Weimar, Apr. 6, (dpa/GNA) – Concentration camp survivors were joined by several hundred people on Sunday in commemorating the liberation of Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp 80 years ago.
At the tribute to Holocaust victims, the use of the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza sparked a backlash from some in attendance.
When a young participant spoke in English of a genocide in Palestine, boos could be heard from the crowd and the memorial’s director stepped in to criticize the speaker.
Historian and memorial foundation director Jens-Christian Wagner said it was necessary to be able to also mourn the innocents killed in Gaza, but to describe the war as a “genocide” – especially in a place like Buchenwald – was not appropriate.
The killings of more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Israeli attacks on Gaza, according to figures from Hamas-led health workers, have prompted genocide accusations from rights bodies like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN’s Special Committee.
Israel denies the accusations and says it is targeting Hamas fighters in response to their October 7 attacks in Israel which killed 1,200 people.
Divisions over the war in Gaza, which are strongly felt across Germany, were also present in the run-up to the memorial events, after a conflict between the Israeli Embassy and the foundation behind the memorial had become apparent.
The foundation had cancelled a planned speech by philosopher Omri Boehm from the memorial programme and announced that Boehm would be invited another time.
Boehm, the German-Israeli grandson of a Holocaust survivor, had in the past been critical of the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem and of Israeli politics.
The Israeli Embassy in Berlin had written on Facebook that it was outrageous and a “blatant insult to the memory of the victims” to invite Boehm, whom the embassy accused of relativising the Holocaust.
Foundation director Wagner had explained that by postponing Boehm’s speech, he wanted to prevent the survivors from being drawn further into the conflict. The survivors should be the focus, not the debate about the speech, he said.
Starting in the summer of 1937, the Nazis deported more than 280,000 people to the Buchenwald concentration camp near the central German city of Weimar and its 139 subcamps. Some 56,000 people were murdered or died of hunger, disease, forced labour or medical experiments before the camps were liberated in April 1945.
Ex-president hits out at German right
Former German president Christian Wulff drew a comparison between the Nazis and today’s right-wing radicalism.
“Based on the coarsening and radicalization, and a global shift to the right, I can now – and this makes me uneasy – imagine more clearly how this could happen at the time,” he said, referring to Germany’s Nazi past.
Wulff called for active engagement in favour of democracy. The current generation bore permanent responsibility for ensuring that evil should never again be victorious, he said.
The former president expressed direct criticism of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that came second in recent elections and continues to surge in opinion polls.
“Those who play down the AfD are ignoring the fact that the AfD is preparing the ground through its ideology for people in Germany to feel uncertain and are in fact concretely in danger,” he said.
Survivors of the camp were invited to attend the service at the Weimarhalle, along with relatives and descendants. In the afternoon, a wreath-laying ceremony was held at the former roll call square of the camp.
Appeal from survivor: ‘Stay human’
Naftali Fürst, a 92-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, spoke at the memorial events.
In his speech, delivered in Hebrew, he described a daily image that had been etched in his mind from his time at the Buchenwald concentration camp: prisoners pushing carts loaded with corpses collected from the barracks to the crematorium.
“There are only a few of us left, and soon we will finally pass the baton of remembrance on to you, and with that we are giving you a historic responsibility,” he said.
Fürst, who was still a child when imprisoned in the camps, appealed to the audience: “Stay human – each and every one of you.”
When US troops reached Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Nazi commanders and guards had already fled and armed resistance groups made up of prisoners had taken control.
Some 21,000 prisoners were freed, including more than 900 children and adolescents. Just a short time before, the SS paramilitary force had forced tens of thousands of prisoners to go on so-called death marches.
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