A New Nazi Germany?

There are many reasons I care about Germany.

First, my mother was a German Jew who survived the Holocaust but lost much of her family in Hitler’s infamous gas chambers. Second, I lived there for a while as a young man and have returned occasionally to visit. Recently, in fact, I discovered several German relatives I never knew I had. And finally, my children and I have applied for German citizenship under a program serving the descendants of those once forced to flee.

So you can imagine my alarm after seeing a headline screaming that German Jews “fear a throwback” to Nazi Germany. “To me,” one lamented to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “it is a pure Nazi party.”

She was talking about the far-right Alternative for Germany—popularly known as AfD—which had just won 43.8% of the vote in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Which, interestingly, is close to my mother’s hometown of Chemnitz, where the AfD also enjoys wide support.

Then I got another surprise. The party’s leader is an openly gay woman living with her female Sri Lankan-born partner in Switzerland. Whoa, I couldn’t help thinking, that doesn’t sound very Hitleresque to me.

So what’s really going on? What exactly does this up-and-coming party stand for? Turns out it’s fairly simple: strong national sovereignty, strict border control including deportation of illegal immigrants, preservation of German cultural identity, opposition to “gender ideology,” traditional family values, smaller government, law and order, and a socially conservative view of religion including Islam.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before, most recently from Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Which, like the AfD, has frequently been dubbed fascist by its liberal opponents.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you I voted for Trump in 2024. And though he’s done many things I don’t like since then, resurrecting fascism isn’t one of them. At least not yet.

To be fair, given its tortured history, Hitler’s shadow is far more disturbing in Germany than anywhere else. Which probably explains why the AfD inserted language into its 2025 platform disavowing antisemitism. Jewish life in Germany, the party insisted, is most critically threatened by “Israel-hostile Muslims” whose antisemitic insults, attacks, and demonstrations ought to be banned and prosecuted.

Of course, just like Republicans, the AfD has its own brand of fanatics, some of whom have openly promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories, minimized the Holocaust, claimed the SS “were not all criminals,” and described Berlin’s memorial to Jewish victims as a “monument of shame.”

All of which party officials have also disavowed. “I’ve never met a Nazi in our party,” deputy AfD leader Beatrix von Storch told the Wall Street Journal. What Storch has met, she said, are “some idiots who were making stupid remarks or tweets. We are a party of 60,000 members, and you will always find some idiots anywhere.”

For my money, though, the more dangerous idiots are on the other side: members of the far-left Die Linke party, which last week won enough votes in Berlin to leave its candidate, Eliff Eralp, poised to become the city’s mayor. No big deal, of course, except that she’s an avowed socialist who’s publicly described New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—a virulent anti-Zionist and accused anti-Semite—as her “great role model.” And celebrated her victory with known supporters of Palestinian terrorist groups. Not to mention, benefited from a recent campaign concert featuring calls for intifada and chants of “Death to the IDF.”

I’m sorry, but if we must throw around the Nazi label, I believe it fits the radical “pro-Palestine” Islamic, jihadist, Jew-hating mobs and their supporters on the left far more snugly than it does the handful of deluded historical revisionists on the right. The AfD has its problems, German/Jewish author Mirna Funk admits, but Die Linke “is much more anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish.”

Bottom line: if you’re worried about the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany, look to the left, not the right.

(This essay appeared originally in The Manila Times)