MADRID — Germany's President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday became the first German head of state to visit Guernica, the Basque town devastated by a Nazi air raid during Spain's civil war in one of the first modern air bombings of civilians.

Accompanied by Spanish King Felipe VI and Basque regional President Imanol Pradales, Steinmeier laid a wreath draped with a German flag at a cemetery housing a mausoleum built in 1973 for hundreds of victims of the bombings.

Before the ceremony, Steinmeier, his wife Elke Buedenbender, and King Felipe VI shook hands with two survivors of the bombing, Crucita Etxabe and Mari Carmen Aguirre. Born in 1930, the two women were under 7 when the air raid struck.

Steinmeier later visited the Gernika Peace Museum, which preserves survivor testimonies and archival images. Speaking to reporters, he called Guernica "a place where the horror of war and the vulnerability of innocent people have been indelibly etched into our European memory".

He acknowledged the bombing as "a brutal crime, whose sole target was the civilian population", saying he walked through the town "with humility" and insisting the suffering "must not be forgotten".

Emilio Apperibai — only 8 months old when the bombs fell — told local media that the German president's visit was "deeply moving", adding that it should "serve as a reminder, so this never happens again".

Burden of guilt

Speaking at a gala dinner hosted by the king and his wife, Queen Letizia, in Madrid on Wednesday, Steinmeier said Germans bear "a heavy burden of guilt in Guernica" and called the memory of the attack "a warning to stand up for peace, freedom and the protection of human rights".

"It is very important to me that we — and I am deliberately addressing this sentence to my compatriots in Germany — do not forget what happened back then. This crime was committed by Germans," he said.

Adolf Hitler's Condor Legion bombed the historic city of Guernica on April 26, 1937, in support of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's army in what Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering later told the Nuremberg trials was "an opportunity to put my young air force to the test".

Earlier on his three-day visit to Spain, Steinmeier and Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica, regarded as an antiwar symbol, which hangs in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum.

AGENCIES - XINHUA