Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Bialystok, Hohnstein Castle, Columbiahaus, Dachau.
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Rolf Heinemann, historian and active in the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime, reads out the names of the extermination and concentration camps in which the National Socialists tortured their victims to death in front of the Paulskirche.
He will list 53 places at the end.
Heinemann has a bucket full of red roses next to him.
One by one, people step forward, take one of the flowers, place it at the memorial for the victims of National Socialism created by the artist Hans Wimmer in 1964, and stand still for a moment.
Alexander Juergs
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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A memorial service was held on Thursday afternoon on Paulsplatz and in the Paulskirche to commemorate the victims of the National Socialist dictatorship, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and political opponents of the Nazis.
The reason for this was the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust.
The day of remembrance commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
77 years ago, on January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers succeeded in taking the camp run by the SS and liberating the prisoners still living there.
More than one and a half million people had previously died in the camp.
A human-powered "killing machine"
In his speech at the commemoration hour in the bright plenary hall of the Paulskirche, Frankfurt's Mayor Peter Feldmann (SPD) therefore spoke of Auschwitz as a "killing machine".
The fact that this machine did not run by itself, but was supported and operated by people, he called the incomprehensible thing about the Nazi death camps.
"Auschwitz was not a tidal wave that came over the world, Auschwitz was made by people," said Feldmann.
In his short speech, the mayor also remembered Trude Simonsohn, the honorary citizen of Frankfurt, who survived Auschwitz and another concentration camp.
The Jewess died just a few days ago at the age of 100.
Simonsohn was a contemporary witness for many years and spoke about her experiences, often with children and young people.
In the Paulskirche Feldmann read a chapter from her memoir book "Another Luck".
In it, Simonsohn described how she reached the Auschwitz camp, how she saw the notorious concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, how her hair was shaved, how she had to pass through a trellis of SS men naked.
"After an hour in Auschwitz I knew where I was: in hell," Feldmann recited the notes of the Holocaust survivors.
An alarming study
The commemoration hour in the Paulskirche on Thursday was not the only event in the region to commemorate the suffering of the victims of National Socialism. Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) spoke a commemorative speech in the plenary hall of the Main-Taunus district in Hofheim. Pupils from the Albert Einstein School in Schwalbach presented a project in which they dealt with the fate of Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era. A memorial wall for Alfred J. Meyers, the former chairman of the FSV Frankfurt sports club, was created as part of a project by football fans in Frankfurt's Ostpark. Meyers was deposed by the Nazis and fled to the United States.
The World Jewish Congress has published an alarming study on the occasion of the commemoration.
Accordingly, anti-Semitism has spread particularly strongly among young Germans.
According to the survey, almost every third German between the ages of 18 and 29 takes anti-Semitic positions.