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The Masterplan
Back to the gathering in Potsdam. The organizer was a retired dentist named Gernot Mörig with longstanding Nazi links (he’s the son of one, for one thing; his father joined the NSDAP in 1932 and was a member of the SA.) Gernot Mörig was well-known on the völkisch scene, as was his whole family.5
In the invitation to the event, Mörig wrote proudly that “the masterplan” would be presented by “none other” than Martin Sellner.
Sellner was the first speaker of the day. Correctiv set the scene:
Sellner takes the floor. In his speech he details what remigration would mean in Germany. There are three target groups of migrants, he explains, who should be extradited from the country—or, as he puts it, “foreigners” who should undergo “reversed settlement.” They are: asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens. It is the latter that, in his view, would pose the biggest “challenge.” In other words, Sellner’s plan would divide German residents into those who would be able to live peacefully in Germany and those for whom this basic human right would no longer apply.
The scenarios sketched out in this hotel room in Potsdam all essentially boil down to one thing: people in Germany should be forcibly extradited if they have the wrong skin color, the wrong parents, or aren’t sufficiently “assimilated” into German culture, according to the standards of people like Sellner. Even if they have German citizenship.
The majority of the subsequent presentations and discussions, Correctiv reported, focused on this concept. The participants also discussed sending people to a “model state” in North Africa, an idea with a pedigree no one there could have missed: The Nazis initially planned to deport millions of Jews to Madagascar.
There was no objection to the masterplan from the AfD politicians in the room, Correctiv reported, just questions about how to implement it:
Silke Schröder, a property developer and board member of the right-leaning Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Association), wonders how re-migration would work in practice. Surely if a person has the “appropriate” passport it would be “impossible,” wouldn’t it?
For Sellner, this is just a detail. A “high level of pressure” will be exerted on people to adapt, he says, via “customized laws.”
There is certainly no opposition to the idea from the AfD members in the room. On the contrary, MP Gerrit Huy emphasized that she had been pursuing this goal for years. …
The AfD parliamentary group leader for Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, is also in the room. It is he who will, later on in the day’s proceedings, appeal for donations. He has considerable influence within the AfD; the party is currently polling in first place in Saxony-Anhalt. His sales pitch, very much in keeping with the “masterplan” of Sellner, details his ideas to change the image of German streets. Foreign restaurants would be put under pressure. Living in Saxony-Anhalt should be made “as unattractive as possible for this clientele.” And that could be accomplished very, very easily, he claims. …
Discussion now turns to the practical details, the steps that need to be taken. Mörig wants to select a committee of experts to fine tune the details of this plan for mass deportations. These experts will ensure the masterplan is executed “ethically, legally, and efficiently,” so that the racially-motivated forced displacement of people has the guise of a legal migration policy. Mörig already has a candidate for the committee in mind: Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesverfassungsschutz), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.6
… The group’s focus now turns to how the idea of re-migration can be turned into a political strategy. Sellner says that “metapolitical and pre-political power” must be built up in order to “change public opinion.” An active political frontline must be ready to support the incoming right-wing government in Germany after the election. And part of this support, as is made clear during the presentations and speeches, has to be financial. There is talk of influencers, propaganda, campaigns, and university projects. The tools to establish a right-wing anti-establishment climate. And ultimately the tools to weaken Germany’s democracy by questioning elections, discrediting the constitutional court, suppressing opposing views, and censoring public service broadcasting.
In the afternoon, it’s Ulrich Vosgerau’s turn to speak. He is a lawyer and was a member of the board of trustees of the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation, and is currently representing the AfD in the German Constitutional Court in a dispute over the foundation’s funding. He talks about postal votes, legal processes, the secrecy of the ballot, and his concerns about voters of Turkish origin who, he claims, are unable to form an independent opinion. Vosgerau suggests drafting a letter which would cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections. His speech is met with applause.
Correctiv saw, in these events, an illustration of way “the strategies of various far-right actors and organizations intertwine.”
Sellner provides the ideas, the AfD politicians take them on and bring them to the party. Others in the background take care of the networking and bringing in wealthy sympathizers and supporters from the conservative middle-classes. And the debates always revolve around one question: How can a homogonous ethnic community be achieved in Germany? …
What have we learnt from this meeting? That there is a retired dentist who has a conspiratorial network of fellow far-right extremists. That representatives of the AfD were willing to meet with radical right-wing activists and neo-Nazis. That they have a “masterplan” to deport German citizens because of their “ethnicity”—a plan which would undermine Articles 3, 6 and 21 of the German constitution. And that there are a number of wealthy potential donors for this project. We’ve learnt that there is an expert in German constitutional law who has sketched out legal methods to systematically cast doubt on democratic elections. That there’s an AfD politician who wants to organize election donations that would bypass the party. And that there is a hotel owner in Potsdam who earned some money to cover his costs.
