“New Moral Low”: Left-Wing Protesters Target Buchenwald on Liberation Day
An alliance is demanding the right to wear keffiyehs at the former Nazi camp, despite a court ruling backing the memorial’s authority to restrict political symbols.
The main building of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp
JENS SCHLUETER / AFP
An alliance is demanding the right to wear keffiyehs at the former Nazi camp, despite a court ruling backing the memorial’s authority to restrict political symbols.
Left-wing activists are planning to stage a protest at the Buchenwald concentration camp on the anniversary of its liberation—accusing the memorial’s managers of not being “anti-Israel” enough.
The demonstration, organised under the banner “Keffiyehs in Buchenwald,” is set to take place on April 11th, the date the camp was freed from Nazi control in 1945.
The group is demanding the right to wear the keffiyeh—widely associated with the Palestinian cause and, in some contexts, pro-Hamas activism—at the site. Their campaign follows a ruling last year in which a German court said the memorial has the right to refuse entry to those wearing the scarf. Memorial director Jens-Christian Wagner has stressed that the keffiyeh was not automatically banned, but that “when it is used together with other symbols … to relativise Nazi crimes, then we would ask people to remove those symbols.”
A woman who claims to have been barred from the memorial last April asked ahead of the planned protest: “How can it be that the genocide against the Palestinians is now being denied in this very place?”
News of this upcoming action has, of course, sparked a major backlash.
German journalist Sarah Maria Sander described it as “a new moral low point in Germany,” while NZZ deputy editor in chief Morten Freidel dismissed the activists’ argument as “just as tasteless as it is oblivious to history.”
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, also condemned the planned protest, saying that demonstrators were “twisting history … relativising victims” and “packaging antisemitism as activism.”
And then people seriously wonder why antisemitism is rising again.
A concentration-camp memorial becomes the target of a “left-wing protest” because it’s supposedly not anti-Israel enough. Absurd? No — this is Germany in 2026.
Where Jews were murdered, people now want to demonstrate against the Jewish state. Twisting history. Relativizing… https://t.co/lDrdBBueqI
If plans go ahead, the demonstration will take place on April 11th.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
