House of the Wannsee Conference, today a memorial
Photo: REUTERS
Eighty years after the Wannsee Conference, Israel's ambassador to Germany and the German ambassador to Israel denounce that the facts of the Holocaust are still being denied or played down. The denial and trivialization of the Shoah is not only widespread among political radicals, but a social and international phenomenon. That's what Jeremy Issacharoff and Susanne Wasum-Rainer write in a guest article for the "Tagesspiegel" and the Israeli daily newspaper "Maariv".
For this reason, Israel and Germany wanted to jointly initiate a resolution at the United Nations this Thursday, the letter goes on to say. The political leaders worldwide are called to support. "This resolution is meant to be a sign of hope and inspiration for all States and societies that stand up for diversity and tolerance, strive for reconciliation and understand that remembering the Holocaust is essential to preventing such crimes from happening again," they write the ambassadors in the guest post.
At the so-called Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, high-ranking Nazi officials discussed the systematic murder of up to eleven million Jews in Europe.
The aim of the meeting in a villa on Berlin's Wannsee was to accelerate the implementation of the genocide.
The meeting is considered one of the key events of the Holocaust.
The guest contribution by the two ambassadors states that the denial of historical facts of the Holocaust is not only an attack on the victims of the extermination and their descendants, on Jews all over the world and on the State of Israel.
It is also an attack "on the basic condition of peaceful societies and peaceful coexistence worldwide".
The ambassadors also made suggestions for measures to combat Holocaust denial.
This includes a uniform definition of anti-Semitism, investment in education and awareness-raising, and measures to prevent the Holocaust from being questioned or relativized on social media.
as/dpa