Death threats no longer surprise the director of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. With the unprecedented victory of the German far right in a regional election, he expects even more difficult days ahead.
“My colleagues and I have been upset and depressed since Sunday evening,” Jens-Christian Wagner, head of the foundation that administers the former Nazi camp, told AFP.
The Thuringia region, where the site is located, saw the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party triumph in Sunday’s election. For the first time, far-right MPs will be the most numerous in the parliament of this small state in eastern Germany.
“The opinions against our memorial will grow stronger and it will become increasingly difficult to change people’s minds,” Jens-Christian Wagner grimaces.
The AfD’s leader in Thuringia is a former history teacher, Björn Höcke, and one of the party’s most radical figures, advocating a break with the culture of repentance for Nazi crimes, a long-undisputed post-war legacy.
In 2017, he called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame.”
Death threats
Next year, the foundation will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp, the first to be entered by American troops on April 11, 1945.
“Maybe nothing will go as planned, maybe we will have to re-establish a police station,” the historian considers.
This was already the case in the 1990s due to repeated incursions by neo-Nazi groups.
Jens-Christian Wagner recently received four death threats after sending a letter to 350,000 residents of the state to convince them not to vote for the AfD.
And the attacks have multiplied in recent years, on the foundation’s social networks, “flooded with revisionist content”, as on the place of memory.
Trees planted in tribute to survivors have been cut down and swastikas have been carved into the camp.
Filled with anti-Semitic provocations, the visitors’ guestbook was even removed.
Those responsible for these acts “are idiots with no political motivation and do not represent the AfD,” says Uwe Baumann, 63, who came to visit the camp with Hungarian friends.
The man, “horrified” by Nazi crimes, crosses a vast plain surrounded by barbed wire, near the former crematorium.
Between 1937 and 1945, 56,000 people died in Buchenwald. Thousands of Jews were among the victims, but also Roma, political opponents of Hitler’s regime, homosexuals and prisoners of the Soviet Union.
“The AfD is seen as a black sheep, but it has no problem with the Nazi past,” says the pensioner.
Memorial culture
“The AfD not only downplays Nazi crimes, but also spreads positive references to Nazism,” counters Jens-Christian Wagner.
Latest example: Björn Höcke included a song by the poet Franz Langheinrich, one of the architects of Nazi cultural policy in the 1930s, in his election programme, assures Mr Wagner.
This year, he was fined twice by the courts for knowingly using a slogan of a Nazi paramilitary group at rallies.
“By relativising the Holocaust, Björn Höcke also denies the foundations of German democracy,” notes Lorenz Blumenthaler of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation.
The memorial culture was not “imposed by the government”, but “comes from civil society”, recalls the spokesperson of this NGO committed to fighting the extreme right.
“There are political forces that today are once again contesting (Nazi crimes), relativizing them or minimizing them […] “We are deeply ashamed of this,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Monday.
In Thuringia, all other parties refused to join forces with the AfD to form a government.
But the far right could still influence the funding of the memorial, 50% of which is provided by the region, fears Mr Wagner.
How to counter the AfD’s “cultural hegemony”? The memorial wants to strengthen its presence on social networks and is considering investing in TikTok.
A space saturated by the AfD and disinformation, but where “certain influencers explain the work of memory very well to the youngest,” notes Lorenz Blumenthaler.