© REUTERS/Matthias Rietschel

Back in 2000, Kurt Biedenkopf, then prime minister of the federal state of Saxony, made a peculiar statement. Saxonians, said this experienced West German politician who had moved east after the fall of the Berlin wall, had “shown themselves to be completely immune against extreme rightist temptations.” Biedenkopf was wrong. And by banking on denial, he contributed to making things worse.

This week’s right-wing riots that shook Chemnitz, Saxony’s third largest city, have roots reaching well back into the 1990s. That period was one of huge disruption for East Germans, calling into doubt much of what they had lived and worked for. It was also the time when neo-Nazi and right-wing extremists started to spread out their networks and make inroads into mainstream society.

So, what happened in Chemnitz? On August 26, a 35-year old German was knifed to death in this city of 240,000, a bleak place dominated by socialist-era high-rises and a gigantic statue of the head of Karl Marx. Police quickly arrested two refugees, a 22-year old Iraqi and a 23-year old Syrian, as the main suspects. That same evening, neo-Nazi groups took to the streets, hunting and attacking any foreigners they could find. Undermanned and under-equipped, the police mostly looked on.

Worse, the police were still badly understaffed the next day when right-wing extremists organized another march through Chemnitz. 6000 people joined in, some of them hard-core Nazis who were emboldened enough to give the Hitler salute (a crime in Germany) in front of cameras and police units. 20 people were injured in clashes between neo-Nazis and left-wing counter-demonstrators.

A Bungled Operation

Clearly, the police operation was bungled; just as clearly, Saxony has a growing problem with right-wing sympathizers within the police and justice system. Shockingly, a justice official in the state capital Dresden took a picture of the arrest warrant for the two men from Iraq and Syria, listing their full names, the names of witnesses and the judges involved. The document was then illegally spread through right-wing social networks. The official was later suspended from his duties.

In a more harmless, yet equally revealing incident in mid-August in Dresden, policemen had detained a television crew for 45 minutes during a rally of the anti-foreigner movement Pegida after one of the demonstrators had protested against being filmed. The demonstrator later turned out to be an employee of the state office of criminal investigation–he has since been suspended, too. Yet it took the Dresden police several days to officially apologized to the TV crew.

For years, Saxony has led the statistics in Germany for hate crimes against foreigners. It was also home to the NSU, a right-wing terrorist group that between 2000 and 2007 murdered nine immigrants and one policewoman. In Saxony, neo-Nazis have established powerful informal networks. Soccer fan clubs play a particular role, as do right-wing rock bands.

Successful in Saxony

There are social, economic, and psychological reasons why the German far-right is so spectacularly successful in Saxony. This once heavily industrialized region was hit particularly hard by the economic disruption which accompanied reunification. High unemployment and low wages have contributed to a widespread feeling among Saxonians of being second-class citizens in the new Germany. And when Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed nearly a million refugees to Germany in 2015, many East Germans felt even more abandoned, believing that the benefits they should have received were now being given to refugees.

Such resentment is not limited to Saxony or to eastern Germany. In many of West German cities, competition between low-income indigenous groups and refugees for apartments or childcare is much more acute. But Saxony has a long political tradition of underplaying right-wing tendencies. “Saxony does not have a significant problem with right-wing radicalism,” said then Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich as late as 2011, echoing Biedenkopf. As a consequence, the police and justice system failed to combat neo-Nazism effectively.

Saxony’s current Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, a member of Merkel’s CDU, follows the line of his predecessors: naturally, he does not encourage xenophobia or neo-Nazism, but neither does he clearly point out what is right and wrong. And after the riots in Chemnitz, Kretschmer said that the police had done “a super job.”

Spreading into Politics

From fringe groups, right-wing ideology has spread not only into state institutions like the police, but also into politics. It was in Saxony that the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) used to register its best results; it’s here that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now scores highest. At the federal elections in 2017, the AfD received 27 percent of votes and emerged (by a tiny margin) as the strongest party in Saxony. Also, the AfD members of the Bundestag elected in Saxony are among the most radical in the party. The most prominent of them is Jens Maier, a judge (!) from the Dresden district court.

The enormous success of the party in eastern Germany has also accelerated the radicalization of the party as a whole. Today’s xenophobic and revisionist AfD has little in common with the conservative, anti-Euro party founded in 2013 by West German conservative economists. And as the party has become more extremist, many of its members throughout Germany have become more radical as well.

