In the summer of 2015, Germany experienced a refugee crisis that has affected the country ever since, leaving it deeply divided. Ten years later, it’s worth examining how this event and its interpretation became entangled with Germany’s Nazi past—and how historical memory was manipulated to justify controversial policy decisions.
From the outset, history was weaponized to justify the influx of over a million people—mostly ‘undocumented’—by year’s end. The international press quickly embraced this narrative. “Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, have emerged as contenders for the fastest international image makeover in recent memory,” wrote The Atlantic in September 2015. The article noted that just six months earlier, Der Spiegel had depicted Europe’s mood by photoshopping Merkel into a photograph of Nazi commanders on the Acropolis, arguing that “the euro zone’s debt crisis had set Germans up as the European Union’s unpopular economic dictator.”
The historical parallel was made explicit. As one German political scientist, Petra Bendel, told The Atlantic, “German citizens know that the regulations of the Geneva Refugee Convention stem from the historical experience with Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.”
This interpretation was likely never shared by a majority of Germans. By September 2015, despair and helplessness had set in among ordinary citizens who felt their opinions had never been solicited and that the state was losing control.
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