A Spanish minister on Wednesday condemned a carnival parade featuring gun-toting Nazis and lines of dancing Jewish victims, a day after Israel’s ambassador expressed outrage over the spectacle.
The display, which also featured a parade float designed like a gas chamber, was the second such incident this week after a Belgian town earned a stiff rebuke from the European Commission.
The weekend carnival parade featured floats with anti-Semitic caricatures showing Jews with hooked noses, obsessed with money and dressed up like insects.
The Spanish parade was the climax of carnival festivities in Campo de Criptana, a small town near Madrid.
Images on Twitter showed dozens of people in full Nazi-style regalia and others wearing the striped pajamas worn by concentration camp prisoners.
Children were pictured dressed in the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied areas.
On top of one float, a woman in a Nazi uniform could be seen gyrating alongside a model Doberman under two giant chimneys. Elsewhere, a line of Jewish victims in red hot pants and bustiers with a gunshot wound to the heart danced with Israeli-style flags.
The footage and images quickly sparked a furious backlash.
There were widespread expressions of revulsion both online and off.
“Horrified at the carnival parade in Campo de Criptana,” Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, EU and Cooperation Arancha Gonzalez Laya wrote on Twitter. “I totally reject any trivialization of the Holocaust. Following contact with the organizers, they have apologized to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain. It is essential to keep teaching about the memory of the Holocaust.”
Her remarks came a day after Israeli Ambassador to Spain Rodica Radian-Gorden criticized the parade as an affront to the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
“I am horrified by and utterly reject the shameful trivialization of the Holocaust that took place at the Campo de Criptana carnival,” she wrote on Twitter. “It is an affront to the memory of the victims of the Shoah [Holocaust] and an intolerable expression of antisemitism.”
Campo de Criptana town hall said in a statement that the cultural association behind the event had said the planned production would “pay homage to the millions of people who were wrongfully killed” during the Holocaust.
“Once we saw the enactment, we had the same criticisms. If the initial objective was to commemorate the victims, it is evident this did not happen,” it said.
It said that it had no part in the production and insisted on its “absolute condemnation ... of the genocide inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazis, and any mockery or trivialization of the issue.”
Carnival parades take place every year across Spain and Europe in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday.
The Belgium carnival in Aalst is a centuries-old event long known for mocking public figures, but it has come under fire for parading insulting and derogatory depictions of Jews.
The event last year lost its place on a UNESCO heritage list because of anti-Semitism.
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