German Holocaust survivor Eva Umlauf appealed in an open letter on Thursday to conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz not to align his centre-right CDU/CSU bloc with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to pass legislation.
Merz, who is widely viewed as the frontrunner to replace current Chancellor Olaf Scholz after upcoming elections, broke taboos on Wednesday by relying on votes from the AfD to pass a motion calling for a crackdown on migration in the lower house of Germany’s parliament.
Another vote on a CDU-backed package of migration policies is expected in parliament on Friday.
“Don’t do it, Mr Merz,” reads the letter from Umlauf, which was published by the Süddeutsche newspaper.
She wrote that she hoped not to witness the rise of far-right parties in her lifetime – but there is now a shift to the right throughout Europe, and hatred and agitation are becoming acceptable again.
“Hand on heart: it scares me to death,” wrote the 82-year-old Umlauf. “We have all seen where this path can lead.”
Umlauf was taken to the Auschwitz extermination camp when she was just two years old and, in her own words, would have been murdered if her train had arrived just three days earlier.
“Don’t underestimate the right-wing extremists. Turn back on the path you took on Wednesday. Approach the other democratic parties, find compromises,” she appealed to Merz.
The vote on Wednesday broke taboos, “but on Friday, for the first time in post-war history, a law could be passed in the Bundestag together with right-wing extremists,” warned Umlauf.
What happens in the Bundestag this week will go down in the history books, wrote Umlauf, “because this is exactly how it starts, this is how we normalize the enemies of democracy.”
