Political parties with the words “national” or “democratic” in their name are often amusingly and tragically totalitarian in their aims, and the National Democratic Party (NDP) of Germany is no different. An extreme right-wing party with neo-Nazi sympathies, the NDP has roiled up a controversial debate about the WWII bombing of Dresden.

As politicians in the eastern German region Saxony, who convene in Dresden, began their parliamentary discussion about how to commemorate the victims of the bombing of Dresden on the 60th anniversary of the event, a dozen members of the NDP refused to participate in the one minute moment of silence dedicated to remembering the victims of the second world war and German National Socialism. The NDP members refused to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps. Only those who died when German cities were bombed should be commemorated, they insisted. Juergen Gansel of the NDP later condemned the Allied attack on Dresden as “mass murder,” in “Dresden’s Holocaust of bombs.” Gansel asserted that the NDP is “taking up the political battle for historical truth, and against the servitude of guilt of the German people.”

For two days during World War II, beginning on February 13, 1945, the Allied forces bombed the city of Dresden, which functioned as a strategically important rail and communications hub for the Nazis. Responding to a Russian request, British and then American aircraft rained bombs on the city. Due to the influx of German refugees entering the city from the eastern provinces, some historians suggest that the official death toll of 35,000 is too conservative.

The NDP’s particular brand of historical revisionism seems to carry a starting amount of currency among young Germans; a poll conducted by the newspaper Welt am Sonntag revealed that 27 percent of Germans 30 years old or younger considered it acceptable to call the bombing “ Dresden’s Holocaust of bombs.” In contrast, only 15 of those who were at least 60 years old found the term acceptable. Disturbingly, it is the German youth who are carrying the banner of historical revisionism.

Mimi Hanaoka