When news of the conference came to light in January last year, Germans immediately drew comparisons to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, when the Nazis formulated the Final Solution. Nearly a million and a half Germans took to the streets in protest. The plan was “an attack on the constitution and the liberal constitutional state,” a group of six organizations, including the German Association of Judges and the German Bar Association, said. “The legal legitimacy of such fantasies [of mass deportation] must be prevented by all legal and political means.”
In November last year, 113 members of the Bundestag, from multiple political factions, submitted a motion to consider banning the party outright.
On their website, the AfD doesn’t discuss things like “the masterplan.” Instead, there’s anodyne rhetoric: “The AfD is a political party under the rule of law, and thus pledges its unequivocal allegiance to the German nation which includes all those with German citizenship.” Immigrants with German citizenship, they say, are “just as German as the descendants of a family that has lived in Germany for centuries.”
But they don’t mean this.
The AfD is a complicated case not just because it is careful not to skirt the formal law, but because it is not entirely a neo-Nazi party, and because some of the issues to which it is responding are real, even if the solutions it proposes to rectify them are disgusting.
Not all AfD voters are neo-Nazis, nor are they necessarily the type who would be keen on the masterplan. In 2019, Jeffrey Gedmin described its voters this way:
The large majority of AfD voters …can be mostly fairly described in my view as disaffected conservatives, as traditionalists struggling with—or outright resisting—rapid social and economic change. As for the AfD leadership, it’s a hodgepodge. There are conservatives, social conservatives, radical rightists, and pure opportunists and demagogues whose actual ideological agenda remains unclear. In some ways, AfD is a Left-Right party. One might say national-socialist. That’s an expression which in Germany generates far more heat than light, of course, but it fits to some extent. …
As for the agenda of those populist politicians who lead, many are indeed demagogues. They tap into and manipulate voter opinions and political narratives. But they also reflect something in their respective countries, some of which is problematic and alarming, to be sure. Yet what of those citizens who simply feel unrepresented by mainstream parties, who become politically homeless and seek shelter where shelter is provided? What if Muslims in Europe, suddenly in large numbers, are forcing Europe to grapple with things long in coming? That is, have Europeans themselves evaded their own fundamental questions about identity?
As he suggests obliquely, but does not quite say, there is a cohort of unassimilated, radicalized Muslims in Europe. No one is quite sure what to do about it. The problem is not as grave as the far-right believes, but neither is it trivial or nonexistent, as many on the left insist. This cohort is poor, criminogenic, and retrograde in its views of Jews, homosexuals, and women. It produces terrorists. Integrating this community is a genuinely difficult problem. Solving it, if it can be solved, will require the wisdom of Solomon.
Deporting everyone who is not an ethically pure German is not what Solomon might propose (save as a ruse to discern who among us is a neo-Nazi). It is an appalling and immoral idea. Hitler’s plans to deport Jews were predicated on the very same logic, and the Nazis views of Jews were remarkably similar to the AfD’s views of Muslims.
Many don’t realize this: Perhaps because the Jews who were admitted to the United States were uncommonly talented, it’s widely believed the Jewish community in Germany was composed entirely of highly-assimilated Martin Bubers and Albert Einsteins. It is true that most Jews in Germany held German citizenship, and many Jewish families were completely assimilated, had been in Germany for centuries, and thought of themselves as German. But there was also a significant community of Jews who had only recently immigrated to Germany from Eastern Europe. They did not hold German citizenship, and while some were well-integrated into German society, many lived in distinct immigrant communities, spoke Yiddish, and struck everyone, including more assimilated German Jews, as superstitious, backward, and distasteful. By 1930, a quarter of the German Jewish community had to be supported through community welfare programs. (The idea that Jews controlled Germany’s economic life was an antisemitic myth.) What is said about Muslim immigrants now—that they are backward, that their culture is too alien for them ever to be assimilated, that they are poor, that it isn’t nice to see them on the streets—is precisely what was said about Jewish immigrants. If the far right is now obsessed with the idea of the Muslim as sexual predator, the Nazis were even more persuaded that Jewish men had nothing better to do than to rape white women.
