The German head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will play the starring role on Friday at Guernica in an act of profound historical significance: asking for clemency from the victims of the bombing of the Basque city on April 26, 1937, by the Condor Legion, which Hitler had sent to support Franco. Guernica became a proving ground for the Nazi air forces in the face of the impending World War II, and its destruction is immortalized in the painting of the same name by Pablo Picasso, which Steinmeier reflected on last Wednesday at the Reina Sofia National Museum.
Germany had already apologized in 1997, when then-Federal President Roman Herzog sent a letter bearing his country’s responsibility for the massacre and apologizing, but Steinmeier will be the first to do so in person, at the Zalo Cemetery, where the remains of the victims who were recovered after the bombing lie, and at the Guernica Peace Museum. The trip to the Basque Country will be the culmination of the three-day state visit of the Federal President and his wife Elke Budenbender. During his stay in Spain, Steinmeier acknowledged that the Luftwaffe had committed “serious crimes” in Guernica and that “horror and mourning are still alive in many Basque families.”
The German Head of State will travel to the Basque Country, accompanied by Felipe VI, who will make his first visit to Guernica. The last king was his father, Juan Carlos I, in 1991. Ten years ago, on February 4, 1981, deputies suddenly interrupted the king’s speech in the Chamber of Deputies in Guernica. abertzalesThis created a climate of extreme tension less than three weeks after the coup attempt on February 23. Now the left-wing Basque nationalist Bildó party has announced that it will not attend the events because it considers Felipe VI’s presence “harmful.”
Yes, the leaders of the Socialist Party, the PNV, the People’s Party and Somar will attend, as well as the leader of the Basque Lindakari, Imanol Pradales, who will hold a reception for the German president at the Agoría Enea Palace and will participate in honoring the victims of the civil war at the Zalo Cemetery and at the Guernica Peace Museum. Steinmeier and Felipe VI are scheduled to meet two survivors of the bombing, Crocita Etxabe and Marie Carmen Aguirre. On Wednesday, during the dinner he presented to the German President at the Royal Palace, the King expressed his appreciation and gratitude for “a gesture of profound symbolic importance and harmony” represented by his visit to Guernica, which is “a reminder of the horror to which totalitarianism leads.”
On the 21st, Pradales asked from the tribune of the Basque Parliament that the Spanish state also make reparation and recognize the wrong done by Franco’s dictatorship and the “injustices suffered by Euskadi” in the past.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez received Steinmeier in La Moncloa, where he thanked him for his visit to Guernica. Sanchez acknowledged Germany’s “commitment to the culture of memory (…) which Spain is also deepening on the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Franco,” according to Moncloa newspaper sources. The same sources added: “They exchanged concerns about the rise of extremism in Europe and stressed the importance of democratic forces working unitedly and with constructive solutions to protect European values.”
After his visit to Guernica, the German head of state will head to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on Friday before returning to his country.