“We remember the millions of people who were deported to concentration camps, tortured and murdered there,” he said on Wednesday during a visit to the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

“They were imprisoned here because they were political opponents of the regime, because they were Jews, because they were counted among the Sinti and Roma, because they were homosexuals or because they were prisoners of war.”

Sachsenhausen had been a training ground for perfecting genocide, Steinmeier said. “The victims have a right to be remembered and we must preserve that memory.”

The responsibility today, he said, was to resolutely counter all forms of anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination. He said it was gratifying that, according to surveys, younger people have an increased interest in learning more about this part of history.

“Young people in particular need to look at the past in order to learn for the present and to shape the future,” said Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, who accompanied Steinmeier alongside Brandenburg state premier Dietmar Woidke, who said that hate and hatred must never win out over human rights and tolerance again.

“The legacy of contemporary witnesses must be preserved and passed on to future generations so that such atrocities never happen again,” Woidke warned.

More than 200,000 people were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners perished through hunger, disease, forced labour, medical experiments, mistreatment or systematic extermination.

In 1996, January 27 was declared a legal day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in Germany.