I have pointed this out before in conversation. Inevitably, the rejoinder is that the Jews weren’t terrorists. But neither are Muslims, in the vast majority. Jews were, however, significantly overrepresented among Bolsheviks, and this association served exactly the same rhetorical function for the Nazis. Indeed, one could say that the case for expelling the Jews from Germany was stronger than the case for expelling Muslims now: Bolshevism was more dangerous than contemporary jihadism, if you measure these things by the corpse. This did not mean the idea of expelling the Jews was anything but an obscenity.
The idea of expelling an entire people from their homes is part of a genocidal logic. Rory Stewart makes just this point in the discussion below. The whole conversation is surprisingly good, but he discusses the idea of expulsion, in particular, at about 39:30. (I think I’ve managed to set it so that it starts at the right place.)
The Remigration
Let me give you a feeling for what the AfD’s ideology looks like in the wild. Here’s a video:
The lyrics:
Ich habe dieses Gefühl. Das wird dir heute ein Riesending. Das ist die Abschiebeparty. Ja, das sagt mir mein Instinkt. Fliegen alle nach Hause? Es hat sich hier keiner benommen. Wir sind voll am Feiern. Sie werden nie wieder kommen. Reißt die Hände in die Luft und macht die ganze Nacht Krach, damit auch jeder linke Spasti geht, weil er abkackt. Diese Nacht ist Deutschlands Nacht. Die Remigration geht los. Lass die Bässe richtig pumpen. Bis in jeden Zeckenclub. Das ist ja Musik bei uns. Da brennt jeder Club. Es wird gefeiert wie noch nie. Schmeißt die Hände in die Luft. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle! Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle Aller. Sie alle gehen alle heim. In Deutschland wird nur noch im Iran. Das ganze Volk ist mit dabei. Das ist das absolute Highlight. Wir sind mehr, Wir sind mehr, sagen sie und heulen auf. Doch ihr könnt hier nichts mehr retten. Aus Deutschland. Wie blau. Deutschland. Sommer voller Feiern. Wir sind richtig laut. Die ganze Nacht Party. Jetzt singt der Thalerhof nach Haus. Er hat den Aperol mitgebracht. Der Spritzkrieg findet kein Ende. Wir rasten richtig aus. Wir schlagen voll über die Stränge. L’amour Touhou wird aufgedreht. Die Menge flippt aus. Wir nehmen uns in den Arm und schreien. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab! Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle. Hey, jetzt geht’s ab. Wir schieben sie alle ab. Sie alle ab! In English: I have this feeling. Today is going to be a big deal. This is the deportation party. Yeah, that’s what my instinct tells me. Is everyone flying home? Nobody behaved here. We’re partying hard. They’re never coming back. Throw your hands in the air and make noise all night, So every leftist loser leaves because they can’t handle it. Tonight is Germany’s night. Remigration is starting. Let the bass pump loud, all the way into every squatters’ club. That’s our music. Every club will be on fire. We’ll party like never before. Throw your hands in the air. Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them. Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them. Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them! Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them are going home. In Germany, only Iranians remain. The entire nation is part of it. This is the absolute highlight. “We are more,” they say, crying out loud. But you can’t save anything here anymore. Out of Germany. How blue. Germany. Summer full of parties. We are really loud. The whole night. Party. Now the Thalerhof is singing on the way home. He brought the Aperol. The Spritzkrieg knows no end. We’re completely losing it. We’re going totally wild. L’amour toujours is cranked up. The crowd goes crazy. We hug each other and scream: Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them. Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them. Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them! Hey, here we go! We’re deporting them all. All of them!
