As neo-Nazi attacks against foreigners continue throughout Germany, condemnations of the far-right extremism are growing louder and more prominent.
On Sunday, an Israeli Cabinet minister joined close to 8,000 Germans at a demonstration against neo-Nazism at the site of a Jewish memorial destroyed by arsonists two weeks before.
Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni told a rally at the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp that widespread protests over the arson attack meant no Germans could claim they did not know about right-wing violence and anti-Semitism, as they had during the Nazi era.
Speaking in Hebrew, Aloni said the destruction of the barracks at Sachsenhausen where Jewish prisoners had been held could not harm the 10,000 Jews who perished there.
“But this crime could serve as a powerful warning to all of us: Never again hatred of foreigners, never again anti-Semitism.”
Destroyed in the arson incident was a new Jewish museum and memorial to the dead.
The rally came a day after Chancellor Helmut Kohl proclaimed that “hatred of foreigners and anti-Semitism are shameful for our country.”
Kohl spoke in a television address commemorating the second anniversary of the reunification of Germany, a merger that has brought in its wake a rising tide of right-wing assaults against foreigners as well as anti-Semitic acts.
GERMAN FUTURE ‘IN DANGER’
A warning note was also sounded Sunday by noted Israeli writer Amos Oz.
“The fire at Sachsenhausen may have been laid to erase Germany’s terrible past,” he said. “But it is not the past that burns in Sachsenhausen. No, it is the German present and German future that are in danger of catching fire.”
Oz was speaking to an audience that included German President Richard von Weizsacker when he accepted the country’s most important literary award, the Peace Prize, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Most of Oz’s books have been translated into German.
At the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, Aloni said that the creation of the State of Israel had provided “a place of refuge for our people. And we will defend ourselves when necessary.
“But at the same time,” she said, “we will struggle everywhere against the terrible manifestations of hatred against people on the grounds of color, ethnic origin or cultural background.”
Aloni laid a wreath at the site of the destroyed memorial in the presence of a crowd that included Berlin Mayor Eberhardt Diepgen and Manfred Stolpe, prime minister of the state of Brandenburg, where Sachsenhausen is located.
“Today, I have been among friends who came to protest against the barbaric attacks of the neo-Nazis,” Aloni said. “I had a good feeling that people really care — at least those who turned up here.”
That may have been an indirect barb at Kohl, who some here feel has acted with insufficient vigor against neo-Nazi attacks. When a vice minister in the Chancellor’s Office sought to convey Kohl’s greetings to the Sachsenhausen rally, the crowd responded with loud jeers.
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