A 99-year-old Holocaust survivor announced on Thursday his decision to return his federal order of merit award to the German state as a protest against a parliamentary vote that for the first time utilized support from the far-right to secure a majority.
Germany's main opposition conservatives, expected to win a national election on Feb. 23, passed a motion in parliament on Wednesday for a significant crackdown on migration with the assistance of votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The non-binding motion's passage with the help of the AfD was symbolically significant, breaking a long-standing taboo among mainstream parties against collaborating with the far-right. Albrecht Weinberg, a Holocaust survivor born to a Jewish family in 1925, shared that he would be returning his decoration in objection to the vote. Weinberg endured the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen during World War II before immigrating to the United States post-war and returning to live in Germany a decade ago.
Photographer Luigi Toscano, known for 'Lest We Forget', a project sharing Holocaust survivors' stories, also declared his intention to return his order of merit in protest of Wednesday's vote. Toscano criticized the CDU (conservatives) for compromising democratic values by aligning with a party partly seen as right-wing extremist during the resolution.
With the AfD being monitored for suspected right-wing extremism and having been previously criticized for its views on Germany's Holocaust remembrance, the recent vote took place just hours after a commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Reflecting on the vote, Auschwitz survivor Eva Umlauf, 82, drew parallels to 1930s Germany before the rise of Hitler's Nazis, cautioning against repeating history's mistakes in an open letter published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.