character of the Cenotaph; officials thus removed some tributes which contained overtly political messages. A group of 5,000 unemployed men, on an anti-capitalist protest, paraded past the Cenotaph in 1921 and laid wreaths at its base; several with explicit political messages were removed. In 1933, Alfred Rosenberg, representing Nazi Germany, controversially laid a wreath at the Cenotaph. The accompanying card was removed overnight and the swastika on the wreath was scratched off. The following day, Captain James Sears, a First World War veteran and prospective Labour Party parliamentary candidate, removed the entire wreath and threw it in the river. He described his actions as "a deliberate protest against the desecration of our national war memorial" and against the views of the Nazi Party, which he believed were the same as those Britain had fought against. Sears was arrested, charged with malicious damage, and fined. Some newspaper columnists and letter writers sympathised with Sears's actions, though others felt that his actions themselves desecrated the Cenotaph by using it to make a political statement. Following the Second World War, the Cenotaph was rededicated to include the British and empire dead from that war, and its dates in Roman numerals (MCMXXXIX and MCMXLV) were added to the inscription. King George VI unveiled the additions at a ceremony on 10 November 1946. No separate national memorial was built for the casualties of the second war; instead, remembrance services were expanded to commemorate the new dead, and veterans of that war and later conflicts joined an annual march-past. Several political protests have taken place in the vicinity of the Cenotaph. In 2000, anti-capitalist protesters spray-painted slogans on it and on a statue of Winston Churchill. In a 2010 student protest, a man climbed the base and swung from one of the flags. In June 2020, the base was vandalised with spray paint during Black Lives Matter protests, and the following day a protester attempted to set fire to one of the Union Flags on the Cenotaph. The Cenotaph and several other monuments were covered up temporarily to prevent any further vandalism, though a group of far-right counter-protesters congregated around it a few days later. On 11 November 2020, Extinction Rebellion held an unauthorised protest at the Cenotaph that was condemned by politicians and the Royal British Legion. In 2013, just before the centenary of the First World War, English Heritage carried out £60,000 of restoration