“Every single person in our country bears responsibility, regardless of their own family history, regardless of the religion or birthplace of their parents or grandparents,” he said.
“We must not and will not accept any relativisation. And we will also remind each new generation of its ongoing responsibility.”
Scholz said this remained an ongoing challenge in schools and universities, in migrant integration courses and in everyday life.
Monday marks 80 years since the World War II liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in what was Nazi-occupied Poland.
Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust murders of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.
Scholz said these were “more than a million unique people, individuals, wives and husbands, boys and girls, grandmothers and grandfathers. They were gassed, shot, they died of hunger, forced labour and medical experiments.”
He honoured other victims, including Sinti and Roma, political opponents of the Nazi regime, homosexuals, the sick and people with disabilities.
Scholz said “the uniqueness of the Shoah must be communicated again … to counteract the countless attempts to falsify and relativise history.”
He pledged an ongoing battle against anti-semitism, whether from the left or right, politically motivated or religious, home-grown or “from outside the country”.
Germany has seen a surge in anti-semitic incidents since the Gaza war that erupted after the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
The chancellor recalled the first article of post-war Germany’s Basic Law – “human dignity shall be inviolable” – and stressed its importance “in the face of increasingly shameless attempts to normalise right-wing extremist positions”.
“This fight for the inviolability of the dignity of each and every individual continues,” he said, citing increasing attacks, online and offline, targeting people because of their beliefs, gender or skin colour.
“Our responsibility, 80 years on, is to resist this hatred.”