Germany marks 70 years since Wannsee Conference

Jan 20, 2012, 13:20 GMT

Berlin - Germany on Friday marked the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, when high-ranking Nazi officials met to plan the genocide of European Jews, the process that became infamous as the Nazi's 'Final Solution.'

Christian Wulff, Germany's current president, vowed that hatred towards foreigners would not be allowed to take root.

The ceremonies were held at a suburban Berlin mansion at Wannsee, which is now a Holocaust memorial. On January 20, 1942, 15 senior Nazi officials met there to approve the organizational details of the genocide, with Jews to be registered and transported to death camps.

War crimes investigators never found an explicit written order from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to launch the Holocaust, so its documented start is accepted as the 1942 conference.

In November, the nation was shocked when it came to light that three neo-Nazis were behind 10 unsolved murders from 2000-07, most of them of Turkish people, again reviving concerns about racism in Germany.

German President Christian Wulff told Israeli Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled and other dignitaries he felt 'shame and anger' that Germans had committed such killings in the past decade.

'Nobody, not even the police, was willing to even believe that such a thing could still happen today in Germany,' he said. 'We will do all we can to ensure terrorism and murderous hatred towards foreigners and foreign things never takes root in Germany.'

Peled, who survived the war as a child with a false identity in Belgium, recited a kaddish, or Jewish prayer of mourning for his own father, who was killed in the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp.

Wulff vowed that modern Germany would come to the aid of Jews worldwide if they were in danger or facing persecution.

'This place and the name, Wannsee, has become a symbol for the bureaucratically organized sorting of lives into worthwhile and useless, for governmentally organized extermination,' said Wulff.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day next week marks the liberation of the biggest death camp, Auschwitz, by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.