Holocaust Remembrance Day has been marked with a scandal in Germany as two local rap stars, Kollegah and Farid Bang, won a major music award despite bragging about having the bodies of prisoners of concentration camps in one of their songs.
The line in question is "My body is more defined that those of Auschwitz inmates" from their creation "0815," which outraged the German public last year.
The scandalous reference didn’t stop the 2018 Echo Music Awards awarding the artists; "Jung, brutal, gut aussehend 3" (or "Young, brutal, good looking 3") was named "Best Album of the Year." The organizers explained the decision by appealing to freedom of expression.
However, not all the ceremony participants supported the move.. Front man of German punk rockers Die Toten Hosen roasted the rappers on stage, claiming they had crossed the line in their provocation, and got a big round of applause.
However, when their turn came to get the prize, the hip-hoppers rebuffed the accusations and warned against politicizing the matter.
"I do not want to make a political debate out of it here," Kollegah said, according to DW web-site.
Bang claimed they reject "any and all forms of anti-Semitism and hate against minorities."
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Twitter didn’t believe their claims, shaming the award for supporting anti-Semitism.
Nobody can tell me that the # ECHO2018 has no political message for the #anti-members #FaridBang and #Kollegah. Here is a clear message: Jews, forgive us Germans, if the #Islam has its say, we neither can nor want to protect you.
Muslim anti-Semitism is also a problem, but we must not forget about the regular German anti-Semitism of a Kollegah or Farid Bang.
Yep. Germany gives two anti-Semites the major German Music Prize on the #YomHaShoah day. Nothing surprising here.
Kollegah and Farid Bang use their "music" to send young people back to the Stone Age. They provoke misogyny and homophobia. They fuel prejudice and hatred. And then they also get a prize. Incomprehensible.
The ceremony incidentally fell on the Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the victims of systematic extermination by Nazis during World War II.
According to the most conservative figures on the Holocaust, provided by Adolf Eichmann, one of the Holocaust's architects, the overall death toll stands at 6 million Jews, as well as millions of other perceived undesirables such as Slavs and trade unionists. Meanwhile, a research project started in 2000 by investigators with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, found in 2013 that from 15 to 20 million people had died or been imprisoned at a range of Holocaust-related sites.
According to official data, 1 million were killed in gas chambers, shot dead or starved to death in the Auschwitz camp alone between 1940 and 1945, including 232,000 children.