speeches

Mr. Acting Lord Mayor,
Honored Guests,

Before I begin my remarks I want to pay tribute, also in the name of the United States of America, to former Federal President Johannes Rau. He will hold an honored place in our memory for his extraordinary political achievements, for his engagement on behalf of transatlantic relations, and for his tireless efforts to advance reconciliation between Jews and Christians.

It is a high honor for me as a representative of the United States of America to participate in today’s commemoration. I remain aware that the atrocities that occurred at Abtnaundorf and in Nazi extermination camps are first and foremost European history. However, for millions of Americans these events relate powerfully to family history. Moreover, the defeat of Nazism is integral to Americans’ understanding of our nation’s place in the world. And, for humanity, the lessons of the Holocaust remain crucial to the advancement of human rights and the assertion of human dignity.

It was during my year as an exchange student at the University of Hamburg that the American television series "Holocaust" appeared on German television. That dramatization with fictional characters inspired many parents and grandparents to sit with their children and grandchildren and discuss, in some cases for the first time, what they had seen and experienced in the Nazi period and what it meant to them.

One movie alone did not bring this about, but rather, we have seen that through the courage of many people, that dialogue across the generations continued and expanded during the ensuing decades into a dialogue across borders between former aggressor and victim nations. It is now also a dialogue between, on the one side, groups and individuals – victims of the greatest crime of the 20th Century – and on the other side, present-day officials of governments that sixty years ago did too little to prevent those crimes or later did too little to acknowledge the victims’ suffering.

In my own professional path I participated in a small way in this historic process of examination und reconciliation. Recent years have witnessed a public dialogue between those who profited from the Nazis’ thefts of property and use of forced labor during the Second World War and the survivors of the Nazis' "death by labor" policy. Finally, after so many years, has come recognition for the former slave and forced laborers and for victims of asset theft or their heirs.

During my tenure in the American Embassy I was a member of the American delegation that in concert with the German federal government helped conceive and steer the negotiations treating compensation for these victims. Leaders of German business and their American legal counsel negotiated over 18 months with officials of Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Israel, with representatives of the World Jewish Congress and the Committee on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and with attorneys representing former forced and slave laborers as claimants.

The result of those remarkable negotiations was the creation of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future.” Through this foundation German business and the German Federal Government have made individual payments to former forced laborers and persons whose property was confiscated. With this, their grievous suffering, humiliation and personal losses were recognized under German law for the first time.

One of the co-chairmen of those talks, with the German statesman Otto Graf Lambsdorff, was the American Under Secretary of State, later Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Stuart Eizenstat. Some years after the conclusion of the negotiations, Ambassador Eizenstat addressed the broader issues of the Holocaust in remarks on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, a world-renowned center of scholarship, public education, and emotional reckoning.

Ambassador Eizenstat reflected on the concept Remembrance. This is the obligation of our present age and future generations toward the victims of Nazi crimes. Remembrance, he said, must take several forms.

Eizenstat’s first finding is that we must perpetuate the memory of the six million killed in the Holocaust.
Across Germany, Europe, and North America, officials, educators, historians, the media, and engaged private citizens keep before us all the brutal truth about the Holocaust. We contemplate and learn from this truth in its many facets. I want today to honor and thank for their work to perpetuate memory and preserve these truths the staff and volunteers of the Leipziger Gedenkstätte "Erinnern für die Zukunft" and the Förderverein Dr.-Margarete-Blank e.V. For their own efforts and as representatives of many others, I wish to recognize Ms. Charlotte Zeitschel, Ms. Sabine Kunze, Dr. Dieter Chitralla, and Dr. Günter Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt has assembled and will present today a scholarly documentation of the extermination of non-German Jews in the Leipzig area during the last years of the war.

The second imperative in Ambassador Eizenstat’s view is to insist the lessons of the Holocaust be applied to contemporary problems.
As informed citizens we must challenge and discredit expressions of xenophobia in all its forms, in our daily lives and in our wider world. Why should a city in Eastern Europe, having had no Jewish population for over two generations, ignore and thereby accept bus shelter graffiti of a Star of David hanging from a gallows? How do the residents of an American community react in September 2001 when one of their neighbors, blindly seeking revenge against Muslim Arabs, shoots dead an utter stranger, a turban-wearing shop keeper who is in fact an Indian immigrant of the Sikh faith? What are we to make of the beating and humiliation of residents of Mitteldeutschland who find themselves picked out and picked on because they look different? The news magazine SPIEGEL, in its issue of 16. Januar 2006, closed its article on the recent beating of a 12-year-old boy by apparent right-extremists with the sentence: “A youth from near Pömmelte meanwhile explains what being ‘rightist’ means in that local area: ‘that you have a hatred for everybody else, and you yourself don’t know why.’” In our search for answers to that “why” may lay the path to our common goal of “Never again.”

The third conclusion: Honor the survivors by helping the living and their families.
I referred to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future.” That foundation and many other institutions and private initiatives support remembrance and future-oriented programs to educate and thereby, one hopes, to preclude the return of such virulent hate and violence by one people against another. Today’s commemoration is also an occasion to commend and encourage this work.

Ambassador Eizenstat’s fourth and final point was: Reject anti-Semitism wherever the Jewish people are threatened; to which I would add: confront and prevent genocide against any people.

The international community speaks with one voice in denouncing the recent, hateful statements of the Iranian President regarding Israel’s right to exist. Many nations are joined in the effort to protect the people of Darfur from further butchery and to reach a political accommodation that affords them security and the chance to build a better life with material assistance from outside. And, as we continue our dialogue about the Holocaust, so too should we draw lessons from the hesitancy of many outsiders to intervene against mass killing in Rwanda or the Balkans little more than a decade ago. And we must remain alert to future Rwandas and Darfurs if the words "never again" are to have real meaning.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we come to Abtnaundorf to remember, to learn and to teach, and in so doing to pay honor. I thank the acting Lord Mayor, responsible city officials and others involved in the organization of this commemoration for giving me the opportunity to contribute to our dialogue across nations and generations about the Holocaust. May the victims of Nazi aggression know peace.