Popular
anti-Communist dissident, Joachim Gauck is blamed for marginalizing
Holocaust
At home Germany’s newly elected president enjoys widespread public and political
support. But in Israel not everyone is happy about Joachim
Gauck, with a prominent Israeli Nazi hunter accusing him
of having marginalized the Holocaust when he signed a declaration
equating Nazism with Communism.
Gauck, 72, a former Evangelical pastor
and political dissident in Communist East Germany, became
well known for his role as federal commissioner for the archives
of the Stasi, the East’s fearsome secret police. Not belonging
to any political party, many Germans see him as a symbol
of the peaceful struggle against oppression and human freedom.
On Sunday, the German Bundestag voted for him to become the
new head of state with nearly 80 percent support; only the
far-left party Die Linke fielded an alternative candidate:
Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld.
“He will certainly bring fresh wind
into politics and should, as a moral authority, bring our
diverse society closer together,” said Dieter Graumann, the
president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
President Shimon Peres is expected
to congratulate his new German counterpart upon his election.
“He will be a very interesting president,”
said Avi Primor, who served as Israel’s ambassador in Germany
from 1993 and 1999 and has met Gauck many times. “He will
arouse discussions that will have an influence on public
life, which doesn’t mean that everyone will like it. I guess
he will irritate many people.”
Indeed. While Germany’s far-left has
always been critical of Gauck for his anti-Communist stance,
at least one Israeli has already spoken out against Gauck,
for having signed the 2008 Prague Declaration on European
Conscience and Communism, which likens the crimes of the
Nazis to those of the Communists.
“The claimed exchangeability of both
phenomena ignores the fact that the Holocaust was without
precedence and overstates the actual historical meaning of
Communist crimes,” Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, wrote Sunday in an article
in the German leftist daily Taz. “The impact this equation
has can hardly be underestimated. On a practical level, it
will mainly help post-Communist countries cover up the role
countless citizens of Eastern European countries played in
the mass murder of European Jews.”
Signed by more than 50 members of the European parliament and a few other prominent
politicians – including Gauck and the late Czech president
Václav Havel – the Prague Declaration asserts that the “millions
of victims of Communism and their families are entitled to
enjoy justice, sympathy, understanding and recognition for
their sufferings in the same way as the victims of Nazism
have been morally and politically recognized.” The text further
states that “both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes
… should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted
the 20th century.”
By declaring the crimes of the Communists as genocide, the signatories of the
Prague Declaration aim to transform “nations of perpetrators”
into “nations of victims,” Zuroff lamented. The signatories’
call to establish a day of remembrance for the victims
of both Nazi and Communist regimes on August 23 – the day
the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed – shows they consider
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany equally responsible for
World War II and the Holocaust, he added.
Zuroff lauds Gauck for his efforts
to raise attention to the villainy of Communism. But the
“rewriting of European history books in the spirit of an
incorrect equation of Communist and National Socialist
crimes would let future generations grow up with a wrong
image of the Holocaust, and therefore level the important
difference between perpetrators and victims, consequently
freeing the perpetrators from any responsibility,” he writes.
“I’m really very apprehensive
about what direction Germany will take on a wide range
of Holocaust related issues, given his position which is
so problematic,” Zuroff told The Times of Israel on Sunday
afternoon, immediately after Gauck’s election was announced.
Zuroff added that the president in Germany holds almost
no political power, rather, similar to the Israeli presidency
is mainly representative in nature.
“Gauck is supposed to be a moral
compass — in that capacity, the president has tremendous
influence on historical issues and issues of Shoah,” Zuroff
added.
Ambassador Primor, who is also
a former president of the Israel-Germany Association and
the Israel-Germany Chamber of Commerce, said that he disagrees
with the conclusions of the Prague Declaration but added
that Gauck should not be criticized for bringing the matter
up for debate.
“I would welcome a discussion
about that. Why not clarify it?” he told The Times of Israel.
Many German officials are eager to always be politically
correct — not Gauck. ”He has an opinion – which I don’t
share – but I’m glad that the opinion will be debated,”
Primor said.
Representatives of German institutions
in Israel likewise said that the Holocaust must not be
compared with the misdeeds of the Communists, but that
Gauck’s signing the Prague Declaration does not render
him unfit for president.
“From the personal conversations
I had with him I can categorically state that he does not
belong to those who relativize the Holocaust,” said Michael
Mertes, who heads the Jerusalem office of the Konrad Adenauer
Foundation, which is close to the governing center-right
CDU party. The fact that Gauck signed the Prague Declaration
needs to be seen in the context of the desire of Eastern
European countries to draw attention to the misdeeds of
their former Communist rulers, but that does not mean he
disagrees with the mainstream opinion of German historians
who see the Shoah as a genocide without parallels, Mertes
said.
timesofisrael.com
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