What American Jews need to know about Germany’s growing far-right antisemitism

By Jake Wasserman
October 28, 2024

As I walked toward the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial site on a fall day recently, I passed a campaign poster that read, “ES IST ZEIT für ein Land ohne Denkverbote!” — “It is time for a state without bans on thinking.”

History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, and here was evidence. The slogan of a far-right party that traffics in antisemitism, Holocaust denial and xenophobia was plastered on a lamp post just outside a compound where Nazis forced 200,000 Jews, communists, homosexuals and other enemies of the state into hard labor and murdered them by the tens of thousands.

The poster promoted the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (“AfD”) party, which the night before had won 29.2% of the vote in Brandenburg’s state parliament — barely edged out by the Social Democrats (SPD) with 30.9% of the vote.

The slogan echoes a line in the 2021 AfD party platform that criticizes “political correctness” as a limit on free thinking and free speech. But in a country that bans the expression of ideas that invoke the ethnonationalism of the Nazi government, the poster raises the question: What sorts of thoughts, and action, does Germany’s ascendant far-right party seek to unban?

I spent two weeks visiting Germany as part of a Fulbright program for journalists, and while there I saw up close how the changing politics of the 33-year-old democracy have resulted in American-style polarization. In nearly every conversation I had with German journalists, activists, and citizens, fear of the growing popularity and power of the AfD — and the perceived threat that two-thirds of Germans believe they pose to democracy — abounded.

Far-right wins plurality for first time since Nazi Party was banned

Prior to my arrival in Germany, two other states in the former East, Thuringia and Saxony, held state elections where AfD’s popularity has been steadily growing over the last decade. Saxony’s results split similarly to Brandenburg’s — with AfD placing a close second behind the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). But in Thuringia, AfD won outright and became the first far-right party to win a plurality in a state government election in Germany’s history since the Nazi Party was banned in 1945.

AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, should hypothetically be leading a future Thuringian government, but can’t because no other parties want to join a coalition with AfD. Höcke has been charged twice by the government for using banned Nazi phrases; in 2017, he was nearly expelled from the AfD for referring to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which sits near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, as a “monument of shame.” He has also called for a “national turnaround” of how Germany reckons with its Nazi past.

In a clear case of Holocaust distortion, members of AfD in 2018 disrupted a tour at Sachsenhausen by constantly interrupting it with antisemitic statements, doubting the existence of a gas chamber at the camp and trivializing the crimes committed there by the Schutzstaffel (SS).

In 2019, after a 27-year-old German gunman opened fire at a synagogue in the state of Saxony-Anhalt killing two people on Yom Kippur, Thuringia’s then-interior minister Georg Maier said that Höcke bore “moral responsibility” for the terrorist attack. The Thuringia branch of the AfD is now classified as a “suspected” extremist group and is under investigation by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.

Jewish reaction to the AfD

There has been discussion of banning the AfD, but Josef Schuster, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur in August that he “fears that a ban might backfire, potentially elevating the AfD’s prominence and making the situation worse.”

The Council released a brochure in collaboration with the American Jewish Committee ahead of last month’s state elections, saying AfD maintains a “tactical relationship with antisemitism.” And last year, Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, expressed concern about the AfD as a threat to Jewish life in the country, accusing the party of backing forces that downplay the Holocaust and even wanting to ban shechita.

“If the AfD wants to curtail Jewish dietary laws, that is a threat to Jewish life,” he told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

Klein warned in an interview with the AJC that the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments of the AfD are intrinsically linked to antisemitism, and that Germany’s fight to remember the Holocaust and oppose antisemitism is a fight for its democracy.

The remigration “promise”

The fear of a future national win by the AfD intensified earlier this year for some Germans, after the party’s leaders held a secret meeting with neo-Nazis to plan the “remigration” of undocumented immigrants and German citizens who were originally born elsewhere and are now deemed unfit for the party’s vision of society. After the German investigative newsroom Correctiv broke the news of the meeting, millions of people took to the streets to protest the plan and the gathering, which some compared to the Wannsee Conference, where in 1942 the Nazis plotted the “Final Solution” to deport and murder all of European Jewry.

Although AfD was founded in 2013 as a response to the European debt crisis, branding themselves as a financially responsible alternative to German leadership under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the party has moved steadily to the far-right. AfD’s remigration plan is the result of nearly a decade of nativist politics in response to the German government accepting the largest number of refugees in the European Union from conflicts like the Syrian civil war and the war in Ukraine.

AfD voters told Vox earlier this year that they believe the party is “protecting the Germany they know.” They say newcomers seem to be receiving support that longtime residents aren’t, and they believe too many languages other than German are being spoken in schools.

“I’m glad that someone is taking care of all this scum that has spread here in our country, in our beautiful Germany,” a supporter in Brandenberg told CNN at an AfD meeting in February.

Germans listed immigration as their number one issue ahead of June’s European Parliament elections where AfD placed second. (On this side of the Atlantic, Americans overall say the economy is their top issue in the upcoming election, but Trump supporters rank immigration close behind, and 50% of Americans support former president Donald Trump’s plan to mass deport undocumented immigrants).

Dr. Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD leader in Brandenberg, declared that “remigration is not a secret — but a promise.”

Germany knows better than most countries what happens when politicians seek the mass expulsion of people who they believe don’t belong. Still, AfD’s political power continues to grow in the former East. And its popularity is influencing the current socialist-green-liberal government, which has toughened its immigration policies and is now cracking down on border control after a Syrian refugee killed three people in a terrorist attack over the summer.

Is Germany’s “memory culture” at risk?

Germany’s post-World War II reunification has championed European values: human dignity, freedom, democracy and other facets of pluralistic societies. In Germany, that has required a strong “memory culture,” which aims to educate citizens on the horrors of the Holocaust in an effort to never forget the 12 years of National Socialism, and never again let those atrocities happen.

As a result, a majority of Germans have long felt “a special responsibility” to Israel, with the country’s founding inextricably linked to the horrors of the Holocaust. But since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, and Israel’s war with the terrorist group in Gaza, many Germans have become less supportive of the Jewish state. And as has been true around the world, antisemitic incidents there have increased.

On the anniversary of Oct. 7, 10 memorial stones for victims of the Holocaust were stolen in the town of Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt, where AfD won the largest number of seats on the town’s council in municipal elections held in June. In Berlin, with a community of about 8,000 Jews, antisemitism has hit record levels.

The day before I went to Sachsenhausen, while walking down Berlin’s Unter den Linden, I stumbled upon an event at Bebelplatz — the site where Nazis burned books written by Jewish authors in 1933. A local synagogue was preparing to commemorate a new Torah for their congregation. The event took place behind a short fence with armed Polizei presence and multiple police cars on the street nearby to ensure safety during this Jewish celebration. Under a far-right government, would this protection, which should be unnecessary, even be possible?

As it moves toward Election Day next year, Germany must choose whether it will remember the brutal lessons of the past and protect the Jews and other groups devastated by it, or become again a state that sacrifices its citizens in the name of freedom.

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