Israel President Visits German Death Camp Site

Making his first trip to reunited Germany, President Ezer Weizman of Israel visited a former Nazi concentration camp and urged young people to make the next century better than this one.

After being greeted with military honors at a Berlin airport by German President Roman Herzog, Weizman made a first stop at the Sachsenhausen camp, just north of the city. About 100,000 people--thousands of them Jews--were killed at the camp under Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

“My personal feelings are heavy, and there is a feeling of anger,” Weizman told journalists before he walked through the iron gate of the camp, where the Nazis placed the words “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes one free”).

The two presidents toured the frozen, desolate grounds before laying a wreath in front of the ruins of the crematory and gas chamber.

“Learn what happened,” Weizman said. “Study well why it happened. Study well how it can be avoided. . . . Let the young generation look to the 21st century as a completely different century [from] the 20th.”

Heavy security followed the Israeli president throughout the day as he lunched at Bellevue Castle and walked through the Brandenburg Gate.

In the evening, Weizman and Herzog met with a group of mostly Jewish youths at the New Synagogue, which was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II and recently reopened.

Today, Weizman is to pay tribute to the anti-Nazi resistance at Berlin’s Ploetzensee memorial before leaving for meetings with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and others in Bonn.

Weizman’s visit comes as the German government is still debating how to fulfill a year-old agreement signed by Kohl and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin under which Germany was to make payments to about 35,000 survivors of Nazi violence.

Most of those involved were German-speaking Jews from Latvia and Romania who migrated to Israel and the United States in the 1980s.

Weizman told Israel Radio that he cannot understand how Jews continue living in Germany, considering its history. He said relations between the two states today are good but added:

“I, for example, cannot understand how 40,000 Jews can live in Germany. I am unable to understand that, but it is an independent world, so go ahead. . . . The one thing I can say to Jews is what I always say to Diaspora Jews. . . . The place of the Jews is in Israel.”

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, the leader of Norway’s tiny Jewish community said Jews want the Norwegian government to pay for Jewish property seized by the country’s Nazi collaborationist regime.

Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior said he and other representatives of Norway’s 2,000 Jews are negotiating with Oslo over compensation for Jewish bank accounts, real estate and goods that he said totaled tens of millions of dollars.

Melchior said the issue will be discussed when the New York-based World Jewish Congress meets next week in Jerusalem.

No immediate statement was available from the Norwegian government.