Kohl Visits Auschwitz Camp, Decries Nazi Barbarism

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl bowed his head in silent tribute Tuesday at the former death camp at Auschwitz, where the Nazis killed 4 million people during World War II, and he later vowed that such barbarism must never be repeated.

Kohl laid a wreath at the camp’s death wall, where 30,000 victims were shot. He then bowed his head and stood in silence as Poland’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Menahem Yoskovitch, recalled the Holocaust and prayed for the dead, most of them Jews.

Kohl wrote in the camp visitors’ book: “The warning (given by) this place must never be forgotten. Unspeakable harm was inflicted on different peoples here, above all European Jews, in the name of Germany.

“We vow here once again to do everything to ensure that life, dignity, justice and freedom for all persons--regardless of what God they worship, what nation they belong to and what heritage they have--remain unviolated on this Earth,” he wrote.

On the last day of a visit to Poland intended to sweep away 50 years of mutual suspicion since the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland that launched World War II, Kohl spent 90 minutes at Auschwitz and the adjacent Birkenau death camp in the southern town of Oswiecim, 30 miles west of Krakow. Auschwitz was the German name for Oswiecim.

Kohl was accompanied to Auschwitz by Heinz Galinski, leader of West Germany’s Jewish community, who survived two years in Auschwitz.