Why Alice Weidel Called Hitler “Left-Wing” — and What It Reveals About the AfD

A realistic scenario? An AI generated image imagines Adolf Hitler as a communist.

Dear Reader,

When AfD leader Alice Weidel claimed that Adolf Hitler was “left-wing”, outrage followed immediately. But behind the historical absurdity lies a deeper ideological contradiction at the heart of Germany’s far-right party — one that helps explain both its rhetoric and its internal tensions, and which sits squarely within the rise of the AfD over the past decade.

Weidel told Elon Musk last week that Adolf Hitler was a “communist socialist guy” and “the exact opposite” of right-wing, public outcry was guaranteed.

Now, you might think that the fact that Hitler put the word “socialist” into the name of the party he founded in 1920 would mean that such a comment could be shrugged off as “controversial but not crazy”.

But you’d be wrong.

Historians and commentators took to the airwaves to laugh at Weidel’s ignorance of historical facts, or to suggest that she was deliberately trying to wash her hands of her party’s most controversial forefather.

For Die Welt newspaper, Weidel’s claim was “completely ridiculous.” For historian Andreas Wirsching, it was an “infamous propaganda manoeuvre” meant to “camouflage the right-wing past and the true goals of right-wing extremist policies.”

Media outlets up and down the country found some expert to tell them that Weidel was talking tosh. Public broadcaster ZDF lined up three historians who said that her comment was “complete rubbish,” “fake news” and “disinformation.”

Weidel isn’t the first person in the German-speaking world to find herself in hot water for claiming that Hitler was left-wing. An Austrian journalist was sacked by her newspaper in 2022 after posting to Twitter that Hitler was “a socialist through and through.”

Suggesting that the founder of the National Socialists was a socialist is dangerous territory.

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