Frank-Walter Steinmeier Quotes

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other.

A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State [Germany], as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims [the Jews] of the government that preceded it [Nazi Germany].

In my several visits to Germany, I have written in admiration of that country's strenuous efforts to face its past and make amends.

Germany remains among the few countries in Europe to acknowledge, officially and nationally, its responsibility for the crimes it led against our people.

It took Austria a long time to be honest about its past.

Many Germans dream of revenge today.

We Germans have a special responsibility to be alert, sensitive, and aware of what we did during the Nazi era and about lasting damage caused in other countries. I've got tremendous sympathy for that.

We abide by our responsibility as Germany for the Shoah.

I am not a German bitter-ender. I am, though, a German never-forgetter.

Germany is a nation that created an enormous amount of suffering on the planet. The German people also themselves have suffered, because it always goes together.

After the war, Germany fully confessed to all its dirty tricks. It's necessary to is draw a line under the past, even if people did something evil. Until we do, wounds won't heal.

I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come... so we don't see any reason to change our view of history.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

The justice of our cause must be reflected in the manner in which we rectify the crimes of the past.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

If I say, 'I forgive you,' I have implicitly said you have done something wrong to me. But what forgiveness is at its heart is both saying that justice has been violated and not letting that violation count against the offender.

I promised never to let the Rwandan Genocide die because I knew the Rwandans didn't have much power internationally and certainly didn't have the resources. I felt it was my duty having witnessed it, and having stayed to witness it, that I had to talk about it and keep it going.

If an atrocity has been committed in Germany and Europe why should the Palestinians be made to suffer?

Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

We all know that history cannot be undone. But let me assure you that we Austrians know that, because of our history, we have a great responsibility.