Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, met German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, in southern Poland, and thanked her for announcing Germany’s commitment of $60 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation for support and preservation of the memorial site

 Her visit is the first in her 14-year tenure as Chancellor of Germany, the first time a German chancellor has visited the site since 1977, and only the third time a German chancellor/head of government has visited since WWII. The chancellor has gone to other concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, which are in Germany, but she had not visited Auschwitz. The visit comes in advance of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 2020, and amid rising levels of anti-Semitism in Europe and around the world.

Chancellor Merkel entered through the camp’s notorious gate marked “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free), and lit a candle in memory of the more than 1.1 million people killed there. She visited the museum’s Conservation Laboratories, which preserve suitcases, human hair and every shoe, every document, and every building that remains at the site. She also visited the Central Sauna building at the former Birkenau camp, where prisoners were subjected to “disinfection” before being forced into slave labor.

On the eve of her visit, the chancellor said that Germany would contribute $66 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, in addition to the $80.5 million it has given over the past decade. The United States has contributed $15 million to the endowment.

[Pictured with chancellor Angela Merkel are Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, second from right, flanked by Holocaust survivors.                     Getty Images/Janek Skarzynski