It looks like the continuation of the “180 degree turn in commemoration policy” that the AfD right-wing extremist Björn Höcke has been calling for for years: right-wing extremists rabble in memorials for the victims of National Socialism, they deny the Holocaust and take pictures of themselves giving the Hitler salute in former concentration camps. They daub information boards and memorial stones with swastikas and hate slogans, break stumbling blocks out of the asphalt or destroy memorials. Parallel to these acts of vandalism, representatives of the AfD repeatedly question the public funding of memorials. Similar to the area of Culture, which recently has increasingly become a battlefieldpolitical representatives of the new right as well as right-wing extremists and vandals seem to be working towards the same goal of undermining the culture of remembrance – perhaps uncoordinated, but very frightening together.
What makes the attacks particularly cynical is that they take place at the scenes of the National Socialist mass murders, where countless people suffered – Jews, forced labourers, Sinti and Roma, social democrats, homosexuals, communists, Christians. A group of visitors to the AfD politician Alice Weidel thinks it is appropriate to question the Holocaust at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial. Right-wing extremist Nikolai Nerling mocks Anne Frank, who died there, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial of all places. Activists like Nerling use memorial sites as symbolic stages and attention-grabbers for their performances. They are concerned with the maximum breaking of a taboo, the mockery of the murdered. However, most perpetrators remain anonymous. They deliberately want to hurt other people’s feelings. Their actions bear witness to anger and brutality, but also to cowardice. The target of many attacks are unguarded memorial stones and memorials.
research of Süddeutsche Zeitung and the NDR have documented more than a hundred such attacks on the culture of remembrance over the past six years – on average more than one per month. They seem like aggressive gestures of suppression and hardening, like an attempt not to have to face the history of this country. This has a lot to do with defensiveness, perpetrator-victim reversal, cold feelings and sheer hatred and very little to do with enlightened patriotism.
Nikolai Nerling in 2019.
(Photo: Sachelle Babbar/Imago Images/ZUMA Wire, Collage: Stefan Dimitrov)
Violence as a means of denying history is not new. In 1979, a neo-Nazi blew up transmitters to prevent the television series “Holocaust” from airing. An NPD functionary was arrested as the perpetrator. In 1999, right-wing terrorists attacked the exhibition with which the Hamburg Institute for Social Research documented the crimes of the Wehrmacht. In January 2020, a package containing, according to a police report, “an explosive device with a serious effect” was deposited at the entrance to the memorial of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Thuringia. Places of remembrance, of respect for the dead, and shame are systematically disregarded. Memorial staff are insulted and threatened. For years, memorial sites have therefore felt compelled to train their employees in how to deal with such disturbances. They have to learn to pay attention to right-wing symbols and codes when visitors are dressed, have to interrupt tours again and again, and ban some visitors from the house.
But the truth is that every year more than a million visitors to the “Topography of Terror” in Berlin learn about the Nazis’ apparatus of violence. The Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Brandenburg alone sees more than 700,000 visitors every year. In addition, confused historical revisionists and neo-Nazis are a tiny minority. When right-wing extremist Nerling agitated against the “cult of guilt” during one of his appearances at the Dachau concentration camp memorial in February 2019, the school class of a group of visitors clearly and unequivocally contradicted him. The young people showed more human decency and responsibility in view of German history than the self-proclaimed “people’s teacher”.
Here you can find them Chronicle of Incidents.