Volkswacht Bodensee - German president honours victims in Guernica, razed by Nazis

The elite Condor Legion razed the northern Basque town on April 26, 1937 in support of General Francisco Franco's rebels during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) alongside Fascist Italy.

Steinmeier and German First Lady Elke Buedenbender joined King Felipe VI at a ceremony held at a Guernica cemetery in memory of the victims, AFP journalists saw.

The heads of state were due to visit the town's Museum of Peace, which tells the story of the tragedy, viewed by historians as a precursor to the mass terror bombing of civilian targets during World War II.

Some 50 aircraft dropped 30 tonnes of explosives on Guernica in successive waves, including incendiary bombs, before Messerschmitt fighter planes mowed down civilians as they tried to flee.

Guernica, considered the first town to be destroyed by aerial bombardment, became synonymous with the horror of civilian suffering during wartime.

At the start of his three-day state visit to Spain on Wednesday, Steinmeier urged Germans never to forget the "crime" of Guernica, for which his country had earned "a heavy burden of guilt".

"Guernica is a reminder -- a reminder to stand up for peace, freedom and the preservation of human rights," he told a gala dinner at Madrid's Royal Palace.

The visit comes almost 30 years after former president Roman Herzog became in 1997 the first German leader to officially recognise the country's "involvement" in the massacre and apologised to the Spanish people.

"To you, survivors of this attack, to you, witnesses of the horror suffered, I send my message of remembrance, solidarity and mourning," Herzog wrote in a speech read out in Guernica by Germany's ambassador.

The raid was immortalised by Pablo Picasso's anti-war masterpiece "Guernica", a painting that captures the horror of innocent civilian suffering and which Steinmeier viewed at Madrid's Reina Sofia art museum on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the painting last week and has compared the massacre in Guernica to the suffering inflicted by Russia's invasion of his country.

Spain remembered its own authoritarian past on November 20, which marked the 50th anniversary of Franco's death and the end of his 36-year dictatorship.

L.Maurer--VB