No state has been as assiduous in attacking the Palestinian solidarity movement and supporting Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as Germany.

Today, it is impossible to hold a pro-Palestine demonstration in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany without facing attacks from the police, intimidation from the state, and accusations of anti-Semitism from the press.

In April, the Palestine Assembly, a high-profile pro-Palestine conference in Berlin, broken by hundreds of police officers. The British Palestinian chancellor of the University of Glasgow, Ghassan Abu Sitta, was prevented from entering Germany to attend the conference and was deported back to the UK. He was subsequently banned from entering the entire Schengen area.

Abu Sitta, a surgeon who has volunteered in several Gaza hospitals since last year, planned to give a speech about the horrible conditions in which Israeli attacks have left the Strip’s health system. Later, a German court dump the ban.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from entering Germany and prevented from even participating in the Congress via video link.

German authorities said they attacked Abu Sitta, Varoufakis and others at the conference because they considered their speeches “anti-Semitic.”

There is no truth in this statement. Germany is not silencing pro-Palestinian voices to protect Jewish rights and combat anti-Semitism. This is evident not only in the content of the speech it censors, but also in the way Germany treats anti-Zionist Jews who speak out in favor of Palestinian rights.

Iris Hefets, a German-Israeli psychoanalyst in Berlin, for example, was arrested last October on charges of anti-Semitism. Her only “crime” was walking alone with a sign that said: “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.”

In the same month, more than one hundred German Jewish artists, writers, academics, journalists, and cultural workers published an open letter condemning Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and accusations of anti-Semitism aimed at anyone – including Jews like themselves – who criticizes Israel’s conduct.

“What scares us is the atmosphere of racism and xenophobia that prevails in Germany, hand in hand with a restrictive and paternalistic philosemitism. “We particularly reject the combination of anti-Semitism and any criticism of the State of Israel.”

So why is Germany working so hard to ensure that no one speaks out against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which triggered a genocide case before the ICJ?

The answer lies in German history, but, as many assume, it is not tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure it never happens again.

Germany was never completely denazified. He never attempted to come to terms with the policy that had led to Hitler’s rise.

After the Second World War, the reacceptance of the German State in the international community was subject to a process of denazification. However, this process was soon abandoned. It was overcome by the Cold War. Germany made amends for its crimes against the Jews – but not against the Roma – by providing unconditional and unlimited support for the newly founded “Jewish State”, the West’s military outpost in Palestine: Israel.

Eliminating the political structures that led to the rise of the Nazis – imperialism and the German military-industrial complex – would have run counter to the need to oppose the Soviet Union.

Immediately after the war, there was strong opposition in the West to German rearmament. The 1944 Morgenthau Plansupported by then-US President Roosevelt, he called for the complete elimination of the German arms industry and other industries that could contribute to the reconstruction of a German army. Post-war Germany was to be an agricultural and pastoral state.

However, the Cold War meant that the West needed Germany as part of the Western alliance. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s closest collaborator, Hans Globke, had been integrally involved in the implementation of the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935. “Extraordinary precautions” were taken during the 1961 Eichmann trial. taken by prosecutor Gideon Hausner to prevent Globke’s name from being made public.

In 1953, Germany began paying reparations, not to individual Holocaust survivors, but to the State of Israel in the form of industrial goods, including weaponry. The West focused on the Soviet Union. Denazification was quietly forgotten when Germany integrated into Western military alliances and joined NATO in 1955.

Instead of the elimination of the genocidal ideology that paved the way for the Holocaust, as originally intended, it was replaced by an unconditional embrace of Israel. Israel is treated like “Germany”reason of state“.

This abandonment of denazification transformed the Nazi Holocaust from a product of Germany’s social and economic crisis during the Weimar period to an inexplicable ahistorical anomaly, arising out of nowhere and having no roots in the German national psyche. He placed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis above class and politics.

The Holocaust was not Germany’s first genocide. Between 1904 and 1907, the German army under General Lothar von Trotha killed 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama people in southwest Africa. Thousands of people were taken to concentration camps, where most died.

The Nazi concept of “lebensraum” or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel. Trotha and the Germans campaigned ruthlessly toward an “endlosung,” or final solution.

In the “genocidal gaze” Elizabeth Baer described this genocide as “a kind of dress rehearsal” for the Nazi holocaust.

The colony’s imperial administrator, Heinrich Göring, was the father of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s lieutenant. Fischer conducted gruesome experiments on inmates, sending their severed heads back to Germany before training Nazi SS doctors, including Josef Mengele, the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz.

The German state’s acceptance of Israel’s current attack on Gaza is not so much due to guilt for the Holocaust as to the need to normalize and relativize it. Supporting Israel’s Holocaust, as an act of necessary “self-defense,” allows Germany to cling to the fictions it created about its own Holocausts.

The German authorities understand perfectly well that Israel is committing genocide and has started this war with the intention of ethnic cleansing and exterminating the Palestinian people.

They have seen the images from Gaza. They are aware of the indiscriminate bombings and hunger. They have heard the evidence that South Africa presented to the ICJ.

They know how Defense Minister Yoav Gallant started the genocide by describing the Palestinians as “human animals” (the same phrase as Himmler). used about the Jews on October 4, 1943, in a talk before SS generals. You undoubtedly know that the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich speak about how “justified and moral” it would be to starve two million Palestinians.

In short, the German authorities know what Israel is doing: they know that their ally is committing another Holocaust. They are simply trying to present this as normal, fair and inevitable, because they have done the same thing several times in their not-so-distant history.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.