After Germany’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, the country built its subsequent political system on the principle that a repeat of the political catastrophe of the Third Reich must be impossible. The new political order of the Federal Republic of Germany rested on recognition of and acceptance of responsibility for the Holocaust, rejection of ethnic nationalism, and a societal taboo on justifying Nazi ideas. Recent trends in German domestic politics, however, show that views and approaches that for decades remained on the political margins are gradually re-entering public debate. It is telling that among the leading politicians of Alternative for Germany (AfD) are people whose closest ancestors were linked to the NSDAP, the SS, the SA, and the state apparatus of the Third Reich. Ancestry itself does not make them responsible for the deeds of previous generations. Yet some of AfD’s leading figures use rhetoric that calls into question the postwar approaches to assessing Nazism, ethnic belonging, and historical responsibility.
A starting point is AfD co-chair Alice Weidel. On 2 November 2024, WELT published an investigation by journalists Dirk Banse and Uwe Müller, prepared for Welt am Sonntag. Drawing on documents from the Bundesarchiv and other archives, the reporters established that her grandfather Hans Weidel joined the NSDAP as early as late 1932, entered the SS in January 1933, and belonged to a number of regime organizations. From 1941, Hans Weidel served as a military judge at the commandant’s office in occupied Warsaw — within the system of Nazi military justice. That system was used, among other things, to prosecute opponents of the occupation regime and members of the resistance. Archival records from the period document numerous repressive sentences against Polish citizens and Jews.
Eight decades later, his granddaughter offered her own interpretation of Adolf Hitler’s ideology. In January 2025, in a conversation with Elon Musk, Weidel claimed that Hitler had supposedly not been a conservative but a “communist and socialist.” German historians criticized this reading as historically inaccurate: the Third Reich was anti-communist in its essence, and communists, Social Democrats, and socialists were among its first victims. Weidel’s statement drew substantial criticism because it effectively detached National Socialism from the far-right political tradition, even though historiography classifies Nazism as a far-right ideology.
This was not the only instance in which Weidel resorted to similar rhetoric.
In 2018, in the Bundestag, she spoke of “girls in headscarves,” “state-supported men with knives,” and “other idlers,” for which the then President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble, issued her an official reprimand. On another occasion, Weidel called the then federal commissioner for integration, Aydan Özoğuz, a “stain” and a “disgrace” for Germany. Almost simultaneously, one of AfD’s founders and its former co-chair, Alexander Gauland, said that the politician of Turkish origin should be “disposed of” in Turkey. Such remarks shifted political debate onto the terrain of dividing society by origin and ethnicity and became the subject of accusations of xenophobic and discriminatory rhetoric.
No less revealing is the family of Beatrix von Storch, a Bundestag member and one of the best-known figures in AfD’s federal leadership. Her maternal grandfather, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, was Reich Minister of Finance from 1932 to 1945 and remained in office throughout Hitler’s rule. After the war he was convicted in the Ministries Trial — one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Her other grandfather, Nikolaus von Oldenburg, was a member of the NSDAP and the SA.
Von Storch herself is one of the advocates of AfD’s hard-line anti-migration policy. On 31 January 2016, Tagesschau reported that on Facebook, asked whether women with children should be prevented from crossing the border with the use of firearms, she answered “yes.” After the scandal, she clarified that the use of weapons against children was unacceptable, but that under certain conditions it could be permissible against adult women. Later von Storch said her answer regarding children had been a mistake. At the same time she continued to insist that, under certain circumstances, the law allows the use of weapons against adults. The episode became one of the most high-profile examples of radical anti-migration rhetoric among AfD’s leadership.
Family history intersects even more directly with political rhetoric in the case of Maximilian Krah, a Bundestag member, former MEP, and one of AfD’s prominent federal politicians. His grandfather, the physician Martin Krah, was a member of the NSDAP and the National Socialist German Doctors’ League and voluntarily served as a doctor in the Hitler Youth. Controversy around Krah himself erupted ahead of the European Parliament elections, when on 18 May 2024 Italy’s La Repubblica published an interview in which, asked whether one could take pride in ancestors who had been SS officers, Krah replied that guilt must be assessed individually and stated: “I will never say that everyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.”
The remark caused a serious political rift between AfD and its then partners among Europe’s right-wing parties. Rassemblement National said it would not cooperate with AfD in the next European Parliament. Despite being sidelined from the election campaign, a few months later Krah told supporters that Germans should “honor their ancestors” and that “they were not criminals.” Combined with his earlier remarks about “white Saxons” and the use of ethno-nationalist language, this intensified the debate over part of AfD’s attitude toward Germany’s Nazi past.
The trend is not limited to politicians with a documented Nazi past in the family. One of AfD’s most influential figures, Björn Höcke, said as early as January 2017 that Germany needed a “180-degree turn” in its policy of historical memory. In the same Dresden speech he said Germans were “the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. A similar assessment of the Nazi period was later offered by Gauland, who called it merely “a speck of bird shit” in Germany’s more than thousand-year history.
The risk of such trends does not lie in a direct repeat of the political situation of the early 1930s, but in the gradual normalization of approaches that for a long time after the Second World War were considered unacceptable in German politics. At issue, above all, are the ethnic division of society, harsh rhetoric toward particular groups, and a revision of the established attitude toward the Nazi past. Historical experience shows that political norms change gradually: statements and approaches that at first provoke sharp rejection can, over time, become an ordinary part of public debate.
