[Rudey]

France and Germany vow to 'never forget' Nazi crimes

By News Agencies

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder vowed Tuesday that his country would live up to its "moral obligation" to keep alive the memory of the Nazis' crimes, as he paid tribute Tuesday to the victims of the Auschwitz death camp, liberated 60 years ago this week.

In France, President Jacques Chirac inaugurated an expanded Holocaust Memorial in Paris, promising dozens of Nazi death camp survivors that France would "never forget."

Between one million and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews - perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Overall, six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

The memory of the Nazi genocide "is part of our national identity," Schroeder said. "Remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation - we owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves."

"It is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb to it," the German chancellor promised.

Germany's national Holocaust memorial, sited next to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, is due to open in May, and the chancellor said it would serve as "a signal against forgetting."

He also stressed that German leaders would protect the country's growing Jewish community "with the power of the state against the anti-Semitism of the incorrigible."

"That there is still anti-Semitism cannot be denied," Schroeder said. "Fighting it is the task of all society."

German President Horst Koehler will represent Germany on Thursday when world leaders gather at the death camp site in Poland to mark its January 27, 1945, liberation by the Red Army.

"History haunts our consciences," Chirac said at the Paris memorial housing a crypt with Auschwitz victims' ashes, walls inscribed with the names of France's 76,000 deported Jews and the largest center of Holocaust documentation in Europe.

"It gives us a never-ending duty" to be vigilant, he said. "Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It is a perversion, a perversion that kills."

Chirac was, in 1995, the first French president to acknowledge the French collaborated with their German occupiers between 1940 and 1944. He said on Tuesday that France must pass on the memory of the crimes against the Jews from generation to generation.

"The chain must never be broken," he told a crowd of about 70 survivors and scores of Jewish leaders, representatives of other religions, politicians and celebrities.

The duty to remember Auschwitz committed France to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms and support Israel in its right to exist, and the Jewish state, the Palestinians and all their neighbors in the search for peace, he said.

"I have rarely heard such a perfect speech," enthused Jacques Goldstein, 85, who was sent to Auschwitz with his wife Madeleine, separated from her and reunited in Paris in 1945.

"He said everything that I think as a survivor, a Frenchman and a Jew," he said. "He touched on all the errors of the Vichy government and on the existence of Israel and its neighbors."

"There can be no compensation for the scale of the horror, the torture and the suffering that took place in the concentration camps," Schroeder said at an event at a Berlin theater, organized by the International Auschwitz Committee.

France's Holocaust Memorial, opened as the Memorial for the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1953, was expanded with funds from dormant bank accounts left behind by Holocaust victims.

Located in Paris' old Jewish quarter, it has a permanent exhibition, extensive documents and multimedia facilities. In addition to the new marble walls naming the deportees, it will open another wall with names of non-Jewish French who hid Jews during the war. Three-quarters of France's Jews survived, mostly by hiding in rural areas.

-Rudey