Germany’s conflation of Judaism with Zionism is dangerous

It fills me with dread to read on german campaigning site campact how far advanced the resurgence of ultra right- wing fascists has become.
Sadly that does not surprise me as after WW2 people in the west went down the route of denial, and those in the GDR had to follow a socialist path with the underlying german trait of applying again an authoritarian approach.
I believe that to work through issues relating to WW2, the Holocaust and racism in general was not supported nor encouraged in both states as those in power had their own agendas.
It was only that from 1968 onwards young people started to ask questions and challenged the existing narrative of ‘we did not know’, ‘show some respect’, the ‘americans are our saviours’ (we had the Marshall Plan), and if ‘you don’t like it here, go and live in the GDR’, ‘you communist’ or similar.
WW2 did not happen in german history. We were faced with 12 years of history having gone awol in 1933 and only returning in 1945. So we had to do our own research getting a crash course in WW2, war crimes , crimes against humanity during Nazi rule, Holocaust. We detested the racism against foreign workers from Italy, Greece and Turkey who were actually referred to as Guest workers, but would you really give guests low pay and the jobs no-one else wanted to do?
In 1974 I was approached by members of the VVN which represented the views of anyone who was prosecuted by the nazis. VVN means loosely translated a Bund of those prosecuted by the Nazis. This meant polizical prisoners, initially jewish people later members of other religions, gay people, artists, anyone whose face did not fit.
Leo was my contact. Sadly, he passed away in 1996. He was a jewish freedom fighter, communist and also joined the french resistance on release from concentration camp. In 1975 Leo tasked me with setting up an exhibition at the uni in Göttingen in memory of the Holocaust. It was the girst time that actually a wide range of left political groups took part invthis project, in workshops during the week and in petitions. To say I learned a lot is an understatement! Apart from that my cousin in the GDR was sending me her history books which dealt with WW2, Holocaust and related aspects.
Main message for me was “Never again!”
How to make people aware of the need to learn from history was another problem.
If people don’t learn from history, then they are more likely to make the same mistakes again and again.
Or even explaining to people in the WEst that.the Marshall Plan contained a statement in the small print, that dhould it come to another war in Europe both the FRG and the GDR would be the battle ground. We were still an occupied country, quite literally as no peace treaties had been signed, we were in legal terms not a proper state.
Our parents Generation and that of our grandparents opted to forget everything. Police and establishment tended to be blind on the right eye. People on the left, gor example members of the communist party were hit with being banned from working as teachers despite teachers being in high demand due to a severe vaxancy rate.
During 1967 General Election Campaign we experienced the nasty side of the police and establishment when we “joined” an event by the german tory party whose security bods were beating up anyone who dared express a diverging viewpoint. The event ended up with about 30 people needing hospitalisation, some of them for a number of days. We ended up making countless visits to those in hospital to help them get into touch with their friends.