As a consequence, Germany now has a sizeable far-right party that in spite of its leadership squabbles is stable and well established. With 15 to 17 percent in the polls, it appears that the AfD is here to stay. In a European context, that would not be unusual. But for Germany with its Nazi past and the Holocaust, it’s a disturbing first.

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© REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski

In the Western world, the rise of right-wing populist movements, with their anti-Islam, anti-immigration, and anti-liberal programs, is quickly becoming the new normal.

2016 saw the success of the Brexit movement and the election of Donald Trump as US president. Austria twice came very close to putting a right-wing populist into the president’s office; Poland and Hungary are governed by nationalist, euroskeptic, increasingly authoritarian parties.

With three important European elections in 2017, it seems that trend will continue. In France, Marine Le Pen looks set to enter the run-off of the presidential elections this spring. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party may emerge as the new parliament’s strongest group.

In this context, Germany seems comparatively less affected; according to current polls, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to score no more than 15 percent of the vote in the federal elections scheduled for September 2017.

German History is Different

Numbers, however, don’t give the full story. Germany is different because German history is different. This is the country with the darkest past in Europe, the country that ­– in the name of the German people – perpetrated the worst crimes against its neighbors and its own citizens. Facing up to the truth of this history is one of post-war Germany’s most important achievements.

Yet it is here that the AfD, which started out as a euroskeptic but essentially liberal party four years ago, is transforming itself into a radically nationalist and xenophobic movement. Most telling, some of its leaders are trying to re-invent the way Germany looks at its Nazi past.

The most radical AfD politician is Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the state parliament of Thuringia. In a speech given in mid-January in Dresden – home of the anti-Islam Pegida movement – Höcke railed against what he called “this stupid remembrance policy” which was now paralyzing the Germans more than ever. “We need a 180 degree turn-around in memory politics.”

Höcke was certainly not speaking out of ignorance. This 44-year-old West German, a descendant of a family displaced from the former German territories at the end of World War Two, was a history teacher before entering politics.

“The bombing of Dresden was a war crime, comparable to the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Höcke said. “With the bombing of Dresden and the other German cities, they (the allies) wanted nothing less than to rob us of our collective identity. They wanted to destroy us root and branch, they wanted to uproot us. And together with the systematic re-education begun after 1945, they nearly succeeded. There weren’t any German victims any more, only German perpetrators. To this day, we are unable to mourn our own victims.”

Höcke, continuing his speech about “the state of mind of a totally vanquished people”, vehemently lashed out against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a monument dedicated to the six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis. “We Germans (…) are the only people in the world that has planted a memorial of shame into the heart of its capital.”

It’s this passage of the speech that caused particular outrage with the wider German public. Within the AfD itself, Höcke was also criticized. Frauke Petry, one of the main party leaders, reportedly wanted to expel him. Yet she may also have tactical reasons to distance herself from Höcke, who is her most dangerous rival within the AfD. After a weekend of deliberations, the party leadership decided against expelling him.

Another Misunderstanding?

Höcke himself later claimed he had been misunderstood. Talking about a “memorial of shame” did not mean that the Holocaust memorial was shameful, but referred to the shame that caused Germany to put up the memorial, he said.

This is a move that AfD politicians have used before: Make statements that will please the party’s right wing extremists but offend the wider public, then claim you have been misunderstood and misreported, preferably by the evil “mainstream media.” Thus, you get to appease the more liberal part of your audience while making sure that your original proposals still get plenty of attention.

Yet in this case, few people believe Höcke’s historical innocence. “When politicians from the AfD try to relativize the shame of the Holocaust, this shows the radically right-wing face of the party,” said Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas, a Social Democrat. “The AfD appears to aim to become a new political home for neo-Nazis.“

In a telling coincidence, Höcke gave his Dresden speech the same day that Germany’s constitutional court refused to ban the extremist German National Party (NPD) – not on grounds of it being ideologically harmless, but because the party has dwindled to political irrelevance. This is certainly true, but the court’s decision sends a dangerous signal of impunity to neo-Nazi ideologists.

About a third of the 26,000 AfD members are thought to be supporters of Höcke and his extreme views. This wing of the party will almost certainly be represented in the Bundestag after next September, lending an element of respectability to their views. Having managed the transition from a conservative anti-Euro party to an anti-immigration movement, the AfD is set to radicalize many of its members and voters even further.

The outlook for Germany’s political culture is grim. While the AfD is far from gaining a majority anywhere, and while none of the other main parties will ally with it, Höcke’s ideas do resonate with some Germans. But given its history, this country cannot claim innocence.

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