This visit to the concentration camp by the current president of the Jewish state is part of the continuity of the reconciliation with Germany that began after the war between the two countries.

Alongside his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Israeli head of state evoked the first steps of his father, who was then an officer, in the middle of the Holocaust mass graves.

“Standing on a wooden crate, he shouted in Yiddish in front of hundreds of skeletons: Jews! There are still Jews alive! There are still Jews in the world!”.

At the time, in 1945, the camp in northern Germany was covered with barracks that the British army had hastened to burn down, according to them, to stop the epidemics.

There now remain huge mass graves covered with grass and on which small pebbles have been placed, the traditional tribute of the Jews to their dead.

Next to a stone brought from Jerusalem by his father in 1987 during his visit – at the time the first by an Israeli president to Germany – Isaac Herzog urged Israel and Germany to fight uncompromisingly against any form of anti-Semitism and racism.

“It is our duty in the name of the past,” he said.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier for his part acknowledged that “it took a long time for the Germans to understand that they themselves had been liberated” at the end of the Second World War. Paying homage to the “courage” of Haïm Herzog, Steinmeier called on his fellow citizens to “never forget the Holocaust”.

“There must be no place for anti-Semitism in our country,” he hammered in front of a memorial in the name of the Jewish people and not far from a tombstone paying tribute to Anne Frank, who died in this camp and later became world famous for her diary written in an Amsterdam attic where her family was hiding from the Nazis.

– Last survivor –

The meditation at the Bergen-Belsen camp was the last leg of the Israeli president’s three-day visit to Germany, which culminated in the commemorations of the bloody hostage-taking by a Palestinian commando during the Munich Olympics. in 1972, in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed.

Originally built in the spring of 1943 to serve as a detention camp for several thousand Jewish “hostages” holding foreign passports that the Third Reich planned to use as “bargaining stone” against German prisoners of war, the Bergen camp -Belsen quickly became an “ordinary” concentration camp.

From January 1945, it housed many detainees transferred from other camps too close to the Russian front, such as Auschwitz. Most of the prisoners died of starvation and epidemics from February-March. After the liberation of the camp on April 15 by British troops, 13,000 inmates still died.

In this moor now dotted with pines, oaks and birches, the ceremony took place in the presence of five survivors, a Swede, two Israelis, an American and a German, Albrecht Weinberg.

The latter, aged 97, was twenty at the time of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where he had been deported after two years in Auschwitz.

“I am one of the last survivors. As long as I can, I continue to bear witness to what happened,” he told AFP from his wheelchair.

After living 60 years in the United States, he returned to his hometown, Leer (northwest), which encouraged him to return and gave his name to a high school.

He goes there regularly to tell his story to German pupils “who don’t understand how such a thing could have happened”.