Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia, once called for a “180-degree turn” in the country’s memory politics and heavily criticized the construction of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. “We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of our capital,” he said.
Contrary to the crude terms in which Musk described the situation, virtually no one in Germany argues that children should feel guilty for the crimes of their ancestors.
“Nobody makes children feel guilty for Nazi crimes,” said Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador to Israel. “We want them to grow up informed and responsible and to apply the lessons of Germany’s past.”
Yet studies show that knowledge of the Holocaust in Germany is waning, and that belief in misinformation is on the rise. Almost a fifth of Germans believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, according to a recent study that exposed how knowledge of the Holocaust in several countries is declining, particularly among young adults.
On Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz joined world leaders at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
“It must distress us how many young people in Germany hardly know anything about the Holocaust,” Scholz told several German newspapers in the run-up to the visit. “We must uphold the memory, when the last witnesses are no longer alive,” he added.
“Parties like the AfD and apparently also Elon Musk have an interest in people forgetting or not reflecting,” Carmen Wegge, a parliamentarian for Scholz’s SPD told POLITICO. Because if they did reflect, “they would realize that our democracy is in danger again.”
