Germany marked the
80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi’s Buchenwald concentration camp
on Sunday,( 6 April ’25) with warnings against global “radicalisation 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,
attended by scores, including several Holocaust survivors from across Europe.
Voigt said that
Buchenwald was “a place of systematic dehumanisation” and that everything that
happened at the death camp “was designed to break the human spirit and its dignity”.
He also said the
October 7 Hamas attack on Israel showed that “the intention to exterminate Jews
is not a thing of the past”. Voigt was referring to the attack by the
Palestinian militant group that left some 1,200 people dead and 251 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, former
German President Christian Wulff issued a stark warning about the current
global political situation...He called
for active commitment to democracy and the preservation of humanity. He said:
“We bear a permanent, ongoing, eternal responsibility from this because evil
must never be allowed to prevail again.”
Wulff also criticised
the anti-immigrant and far-right Alternative for Germany party. He said that
those who “trivialise” the far-right 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”.
In the run-up to the
memorial event, Israeli officials objected to a planned commemoration speech by
philosopher Omri Boehm, a grandson of a Holocaust survivor and a known critic
of the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza. This prompted organisers to withdraw the invitation.