Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday addressed the Bundestag as part of a visit that coincides with the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
After giving his address to German lawmakers, Herzog was set to join German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to lay a wreath at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
He and Steinmeier, accompanied by their wives, are then set to visit the memorial site of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen near the Lower Saxony town of Celle.
More than 52,000 concentration camp prisoners and around 20,000 prisoners of war died at the notorious site. Among them was the Jewish girl Anne Frank, whose diary became world-famous.
Herzog’s father Chaim Herzog, who was the president of Israel from 1983 to 1993, was among the British officers who liberated the camp.
After arriving on Sunday, Herzog on Monday attended a commemoration to mark 50 years since the Munich Olympic Games massacre.
Eight gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed the Israeli team’s apartment at the Olympic village on September 5, 1972.
They shot dead two athletes and took nine hostage. West German police responded with a botched operation in which all the hostages and a police officer were killed.
rc/wd (AFP, epd)
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