“Spritzkreig.” Nice touch. Do listen to it: What “Sie alle” sounds like is not a coincidence.7
Still not sure? Here’s some more. Put the volume up:
Sie sagen wir sollen uns schämen die Köpfe senken uns wegdrehen die Fahne verstecken die Stimme verschweigen am Boden knien und still vergehen doch wir sind mehr als nur Geschichte mehr als Schatten Staub und Rauch wir sind die Feuer die noch brennen wir sind die Stimme im Bauch sei stolz auf dein Land erhebe die Faust es ist nicht verkehrt wenn du darauf baust die Wurzeln sind tief das Herz schlägt laut ein Sturm zieht auf sei stolz sei stolz sei stolz auf dein Land man schreit von Schuld und Fehlern als wären wir nur Dreck doch was ist mit der Schönheit den Wäldern den Fluss und dem Berg was ist mit der Kunst der Sprache der Kraft die uns trägt wir sind die Erben der Stärke egal wer uns was erzählt das Land ist kein Gott keine heilige Pflicht doch wir sind sein Herz sein Stolz sein Gesicht es lebt in uns in jedem Schlag wir tragen es weiter Tag für Tag sei stolz auf dein Land erhebe die Faust es ist nicht verkehrt wenn du darauf baust die Wurzeln sind tief das Herz schneckt laut ein Sturm zieht auf sei stolz sei stolz sei stolz auf dein Land nicht blind nicht dumm nicht voller Hass doch wer aus klein redet zerbricht unser was patriotismus ist kein Gift kein quie keine Frust es ist Liebe z Heimat die in uns erwacht und muss entschuldigung ich bin zu laut tut mir leid vielleicht sollte ich mich hinlegen nein heute nicht mit jedem Atemzug mit jeder Tat wir bauen die Zukunft wie es uns passt sei stolz auf dein Land schreies heraus die Welt soll hören was du daraus machst die Erde vibriert der Himmel erbt wir sind das Land das weiterlebt ein Lied für die Heimat ein Schrei in die Nacht für alle die wissen was Liebe entfasst kein Schwert kein Schild nur Hände und Mut sei stolz auf dein Land denn hier liegt dein Blut denn hier liegt. In English: They say we should be ashamed, Lower our heads, turn away, Hide the flag, silence the voice, Kneel on the ground and quietly vanish. But we are more than just history, More than shadows, dust, and smoke. We are the fires still burning, We are the voice in the gut. Be proud of your country, Raise your fist. Stand tall for your land, Raise your fist high. It’s not wrong to believe in its might. The roots are deep, the heart beats loudly. A storm is brewing. Be proud, be proud, Be proud of your land. They scream of guilt and mistakes As if we were nothing but dirt. But what about the beauty, The forests, the river, and the mountains? What about the art, the language, The strength that carries us? We are the heirs of that strength, No matter what anyone says. The country is no god, no holy duty, But we are its heart, its pride, its face. It lives in us, in every heartbeat. We carry it forward, day by day. Be proud of your country, Raise your fist. It’s not wrong to rely on it. The roots are deep, the heart beats loudly. A storm is brewing. Be proud, be proud, Be proud of your country. Not blind, not dumb, not full of hate. But whoever belittles us, breaks what’s ours. Patriotism is no poison, no grievance, no frustration. It is love for the homeland that awakens in us. And—excuse me—I’m too loud. I’m sorry, Maybe I should lie down. No, not today. With every breath, with every act, We build the future as it suits us. Be proud of your country, shout it out. The world should hear what you make of it. The earth vibrates, the heavens inherit. We are the country that lives on. A song for the homeland, a scream into the night, For all who know what love unleashes. No sword, no shield, just hands and courage. Be proud of your country, For here lies your blood.
I had a feeling when I wrote about Rammstein—20 years ago, now—that this was where this form of musical experimentation was headed.
But these days, I can feel how much our culture has changed. I’m fairly sure that just 20 years ago, no one would have needed to be told that the image in the video is an homage to the Nazis, or that this is music by which to drive a Panzer division through Poland. But the generation that lived through the rise and fall of the Third Reich is now gone, and with them, a culture with a more instinctive grasp of the Nazi aesthetic.
We’ve also become illiterate. It is no longer common knowledge that a text can have a meaning beyond the strictly literal. If I were to post that video and the lyrics on Twitter, someone would reply, “What’s wrong with it? They didn’t say they’re Nazis. They’re just patriotic.” I can’t do anything to cure the deficits in our educational system. I’ll just remark that if Elon Musk doesn’t know enough about the Third Reich to grasp exactly what’s wrong with that video, he doesn’t know enough to be advising Germans how to vote.
Crazier and Crazier
The AfD’s rhetoric has evolved. It has become increasingly provocative and, in some cases, explicitly extremist, particularly under leaders such as Alice Weidel, Alexander Gauland, and Björn Höcke. The videos above are especially egregious examples. But they align with broader themes in the AfD’s public messaging.
Björn Höcke, for example, a leading figure in the Flügel, called for a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s remembrance culture. He has criticized Germany’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin as “monument of shame,” which it is, but he does not find that condign.
During the previous election campaign, Alice Weidel had said that she and Höcke were “two parts of one party.” But after the “monument to shame” speech, the AfD’s federal executive board initiated expulsion proceedings against him, perceiving him as an electoral liability. In 2017, Correctiv obtained and published the 62-page case for his expulsion assembled by the AfD leadership.
Höcke, they wrote, demonstrated a “fundamental rejection of the party system,” peppered his speeches with terms favored by Hitler, and supported in his words and writing the explicitly neo-Nazi NPD (the party deemed utterly noxious but too insignificant to ban).
