COLOGNE, Germany — The leaders of Germany on Friday joined hundreds of mourning relatives in one of the country’s most hallowed cathedrals to honor the passengers and crew members who died when a jet smashed into a French mountainside last month.
The crash horrified the world after investigators said the copilot had deliberately brought down the plane.
President Joachim Gauck, once a Lutheran pastor in Communist East Germany, and Chancellor Angela Merkel were among the state and national leaders who gathered in the Cologne Cathedral for the two-hour, nationally televised memorial service.
Gauck gave voice to many of the issues that have arisen in a shocked country since the March 24 crash of the Germanwings plane. The president, who was on a state visit to Latin America when the crash occurred, noted that the shock was all the deeper when the world learned that the copilot was likely responsible.
“We lack words for this deed,” said the president. He said it had given rise to a “dreadfully oppressive burden of feelings” — incomprehension, rage, and anger that made the loss all the harder to bear.
There have been many memorial services in Germany, Spain, and elsewhere since the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 24. But the ceremony in Cologne illustrated the extent to which this country has been affected more than any other.
About half the people onboard were from Germany, as was the copilot, Andreas Lubitz. There were 150 candles burning in the cathedral Friday, one for each person on the plane, including Lubitz.
“We don’t know what was going on inside the head of the copilot in the decisive second, in the decisive minutes,” Gauck said, referring to the time in which Lubitz blocked the captain of the plane from reentering the cockpit and set a course into the French Alps.
But, Gauck noted, “we do know that his family also lost someone they loved on March 24.”
The crash has also shaken confidence in Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings and a symbol of German reliability and technical excellence.
The airline suffered a serious blow to its reputation after admitting that it had known since 2009 that Lubitz had a history of severe depression. German prosecutors have disclosed that he underwent several years of treatment for suicidal tendencies.
The heads of Lufthansa and Germanwings were among the 1,400 mourners in the cathedral, most of them relatives of victims, or invited dignitaries. The headquarters of Germanwings is less than 10 miles from the cathedral near the Cologne-Bonn airport. Montabaur, the hometown of Lubitz, is about 60 miles to the south of Cologne.
The plane was bound from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, and many of the victims were from the surrounding region in western Germany, including 16 high school students and two teachers from the town of Haltern am See, which is about 60 miles north of Cologne.
The students were returning from an exchange program in Spain.
Also killed were two acclaimed opera singers from the Deutsche Oper in Düsseldorf. A colleague, the Romanian soprano Luiza Fatyol, sang “Pie Jesu” by Gabriel Fauré during the service. Later, two violinists from Haltern played John Williams’s theme from the movie “Schindler’s List.”
As the shock of the crash begins to wear off, representatives of the airline industry, including pilots and crew members, have been arguing that it was an isolated incident, and that rushing to introduce wholesale changes in the system would be misplaced.
A task force made up of representatives of the German government and airlines is examining ways to better identify pilots with serious mental health problems and to prevent them from flying. But there is also heavy resistance to any changes that would compromise the strict confidentiality of medical records, which many Germans regard as sacred.
The Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, led the ecumenical service along with Annette Kurschus, head of the Lutheran church in the region of Westphalia. She summed up the national mood, at least in part, by reiterating that “something incomprehensible has happened.” The cardinal invited all mourners, including those he acknowledged might not have the habit of Christian prayer, to “be carried” by the solidarity of others.
Representatives of the Orthodox Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths also read short prayers.
On a windswept April day, the vast, hushed cathedral was chilly. People identified as emergency counselors were in the aisles; at each seat was a stylized wooden angel that mourners were encouraged to clutch if seeking comfort. They were urged to search for sustaining angels in everyday life. Angels were presented to Gauck, ministers from Spain and France, including Jorge Fernández Díaz, the Spanish interior minister, and to Hannelore Kraft, governor of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
“We are left with only one question: Why?” Kraft said in remarks to the mourners after the ecumenical service concluded.
One angel was handed to Thomas Winkelmann, the head of Germanwings.
The Dom, as the cathedral is known, is one of Germany’s oldest and most important cathedrals and one of the largest in the world. Construction began in 1248 on a site that had been used for Christian worship at least since the 600s. The cathedral, with its signature twin steeples, was not completed until 1880. Though badly damaged by bombs in World War II, the cathedral remained standing and has since been restored.