JTA — As anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian activists were shut out of the former Buchenwald concentration camp this weekend, a timeworn fight about the site’s history resurfaced.

That dispute, which dates back to the camp’s liberation in 1945, centers on how the victims of Buchenwald wanted to be remembered. The activists, a group called “Kufiyas in Buchenwald,” said their fight for Palestinians upheld a pledge made by thousands of Buchenwald survivors days after they were freed.

The inmates swore to punish the guilty, destroy Nazism, and create a new world of peace. That promise, known as the “Oath of Buchenwald,” has been invoked by varying regimes and political movements ever since it was uttered.

Kufiyas in Buchenwald was blocked from demonstrating at the Buchenwald memorial on Sunday after a court in the nearby city of Weimar upheld a police ban. The planned event would have marked the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by US troops — and the day before the Jewish world observes Yom HaShoah, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day.

Judges decided that the rally would likely “violate the dignity of victims” of the Nazis. The activists were offered the alternative of protesting in downtown Weimar, which they refused.

Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, holding Jews along with political prisoners, Roma, gay people, and prisoners of war. Roughly 56,000 people were killed there, among them some 11,000 Jews.

Kufiyas in Buchenwald argued that their protest would honor the memory of Buchenwald’s victims together with all “victims of genocide and fascism.” The campaign was formed after a German court ruled that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh, which has been adopted by left-wing anti-Israel protesters. The memorial foundation argued that, in some contexts, the symbol could be disruptive and undercut the memorial’s purpose. Its critics said the foundation was suppressing speech that criticized Israel and fell in line with the mission of Holocaust remembrance.

By not addressing “the genocide in Gaza,” Kufiyehs in Buchenwald said the memorial became “a place of historical revisionism and genocide denial.”

The memorial site said that Kufiyas in Buchenwald were the ones abusing history.

“This is a completely inappropriate instrumentalization of the memory of the victims of National Socialism for one’s own political, misanthropic agenda,” Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesperson for the memorial foundation, told the German broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. The planned rally was also excoriated by the European Jewish Congress, the Conference of European Rabbis, and other groups.

Israel dismisses claims of genocide in Gaza, where operatives for the Hamas terror group have embedded themselves among the civilian population and in mosques, hospitals, and schools.

The war in Gaza was initiated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel, massacring some 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Strip. Israel’s military says it has gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties during the conflict, including by issuing warnings of upcoming strikes.

Current-day atrocities have been invoked at Buchenwald before, according to William Niven, an emeritus professor of Nottingham Trent University who teaches German history.

In 1993, about 3,000 people demonstrated on the site against the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Marek Edelman, the........

© The Times of Israel