“Never again,” insisted the German Chancellor on Saturday for Holocaust Remembrance Day, in a context of strong mobilization of his fellow citizens against the far right. In total, demonstrations in more than 300 villages and towns are planned this weekend in the country, according to the alliance “together against the far right”.
In Kiel, a city in northern Germany, 11,500 people, according to the police, 15,000, according to the organizers, gathered on the town hall square at the end of the morning. “Democracy is not for the faint-hearted!”, “Red card for the AfD (the German far-right party, the Alternative for Germany)”, could be read on the signs, indicated to AFP Johannes Böcker, a 29-year-old physiotherapist who took part in the rally. “For me, it was important to demonstrate to commemorate the victims of National Socialism but also to protest against the rise of the far-right,” he said.
In Düsseldorf (west), “several tens of thousands of people” gathered, according to the police. In a podcast broadcast on Saturday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz recalled German responsibility for the crime against humanity that is the Shoah. He was delighted to see his country “standing up”, because “millions of citizens are marching in the streets”.
Tense context
For two weeks, Germans have been rallying across the country against the radical tendencies of the AfD. “There are three times more demonstrations than last week, particularly in eastern Germany,” wrote the citizens’ alliance Campact, which is among the organizers of the movement, in a press release released on Saturday morning. In this region which corresponds to the former GDR, the AfD obtained its best electoral results.
Two weeks ago, social democrat Olaf Scholz took to the streets in Potsdam, a city neighboring Berlin where he lives. On Saturday, his Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius, plans to demonstrate in Osnabrück (North-West), where he was born.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which corresponds to the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the Soviets on January 27, 1945, is an annual occasion for commemorations. But this year, his 79th birthday comes in a tense context after the revelation on January 10 by the German investigative media Correctiv of a meeting of extremists in Potsdam, where they discussed a planned expulsion last November mass of foreign people or people of foreign origin.
In front of the deputies of the Bundestag, on January 18, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser compared it to the Wannsee conference where the Nazis planned the extermination of European Jews in 1942. “’Never Again’ requires everyone’s vigilance. Our democracy is not a gift from God, it is made by men,” warned the Chancellor. And to conclude: “Never again, it’s every day.”