Shortly before the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, the memorial site of the former concentration camp Buchenwald once again declared itself an AfD. At the beginning of 2017, the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial had already banned the Thuringian AfD parliamentary leader Björn Höcke, and now it is extending it to its entire party.
The Foundation considers it necessary „that representatives of the AfD at a memorial service in these places not participate, as long as they do not credibly distance themselves from the anti-democratic, anti-human rights and history revisionist positions in their party,“ it said in a statement. On Friday, a wreath for the victims will be deposited in the memorial with survivors and representatives of the Thuringian state government.
The memorial referred to a speech by Björn Höcke. The AfD politician had said in Dresden, among other things, with regard to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin: „We Germans, so our people, are the only people in the world, which has planted a monument of shame in the heart of his capital.“
Foundation director Volkhard Knigge wrote in a letter to the members of the AfD parliamentary group in the state parliament, Höcke hold today to his expressed in January 2017 opinion on the culture of remembrance. The two years ago by the AfD federal leadership against Höcke initiated party exclusion proceedings is now set.
„Even from your group we have no distancing from his positions known,“ it said in the letter. Today it can be stated: „Anyone who does not credibly defend themselves against such positions and the associated trivializing, relativizing concept of history within the AfD supports them.“
At Buchenwald Concentration Camp (Buchenwald) near Weimar, more than 56,000 people died of torture, medical experiments or hunger and illness until the end of the Second World War. In special facilities, more than 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot. It was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists abducted around 270,000 people from all over Europe.
