At the train station exit in the German city of Wiemer, a signpost awaits the flocks of tourists that seem to sum up the region’s last 250 years of history: Right: To the homes of Schiller and Goethe, two giants of Western culture; Left: To the original Bauhaus university, the birthplace of an architecture and design movement that changed the world. Up: The hill overlooking the city where, among the bare trees, sits the Buchenwald concentration camp.
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Hundreds of thousands of tourists will pass, often within a few short hours, from Friedreich Schiller’s desk with his quill and inkwell where he wrote “William Tell,” to Buchenwald’s horrific crematorium. They will, no doubt, all wonder how in the very same place where some of the world’s cultural zeniths were born, its deepest abysses were also created. Anyone who walks the less touristy streets of Wiemer at night, or waits for Monday afternoons, might find the answer.
Mondays are when the far right raises its head once more. Mondays are when the noisy demonstrations happen. It’s mainly Alternative for Germany (AfD) supporters. You won’t see here swastikas or Nazi salutes, which are still outlawed in Germany. But the basic message is similar to those in whose name the concentration camp at the top of the hill was built.
This is by no means marginal. The city of Weimer is in Thuringia, where polls predict the AfD will soar to over 30% of parliamentary seats in the upcoming elections in September. Similar figures are also predicted for the neighboring states of Brandenburg and Saxony. All this will guarantee the far-right enormous power in certain scenarios, including as part of governments themselves. In Germany overall, AfD has the support of 20% of voters and, if elections were held today, would be the second largest party - larger than that of Chancellor Sholtz.
All this trickles nicely into Wiemer and its surrounding villages with endless accounts of beatings, broken windows, dead animals left in mailboxes, and even attempts to run people over. The targets are usually people regarded as “Leftists”, “Greens” or anyone challenging the conventional gender binary. But in Buchenwald too - yes, at a memorial site as symbolic as this – you feel the difference. Some do it politely, showing up for tours of the camp and then begin asking questions downplaying the extent of the Holocaust, and arguing with the guides. Others are more violent about it: Employees working at the site are subjected to daily threats. Swastikas are daubed in the camp. There are Nazi salutes and trees planted in memory of the victims are cut down. At Buchenwald, they estimate that one in two hundred visitors come to cause incidents such as these. It might not sound like a lot, but the site receives annually half a million visitors.
It's not just Buchenwald and it’s not just East Germany. Data attests to hundreds of attacks on Holocaust memorial sites across Germany. It’s just that here it’s almost legitimate. Last month, several site employees reported their tires being slashed. “We have a display in Buchenwald that’s been closed for three years because we don’t have enough security personnel and the attackers have become louder and more aggressive,” says memorial site director, Prof. Jens-Christian Wagner. The atmosphere in the country has made them abandon their fears. If this is how our parliament talks, these are legitimate views. It’s gotten worse very quickly. Since 2020, with Covid, we’ve been hearing antisemitic tales I thought I’d never hear, and then the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis – it all works in AfD’s favor.”
Buchenwald concentration camp was among the first built on German soil - as early as 1937. At its peak, tens of thousands were imprisoned here. The term” Buchenwald” refers to a complex including 139 sub-camps, the best known of which was Dora-Mittelbau. The prisoner population was diverse: German political dissidents (mainly in the early years), Communists and homosexuals, Russian prisoners, Gypsies – and Jews of course.
An estimated 280,000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald, 56,000 of whom died including 11,000 Jews. Horrific medical “experiments” were also conducted at the camps and, at Himmler’s orders, a brothel was set up where female prisoners were raped several times a day by prisoners granted this special “privilege” (this did not include Jews). These 100 acres of Hell were liberated in April 1945 by the Allies who found themselves marching, astounded, into an industrialized murder facility. Photographers were quickly brought in to record the piles of bodies and the condition of the prisoners – those who hadn’t been taken out of the camp on “death marches,” or had been hastily murdered as the Nazis escaped. Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley arrived at the camp and were shocked by what they saw. Evidence from Buchenwald was published in the media almost immediately and was among the first testimonies telling the world of the Holocaust.
All this made Buchenwald a symbol, and after the unification of Germany, the memorial site gathered momentum and became among the most famous and most visited. But Björn Höcke, one of AfD’s more radical leaders (apparently even parties such as these have their spectrums) has called for a “180-degree turn” in the way Germans view the Second World War. Höcke is a party leader in Thuringia and his spirit is felt in the city of Weimer and at the Buchenwald memorial site.
