Karl Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the grandson of the Hitler assassin Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, has defended the right of the AfD party to lay wreaths at memorial ceremonies, even while sharply criticizing the political party itself. Speaking to the news outlet “Welt,” the Stauffenberg grandson asserted that, fundamentally, democracy requires allowing different viewpoints to be heard, and therefore, he believed the AfD should not be denied the right to participation.
However, he strongly denounced the AfD’s handling of his grandfather, describing it as “absolutely horrible and repulsive.” He argued the party exploited his grandfather for its own purposes and attempted to remove him from his proper historical context.
Karl Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg vociferously rejected the AfD’s assertion that his grandfather would vote for the party today. He stressed that his grandfather’s experience of the foundations of liberal democracy was fundamentally different from what modern Germany had enjoyed over the last eighty years. Nevertheless, he emphasized that his grandfather sacrificed his life to end tyranny and terror. For this reason, he called a joke made by cabaret artist Uwe Steimle at an AfD event last week “particularly repulsive.”
Stauffenberg also urged that commemorating the events of July 20, 1944, remains vital, but “only if lessons are drawn from history and consequences arise from them for all of us.” He noted that democracy has brought freedom, peace, and prosperity to the country, yet it also mandates ensuring that deeply dehumanizing, unjust regimes, whether like the Nazi era or the GDR regime, never return to Germany.
The prominence of the dispute became a public scene during the federal government’s memorial ceremony for the failed Stauffenberg assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Tobias Korenke, a great-nephew of the evangelical theologian and Nazi resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was involved in an incident where he attempted to remove an AfD parliamentary group from the memorial site at Bendlerblock, leading to a physical confrontation with security personnel.
