Head bowed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid homage in Jerusalem on Thursday to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and said Germany had a responsibility to confront anti-Semitism and never to forget the Holocaust.
She began a day of meetings between Israeli and German government officials with a visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, where she laid a wreath on a stone slab that contains ashes of death camp victims.
“Almost 80 years ago, on the pogrom night of November 9, Jews in Germany faced unimaginable hate and violence. This was followed by the unprecedented crimes against civilisation in the form of the Shoah,” Merkel, speaking German and using the Hebrew word for Holocaust, said at Yad Vashem.
“Germany has a perpetual responsibility to remember those crimes and to confront anti-Semitism, xenophobia, hate and violence,” she said.
Merkel arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a 24-hour visit as part of annual government-to-government talks between German and Israeli ministers. The chancellor’s conservative party is under pressure from a surge in nationalism and far right violence in Germany which has been fuelled by anger at her decision to welcome more than a million mostly Muslim asylum seekers in 2015.