Survivors of the Holocaust have been following the German federal elections with special interest. Commenting in Berlin, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee said:

"The fact that the AfD has experienced losses in the elections for the German Bundestag is a piece of good news for Holocaust survivors, and it radiates throughout Europe. It will be up to the democratic parties to analyse to what extent these losses are due to the ignorant hate-speech of the AfD, their internal disputes or their permanent contempt for democracy.

But the individual results for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia look more disconcerting. They clearly show that the democratic parties treated the AfD far too gently as ‘normal’ democratic fellow contenders in the election campaign, instead of taking the representatives of that party to task in the election debates and constantly exposing them with their rhetoric of hatred, their contempt for democracy and their massive involvement with violent developments in the so-called Querdenker (lateral thinkers) scene.

Consequently, the AfD results in Saxony and Thuringia are a dramatic wake-up call, not just for the democratic parties, but for society as a whole, to counter this development with a strong and robust commitment to democracy."