President Chaim Herzog said Tuesday night that he was not embarking on a “journey of forgiving and forgetting” but on a trip “symbolic of the victory of the victims of the Holocaust over its perpetrators.”
Herzog, addressing Cabinet Ministers and senior officials in Jerusalem hours before his departure early Wednesday morning on an official 10-day visit to Switzerland and West Germany, was referring to the controversial portion of his trip — the five days he will spend in Germany, beginning next Monday. He will be the first President of Israel to set foot on German soil in official capacity.
His first stop will be the site of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, which the Irish-born Herzog, as an officer in the British army, helped liberate in the final stages of World War II. That is expected to blunt some of the criticism directed at the President by rightwing and nationalist elements in Israel who object to his going to Germany.
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