On Monday, January 27, 2025, the Federal President and Mrs. Büdenbender attended the ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the former German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Poland. They were accompanied by a large high-ranking delegation from politics and society, including survivors Pavel Taussig (* 1933 in Bratislava, Slovakia, as the child of a Jewish father) and Christian Pfeil (* 1944 in Lublin, Poland, as the child of a German Sinti family). After flying from Berlin to Katowice and being received by the German Ambassador to Warsaw, Viktor Elbling, the motorcade first went to the Auschwitz main camp, where there was a conversation between the survivors, the Federal President, and the Federal Chancellor, as well as a wreath-laying ceremony. Afterwards, everyone attended the two-hour memorial ceremony in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to which heads of state and representatives from around the world had traveled. To conclude, the Federal President gave an interview to the “Heute Journal,” in which he made clear: “We have our own history, and the Shoah is part of this history and thus also part of our identity. We were fortunate with post-war democracy because the Allies liberated us from National Socialism. They also helped, especially the Americans, to build a post-war democracy – and it stands on a framework that draws lessons from the experience of National Socialism. And this lesson also includes the ‘Never again!’ from Buchenwald. And ‘Never again!’ means that we must not only take precautions to prevent similar events from happening again, but also that we must avoid any kind of relativization of history, any kind of discrediting of memory; and of course, currently, it means that we must oppose the spread of antisemitism in our country. And this is necessary.” The delegation then flew back to Berlin.
Historical background:
On January 27, 1945, troops of the Red Army reached the Auschwitz camp complex and found around 6,000 survivors there. Between 1940 and 1945, the SS deported a total of 1.3 million people to Auschwitz (main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and their sub-camps): 1.1 million Jews, 140,000 Poles, 20,000 Sinti and Roma, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and more than 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities. 960,000 of the approximately 1.1 million murdered in gas chambers were Jewish children, women, and men from all over Europe. Since 1996, January 27 has been the official day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in Germany.
Pavel Taussig’s memories were published in 2022 in the Foundation’s eyewitness series: https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/publikation/ich-habe-den-todesmarsch-ueberlebt/
