City, state and judiciary enable macabre memorial theater by neo-Nazis
On February 15, 2025, an estimated 3,000 neo-Nazis - more than twice as many as in previous years - marched from Mitte station through the city center of Dresden to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in World War II. They once again ranted about the innocent city of art and culture, even about the "innocence of the German people" and exaggerated the number of deaths from the bombing into the hundreds of thousands.
This torrent of lies can be summarized in the propaganda narrative of the "bomb holocaust", which was once again prominent this year in speeches and on a banner reading "You call it liberation. We call it mass murder!" // Bomb holocaust // Dresden: February 13th, 1945 – February 14th, 1945 – February 15th, 1945 […]” spread on the streets and squares of Dresden. Its aim: to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator, to trivialize, relativize and deny the Nazi mass crimes against those persecuted as Jews, Sini*zze and Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, people unworthy of life and political opponents.
The fact that neo-Nazis were able to trample on the fate and reputation of the victims of National Socialism to such an extent on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden is the responsibility of both the city of Dresden and the state of Saxony. After we, as BgA-Ostsachsen, filed a detailed complaint against the above-cited banner in accordance with Section 130 Paragraph 3 of the Criminal Code (incitement to hatred) in March 2022, the Dresden Public Prosecutor's Office (2023) and the Dresden General Public Prosecutor's Office (2024) refused to bring the banner to court and thus to take its true intention seriously. And while the city at least in 2023 took the simmering legal dispute as the starting point for an assembly order to prohibit the use of the term for the demonstration, this year it refrained from confronting the neo-Nazis and even granted them a march route in the heart of the city.
We will continue to examine and use all political and legal means to ensure that this macabre memorial theater is no longer given a stage in the supposedly so open city of art and culture. We would like to explicitly thank – and exempt from criticism – the thousands of counter-demonstrators who braved the cold of winter and society on February 13 and 15, and who even risked serious physical injuries to oppose neo-Nazis and the shift to the right. Our solidarity goes out to all those who are despised, threatened and attacked by neo-Nazis!
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