Prof. Jens-Christian Wagner (57) sits in his office at the memorial site in the middle of a rectangular mustard-colored hut. Originally, the Nazi officers managed the camp from this hut. His desk is covered with papers and he’s surrounded by bookshelves filled with folders. There’s a sign with a swastika resting against the wall that was recently removed from the camp. Buchenwald is a favorite site for far-right thugs who walk around it freely. “We explain the Nazis from the end – from the bodies.” He tries to tell me what happens at the site “But it’s important to go to the beginning. There’s no mass murder at the beginning, but rather persuading the Germans they’re the best. This enchanted lots of Germans. They treated anyone who didn’t agree with Nazi ideology as dangerous and believed that German society must protect itself from them. The people in the concentration camps were declared a barbaric danger, and the Germans believed it.”
“This whole narrative is repeating itself now, with the AfD fascists and Björn Höcke, a right-wing extremist with an ideology dissimilar from, but equal to, the Nazis. He’s a racist antisemite who wants to deport the non-ethnic Germans. He believes in violence and talks about it quite openly - in his books too. AfD has 20% support across Germany. One in five voters wants to vote Nazis into parliament.”
Do you understand why people support them?
“We’re living at a time with a range of crises: Covid, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, immigrants, terrorism, war in Israel, the energy crisis. There are hard questions and people are looking for easy, populist, answers. This is where AfD comes in.”
The thing is that the enthusiastic AfD supporters, at least most of them, don’t view themselves as Nazis. Quite the opposite. “In their minds, they’re not Nazis. They’re anti-fascist in fact” explains Prof. Wagner. That’s what Höcke says. It’s a twisted paradox. They demonstrate, marching in their hundreds on Mondays in the city square. Their logo is the Oath of Buchenwald – to fight until they uproot the Nazis. So, in their own eyes, they’re fighting against imperialistic fascism – that is Germany.”
So, they seem to identify with the Buchenwald prisoners
“Yes. That’s why we need to enforce the recognition of the history. That’s what we do here. The problem is that not a lot of people come. So, we have to reach out from the memorial site to German society. We need to be engaged with the public, mainly digitally. Much of the information and testimony is growing in the digital sphere. There’s also a lot of fake news and fake history out there. We’re drowning in it. So, we need to be on social networks much more. We’re now trying to find influencers to do it as we know the AfD is very good online. Some polls show that 48% of 18–29-year-olds support AfD.”
Höcke has called for “a 180-degree turn” in memory. What does that mean?
A “180-degree turn” means celebrating Germany’s past, including its Nazi past as a celebration of heroes. They want an authoritarian, racist, antisemitic state. They want German nationalism, and for that, you need to remove obstacles. The memory of what the Nazis did constitutes an obstacle. I’m an obstacle. Party representatives have already requested I be removed from my position.”
Do you fear for the future of sites like Buchenwald?
“I’m not afraid. I’m concerned. I don’t think they’ll close the site. They’ll change it. They won’t praise the Nazis. They won’t cry over the victims, but they won’t say who did it or, as Höcke says, that the Nazis were leftists. They’ll use the camp for their crazy ideologies.”
Are you facing a lot of personal threats?
“E-mails, hate speech, and right-wing propaganda, at least once a day. The worst was when they took my picture from the newspaper and put a target on my face. I live in the area with my wife and daughter. I shut the windows when it gets dark. When I’m walking around, I’m always looking behind and around me. I have to be careful. But I refuse to live in fear.”
Do you ever say to yourself, or Jewish friends, that it’s time to go?
“I’ll say that to my Jewish friends, definitely in the villages - but in the future. I talk to colleagues and my wife. My wife says she’ll leave Thuringia if AfD gets into government. I’ll stay, because if everyone leaves, there’ll be no one left to fight the racists.”
I go out to stroll the paths of Buchenwald from the iron gate (on which a Nazi with a particularly dark sense of humor was sure to emblazon the inscription “To Each What They Are Due”) and the crematorium - the final destination for so many prisoners. My phone rings. It’s Naftali Fürst (now 91) who was liberated from Buchenwald, in April 1945, in a very difficult condition. A well-known picture of Fürst on a bunk beside Eli Wiesel is displayed in the camp. “I didn’t come here and I didn’t speak German for 60 years” he says. “In the sixtieth year, I came for a memorial ceremony. The driver opened the door for me and said ‘I’m taking you to Buchenwald.’ It was strange and scary. I’ve been coming every year since then. I give speeches and I’m received very nicely in the parliament. But in recent years, I’ve been seeing right-wing demonstrations, trees memorializing murdered disabled people being uprooted, and pictures being defaced, including my own. It’s sad and it’s infuriating. I feel the more I talk about my memories, the more Nazism just escalates.“
So, what’s going to happen?
