In a public letter to the CDU’s party and faction leader, Friedrich Merz, Auschwitz survivor Eva Umlauf warns against making politics with the consent of the right-wing. The 82-year-old, a trained psychotherapist, urges Merz to not underestimate the right-wing extremists and to reverse course.
Umlauf, who was brought to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 with her mother, writes that the joint voting of the CDU with the AfD in the Bundestag on Wednesday “has shaken the democratic firewall to its foundations.”
If the CDU were to pass a law together with right-wing extremists in the Bundestag on Friday, the firewall “could be torn down.” She begs Merz: “Do not do this. Turn around, Mr. Merz, as hard as it may fall for you.”
Otherwise, “the enemies of our democracy” would be normalized. “We all know how German politicians once thought they could work with Hitler and the NSDAP together. You hold them in check” Umlauf writes. “And in a few years, our democracy turned into a dictatorship. Peace turned into war.