On Nov. 28, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier became the first head of state of the country to visit Guernica, the town in northern Spain destroyed in a 1937 Nazi air raid during Spain’s civil war, which Pablo Picasso famously depicted in a painting now on view at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Joined by King Felipe VI of Spain, Steinmeier called on Germans to “not forget what happened back then.” The two laid a wreath for the victims and then met two survivors of the attack at the Museum of Peace.
Steinmeier said in a speech at a state banquet, hosted by the king and Queen Letizia in Madrid on Nov. 26, that “Germans committed terrible crimes in Guernica.”
On April 26, 1937, the “feared Condor Legion bombed the city, razing it to the ground,” Steinmeier said at the event. “Hundreds of defenseless children, women and men lost their lives in appalling, agonizing ways. The terror, pain and grief is felt to this day.”
“It is very important to me, and I am consciously addressing this sentence to my compatriots at home, that we do not forget what happened back then,” Steinmeier said. “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 this, now and in the future.”
Imanol Pradales, the regional president, urged Spain to match Germany’s willingness to confront the past.
“No one has any doubts that the current Spanish state is very different from that one,” he said. “We’re asking nothing more, and nothing less, from the Spanish state than what the German president is doing.”
