Steinmeier: "Our democracy needs people like you"

Created: 07/04/2022 13:37

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier congratulates the award winner and Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer.

© Britta Pedersen/dpa

Margot Friedländer has been awarded the Walther Rathenau Prize.

"We must never again let the Jewish community down," said Federal President Steinmeier.

Berlin - Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called on all citizens to take decisive action against anti-Semitism in Germany.

At the same time he thanked the Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer for her enlightenment about the persecution and extermination of the Jews by the National Socialists.

"Our democracy needs people like you," said Steinmeier at the presentation of the Walther Rathenau Prize to the 100-year-old.

Friedländer knows what can happen if too few people profess democracy.

She knows what happens when people dehumanize other people.

And she passes on this knowledge.

“Our country cannot be thankful enough for this knowledge that you are giving us, for the reconciliation that you are giving us.

Both are a reminder and an obligation for all of us,” said Steinmeier.

"Never again must we let the Jewish community down, that is precisely our responsibility, which remains, in the present and in the future."

Not only Jews are called upon to raise their voices against Jew hatred.

"Everyone else, even those who are not Jews, must fight this battle."

Steinmeier said it made him angry how blatantly anti-Semitism was showing up again in our country - "on the streets, also in schoolyards, mostly on the internet - and that in our country of all places".

He wished that the attack on the synagogue in Halle would have turned the tide.

"But Jews in Germany have been mocked and degraded ever since, and some have been violently attacked.

This is unbearable."

It is also unbearable when opponents of the Corona policy present themselves as persecuted people with a yellow star.

"This is a mockery of the victims of the Shoah and a trivialization of anti-Semitism," said Steinmeier.

Friedländer's family had been deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis and murdered.

She survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

In 1946 she went to the USA with her husband Adolf Friedländer.

After his death, she returned to her hometown of Berlin, where she has lived since 2010.

She reports regularly to schools and institutions about her experiences under National Socialism.

"We can't change what was.

But it must never happen again,” emphasized Friedländer on Monday at the award ceremony.

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With the Walther-Rathenau-Prize, the institute of the same name honors people for an outstanding life's work in foreign policy.

Most recently, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) received the award last year.

Rathenau had been foreign minister in the young Weimar Republic.

The liberal Jewish politician was shot dead by right-wing extremists in Berlin's Grunewald on June 24, 1922 on his way to the Foreign Office.

dpa