VIENNA (AP) — Germany marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi’s Buchenwald concentration camp on Sunday, with warnings against global “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, attended by scores, including several Holocaust survivors from across Europe.
Voigt said that Buchenwald was “a place of systematic dehumanization” and that everything that happened at the death camp “was designed to break the human spirit and its dignity.” He also said that the Oct. 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.
“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. He said: “We bear a permanent, ongoing, eternal responsibility from this because evil must never be allowed to prevail again.”
Wulff also criticized the anti-immigrant and far-right Alternative for Germany party. He said that those who “trivialize” 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 organizers to withdraw the invitation.
Buchenwald, established in 1937, was located in what today is the eastern German state of Thuringia. More than 56,000 of the 280,000 inmates at Buchenwald and satellite camps were murdered by the Nazis or died as a result of hunger, illness or medical experiments before it was liberated by U.S. Army troops on April 11, 1945.
A wreath-laying ceremony will follow Sunday afternoon at the camp’s former roll call area.