German far-right leader does not consider May 8 to be a date worth celebrating

The leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Alexander Gauland, opposed the announcement of the day of the surrender of Nazi Germany - May 8 - as a permanent holiday. "May 8 cannot be a holiday because it is a mixed day. It was a day of release for prisoners of concentration camps. But it was also a day of absolute defeat, a day of the loss of significant parts of Germany and decision-making opportunities," he told the German media.

According to an ultra-right politician, May 8 cannot be a "happy day for Germany." As Gauland noted, on May 8 there is a “positive”, “but women raped in Berlin will see this very differently from prisoners in concentration camps.”

In an open letter to Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Angela Merkel, Holocaust-surviving Auschwitz committee chairman in Germany, Esther Bejarano, called for May 8 to be declared a holiday of liberation from National Socialism.

This year, May 8 - 75 years after the end of World War II - will be celebrated as a public holiday in Berlin.

Recall that the party "Alternative for Germany" has repeatedly distinguished itself by statements aimed at revising the historical assessment of the period of National Socialism in Germany. One of the party’s leaders, Bernd Hecke, spoke out against the presence of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin.

However, the deputy of the Bundestag, the co-chairman of "AdG" Alexander Gauland urged the Wehrmacht to be proud, verbatim declaring: "We have the right to be proud of the merits of our soldiers in two world wars."

It should be noted that in Vestnik Kavkaza he repeatedly warned of the revisionist approach of German nationalists to the history of World War II. The ideology "Alternatives for Germany", whose supporters live with dreams of restoring the Third Reich and returning East Prussia (Kaliningrad), is a long-term threat to Russia's interests.

It is noteworthy that at the same time, the Nazis from Alternative for Germany closely cooperate with the Armenian authorities and the Karabakh separatists. One of the favorite guests in Nagorno-Karabakh was MP Stefan Koyter, cursed by the fact that he greeted his colleagues in the Bundestag with the phrase "Zig Heil!"

As the German political scientist Heiko Langner noted in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza, “both Karabakh separatists and German nationalists are convinced of the supposed superiority of Christian civilization over the rest, and therefore advocate a nationalist identity policy to the detriment of other groups of the population. In Nagorno-Karabakh, in many ways "became a reality a picture that AdG would very much like to see in Germany."