Merkel: Hitler came to power 80 years ago because most Germans were quiet

Speaking today at the opening of an exhibition on the occasion of the anniversary of the rise of Adolf Hitler and his regime to power, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Nazism took power 80 years ago because most Germans stayed silent. She called that experience a warning for today’s generation and called for the promotion of democracy, freedom, and human rights.

"There is no other way to say this:  The rise of Nazism was facilitated not only by the fact that elites and part of German society participated in it, but primarily by the fact that a large majority of Germans at a minimum tolerated its rise," Merkel said. "The persecutions, the stripping of rights that finally resulted in the Second World War and in the crime of civilization called the Shoah were facilitated only by the fact that a large majority averted their eyes and stayed silent."

"For us Germans this must be a constant reminder. Human rights do not arise on their own, freedom does not defend itself, and democracy does not achieve itself. All of that is done by a living society, by human beings," the Chancellor said in her speech.

Merkel then opened the exhibition, called "Topography of Terror", at Berlin’s Documentation Center of the Crimes of Nazism, erected at the site of the former central Gestapo office in Berlin. The exhibition uses photographs and news reports from the time to map the events from the appointment of Hitler as Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933 up until roughly half a year later when the Nazis seized total control of the German media, politics, and society.

"It took only six months to destroy all of the variety that existed at that time," Merkel recalled. The unpleasant anniversary of the rise to power of the "brown dictatorship" is being commemorated today by German legislators and by the country’s highest constitutional officials at ceremonies in the Federal Assembly and elsewhere honoring the victims of the Nazi regime.