Supporters of the “Last Generation” climate change activist group protesting in Berlin. Photo: Reuters/Jonas Gehring

A sharp internal split has emerged among a group of radical climate change activists in Germany concerning the links between some of its members with a prominent environmentalist accused of trivializing the Holocaust.

The row within the “Last Generation” group, which is active in Italy and Austria as well as Germany, centers on comments made by Roger Hallam, the British co-founder of the “Extinction Rebellion” (ER) group that staged a number of high profile environmental protests before announcing a shift away from its direct action tactics earlier this year.

In a 2019 interview with the news outlet Die Zeit, Hallam diminished the significance of the Nazi Holocaust, describing it as “just another fuckery in human history.”

“The fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history,” he said.

He then compared global warming with the gas chambers operated by the Nazis at several concentration camp for the purpose of exterminating Jewish and other prisoners. Climate change was the “pipe through which gas flows into the gas chamber,” Hallam argued. “It’s just the mechanism by which one generation kills another.”

Hallam’s comments resulted in the German branch of ER severing ties with him as they condemned his “belittling and relativizing statements about the Holocaust.” However, Hallam continues to exercise influence over many German climate change activists, including leaders of “Last Generation” such as Lars Werner, Melanie Guttman and Lea Bonassera, the news outlet Bild reported.

In a statement issued on the group’s Telegram channel over the weekend attempting to dampen the dispute, Werner acknowledged that the “industrial mass murder in the Holocaust is a unique event in history in the way it was carried out.” While he said he understood the attraction of invoking the Holocaust in the context of other atrocities and emergencies, Werner underlined that “one must not allow oneself to be tempted to trivialize the Holocaust with simplifying comparisons.”

Werner’s statement followed a volatile online discussion within the group. Several posts attacking the group’s connection with Hallam were discovered by the Welt news outlet. One activist said that she didn’t want “to belong to any organization that doesn’t vehemently oppose the relativization and banalization of crimes,” while another asserted that the Holocaust “isn’t just a post-it note to stick on things to show how bad they are.”

Other activists expressed opposition to the condemnation, dismissing Hallam’s critics as “right-wing extremists” and referring to journalists who covered the controversy as the “gutter press.”

One activist told Bild that the leadership of the group was to blame for the split. “If the core team hadn’t been trying to downplay and ignore the issue for months, it wouldn’t have gotten this far,” they said.