The director of the memorial at two former Nazi concentration camps says he has received threats after sending a letter to voters ahead of state elections next month, sounding the alarm about the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Jens-Christian Wagner, who heads the memorial at the Buchenwald and Mittlebau-Dora concentration camps in the eastern state of Thuringia, sent a letter to 300,000 voters aged 65 and over ahead of regional elections scheduled for September 1.
The letter was sent to seniors, he said, because such people are less likely to get their information from social media. No taxpayer dollars or memorial donations were used in the mailing, he said.
Wagner, a veteran historian, warns that the AfD in Thuringia, where the party’s state branch has been classified as far-right by the domestic intelligence service, “is trying to trivialize the horrors of the Nazi regime.”
In a statement on the memorial’s website, Wagner said that while it was “unusual” to send a letter to voters, the move was justified by the fact that the “AfD notoriously opposes the culture of remembrance and discredits our work as a ‘cult of guilt.'”
Since he sent the letter, his photo has been pasted on a stone monument commemorating the prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp who died during the death marches, Wagner wrote on the social media platform X on Tuesday.
He also received an email from a woman in the city of Weimar, stating that he would be punished for his actions, the director wrote.
