Vaccine Opposition and the Appropriation of Antisemitic Symbols
Among certain strands of the “Querdenker” (“lateral thinker”) movement protesting the pandemic measures against COVID-19, there were deliberate visual allusions to the oppressions by the Nazi regime. By combining highly charged imagery with reworded slogans, they wanted to present themselves as being persecuted just like the victims of the Nazi regime, thereby whipping up a scandal around the government’s public health measures. The wearing of a repurposed yellow Star of David mostly began at public demonstrations, but then quickly spread through social media images as well.
The slogan “dogs and the unvaccinated must remain outside” is a reference to shop signs that once said “dogs and Jews must remain outside”. Such signs and similar ones were widespread in Nazi Germany. Besides presenting themselves as being persecuted just like the Jews were back then, “Querdenker” activists were also suggesting they were being treated like pets or animals. Wearing a yellow Star of David with the word for “unvaccinated”, calling out the slogan “is it time again?”, and dressing up in the striped uniforms of camp prisoners were all designed to highlight the alleged danger that vaccine opponents would soon be locked up in modern-day concentration camps.
Besides using the yellow Star of David, the “Querdenker” movement also made other visual allusions to Nazi persecution. For example, there was a social media illustration depicting the wrought-iron gate of a Nazi concentration camp, but instead of “Arbeit macht frei”, it says “Impfen macht frei” (not “work will set you free”, but “vaccination will set you free”). In 2023, the regional courts of both Bavaria and Berlin declared the dissemination of this and similar images to be Volksverhetzung (“incitement to hatred”), prohibiting their further use for publicity purposes.
Historical Precedents
Even back in 1881, vaccine opponents were already using antisemitic arguments. Parts of the Nazi movement picked up on these ideas and further disseminated them through caricatures and other visual propaganda. For example, the old antisemitic legend of “Jews poisoning the well” was taken up by Nazi cartoonist Philipp Rupprecht, alias “Fips”, in order to discredit vaccination efforts. However, Hitler himself supported a mandate for smallpox vaccinations, in order to bolster the people’s “defensive readiness”.
The caricature reads:
“The Vaccination.
I’m in an uneasy mood, for poison and Jews rarely do good”.
In 1796, the British physician Edward Jenner developed the world’s first true vaccine by using the cowpox virus to vaccinate humans against smallpox. But vaccination remained controversial, especially in church circles. The greatest fear was that a hybrid of human and cow would be created by this implanting of animal matter into human beings. Whether the British illustrator James Gillray shared these fears or ridiculed them cannot be deduced from his cartoon nor from its publication context, and remains debatable to this day.