For the first time in her term, Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit the former Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz. This was announced by a government spokesman on request, thus confirming a report by the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Merkel has accepted an invitation from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation and is attending a ceremony to mark the tenth anniversary of its existence on 6 December, the report said. Accordingly, Merkel wanted to visit during her stay both the former main camp Auschwitz and the camp Birkenau.
According to the report, an early visit by Merkel is also planned because a visit by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is scheduled for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Red Army in January. During her chancellorship, only Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl traveled to Auschwitz.
Merkel had visited several memorials of former concentration camps in recent years. In 2013, she visited the former Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia together with former US President Barack Obama. In the same year she visited the former Dachau concentration camp.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination camp of the Nazis during the Second World War in Poland, then occupied by Hitler Germany. Some 1.1 million people were murdered there, most were Jews. 80,000 non-Jewish Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma and 20,000 Soviet soldiers were also murdered in the camp, which liberated the Red Army on January 27, 1945.
The founding of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation in 2009 is the result of an initiative by former Polish Foreign Minister and former Auschwitz inmate Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. On request, the Foundation confirmed the commemoration on 6 December, but did not want to comment on possible participants.
