German president to visit Guernica, site of 1937 Nazi bombing

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MADRID (Reuters) -German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will on Friday become the first German head of state to visit Guernica, the Basque town devastated by a Nazi air raid during Spain’s civil war in one of the first modern air bombings of civilians.

Accompanied by Spain’s King Felipe VI and Basque regional president Imanol Pradales, the German president will lay a wreath at a cemetery housing a mausoleum built in 1973 for hundreds of victims of the bombings.

Speaking at a gala dinner hosted by the King and his wife, Queen Letizia, in Madrid on Wednesday, Steinmeier said Germans bear “a heavy burden of guilt in Guernica” and called the bombing “a warning to stand up for peace, freedom and the protection of human rights”.

“It is very important to me that we – and I am deliberately addressing this sentence to my compatriots in Germany – do not forget what happened back then. This crime was committed by Germans,” Steinmeier said.

The visit comes as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) tops some nationwide polls and is expected to perform strongly in five state elections next year, fuelling debate about the limits of political cooperation with the party.

Steinmeier, who as president is expected to stand above day-to-day party politics, ruffled feathers this month within the party when he warned of a growing danger from right-wing extremist forces.

Hitler’s Condor Legion bombed the historic city of Guernica on April 26, 1937 in support of Francisco Franco’s forces in what Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering later told the Nuremberg trials was “an opportunity to put my young air force to the test”.

Historians have accused successive German governments since World War Two, as well as representatives of the armed forces, of playing down the attack, and an official apology was offered to the Basque people by then German President Roman Herzog only in 1997.

Earlier on his three-day visit to Spain, President Steinmeier and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica”, regarded as an anti-war symbol, which hangs in Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum.

(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee in Madrid; Additional Reporting by Sarah Marsh in Berlin, editing by Ed Osmond)