German bishops say country still needs cleansing, dialogue on Shoah

Published: 2005-01-27

BONN, Germany (CNS) -- Germany's Catholic bishops said that 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, their country still faces a "long road of cleansing and dialogue." "Our nation has needed a long time to face responsibility for the monstrous crimes committed by Germans in Germany's name -- even now, the mechanisms for erasing it from our memory are still at work," the bishops' conference said in a statement issued Jan. 25 in Bonn. "It is our nation's fault that Auschwitz was made possible, because few of us had the courage to resist. Our church must also take co-responsibility, recognizing the long tradition of anti-Judaism among Christians and within the church," said the statement, published to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland. Heads of state and church leaders gathered Jan. 27 on the site of the German-run camp, where more than 1.1 million mostly Jewish inmates were killed during World War II.

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