Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

154   SPEECHES | POLITICS AND SOCIETY Politics and Society ©Dachau Memorial Let me begin by greeting the survivors and liberators we are privileged to have among us today: Mr Lafaurie, Mr Naor, Mr Rosenthal, Mr Candotto, Mr Finsches, Ms Farbmann, Mr Legmann, Your Royal Highness, Mr Gahs, Minister of State, Madam President of the Land Parliament, Excellencies, Mr Freller, Dr Hammermann, Mr Boueilh, Ladies and Gentlemen, Weimar and Dachau are separated by about 400 kilometres – or by one day. 22 March 1933, here in Dachau, was the first time prisoners of the National Socialist regime were brought through the gates of a concentration camp – gates which until then had belonged to the gatehouse of a factory yard. One day later, the Reichstag in Berlin voted to adopt the Enabling Act and sealed the fate of Weimar democracy. One day. WhenWeimar was over, things started here in Dachau. The first victims of a regime that chose fear and violence as its tools were brought here. Dachau stands at the start of the terror that culminated in genocide. This is where terror was systematised. In the beginning, it targeted the political opponents who had most strongly opposed National Socialism. Courageous men and women who stood up against coercion and oppression. As President of the German Bundestag, I pay tribute to them today. Kurt Schumacher, the first Chairman of the SPD after the   SecondWorldWar, spent more than seven years of his   imprisonment in Dachau. He died in 1952 of the after-effects of his time in concentration camps, which had taken a great physical toll on him. Many inmates of Dachau did not survive their incarceration. Dachau concentration camp was the National Socialists’ callous model – one of the first places where nothing counted except the tyranny of the SS. The victims, the prisoners, were to be systematically broken by violence and persecution. As Centre Party politician and Catholic labour leader Joseph Joos put it, the intention was to eradicate the human within the prisoner. He was imprisoned at Dachau from 1941 to 1945. For twelve years, people were demeaned, abused, tortured and brutally murdered in the Dachau concentration camp. It went on until the soldiers of the 7th U.S. Army arrived here on 29 April 1945. Thousands were killed by their German SS guards even in the last days of the camp, or lost their lives on the death marches. In the weeks after the liberation too, former prisoners died in harrowing numbers. They were emaciated with hunger, disease and suffering. It is so unthinkable to me what happened in places like this. What you and some 200,000 others from across Europe suffered here in Dachau concentration camp and its many subcamps. In January, the Bundestag commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp 80 years ago and remembered the victims of Nazi rule. In a few days, it will be 80 years since the end of the Second WorldWar.We will mark that date with a remembrance cere- mony in the Bundestag too. Julia Klöckner, Member of the German Parliament President of the German Bundestag 80th anniversary   of the liberation of Dachau  4 May 2025