The US Vice President visited the concentration camp Thursday afternoon. He laid wreaths at the foot of the statue, creating signs of a cross, pausing before a memorial wall with the words “Never Again” written on multiple tongues, including German and English.
JD Vance told reporters that he had read about the book's Holocaust but that the “unspeakable evil” had been forced home by a trip to Dachau. “It's something I will never forget and I'm grateful to be able to see it first hand,” Vance said.
However, after Vance spoke in Munich the following day, the German leader effectively questioned whether he understood what he just saw.
Eighty years after American soldiers released Dachau, this weekend, German top officials accused Vance and, in fact, President Trump of boosting political parties that many Germans believe to have been dangerously derived from Nazism. did.
The German alternative, or that party, called the AFD, is sitting second in the polls for parliamentary elections next Sunday, with about 20% of its people saying it supports it. However, other German parties are willing to govern it. That's because the AFD disregarded Hitler's atrocities. Some party members enjoy Nazi slogans.
The German intelligence agency classifies some of the AFD as extremists. Members have been arrested in connection with multiple plots to overthrow the government. He reportedly attended a rally last year that included discussions on the deportation of not only asylum seekers but also German citizens who have migrated to the country.
“The commitment to “never again” cannot be reconciled with the support of the AFD,” Prime Minister Olaf Scholz said Saturday morning in Munich as part of Vance's long responsibilities.
“This is never again” is a historic mission that Germany, as a free democracy, wants to live on every day,” he said. “There will never be fascism again, no racism again, no more aggressive wars.”
Decades of German law and political practice revolve around the belief that, in order to prevent another Hitler from taking power, the government must ban hate speeches and avoid political parties as appearing extreme. I've done it. The country has intelligence reporting tools to monitor extremists, and in rare cases there is a constitutional court that can completely prohibit parties.
Vance, like Elon Musk, another Trump administration official, parached his approach and parached the country's Congressional elections. Both men say it's time for Germans to stop cop for speeches and begin dealing with the fierce side of the country as an avatar for voters who have been disenfranchised from sharing Trump's opposition to mass immigration.
Musk publicly supported the AFD last month, telling party members that the Germans “focus too much on past guilt.”
Musk and Vance's prescriptions are perhaps the most verbose message in mainstream German politics.
A writer for the leading German newspaper, Der Spiegel, declared on Saturday morning that Vance had given the AFD the German word “Wahlkampfgeschenk,” or “campaign gift.”
Even before the speech, analysts at the Munich Congress warned that the regime's worldview would overturn the alliance on both sides of the Atlantic.
“We have a US government with different values and a different vision of what the West should be,” Jana Puglierin, senior policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations in Berlin, said in a panel discussion on Friday. I did.
In his speech, Vance called European restrictions on speeches a greater threat than military attacks by Russia and China, comparing them to those imposed by the Cold War Soviet Union.
“I'm looking to Brussels,” Vance said. A country where police attacked civilians suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of their “fighting misogyny.”
Whether intentional or not, Vance's speech was in the midst of a controversial political debate. Europe is currently struggling with questions about how to treat the right fierce political parties that have won voters' shares. In some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, those parties have joined the federal government. In others, like France and Germany, mainstream parties have blocked them so far.
Still, some lines are fuzzy. Friedrich Merz, the prime candidate for the prime minister, last month slammed accusations of pushing for a series of parliamentary immigration restrictions that require them to pass the AFD vote. Merz defended the decision but said he would never allow the AFD to join his Christian Democrats and officially in the government.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding German criticism of Vance.
Germany has also had long-term debate over the scope of speech laws, but recently it has been inflamed by the war in Gaza. Although restrictions prohibit anti-Semitic speeches, some Germans, including the Berlin arts community, have defined them too widely, and they are effective in criticizing Israel and their actions in war. They complain that it is prohibited.
The two overlapping factors seem to drive Musk and Vance in Germany's expansion.
One is an attempt to build a new transatlantic alliance between parties who share Trump's core values, particularly those that are hard-pressed opposition to large-scale migration.
Another is for online or other speeches or other reasons that the government deems hatred or “misinformation” but says that conservatives intend to suppress their political opinions. It is an effort to wipe out European laws and social norms. Musk has condemned these restrictions as an attack on freedom. He amplified such speeches on his social media platform X.
AFD Over the past decade, he has climbed the polls on the strong strict restrictions on promises, including millions of asylum seekers that have flowed from the Middle East into Germany, as well as the promised deportation. Prime Minister candidate Alice Weidel has denounced the censorship of Germany and the European Union. She met Mr. Vance on the sidelines in Munich.
Weidel has had a paradoxically and paradoxically similar frustration sufficiently as part of his ongoing efforts to alienate the AFD from the Nazis and throw mainstream parties as a real threat to the country.
“What Adolf Hitler did,” she told Musk in an interview last month. “The first thing – he switched free speech, where he controls the media. Without it, he wouldn't have been successful.”
