As the decades passed, the group – made up of those who had survived the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust – had slowly begun to rebuild their trust in Germany. Even as far-right movements gained strength in Hungary, France and Italy, many in the group were certain that Germany had learned the lessons of its past.
That trust was shattered on Sunday after a far-right party won a German state election for the first time since the second world war, said Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, an association launched in 1952 by survivors of the Nazi concentration camp.
“For survivors, this result, obviously, is deeply depressing,” he said. “They thought that Germany, after the experiences of the Holocaust, the rise of the Nazi party, the SS and everything, would be especially aware of the dangers of this ideology. And of people who are fond of this ideology and who try to bring it into politics and parliaments.”
In the eastern state of Thuringia, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) emerged as the most voted-for party on Sunday with nearly 33% of the vote and in neighbouring Saxony it came second with almost 31%.
Particularly worrying were exit polls suggesting that more than a third of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 in Thuringia had backed the AfD, said Heubner. “The survivors are asking themselves: ‘Didn’t we do enough to teach, to tell, to show [people]?’”
The AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has twice been convicted of knowingly using the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany” at political events. A former history teacher, Höcke has called for an “about-face” in Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance and atonement.
Thuringia was where the Nazis first won power in a German state government in 1930, going on to consolidate control in Berlin three years later.
Germany’s Central Council of Jews criticised Sunday’s election for offering up what it described as “populist pseudo-answers from radical parties” rather than honesty and sincerity. “The elections were like a punch to the country,” said Josef Schuster, the council’s president. “Can we recover from this blow?”
Polls had long predicted that the AfD would do well in the state elections, said Tarik Abou-Chadi, a professor of European politics at the University of Oxford.
Even so, the large number of voters who had turned up to cast their ballots for a party known for its fierce rhetoric against migrants, Muslims and other minorities had left him reeling. “As a German citizen, a queer person of colour, it is simply devastating and frightening that, at very high turnout, over 30% support extreme-right fascists,” Abou-Chadi wrote on social media as the results came in.
In an interview hours later, Abou-Chadi pointed to the many aftershocks of the results. “For people like me there’s a basic question of being safe and of being accepted in parts of the country.”
These concerns have been exacerbated in recent years as support for the AfD rises nationally, leading many mainstream politicians to harden their stance on migration, a response that seemingly has served to legitimise the AfD’s narrative. “And this creates a discourse that is really dangerous for people of colour,” said Abou-Chadi.
On Sunday, opposition to migration proved key not only to the AfD but also to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the leftist-conservative party that emerged as a potential kingmaker in Thuringia and Saxony.
The impact of this hardening discourse has already been noticed in Thuringia, where the AfD chapter, along with that in Saxony, have been designated as “rightwing extremist” by security authorities.
Ezra, an NGO that helps victims of far-right, racist and antisemitic violence, was among the organisations that recently cited the growth of an “extreme rightwing movement in Thuringia” to explain why the state had seen “an all-time high of rightwing and racist violence” in 2022, followed by similar levels of violence in 2023.
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This hardline rhetoric was on full view in the lead-up to the election, as posters in Thuringia’s cities and villages called for “summer, sun and remigration”, the latter an allusion to mass deportation plans allegedly discussed by some AfD politicians along with other far-right figures at a meeting last year.
The campaign clashed with the state’s reality of immigration levels that rank among the lowest in Germany.
At the Thuringia Refugee Council, Sunday’s election result left many alarmed over what may come next. “Many migrants in Thuringia are increasingly afraid that racism and discrimination will increase in their everyday lives and will be less structurally sanctioned,” it said in a statement.
The AfD has long sought to scapegoat migrants, said Maurice Stierl, a researcher at Osnabrück University’s Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies. But what had shifted in recent years was the willingness of mainstream parties to emulate this.
“What really worries me is the anger and hate that are being whipped up by both the radical right and parties of the supposed political centre,” he said. “People of colour all over Germany feel abandoned and scared.”
He pointed to comments by Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on Sunday as voters in Thuringia and Saxony headed to the polls, in which he called for the country to prioritise limiting migration in the coming years.
“Migration is being turned into the embodiment of societal problems,” said Stierl. “It’s easy and it deflects from the larger global challenges that we all face,” he added, citing climate breakdown as an example.
In Germany, where nearly a quarter of the population has a migration background, meaning they or their parents arrived in Germany after 1950, this deflection had translated into the AfD peddling unrealistic ideas. “We live in a migration society. Their mass deportation fantasies will not change this reality.”