OREANDA-NEWS The German Bundestag honored the memory of the victims of National Socialism. «We remember the millions of people who were persecuted, robbed, humiliated, tortured, condemned to death because they thought differently, believed differently, loved differently, or because their lives had no value for the National Socialists», Bundestag Chairman Barbel Bas said on Thursday, January 27, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

«She complained that too few Nazi criminals were brought before the court and too many of them got off with insufficiently severe punishments. The genocide of Jews in Europe is a crime of the Germans, but at the same time it is a past that concerns everyone», Bas stressed.

The head of the German Bundestag strongly condemned anti-Semitism. Stereotypes and prejudices about Jews should not be allowed to spread again, Berbel Bas stressed. 87-year-old Inge Auerbacher, who was born in 1934 in the Baden city of Kippenheim and in 1942 was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where several of her relatives and friends died, spoke at the memorial ceremony. Together with her parents, Auerbacher was liberated by Soviet troops on May 8, 1945, after the war, the family emigrated to the United States.

The former prisoner said that she still remembers «the terrible time of horrors and hatred of Jews». She noted with regret that anti-Semitism has once again become commonplace in many countries, including Germany, and called for «this disease to be cured as soon as possible». «Hatred of people is something terrible. We were all born brothers and sisters. My deepest desire is the reconciliation of all people», Inge Auerbacher said and urged never to forget the past.