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Berlin (dpa) - State Minister for Culture Monika Grütters warned against the relativization of Nazi crimes on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"When we commemorate the victims of National Socialism, we have the images of organized mass murder of the millions," said the CDU politician at the German press agency in Berlin.
"They testify to the inhumanity of a racist and violent ideology."
"This makes the recurring attempts to instrumentalize, relativize or forget about the suffering of that time for political purposes all the more unbearable," said Grütters.
"All of this demands from us resolute opposition in word and deed and constant efforts to come to terms with and clarify - especially by and with the coming generations."
Grütters described the political and historical mediation work of memorials and places of remembrance about the Nazi crimes as indispensable for this.
"That is why we will do all we can this year to support them in reaching even more people than before with new, digital formats."
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The National Socialists and their helpers murdered six million Jews during the Second World War.
Israel has been commemorating the victims on Holocaust Remembrance Day since 1951.
In 2005, the United Nations set International Holocaust Remembrance Day to be January 27.
On this day in 1945 the Red Army reached the German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and freed more than 7,000 surviving prisoners.
In Auschwitz alone, the Nazis killed more than a million people, mostly Jews.
Many were gassed, and the bodies were then cremated.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210127-99-185181 / 3
Memorials
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Website for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Working definition of anti-Semitism
Friends of Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem's Youtube channel