Commenting in Berlin on the development of the anti-Semitic affair surrounding Hubert Aiwanger and the reactions of his party colleagues, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, said:

"Holocaust survivors are disturbed and pained by the anti-Semitic scandal surrounding Hubert Aiwanger. They view the despicable leaflet as an attack on their human dignity and as a mockery of their murdered relatives, and they are asking themselves what kind of motives and attitudes could have inspired young people in Germany in 1987/88 and prompted them to print and disseminate such cynical, abhorrent and malicious contents. The apologies and distancing efforts that have taken place over the past few days explain nothing whatsoever, and they are in fact coming across as extremely blunt and dogmatic. This situation is untenable in view of the suffering that this debate is causing the survivors. What’s more, the politicians of the Free Voters party are now presenting themselves in public as victims of a smear campaign in Bavaria. But the survivors who have spent decades of their lives providing accounts to school students of their ordeals in the camps and their experiences of the chimneys of Auschwitz, would have definitely appreciated a statement from the direction of Aiwanger:

‘I am ashamed and I am sorry.’ Hubert Aiwanger would be well advised, at least for some time, to withdraw from the forefront of politics. No matter where he appears in future, the contents of this loathsome leaflet will always be hanging in the air alongside him."