At 80th anniversary of Buchenwald liberation, former German president warns of rise of far right
VIENNA — Germany marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' Buchenwald death camp on Sunday as one of the country's former presidents warned against 'radicalization and a worldwide shift to the right.'
The governor of the state of Thuringia, Mario Voigt, and former German President Christian Wulff spoke at a ceremony in the city of Weimar, near Buchenwald, attended by scores of people, including several Holocaust survivors from across Europe.
Voigt, whose state includes Buchenwald, called it 'a place of systematic dehumanization' and said that everything that happened at the concentration camp 'was designed to break the human spirit and its dignity.'
The Buchenwald camp was established in 1937. More than 56,000 of the 280,000 inmates held at Buchenwald and its satellite camps were killed by the Nazis or died as a result of hunger, illness or medical experiments before the camp's liberation by U.S. Army forces on April 11, 1945.
Voigt also said that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel showed that 'the intention to exterminate Jews is not a thing of the past.'
The attack led by the Palestinian militant group left about 1,200 people dead, and 251 were taken hostage, sparking the war between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli retaliatory offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 50,695 Palestinians and wounded 115,338, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
In his speech, Wulff issued a stark warning about the current global political situation.
'Due to the brutalization and radicalization and a worldwide shift to the right, I can now — and this makes me uneasy — imagine more clearly how this could have happened back then,' Wulff said, referring to Nazi terror and the developments leading up to it.
He called for active commitment to democracy and the preservation of humanity. 'We bear a permanent, ongoing, eternal responsibility from this because evil must never be allowed to prevail again,' he said.
Wulff criticized the anti-immigrant, far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. He said that those who 'trivialize' the party 'are ignoring the fact that the Alternative for Germany's ideology is creating a breeding ground for people to feel uncomfortable in Germany and that they are actually in real danger.'
Trump White House advisor and billionaire Elon Musk has praised AfD, and Vice President JD Vance met with the party's leader during a recent visit in Munich.
Holocaust survivor Naftali Furst, 92, spoke at the wreath-laying ceremony held at the camp's former roll call area. From the ages of 9 to 12, he resided at four Nazi camps, including Auschwitz.
'To this day, the image is etched in my memory: carts pushed by prisoners loaded with corpses that were collected from the barracks and taken to the crematorium, reduced to ashes,' Furst recalled.
Addressing the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, Furst remarked, 'There are by now only very few of us left. Soon, we will pass the baton of remembrance on to you for good. In doing so, we are entrusting you with a historic responsibility. Remember on our behalf what you have learned from us. Because you are the witnesses of the witnesses.'
Furst concluded: 'Keep coming back to this place, to Buchenwald, where civilization was reduced to zero. Remain vigilant in our name, and in memory of us; recognize when human rights, women's rights, children's rights and minority rights are being violated. And when and where democracy is under threat, act and remain, each of you, a human being.'
In the run-up to the memorial event, Israeli officials objected to a planned commemoration speech by philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and a critic of the Israeli government and its military actions in Gaza. Organizers withdrew the invitation.
Some 6 million European Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Liechtenstein writes for the Associated Press.
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