Head of Nazi camp memorial threatened after sending letter to voters

The director of the memorial at two former Nazi concentration camps says he has been receiving threats after sending a letter to voters ahead of state elections next month in which he sounds the alarm over the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Jens-Christian Wagner, who heads the memorial at the Buchenwald and Mittlebau-Dora concentration camps in the eastern state of Thuringia, sent a letter to 300,000 voters over 65 ahead of regional elections scheduled for September 1.

The letter was sent to seniors, he said, because such people are less likely to get their information from social media. No tax funds or donations for the memorial work were used in the mailer, he said.

In it, Wagner, a trained historian, warns that the AfD in Thuringia, where the party's state-level branch has been classified as far-right extremist by domestic intelligence, is "trying to trivialize the horrors of the Nazi regime."

In a statement on the memorial's website, Wagner said that while sending a letter to voters was "unusual," the move was justified by the fact that the "AfD notoriously opposes the culture of remembrance and discredits our work as a 'cult of guilt'."

Since sending the letter, his picture has been glued to a stone monument that commemorates the inmates of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp who were killed on the death marches, Wagner wrote on social media platform X on Tuesday.

He also received an email from a woman based in the city of Weimar saying he would be punished for his actions, the director wrote.