Iranians in Germany to visit Auschwitz

By · March 28, 2008

Thirty Iranian expatriates living in Berlin will visit Auschwitz in April.

The ex-pats want to show Iran’s president, who has denied the scope of the Holocaust, that they have no doubt about the facts of the Holocaust, “the most massive, industrialized extermination in the 20th century,” a statement by organizers said.

The trip, from April 11 to 14, is sponsored by the Iranian Dialog Circle of Berlin and the Berlin educational branch of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, which is associated with Germany’s Green Party. The group also will meet with the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor in Krakow and with the leadership of the Krakow Jewish community.

The group said this week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the Holocaust and threatening of Israel, “has introduced a new expression of anti-Semitism onto the stage of international politics.”

Iranians are associated with such statements “against their will,” the statement said. “That is why many Iranians living abroad, for whom it is easier to counter these false statements about history, consider it their moral and democratic duty to show the public that they do not endorse the policy and ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”