Anti-Semitism must be combated with all our might, Viola Amherd said ahead of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
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Remembering this and the victims of National Socialism is a historical responsibility, said the Swiss Defence Minister, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year.
“The rise in anti-Semitism in light of the terrorist attacks by Hamas against the Israeli civilian population on October 7, 2023, must therefore be combated resolutely and with all our strength,” said Amherd ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Saturday.
Regardless of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the military operations in Gaza and other occupied territories, it is unacceptable for Jewish citizens in Switzerland to be attacked or to feel threatened, Amherd said in a statement from the defence ministry. Anti-Semitism, like other forms of hatred against people because of their race, ethnicity or religion, has no place in a democratic society, she said.
On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The extermination camp west of Krakow in Poland was one of several extermination and concentration camps in Nazi Germany’s sphere of influence, where at least six million Jews from all over Europe were murdered on German orders, alongside Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners and other victims of persecution.
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