"Inside, I know antisemitism is something we’ll have to learn to live with forever. So, this year, I want to bring my granddaughter and great-granddaughter here."
After talking with Fürst, I run into a 77-year-old grandmother walking with her five-year-old grandson. "I just came for a walk with him," she tells me near the crematorium and asks where I'm from. I respond and keep walking. "Tell me, what are you doing in Gaza?" she shouts at me. "Maybe we should bring all the Israelis here, so they can see what war is."
The phone rings. It’s Buchenwald survivor Fürst on the line again. He just wanted to mention that his granddaughter and great-granddaughter - the ones he means to bring to the ceremony in the camp - hid for hours in the safe room on October 7 in Kibbutz Kfar Azza. Her husband's parents, the late Eitan Ziv and Tami Peleg-Ziv, were murdered.
I asked Prof. Wagner if the antisemitism he’s experienced from visitors to Buchenwald has increased since October 7.
“No. It’s higher in Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. There aren’t many refugees in Thuringia, so the problem here isn’t Islamist, but rather right-wing. There are daily provocations: people with tattoos; swastikas are daubed here about once a month; trees get uprooted; there are marches with Nazi salutes, Sieg Heil, Heil Hitler. It’ll only exacerbate as elections draw near.”
It might even get worse after that at least according to Harald Ziel (63), Deputy Principal and mathematics and physics teacher at a local school. “There’s a TikTok channel here for children where the far right explains to them who’s a leftist teacher and who isn’t,” he says. “Younger teachers are already asking us what’s going to happen. Teachers are telling us they’re censoring themselves and are afraid to implement educational programs because of their fear of far-right parents.”
Is this also reflected in teaching content?
“They haven’t yet touched Holocaust and Nazi studies, but there are parents expressing discontent. Lessons on gender, sexual identity, gender-based language, and LGBT rights are canceled due to these fears. Young teachers are careful. They don’t want to be marked if the next government includes AfD.”
And you?
“If it does happen, I’ll flee to my two daughters in Berlin. I sometimes walk around the town center and see my students in the far-right demonstrations. They don’t want to learn history, so they won’t learn how not to repeat it. As a nation, we’ve failed to educate toward democracy, and that’s where AfD came in. Are Muslims demonstrating against Jews? Are leftists ranting against Jews at the Berlinale film festival? AfD gets in there and promises people who get upset by it that they’ll protect the Jews. It’s BS, but people believe it.”
Why?
“Because the other parties aren’t providing answers.”
Thüringer Allgemeine is one of the most widely read newspapers in the state of Thuringia and journalist Fabian Claus, who covers turbulent local politics, has had the pleasure of feeling the long arm of far-right activists. At the right-wing demonstration on Monday, I saw demonstrators carry his picture with contempt. He’s a marked man. “During Covid, I was writing about people demonstrating against the government and how people from the right were riding on the back of these legitimate demonstrations to spread their extremist right-wing ideology,” he tells me. “Ever since, they’ve been using my name and picture at the demonstrations. They attacked me in April and the newspaper has been providing me with bodyguards when I go to cover demonstrations.”
That’s scary
“I have a wife and a six-year-old son. We’re not afraid. We’re aware of the danger, but my wife says ‘If you don’t look and don’t write, no one will look and no one will write’. Democracy is the answer for the free world. I sometimes think of censoring myself, but that won’t happen. My editors are behind me, but ask me to be careful. This is my mission - exposing the lies. Not AfD voters are Nazis, but lots of them do know who they’re voting for and who they’re following. I’m not against anyone. I’m for the truth. And we have to win. The democratic parties must find a way to work together. AfD has 30%, but 70% are voting for democratic parties. There are more of us.”
And if it doesn’t work?
“It looks like we’ll leave. Lots of people in the liberal camp are talking about leaving. Because Höcke is saying explicitly what he’s going to do.”
What does Höcke say he’ll do?
