Did the Germans ever apologize to the Jews after the Holocaust?

Answer 1

Yes




Answer

German President Apologizes to Italy
for Nazi massacre
Wednesday, 17-Apr-2002
Story from AFP / Claudine Renaud
Copyright 2002 by Agence France-Presse

MARZABOTTO, Italy, April 17 (AFP) - German President Johannes Rau expressed his "profound sorrow and shame" to Italy Wednesday for the Nazi massacre of almost 1,000 villagers at the end of World War II.
A solemn Rau made the formal apology at a ceremony attended by families of the victims gathered in this Appenine town near the northern city of Bologna. The 955 victims, including women and children, came from Marzabotto and a cluster of surrounding villages raided by SS troops between September 29 and October 5, 1944.
"When I think of the children and of the mothers, of women and entire families, victims of the extermination of those days 58 years ago, during which the Germans brought violence and an immense pain to Marzabotto, it brings me a feeling of profound sorrow and shame," said Rau. "I bow before these deaths," he added, flanked by an openly weeping German ambassador to Italy, Klaus Neubert.
The apology for the Nazi slaughter as the highlight of a four-day official visit to Italy that Rau began on Monday. The half-hour ceremony took place before about 100 invited guests in front of a ruined church in the Monte Sole district of the town where many of the victims lived. The president, accompanied by his Italian counterpart Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, had earlier visited a memorial to the victims in the town centre. It is decorated with plaques linking this mountain town of 6,000 people with others which have experienced similar wartime tragedies, among the Oradour-sur-Glane in France, Coventry in Britain, and Guernica in Spain.
The massacre, the worst atrocity carried out in Italy during World War II, is burned into the collective memory of Marzabottoand the neighbouring villages of Girzzana and Monzuno. SS troops under the command of Walter Reder rounded up and shot 955 civilians, including 216 children and 316 women, ostensibly in an attempt to rout the Italian resistance. The victims are buried in the local cemetery.
"It's a worthy gesture," Pasquale Palmieri, 77, a former member of the Italian resistance and a Survivor of the massacre, said earlier Wednesday. "It will show perhaps that there is no more hatred. I agree with it. But my neighbour who had 19 members of his family killed won't be going to the ceremony." "He says that it's not Rau who should come but the four officers who are still alive and who did the killing," Palmieri told AFP.
Palmieri was 18 when he joined the Italian resistance against the occupying Germans, who became Italy's enemy after a treaty between Italy and the allies in 1943. He recounted his horror at seeing a three-month-old baby thrown in the air and shot by the Nazis, before his parents were executed. "There are things which break your heart and nobody can comfort you," he said as tears swelled in his eyes.
Reder was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal in Bologna in 1951, seven years after the slaughter. He was freed in 1985. According to an Italian weekly news magazine, L'Espresso, around a dozen ex-SS officers who participated in the massacre are still alive and have been identified by Italian magistrates who want to question them.
Rau compared the SS officers who carried out the killing to "hyenas", the consequences of whose actions "must be faced by the generations to come." The German president said that at the end of the war "reconciliation seemed impossible." He thanked Italians for the fact that "Marzabotto is no longer something which divides but which unites." "What happened is a part of our common history and from it was born our duty to a peaceful future," Rau said.
Ciampi, 80, said that memory of the massacre would serve as a warning "so that there will never again be blood spilt between the peoples of Europe."

Source: www.custermen.com

Answer 2

Maybe not all of them. Here is a news article released in 2002. German President Apologizes to Italy for Nazi massacre Wednesday, 17-Apr-2002 - Story from AFP / Claudine Renaud MARZABOTTO, Italy, April 17 (AFP) - German President Johannes Rau expressed his "profound sorrow and shame" to Italy Wednesday for the Nazi massacre of almost 1,000 villagers at the end of World War II. A solemn Rau made the formal apology at a ceremony attended by families of the victims gathered in this Appenine town near the northern city of Bologna. The 955 victims, including women and children, came from Marzabotto and a cluster of surrounding villages raided by SS troops between September 29 and October 5, 1944. The apology for the Nazi slaughter as the highlight of a four-day official visit to Italy that Rau began on Monday. The half-hour ceremony took place before about 100 invited guests in front of a ruined church in the Monte Sole district of the town where many of the victims lived. The president, accompanied by his Italian counterpart Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, had earlier visited a memorial to the victims in the town centre. It is decorated with plaques linking this mountain town of 6,000 people with others which have experienced similar wartime tragedies, among the Oradour-sur-Glane in France, Coventry in Britain, and Guernica in Spain. The massacre, the worst atrocity carried out in Italy during World War II, is burned into the collective memory of Marzabotto and the neighbouring villages of Girzzana and Monzuno. SS troops under the command of Walter Reder rounded up and shot 955 civilians, including 216 children and 316 women, ostensibly in an attempt to rout the Italian resistance. The victims are buried in the local cemetery. For more on this war crimes, see book “Silence on Monte Sole”, by Jack Olsen, published by G. P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1968

Answer 3

It would probably be to humiliating for them to admit their wrondoings, and there haven't really been any accounts of the Germans apologizing, so most likely no, they did not.

MOST LIKELY, SOME DID.

_____

Steady on! "The Germans" can either mean individual Germans or German governments. As for the latter, please note:

• From 1953-1975 West Germany made voluntary payments to Israel.
• Many German Holocaust survivors and also Jews who emigrated from Germany in the early years of Nazi rule received compensation - obviously not in full, but some compensation nevertheless. Many were compensated for loss of property and awarded pensions. In a few cases they were also given free medical treatment in Germany.
• Since 1949 people who were stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis have been entitled by law to have it restored on demand. This is enshrined in the German Constitution and applies to Jews and non-Jews alike.
• In 1990 the then East German parliament, conscious that East Germany had done very little to make amends, passed a law allowing Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in East Germany with very few questions asked. When the two parts of Germany were reunited later that year, this law was adopted with only very minor modifications by Germany as a whole. An estimated 150,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union have settled in Germany since 1991.

German governments may not have made a formal apology (probably for legal reasons) but they made very some practical efforts to make amends.

Also - in 1970, when the then Chancellot Willy Brandt visited Warsaw he knelt, apparently spontaneously, in front of the memorial to the dead of the Warsaw Ghetto. A survey conducted by the Spiegel magazine indicated that 41% of West Germans thought it was appropriate, 48% thought it was 'exaggerated' and 11% were unsure.

West Germany was the first country to make Holocaust denial a criminal offence. (Even if one dislikes this as an infringement of freedom of speech it does suggest something about official attitudes).