Former German president warns of far right at 80th anniversary of Buchenwald liberation

Germany marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi’s Buchenwald concentration camp today, with warnings against global “radicalization and a worldwide shift to the right.”

The governor of the state of Thuringia, Mario Voigt, and former German president Christian Wulff speak at a ceremony in the city of Weimar, attended by scores, including several Holocaust survivors from across Europe.

Voigt says that Buchenwald was “a place of systematic dehumanization” and that everything that happened at the death camp “was designed to break the human spirit and its dignity.” He also says that the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel showed that “the intention to exterminate Jews is not a thing of the past.”

In his speech, Wulff issues a stark warning about the current global political situation.

“Due to the brutalization and radicalization and a worldwide shift to the right, I can now — and this makes me uneasy — imagine more clearly how this could have happened back then,” Wulff says, referring to Nazi terror and the developments leading up to it.

He calls for active commitment to democracy and the preservation of humanity, adding: “We bear a permanent, ongoing, eternal responsibility from this because evil must never be allowed to prevail again.”

Wulff also criticizes the anti-immigrant and far-right Alternative for Germany party. He says that those who “trivialize” the far-right party “are ignoring the fact that the Alternative for Germany’s ideology is creating a breeding ground for people to feel uncomfortable in Germany and that they are actually in real danger.”