After coordination in the Bundestag: Holocaust survivor wants to return Cross of Merit

The Holocaust survivor Albrecht Weinberg wants to return its Federal Cross of Merit after the Union has carried out a Bundestag application for migration policy with votes from the AfD. The Mannheim photographer Luigi Toscano, who, like vineyard, is committed to a Nazi commemoration, wants to do the same. He had agreed the plan together with his friend Weinberg, who comes from Leer in East Frisia, said Toscano. He would give back the honor in Berlin to Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which he gave him in 2021 together with Weinberg. “Either the Federal President welcomes us or we throw it into the mailbox with him,” he said. He was shaken, outraged and agitated about what happened in the Bundestag on Wednesday. “I have been revealed for my democratic values,” Toscano told the German Press Agency. Several media had previously reported.

The Union had brought its five-point plan for a sharper migration policy on Wednesday with votes from AfD, FDP and without a faction by the Bundestag. For the first time, the AfD obtained a majority in the plenum. On Friday, the parliament will vote on a draft law of the Union to contain migration. In addition to the AfD, FDP and BSW already signaled their consent.

Return a spontaneous decision

Weinberg is also shocked by the result of the vote in the Bundestag. It was a spontaneous decision to return the Federal Cross of Merit, which was a high honor for him. He wanted to do the same as his friend Toscano. “It has become too difficult to wear it when you have such messages. Terrible,” said the 99-year-old of the German Press Agency.

Weinberg survived the three concentration camps Auschwitz, central building dora in the Harz, Bergen-Belsen near Celle and several death marches. His Jewish family was almost completely murdered by the Nazis. In 2012 he returned to his East Frisian homeland with his sister from the USA. Since then he has been in schools and reports pupils about his memories.

He wants to do that too. “I have been to schools in schools in the past ten years and speak to students what can be and what would be if they take over the power again,” said Weinberg with a view to the AfD. “They have no idea what it looked like ’45 Germany.” He hoped that people would come to reason. “Politics is a strange business.”

Toscano expects use for democracy

Toscano, photographer and filmmaker, publicly draws the fate of the survivors with the memory project “against forgetting” and pays attention to the last contemporary witnesses of the Nazi crimes.

“The problems we have with the migration, we know that they are there, but we must not solve them with the drainers of the right,” he said. He actually expects Democrats 100 % commitment to democracy. What happened yesterday has nothing to do with it. “The symbolism and the dangers resulting from it are devastating.”