A declaration appealing to German parents and teachers to “break their silence over the past,” and teach the younger generations about the occurrences of the Hitler era, was adopted here today, at the close of the tenth German Evangelical Church Congress which attracted 100,000 Germans from West Germany as well as from East Germany.
The declaration was adopted by the Jewish-Christian relations group of the congress, one of the two major study groups organized by the congress. The other seminar concerned political affairs. The Jewish-Christian study group declared in its final statement that the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem “concerns all Germans.”
The group also called for speeding up of the processing of indemnification to victims of Nazism, and demanded that applicants for compensation by victims of Nazism be treated “generously.” One of the principal speakers before the congress, Prof. Krausnick, secretary of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, told the session that the younger people must “know their past in order to understand the contemporary world.”
Nazism, he said, “was “not an inescapable development.” There may have been “dangerous tendencies before 1933,” he stated, “but the German people had its undeniable responsibilities, and these were probably the decisive factors.”
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