Germany has an “everlasting responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism, for the victims of World War II and, above all, for the Holocaust,” Merkel declared in a video message Saturday.
“And this must be made clear from generation to generation and it must be said with bravery and moral courage, every individual can make a contribution so that racism and anti-Semitism have no chance,” she said.
On January 30, Merkel will visit Berlin’s Topography of Terror Documentation Center, built on the foundations of the headquarters of the Secret State Police — the SS — and the Reich Security Main Office, which were destroyed during the war.
Exactly 80 years ago — on Jan. 30, 1933 — Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was sworn in as chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg.
In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI warned that "the memory of this immense tragedy, which above all struck so harshly the Jewish people, must represent for everyone a constant warning so that the horrors of the past are not repeated."
The memory of this tragedy, which hit the Jewish people especially hard, must represent for everyone a constant warning so that the horrors of the past are not repeated," the pope said during his traditional Sunday prayer at St Peter's Square.
He also expressed the wish that "one overcomes all forms of racism and hatred" and that "the respect and dignity of human beings be encouraged."
In Warsaw, Poland, Holocaust survivors, politicians, religious leaders and others marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with solemn prayers and the now oft-repeated warnings to never let such horrors happen again.
Events Sunday took place at sites including Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former death camp where Hitler's Germany killed at least 1.3 million people, mostly Jews, in southern Poland.
Sunday marks the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops in 1945.
In 2005, the UN General Assembly declared 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Events are taking place across the world today to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter will give the keynote address at a commemoration at the Mansion House in Dublin Sunday night.
Holocaust survivors will gather in London for a candle-lit concert on the Millennium Bridge.