The message couldn’t be clearer from Dr. Jens-Christian Wagner, director of Buchenwald Memorial, Germany’s largest former concentration camp site.

Take a history book, retreat for three days, read it, and please be silent.

His directive comes in response to Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at a Donald Trump campaign event, a gesture that has sparked international outrage.

Wagner, the historian who oversees the site where Nazi forces murdered 56,000 people, told The Times that Musk represents “a dangerous combination of unstable and far-right extremist.”

As the director of one of Europe’s most significant Holocaust memorials, and expert in Nazi history, Wagner’s warning carries particular weight.

The timing is notable. Buchenwald Memorial, which operated as a concentration camp from 1937 until its liberation by U.S. troops in April 1945, now faces weekly visitor assaults on its dignity.

Wagner reports an escalating pattern of disruptions: Elon Musk-like Nazi salutes, “Sieg Heil” chants, and deliberate interference with guided tours.

[Notorious UK political extremist] Davies “went on tour to Germany to Buchenwald to give the Nazi salute in the execution chamber that was a flagrant and provocative breach of German law”. […] “To a terrorist hiding in plain sight, which is what Mr Davies is, bans mean nothing.”

That incident was 2016, not long after several others, if you see what I mean about Buchenwald staff being experts in identifying provocative gestures by Elon Musk.

Police are investigating a football fan who allegedly made the Hitler salute at the former Buchenwald concentration camp…. The incident follows a previous case in mid-July when several men were arrested after giving the Hitler salute at the former concentration camp.

A year before his Nazi salute, Musk stood accused of antisemitism as he staged an Auschwitz photo op with his toddler. The partner of the Holocaust survivor present with him saw right through it. She reported “He was utterly detached… about his press junket” and called him a sociopath using the death camp PR to hide intentions.

Most recently, staff discovered Elon Musk’s controversial “X” brand (formerly called Twitter) carved into a seminar room table. In context of Tesla’s campaign to cut down 500,000 trees around Berlin, vandals at the camp have destroyed 50 of the memorial’s 250 commemorative trees.

Wagner’s rebuke of Musk highlights a growing crisis: when apartheid-raised South African billionaires normalize Nazi gestures in America, it emboldens extremists to target the very spaces dedicated to ensuring we never forget the Holocaust’s horrors.

Update: Elon Musk made a surprise visit to stoke Nazism at a German extremist political rally where he told them to forget the past. Speaking from his personal experience, as the grandson of an extremist arrested in Canada for being a national security threat during WWII (grandfather who fled to amass a fortune of blood money extracted by a white supremacist South Africa), Musk regularly signals to his followers that they should attempt the worst mistakes in history again.