His monument-of-shame speech, they wrote, resembled in word and meaning speeches by Hitler, which they illustrated over the course of two pages by comparing his speech, side-by-side, with quotes from Hitler. His language indicated a “fundamental rejection of the party system.” He engaged in “egomaniacal outbursts” and embraced the “Führer principle.” His calls for a “complete victory” were signs of an “excessive proximity to National Socialism.”
They rejected Höcke’s defense that his speech was misunderstood. It is a common strategy among AfD politician to claim that their statements have been misunderstood, so it is notable that internally, they rejected this defense: “It does not matter how the respondent might have meant certain parts of his speech,” they wrote, but rather how the audience understood it. “Anyone who listens to the speech with the appropriate volume, with eyes closed, feels transported to a time of the Third Reich.” The document detailed his use of pseudonyms to engage with and support explicitly neo-Nazi organisms. All of these are their words, not mine.
The party’s arbitration tribunal ruled that Höcke could remain. It was the board members who brought the case against him who left the party, some of them declaring that the party had become too crazy. Höcke—”excessive proximity to National Socialism” and all—remains one of the AfD’s most significant figures. He is the leader of the Thuringia branch and its parliamentary group, the AfD’s primary ideologue, and its string-puller. Since the 2022 party congress, he has consolidated his power. In the September 2024 Thuringian state elections, Höcke led the party to victory with 33 percent of the vote. (Only a few months before, he had been fined €13,000 by a court in Halle for using a banned Nazi slogan in one of his campaign speeches. Under Germany’s press laws, he may officially be described as “fascist.”)
He’s not one bad apple. André Poggenburg, the Flügel’s co-leader until August 2018, called Turks in Germany “stateless vermin” and left-leaning politicians “malignant growths on the German nation’s body.” Former party leader Alexander Gauland calls the integration of migrants a “genetic dilution” of the German people. He dismissed the Nazi era as “just a speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful Germany history.” Germans, he has said, should be “proud” of their soldiers in both world wars. The party hurls one of Hitler’s favorite epithets, Lügenpresse, or “lying media,” at journalists. It calls immigrants “parasites.” In the words of Verena Hartmann, who left the party in January 2020, “Those who resist this extreme right-wing movement are mercilessly pushed out of the party.”
Last November, three party members were arrested when police busted up the Saechsische Separatisten, Saxonian separatists, whom police claimed were preparing an attempt to impose “governmental and societal structures inspired by National Socialism.” The group is reported to be convinced that Germany is on the edge of collapse, requiring them to seize Saxony and other eastern German states by force and then ethically cleanse them. Police raids uncovered unregistered weapons, Kalashnikov cartridges, silencers, the shell of a mortar grenade. (The embarrassed AfD expelled the frisky Saxons.) Just last week, the AfD chapter in Karlsruhe decided it would be a lark to have its campaign material printed to resemble a one-way plane ticket. These were put in the mailboxes of people who, as one report delicately put it, “potentially had a migrant background.” The police placed the party under investigation on charges of inciting racial hatred. At its recent pre-election conference in Saxony, party leader Alice Weidel gave a lusty speech calling for immigration. “Alice für Deutschland!” the crowd yelled. (It’s a pun on the Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland,” which is banned.)
So those videos and their lyrics aren’t aberrations. They’re symptomatic of a deeper shift in political discourse—one hardly limited to Germany. As Rory Stewart points out, what should never be normalized is now normal:
… And of course, what’s happening all the time, and this is why it feels so much more dangerous than people acknowledge—why we are beginning to see elements of the 20s and 30s coming through—is that they [far-right parties] all give space to each other. There’s this horrible phrase, “the Overton window,” of what’s kind of acceptable to say or think. They’re shifting it. Suddenly, Robert Jenricks is saying things no Conservative Cabinet member under Theresa May or David Cameron would ever consider saying.8 It becomes acceptable. And as that shifts, you get more and more slightly dopey people, voters on the right, beginning to think, “Well, you know, is it such a bad thing?” and “Maybe we can just, um, sort of expel these people peacefully—we don’t need to actually, you know, round them up.”
And of course, people forget what’s going on here, which is that the early ideologues for the war in the Balkans initially talked about peaceful separation between Bosnians and Serbs. Not very long ago. In Europe, you know, during our working lives. That Eichmann was working for Hitler to peaceably resettle Jews out of Austria. The idea initially was not to kill them, the idea was just to push them out. I think to Madagascar, initially.
