Published: 3 February 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
MATI SHEMOELOF: German lawmakers have introduced legislation that defines the false equation as a hate crime, as right-wing leader Florian Jäger has discovered
ABOUT A WEEK AGO, my family and I were leaving our house when we saw a convoy of people protesting against the possibility of mandated vaccinations in Germany. My partner immediately hurled loud insults at the protesters. But I was scared.
I knew that among the protesters there were; QAnon supporters (who articulate anti-Semitic sentiments relating to the pandemic), neo-Nazis, right-wing extremists who oppose immigration into Germany, and anti-Semites. I was silent and let the demonstration pass. I wasn’t going to make myself a target.
When I returned home, our street was littered with anti-vaccination flyers. On one, there was a picture of anti-vaxxers inside a concentration camp. It was my turn to get angry. In the past, these people have worn the yellow badge of the Jews. They saw themselves as sheep being led to the slaughter.
A leader of the anti-vaccine movement in Germany is Florian Jäger, who in 2015 founded a branch of the far-right party AfD in Dachau, the Bavarian city where the Nazis first established a concentration camp.
In a Facebook video, Jäger compares the situation of unvaccinated Germans during the pandemic to the persecution of Jews in Kristallnacht in 1938. Jäger accuses politicians, particularly Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (of the Christian Socialist Union party), of using Nazi methods to incite "popular anger" against the unvaccinated. "However, this 'popular anger' did not break out as quickly as the National Socialist propaganda machine,” he says.
