German Family Minister Karin Prien commemorated the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre in Kiev on Tuesday, 85 years after Nazi forces murdered tens of thousands of Jews at the site.
"Remembrance means responsibility - and this responsibility does not fade - never," Prien said at the memorial, alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other guests.
Prien, who has Jewish roots, also recalled her own family's losses during the Holocaust. "I, too, lost relatives in the Shoah," she said.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, German Einsatzgruppen, assisted by soldiers, police and SS members, shot dead 33,771 Jewish residents of Kiev at Babyn Yar, then on the outskirts of the city.
Prien described the massacre as a "crime at the beginning of the Shoah that remains incomprehensible to this day."
Representatives from Israel and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem also attended Tuesday's commemoration at the site, which is now home to a memorial complex featuring several art installations.
Zelensky, Prien and other guests placed burning red candles at the memorial amid tight security.
Prien later said it was "of great importance" to commemorate the massacre, but added that Germany "must also always take responsibility for what is happening today and what will happen tomorrow - and to do so here in Kiev, where today a people is once again fighting for its survival."
Earlier, Prien had also paid tribute to the dead with a candle at the flag memorial site in central Kiev for the soldiers killed in Russia's war on Ukraine.
Zelensky had already spoken out on the exact anniversary last month.
"This tragedy reminds us how painful it is to lose relatives and people close to us, and how much the value of human life as a whole can be degraded," he said on September 29.
Saxony-Anhalt also on Prien's mind in Kiev
Prien also addressed the fact that at home in Germany, a politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was elected as the speaker of the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt at its constituent session on Tuesday.
Responding to a question on the matter at Babyn Yar, she said it was "very distressing - not only for Jews in Germany, but for everyone."
Prien said German civil society "will have to fight hard to ensure that the culture of remembrance in Germany, regardless of the election results in the individual federal states, continues to have the status and function it must have in a country of perpetrators who committed precisely this crime here in Babyn Yar."