The fact that people are not processing [is] that liberalism isn’t just—there’s been a flurry of articles in Unherd, from Trevor Phillip, for example … articles in the Times, saying, “Liberalism’s dead; the center’s dead; the energy is now on the Right.” But liberalism isn’t just Alistair and Rory with sort of mushy ideas and being too optimistic about Kamala Harris. It’s moral. It’s the idea that humans are equal in dignity. [It’s] the lessons of the Second World War, which is that if you give up on the idea that humans are equal, and you start saying there are better people—white Austrians—and less good people—Muslim Austrians—so many things follow from that: the collapse of your democracy. And ultimately, war.
The Kremlin Party
These aspects of the party’s ideology aside, the AfD is most notable for being a Russian cat’s paw. Its romance with Russia aligns with its broader opposition to the EU and NATO, its nationalism, and its opposition to “globalism.” (This term is capacious, and if it has any meeting, it means “Jews.”) Party figures consistently express admiration for Vladimir Putin’s leadership style and for Russia itself, which they view as a model of strong, nationalist governance. They.regularly praise Putin for his defense of sovereignty, traditional values, and resistance to Western liberalism.9
Before Elon Musk’s intervention, most Americans had never heard of the AfD. The far-right cognoscenti, however, are sympathetic to the AfD’s loathing of ethnic minorities and its demands for mass deportations. This is unsurprising, given the mood in the United States, even if it’s odious. But for the life of me, I can cannot make sense of their eagerness to support a party that is at once the devoted foot servant of America’s adversaries and explicitly anti-American. Does Elon Musk grasp what would happen to his investments in Germany if this party came to power?
AfD leader Alice Weidel hails Russia an ally in the fight against “globalism.” Her party insistently. calls for lifting EU sanctions on Russia, which it claims are an aspect of a broader Western provocation of Russia. It supports Russia’s position on Ukraine, and blames Russia’s invasion on NATO. It supported its position in Syria. It portrays Russia as the defender of “traditional European values,” Christianity, and the family, contrasting this nobility with what it holds to be the West’s moral decline.
In return, RT and Sputnik give the AfD glowing coverage and spread its messages to German and international audiences. Russian-linked bot networks amplify AfD content. Russia micro-targets voters on social media, particularly Germany’s Russian-German minority. There are excellent grounds to suspect Russia supports the party financially through opaque donations and by making helpful connections between its members and Russian business interests.
This is why the AfD is known, in Germany as the “Kremlin party.” It isn’t an accident that the AfD’s support is strongest in eastern Germany, where there is nostalgia for the Soviet days and the old comrade networks can be easily reactivated. (It is interesting that the AfD is strongest in the regions of Germany with the fewest immigrants.)
The AfD’s central proposals in advance of the 2024 European elections were decisively hostile to the West. They called for Germany to abandon the euro, seek observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and cooperate with the Eurasian Economic Union.10 Their manifesto was peppered with Russian nationalist lingo—lots of talk of “Eurasia” and the “multipolar world order.” The preamble argued that “non-European great powers”—by which they mean the United States—had drawn “the states of Europe into conflicts” that are “diametrically opposed to fruitful trade relations in the European-Asian area.”
AfD MPs travel to Moscow so frequently that you’d think miles on Aeroflot got you somewhere other than Siberia. They pitched up in Crimea just after its annexation, then landed showily in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk. They offered no criticism of the lack of press freedom or the Gulag of prisons and torture chambers Russia was swiftly constructing on Ukrainian soil. They’ve taken part in the pretense of monitoring Russia’s presidential elections, with one of their MPs praising the vote as “free, equal and secret.”
In 2021, Die Welt tallied up the AfD’s travels:
Welt has identified more than 100 travel movements to Russia, to contested areas in eastern Ukraine, to Crimea, to the Caucasus and to Belarus since 2015. The travelers were members of the state parliament, the federal government, the EU parliament, and party officials.
The leader among the travelers is Gunnar Lindemann, who sits in the Berlin House of Representatives for the AfD. He has traveled to those regions at least 15 times in the past three years. In 2018 alone, Lindemann traveled to Crimea at least three times. He traveled to Donetsk and Luhansk in occupied eastern Ukraine and to the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Lindemann calls the killed Ukrainian warlord and separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko a “friend.” He also adorns himself with an “order” from the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” for the “development of international relations.” … Russian-speaking media cover such visits intensively. As a “German MP,” Lindemann is supposed to increase legitimacy. When asked, he described his trips as “private” and said he financed them himself.
Stefan Keuter follows in second place, with at least 11 documented trips since 2018. His travel list includes election observation in Russia, Abkhazia, and Azerbaijan. Keuter’s activities even go beyond the trips. Not only did he travel to Crimea several times, but he was also involved in the program committee of an economic forum in Yalta. He was a speaker twice at a forum organized by the Russian parliament.
