the 2015-16 refugee crisis.
“Our historical responsibility must be passed on in schools, universities, in vocational training, in integration courses and in everyday life,” he continued.
“So that we, in Germany, a country of immigration, can make ourselves understandable to everyone who comes from countries where we don’t talk about the Shoah or talk about it in a completely different way,” he said. “It’s an absolute necessity.”
Nevertheless, he added: “We must not fall into the trap of those who see the opportunity to blanketly deny more than five million Muslim citizens their place in our society.” An indication of the attention of the extreme right, which is on the rise in Germany advance is.
Austria, which was annexed by Hitler a few months before the pogrom, also commemorated it with a ceremony in parliament, a memorial march and a wreath-laying ceremony in the presence of members of the government and President Alexander Van der Bellen.
In front of representatives of the foreign press who were received at the Hofburg, the head of state then emphasized the “special historical responsibility” of both countries.
“Austrians were also perpetrators of crimes during the Nazi era” and “anti-Semitism has no place in Austria,” he said.
On the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938, the unprecedented violence during Kristallnacht – so called because of the broken glass that littered the streets following vandalism – was portrayed by the Nazi regime as retaliation for the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a Polish Jew.
These pogroms, which sparked international outrage, marked Nazi Germany’s intensification of its persecution of Jews. Six million of them died during the Shoah.