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Can we say Holocaust again?

Gaza, German memory politics, and the struggle over language


23/07/2025

Memory on trial: the Berlin case

On April 24, this year, a Berlin Court sentenced an activist for incitement to hatred after she walked around the Bundestag on November 3, 2023 with two signs reading “No to the murder of 8.500 civilians in Gaza so far” and “Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?” The ruling made clear that in Germany, drawing any connections between the Nazi Holocaust and other atrocities is not tolerated.

Trial and ruling

The activist was convicted of Volksverhetzung, under Section 130, par. 3 of the German Criminal Act, according to which anyone, who publicly or in a meeting, approves of, denies, or downplays crimes committed under National Socialism, as defined in Section 6(1) of the Code of Crimes against International Law, in a way that could disturb public peace, may face up to five years in prison or a fine.

The prosecutor accused the activist that, by carrying the two signs, she had equated “the fate of approximately six million Jews and other persecuted groups who were industrially deported and exterminated under Nazi rule” with “Israel’s and the IDF’s response to the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, to the detriment of approximately 8,500 civilians in Gaza.” The prosecutor further stated that by doing so, the activist had “trivialized the nature, scale, and consequences of the oppression, violence, and mass industrial extermination (…) due to the obvious imbalance between the events.”

The activist claimed that her reference to the Nazi Holocaust was meant as a moral warning motivated by Germany‘s pledge of “Never again”, which she understood as a commitment to oppose all genocides, regardless of where and against whom they occur.

Her lawyer supported her claim by describing the ongoing mass atrocities unfolding in Gaza and citing both international law and the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who spoke of the responsibility of “Never again” precisely in light of the situation in Gaza. Therefore, the lawyer argued, the defendant’s action should be considered as a political expression protected under the right to freedom of expression. The lawyer also referenced established jurisprudence of the Federal Constitutional Court, which holds that where a statement can be understood in several ways, courts are obliged to consider the least punishable interpretation to protect freedom of expression.

The Berlin District Court, however, followed the prosecution and found that the combination of the two signs constituted a direct comparison between the Nazi genocide of six million Jews and other victims and “Israel’s military response to the October 7, 2023 attacks”, and that the disparity in nature, scale and consequences between the two events amounted to a clear trivialization of the Nazi crimes by violating the dignity of their victims. The Court further noted that even under the protection of freedom of expression, there was no other more favorable interpretation conceivable.

Courts under scrutiny for trivializing genocide

The Court’s ruling was heavily criticized by scholars and activists alike because it seemed less about sound legal reasoning and more a part of a broader trend in German jurisprudence shaped by German Staatsräson—the state‘s commitment to Israel’s security as a reason of state.

The claim that the activist downplayed the Nazi Holocaust appears implausible indeed, as her action precisely raised the question of what lessons have been learned from the Holocaust—particularly in the face of another ongoing genocide that, at the time of her protest, numerous human rights organizations and renowned genocide scholars like Raz Segal, had already described as a textbook case of genocide.

Furthermore, the International Court of Justice has affirmed that genocide is not established by the number of victims but primarily by a genocidal intent. Against this background, it is difficult to understand why the Court based its assessment largely on the disparity of victim numbers—especially considering that the activist herself did not equate these figures. Instead, the Court should have considered that Israeli officials with command authority have been openly using dehumanizing rhetoric that refers to Palestinians as “human animals” and Gaza as “the city of evil”, and have explicitly expressed genocidal intent by declaring their aims such as “razing Gaza” and “we must erase the memory of Amalek”.

It would also have been relevant for the Court to take into account the situation in Gaza at the time of its ruling, in order to assess the foreseeability of the scale of these events. By then, more than 51,000 Palestinians had reportedly been killed—bombed, deliberately shot or starved to death. Tens of thousands were missing. Almost the entire population had been displaced and 92% of all housing units destroyed or damaged. More than two thirds of Gaza’s educational, religious, cultural and health care infrastructure had been completely destroyed, including universities, schools, mosques and cultural sites. Nearly all hospitals were targeted. Hundreds of teachers, writers, artists, scholars,journalists and health workers were arrested, tortured or killed. Since March this year, the remaining population, already subjected to a complete siege, has been facing a total blockade on humanitarian aid, which many observers have described as a deliberate campaign of mass starvation, with Israeli distribution centers turning into deadly traps.

