‘Nationalism and Racial Madness’--a Partial Text of Apology

Following are excerpts from a joint statement by East Germany’s Parliament on Thursday:

We, the first freely elected parliamentarians of the GDR (East Germany), admit responsibility as Germans in East Germany for their history and their future and declare unanimously before the world:

Immeasurable suffering was inflicted on the peoples of the world by Germans during the era of national socialism. Nationalism and racial madness led to genocide, particularly of the Jews in all European countries, of the people of the Soviet Union, the Polish people and the Gypsy people.

Parliament . . . admits responsibility on behalf of the citizens of this land for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish women, men and children. We feel sorrow and shame, and acknowledge this burden of German history.

We ask all the Jews of the world to forgive us. We ask the people of Israel to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility of official East German policies toward Israel and for the persecution and humiliation of Jewish citizens in our country after 1945 as well.

We declare our willingness to contribute as much as possible to the healing of mental and physical sufferings of survivors and to provide a just form of compensation for material losses.

We are for giving persecuted Jews asylum in East Germany.

We wish to integrate Germany in a pan-European security system in such a way that our people are guaranteed peace and security.

We are aware that the changes in our country would not have been possible without new thinking and perestroika (program of reform and restructuring) in the Soviet Union.

The East German Volkskammer (Parliament) acknowledges that East Germany shares guilt for the crushing of the “Prague Spring” (reform movement) of 1968 by Warsaw Pact troops. Because of fear and cowardice, we failed to hinder this violation of international law.

The . . . Parliament of East Germany asks the people of Czechoslovakia to forgive us for the injustice done.

The East German people, through their peaceful revolution in the autumn of 1989, removed the dividing effects of the inhuman inter-German border.

Now the two parts of Germany should grow together and thus promote the creation of a pan-European peace order within the framework of the CSCE (35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) process.

We declare solemnly once more our unequivocal recognition of the German borders with neighboring states that resulted from World War II.

The Polish people in particular should know that their right to live within safe borders will not be questioned by territorial claims from us Germans, either now or in the future.

We confirm the inviolability of the Oder-Neisse border with the Republic of Poland as a foundation for the peaceful coexistence of our peoples in a common European house. This should be confirmed by treaty by a future pan-German parliament.