Holocaust commemoration: Steinmeier to Musk: Responsibility knows no conclusion

80 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier emphasized Germany’s lasting responsibility for the Holocaust and opposed any relativization. What happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other German concentration camps under the Nazi rule, “this is part of our history and thus also part of our identity, with which we have to deal with,” he said during a tour of the former camp, in the Between 1940 and 1945 more than a million people were murdered – especially Jews.

He also reacted to a statement by the US billionaire Elon Musk, who had criticized in a video message for an AfD election campaign event at the weekend that Germany was “too much focus on past guilt”. When asked by a journalist, he said in Auschwitz: “I don’t think Mr. Musk is waiting for my advice. But my conviction remains: Responsibility knows no line.” Whoever thinks that one can now make a line underneath, he recommends that “to come here now and to find the conversation with survivors”.

Steinmeier, together with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Federal Council President Anke Rehlinger, takes part in the ceremony for the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The country has never been represented so prominently at such a commemoration. “Auschwitz stands for the monstrosity of an unprecedented human crime,” said Steinmeier.