A podcast comment, a resignation, and a reminder of Germany's historical duty
What the AfD leader in Saxony-Anhalt framed as philosophy, others saw as a dangerous taboo breach. Who draws the line?
Dear Reader,
As next year’s state election in eastern Saxony-Anhalt looms, the Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s leading candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, has sparked a firestorm.
In a recent Politico podcast, he described the Nazi era as a “low point” in German history, but refused to call the Holocaust “the worst crime in human history,” arguing that he “cannot process the whole of mankind.”
When the podcast host asked him about a campaign event where an MC called out “Sieg!” and the crowd replied “Mund!” — noting its similarity to the “Sieg Heil” chant — the politician insisted it was simply an innocent use of his name.
Siegmund, a 35-year-old “rising star” of the AfD, complained that a “language police” now dictates how people should talk about the past. Modern efforts to ban phrases once used by the Nazis are “completely overexaggerated,” he added.
In a country highly sensitive to any attempts to relativize the crimes of the Nazi era, his comments drew immediate and widespread outrage. They also fit an increasingly familiar pattern that has accompanied the rise of the AfD: provocation framed as innocence, followed by claims of elite overreach and censorship.
But Christian Dorst, deputy parliamentary leader in Brandenburg’s BSW, defended him on social media.
Dorst wrote on X that one could interpret Siegmund’s words as a “precursor to Holocaust denial,” but added that a different interpretation was also possible. He quoted Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing” to signal that he too cannot comprehend the entire scope of human history.
The response was swift: Dorst resigned the very next day. BSW leadership said his increasingly combative role as a social-media commentator was incompatible with his official duties — even though Dorst insisted he never questioned the Holocaust’s singularity.
BSW — the anti-woke, economically left-wing party founded last year by Sahra Wagenknecht — is currently the junior partner in Brandenburg’s fragile coalition with the SPD.
What has the reaction been?
Siegmund’s comments sparked indignation across the political spectrum. Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, condemned the statements as “complete shamelessness,” warning they could signal sympathy for the Nazi era.
He added that such relativisation of Nazi crimes “must awaken democrats” and called the AfD a “danger to our open society.”
The centre-right CDU joined the criticism. “Anyone who trivialises the Holocaust is distorting history and inciting hatred against Jews,” said General Secretary Carsten Linnemann.
Inside the AfD, reactions were divided. The national leadership issued a distancing statement, declaring simply: “The Holocaust is the worst crime against humanity.”
Yet others defended Siegmund. Rüdiger Lucassen, the party’s defence policy spokesperson, said the podcast question amounted to a “demand for confession” — pressure to recite a prescribed moral judgment — and expressed support for Siegmund’s response.
Bild noted that the episode was reminiscent of former AfD leader Alexander Gauland’s infamous 2018 remark calling Nazi crimes a Vogelschiss (“bird droppings”) in the sweep of German history, which likewise sparked nationwide outrage.
What happens next?
Neither Siegmund nor Dorst is expected to face legal consequences. Their statements do not meet the threshold for Holocaust denial or incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung), both criminal offences in Germany.
Still, Siegmund’s comments may alienate more moderate voters uneasy with a candidate who deliberately touches taboo terrain. But the overall damage is likely limited.
The most recent INSA poll puts the AfD at roughly 40 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, giving the party a realistic shot at dominating the next Landtag after the 2026 state election on September 6th. With such strong support — especially in the east — some voters may not be deterred by provocative rhetoric.
And if Gauland is a precedent, Siegmund may even benefit internally: Gauland’s scandal ultimately strengthened his standing among AfD loyalists, who viewed him as challenging political correctness and Germany’s “culture of guilt,” as well as defending unrestricted speech.
Siegmund is already very popular and social-media-savvy, positioning himself on his TikTok channel Mutzurwahrheit90 — which has hundreds of thousands of followers — as someone who challenges the status quo.
Still, today’s AfD as a whole is more fragmented and strategically cautious. The leadership — currently polling as Germany’s strongest party nationwide at about 26 percent — moved quickly to distance itself from Siegmund. The party knows it needs to soften its public image ahead of key elections, even if it can afford to be more confrontational in the eastern states where it enjoys the strongest support.
Rachel’s take
I think most morally intact people would agree that genocide is atrocious, regardless of who commits it or who suffers. Siegmund and Dorst did not dispute that.
