"Five or six" persons among 17 visitors "constantly interrupted" a tour of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin on July 10, staff at the memorial site told the Tagesspiegel. Members of the group reportedly uttered "manifestly far-right and historically revisionist" interjections.

The disruptive visitors from the Lake Constance constituency of opposition Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel were reportedly traveling under a federally-funded scheme to enable voters to visit parliamentarians in Berlin.

A spokesman for Weidel said she herself did not take part in the tour and was "quite surprised" by the alleged incident.

However, the visit to the memorial and the Sachsenhausen Museum was explicitly requested by Weidel for the information tour, the Federal Press Office (Bundespresseamt, BPA) told DW.

Read more: Women increasingly drawn to right-wing populist parties, study shows

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



'Historically untenable remarks'

Tagesspiegel said a federal government spokeswoman had confirmed that "anti-Semitic and historically untenable remarks" were made by one visitor, prompting the expert guide on the day to break off his presentation.

Panoptic terror facility

Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler commissioned architects to erect Sachsenhausen in 1936 on the fringe of the town of Oranienburg, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Berlin, as a structure to exhibit widespread terror and administer other camps in Nazi-held territory.

Tens of thousands of inmates lost their lives to starvation, ill-health and executions up until Sachsenhausen's liberation by Soviet and Polish troops in 1945.

April 2015: 70th anniversary of Sachsenhausen's liberation

Among its 204,000 inmates over those nine horrific years were German dissidents, citizens of other European nations, and minorities racially targeted by the Nazis.

Nazi crimes relativized

Horst Seferens, spokesman for Brandenburg state's foundation which oversees memorial sites outlying Berlin, said that some of the AfD visitors of July 10 had sought to relativize the crimes at Sachsenhausen with alleged acts by war-time Allies that defeated Hitler's Germany.

The AfD interrupters, said Seferens, had cast doubt on the existence of a gas chamber installed at Sachsenhausen, had trivialized Nazi death camp crimes, and had belittled memorial site staff by implying manipulation and incompetency.

Tagesspiegel said Brandenburg police had launched a probe against persons unknown.

Weidel requested Sachsenhausen's inclusion

The Federal Press Office told DW that it first learned about the incident at the end of July and had been specifically asked by Weidel to include Sachsenhausen in the constituents' trip to Berlin.

Listen to audio 03:04 2011: Sachsenhausen spokesman Seferens

For the purpose of political education, each of the Bundestag's 709 parliamentarians could invite 50 citizens from his or her electorate on "information trips" to gain insights into "political" Berlin and its history on three occasions each year.

These "information trips" were organized and financed via the press office, said the BPA.

Locations visited included the Bundestag's chamber itself, federal ministries, the Chancellery, the BPA and also memorial sites recalling Germany's Nazi past and the former East Germany.

"We regard the political education trips as animportant component of our work," said the BPA. adding that in the wake of the incident it was consulting with the staff of memorial sites.

"The federal government rejects decisively and unmistakably.any relativization and trivialization of the crimes of the National Socialists, the war of extermination and Holocaust begun from Germany," said the BPA.

More resources, says Schuster

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the AfD adherents' behavior was "bitter" but not surprising.

The AfD seemed electorally ready to use any means, he said, even by trampling on the dignity of Nazi victims.

Memorial sites, enduring more and more "shameful and unacceptable behavior from visitors" needed support, including financial resources, to assist their staff to deal with such situations, Schuster said.

Every evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day'spaniahb2018

hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.