The Agony of Haunting History

"Never in human history was there a campaign like the one the Nazis and their accomplices conducted to annihilate the Jewish people."

"Never in history was a state responsible, as Nazi Germany was responsible, for the loss of all semblance of humanity, for the erasure of all mercy, for the pursuit of the worldwide obliteration, with such awful cruelty, of an entire people."

"I shall never forget how he [his father former Israeli President Isaac Herzog] described to me the horrors he witnessed. The stench. The human skeletons in striped pajamas, the piles of corpses, the destruction, the hell on Earth."

"The partnership between Israel and Germany has achieved global renown, and we must continue deepening and cultivating it for the benefit of a brilliant future not only for our countries but for the whole of humanity."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, addressing the Bundestag

Israeli President Isaac Herzog delivers his speech at the German parliament Bundestag at the Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 6, 2022.

"It took a long time for the Germans to understand that they themselves were also liberated at that time, namely from their murderous ideology and an inhuman dictatorship."

"The fact that we Germans were able to live in freedom and democracy again, at least in the
West, is due not least to the allied liberators."

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier

There are those whose heritage is that of knowing and living within the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust who will remain forever haunted by the spectre of Jews transported from all over Europe to Nazi concentration camps, slave-labour camps, and death camps where Jews were industrially murdered, augmented by campaigns in European towns and villages where locals gave enthusiastic assistance to Nazi SS troops in ridding their towns and villages of the presence of their Jewish neighbours.

 

Primary Image: Prisoners in barracks at the Buchenwald concentration camp. (National Archives and Records Administration, 208-AA-206K-31.)

This older generation would never seek to set foot on German soil. Knowing full well from documented narratives and well-published documentary evidence that German citizens were not ignorant of the fate of Europe's Jews. They had been well prepared to accept the necessity of obliterating the menace of the Jewish existence among them. Jews who plotted to assume control of news, banking, industry, academia for the end of ruling the world economy. All the while their fascist government was doing just that. 

Jews, wearing yellow stars humbly walking the streets of cities where once they were proud citizens of superior repute, enhancing the cultural life of society, excelling in the arts and sciences, advancing the future of humanity. And a campaign of vilification and humiliation reduced those proud citizens to subhuman status, to be scorned and reviled. Setting the stage of the systematic industrial-scale annihilation that would follow.

How does a nation, proud of its long history of civilized cultural superiority in literature and the arts, music and science, reduce itself to the status of organized butchery of Jews? Why in good faith, would any Jew alive today want to visit with the Germany whose focus on destroying Jewish lives made it a pariah for such a short period of history? Well, nations like Israel do what they view they must, to survive, finding support and 'friends' wherever it can. Practical purpose dominates the issue. 

 

"I bring no forgiveness and no forgetting", said President Herzog in his address to the lower  house.

Israel's current president's father before him also a president of Israel, was among the liberators of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945. Chaim Herzog was a military officer in the British Armed Forces. Following his son's address to the German parliament this week both presidents and their wives arrived at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews comprised of a field of 2,700 concrete slabs not far from the Brandenburg Gate.

 

Herzog's father was the first Israeli president to visit Germany after the war in 1987

 

Later, they visited the former concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, for a tour of the memorial site where they met with survivors and German high school students. Over 52,000 mostly Jewish prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. Over 19,000 prisoners of war comprised mostly of soldiers from the Soviet Union, died at the PoW camp adjacent. 

Menachem Rosensaft with the World Jewish Congress, son of Bergen-Belsen survivors was born at the displaced persons camp close to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The last stop for the Israeli president was a trip from Berlin to Munich to participate in the 50-year anniversary ceremony honouring the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Olympic Games by Palestinian terrorists. 

"Both presidents made clear that the remembrance of the evil perpetrated at Bergen-Belsen must be a guidepost for the future of both nations."

"For Herzog especially the visit was clearly a personal pilgrimage that was rooted in his father's experience in liberating the camp."

Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel, World Jewish Congress