The Misuse of History

In the summer of 2015, Germany experienced a refugee crisis that has affected the country ever since, leaving it deeply divided. Ten years later, it’s worth examining how this event and its interpretation became entangled with Germany’s Nazi past—and how historical memory was manipulated to justify controversial policy decisions.

From the outset, history was weaponized to justify the influx of over a million people—mostly ‘undocumented’—by year’s end. The international press quickly embraced this narrative. “Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, have emerged as contenders for the fastest international image makeover in recent memory,” wrote The Atlantic in September 2015. The article noted that just six months earlier, Der Spiegel had depicted Europe’s mood by photoshopping Merkel into a photograph of Nazi commanders on the Acropolis, arguing that “the euro zone’s debt crisis had set Germans up as the European Union’s unpopular economic dictator.”

The historical parallel was made explicit. As one German political scientist, Petra Bendel, told The Atlantic, “German citizens know that the regulations of the Geneva Refugee Convention stem from the historical experience with Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.”

This interpretation was likely never shared by a majority of Germans. By September 2015, despair and helplessness had set in among ordinary citizens who felt their opinions had never been solicited and that the state was losing control.

Communities nationwide groaned under the strain. Berlin’s welfare office (LaGeSo) teetered on the verge of collapse, requiring police deployment to prevent the building from being stormed. “The scene has ranged from chaotic to downright dangerous,” reported The New York Times. In September, the president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) resigned in what many interpreted as a protest against the open border policy. By November, Germany’s ifo institute estimated refugee costs at €21.1 billion for 2015 alone. In December, school authorities worried that children would go without physical education for entire terms because sports halls remained occupied as shelters.

As public pressure and discontent mounted, so did the moral framing of the crisis. “If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in emergency situations, then this is not my country,” Merkel declared at a September press conference. Mainstream newspapers like Die Zeit published pieces recalling how Jewish refugees were turned away in the 1930s, implicitly urging readers not to let Syrian or Afghan refugees suffer the same fate.

By 2018, the AfD had surged in popularity due to migration-related issues. On Holocaust Memorial Day, Germany’s Bundestag shamelessly used the occasion to deliver pro-migration messages. Many of the claims made during the 2015 crisis had been shown to be deeply flawed. Integration into the labor market proved extremely difficult—even eight years later, according to Germany’s employment agency, only 64% of those who arrived in 2015 held some form of employment. It had also become clear that Islamists had exploited the crisis to smuggle in terrorists, a point highlighted by Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in a 2016 speech. A police report from 2017 also showed an increase in the number of rapes and murders of women and girls (this included the murder of a 14-year-old Jewish girl by an Iraqi refugee in 2018).

Rather than acknowledge mistakes or address public concerns, Wolfgang Schäuble, then president of the Bundestag, used the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation to criticize those who “exclude others because they look different.” This was, quite correctly, seen as a message to the AfD, which was present in parliament after winning seats in the 2017 September elections. German history’s lesson, he claimed, was how fragile freedom and civil society remained. Meanwhile, Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch called Germany’s refugee reception an “incredibly generous, humane, and courageous gesture.”

The power of this message on Germans still haunted by their ancestors’ terrible mistakes cannot be overestimated. But it was fundamentally dishonest—and those who viewed it as propaganda were correct.

Many arrivals were single young men in their prime, hardly the most vulnerable demographic, as observers noted at the time. As commentator James Kirchick pointed out in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung guest column, Syrian refugees weren’t fleeing imminent death but leaving refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. These camps, while imperfect, bore no resemblance to Auschwitz. Drawing such parallels amounted to particularly vile Holocaust relativization.

Kirchick also noted that unlike 1939, when no Israel existed to protect Europe’s persecuted Jews, today’s Middle East contains wealthy Arab-Muslim countries that “didn’t lift a finger to alleviate the suffering of their brothers.”

Ten years later, the “Syrian refugees as new Jews” rhetoric appears especially troubling. Studies by historian Günther Jikeli show that a majority of arrivals brought deeply troubling antisemitism with them—a fact that can no longer be ignored. Many of those celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel in Germany proved to be Syrians or others who had entered the country in the previous years. The problem’s extent became clear when Berlin’s police chief declared in November 2023 that Jews and homosexuals were no longer safe in “neighborhoods where the majority of residents are of Arab origin and harbor sympathies for terrorist groups.”

The 2015 border opening followed no clear script—it was largely unplanned and chaotic. But it was promoted by a ruling elite basking in liberal commentators’ worldwide jubilation. Open borders served as virtue signaling at the expense of long-term residents’ welfare, including the Jewish community.

One of the gravest moral offenses was the misuse of the Holocaust and Nazi injustices to justify this policy. Kirchick rightly describes this as political malice. Rather than being remembered, history became a weapon, manipulated to silence legitimate concerns and debate. The consequences of this moral blackmail continue to influence German society today, serving as a reminder that even the most sacred historical memories can be corrupted when exploited for political gain.