The Nazis lost ‘all semblance of humanity’, Isaac Herzog tells Germany’s parliament
The Israeli president draws on the 'awful cruelty' of Germany's history and contrasts it with today's friendly relations in a speech to the Bundestag
The Holocaust is an integral part of Israel’s national identity, the country’s president told Germany’s parliament in a speech that mentioned both the Third Reich’s atrocities and the friendly relations that have emerged since.
Isaac Herzog said the Shoah, the systemic murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime, was part of what made his country today “whether we want it or not”.
“A people who carries in its historic memory such a dark, abysmal, impossible experience, is not a people like all peoples,” he said.
“And despite all of this, even if we cannot meet in the realms of memory, we must meet in the realms of meaning and mutual learning. To give meaning to the memory. To treat memory as an obligatory imperative, as a moral imperative, as responsibility.”
Herzog added: “Never in human history was there a campaign like the one the Nazis and their accomplices conducted to annihilate the Jewish people.
“Never in history was a state responsible, as Nazi Germany was responsible, for the loss of all semblance of humanity, for the erasure of all mercy, for the pursuit of the worldwide obliteration, with such awful cruelty, on an entire people.”
He also recounted his late father, the former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, who was part of the British unit that liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945.
“I shall never forget how he described to me the horrors he witnessed. The stench. The human skeletons in striped pyjamas, the piles of corpses, the destruction, the hell on earth,” Isaac Herzog told the Bundestag.
It is the second day of Herzog’s three-day visit to Germany, which began on Monday to mark the anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks.
That attack left 11 Israelis, one German policeman and five members of the Palestinian terror group Black September dead after members of the Israeli Olympic teams were taken hostage
Germany reached a compensation agreement with relatives of the victims last week.
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