German finance minister cites his offices' Nazi past on Holocaust day
On the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner evoked the sinister past of his authority's own offices while warning against any repeat of the Holocaust.
"It was the idea of dehumanization that paved the way for the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. What happened back then must never be repeated," Lindner was quoted as saying on Saturday in a Finance Ministry post on X, formerly Twitter.
The post featured a photo of Lindner in a conference room in central Berlin.
"In this room in today's Federal Ministry of Finance, preparations were made in 1938 for what later went down in the history books as the Wannsee Conference: the coordination of the mass murder of European Jews," the caption reads.
The ministry has been based in the Detlev Rohwedder House on the capital's Wilhelmstraße major thoroughfare since 1999. The imposing edifice was built during the Nazi era in 1935-36 as the headquarters of the Aviation Ministry headed by Hermann Göring.
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the survivors of the Auschwitz, the site of which is located in modern-day Oświęcim, Poland.
More than 1 million people were murdered at the camp, most of them Jews. The date of its liberation has been observed as Holocaust Remembrance Day in Germany since 1996, and the United Nations proclaimed the date an international day of remembrance in 2005.
