President Chaim Herzog sent messages of greetings yesterday to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
The message to Gorbachev said that the people of Israel will never forget the role### the Red Army in helping to defeat the Nazis and the help that it gave the victims who survived the Holocaust. In his message to the Queen, Herzog noted the courage of the British people in fighting the forces of evil.
In events yesterday marking the defeat of Nazi Germany, Ambassador Niels Hanssen of West Germany laid a wreath at the Yad Vashem Memorial. He said, after a brief ceremony at which he was accompanied by a group of West German visitors to Israel, that he had laid the wreath “because on this day we think of what happened during the 12 Nazi years– all that had been done by Germans, in the name of Germans, to the Jews.”
‘WE GERMANS DO NOT WANT TO FORGET’
Continuing, Hanssen declared: “We Germans do not want to forget it, and we feel responsible for it regardless of the generation. This is the attitude not only of official Germany, of my government and the Federal President, but it is my conviction that this opinion is shared by the overwhelming majority of the Germans at large.
“I think it is symbolic that a group of German visitors laid a wreath at Yad Vashem together with me.”
At the Yad Eliahu stadium in Tel Aviv, delegations from 40 countries gathered for the main ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.
AN OBLIGATION TO LEARN A LESSON
Addressing 3,000 people assembled in the sports arena, Premier Shimon Peres declared, “I believe that the triumph in the second World War was the greatest military victory ever know in history. But not less than that, it was not just a military victory but a moral victory for all mankind.”
The Premier added, “We all bear a sacred obligation to learn a lesson: No more yellow patch; no more death march; no more final solution. In the spirit of the tradition of our deceased brothers who commanded us to live, for our children and those who come after us, let us decide to take action, to prevent discrimination, to wipe out hatred and route terrorism.”
At the same rally, Education Minister Yitzhak Navon, a former President of Israel, formally announced the grant of “commemorative citizenship of Israel” to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and to the Righteous Gentiles who helped other Jews escape and who died for their efforts.
Speakers at the rally included Mayor Edward Koch of New York; the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis; and the Israel Defense Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Moshe Levy.
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