- Title: ISRAEL/POLAND: Calls for Vatican to denounce Holocaust denials
- Date: 5th February 2009
- Summary: RAMAT HASHARON, ISRAEL (FEBRUARY 4, 2009) (REUTERS) AVNER SHALEV, CHAIRMAN OF YAD VASHEM, ISRAEL'S HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, WALKING FROM HOUSE (SOUNDBITE) (English) AVNER SHALEV, CHAIRMAN OF YAD VASHEM, ISRAEL'S HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, SAYING: "I think what Chancellor Merkel has said, is the appropriate, I think, reaction or response to what has happened in the Vatican, because I
- Embargoed: 20th February 2009 12:00
- Keywords:
- Topics: International Relations,Religion
- Reuters ID: LVA96K8SZQHGG27A1XQJJ4LRND3D
- Story Text: Support in Israel for the German Chancellor's call for the Vatican to clearly denounce Holocaust denial, while the director of the museum at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland says that Holocaust revisionist theories are "heinous".
The chairman of Israel's Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, said Wednesday (February 4) that he supported German Chancellor Angela Merkel's call for the Vatican to denounce Holocaust denial.
Pope Benedict XVI sparked a furore late last month with his lifting of the excommunications of four bishops, including that of Briton Richard Williamson who denies there were gas chambers and once said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in concentration camps.
Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast on Jan.
21: "I believe there were no gas chambers". He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by mainstream historians.
Williamson later apologised to the pope "for the unnecessary distress" he caused him but has not yet recanted.
Among those who condemned Williamson and the pope's decision were Holocaust survivors, progressive Catholics, members of the U.S. Congress, Israel's Chief Rabbinate, German Jewish leaders and Jewish writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
Avner Shalev, the chairman of Yad Vashem, called Chancellor Merkel's remarks, "courageous".
"I think what Chancellor Merkel has said, is the appropriate, I think, reaction or response to what has happened in the Vatican, because I think the situation is that right now, a bishop who has to be a kind of leader is a Holocaust denier, and I'm expecting a full condemnation and separation from the stands of the Vatican and the Pope and, I think, the ideas which are expressed by this Bishop Williamson. And she (Merkel) has done the appropriate thing because she's dealing with the truth, and she's claiming the truth, and she's asking that something very clear will come out from the Vatican about this issue, and we expect the same thing. I can praise the words of Merkel, Chancellor Merkel, because I think she is a courageous leader that is leading and asking for the truth in this matter," Shalev said, at his home near Tel Aviv.
Shalev described remembering the Holocaust as a duty from Catholics.
"We still remember the very important words of the former Pope, John Paul II, when he addressed this issue in his visit to Yad Vashem years ago, and he said it loudly and clearly that the followers of the Church will remember and will do anything to keep this awareness because its part of the demand of the Church. It's part of those who are following the truth and following the truth of God. And only in a period, where actually, the truth and the belief in God was twisted, a kind of Holocaust occurred. And this is the reason that everyone of the followers of the Church will keep the remembrance in a very significant manner," Shalev said.
The man overlooking the site of one of the most notorious WWII Nazi death camps called revisionist theories on the Holocaust "heinous" after Pope Benedict's lifting of the excommunications.
"Negationist theories are heinous, regardless if they are said by a pseudo-scientist or bishop." Piotr Cywinski said.
"History has been examined well enough, has been lived well enough. There are living among us people who remember those times, There are people still alive who worked on the machine of extermination, the crematoria.
Of course you can negate everything, but you cannot hurt another human in such a way." he added.
Nearly six million Jews were murdered in Europe as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" to what the Nazi dictator called the Jewish problem, according to Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial to the victims.
The decision to kill all the Jews of Europe was formulated in late 1941, and Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 coordinated the apparatus of mass murder.
Most Holocaust victims were murdered in six Nazi extermination camps.
Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest and at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there before its liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945.
In total 85 percent of the Jewish population in Poland died - some 2.8 million people.
At least 1.5 million children were killed in the Holocaust and only an estimated 11 percent of Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived.
Other victims of Nazi atrocities - labelled "enemies of the German state" - totalled an estimated 5.5 million and included three million Poles up to half a million Gypsies, and an estimated 10,000-15,000 homosexuals.
Catholic and Protestant clergy also were sent to concentration camps as well as Jehovah's Witnesses. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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