“They’re fighting the press, the government, the Greens, Berlin, the immigrants – including deportation. They’ll cut off the budget. Schools will no longer take care of disabled children or children with special needs. Höcke has said that integrating the disabled has failed and that we need to separate them. This is a method we know from the Nazis.”
But why? What do they want?
“A pure Germany, deporting others. They want a return to Nazi Germany. They understand that people want emotional, not rational, solutions and they have simple answers to complex problems. But I’m not sure that these are always democratic answers.”
So, what’s going to happen?
“We’ll have a police state. It might mean that demonstrations are forbidden. The police and the state will operate against the demonstrators, together with the courts. They’ll write new laws, back to East Germany. Maybe we’ll have the Stasi here.”
Possibly, but you don’t need the Stasi to be afraid and Lara Lütke (33) has learned this the hard way. Lütke was born in Munich and came to Weimar a decade ago to study at the Bauhaus University. She knows Israel well, having spent a year here on a student exchange program with Bezalel Art School. On completing her studies, she opened a café with a partner in Weimar. “We opened a place that’s a safe house for people on the margins of society and somewhere to get information about left-wing political activism” she explains. The far-right responded quickly. “They glued our locks three times. We then put up pictures of murder victims of the far right. They smashed our window. It shocked us. I started being afraid to go out alone at night. Any sudden movement would scare me. I was down. I stopped going to demonstrations. They tried smashing the window again. Then, someone came in, broke the pride flag, and ran off. We bought tear gas but realized it was time to fold as the neighbors were complaining they were scared. We closed in February 2023.”
She’s leaving in two months for Morocco. She has no onward plans. Lütke claims it’s not connected to the far right. She’s just done with Weimar. She won’t be coming back here. “If things don’t change, I don’t see a bright future for this place. My café and its closing serve as a metaphor for what happens to anyone thinking alternatively here. The thugs with the sticks will always show up.”
When well-publicized attacks take place, like that of the murder of two Jews in the synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur five years ago, the local police respond quickly. But “lighter” attacks such as verbal or physical threats. are files that will invariably close very swiftly. Victims who, nonetheless, refuse to be silenced and try fighting their attackers may find their way to Adv. Kristina Pejcic has a law firm with her partner in Jena, Thuringia’s second-largest city. The firm specializes in suits filed by victims of crimes by right-wing extremists against Jews and immigrants. Their hands are full. “We’re seeing more and more verbal and physical attacks by 45-50-year-old men on seven or eight-year-olds who are not pure Germans,” she says. “It has legitimacy and they know the victims won’t file complaints because they’re scared.”
Are you afraid yourself?
“I’m so f***ing scared. I’m 40. I have no children. I’m very academic. I’m their enemy. They don’t want me in society.”
The source is very clear to her: AfD. “I think the party should be outlawed, that it shouldn’t be voted into parliament. Maybe that’ll eliminate 20% of the votes but, if elected, they’ll eliminate much larger parts of the population. This is the last way for us to save minorities so that my Jewish and black friends, and my father who’s in a minority group, will stop living in fear.”
If they do win?
“So, I’m leaving. Immediately. My whole office is leaving. We just don’t know where to. What’s the alternative? Where’s safe? We’ll fight until the end, but if they do win, we’re leaving. I don’t see their rise stopping. We’ll try everything we can through political channels. But if the majority thinks Fascism is the solution, we have to save ourselves and go. We won’t be part of National Socialism again. I’m sorry I’m not optimistic. I’m losing hope every day. This is my home. This is my f***ing home and AfD is expelling me from my home. They’re expelling me from my country.”
I asked Prof. Wagner from the Buchenwald Memorial site if these nightmare scenarios are realistic. “I don’t think it’ll come now” he answers. “They (AfD) are 36%, so they’ll have enough votes to block decisions requiring a two-thirds majority, or they may be part of the government, but maybe the small parties won’t reach the 5% threshold and won’t get into parliament and their votes will go into the trash. And then, with 40%, you could get an AfD government. 40% isn’t that far from 36%.”
And can this rise be curbed?
“Possibly. Things are changing now with the big demonstrations across Germany against the right wing. It gives me courage. In the city of Nordhausen (in northern Thuringia), everyone was sure that the AfD candidate would win. He compared Dresden to Auschwitz, the Americans who came to the rescue of the Nazis. Everyone went silent. We understood that civil society needs support, and a shot of courage. People then woke up – and he lost. Our job is to work so that hope overcomes fear.”