In light of these considerations, one must seriously question whether it was the activist who trivialized the Nazi Holocaust, or rather the Court itself—by instrumentalizing the legacy of the Holocaust to downplay the magnitude of another ongoing genocide, now entering its 21st month, and thereby desecrating the very legacy it claims to protect.

Holocaust and the struggle over language

The Berlin case raises broader questions about Germany’s claimed singularity of the Nazi Holocaust, how the genocidal events are interlinked, and more fundamentally, what language we use to speak of today’s atrocities and of the genocide in Gaza.

Singularity and interconnections of genocides

There is a German obsession in general to treat the Nazi Holocaust as an unique and untouchable event—something that has fiercely been defended, notably during the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. This is understandable to the extent that every genocide unfolds in its own specific historical, political and social context.

The Nazi Holocaust stands out as the first large scale genocide of more than 6 million European Jews and hundred of thousands Roma and Sinti, disabled people, and political dissidents, executed with chilling bureaucratic efficiency, by a modern European fascist state, on European soil, and with extensive documentation through survivor testimonies and institutional archives. It was also the genocide that helped lay the foundation for the modern international legal system, including the drafting of the Genocide Convention.

What is happening in Gaza is historically unprecedented too. It has become the first genocidal campaign to be livestreamed in real time with daily footage documenting the systematic mass killings and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the deliberate destruction of their land. It is also for the first time that a world court has ruled a state plausibly committing genocide while atrocities are still ongoing. A historical irony lies in the fact that the mass killings are being carried out by a state, itself partly founded by survivors of the very genocide that led to the modern international framework. A framework that is now collapsing in front of our eyes in Gaza.

It is important to comprehend these genocidal events in their broader contexts as the histories of Germany, Israel and Palestinians are deeply intertwined. Germany, once the perpetrator of the Nazi Holocaust, today supports, both politically and through arm sales, descendants of its victims in carrying out another genocide against another people. It does so, cynically, under its Holocaust banner of “Never Again”.

These events are not isolated from all other atrocities either. They have to be viewed within the longer legacies of Western colonialism. This includes racialized state violence and the systematic dehumanization of marginalized groups labeled by dominant state powers as “the other”—as was done with the European Jews and Roma and Sinti under Nazi Germany, with the Tutsis in Rwanda, and as is happening with Palestinians under Israeli occupation today.

To relate and also compare such genocidal events is not the same as equating them. In fact, it is a necessary effort to be made—to understand their causes, patterns and consequences, in order to learn from them, prevent their repetition, and hold the perpetrators accountable. When those who draw these connections are systematically silenced, then the activist’s question—”what have we learnt from the Holocaust?”—becomes not only justified, but essential.

Language of atrocities, and who owns the word “Holocaust“

What has been unfolding in Gaza today goes further than many atrocities we have previously witnessed. The sheer scale and horrific nature of this genocide have long surpassed a threshold that demands a serious and urgent reconsideration of the vocabulary available to describe atrocities of such magnitude, including whether the term holocaust, in its broader historical and linguistic sense, may be rightfully invoked in this context.

First, it is important to note that the word holocaust is not a legal term. In contrast, the word genocide is legally defined in the Genocide Convention of 1948 and means the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944, had envisaged it to entail not only the physical destruction of a population but also the destruction of its culture, language, and identity. His broader vision was, however, excluded from the final text of the Genocide Convention.

