Read: Elie Wiesel and the agony of bearing witness

Institutions of memory such as Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland play an important, and unique, role in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Nazi regime. For millions of visitors annually, these institutions bear witness to the unthinkable crimes that took place on their grounds and expose people to the visceral discomfort associated with being in a former concentration camp.

But although Sachsenhausen and other such sites seek to stay above the fray politically, in recent years they have been confronted with politics—as the AfD incident here showed, sometimes even within their own walls. The rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, coupled with growing anti-Semitism, puts places such as Sachsenhausen in a new and difficult position. These places teach about the horrors of the Nazi era with a message of “Never again,” even as some in the AfD, the first far-right party since the Nazis to sit in Germany’s Parliament, downplay or question the very history of the Holocaust.

What’s more, groups such as the AfD are debating the experiences of Holocaust survivors and minimizing the crimes they lived through just as the last of these survivors, who have been an integral part of preserving the experiences of this era, are dying out.

How, then, can Holocaust memorials balance their role as apolitical sites of memory with the responsibility to defend the values they represent? And how, in a broader sense, can they adapt their work as the events they chronicle recede further and further into the past?

“We’re not politicians,” Axel Drecoll, the director of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, told me recently in his office. “But the way we talk about history is massively affected by these movements. And I'm deeply convinced that our consensus for a peaceful and rule-based existence is strongly based on the fact that we keep our critical reckoning with the past alive."

For Drecoll and others in his position, the problem isn’t just that right-wing-populist rhetoric and actions at times echo the very rhetoric their institutions warn against. It’s also that reinterpreting history as a way to create a new nationalist narrative is a rhetorical hallmark of parties such as Germany’s AfD and Poland’s ruling right-wing-populist Law and Justice Party (PiS). For those who see protecting the integrity of history as their primary task, far-right rhetoric feels like a direct assault.

Here in Germany, AfD leaders have sought to diminish the importance of the Nazi era to produce an argument for renewed national pride: The party’s co-leader Alexander Gauland referred to it as a “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise admirable history, while Björn Höcke, who leads the party’s most extreme wing, called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and has defended Holocaust deniers. (Höcke’s rhetoric led administrators at Buchenwald, a former concentration camp and memorial based in his home state of Thuringia, to ban AfD politicians from its commemorative events.)