Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, commented in Berlin on the planned election campaign discussion between the Thuringian CDU chairman Mario Voigt and the leading Thuringian AfD candidate Björn Höcke on 11 April, the day of the liberation of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps:

"The decision by the chairman of the Thuringian CDU to allow one of the best-known figureheads of right-wing extremist agitation in Europe to make a widely publicized appearance on this day of remembrance, of all days, seems politically utterly insensitive and macabre to Holocaust survivors.

They see this as harmful to the culture of remembrance in Germany, which is promoted and supported by all democratic parties, and also as damaging to the trust that has developed between survivors of the German concentration and extermination camps, Thuringia, and Germany, over the past decades."