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It was dusk last Saturday in Hannover when the 22-year-old, who identified herself as “Jana”, took the stage in a demonstration against Covid-19 measures.
The online video of her speech, viewed more than a million times in two days, shows the young woman in a black coat on a small stage making a dazzling historical comparison.
“Jana” tells the crowd how, in recent months, she has protested pandemic restrictions and distributed anti-federal pamphlets.
“I feel like Sophie Scholl,” he says, citing the name of a 21-year-old Munich woman executed by the Nazis in 1943 for agitating against the fascists and their war effort.
Moments later, a man walks up to Jana, hands her his high-visibility vest, and is heard to say that “he’s not working as a butler because of such nonsense.”
“This is minimizing the Holocaust,” he tells the surprised young woman. Another viewer yells, “This is beyond embarrassing.”
Insisting that she “did nothing,” Jana turns her back on the crowd, drops the mic and script before leaving the stage in tears.
She is not alone. Last week in Karlsruhe, an 11-year-old girl told another anti-mask gathering that she felt like Anne Frank because she had to celebrate her birthday with friends in silence to avoid attracting the attention of neighbors.
Concentration camp
Frank, born in Frankfurt, hid with his family in a hidden apartment in Amsterdam until they were betrayed; the girl was 15 when she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In recent months, German opponents of Covid-19 restrictions, and a thriving army of virus conspiracy theorists, have embraced the idea that they are resistance fighters against a new German totalitarian state.
Beata, a friend from Berlin, is convinced that her refusal to wear a mask where necessary will soon see her excluded from German life to the point that “eventually she will have to wear something like a Star of David.”
The star was introduced to Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s and it was mandatory for Jews to wear it visibly, making them easier targets for discrimination and violence.
Some anti-mask protesters have donned stars and striped concentration camp uniforms at anti-lockdown marches.
And last week, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) dubbed Germany’s reformed Covid-19 regulation an “Enabling Act,” in a deliberate nod to the 1933 law that disabled parliament and handed over to the Nazis absolute power.
The scale of such skewed comparisons has caused a horrified backlash from German politicians. Chancellor Heiko Maas has argued that “anyone who compares himself to Sophie Scholl or Anne Frank today is scoffing at the courage necessary to stand up to the Nazis.”
View ‘disgusting’
Dr. Josef Schuster, head of Germany’s Jewish community, described the comparisons of the anti-mask protesters as “disgusting.”
“Just as the demonstrations show no respect for the health of other citizens,” he said, “they have no respect for the Nazi victims.”
Long-term Holocaust researcher Alexandra Senfft suggests that the growing number of such comparisons exposes a worrying deficit in the German historical debate. Despite considerable public commitment to Nazi crimes, he believes that few Germans have dealt with the personal perpetrators of their own family.
Instead, they view the perpetrators of the Nazi era as an abstract “other,” allowing them a more comfortable overidentification with the victims.
Senfft, a writer and granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal, suggests that Covid-19 pressures have catalyzed a transgenerational transmission of perpetrator denial and perpetrator-victim investment in Germany. This, combined with a possible authoritarian upbringing, he suggests, has created a subconscious desire for authoritarianism and a strong leader figure among those who claim to be marching for “freedom.”
“This is a perversion of history and a falsification of the facts that amounts to a second guilt,” he says. “He abuses the victims, mocks their fate and hurts their descendants.”
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