Two events clashed in the past few days: January 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, in 2025 witnessed the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp. Many of the few remaining survivors came to the site of their suffering, together with many heads of state, to remember. From Germany, the President, the Chancellor, and the President of the Bundestag (the lower chamber of parliament), were present. German news magazines devoted more than half of their reporting time to covering the events directly from the murder site, where one million out of six million Jewish lives had been extinguished by an industrialized murder machine, together with some 100,000 others, many of them Poles who had dared to confront the German occupiers.
January 25, 2025: Elon Musk, high tech innovator, multi-billionaire, controller of a massive social media empire, and close confidant and advisor to the new US president Donald Trump sent a supportive video to a pre-election party gathering of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing populist party. Parts of the AfD have been categorized as radical right and anti-democratic by the German Intelligence Agencies, and a party leader was recently sentenced in criminal court for the use of Nazi language and symbols. Musk (himself with at least the appearance of a Hitler salute) expressed strong support when he told those gathered that their country placed “too much of a focus on past guilt.” Earlier, Musk had expressed praise for the AfD, and he recently engaged in a supportive conversation with its leader Alice Weidel on his platform X.
