According to the police, around 500 people took to the streets in Weimar to demonstrate against the right and a performance by the controversial Thuringian AfD state party and parliamentary group leader Björn Höcke. At a rally with Höcke as a guest speaker, around 500 people also came together in the center of Weimar on Monday, according to the police. The head of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation, Jens-Christian Wagner, reiterated his criticism of Höcke’s appearance “of all things on the anniversary of the liberation from National Socialism”.
Höcke is “a notorious anti-Semite, racist and historical revisionist”. It is a shame that Höcke is speaking in front of the German National Theater on this day, where “the democratic Weimar Constitution hated by the Nazis was passed in 1919”. Historical revisionism is the link between the new and the old right and helps “to overcome the lessons learned from dealing with National Socialism and its crimes, i.e. respect for human rights, democracy, peace and humanity”.
The Thuringian AfD is led and observed by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a secured right-wing extremist effort.
Höcke warns of “digital dictatorship”
Höcke warned of a “digital dictatorship” and claimed that a new fascism would come. “He’ll come and he’ll say I’m anti-fascism. Like them over there,” shouted Höcke, pointing to the participants in the counter-demonstration, where Wagner had previously spoken. “In the end it all boils down to a digital dictatorship – in the name of anti-fascism, in the name of Buntism, in the name of world climate salvation.”
Höcke also demanded: “The power of the parties in Germany must be massively reduced.” He does not know whether there will still be parties in the future. But it is good that there are assemblies “and there will also be parliaments in the future”.
On May 8, 1945, Höcke said that “Hitlerism” was over by then. “And here in Weimar, here on this historic square where I stand today, here in this important historic German city, the next dictatorship began immediately – Stalinism made its way.” The best symbol of this is the camp in Buchenwald, which the winners “simply continued”. Höcke called from a pickup in front of a kebab shop next to the theater: “Never again fascism, never again dictatorship.”
In the Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar, around 56,000 people were murdered by the Nazis or died of disease, starvation, forced labor and medical experiments. More than 8000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot.
