How much NSDAP is hiding in the AfD?

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Today, state elections are being held in the eastern German states of Thuringia and Saxony.

With a combined population of just over six million people, the way these two states vote may offer limited insight into the broader national mood. However, the results will still make headlines across Europe, and perhaps even further afield.

When the first exit polls are announced shortly after 6 pm, mobile phones across the continent will start pinging with the announcement of the shock result.

Unless the polls have been wildly off the mark, the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to come first in Thuringia and either win or place a close second in Saxony.

It will mark a watershed moment for the populist party, established only 11 years ago. What we are now seeing is not a sudden lurch, but the culmination of a longer process that helps explain the rise of the AfD over the past decade. The party has never won a state election in its brief history, and it will undoubtedly use any success to argue for inclusion in the next coalition governments of these states.

Cue opinion articles across the continent asking whether fascism is about to be back in power in Germany after an 80-year pause.

That would certainly reflect the mainstream perspective in Germany.

Earlier this month, the influential political magazine Der Spiegel featured a cover showing AfD figure Björn Höcke in front of Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, under the headline, "How Fascism Begins."

This prevalent view of the AfD means that the consensus approach to dealing with them resembles that taken with a deadly virus. Instead of Zero Covid, we have Zero AfD. The results, though, have been just as questionable as taking such a repressive approach to a communicable disease.

Humans react in all sorts of unpredictable ways to attempts to suppress behaviour. One way, it would appear, is siding with a quarantined party as a way of giving “the elite” the middle finger.

But, just how much NSDAP is hiding in the AfD?

The primary piece of evidence that there are Nazis masquerading as democrats in the party comes in the form of Björn Höcke, the party leader in Thuringia.

A former history teacher, Höcke deliberately uses Nazi slogans and terminology in his speeches, has advocated shrinking the population of Germany to 60 million by pressuring Turkish Germans to leave, and allegedly wrote for a neo-Nazi magazine under the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig.” No prizes for spotting the hidden code in the name.

The second piece of evidence is that senior party figures are accused of trivialising the crimes of the SS and the Wehrmacht.

Commonly cited is a quote by Maximilian Krah, the man who led them in this year’s EU elections, who told an Italian journalist earlier this year that “I would never say that someone who wore an SS uniform is automatically a war criminal.”

That quote has been republished throughout the German media and beyond as proof of the fascist sympathies inside the party. For clarity, though, this is Krah’s full quote:

“At the end of the war, there were almost a million men in the SS. Günter Grass was a member of the Waffen SS. My wife’s parents were Germans who lived in Hungary. They had the choice of being recruited either by the Hungarian army or by the SS. If they had joined the Hungarian army as Germans, as we knew from the First World War, that would have been a death sentence. So they joined the SS. There were also many farmers among the 900,000 or so members of the SS. There was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not all of them were. I will never say that everyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.”

By the way, whether one should consider the SS as a whole a criminal entity, or just some of its units, is an old debate that was still around during the era of Helmut Kohl.

Thus, this quote is ambiguous. It might tell us something about Mr Krah. It may also tell us something about the way that the media reports on the AfD.

Opposing the view that the AfD is a resurgence of fascism is the fact that the party's policies are decided through votes at party conferences, just like any other democratic party. The resulting platform often resembles much (but far from all) of what the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) stood for during most of the 20th century.