In his speech, Reißfelder stressed the importance of the date to commit to humanity, to ban all acts of violence and to strive for peaceful solutions in times of conflict.
The day was even more important nowadays as the horrors of war may fade from the memories once the last contemporary witnesses of the 2nd World War have died.
The commemoration took place at St. Paul's curch in Frankfurt and was organised by the Hessian state governement, the Hessian section of the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission), the city of Frankfurt and the Bundeswehr (German Federal Defence Forse) command in Hesse.