Key Takeaways:
Germany's postwar identity, built on Holocaust remembrance, is fracturing as the far-right AfD polls at 28% and a generation without living witnesses comes of age.
Nearly 40% of Germans say it is time to move on from Nazi-era guilt, a Bielefeld University study found, as the far-right Alternative for Germany party polls first at 28% and Holocaust survivors dwindle to an estimated 21,300 by 2040.
"The accumulation of crises has made it harder for young people to focus on the past," said Matthias Thiel, head of political education at Berlin's Louise Schroeder vocational school. "There is just too much noise."
Some 12% of Germans aged 18 to 29 have never heard of the Holocaust, versus 5% across all age groups, according to a 2025 Claims Conference survey. Another 13% of younger respondents said the number of Jews killed was greatly exaggerated. Antisemitic incidents in Germany nearly doubled between 2023 and 2024 to their highest-ever level, per RIAS, a monitoring network. More than two-thirds of Germans see antisemitism rising, a European Commission survey showed, compared with less than half across the rest of Europe.
The erosion of Holocaust memory carries implications beyond Germany's borders. Berlin is now the second-largest military spender in NATO in absolute terms, and the AfD — which calls for ending the "perpetuation of a guilt complex" — is on track to potentially lead a state government after the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt, where it polls above 40%. "It's an affront to the victims of the Holocaust to call Germany to abandon its culture of memory, but it's also an imminent danger to German democracy," said Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, which is opening education centers in Munich and Leipzig.
The shift reflects a demographic transformation underway in Germany. By 2024, 40% of residents aged 15 to 24 were either migrants or had parents who immigrated, government data show. Among those under 15, the proportion reached 43%. A 2010 poll by Die Zeit found that 68% of Turkish migrants in Germany knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. With survivors like Margot Friedländer, who died last year at 103, almost gone, the living link to the country's crimes is disappearing.
Dervis Hizarci, a German Muslim with Turkish parents who leads the Berlin-based anti-antisemitism organization KIGA, travels to schools across the country to bridge that gap. "You can take kids by the hand and get them all the way to caring deeply about the Holocaust," he said. "You just need to make the connection to them."
The AfD is capitalizing on this disconnect. At its national convention in Erfurt this month — which coincided with the 100-year anniversary of a Nazi Party meeting that consolidated Adolf Hitler's power — the party re-elected co-leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla. The party's platform for the Saxony-Anhalt election calls for refocusing school curriculum on the creation of the second German Reich in 1871 and restoring memorials to fallen soldiers. "A people without national consciousness cannot endure in the long run," the party wrote in its 2025 election manifesto.
Mainstream parties maintain a "firewall" against working with the AfD, but the party's rise raises questions about Germany's reliability as a European anchor. "Even if you think that only half of the 26% to 28% of the people who support them don't feel they need to honor the Holocaust, that is still a big number," said Liana Fix, senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The last time Germany faced a comparable reckoning with its past was during reunification in the 1990s, when East Germans — who had been educated under a state that minimized Nazi crimes as a West German problem — encountered a remembrance culture built over four decades. Today's challenge is larger in scale: a multi-ethnic population with no personal connection to the war, a far-right party polling first nationally, and a security environment that demands German leadership at a scale unseen since 1945.
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