It’s not clear that Siegmund — who grew increasingly defensive as the interviewer pressed him — was consciously attempting to normalise Nazi crimes through his language. But his remarks unmistakably challenged a cornerstone of Germany’s post-war identity and remembrance culture, which he dismissed as overly preoccupied with “what happened 80 years ago.” He even criticised mandatory school visits to former concentration camps, a long-established element of German civic education.
But in Germany, the Holocaust is not simply one atrocity among many; it is foundational to the country’s post-war constitutional identity. It should be recognised as singularly horrific, not treated as an event whose place in history can be concretely quantified. Such debates may have academic merit, but in public life they can inadvertently dilute the gravity of something unspeakable — especially as the last survivors pass away, historical memory fades, and antisemitism in Germany rises sharply.
This is why I think Dorst’s decision to step down, and the AfD leadership’s public distancing from Siegmund, were both respectful and responsible choices. Public officials in Germany are expected to uphold both legal and ethical standards. By defending Siegmund’s comments, even while framing them philosophically, Dorst exposed both himself and his party to political and moral scrutiny. Stepping down can therefore be seen as taking responsibility and preventing further harm.
I do not see Germany’s remembrance culture as a “culture of guilt” but rather as a culture of not forgetting something so uniquely terrible that it resists comparison — particularly in the country where it was perpetrated.
Last week’s poll result: Will the Merz government survive until the next regular election?
Yes - 27%
No - 73%
News in Brief
👴 On Monday, a group of around 20 top economists issued a public warning, urging the government to scrap its controversial pension package. They argue it jeopardises long-term fiscal stability by locking in a 48% Haltelinie — a guaranteed minimum pension level that would force contribution rates sharply upward as Germany ages — and by expanding the costly Mütterrente (mothers’ pension). The economists say the reform fails to address deeper issues such as demographic change and weak productivity growth. Meanwhile, tensions inside the coalition are rising: the CDU/CSU is pushing ahead despite resistance from the Junge Union, a rift that could trigger a serious political crisis if sufficient coalition lawmakers rebel in the Bundestag.
🇿🇦 This week Chancellor Friedrich Merz is making yet another high-profile appearance as the so-called Außenkanzler (“Foreign Chancellor”) at the G20 Summit in South Africa. While not an official German title, the term has come into common media usage to emphasise that Merz is increasingly positioning himself as a mediator in global conflicts — especially in the absence of leaders like Trump and Xi — even as contentious domestic issues remain unresolved. These sentiments were magnified when Merz joked in Johannesburg that the contentious pension reform fight “doesn’t play any role here. I can guarantee you that.”
💰 Germany spends 41 percent of its total government budget on welfare payments — more than even the Nordic welfare states — according to a study published this week by the German Economic Institute (IW). Nearly half of that goes to propping up the pension system. At the same time, the report warned against further growth in social spending, calling it a risk to fiscal sustainability. It also highlighted significant structural imbalances: high administrative costs (now 11 percent of total spending) and very low public investment (just 6.2 percent), while education spending is among the lowest in the OECD.
Members’ Corner
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Sincerely,
Rachel Stern
There are several things going on in this discussion -- both in the interview itself and in its analysis here from Ms. Stern -- which are worthy of remarking upon. These remarks encompass the general human condition with respect to politics, Germany's postwar culture, its modern self-conception, and its very identity.
Firstly, and most generally, it raises the question of what we expect our politicians to be. Are they mere civic functionaries, discharging a humble duty with a minimum of personality? Are they naked Machiavellians enriching themselves and their families as flies to the rotting body politic? Are they idealists and idealogues charged with transforming society along the ideological lines promoted by their campaigns in accordance with their voters (which, in a multi-party democracy such as Germany, will almost never reflect the will of the majority no matter which party "wins" the plurality of popular votes or ridings, and can therefore always be attacked as democratically illegitimate)? Are they aspiring philosopher-kings, taking in the broad sweep of the human condition and acting in a way ultimately beneficial to their constituents even if individual decisions remain inscrutible and opaque to the masses?
Often, the answer is "all of the above", which allows us to play games with candidates that they can almost never win. In my opinion, this interview is one such. The question is nothing more -- and nothing less -- than a simplistic litmus test to see whether a given politician is going to enforce the elite German conception that we are the most evil country, and people, to have ever lived. This conception is itself an example of Germans' general cultural narcisissm, ironically part of the selfsame impulse which led the despicable madmen of a century ago to launch their wars of annihilation and to engineer the Holocaust in the first place.
The Holocaust represents, as the late sociologist and philosopher Rolf Peter Sieferle noted in his posthumous work Finis Germania, the cornerstone of Germany's postwar civic religion. The book proved this point when one quote in particular, in a passage entitled "Aus Auschwitz lernen", was taken out of context and caused just such a media controversy in 2016.
