{"id":4024,"date":"2026-04-12T17:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T17:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/4024\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T17:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T17:45:08","slug":"row-over-protest-at-buchenwald-memorial-event-highlights-rising-sense-of-danger-in-germany-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/4024\/","title":{"rendered":"Row over protest at Buchenwald memorial event highlights rising sense of danger in Germany \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Buchenwald concentration camp memorial on Sunday, a ceremony to remember Germany<\/a>\u2019s burdened past knocked out a long-planned protest over the country\u2019s contested present.<\/p>\n

For weeks, German-based Palestinian <\/a>solidarity groups vowed to hold a vigil, in parallel with the 81st anniversary of the Nazi camp\u2019s liberation, with protesters wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, popular at Gaza solidarity marches.<\/p>\n

Organisers said the vigil was to honour genocide victims and call out the hypocrisy they see in German support for Israel<\/a> since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023. <\/p>\n

In the end, however, their protest came to nothing. A last-minute appeal upheld a previous ban on keffiyehs at the memorial on Sunday and, according to local police, protesters failed to show up at an alternative site assigned to them in the nearby eastern city of Weimar.<\/p>\n

Buchenwald was a sprawling Nazi camp and a prison for about 278,000 people from 50 countries \u2013 and, ultimately, a grave for about 56,000 people. Today the main memorial is a vast, birch-tree-lined site where stone foundation outlines are all that remain of most camp buildings.<\/p>\n

Large crowds attended Sunday\u2019s ceremony, applauding as memorial director Jens-Christian Wagner warned that fringe extremists were attacking the camp\u2019s legacy to undermine democracy.<\/p>\n

He described keffiyeh protest organisers as extreme-left \u201csect-like groups who are abusing memory for their own ends\u201d. <\/p>\n

A far greater threat, he warned, comes from the far-right Alterative for Germany (AfD).<\/p>\n

Buchenwald camp memorial is located in the state of Thuringia, which chooses a new state government next year, and where the local AfD has 39 per cent support.<\/p>\n

The party is polling 38 per cent in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt and could win an outright majority in the state parliament in September.<\/p>\n

On Saturday AfD delegates there backed an election manifesto denouncing postwar historical work for \u201cperpetuating neurosis\u201d towards German national identity.<\/p>\n

Popular German actor Hape Kerkeling, whose grandfather survived Buchenwald, warned the crowd in a speech: \u201cWhoever draws a line under the past draws a line under our democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two elderly survivors of Buchenwald attended from Poland and Belarus but did not address Sunday\u2019s ceremony. <\/p>\n

Many survivors from Israel were unable to attend as the war in Iran saw their flights cancelled. <\/p>\n

Quoting one of them, Naftali F\u00fcrst, Wagner said: \u201cHe wrote to me yesterday: \u2018Buchenwald is a political place but not a political stage\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was a nod to Buchenwald\u2019s unique \u2013 and contested \u2013 past. An underground communist organisation played a crucial role in liberating the camp in April 1945 as US soldiers arrived.<\/p>\n

On Saturday one group behind the abandoned keffiyeh protest, the Jewish Antizionist Network, posted online a statement it had filmed in the Buchenwald memorial. It accused Germany of \u201cpathological, ideological, financial and political support for the apartheid state of Israel as it commits genocide in Palestine\u201d.<\/p>\n

The scarf standoff erupted first last April when a woman was denied access to the memorial because she was wearing a keffiyeh. This week on Instagram the woman, who identified herself as Anna, described the move as \u201conly one example of many cases of anti-Palestinian repression by memorials\u201d.<\/p>\n

Wagner said keffiyehs were not banned outright at the Buchenwald memorial but were viewed critically at events attended by elderly \u2013 often Jewish \u2013 survivors.<\/p>\n

Asked about the woman protester, he told the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung: \u201cThe woman turned up once before in the memorial with a keffiyeh and, with a Hamas-linked activist, filmed illegally a video where she likened what she called the genocide in Gaza implicitly with the Holocaust.\u201d <\/p>\n

Another driving force behind Sunday\u2019s planned protest, the Communist Organisation, is a fringe breakaway from Germany\u2019s Communist Party.<\/p>\n

It denounced Sunday\u2019s Buchenwald anniversary event as symptomatic of flawed postwar German memory culture in which \u201cremembrance of fascism was and is … always used for the support of Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Communist Organisation attracted attention in 2023 after praising the October 7th attacks as a \u201cshining signal for the worldwide battle against barbarism and the liberation of humanity\u201d. Days later the group described the attacks that claimed 1,200 lives as a \u201crising up for revolution, return and liberation\u201d.<\/p>\n

A post on its Instagram profile likened the red triangle, a Nazi camp symbol for political prisoners, to the red cross symbol used by Hamas.<\/p>\n

The Israel-Gaza conflict overshadowed, too, last year\u2019s 80th anniversary ceremony in Buchenwald. The memorial, under pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin, uninvited keynote speaker Omri Boehm, an Israeli-born philosopher and grandson of a Holocaust survivor.<\/p>\n

The embassy argued that Boehm\u2019s work, focused on the idea of universal humanism and human rights, attempted \u201cto dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust\u201d.<\/p>\n

Wagner disagreed strongly but yielded, saying survivors \u201cfaced a conflict of loyalty because of the pressure exerted by the embassy\u201d. <\/p>\n

He later attacked the Israeli ambassador and said Germans \u201ccan and must criticise the Israeli government\u201d for its far-right coalition partners.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, American visitors to Buchenwald, the children of camp survivors, said warnings about extremist dangers to democracy were already palpable for them in the Trump-era US. All asked not to be quoted or named, fearing reprisals on their return to the US. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Buchenwald concentration camp memorial on Sunday, a ceremony to remember Germany\u2019s burdened past knocked out a long-planned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,57,382,2152],"class_list":{"0":"post-4024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-germany","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-palestine","11":"tag-second-world-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}