Speakers at a commemoration ceremony at the Plötzensee memorial in Berlin, where Germany's war-time Nazi dictatorship carried out many executions, on Sunday warned against historical amnesia amid a rise of the far right.
"We are today again seeing […] how the poison of hatred, racism and exclusion is penetrating and shows itself in social coarsening, not least in language, through violence and conscious playing with the images of Nazi propaganda," Matthias Brandt, son of former chancellor Willy Brandt, said.
Brandt was the main speaker at the event marking the 81st anniversary of an assassination attempt on Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in 1944, about a year before the end of World War II.
He cited a number of racist terms used by the Nazis, noting they were increasingly being used again. Doing nothing to counter this was a decision to look away and to let things run their course, he warned.
Willy Brandt fled to Norway as a young man in 1933 to avoid persecution by the Nazis. He later returned to Germany and was elected chancellor at the head of a centre-left government in 1969.
Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said that Germany could not again be the source of a horror of the kind that it produced in the 1930s. "This is the responsibility of all of us resulting from this debt," she said.
"We should and must say the more unflinchingly and louder, we will not allow the rule of law or democracy to be destroyed again," she said.
On July 20, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg attempted to topple the Nazi regime by planting a bomb in Hitler's military headquarters on the eastern front.
After the plot failed, Stauffenberg and three others were executed the same day, and the Nazi regime carried out a wave of further executions of those suspected of being involved in the plans to bring down the regime.
- Germany
- Failed attempt
- Assassinate Hitler
Source: www.dailyfinland.fi
