Kohl Says Nazi Crimes Won’t Be Forgotten

In an emotion-charged ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Chancellor Helmut Kohl said Sunday that Germany carries “never-ending shame” for the Holocaust and will not forget its history.

“Germany bears historical responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi tyranny,” he said. “This responsibility is reflected not least in never-ending shame.”

Wearing a yarmulke, the skullcap worn by devout Jews, Kohl looked out from the steps of the camp memorial at the edge of a meadow where the infamous camp once stood. He told a gathering of about 3,000, including hundreds of camp survivors, that reconciliation with Holocaust victims is only possible if Germans acknowledge their shame.

‘We Must Never Forget’

“We must not nor shall we ever forget the atrocities committed under the Hitler regime, the mockery and destruction of all moral precepts, the systematic inhumanity of the Nazi dictatorship,” he added. “A nation that abandons its history forsakes itself.”

In tone and content, Kohl’s speech was considered one of the most expansive expressions of remorse ever delivered by a West German chancellor. Although different in form, it recalled former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s December, 1970, trip to Warsaw, where Brandt knelt at the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Kohl spoke at the invitation of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany, the major body of West Germany’s 30,000-member Jewish community. His speech was months in preparation.

More than 50,000 Jews, Gypsies and other victims of the Holocaust died at Bergen-Belsen, most of them in the last months of the war. Among those who perished here was a 15-year old Jewish Dutch girl, Anne Frank, whose diary later became one of the most moving and widely read accounts of the Holocaust.

President Reagan delivered his best wishes to the survivors and their families in a special message read by Robert E. Tynes, the American consul in Hamburg. The message was to have been read by U.S. Ambassador Arthur F. Burns who, due to a delay of his flight from Bonn, arrived late at the ceremony.

“The Holocaust is a part of the consciousness of responsible human beings everywhere, no matter what age,” Reagan said in the message. “In a sense we are all its victims, since it forces us to try to come to terms with the time when civilization lost its way.”

Reagan is scheduled to visit Bergen-Belsen on May 5th during his state visit to West Germany. He initially declined Kohl’s suggestion to visit a concentration camp, but last week changed his mind in the face of public pressure, most of it generated by Reagan’s decision to accept another Kohl suggestion to lay a wreath at a German war cemetery.

Kohl’s proposals for Reagan’s visit reflect his effort to reinforce the postwar reconciliation between Germany and its former enemies. This effort was clearly visible in his remarks Sunday.

“We in the free part of Germany realize what it means, following Auschwitz and Treblinka, to have been taken back into the free Western community,” he said. “Those nations did so not least with the justified expectation that we will not disown the crimes perpetrated in the name of Germany against the nations of Europe.

“Today, 40 years later, we continue to acknowledge that historical liability,” Kohl added. “We have learned the lessons of history, especially the history of this century.”

For many camp survivors who listened to Kohl, it marked the first return to the camp since being freed. For them, their families and other Jews, it was an emotionally draining experience.

One young Jewish woman, born after the war, listened as two survivors spoke of their ordeal, then suddenly collapsed in tears. A survivor admitted he hadn’t been able to sleep since deciding to come.

Speaking in Hebrew before a stone monument bearing the Star of David erected on the camp’s first anniversary of liberation, the director of the Organization of Bergen-Belsen Survivors, Dev Zemanovich, now a resident of Israel, explained why they returned.

“We have a commitment to all Jewish blood everywhere,” he said. “We’re loyal to those martyrs whose death gave us life. We must strengthen the consciousness of the Holocaust by visiting the sites in which it occurred.”

In his speech to the gathering, Zemanovich called on the West German government never to impose a statute of limitations on the Nazi war criminals and to help locate those responsible.

“Help us find Josef Mengele and put him on trial before the Jewish people in Israel,” he asked Kohl.

Mengele, named the Angel of Death by Auschwitz prisoners, carried out gruesome medical experiments on prisoners there. He is believed to be alive in South America.

While speeches by Kohl and Werner Nachmann, head of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany, carried messages of reconciliation, some survivors found it hard to reciprocate.

One man, questioned about his experiences by a West German reporter, declined to give his name at the conclusion of the interview. “I’m still afraid,” he explained.

Bergen-Belsen, located on the north German plains 25 miles north of Hannover, was initially used as a prisoner-of-war camp for Belgian and French troops captured in 1940.

In 1941, Russian prisoners were shipped there. During the next two years, thousands of people died there, most of them from starvation.

In 1943, the SS turned Bergen-Belsen into a transit camp for prominent, wealthy Jews, who were able to buy their freedom. In late 1944, with the Soviet army advancing from the East, Hitler ordered Jews from camps in Poland transported there.

Most were transported from Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps in Poland to stay ahead of advancing Soviet forces.

There were neither gas chambers nor ovens at Bergen-Belsen. Most of those who died there starved to death or fell victims of disease.

Wrote the British commander who freed the camp: “No description nor photograph could really bring home the horrors that were outside the huts, and the frightful scenes inside were much worse.”

Anne Frank arrived from Auschwitz in November, 1944. She died just a few weeks before the camp was freed by British troops on April 15, 1945.

Her body, along with thousands of others, lies in one of the 15 mass graves marked on the meadow.

Sunday, many of those graves carried wreaths, from surviving relatives, from Jewish organizations and from political dignitaries.