Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Buchenwald Memorial, has accused the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party of instrumentalizing the historical resistance against the Nazi regime. Wagner told the “Rheinische Post” on Tuesday that the resistance of July 20, 1944, and resistance against Nazism in general, have been notoriously exploited by the AfD for years. He argued that the party suggests that modern political situations-such as the alleged COVID-19 restrictions, the Merkel regime, the coalition government (Ampel), or the Merz government-are equivalents to fighting against Nazism, much like Stauffenberg or the Scholl siblings did.
In addition to this political appropriation, Wagner claimed that AfD politicians routinely promote “historically revisionist, Holocaust minimizing, or even Nazi glorifying positions.” According to the Memorial director, it constitutes an “affront against the dignity of the victims of Nazi crimes” for representatives of a party espousing such views to lay a wreath at the commemoration event for the resistors of July 20, 1944. He further stated that he holds complete understanding for Tobias Korenke’s actions, viewing them even more highly, concluding that Korenke deserves recognition for standing up to historical revisionism and the extreme right.
Tobias Korenke, the great-nephew of the Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had attempted to remove the AfD parliamentary group’s wreath from the Buchenwald memorial in the Berlin Bendlerblock during the federal government’s ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the failed Stauffenberg attack on Adolf Hitler.
