He has made the statement twice during the past fortnight: once on Saturday on during his in-flight press conference when he left Egypt.

He was first reported saying on 22 April when he was meeting with some migrants at the Basilica of St. Bartholomew in Rome.

He was speaking to them about his visit to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos last year.

He continued with the comparison, saying the camps are like the Nazi concentration camps because "migrants are penned in and prevented from leaving."

Both Jewish and German groups reacted in shock when his statement was reported.

The German response was to ask Francis if he's made a linguistic error.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) said the Pope's comparison wasn't appropriate and he should find an alternative.

"The conditions in which migrants are currently living in some European countries may well be difficult, and deserve still greater international attention, but concentration camps they certainly are not," said AJC CEO David Harris.

"The Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labor and the extermination of millions of people during World War II. There is no comparison to the magnitude of that tragedy," he added.

Source

• The Washington Post
• The Times of Israel
• ArutzSheva
• Image: Anadolu Agency

Some 200,000 people who were mentally ill or disabled were killed in Germany during the Nazi era. The cynical name for the extermination program was "euthanasia," which means "beautiful death" in ancient Greek. This horrific past has shaped the way Germany treats the terminally ill and the disabled. Germany's laws on assisted suicide are restrictive, and the country has stricter rules on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a form of embryo profiling, than most other European countries.

In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Germany ratified in 2009. It calls for a so-called inclusive education system for all children, which means that children with disabilities and behavioral disorders should be allowed to attend mainstream schools. The German city-state of Bremen adopted the inclusion requirement in 2009, and other German states are in the process of implementing it.

Now a debate has unfolded on the pros and cons of inclusion. Proponents say that being different has to become normal. But opponents believe that inclusion comes at the expense of special-needs schools, that teachers are overwhelmed, that better students are short-changed, and that disabled children feel excluded in mainstream classes.

It is a debate in which some are berated as idealists and others as ideologues. But, ultimately, the real issue is how to define the moral standards of coexistence.

Berlin contemporary historian Götz Aly, 65, has a 34-year-old disabled daughter named Karline. In a SPIEGEL interview, he talks about the joys and hardships of everyday life with a disabled child. Aly has spent 32 years studying the issue of euthanasia. His book, "Die Belasteten" ("The Burdened"), was recently published by the S. Fischer publishing house.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Aly, you have studied the murders of the disabled and mentally ill in the Nazi era, or what was then referred to as "euthanasia." Didn't the issue strike a little too close to home for you?

Aly: I know, of course, that my daughter would have been one of the candidates for murder at the time. But Karline's illness 34 years ago was precisely the reason I approached the subject in the first place. Perhaps it was also a way for me to come to terms with it. That's what brought me to study the Nazis. It doesn't bother me when issues affect me personally. On the contrary, it bothers me that many Germans who write about the Nazi period behave as if they have no personal points of reference. I sometimes amuse myself by asking older colleagues: "Now what exactly did your father do in World War II?" Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: Deutschland.de

The plaintiff had been dismissed by Caritas Germany after he changed his legal registration as a Catholic, in a public protest against Church policies.

He said that his dismissal was a violation of his freedom of expression, but the court ruled that the Catholic Church has the right to set its own standards for employment.

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