The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Monday sacked its former spokesman Christian Lüth for reportedly inhumane comments about migrants.
The online version of Germany's Zeit newspaper alleged that Lüth spoke of "shooting" and "gassing" migrants last February while meeting a woman influencer in a Berlin bar. The comments were aired in a TV documentary by German media giant ProSieben.
"The comments attributed to Christian Lüth are totally unacceptable and incompatible with the aims and policies of the AfD," said the co-leader of the AfD's parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland.
Suggestions that he had "even endorsed" Lüth's remarks were "fully absurd and entirely fictitious," said Gauland in a statement.
What were the alleged comments?
Meeting the Youtube influencer Lisa Licentia in Berlin's Newton Bar on February 23, Lüth is reported to have told her that the AfD used provocative tactics.
"The worse it goes for Germany, the better for the AfD," Lüth is quoted as saying, adding the party would otherwise be polling just 3%.
Asked by Licentia, whether it was in the AfD interest that more migrants came, Lüth is reported to have replied: "Yes, because the AfD does better."
"We could later shoot them all. That's not at all the issue. Or, gassing, or whatever you want. It's the same to me," Lüth is quoted as saying.
ProSieben did not identify the "high-ranking AfD functionary," it secretly recorded in its documentary "[Far]-Right, German, Radical."
However, Zeit said it had decided, based on its further research, to reveal the name because of the "special public interest."
The film, based on 18 months research in far-right circles by journalist Thilo Mischke, posed the question: Is Germany's liberal democracy in danger?
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II." Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland, again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam
A history of controversy
Lüth has been with the AfD since its inception 2013. He was dismissed from his position as spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group in April after he reportedly described himself as a "fascist."
The AfD is currently the largest opposition party in the German Parliament, the Bundestag.
Former AfD leader Frauke Petry told DW that the party executive had known since "2016 at the latest" that Christian Lüth "performed the Nazi salute, as several witnesses have attested."
Growing far-right scene
Documentary maker Thilo Mischke described the far-right scene in Germany as a "very dangerous" group that was gradually merging with regular people.
"They establish networks and use, for example, these anti-coronavirus demonstrations, and find a way to choose a new enemy — namely the democratic values of our society," Mischke told DW.
Thuringia state's domestic intelligence chief Stephen Kramer, interviewed by Mischke in Monday's documentary, said: "We are far beyond the stage of rascals."
"A few years ago I would have said to you that we are not the Weimar Republic. But when I look at the [recent] developments, especially in the last five or six years, I have to admit to you that I am seriously worried."
ipj/rt (dpa, AFP)
