A commemoration for the Battle of Jutland was held today in Germany at the Naval Memorial at Laboe. The battle is known as Die Skagerrakschlacht in German.
The event was attended by Michael Roth, the Minister of State for Europe at the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the British Duke of Kent.
At the event, Michael Roth said: “With the distance of a hundred years it is sometimes difficult to detect a parallel between the Europe of 1916 and the European Union of 2016. In place of the fragile balance of power of that time is today a European community with common legal values. Today we no longer target each other with weapons, but we discuss political compromises in negotiating rooms in Brussels – sometimes hard , but always according to the rules that we have agreed with each other. The EU is the most successful peace and democracy project in the world. This is perhaps the most important message today.”
The 72-metre-high Laboe Naval Memorial is located close to Kiel in the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany. The monument originally commemorated the German sailors who died in the First World War – but this was extended after 1945 to those who had died in the Second World War as well.
Photo: copyright Deutscher Marinebund