British Extinction Rebellion co-founder sparks fury by referring to the Holocaust as ‘just another f**kery in human history’ in German interview
- Roger Hallam compared murder of six million Jewish people to other massacres
- British co-founder of Extinction Rebellion sparked outrage in German interview
- He told Die Zeit newspaper Holocaust was ‘just another f***ery in human history’
The British co-founder of Extinction Rebellion sparked outrage in Germany today by referring to the Holocaust as ‘just another f***ery in human history’.
Roger Hallam compared the murder of six million Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis to other historical massacres and claimed that memory of the Shoah was holding Germany back.
The 53-year-old former organic farmer was quickly condemned by Extinction Rebellion groups in Germany after his interview with a newspaper in the country.
In an English-language interview he told Die Zeit: ‘The extremity of a trauma…can create a paralysis in actually learning the lessons from it.
‘The fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history.’
Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, being arrested while setting up a toy drone inside London Heathrow airport’s exclusion zone during a protest in September
He cited the Belgian colonialists who ‘went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it’.
Extinction Rebellion groups in Germany were quick to condemn the remarks.
‘We distance ourselves from Roger Hallam’s trivialising and relativising comments about the Holocaust,’ tweeted Extinction Rebellion Germany.
‘Roger has contravened the principles of XR and is no longer welcome at XR Germany,’ the group said, using an abbreviation for Extinction Rebellion.
The Berlin branch of the organisation tweeted: ‘The systematic extermination of millions cannot be normalised. Never. Zero tolerance for anti-Semitism.’
Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany though several politicians have caused controversy with remarks about the Nazi era in recent years.
Roger Hallam (pictured), a former organic farmer whose climate change movement brought large areas of London, claimed to be ‘annoyed’ that so many of his followers ‘made up excuses’ to not get arrested
In 2018, co-leader of the far-right AfD party Alexander Gauland referred to the Nazi era as a ‘speck of bird shit’ in the history of Germany.
His party colleague Bjoern Hoecke also sparked outrage a year earlier, when he referred to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a ‘memorial of shame’.
Hallam’s climate change movement has brought large areas of London to a standstill in large-scale protests the saw roads in the centre of the capital blocked off.
The former PhD student was arrested last month twice in the space of 24 hours and spent six weeks on remand at Wormwood Scrubs.
He was found to be in breach of his bail conditions by entering the five-mile exclusion zone and attempting to cause a public nuisance by trying to fly a drone near Heathrow Airport.
On his release Hallam was slammed by supporters after boasting that prison is ‘pretty much as good as it gets’.
He was also branded an ‘arrogant liability’ for claiming to be ‘annoyed’ that so many of his followers ‘made up excuses’ to not get arrested.
Hallam told his 4,500 followers on Facebook: ‘I was fine and if anything [it] was annoying, it was sitting there thinking about why so many people make up excuses for not taking this step which is now so necessary.’