German president honours victims of Nazi bombing atrocity on Guernica visit

Original article by Sam Jones in Madrid

Eighty-eight years after Luftwaffe pilots took part in the most infamous atrocity of the Spanish civil war, Germany’s president has visited the Basque town of Guernica to honour the victims of the Nazi bombing and to urge that the “terrible crimes” committed there are never forgotten.

Hundreds of civilians were killed and hundreds more injured on 26 April 1937 when planes from the German Condor Legion, operating alongside aircraft from fascist Italy, spent hours bombing Guernica on market day. Adolf Hitler had loaned the Luftwaffe unit to Gen Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces to help them in their coup against the republican government, and to allow Nazi Germany’s pilots to practise the blitzkrieg tactics they would later use in the second world war.

The destruction of Guernica, which would become a template for the aerial bombardment of civilians, was immortalised by Pablo Picasso in the huge monochrome canvas that bears the town’s name.

On Friday, Frank-Walter Steinmeier became the first German head of state to travel to Guernica, where he joined King Felipe VI of Spain in a remembrance ceremony held in a cemetery in the town and laid a wreath for the victims. The pair then visited Guernica’s Museum of Peace, where they met two survivors of the attack, Crucita Etxabe and María del Carmen Aguirre.

Steinmeier, who is on a state visit to Spain, used a speech earlier this week to address the bombing and its legacy.

“Germans committed terrible crimes in Guernica,” the president told guests at a banquet in Madrid on Wednesday.

“On 26 April 1937, the feared Condor Legion bombed the city, razing it to the ground. Hundreds of defenceless children, women and men lost their lives in appalling, agonising ways. The terror, pain and grief is felt to this day by many Basque families.”

Steinmeier, who visited the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica for himself, said the artist’s warning against remaining indifferent in the face of conflict and suffering “has lost none of its urgency”.

He added: “It is very important to me, and I am consciously addressing this sentence to my compatriots in Germany, that we do not forget what happened back then. This crime was committed by Germans. Guernica serves as a warning – a call to stand up for peace, freedom and the preservation of human rights. We want to live up to that, now and in the future.”

His words came three decades after Germany’s then president, Roman Herzog, said he wished “to confront the past and … explicitly admit to the culpable involvement of German pilots”.

Guernica’s mayor, José María Gorroño, who had hailed the visit as “a day that will go down in the town’s history”, used the occasion to repeat calls for Picasso’s masterpiece to be moved from the Reina Sofía to the place that inspired it.

In an interview with Cadena Ser radio on Thursday, Gorroño said the Spanish state owed a “moral debt to the victims of the bombing”, adding: “Picasso’s Guernica should come to Guernica. It’s a worldwide peace icon. The victims need this tribute.”

Meanwhile, the Basque regional president, Imanol Pradales, has called for the Spanish state to follow Germany’s lead in confronting its role in the bombing of Guernica.

“No one has any doubts that the current Spanish state is very different from that one,” he told the Basque parliament last week. “It’s just about affirming truth and justice, and its actions should spring from a commitment to freedom and democracy. We’re asking nothing more, and nothing less, from the Spanish state than what the German president is doing.”