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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday Germany must tackle disguised "middle-class anti-Semitism" and attacked those who were silent about the country's painful past.
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BERLIN (AFP)---German lawmakers commemorated victims of the Holocaust in a special ceremony on Friday and Chancellor Angela Merkel said the country had a special responsibility to fight anti-Semitism.
In the city where the Nazis planned the destruction of European Jewry, parliamentary speaker Norbert Lammert said Adolf Hitler's rise to power had been facilitated by German lawmakers.
"There was no inevitability about it," Lammert said.
He said the experience of the last century had shown that "any kind of extremism, racism and anti-Semitism would not be tolerated anywhere in the world and especially not in Germany."
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II.
Passages from writings by Czech author Lenka Reinerova were read out at the ceremony. The entire family of the 91-year-old Jewish writer, who could not attend because of failing health, was killed in Nazi death camps.
Merkel: anti-Semitism still exists
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday Germany must tackle disguised "middle-class anti-Semitism" and attacked those who were silent about the country's painful past.
Speaking ahead of a memorial day for victims of the Nazi era nearly 75 years after Adolf Hitler's party came to power, Merkel said that while anti-Semitism was often linked to poorer communities, the middle-class was also to blame.
"I see, in the educated classes, a more disguised form of anti-Semitism, that is not so readily defined," Merkel told a conference on fighting anti-Semitism organised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
"There is, in broad parts of the population, an awful silence when faced with all the historical images, with our own history, and this silence is always a danger".
"I want to tackle this problem," Merkel said.
The United Nations has established January 27 as an annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day to coincide with the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945, but the German parliament chose to commemorate it two days earlier.
"We know we have a special responsibility in the fight against anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance," he said.
"It is shameful that in our country we need such a large police presence in order to protect Jewish people from attacks," Lemmert added.