Correctiv, too, published an extensive analysis of the party’s Russian contacts. Some highlights:
- In 2020, AfD leader Tino Chrupalla was welcomed to Russia by Foreign Minister Lavrov. He returned six months later to attend a Russian Ministry of Defense conference. Russia was amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. Chrupalla found nothing to criticize in this. He lobbied for dropping the sanctions against Russia, and in the words of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, became a “mouthpiece for Russian propaganda.”
- In 2021, AfD leader Alice Weidel embarked upon a trip to Russia with the goal of “finally end[ing] the sanctions.”
- In September 2022, directly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, regional parliament members Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Daniel Wald, and Christian Blex visited Russia. With Russian troops pouring across Ukraine’s border, Tillschneider wrote on Facebook, “Russia attacks, writes the Tagesschau. Wrong. Russia is defending itself!” In another Facebook post, he wrote, “Transatlanticists against Eurasians! We have to rethink.” In August 2022, he attended a security conference in Moscow where he railed against the “rainbow empire.”
- In November 2022, AfD MP Petr Bystron secretly travelled to Belarus. MP Matthias Moosdorf attended an economic conference in St Petersburg. In August 2023, Tillschneider returned to Moscow.
- During a speech on German Unity Day in Gera in 2022, Björn Höcke said:“The US government has ordered the German government to commit economic suicide and Scholz and his cronies are carrying out the order. Dear friends, I don’t think it’s going too far to state the following: It was and is US strategy as a foreign power to drive wedges into our continent, to drive wedges between nations that could actually work very well together. … Our natural partner, the natural partner for us, the nation of tinkerers and thinkers, the natural partner for our way of working and living, would be Russia; a country with almost inexhaustible resources. … If I had to choose now for the German people between the “rainbow empire,” between the new West, between the globalist West and the traditional East, I would choose the East in this situation.”
The report continues in this vein for pages.
When Zelenskyy visited the Bundestag in June 2024, a large number of AfD lawmakers left the building. The party’s district chairman of Chemnitz in Saxony, Nico Köhler, told Deutsche Welle that he preferred “members of the German Bundestag who are not in favor of constantly shoving weapons and money up his ass.”
Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, chairman of Tsargrad (a publication frequently acknowledged for its excellence in the 🦇“Bat of the Day” section of Global Eyes), has a special fondness for former AfD leader Gauland (he of “just a speck of birdshit” fame.) “The performances of Dr. Gauland,” Malofeev has said, “signal that Germany will become Germany again, just as Russia becomes Russia again under Putin.” In 2015, Malofeev’s St. Basil the Great Foundation paid for Gauland to visit Russia for a tête–à–tête with Alexandr Dugin.
AfD MPs have appeared on the lunatic Russian war propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s show despite Solovyov’s regular appeals to incinerate Germany. Its members have raised doubt, in the Bundestag, that Russia was behind Navalny’s poisoning with Novichok, arguing preposterously that “there are examples of other state and private actors being in possession of and even using Novichok.” (There are not. Novichok is the Kremlin’s signature.) The party has voted, overwhelmingly, against assisting Ukraine.
These views are not unchallenged within the AfD. A small delegation of its members, for example, visited Ukraine to declare their solidarity. But Russian sympathizers dominate.
The Multipolar World
In 2016, the former chair of the AfD’s youth wing, Markus Frohnmaier, accompanied the former AfD MEP Marcus Pretzell to Crimea, where he communed with the neo-Nazi Manuel Ochsenreiter, an acolyte of Alexandr Dugin. When Frohnmaier entered the Bundestag, Ochsenreiter became his adviser. Frohnmaier reluctantly dismissed him when the German public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into Ochsenreiter for a terrorist attack in Ukraine. Alexandr Dugin mourned when Ochsenreiter died in 2021, writing on Facebook: “He was a staunch German patriot. Brave and courageous. He sacrificed his life for the multipolar world. He was an opponent of the open society and the Atlanticists. He chose a greater Europe, the Eurasia, the Plurisverse.”
The Dossier Center in London, financed by Putin critic and businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, obtained and furnished to the media a 2017 strategy document circulated within the Russian presidential administration. It detailed efforts to destabilize the European Union, promote Russian propaganda, and discredit Russia’s critics. Of Frohnmaier, it said, “In the Bundestag, there will be a deputy who belongs to us and whom we have absolutely under control.”
