Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-142"
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"en.20050126.8.3-142"2
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"Mr President, the most notorious of the concentration camps set up by Hitler, Auschwitz, officially opened on 14 June 1940. It was intended at that time for Polish political prisoners whom the Nazis wished to treat with particular severity. At the head of the camp was a former common criminal who, in 1946, would boast of having exterminated three million people. As from 1942, he would send up to 6 000 victims per day to the gas chambers, mainly Jews from all corners of Europe.
As soon as they arrived, those who were too weak to work were picked out and eliminated. The others were exploited to the point of total exhaustion. During the summer of 1944, the Nazis resorted to large-scale executions to liquidate more Jews. Russian prisoners of war were also exterminated at Auschwitz, as were Roma, homosexuals, disabled people and anti-Fascist resistance fighters. It was Auschwitz too that went on to supply living subjects for experimentation. An extension of the camp, located at Birkenau, was specially designated for the extermination of the Jews. The crematoria burned more than 20 000 corpses per day. It was there that the majority of Jews brought from Western Europe and the Balkans were eliminated. This was how the majority of Western European Jews would disappear, in particular almost three million Polish Jews. With them was annihilated a whole universe of traditions and culture, now lost for ever.
In all cases, this genocide is fundamentally connected with anti-Semitism and, more broadly, with Nazi racism. In particular, the Hitlerian vision of the world was of crucial importance, founded as it was upon the obsession with racial purity. From the start, Hitler’s racism contained the seeds of genocide. Alongside the Jews, other peoples, such as the Roma and the Slavs, were exposed to the murderous effects of this racism. For Hitler, they all deserved to die.
It was in February 1940 that the deadly Zyclon B gas was tested on 250 Roma children, at which point the huge agony of hunger, cold, exhausting labour, diseases, brutality and pseudo-medical experiments began. A final 4 000 Roma were gassed and burned on 1 August 1944 in order to make way for further deportees.
Will there never be an end to anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia? No doubt they will not disappear until all human families, faithful to their cultures and traditions, come together within a universal community. The Jews have suffered a lot and are still suffering. Minorities are often oppressed and suffer inordinately. To fight anti-Semitism and racism is not, therefore, to fight for the Jews or for minorities but to fight for humanity."@en1
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