Swastikas and jackboots: an emboldened far right visits Buchenwald

Jens-Christian Wagner used to like working in the evenings with the curtains of his study pulled back, so he could look out on the world outside. “Now I draw them,” he says. “I don’t want people to see me. I don’t want to be on display.”

Wagner isn’t a reclusive oligarch, or a publicity-shy rock star. He is a historian who runs the memorial complex at Buchenwald, one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous concentration camps.

Previous holders of the job were scarcely ever in the public eye. But times have changed. As the German right revives, Wagner has become a hate figure for a growing chorus of ethno-nationalists, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. One of Germany’s darkest places is getting even darker.

Wagner keeps a folder with all the hate-mail he gets. One is a picture of him with a speech bubble saying: “I am a disgusting piece of Hebrew shit. I am a Jew and celebrate the cult of guilt and remembrance terrorism.”

Such attacks are not new, he says. But in the past the messages were anonymous. “Now they don’t hide their identity. They even put their addresses and telephone numbers.”

Buchenwald is one of the most potent symbols of Nazism and the horrors it unleashed. Between 1937 and 1945, 278,000 prisoners were held there, from more than 50 countries. Some 56,000 of them died. With its crematoria and punishment blocks it is a desolate place, where visitors come to contemplate man’s inhumanity to man.

For that reason it is a thorn in the far-right’s side. Nationalists have long inveighed against what they call the “guilt cult”, the idea that Germans must atone for the crimes perpetrated in their name during the second world war, that they bear a moral responsibility to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. For them, the historians trying to keep the flame of remembrance alive at places such as Buchenwald are traitors to the German Volk.

The rightwingers now have a vehicle: the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, which just won 16 per cent in this month’s European election — its best ever result in a nationwide vote. The man who headed its list for that election recently said not everyone who served in Hitler’s SS was a criminal. Its former leader Alexander Gauland once said the Nazi period was just a “piece of bird shit” in Germany’s glorious 1,000-year history.

The AfD is particularly strong in Thuringia, the eastern state where Buchenwald is located. Polls suggest it is on course to win regional elections there in September — despite the fact its leader in the state, Björn Höcke, is one of its most extreme figures. He was recently fined €13,000 by a local court for using a banned slogan once deployed by Hitler’s Stormtroopers.

Even before the AfD’s rise there were troubling incidents at the camp. Wagner says neo-Nazis would sometimes show up wearing jackboots and far-right insignia. “They would circle the groups of visitors, like sharks in the water,” he says. “Trying to intimidate them.” The most notorious were members of the NSU, or National Socialist Underground, a small neo-Nazi group that murdered 10 people between 2000 and 2007 — the majority ethnic Turks.

Another common tactic is to pretend to be normal tourists and ask guides provocative questions with a far-right tinge. A favourite is: “Fine, you’ve told us all about Buchenwald, but what about the thousands of German soldiers who died in the [Allies’] Rheinwiesen prisoner-of-war camps in western Germany in 1945?”.

This kind of revisionism is chilling. But there is far worse. Vandals have, over the years, chopped down many of the trees planted in memory of Buchenwald’s victims. They have sprayed swastikas on signs and photographed themselves giving the Hitler salute in front of the gates.

Staff at the museum say survivors used to be able to set the record straight when revisionists questioned what happened here. But the last witnesses are dying out. The fear is it will become ever harder to combat the lies being spread about this place.

Wagner admits to finding such developments dispiriting. In private he is a little more cautious than he used to be. But he refuses to “let them intimidate me”. “If we start to show fear, that’s exactly what these people want,” he says.

guy.chazan@ft.com