Represenatives of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have been banned from attending Holocaust remembrance services at the largest Nazi concentration camp on German soil.

Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald Memorials Foundation, told AfD politicians in the state of Thuringia where the camp is located they were no longer welcome because of anti-democratic and racist tendencies in the party.

He sent a letter to the local AfD chapter informing them the ban on memorial services would run “indefinitely”, according to The Local.

Mr Knigge said AfD politicians were not welcome until they had “credibly distanced themselves from their party’s anti-democratic, anti-human rights and revisionist positions”.

Around 56,000 people were killed at Buchenwald during the Second World War, among the estimated six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, told supporters two years ago that Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a “memorial of shame” and said history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

The far-right party, whose popularity surged amid anger over German chancellor Angel Merkel’s 2015 decision to accommodate over a million refugees, has said Islam is incompatible with the German constitution, but rejects charges of racism.

Earlier this week, MPs from the AfD staged a walk out from the Bavarian parliament during a service to remember Holocaust victims after it was accused of playing down Nazi crimes.

Charlotte Knobloch – the former head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews and a Holocaust survivor – told the chamber the AfD based its policies on “hate and marginalisation”, leading more than a dozen AfD politicians to walk out while remaining members of the parliament applauded her speech.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, speaks at the Bavarian Parliament in Munich (AP)

On Saturday Chancellor Merkel underscored the urgency of combating antisemitism, racism and hatred more than 70 years after the Holocaust, calling for new ways to keep alive the memory of the millions of people killed by the Nazis.

Ms Merkel, in a video address released ahead of Sunday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, said it was everyone’s responsibility to ensure “zero tolerance” of xenophobia and all forms of antisemitism.

“People growing up today must know what people were capable of in the past, and we must work proactively to ensure that it is never repeated,” Ms Merkel said.

Last year Germany appointed a commissioner to oversee efforts to combat antisemitism and will also set up a central repository to collect information about such incidents, Ms Merkel said.

“It will be crucial in the coming time to find new ways of remembrance,” she added. “We must look more closely at the personalities of people who were victims back then, and to tell their stories.”

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Ms Merkel also cited the importance of supporting Holocaust memorials and private initiatives such as the “stumbling stones” project, which installs brass bricks inscribed with the names and key details of people near the homes from which they were deported during the Nazi era.