Holocaust: Chancellor Mr Gerhard Schröder has urged ordinary Germans to be vigilant against neo-Nazis, reminding them that ordinary people helped the Nazis to power in the 1930s.
Mr Schröder will today tell survivors of Auschwitz, freed 60 years ago this week, of his "shame" in the face of the "hell of the concentration camps" they survived and of those who were murdered with "cold industrial perfection".
"Nazi ideology was wanted and made by people," he said in the text of a speech to be delivered today to the International Auschwitz Committee.
"The brutalisation of thought and the loss of moral inhibitions had a history."
Mr Schröder's carefully-crafted remarks sent a clear signal just days after 12 members of an extreme-right party walked out of the Saxon state parliament in Dresden rather than participate in a minute's silence for Holocaust victims.
The NPD captured 9 per cent of the popular vote in state elections in Saxony last September.
A government attempt to ban the party failed in 2003 and another ban attempt is unlikely.
Mr Schröder instead called it the "duty of all democrats" to counter neo-Nazi attempts to downplay the Nazi crimes.
"That there is anti-Semitism is not to be denied. Fighting it is the task of the whole society."
He said the power of the state would be used to protect the fast-growing Jewish community in Germany, now the third-largest in Europe, from the "anti-Semitism of the unteachable".
The Chancellor said Nazi crimes were a burden that Germans carry with "sadness but also with a most serious responsibility".
"The overwhelming majority of Germans living today carry no blame for the Holocaust. But they carry a particular responsibility.
"For some this part is difficult to carry. But it changes nothing that this remembering belongs to our national identity."