Frohnmaier claim to have no idea what they were talking about. He proceeded, in a September 2023 Bundestag debate, to attack the German government for its aid to Ukraine:
And I have to ask, Mr. Habeck, are you actually the German Business Secretary or the Business Secretary for Ukraine? Do you actually represent German interests or do you represent the interests of foreign countries? The citizens of Germany know the answer. This government, Bandera and Baerbock, Volodymyr and Habeck, these foreign administrators, they don’t give a damn about Germany.
The AfD has fully embraced the idea that the world should be divided into spheres of influence in which the great powers control their neighbors, meaning Russia should be given a free hand in Ukraine and the Baltics, China should be do what it will with Taiwan, and the United States, presumably, should help itself to Panama and Canada. (It’s hard to guess how they view our seizure of Greenland. I guess they’d wait to hear what the Kremlin tells them to think.)
The writings of AfD luminaries echo Dugin to the word. For example, in 2023, the AfD European election frontrunner Maximilian Krah published “Politics from the Right—A Manifesto.” A sample:
Right-wing foreign policy seeks stability on the basis of organic and natural ties. Europe is historically, culturally and economically also such a region, but militarily and politically it does not want to be, because its elites have committed themselves to globalism and act as vassals of the USA. In a multipolar world, these regions organize themselves. …
The economic, cultural and political power of the West is crumbling. … If Russia does not completely fail with its project, a different world order will emerge and a different international law. Current processes of change will become more visible and accelerated. The political right can win during the process.
Krah later explains what the “multipolar world” he advocates would entail: “[T]he concrete shaping of human rights should not be pursued in a globally uniform way, but should form differently dependent on the cultural area.”
This not a banality. It is the language Putin favors. It necessarily means the abandonment of the idea of inalienable and universal human rights.
Neo-Nazis, antisemites, hysterics, fruitcakes, lunatics, anti-vaxxers, Covid conspiracists, Putinverstehers, Kremlin lackeys, sad sacks who still haven’t adjusted to capitalism, America-haters, enemies of liberal democracy, losers, and Saxon putschists—there’s really not much to love about this party. Should they ever come to power, God forbid, Tesla’s German gigafactory would be destroyed by AfD’s proposed policies.
So what on earth is Elon Musk thinking?
That question will be the topic of Part II.
Timothy W. Ryback just published an article in the Atlantic explaining how Hitler was able to come to power entirely constitutionally. If you don’t know the story, you should, and he does a good job telling it. Hitler’s private attorney, he writes, “commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing ‘the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law,” then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness.
It seems to me that Germany has used this power appropriately and responsibly. This doesn’t mean that there’s no risk to this kind of constitutional arrangement. For an example of the way such a power should not be used, look at Turkey, which by my count has banned at least 47 political parties since the founding of the Republic, but somehow managed not to ban the party that would, in fact, dismantle its constitution.)
A few days ago, the Saxon State Office for the Protection of the Constitution rejected an appeal against this designation from the AfD’s Saxony branch.
Robert Zubrin provides an excellent introduction to Alexandr Dugan here. It is important to be familiar with his thinking: We’re now living in his world, and you can’t understand it without understanding his influence.
In “My neighbor, the neo-Nazi,” the author claims that Mörig said, “I’ve been around since I was six,” meaning he was immersed from that age in völkische, neo-Nazi groups and ideas “against which the AfD looks liberal.” The author concludes the designation “neo” is superfluous. The guy’s just a Nazi.
Maaßen was evicted from the CDU and put under surveillance for his extremism after tweeting that “the driving forces in the political media space had an eliminatory racism against whites” and a “burning desire that Germany may die.” He then said an interview that there was “a green-red racial doctrine according to which whites are considered an inferior race and therefore Arab and African men must be brought into the country.” An investigation revealed that everyone around him had long known him to be an inveterate antisemite. Comforting to know that he was charged with defending the constitution.
“L’amour toujours” was a hit song by Gigi D’Agostino. Neo-Nazi groups co-opted the melody, overlaying it with chants like “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus.” (Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.) The phenomenon gained attention following an incident on the German island of Sylt, where patrons at a bar were recorded chanting these slogans to the tune of “L’amour toujours.” The video went viral, prompting police investigations. (I’m not sure that I understand the line “only the Iranians remain.” If our German readers could help me with this, I’d be grateful.)
Jenricks is the UK’s Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. They discuss his recent comments earlier in the video.
The idea that Russia is a bastion of “traditional values” is one of the more impressive achievements of Russian propaganda. Others have written at length about this myth, so I won’t. If you’re in doubt, though, I can clear this up. Just ask.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a club of highly autocratic regimes dominated by Russia and China. The Eurasian Economic Union, led by Moscow, is made up of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan.
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