Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) is a German far-right political party on the rise; it’s characterized by anti-climate, anti-immigration, Islamophobic, and anti-semitic policies. Several of its leaders have used Nazi dog-whistles, visited Nazi sites, and echoed Nazi slogans since its founding in 2013. AfD is currently polling in second place throughout Germany and is expected to perform well in local elections this year and national elections in 2025. The growth of the AfD’s bluntly fascist rhetoric seems to contradict Germany’s “Culture of Remembrance.” The first step to understanding the AfD’s strength — and to preventing its ideology from gaining further support in the US, Germany, and worldwide — is to understand the failures of the German government in economic reconstruction, the historical failure of denazification, and modern political complacency.
Right-wing populist movements like the AfD and the historical Nazi party often gain their greatest support in times of economic anxiety and hardship. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the AfD’s strongest base of support lies in what was once East Germany, where unemployment is markedly higher and income considerably lower than in former West Germany. The German government has failed to sufficiently invest in the former East German economy and help cushion its transition into the national economy, resulting in these economic disparities. The economic conditions in East Germany have created fertile ground for extremist ideology to spread — conditions not too dissimilar from the Great Depression that precipitated the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.
Another major factor in the resurgence of German fascism is the historical failure to suppress and dismantle Nazi ideals in Germany. Of the estimated 200,000 Germans who perpetrated crimes on behalf of the Nazis, a mere 6,656 were convicted. To add perspective, that is a lower figure than the number of Nazi guards at Auschwitz alone. Many of those prison sentences were short to begin with or later reduced, as the West’s pivot to confront communism resulted in a policy of amnesty to Nazis useful in the Cold War. Even leaders like Winston Churchill saw fascism as a lesser evil than communism, proclaiming that Mussolini had “rendered a service to the world” in opposing communism. In fact, while the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was banned in 1956, the openly Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP) continues to operate to this day. Furthermore, many of the businesses that had fed the Nazi war machine, such as Volkswagen and BMW, were allowed to continue with business as usual. As well as failing to punish the Nazis themselves, the West was initially unsuccessful in the ideological denazification of the German public. A majority of West Germans from 1945-1949 described Nazism as a “good idea but badly applied,” and 25 percent of West Germans stated they had a positive idea of Hitler as late as 1952. In the East, Soviet propaganda around the Allied bombings of Dresden has so succeeded in vilifying the United States and its wartime allies that it spawned annual Neo-Nazi rallies. By no coincidence, Dresden is now a stronghold of the AfD and other Islamophobic movements. With true denazification efforts neglected for so long, Neo-Nazism has recently been on the rise.
It is the political complacency of modern Germany, though, that has allowed the AfD to thrive and establish a foothold in the country’s politics. According to Holocaust historian Christoph Kreutzmüller, “[Germany] missed the chance in 1923 to say ‘full stop.’ [There was] a series of lost chances to enforce the rule of law.” We are witnessing something similar now — despite the dangers it poses, the German government has refused to take decisive action and enforce its infamously anti-Nazi laws. Instead, anti-fascists are the ones being sentenced to prison time in cases of political violence. In 2020, Germany was forced to disband one of its special forces units after a “trove of Nazi memorabilia [commemorative artifacts and such] and an extensive arsenal of stolen ammunition and explosives was discovered.” Fascism is making a real resurgence in Germany, and its government is failing to take the action necessary to prevent the fascists from getting what they want.
Germany is failing to stop the spread of Neo-Nazi politics despite its “Culture of Remembrance,” and other countries aren’t faring much better. However, Germany can still rectify its mistakes — and so can we all. After all, it wasn’t the end of German democracy when most West Germans supported Nazism after the Second World War, and this doesn’t have to be either. In the face of government failure, it is up to us — the people of Germany, the United States, and every other nation — to do all we can to defeat fascism, and so that “Never Again” remains a solemn promise and not another failed attempt.
