Frank-Walter Steinmeier travels to Basque town for remembrance ceremony marking ‘terrible crimes’ of 1937
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.
