The chairman of the Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany's parliament on Saturday doubled down on his assertion that Björn Höcke, the disgraced Thuringia state parliamentarian for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is a "Nazi."
Thomas Oppermann's remark came specifically in response to the AfD state speaker's statements that criticized Germany's commemoration of its Holocaust crimes. However, Höcke and other members of the AfD have also consistently made outrageous statements about refugees and Germans of color.
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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. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."
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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, 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."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andreas Kalbitz
The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach
"For me, Björn Höcke is a Nazi," Oppermann said at Saturday's meeting of the SPD's state delegates in Thuringia. "Someone who wants to resuscitate the ethnic ideology of the National Socialists has no place in a democratic society."
Oppermann said Germany could no longer tolerate discrimination based on gender, religion, national origin or heritage. "Someone who does not observe this ground rule of democracy has no business in the Bundestag," he said.
'A 180-degree reversal'
"These stupid politics of coming to grips with the past cripple us," Höcke told the AfD's youth wing in January. "We need nothing other than a 180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance." Referring to Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he added: "We Germans, that is to say, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital."
After AfD leaders initiated proceedings to expel Höcke from the party, he attempted to backpedal on his statements. Speaking at a Thuringia state meeting of the AfD last week, Höcke said he had made a "mistake" and taken the wrong tone with what is a very serious subject.
The AfD had nicked voters from both the center-right and Oppermann's own center-left SPD, but the German public's taste seems to have turned a bit following Höcke's disparaging of the commemoration of the nation's mass murders. The SPD has now overtaken German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, 32 percent to 31, in polls ahead of September's elections,and the AfD is third, with 11 percent - a number that once would have been unthinkable for a far-right party.
The diverse city of Cologne is bracing for massive protests ahead of the AfD's planned party congress in April. The willingness of the Maritim Hotels group to host the event and other AfD meetings has led to nationwide calls for boycotts.
