Proposals from the Far-Right for Germany’s Migrants, and the Resulting Popular Backlash
Large numbers of liberal Germans from diverse backgrounds have taken to the streets and public spaces of over a hundred towns and cities, right across the Fatherland, from the weekend of 20/21 January 2024 onwards. These demonstrations by the ‘silent majority’ were preceded by smaller protests from 11 January onwards. Around 250,000 people turned out across Germany on 20 January for the first round of mass public demonstrations. Between 150,000 and 300,000 people subsequently attended a demonstration in Berlin on 2 February, when demonstrators formed a symbolic human “firewall” around the Reichstag and displayed banners proclaiming such sentiments as “Wir Sind Mehr” (We Are More).
This outpouring of public support for German democracy followed disclosures by investigative journalists about the proceedings of a secret meeting of around two dozen far-right sympathisers at the hotel Landhaus Adlon, just outside the eastern city of Potsdam, on 25 November 2023. On 10 January 2024, the non-profit investigative journalism platform Correctiv reported that three AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) members had met with like-minded far-right extremists, including overt neo-Nazis, at a meeting of the “Düsseldorf Forum” convened by Gernot Mörig, a retired dentist from Düsseldorf. Martin Sellner, leader of the Identitarian Movement (Identitären Bewegung) of Austria, discussed his “re-migration” project, under which as many as two million asylum seekers, migrants with residency rights in Germany, and “non-assimilated” German citizens could be “relocated” to a “model state” in North Africa, under a “voluntary departure incentive system”, designed to divest Austria and Germany of people posing “an economic, criminal, and cultural burden.”
The AfD was founded in February 2013 by academics and economists as an anti-establishment and anti-EU party. The well-intentioned, but somewhat misjudged and unplanned-for, acceptance of around a million first-time asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 under Chancellor Angela Merkel shifted its focus to anti-immigration activity, helping it to win 94 (out of 709) seats in the Bundestag in the 2017 elections and thereby transforming it from a fringe entity to a mainstream political party. This September, it is expected to do well at the regional elections in the eastern German Länder (states) of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.
Germany, along with Austria, was the birthplace of Nazism. By the end of the Second World War, around eight million Germans, or 10 per cent of all Germans, were Nazi Party members. Many millions more were affiliated with Nazi organisations, such as the German Labour Front and the League of German Women. Some scholars, such as Daniel Goldhagen, in his controversial 1996 book ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’, have gone as far as to claim that most ordinary Germans of that era were complicit in their support for Nazism.
Post-war Allied efforts at denazification failed, as there was little appetite among most Germans to engage in the process of confronting their “fellow travellers.” In 1951, a new law enabled the majority of ex-Nazis to seamlessly, and silently, join West Germany’s state administration, judiciary, academia, and healthcare-to mention but a few sectors of society-and to infiltrate the highest echelons of political life. West Germany’s third Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, and fourth President, Walter Scheel, were both ex-Nazi Party members. In the East, meanwhile, Nazi ideology was suppressed under pro-Soviet communist rule.
In the West, the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust was left out of the school curriculum in the early post-war years, while a sense of victimhood led to an official conspiracy of silence regarding past misdemeanours, as well as a reluctance to articulate any collective guilt and shame. An undercurrent of pro-Nazi sentiments persisted, declaring itself periodically in later years by a resurrection of anti-Semitic slogans, arson attacks by skinheads on refugees and asylum seekers, and the appearance of Nazi symbols, such as the swastika, on graffiti in public areas. Thomas Klikauer, author of a book on the AfD that was published in 2020, identifies five waves of right-wing extremism in post-Nazi Germany, centred around Die Sozialistische Reichspartei, or SRP (1949-1952), Die Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD (1964-1969), Die Republikaner, or REP (1983-1994), Deutsche Volksunion, or DVU (1987-2013), which merged with the NPD in 2012, and most recently, the AfD, from 2013 onwards.
Notwithstanding Germany’s Holocaust reparations, denunciations of anti-Semitism, and anti-racist policies, the country provides fertile soil for neo-Nazis, whose rise has been triggered by mass migration and perceptions of a “Great Replacement” of “native” white Germans by people of colour. Germany’s political journey will ultimately be determined by the relative strengths of the ‘silent majority’ and of the neo-Nazis, for whom support is rising, particularly in its economically disadvantaged eastern states. At a time of growing discontent and spreading populist sentiment, anything is possible.
Ashis Banerjee