The contextless line reads: "Oder ist es die schiere Zahl der Opfer, die ominösen sechs Millionen? Also etwas fürs Guiness-Buch der Rekorde? Aber Vorsicht, Rekorde sind dazu da, gebrochen zu werden!"
In the latest draft of my long-suffering translation of the whole work: "Or is it the sheer number of victims, the ominous six million? Something rather for the Guinness Book of World Records? But be careful, records are meant to be broken!"
In context, both of the direct passage itself and of the other essays in the section (not to mention the work as a whole), this is an ironic admonishment that failing to properly appreciate the Holocaust in its actual historical (and perhaps even pre-historical) context threatens to turn it into nothing but a rhetorical cudgel which may be used to batter German politicians and other public figures who fail to speak on the subject with anything but the approved religious platitudes.
John Lukacs, the American historian of Hungarian birth and Jewish matrilineage -- which was enough for him to desert his forced-labour detail in order to evade the Eichmann-Kommando when the Germans officially occupied Hungary in 1944 lest he himself be sent to Auschwitz -- wrote a biography and historiography of Hitler called "The Hitler of History" (or, in my translated copy, Hitler: Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung). The first chapter of this work grapples with the question of whether attempts to put Hitler (and therefore the crimes of his regime) into a "proper" historical context are borne of a necessary urge to "historicise" these events, or if they are necessarily attempts to relativise and "rehabilitate" the man and his actions.
Lukacs comes to no firm conclusions in this regard, but raises several interesting questions, including referencing an assertion from the German historian Martin Broszat, who in 1985 remarked that the "demonisation" of National Socialism (and thus of Hitler) must give way to a "historicisation", which Lukacs remarks is a "...desideratum as much as it is a declaration of a fact already apparent for some time" [caveat lector; my translation out of the German translation]. It is worth remarking upon that forty years have passed since Broszat published his "Plädoyer für eine Historierisierung des Nationalsozialismus", and that forty years had then passed since the defeat of National Socialism, and yet the German public conversation around this has grown ever-less nuanced rather than more so.
These are philosophical works, and philosophical men, handling the subject of the Holocaust and its concurrent historical events with due respect and care but also treating it as an event in history and within the scope of the human condition (since, well, it happened and we made it so). Yet they were not politicians, at most only interested in remarking upon or influencing the public conversation as analysts and observers rather than dynamic forces.
Any politician, especially a German politician, and most especially a German politician hoping to win votes for an allegedly nationalist-populist party, would be wise to avoid publicly engaging in musings and conversations of this sort. There is no winning, here; there is only the deep trivialisation of such an important subject by turning it into a "gotcha" designed to upset the balance of state-level elections in the modern day rather than to actually interrogate the legacy of our direct ancestors. Perhaps it would be better otherwise, but this has been the truth at least since the time of Socrates, and likely long before him.
Thus the official AfD response, a simple affirmation of the question, is the only politically-acceptable one...though it is also obvious that, had Mr. Siegmund given it, he would not have been believed any more than the AfD's affirmation shall be taken as their "true" opinion on the matter. It really is rather tiresome, this unwinnable political game, where we demand honesty and nuance and intelligence from our candidates but also "moral clarity" and the simple affirmation of what one is "supposed" to believe in order to be allowed access to the levers of power.
There is much more ground to cover (very much including the all-too-common elision of the AfD with Germany's "growing antisemitism", which is rather a distinct consequence of Germany inviting in millions of migrants from deeply antisemitic Muslim societies...which, in turn, the AfD is also somewhat-paradoxically accused of "instrumentalising" for political gain), but the hour grows ever-later and my insomnia wanes. I will reconsider these musings in a proper post later.
Thank you, Ms. Stern, for your thoughts and for the inspiration to continue the discussion.
Jörg once asked why I was a (soft) AFD supporter and in thinking about it, the “far-right neo-Nazi” label feels like propaganda. In today’s Germany, people get police raids at 6 a.m., massive fines and all their devices confiscated just for “wrong” posts or memes. There are literally state-funded NGOs whose full-time job is to scour the internet for thought-crimes. Yet, it seems* that AfD politicians not getting hit with these Holocaust-trivialising charges everyone seems screams about. It's funny how that works.
I have a lot of thoughts about what he said but as the old saying goes "Discretion is the better part of valour." So I shall leave it there.
*it's possible that I may have missed this as I tend to get my news via the English feeds.