Höcke, one of the senior members of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, said “we Germans… are the only nation in the world that has planted a monument to shame in the heart of its capital.”
Activists have built a mini model of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial outside the home of far-right politician Björn Höcke in Bornhagen. The move is to troll the lawmaker after he caused uproar in January earlier this year when he said Germany should not have such a memorial in its capital city.
Now he’ll be reminded of the murder of the death of six million Jews every day, after the “Centre for Political Beauty” collective secretly rented the house next door ten months ago, and yesterday erected a smaller replica of the Berlin memorial to the European Jews murdered by the Nazis.
The original is a made up of 2,700 concrete slabs representing a cemetery; the miniature one has 26, and is clearly visible from Höcke’s property.
“We are doing our neighbourly duty”, the group’s leader Philipp Ruch said. “We hope he enjoys the view every day when he looks out the window.”
The collective raised enough money via a crowdfunding campaign to keep the memorial there for two years or more. It said it would aim to keep it there indefinitely, or until Höcke kneels down in front of it to beg forgiveness for Germany’s guilt in the World War-like former chancellor Willy Brandt famously did at a memorial in Poland in 1970.
Höcke’s speech in Dresden in January even outraged some of his own party members, some of whom called for his expulsion. He also lamented the fact that Germany “wasn’t able to mourn the German victims” of World War 2.