The word holocaust, meanwhile, predates World War II and—contrary to common belief—was not originally coined to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The term derives from the Greek word holokaustos which means burnt (kaustos) as a whole (holos) and was historically used in religious contexts for a burnt sacrifice. Later on, it was applied more broadly to describe mass atrocities, particularly those involving fire and destruction, including the genocide of the American natives, the Armenian genocide and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

While in Hebrew discourse, the term shoah—meaning catastrophe—has long been the standard reference to the Nazi genocide when written with a capital S, in German discourse, holocaust entered common usage only after the 1979 broadcast of the U.S. television miniseries, Holocaust: The Story of the Weiss Family. Until then, postwar German discourse used words like genocide or mass murder to describe the Nazi crimes against the Jews. 1979, the year when the miniseries was broadcasted, holocaust was voted by the German Language Society as “Word of the Year“, marking its entry into German common language and as a synonym for the Nazi crimes, when written with a capital H.

Some genocide scholars, who have applied the term holocaust to other cases have proposed different moral and historical frameworks to define such events. While no fixed criteria exist, most frameworks include large—scale killings of civilian populations based on their identity (e.g. ethnicity or religion) and motivated by state ideology, destruction of their cultural infrastructure and memory, and irreversible demographic, psychological and cultural loss.

Based on this understanding, it is suggested to distinguish between the term genocide as a legal definition of mass atrocities emphasizing intent, and holocaust as an extension beyond legal criteria that captures the historical and moral dimensions of such atrocities. The word holocaust would thus include not only the intended physical erasure of a people but also—as Lemkin had once advocated for—the erasure of their identity, culture and collective memory, with a moral and historical long lasting impact.

Applying these criteria to the case of Gaza, it is striking with which clarity they are met, considering the available evidence, including footage, eyewitness accounts and detailed reports of international and local organisations.

For almost 21 months, Palestinians have faced systemic large-scale mass killings, with entire neighborhoods erased and families exterminated. We have been watching children, journalists and injured civilians in flames, burning alive in shelters meant to protect them. Children have been deliberately shot in the head, and women specifically targeted, in an effort to halt the continuity of Palestinian life. Gaza’s infrastructure has been largely completely destroyed, its landscape flattened and made unlivable. This comprehensive destruction of life, homes, cities, culture, knowledge and environment have been accompanied by a genocidal rhetoric from Israeli officials expressing a clear ideological intent to erase not only Palestinian life but also its memory and future.

Gaza cannot be seen merely as an international political crisis or a humanitarian catastrophe. Rather, it marks a rupture, revealing a profound moral failure of our modern international legal order and of self-proclaimed liberal democracies whose support has enabled this genocide to unfold in the first place.

To reserve the word holocaust solely for one historical event seems not only presumptuous, it also restricts the vocabulary we need to grasp, articulate and respond to atrocities of such magnitude. Ultimately, to have the language to thoughtfully express what the atrocities in Gaza represent is not a matter of rhetorical provocation, but one of moral and historical responsibility.

TikTok refuses to take responsibility—strike on Wednesday, 23 July, 2025

Statement by the trade union ver.di


Employees at TikTok are staging a one-day warning strike today, July 23, 2025. The trade-union ver.di is calling for the strike. The background of the strike is the company’s plan to dissolve the Trust and Safety department, in which content moderators for the German-speaking region are employed. The work of content moderators is to be taken over in the future by so-called artificial intelligence and outsourced to external service providers. Working conditions at these external providers are significantly worse. Additionally, part of the so-called Live department is also set to be dissolved. Employees in this department are responsible for contact with content creators on TikTok.

Content moderation is an extremely psychologically demanding job, as employees are regularly exposed to highly distressing content. For this reason, comprehensive health prevention measures to reduce psychological strain are essential. The union ver.di sees a danger that TikTok is trying to shirk responsibility for the working conditions of content moderators through outsourcing.

Especially in the area of combating hate speech and fake news, oversight by well-trained moderators is of great importance. These moderators must possess in-depth knowledge of cultural and political contexts in order to identify problematic content. However, by outsourcing this work to artificial intelligence and third-party providers, the role is being devalued. There is a risk that TikTok will increasingly become a platform for manipulative campaigns, as was already observed during the last presidential election in Romania.

Over the past few months, employees were tasked with training the AI that is now meant to replace them—and are now being discarded by the company. They are resisting this under the slogan: “We trained your machines – pay us what we deserve!”

