A controversy has erupted in Germany after far-left groups called for a protest against the memorial of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. According to the German newspaper Bild, citing the Swiss daily NZZ, the demonstration is planned around April 11, the highly symbolic date marking the liberation of the camp in 1945, where more than 65,000 people were murdered by the Nazi regime.
The organizers accuse the memorial’s leadership of not adopting a position they consider “sufficiently hostile toward Israel.” They claim the institution is “criminalizing” pro-Palestinian activists, particularly following last year’s ban on wearing keffiyehs at the site — a decision upheld by German courts.
Under the provocative slogan “Keffiyehs at Buchenwald,” a coalition including the student wing of the left-wing party Die Linke, the anti-Zionist group “Jewish Voice,” and the German Communist Party (DKP) alleges that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism” and “genocide denial.” The site’s leadership is accused of spreading “Israeli propaganda.”
The debate intensified after reports revealed that some initiators of the movement had previously expressed positions favorable to Hamas following the October 7 attacks, with one group publicly describing those events as a “legitimate uprising.”
In Berlin, reactions were swift. Felix Klein, the Federal Government Commissioner for Combating Antisemitism, condemned what he described as “a new threshold in the inversion of victims and perpetrators” and called the initiative “a frontal attack on the dignity of the victims and Germany’s culture of remembrance.”
