The historian running the memorial to the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp has spoken out against tech billionaire Elon Musk, in an interview this week with The Times of London.
Jens-Christian Wagner, who runs the memorial to the notorious camp near Weimar that held hundreds of thousands of Jewish, Communist, Roma, and other political prisoners of the Nazis, told The Times, “One can only say to [Musk], ‘Take a history book and withdraw for three days, read the history book and please be quiet with the poison he’s spreading’.”
“I think Musk is a mixture of mad and right-wing extremist and that is particularly dangerous,” Wagner continued.
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Musk, who bankrolled much of Trump's voter outreach last year and heads up his "Department of Government Efficiency" task force to cut federal spending, has come under fire for making a gesture that has drawn comparisons to a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally. He denies that was his intent and is feuding with Wikipedia over the definition of a Nazi salute.
However, Musk has also increasingly endorsed far-right movements in other countries through his X platform, and what particularly draws Wagner's horror is his open support for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), or Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant right-wing extremist party that has been described by some political observers as an ideological successor to the Nazis.
“Recently we had a case where pupils were spotted lying down in the ovens of the crematorium and photographing each other. It turned out one of the two boys was the son of a local AfD politician who exerted pressure on the school not to punish them,” Wagner told The Times. “Up to now we’ve not had security cameras in the crematorium for ethical reasons because it’s a place where some people come to grieve. But now we’re going to install cameras there too.”