Lawmakers with Bavaria's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) staged a walkout on Wednesday during a memorial service honoring the victims of the Holocaust.

Only four of the AfD's 22 lawmakers in Bavaria's state parliament remained in the plenary hall after Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said the party trivializes Nazi crimes.

"A party is represented here today that disparages these [democratic] values and downplays the crimes of the National Socialists and that maintains close ties with the far-right extremist scene," she said in her speech.

"This so-called Alternative for Germany bases its policies on hate and exclusion ... and is not based on our democratic constitution," Knobloch added.

In a video of the speech posted by local public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, several AfD lawmakers are seen exiting the plenary hall while lawmakers from the remaining parties give Knobloch a standing ovation.

Knobloch, who was narrowly saved from deportation to a concentration camp as a child and survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Bavarian countryside, previously served as the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Read more: Germany opens anti-Semitism reporting center

Nearly all of the AfD's 22 lawmakers in Bavaria left the hall during Knobloch's speech

AfD defends act as 'appropriate response'

Bavaria's state premier Markus Söder sharply condemned the actions of the AfD lawmakers during the Holocaust memorial, saying they were "disrespectful."

Katrin Ebner-Steiner, the co-leader of the AfD's parliamentary group in Bavaria, defended the protest as "an appropriate response."

In a statement posted to her Facebook page, Ebner-Steiner accused Knobloch of "abusing a memorial service for the victims of Nazism to defame the entirety of the AfD and its democratically legitimate parliamentary group by using awful general insinuations."

Katharina Schulze, co-leader of the Greens in Bavaria, came to Knobloch's defense, thanking her on Twitter for her "clear and true words."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alice Weidel Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Frauke Petry German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Björn Höcke The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Beatrix von Storch Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Marcus Pretzell Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Wendt The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andre Poggenburg Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Alexander Gauland - again ... During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks ... and again Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."

AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks Andreas Kalbitz The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity." Author: Dagmar Breitenbach



Backlash over Holocaust comments

The AfD, which frequently denies accusations of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, entered Bavaria's state parliament for the first time last October and is currently represented in all of Germany's 16 state parliaments as well as the Bundestag, the lower house of the federal parliament.

The party has faced backlash for a series of controversial statements by its members, including a remark last June by AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland who said Adolf Hitler and the Nazis "are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history."

In 2017, the head of the AfD in the eastern German state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, sparked controversy by describing Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "memorial of shame" and questioned Germany's culture of remembrance regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said it was putting the AfD under increased observation over concerns about public comments made by party members and possible links to extremist groups.

rs/rc (dpa, AFP, AP, Reuters)

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