Two events clashed in the past few days: January 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, in 2025 witnessed the commemoration of the 80^th 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. 

Musk’s plea to Germans resonates with his master’s appeal to Americans: “Make America Great Again,” a message that implies forgetting about the dark sides of this country’s own history. Americans should take notice: demands to forget about evil in German and American societies go hand in hand.

Such demands of course fly in the face of George Santayana’s famous words that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” They fly in the face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt hopes and Justice Robert Jackson’s words in his opening statements at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg: the trial should document the unbelievable atrocities Germany had committed with witnesses under oath and all the written documents so posterity can never doubt. Musk’s demands are an offense against the US (and other nations’) soldiers who risked and lost their lives to put an end to the Nazi terror and murder machine. They finally fly in the face of Musk’s South African compatriot (albeit on the other side of the racial divide), Nelson Mandela, who made his agreement to a transition from apartheid to democracy contingent on the institutionalization of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The history of apartheid had to be documented and never be forgotten. It included that the regime based its Apartheid laws on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of racial discrimination. 

Some will suggest we take Musk seriously, highlighting his smarts and success as an entrepreneur. They may forget that several heads of leading German business enterprises of the 1930s, world leaders in steel production and chemical industries (including the production of Zyklon B), were most appeasing to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime (and generously accepted the slave labor offered to them). Some later faced justice at Nuremberg. Entrepreneurial success does not go hand in hand with a sense of political ethics and—in Elon Musk’s case—it certainly is accompanied by massive ignorance of German history. Such ignorance delegitimizes his words. The forgetting he preaches is best suited to undermining democracy and to laying the groundwork for future atrocities. An escape to Mars will not be an option.

Joachim Savelsberg, is a professor in the Department of Sociology and an affiliate with the Law School of the University of Minnesota.