Speech by the Mayor, Sabine Löser, on the occasion of the wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the victims of National Socialism on 27 January 2021:
"Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
dear guests,
76 years ago today, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. To this day, Auschwitz stands symbolically for the millions of industrial mass murders, the renunciation of all achievements of civilisation and the loss of all humanity.
People were categorised. Entire ethnic groups were declared "sub-human", denied the right to live and forced to endure inhumane conditions until their death.
You can listen to and read the accounts of concentration camp survivors. The reports of the soldiers who burst into tears when the camps were liberated and only got a rough idea of what must have happened here. The smells of the crematoria that lingered in the air long before the camps, the piles of corpses.
I considered whether I should quote from these exact accounts of contemporary witnesses. But would I be doing justice to the horror? Is it my place to take other people's words into my mouth to describe their suffering in their own words? Or is it not rather our task to listen?
When I hear and read the reports, I am deeply moved, disturbed and still cannot believe it.
But: "It happened, and therefore it can happen again: Therein lies the core of what we have to say."
With these words, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi warned in 1986 against allowing the crimes of the Holocaust to be forgotten.
And that is precisely why it is important and right that we remind ourselves again and again - not just on 27 January - of the consequences that hatred of Jews, people with disabilities, homosexuals, those who think differently, Sinti and Roma and people who are supposedly different from us can have. In the beginning was the word, followed by the deed.
It is our responsibility to listen as long as we still can, to ask questions and then to carry on the remembrance and warning. And it is our responsibility to show a clear edge when we witness inhuman statements and deeds.
May there never be another Auschwitz."