RIAS Incident report: Berlin-Friedrichshain, 23rd July 2016.
A Holocaust revisionist placard was mounted on a busy street corner in Friedrichshain, Berlin.
On 23rd July, a placard attached to a lamppost with text which translate literally as “though we’re all sitting in the same gas chamber, it’s you sitting on the tap from within the red engine”, was recorded on the corner Boxhagener and Warschauer streets.
The text implies that Jews are in control of the “tap” of metaphorical gas that allegedly afflicts everyone. Not only does it thus suggest a conspiracy theory in which Jews are said to be in control of world affairs, but it also cheapens the memory of the Holocaust by creating a false equivalence between the conditions of the victims of the Holocaust and whatever social ills may affect people today, and then using this false equivalence for inflammatory and rhetorical purposes.
The style and content of the writing suggests that the originator is from within the vicinity of the street intersection. Such references to, or comparisons with, the Holocaust have a direct consequence in the lowering the societal threshold for openly antisemitic and revisionist statements.
For Holocaust survivors, their families and those affected by antisemitism, there is an inevitable reawakening of memories associated with the systematic mass extermination of European Jews under the National Socialist movement. We wholeheartedly welcome the swift removal of the placard shortly after it was discovered.