Top Spain diplomat ‘horrified’ at Holocaust-themed carnival parade

Spain’s foreign minister condemns a carnival parade featuring gun-toting Nazis and lines of dancing Jewish victims, a day after Israel’s ambassador expressed outrage over the spectacle.

The display, which also featured a parade float designed like a gas chamber, was the second such incident this week after a Belgian town earned a stiff rebuke from the European Commission.

Its weekend carnival parade featured floats with anti-Semitic caricatures showing Jews with hooked noses, obsessed with money and dressed up like insects. Images on Twitter showed dozens of people in full Nazi-style regalia and others wearing the striped pajamas worn by concentration camp prisoners.

Children were dressed in the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied areas. On top of one float, a woman in Nazi uniform could be seen gyrating alongside a model Doberman under two giant chimneys. Elsewhere a line of Jewish victims in red hot-pants and bustiers with a gunshot wound to the heart danced with Israeli-style flags.

The footage and images quickly sparked a furious backlash.

“Horrified at the carnival parade in Campo de Criptana,” Spain’s Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya writes on her official Twitter account.

“I totally reject any banalization of the Holocaust,” she adds.

“Following contact with the organizers, they have apologized to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain. It is essential to keep teaching about the memory of the Holocaust.”

— AFP