They are demanding:

Severance payments of three years’ salary for each employee affected by the layoffs

An extension of the notice period by 12 months for each employee affected by the layoffs

These demands are justified by TikTok’s high profits. At the same time, the specific training and expertise of the content moderators is being massively devalued through the dismissals. Meeting these demands would enable the affected employees to acquire new qualifications. The urgency of these demands is further increased by the fact that, for some employees, losing their job could also endanger their residency status.

Despite repeated requests by ver.di, TikTok’s management has refused to enter negotiations. Against this backdrop, employees are going on a one-day warning strike on July 23, 2025. It is the first strike by employees of a social media platform in Germany.

“It is disrespectful of TikTok to shirk all social responsibility and even refuse to negotiate with us. Today, the employees are sending a clear signal that they will not accept this. They are going on strike and, in doing so, becoming pioneers of union organizing in the platform economy,” says Lucas Krentel, Deputy Regional Head of the Media Division at ver.di Berlin-Brandenburg.

The employees will hold a boat tour on the Spree River to make the strike visible from the water. They will dock again at 12:30 PM and then hold a strike rally on land.

TikTok Strike Rally
Time: 12:30 PM
Location: Mühlenstraße 70-71, 10243 Berlin

Red Flag: Karl-Marx-Straße is done—and still a huge traffic jam

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin explains why car supremacy must end


View from behind a sea of cars, as if viewer was also stuck in a car in traffic.

After 15 years of construction work, Karl-Marx-Straße in Neukölln is finally open again. Is this a good time for a joke about Berlin’s notoriously incompetent government? No, since this is a political decision: infrastructure is falling apart because the German ruling class wants to spend trillions on weapons.

I go down KMS several times per day. Even as a proud car hater, I assumed the chronic traffic jams would clear up. But absolutely nothing has changed: during rush hours, autos stand still, spewing out poisonous fumes and blocking ambulances. It turns out what blocks cars is not construction sites—it’s other cars.

This is why adding new lanes doesn’t improve traffic flow: Investment in car infrastructure just puts more cars on the streets. As an old German saying puts it: “If you sew streets, you reap traffic.”

Investments

A new segment of the inner-city highway A100 is set to open this year—three kilometers of road for €700 million. The Senate wants to extend it further into Friedrichshain, which will cost over €1 billion.

Last weekend, a segment of the S-Bahn around Schöneweide shut down because there were no workers for the signal box. The U-Bahn line U1 hasn’t been running for two weeks due to a lack of drivers.

Every euro invested in roads is one missing for public transport. Paradoxically, money for subways, trams, and buses is what gets people out of cars—and thus prevents traffic jams.

Car supremacy

I’ve written that car culture seems like an addiction: users claim to love it, even when it clearly makes them miserable. Another way I’ve been thinking about this is “car supremacy.” German traffic rules go back to a Nazi law from 1935, which defined motorized vehicles as the Übermenschen of the streets.

Today, German drivers still enjoy enormous privileges. If you want space to keep a car, for example, the city will provide it to you for free (or at most €10 per year). If you need that space for anything else, including living, you’re on your own.

This kind of extreme privilege can make people feel like any proposed change is an attack. Take white South Africans, who make up 7 percent of the population but control 70 percent of farmland. As soon as anyone talks about reducing inequality, they shout “white genocide.” As the saying goes, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

The same thing is happening with drivers. They kill about 50 people per year in Berlin—yet any measure to stop this constant mass murder feels like an attack on their human rights.

On the remodeled Karl-Marx-Straße, drivers complain that the unprotected bike lanes now take too much space. Most of the limited space, however, is taken up by parking spaces, so huge metal boxes can stand unused for 23.5 hours per day. Meanwhile people are forced to squeeze past each other on narrow sidewalks.

Referendum

Sometime next year, Berliners should be able to vote on a referendum to make the inner-city car-free. I don’t think this has even a tiny-chance of passing. Thanks to the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, countless villages are included inside the city borders. Our odious, provincial mayor comes from the distant town of Kladow, for example. Many suburbanites insist they need cars—and I wouldn’t want to decide for them, as I live in a completely different place. Unfortunately, millions of them are allowed to vote on transport policy for the actual city.

