Page 2503 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 14 November 1989
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East Berlin. I rise to speak on what caused that wall to be built, and what many of us feel was a very dark page in history. As a very famous man, Robbie Burns, once said, "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn". Countless thousands today mourn the fact that six million Jews and others were gassed, shot, tortured and experimented on by a madman or at his direction. We must be ever vigilant that this never again happens in the world - no matter when, where or by whom - to any persons, no matter what their colour, race or religion.
We are lucky that we live in a country which is democratic and in which we have the right to express our feelings through the ballot-box. Let me remind the house that Germany in the early 1930s was also a democratic country, but one man, Adolf Hitler - a house painter, I believe - was able to change this. He gave the world one of the greatest horrors that the human race could ever commit against itself. If we saw animals do this we would, I am sure, be shocked. The world for some time turned its back on the Jews and others and would not believe that this was happening. Today we have the proof, not only moving pictures, stills and books, but records made by the Nazis themselves. They kept records so that they would know how well they had achieved this, the horror of what they were doing.
Some of the people who lived through this hell under Hitler and the Nazis did not make it by using their wits or anything else; they were just lucky. May I say to the people who did not survive this horror, whether they were Jews or others - and there were many other people who were killed for their beliefs - on this day on which we have seen a wonderful happening, a wall coming down between two cities, may they rest in peace.
Berlin Wall
MR HUMPHRIES (4.56): I also rise to speak on the subject that Mrs Grassby has raised. I, like Mrs Grassby, was pleased, excited and gratified to see the wall come down between East and West Berlin, and symbolically between Eastern Europe and Western Europe for the rest of the world, though I would not have attributed much of that wall to the excesses of Nazism.
Mrs Grassby: It would never have happened if there had not been Nazis.
MR HUMPHRIES: Naturally the Holocaust and the excesses of Nazism gave rise to the circumstances where that occurred, but the wall was not built by Nazis, Minister; it was built by a totalitarian state which remains in power today.
Mrs Grassby: It came about because of Nazis.
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