By Rachel More
BERLIN (Reuters) -A 99-year-old Holocaust survivor said on Thursday he would return his federal order of merit award to the German state in protest over a parliamentary vote in which support from the far-right was used for the first time to secure a majority.
Germany’s main opposition conservatives, who are tipped to win a national election on Feb. 23, pushed through parliament on Wednesday a motion calling for a drastic crackdown on migration with the help of votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Though the motion is non-binding, the AfD’s role in passing it was symbolically important. Critics have accused the conservatives of breaking a taboo among mainstream parties against working with the AfD.
Albrecht Weinberg told Reuters he would return his decoration as a protest against the vote.
Born to a Jewish family in 1925, Weinberg spent time during World War Two in the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. He was freed on April 15, 1945, according to the Bergen-Belsen memorial website. He emigrated to the United States after the war but returned 10 years ago to live in Germany.
Some six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Luigi Toscano, a photographer whose project ‘Lest We Forget’ shares the stories of survivors of the Holocaust, said he was also returning his order of merit to the German state in protest over Wednesday’s vote.
‘RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST’
“Yesterday, the CDU (conservatives) betrayed our democratic values with a resolution and the support of a party that is partly designated as right-wing extremist,” Toscano wrote in an Instagram post in which he also mentioned Weinberg’s decision.
The CDU did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
The AfD, which is under state surveillance on suspicion of being right-wing extremist, has come under fire in the past for criticising Germany’s culture of remembrance around the Holocaust. It denies having any Nazi links.
Wednesday’s parliamentary vote occurred hours after German lawmakers held a special sitting to commemorate 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Commenting on the vote, another Auschwitz survivor, 82-year-old Eva Umlauf, compared the situation to 1930s Germany before Hitler’s Nazis took power.
“We all know how German politicians once thought they could cooperate with Hitler and the Nazi party. Keep them in check,” wrote Umlauf in an open letter to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
“And in just a few years, our democracy became a dictatorship. Peace became war,” wrote Umlauf, who was taken to Auschwitz with her mother in 1944.
(Additional reporting by Madeline ChambersEditing by Gareth Jones)