Nonetheless, this referendum will get people thinking. People inside the S-Bahn-Ring are far less likely to own a car than people out in the boondocks. Why do we dedicate so much space to a means of transportation most people don’t use? Why should cars rule the road, even as they are blocking trash pickup and regularly killing kids?

Berlin’s constitutional court just declared that there is no fundamental right to a car. As a communist, I am a democrat—I believe in the equality of all people. I despise apartheid for the same reason I despise cars. KMS, with its myriad cultures, could be beautiful—if only we could get rid of the cars. 

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

27 July–3 August 1919: Chicago race riots

This week in working class history


22/07/2025

27th July 1919 was a hot Sunday. To escape the heat, many Chicago residents went swimming in Lake Michigan. One group of Black teenagers floated on a raft towards waters the White residents had designated “White only”. A White man on the shore, George Stauber, threw rocks at the raft. One hit 17-year-old Eugene Williams on the head and knocked him into the lake. He drowned. A White policeman who witnessed the event refused to arrest Stauber. Instead, he arrested a Black man for a separate offense.

Public murders of Black men were common in the USA: in 1918, in the Southern states, the Ku Klux Klan lynched 64 people. By 1919, this figure had risen to 83. But this was not just a Southern phenomenon. Other forms of discrimination were also deliberately used. In 1917, Chicago state housing introduced racial segregation. Meatpacking industry bosses underpaid Black workers and used them as scabs to break strikes.

Until now, Black Americans had been expected to accept discrimination and murder. But many Black men had fought in World War I “to preserve democracy” and were no longer willing to tolerate injustice. Black socialist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois called on Black veterans not simply to “return from fighting” but to “return fighting”. Similarly, a Black trade union member in Chicago said, “All we demand is the open door. You give us that, and we won’t ask nothin’ more of you.”

1,000 Black residents assembled at the scene of the killing to call for justice and for Sauber’s arrest. The riots that followed lasted eight days. Twenty-three Black people were killed, as were fifteen White people. 537 people were injured, two-thirds of them Black. Between 1,000 and 2,000 residents, most of them Black, lost their homes, mainly due to arson. No one was convicted of Williams’s murder – and two-thirds of convictions were of Black men. Many White rioters who were arrested were immediately released by the police.

The immediate impact of the Chicago Race Riots was defeat and division. But it showed a new Black militancy, together with a willingness among some White Chicagoans to support their Black brothers and sisters in the fight. It showed that resistance to racism was possible. If you are interested in knowing more about the causes of the riots, and the hope of united resistance which followed, I would recommend the film The Killing Floor, produced by Berlin-based activist Elsa Rassbach.

The Berlin police are acting lawlessly and lying about it

Even courts are ruling that the Berlin police are acting illegally


For 21 months, the pro-Palestinian movement in Berlin has been subjected to violent and systematic attacks by the police acting on orders from the state. Demonstrations, rallies and events are brutally suppressed by an excessive number of riot police acting above the law.

This week, the paralegal actions of the police and the state have been made clear in two court verdicts, the first against the city of Berlin on behalf of Palestinian-British doctor Gassan Abu Sitta. This doctor, who worked in Gaza in October 2023, was banned from entering Germany to prevent him from participating in the Palestine Congress in April 2024, where he was to speak as a direct witness to the genocide. This congress, which was to last a weekend, was also raided by the police on the orders of Berlin Mayor Kay Wegner (CDU) after a single speech by Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal, for whom the German state has been making life impossible ever since. This week, a Berlin court ruled that the ban on Dr Abu Sitta entering the country was illegal, more than a year after the event took place. It remains to be determined whether the dissolution of a congress that sought to discuss the genocide and Germany’s role in it was also illegal.

On Wednesday 16th July 2025, a Berlin court also ruled that the actions of the police were illegal. Under orders from German Chancellor Merz (CDU), the police yesterday forced the pro-Palestinian camp set up in front of the Reichstag and the German Chancellery building to move to another location where they would not disturb the chancellor. The protest camp appealed the decision in court and won. Today they will be back where the chancellor can hear them:  “Israel is doing our dirty work”. 

