MOSCOW (Sputnik) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel attended on Sunday a ceremony marking 70 years since the Nazi Dachau concentration camp had been freed by US forces, joining survivors and liberators of the camp.
Dachau, located not far from Munich, Bavaria, was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis. It was opened in 1933 as a concentration camp for political prisoners shortly after Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany.
“This is our public and civic duty. All of us are victims, survivors, all of us are guilty,” Merkel said while delivering her speech, broadcast by RT television channel.
The chancellor recalled the torture and deaths of some 200,000 people in the concentration camp, and stressed that Nazism and anti-Semitism must be fought by all means, as “there is no place for it in the society.”
Merkel also pledged to keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes.