U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visited the memorial site of Auschwitz on Friday along with the Polish president and Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, viewing a train car, crematoriums and the hair of victims that make it such a powerful testament to the evil that befell Europe in the last century.
It was the first visit for Pence, a conservative Christian, to the site where German forces murdered 1.1 million people, most of them Jews but also Poles, Roma and others, during the Nazis' occupation of Eastern Europe during World War II.
Pence and his wife Karen were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda and first lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda.
"It seems to me to be a scene of unspeakable tragedy, reminding us what tyranny is capable of," Pence said hours later during an event Friday evening on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany. "But it seems to me also to be a scene of freedom's victory."
"I traveled in our delegation with people who had family members who had been at Auschwitz – some had survived, some not. But to walk with them and think that two generations ago their forebears came there in box carts and that we would arrive in a motorcade in a free Poland and a Europe restored to freedom from tyranny is an extraordinary experience for us, and I'll carry it with me the rest of our lives," Pence said.
They began their visit by walking under the notorious gate with the German words "Arbeit macht frei," the Nazi slogan meaning "Work sets you free."
There, they paused and turned toward reporters, who took their photos.
Pence toured an exhibition hall that includes human hair and personal belongings of the victims before a wreath-laying at the Death Wall in a courtyard where prisoners were executed. Many of those shot there were Poles who were part of the underground resistance against the German occupation.
The two couples walked side-by-side to the wall for the wreath-laying. The Pences held hands and the vice president adjusted a banner reading "From the people of the United States of America."
Kushner was among a second group that then approached the wall and wreaths.
The second part of the visit took them to the nearby satellite camp of Birkenau, the site of the murder of Jews from across Europe. Pence knelt and bowed his head, placing his hand on a historic red boxcar on the train tracks used to bring Jews to their deaths there.
The couples also placed candles at a memorial to the Holocaust victims, with Pence wearing a Jewish skullcap. Poland's chief rabbi recited a prayer to the dead and a Christian prayer was also recited.
The visit came a day after Pence accused Britain, France, Germany and the European Union as a whole of trying to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and called on the EU to join the Trump administration in withdrawing from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
He made those comments during a conference on the Mideast in Warsaw focused largely on Iran and which Tehran denounced as a hostile act.
Several times during his visit Pence compared the evil of the Nazis to that of Iran today.
He accused the regime in Tehran of "breathing out murderous threats with the same vile anti-Semitic hatred that animated the Nazis in Europe."
He added that "to be there to see the end result of that and understand all that happened there, I think will better prepare us and strengthen the resolve of the free world to oppose that kind of vile hatred and to confront authoritarian threats of our time."
Pence was on a four-day visit to Europe that also included meeting with Polish soldiers and American troops in Poland.
Iran on Saturday rejected Pence's accusations of anti-Semitism, saying it respected Judaism but opposed Israel, which Tehran said was acting like a "killing machine against the Palestinians."
"Iran's historic and cultural record of coexistence and respect for divine religions, particularly Judaism, is recorded in reliable historic documents of various nations," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said.
"The principle that underlies our foreign policy is the aggressive and occupying nature of the Zionist regime (Israel)…, which is a killing machine against the Palestinian people," Qasemi said, according to the ministry's website.
Speaking to Germany's Der Spiegel Online, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described Pence's accusation as "laughable," adding: "Iran has always supported the Jews. We are just against Zionists. The Holocaust was a disaster."
Iran's ancient Jewish community has slumped to an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 from 85,000 at the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but it is believed to be the biggest in the Middle East outside Israel.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, drew lengthy applause Saturday for her spirited defense of a multilateral approach to global affairs and support for Europe's decision to stand by a nuclear deal with Iran.
Merkel's comments at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of world leaders and top global defense and foreign policy officials, followed days of acrimony between the U.S. and Europe over Iran.
Merkel told the group – which included the largest U.S. delegation ever with dozens of members of Congress, Ivanka Trump, Pence and others – that she shared American concerns about many Iranian efforts to increase its power in the region.
But while she said the split with the U.S. over Iran's nuclear agreement "depresses me very much," she defended it as an important channel to Tehran, stressing the need for international diplomacy.
"I see the ballistic missile program, I see Iran in Yemen and above all, I see Iran in Syria," she said. "The only question that stands between us on this issue is, do we help our common cause, our common aim of containing the damaging or difficult development of Iran, by withdrawing from the one remaining agreement? Or do we help it more by keeping the small anchor we have in order maybe to exert pressure in other areas?"
But the U.S. argues that the deal just puts off when Iran might be able to build a nuclear bomb. Speaking after Merkel, Pence pushed for Europeans to end their involvement in the nuclear deal, calling Iran "the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world."
"The time has come for our European partners to stop undermining U.S. sanctions against this murderous revolutionary regime," Pence said. "The time has come for our European partners to stand with us and with the Iranian people, our allies and friends in the region. The time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal."
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who was in office when the Iran nuclear deal was negotiated, went out of his way to thank Merkel and defended the Iran deal as a "significant agreement."
Biden told the group that many Americans did not agree with the Trump administration's "America first" approach.
"You heard a lot today about leadership but in my experience, leadership only exists if somebody and others are with you," he said after Pence's address. "Leadership in the absence of people who are with you is not leadership."
In her speech, Merkel also questioned whether it was a good idea for the U.S. to withdraw troops quickly from Syria "or is that not also strengthening the possibilities for Iran and Russia to exert influence there?"
Turning to nuclear disarmament, Merkel said the recent U.S. announcement that it was pulling out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was "inevitable" because of Russian violations.
Moscow followed suit by also withdrawing from the treaty, strongly denying any breaches. The U.S. administration was also worried that the pact was an obstacle to efforts to counter intermediate-range missiles deployed by China, which is not covered by the treaty.
Merkel noted the treaty was conceived "essentially for Europe," where such missiles were stationed during the Cold War. She said, "The answer cannot lie in blind rearmament."
"Disarmament is something that concerns us all, and we would, of course, be glad if such negotiations were conducted not just between the United States … and Russia, but also with China," she said.
Merkel also defended Germany's progress in fulfilling NATO guidelines for countries to move toward spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024, which has been criticized as too slow. And overall, she rejected the idea of a go-it-alone foreign policy.
She said it's better to "put yourself in the other's shoes … and see whether we can get win-win solutions together."
Pence stuck to the U.S. line that the 2% NATO guideline is a strict commitment rather than a target, saying while more alliance members have met the criteria, "the truth is, many of our NATO allies still need to do more."
He also reiterated American opposition to the joint German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which Washington fears will make Europe overly reliant on Russian gas.
"The United States commends all our European partners who've taken a strong stand against Nord Stream 2," he said. "And we commend others to do that same."
He added: "We cannot ensure the defense of the West if our allies grow dependent on the East."
Merkel defended the pipeline under the Baltic Sea, dismissing the American concerns as unfounded and assuring Ukraine that it won't get cut off from Russian fuel.
Speaking as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko looked on, she told him his country would continue to be a transit country for Russian gas even after the pipeline is complete.
Merkel noted that Europe also has enough terminals to receive more liquefied gas from the U.S., among other options.
"There's nothing that speaks against getting gas from the United States, but to exclude Russia is the wrong strategic signal," she said.
