The director of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial is being investigated for allegedly defaming members of the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s armed forces, by reiterating the historical fact that it committed war crimes during the Second World War.
Jens-Christian Wagner said he was astonished to have received a letter from the state prosecutor’s office in Göttingen on Monday saying it had launched an investigation and asking him to respond to a criminal complaint about a book he wrote last year to accompany an exhibition at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on the role of the Wehrmacht.
“This is not a joke and not 1944 but 2020,” Dr Wagner, a historian who until the end of September was the director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, including Bergen-Belsen, wrote