A member of a far-right German party was reprimanded by Berlin’s Israeli ambassador for appearing to dance on the capital’s Holocaust memorial.
Ambassador Ron Prosor said Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Holger Winterstein had brought “shame upon himself and his party”.
“Enjoy your shameful minute of fame because your name will soon be forgotten. The sanctified souls commemorated at the memorial will never be forgotten,” he said.
Mr Winterstein was pictured posing with outstretched arms on one of the stone slabs that form the memorial in Berlin for the more than 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.
In a social media post accompanying the picture, he wrote: “The zeitgeist is only a brief phenomenon,” in an apparent reference to his party’s opposition to Germany’s prevailing view of contrition for the shameful parts of past.
German media reported that the picture was taken after a protest against government energy policies held on Saturday by the AfD.
The party, known by its German acronym AfD, said it would take action against Mr Winterstein over his “extremely disrespectful behaviour”.
When asked about the incident by German broadcaster MDR, Mr Winterstein said: “That was really stupid of me,” but added he thought there was only a fuss about the photo because he was in the AfD.
Mr Winterstein is a county councillor in Thuringia, a central German state that has returned a strong AfD vote in recent elections.
The party’s leader in the state, Bjoern Hoecke, in 2017 called the Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and called for Germany to perform a “180-degree turn” when it comes to the way it remembers its past.
A party tribunal at the time rejected a bid to have him expelled.
Members of the party were banned indefinitely from attending Holocaust memorial services at Thuringia’s Buchenwald Concentration Camp as their stance “trivialises” history, according to local reports.
