State President Vaira Vike-Freiberga addressed the ceremony of unveiling the commemoration place to Nazi victims in Rumbula near Riga today. In her address the President said that this was a memorial for 25 thousand innocent people, which had been brutally killed on the site on 29th and 30th November 1941just because they had been loyal to their national belonging and religion.
The President said that the Holocaust had painfully touched Latvia and it was a day of mourning both for the Jewish community as well as whole Latvia because, although organized by Himler from Berlin and Friedrich Jekeln as executor, there had also inhabitants of Latvia taken part.
The President stressed that it had been awful act of violence, awful mass murder and those, who had survived had to bring further the remembrance of those innocent victims to next generations in order nothing like that would happen again. Vaira Vike-Freiberga also underlined that people of the world had to be alert towards expression of hatred among nations and religions and alert towards placing all the blame and problems on some easily recognizable group and considering that with eliminating this group everything would be settled. She stressed that the acts committed in Latvia by the Nazi-sent armed men were imbecility and all of us had to take care that paranoia would never again usurp power and commit mass murders in any country.