Likewise, using as an excuse the German Interior Ministry’s statement in November 2023 that the phrase From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free is a Hamas slogan, every time this slogan is heard the police charge fiercely against those who shout it and anyone in the vicinity, whom they then accuse of resisting authority, alongside exercising contempt and insulting them, which are quite serious crimes in authoritarian German society. They also attack peaceful demonstrators for chanting other slogans such as Zionists are fascists, they kill children and civilians or even Free Palestine. Thousands of people have been brutally arrested for alleged crimes related to these slogans and the situations that arise when the police enter demonstrations in hordes of 10 to 15 officers. The use of this tactic of criminalising the pro-Palestinian movement has resulted in some 9,000 cases related to solidarity with Palestine being investigated in Berlin alone, many of which will end up in court. The police continue to carry out these arrests despite the fact that in multiple cases the courts have found that both From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free and Zionists are fascists, they kill children and civilians are not crimes of incitement to hatred.

One of the 4 latest wins in court regarding From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free was very telling. The expert on the Middle East from criminal police was yet again invited to give her testimony of the history and use of the slogan. She could find seven examples since Hamas was founded that could be attributed to them, including the geographical description of where Palestine is in their foundational charter, and some minor examples such as an alleged election poster that had spelling mistakes. The rest of the examples brought forward, including the very first use of the slogan, were either made by zionists, or used worldwide for decades by millions of people as a symbol of Palestine solidarity. Pro-Palestinians have been using it to fight for the rights of all people from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea of a secular state. The sentence of the judge in this case was very stark in favour of stopping the absurd criminalisation of a political movement by the German state apparatus, and offered a stark warning to the prosecutor’s office to stop this criminalisation trend that backs up the criminal court system.

The excessive actions of the police, their tactics of criminalisation and lies are culminating in their actions during and after the rally for the 77th anniversary of the Nakba in Berlin. After doing everything possible to prevent the demonstrators from marching, they were surrounded by hundreds of riot police, who charged in groups of 15, attacking the demonstrators, leaving a trail of seriously injured people and making 88 arrests at a rally of about 1,000 people. In a clear example of reversing the victim and the perpetrator, a police officer who was injured by his own brutality in beating protesters and by a riot they themselves created has been portrayed as a victim of rabid protesters. The German press and politicians have been calling for weeks for greater restrictions on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and the state attorney general’s office is investigating the case. A video of the event analysed by Forensis clearly shows that it was the actions of this police officer and his colleagues that resulted in his injuries. However, today the police, on the orders of the state prosecutor’s office, carried out raids on the homes of five activists and confiscated their electronic devices. They ignored all the evidence showing that it was the demonstrators who were brutalised.

The fact is that if the Berlin police believe they are above the law, it is because they are. To date, none of the beatings that have left hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters in hospital have been punished in the slightest, while the protesters who were attacked face fines and even prison sentences for “resisting” the police. The lies told by members of the police in court, where videos prove that their version is far from reality, also go unpunished. The courts simply ignore them and sometimes believe them despite what the videos and other witnesses show.

This system of paralegal criminalisation is useful for a government and state complicit in the genocide in Palestine, which has demonstrated on more than one occasion that its “Staatsräson” is above human rights and basic morality.

Interviewed by theleftberln.com, lawyer Benjamin Düsberg said: “regardless of the fact that more and more courts are beginning to understand that these slogans are legal, Berlin prosecutor and police are still arresting and criminalizing people for it. They do not give up and will probably try to get a new ‘expert opinion’ in support of their claims. So, we need a landmark decision of higher courts to stop the prosecutor. But I am sure we will get it because the truth is on our side.”

Benjamin continued: “In Germany police officers almost never are indicted or charged for their violent acts. “The legal  system in Germany acts like a ‘cover up- machine’ for the institution of the police,” Biplap Basu, the great human rights advocate once said. It is true – there is basically immunity for police violence in Germany.”