Directors of a memorial at a former Nazi concentration camp have raised alarm about the revisionist views of a far-right politician expected to become its local mayor, saying he will be barred from attending events to commemorate the Holocaust if he is elected.
The Alternative für Deutschland politician Jörg Prophet last Sunday finished almost 20 points clear of the runner-up in municipal elections in Nordhausen, a city of about 42,000 in the eastern state of Thuringia.
In the run-off vote on 24 September, Prophet could become AfD’s first city mayor in Germany, after the far-right party won its first district council and town mayorship in east Germany earlier this year.
Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, said a vote for Prophet would amount to “a clear turn away from the culture of commemorating the Holocaust, which has been constitutive for our federal republic”.
In an article from April 2020, published on the anniversary of allied bombing of Nordhausen at the end of the second world war, Prophet said “the victors showed as little morality as the National Socialists” and claimed US troops were motivated to liberate Mittelbau-Dora only to get hold of the rocket and missile technology manufactured in underground facilities at the site.
The article, which is still up on the AfD politician’s website, calls for an end to a German Schuldkult, or “guilt cult”, a far-right phrase used to describe the German tradition of commemorating the Holocaust.
“If Prophet was already the mayor of Nordhausen, he would have had to resign over these comments alone,” Wagner said at a press conference on Thursday. He said while Prophet was welcome to visit the memorial site, he would be barred from attending commemorative events out of respect for the victims.
In a 2017 beer hall speech, Björn Höcke, AfD’s state leader in Thuringia, called for a “180-degree turn” from the contemporary German culture of remembering and atoning for the Nazi era. A 2021 report by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the party as a proven rightwing extremist outfit in the state.
About 20,000 Jews and political prisoners died at Mittelbau-Dora, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp that was operational between August 1943 and April 1945. After its liberation, photographs from inside the camp travelled around the world as some of the first pieces of visual evidence of Nazi atrocities.
During British air raids on Nordhausen in April 1945, an estimated 8,800 people were killed, including some concentration camp prisoners and displaced people.
The AfD is polling at 32% across Thuringia, which will elect a new regional government in September 2024.
A row over other parties working locally with the AfD appeared to reach a critical point in the state this week when the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the pro-business FDP combined with the far-right party to push through a reduction in stamp duty from 6.5% to 5%, against the will of the three-way governing coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the leftwing Die Linke and the Greens.
Members of the ruling faction accused the CDU of giving AfD the power to influence decision-making in the state, in contrast to its insistence that it would never collaborate with the party at the federal level.
The SPD’s general secretary, Kevin Kühnert, accused the CDU of “consciously allowing a political decision to be made which would not have been possible without the AfD’s votes”. He warned of the consequences of allowing this to become normal. “Democrats can never allow the AfD to tip the parliamentary scales,” he said.
The CDU’s leader in Thuringia, Mario Voigt, defended the decision. “I cannot allow good, important decisions for [the] state, which bring relief to families and the economy, to be dependent on whether or not the wrong people give it their approval,” he said.
