Address by Julia Klöckner, President of the German Bundestag, at the Ceremony of Remembrance marking the end of the Second Word War on 8 May 2025
Good morning!
Federal President,
Ms Büdenbender,
Federal Chancellor,
President of the Bundesrat,
President of the Federal Constitutional Court,
Your Excellencies,
ladies and gentlemen,
fellow Members,
Berlin in May 1945:
the Tiergarten park laid waste,
the walls of the Reichstag building charred,
its dome burnt out,
many windows bricked up in an attempt to avert the storming of the edifice,
the facade riddled with gunfire.
A scene of desolation. An end was imminent.
Fighting went on here for days on end; Red Army troops were already on the upper floors,
German soldiers still in the basement.
This place featured prominently in the birth of the tragedy, the darkest chapter of our German history, with the emergency decree following the Reichstag fire of 1933. And it ended here too.
Like scarcely any other image, the ruins of the Reichstag symbolise the end of the Second World War.
And the end of the National Socialist reign of terror.
The Second World War was the most brutal war in human history. Almost everywhere in Europe, German occupiers committed war crimes. In Eastern and Central Europe, they waged a racist war of annihilation with the aim of exterminating entire peoples.
Shortly after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the German occupying forces abducted and murdered tens of thousands of teachers, priests, doctors – the backbone of Polish society. That suffering inflicted on Poland has far too often gone unmentioned.
The occupiers wreaked havoc in the territory of modern-day Belarus too. They locked inhabitants of occupied villages in their houses and attacked them with hand grenades. They even had children burned alive.
The National Socialists’ reign of terror also raged in the large towns and cities. They aimed to starve Leningrad into submission.
For more than two and a half years, the Wehrmacht cut off all supplies to the population. The operation claimed more than a million lives.
On the edges of the city human corpses were stacked: people who had starved or frozen to death or had been killed in action.
Even today, not everyone is aware of the monstrous extent of the German crimes. Or – worse still – many no longer wish to concern themselves with it.
The need to reverse that trend is another reason for commemorating the eighth of May.
First and foremost, the spring of 1945 meant liberation for the people who suffered most under the National Socialist regime, namely the inmates of the concentration camps.
Every year, on 27 January, we commemorate all of the victims of National Socialism. Merely remembering the Holocaust does not guarantee protection against new antisemitism. Antisemitism has many faces – and many narratives. Even as we vow “Never again”, it is already happening again – right now.
In our streets.
On the web.
And even in universities.
Whoever commemorates the past must also translate its lessons into present-day action.
Ladies and gentlemen, Germany planned, provoked and unleashed the war. And the destructive power of that war was turned back on its instigators.
In 1945, millions of Germans streamed westward to undetermined destinations, fleeing their homes, their worldly goods reduced to the contents of a handcart.
That scene came to epitomise the plight of displaced persons.
People lived on bombsites and in huts. In the final weeks of the war, they hid in cellars to escape the bombing and, in certain areas, the advancing forces.
Especially women and girls. Though often overlooked, they are the victims of every war.
“Perhaps the greatest burden was borne by the women of all nations. Their suffering, renunciation and silent strength are all too easily forgotten by history.”
These are the words spoken by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker in his famous speech of 8 May 1985, 40 years ago today.
Of course women were not free of guilt in the Second World War. But women and girls in particular had to endure great suffering, including sexual assault, during and after the war.
Ladies and gentlemen, let us not forget, for children of women victims have not forgotten either. Allow me to read you a passage from a very recent e-mail that an 82-year-old daughter of one of those victims wrote to the Bundestag:
“As an eye-witness of the Second World War and a witness to the rape of my mother at the Czech-Saxon border in the summer of 1945 during the wild expulsions, I would like to plead earnestly that this year, for the 80th commemoration of the Second World War and its consequences, the women should finally be remembered who were victims of sexual violence in wartime and who are still subjected to violence in armed conflicts today, simply because they are women. (…)”
Her words moved me. Thank you, Mrs Schon, for writing and for accepting my invitation. It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to the visitors’ gallery today.
(Applause)
Thank you for writing, and thank you for coming
In your e-mail, you asked when there would finally be an official remembrance of the women who were victims of sexual violence in that war and those who have been subjected to sexual violence in subsequent wars.
The answer, Mrs Schon, is “today”.
In German post-war society, the suffering of those women was simply suppressed. There were no opportunities for the victims to talk about their ordeals. A sense of shame prolonged their suffering – how many of their lives were destroyed by it?
It is time to give these women their place in our commemoration, to recognise their suffering, and also to honour the incredible strength with which these women fought for survival and contributed decisively to reconstruction.
Monika Hauser, founder of a women’s rights organisation, sums it up in the following words: “Men did not ask their wives, ‘What happened to you in the war?’, so that their wives would not ask them, ‘And what did you do there?’
How did those Germans, women as well as men, feel in May 1945? Defeated, stunned, dejected; many also relieved. But with Germany occupied and soon to be divided, very few indeed felt liberated.
In the propaganda of the German Democratic Republic, the eighth of May was celebrated from the outset as the “Day of Liberation” but was misused at the same time to justify new repression.
It took a highly charged reappraisal process in families and society before we Germans ourselves were able to recognise that the military defeat was actually a liberation too.
Memories of the Second World War are still so important today. Our regional newspapers are particularly useful in that respect. In recent weeks, I have been reading in the Oeffentlicher Anzeiger, our local section of the Rhein-Zeitung, some very impressive accounts of wartime memories collected from the newspaper’s readers. One 98-year-old reader wrote of having experienced the whole gamut of emotions at once after the liberation – the great apprehension, the happiness and the great sense of gratitude he felt then as a young man to have survived the horrors of war at all.
Such stories from local communities, from one’s own home town, help to contextualise more clearly the time of the National Socialist reign of terror.
The eighth of May had given very special significance to our reorientation towards democracy, a democracy to which all Germans can contribute today.
Who could have imagined back in 1945 that a freely elected parliament would ever sit here in the Reichstag building again?
What an unlikely turn history has taken! The Reichstag building is a good memory bank, dear colleagues.
Eighty years ago, many soldiers wrote the names of their home towns or areas on its walls. Written in Cyrillic lettering are names like “Leningrad” and “Kursk”. But also “Yerevan”, “Baku”, “Kyiv” and “Donbas”.
The Red Army troops not only came from Russia. They came from many different Soviet republics, including Ukraine.
Ladies and gentlemen, Tomorrow in Moscow, we shall experience victory parades which, by invoking the memory of the liberators back then, are intended to justify the war against Ukraine today. What an abuse of history!
(Applause)
Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol: and once more girls and women are falling victim to sexual violence, used as a weapon of war.
Ladies and gentlemen, many people in Germany today are preoccupied by the question whether war might engulf our country again.
For a long time, we have felt ourselves and our peace to be inviolable.
Now we need to change our way of thinking again. To preserve peace and freedom, we must be able to defend ourselves by military means too.
This 80th anniversary of the end of the war is about remembrance; at the same time, it is about our mission, because those who are liberated are also duty-bound
to defend liberty.
(Applause)
That is the mission of the eighth of May.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
And it now gives me great pleasure to introduce three young people who have accepted my invitation and will now read three brief texts written by contemporary witnesses. These are young people who work with the German War Graves Commission and do so on a voluntary basis. I offer my sincere thanks to Tankred Suckau, Sophia Wegener and Carl Vitek. It is good to have you here, and we appreciate your commitment. Welcome!
(Applause)