German anti-Zionist group’s plan to protest at Buchenwald memorial over keffiyeh ban sparks outrage

JTA – An anti-Zionist group in Germany has drawn condemnation after it announced plans for a protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in response to a ban on pro-Palestinian symbols at the site. 

The group Kufiyas in Buchenwald claims that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial”. It announced a demonstration for 11 April, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. 

“Instead of honouring the persecuted and resolutely opposing every genocide, the memorial spreads Israeli propaganda and provides ideological ammunition for the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” the group says on its website. 

Buchenwald, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis and one of the largest in the country, was the site of the murder of roughly 56 000 male prisoners, including 11 000 Jews, from 1937 to 1945. 

Last year, a German court ruled that the concentration camp had a right to refuse entry to visitors who wear a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who attempted to wear the scarf to an event commemorating the concentration camp’s liberation. 

The woman, who was only identified by her first name, Anna, posted testimony about her actions on the Kufiyas in Buchenwald Instagram page in which she said she was inspired by the resistance of Buchenwald prisoners. 

“Our fundamental principle is this: criticism of the Israeli government’s policies; settlement policy; or actions in the Gaza Strip is legitimate,” said the Buchenwald Foundation’s director Jens-Christian Wagner in a statement outlining the memorial’s protocols. “However, it becomes antisemitic when used to relativise the Holocaust and discredit its victims as perpetrators. We will not tolerate this at the Buchenwald Memorial.” 

The campaign against the memorial has been signed onto by a host of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which has defended the protest on X as evidence of what “commemorating past German crimes has to do with rejecting current ones”. 

In a post on Instagram announcing the protest earlier this month, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald group wrote that it would hold a “public protest” in Weimar, the German city located nearby the concentration camp. The group also said it planned to host lectures and a “tour that vividly illustrates the events in the former concentration camp”. 

It was unclear whether the protest was intended to take place outside the memorial itself. Kufiyas in Buchenwald didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the location of the protest. 

The protest quickly drew condemnation from German leaders, including the country’s antisemitism czar, Felix Klein, who told the Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the protest marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles”. 

Michael Panse, the commissioner for combatting antisemitism for the German state Thuringia, where Weimar is located, told the outlet that the protest was “tasteless and historically ignorant”. 

The protests also drew condemnation from the European Jewish Congress, which wrote in a post on X that the demonstration represents a “deeply troubling instrumentalisation of Holocaust remembrance”. 

“Holocaust memorial sites are places of solemn reflection and respect for the victims of National Socialism,” the post continued. “They must never be exploited to promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy or glorify those who perpetrate violence against Jews.”