Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-128"
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"en.20050126.8.3-128"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today finds us discussing a resolution on a day that weighs heavily upon us, the day of remembrance to be held in Auschwitz tomorrow, recalling a crime that is associated with that place and unique in human history. Today’s debate, then, must be conducted with all the restraint that befits it.
Not only am I a Member of the European Parliament and Chairman of a multinational group within it, but I am also a representative from the Federal Republic of Germany and a German; speaking as I do this evening in this capacity – by which I mean both my role and my nationality – on the subject of Auschwitz and a resolution on the Holocaust, I am, of course, also speaking as a citizen of Germany, a nation and country with which Auschwitz is inseparably linked.
Auschwitz represents the moral nadir in my country’s history. The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was built by Germans, by criminals with whom I share a nationality, by people who defiled my country’s honour in a way unequalled by anyone before or since. For that reason, a German can never be completely objective when speaking about this subject. Every generation – my own included – inherits what its predecessors left behind them. Auschwitz is part of the heritage with which we modern Germans have had to live.
So it is not only in my capacity as Chairman of this group that I affirm that we Germans have a particular responsibility when it comes to combating anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, fascism, contempt for humanity, terrorism and murder.
Like many other Members of this House, I will be able, tomorrow, and as Chairman of my group, to be able to join Mr Borrell at the ceremony of remembrance at Auschwitz, at which the President of the Federal Republic of Germany will also be present. That it is possible, 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, for Germans to join there with others in remembering that event, that it is possible for a German to go there as chairman of a multinational parliamentary group and, together with his counterparts from other countries – Russia, Poland, Israel, France and Italy, among many others – to spend time there in reflection, to remember the victims and thus to restore to them a little of their dignity, is something that we owe to the European Union. It is the European Union that has made it possible for us Germans to return, with heads held high, to the democratic family of peoples, in which we, the Germans of today, make our contribution to democracy, to human dignity and to the fight against racism and xenophobia.
For that reason, my group endorses this resolution, and those of us who are German – I believe this to be true of all the other groups as well – stand by what it says."@en1
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