“On the occasion of the proclamation of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism on January 27, 1996, the then Federal President Roman Herzog said that remembrance should “express grief over suffering and loss, be dedicated to the memory of the victims and counteract any danger of repetition.”
Today marks the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.
It is right and important to remember current anti-Semitism, xenophobia and misanthropy in our country on a day like this. However, a culture of remembrance based on mere lip service does not do justice to this claim. We must actively counteract any danger of repetition. It is necessary to confront all those – in our country and in the world – who oppress, persecute or even murder people for anti-Semitic, racist, religious or nationalist motives.
I am thinking, for example, of the internment camps in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where the Uyghur population is to be “re-educated”, as the Chinese central government euphemizes its approach to the Muslim minority – coercive measures for birth control, mass internment, arbitrary arrests and forced labour. Around 1.6 million people, mainly of Uyghur, but also Kazakh and Kyrgyz descent, are being held against their will, according to the Society for Threatened Peoples. Experts and critics speak of ethnic cleansing and “cultural genocide”. The Washington Post even classifies Chinese policy as a form of “demographic genocide”.
For a long time, Germany did not comment on this at all or only very timidly so as not to offend the Chinese leadership and jeopardize good trade relations. At the beginning of December 2020, a human rights report by the Federal Foreign Office at least voiced harsh criticism of the human rights violations, surveillance, repression and coercive measures against the Uyghur minority. This is a good step, but it must not stop there.
We – and this applies to each and every one of us – must not weigh economic interests higher than human rights. To look the other way is to be guilty of complicity. Human rights violations must be sanctioned!
Let’s also look outside our own front door. What we Europeans allow ourselves to do to refugees at the borders, but also within the EU, in Greece and in the Balkans, is far from humane.
The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism must awaken us to stand up for the systematically persecuted, to put our humanity to the test and prove it. Today and every day.”
Erwin Kress, January 27, 2021
Spokesman of the Board of the Humanist Association of Germany – Federal Association
