President Frank-Walter Steinmeier honoured Nazi war victims in Guernica on Friday, becoming the first German leader to visit the Spanish town where hundreds of civilians were killed in 1937.
The elite Condor Legion razed the northern Basque town on April 26, 1937 in support of General Francisco Franco’s rebels during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) alongside Fascist Italy.
Steinmeier and German First Lady Elke Buedenbender joined King Felipe VI at a ceremony held at a Guernica cemetery in memory of the victims, AFP journalists saw.
The heads of state then visited the town’s Museum of Peace, which tells the story of the tragedy, viewed by historians as a precursor to the mass terror bombing of civilian targets during World War II.
Some 50 aircraft dropped 30 tonnes of explosives on Guernica in successive waves, including incendiary bombs, before Messerschmitt fighter planes mowed down civilians as they tried to flee.
Guernica, considered the first town to be destroyed by aerial bombardment, became synonymous with the horror of civilian suffering during wartime.
“Guernica is one of those places where the horrors of war and the vulnerability of innocent people have been indelibly etched into our European memory,” Steinmeier told reporters after the ceremony.
The president said the “brutal crime” offered a “warning that we must oppose any nationalism, hatred and violence, but also the warning that we must defend peace, freedom and democracy”.
- ‘Historical responsibility’ -
The visit comes almost 30 years after former president Roman Herzog became in 1997 the first German leader to officially recognise the country’s “involvement” in the massacre and apologised to the Spanish people.
“To you, survivors of this attack, to you, witnesses of the horror suffered, I send my message of remembrance, solidarity and mourning,” Herzog wrote in a speech read out in Guernica by Germany’s ambassador.
Asked about whether he had come to ask for forgiveness, Steinmeier repeated that Germany acknowledged its “historical responsibility”.
The raid was immortalised by Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece “Guernica”, a painting famed for capturing the horror of innocent civilian suffering.
Steinmeier viewed it at Madrid’s Reina Sofia art museum on Wednesday at the start of his three-day state visit to Spain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the painting last week and has compared the massacre in Guernica to the suffering inflicted by Russia’s invasion of his country.
Spain remembered its own authoritarian past on November 20, which marked the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death and the end of his 36-year dictatorship.
