German Leader Marks Holocaust at Bergen-Belsen

Germany’s president marked the liberation 50 years ago of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by calling Thursday for a new generation of Germans to take up the torch of remembrance of Nazi horror.

Roman Herzog told about 5,000 guests, including 500 survivors, at a ceremony on the site of the infamous camp that, with eyewitnesses dying out, Germans would soon run the risk of viewing Nazi atrocities merely as history.

“Now we must do our utmost to speak of the past, convey it and remember it in such a way that young people feel it is their own responsibility to make sure it can never be repeated,” Herzog said.

“How shall our children learn that, for instance, here in Bergen-Belsen, conditions were so inhuman that after the liberation another 13,000 people died who were so weakened by their internment that they could hardly absorb nutrition?”

About 30,000 Jews were among the 50,000 who died at the concentration camp.

In Israel, at 10 a.m. Thursday, air raid sirens throughout the country wailed and every vehicle stopped as drivers and passengers climbed out in the 90-degree heat to stand in silence for two minutes to remember the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.