Schroeder To Speak At Auschwitz
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will speak at a ceremony this month marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a group organising the event said on Tuesday in a statement.
Schroeder and Jewish World Congress President Israel Singer will address a memorial service attended by former inmates of the Nazi death camp in Berlin on 25 January, said the statement.
A ceremony on the actual 27 January anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland by Soviet Red Army troops will be attended by German President Horst Koehler who has been invited by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
Built in 1940 after the Nazi defeat of Poland, Auschwitz was swiftly expanded into the Third Reich's main death camp for the murder of European Jews and others.
"Auschwitz - no word symbolizes more strongly the guilt of Germans in this crime of the millennium," said the news magazine Der Spiegel.
The Nazis killed between 1.2 and 1.6 million people at Auschwitz - most of them Jews.