History – Frankfurt am Main – ECB boss Lagarde: Nazi injustice did not happen in secret – politics
Frankfurt/Main (dpa) – The President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, recalled on Friday the close connection between the main ECB building and the site of a National Socialist crime. The Frankfurt Grossmarkthalle, which is now part of the ECB building, was the collection point for Frankfurt Jews before deportation. “Representatives of the Nazi regime humiliated and robbed more than 10,000 Jewish women, men and children in the basement of the wholesale market hall, forced them on trains to the ghetto, concentration and extermination camps and sent them to their deaths. Only a few survived,” wrote Lagarde on Friday in the ECB blog.
Lagarde emphasized that the acts did not take place in secret. “The wholesale market hall was a very public place,” she wrote. “The deportation of the Jewish population – just like their disenfranchisement and oppression in previous years – did not happen in secret.” The victims were often mocked by passers-by on their way out of the city center.
At the unveiling of a plaque at the entrance to the ECB, Lagarde stressed the importance of remembering the victims of Nazism. “We owe it to the victims, but also to ourselves,” she wrote. “There must be no tyranny and state injustice. And yet they still exist. Even today, some states try to enforce their will with violence, and they do not shy away from mass murder and genocide.”
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the German death camp at Auschwitz. Since 1996, the victims of National Socialism have been remembered in Germany on this day.
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