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A 99-year-old Holocaust survivor has said he will return his federal order of merit to the German president in protest over MPs passing an anti-immigration motion in parliament with the support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.
Albrecht Weinberg, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, told the Guardian he was “horrified” on learning that a proposal submitted by the conservative parties had relied on the anti-immigrant, xenophobic AfD to get it over the line.
On Thursday, Weinberg said: “You know German history? You know then how some people posing as democrats in 1933 abused the legal political process to get into power? What happened in the Bundestag on Wednesday reminded me of Germany in 1933 of how Hitler and the Nazi party managed to come to power through legitimate means.”
Weinberg, who survived Auschwitz along with his brother and sister, said he had decided “very spontaneously” to hand back his medal “because I was very upset about the voting in the Bundestag”.
On Wednesday, the conservative alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) submitted a non-binding motion for a plan that aims to make it policy to turn migrants and asylum seekers away at the German border, and to enable security forces to more easily deport foreigners in Germany.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU and the man likely to become the next chancellor after elections later this month, was urged not to use the AfD to get the motion through by opposition members, who said it breached Germany’s longstanding taboo to keep a “firewall” between the far right and the mainstream.
His decision was even criticised on Thursday by the former chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel who, in a rare intervention into German politics, rebuked him for reneging on a promise not to cooperate, even “by accident”, with the AfD.
Weinberg, who was given Germany’s highest honour for his work in schools raising awareness of the Holocaust, said he was shocked but not surprised by the motion.
He said: “The Nazis wanted to get rid of my family even though we were German citizens, and they succeeded in murdering my parents and almost killed me and my siblings. Now these politicians want to chase everyone out who they don’t like. Did they learn nothing from the second world war? I really wonder whether I should be packing my suitcase again.”
He said he had already been chilled by the historical parallels he saw between the AfD’s tactics and those of the Nazi party after recent reports that the AfD had been distributing flyers designed to resemble plane tickets for deportation that were addressed to “illegal immigrants”.
“It reminded me precisely of how the SA [the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party] had printed small tickets at the local printing press and rang the bell of our house handing one to my father, a one-way ticket … telling him ‘don’t come back’,” he said.
Weinberg, who grew up in the village of Fehndorf Rhauderfehn in East Frisia, northern Germany and will turn 100 in March, was forced into Nazi slave labour in 1939. He and his sister, Friedel, were sent to Auschwitz in April 1943 at the same time as, but separately from, their older brother, Dieter.
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Weinberg said he had been shocked to hear that even his own local MP, “a dear friend” from the CDU, had voted in favour of the motion. He said: “We’re friends. I called her because I was so disturbed – she said she’ll come and see me in a week or two to explain why. What can you do?”
The photographer Luigi Toscano from Mannheim, a friend of Weinberg’s whose project Lest We Forget documented the stories of 400 survivors of the Holocaust, also said he was returning his order of merit. He was prepared to take Weinberg with him and hand it back to President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin personally, he said. “Either the president will receive us or we’ll throw the medals into his letterbox,” he told the broadcaster ARD.
Wednesday’s vote came two days after a memorial at Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp in 1945.
The vote led to criticism from all sides of the mainstream political spectrum. In a statement on her website, Merkel said she stood by her longstanding conviction that there should never be any association between the mainstream parties and the far-right populists.
She wrote: “I think it is wrong to no longer feel bound to this proposal [Merz’s promise not to cooperate with the AfD], thereby allowing a majority with the votes of the AfD in a vote in the German Bundestag for the first time on 29 January 2025.”
Eva Umlauf, 82, who survived Auschwitz and in 2015 told the Guardian the story of how she was deported there with her mother in 1944, also compared the vote to the situation in 1930s Germany.
In a letter to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, she wrote: “We all know how German politicians once thought they could cooperate with Hitler and the Nazi party. Keep them in check. And how in just a few years, our democracy became a dictatorship. Peace became war.”
