THE RECENT GERMAN ELECTIONS

Katja Hoyer is a historian/journalist in Germany who write “Zeitgeist” on Substack, her analysis of German politics. I’ve been reading her this past year, and I think she’s the German Heather Cox Richardson. This analysis of the recent German state elections that saw the far right AfD party make significant gains in the former East Germany is interesting. It’s for sure we Americans won’t get anything this deep in the Corporate Media, which can’t even cover our elections with any intelligence.

Cross-posted from Zeitgeist:

Thuringia was Hitler's stronghold, now it's the AfD's. That doesn't mean it's 1924.

By Katja Hoyer

Last Sunday, a far-right party won a major German election for the first time since the Nazi era. Regional polling in Saxony and Thuringia has sent shockwaves around the globe. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won just under a third of the vote in both states. In Thuringia, that was enough for a comfortable win. 

The idea that a party further to the right than conservatism could ever be popular in Germany again deeply concerns people. I’ve given interviews in the media of half a dozen countries about this since the preliminary results came out on Sunday.

But most of all, it frightens non-AfD voting Germans because many of them feel a nightmarish repeat of history is unfolding in front of their eyes and they have no idea how to stop it.

The temptation is high to equate the AfD with Nazis, citing selected highlights of the chain of events that enabled Adolf Hitler's rise to power. With this warning from history ringing so loud and clear in German ears, people are urged to see that the only way of preventing a repeat of the 1930s and 40s is to keep voting for the moderate parties, regardless of whether they deliver for voters or not.

Lars Klingbeil, co-leader of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, applied this strategy when he called the AfD “Nazis” in a TV debate. When AfD co-leader Alice Weidel asked whether he was referring to her, he said “Yes.”

He’s not alone. The words “fascists” and “Nazis” are bandied around in the political mainstream a lot these days in the hope that they carry some moral weight. Germany’s foremost political magazine Der Spiegel recently ran the title story: “How Fascism Begins. The Secret Hitlers.” Examples included Putin, Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, Modi and the AfD.

Somewhat more subtle approaches have pointed out that it was in Thuringia where in 2024 the AfD achieved its first parliamentary win and where a century earlier, in 1924 the first Nazis were elected as MPs into the regional parliament. Articles on the ‘fateful’ 1924 election circulated in the German media on its centenary in February 2024. 

Of course, there is a lot of sense in studying that election to work out how the Nazis were able to break through, not least because it marks a crucial step on their path to power. In February 1924, Hitler sat in prison awaiting the verdict of the trial for his violent attempt to seize power during the Munich Putsch the previous November.

He would be convicted of High Treason in April and given a five-year sentence and a fine – nothing more than a slap on the wrist from a sympathetic judiciary. Hitler only served 264 days of his prison sentence and under very comfortable conditions that allowed him to write his book Mein Kampf and to direct political activity from his cell. 

Nonetheless, the Nazi Party was banned across Germany. So how could some of Hitler’s disciples stand for election for the Thuringian parliament in February 1924? The answer is important for anyone who favours an AfD ban now: Hitler’s men didn’t stand as Nazi Party members. You can ban a party but it’s far more difficult to ban people. These early Nazis stood as independent candidates or under a list with a new name. That’s what happened in Thuringia and seven of them got elected as MPs. Their influence was to succeed their number by far.

In an effort to secure political stability, a huge block of parties and interest groups (basically everyone not in the SPD or the KPD – the communist party) had merged into the so-called Ordnungsbund (“Alliance of Order”) for this election. This block gained nearly half the vote. Nearly. Having reached 48 percent, they got 35 seats but 37 were needed for a majority. As they explicitly forged this huge alliance to keep the socialists and communists out of government, they wouldn’t now work with them. 

So the Ordnungsbund turned to the seven far-right extremists who demanded nothing less than the legalisation of the Nazi Party in Thuringia in exchange for their cooperation. In order to be able to govern, the Ordnungsbund agreed to that and much more such as lifting a speaking ban on Hitler when he was released and the dismissal of all Jews from the government and public appointments.

Thuringia became a haven for Hitler when he got out of prison. Its capital Weimar became a crucial power base. Thuringia had the first ruling coalition that involved the Nazi Party from 1930. The rest is history. 

Of course, you can draw a lot of parallels to today. Thuringia was a Nazi stronghold and has now become an AfD stronghold. There was inflation then and unstable coalition governments. The list of similarities is long.

But there are also crucial differences. Even as early as 1924, the Nazis were banking on the threat of violence to help them into power. Hitler’s brownshirts, the SA, already numbered around 2,000 men in 1923. They were trained in military techniques, armed and uniformed. Many members were war veterans and had no compunction about killing people. By 1934, when Hitler was consolidating his power, they numbered 4 million. The myth that Hitler acquired near-total power through elections alone has long been debunked by historians.

This is just one of many reasons why 2024 isn’t 1924. Neither the hyperinflation of 1923 nor the devastating depression that followed the Wall Street Crash is comparable to the strains caused by inflation and the rising costs of living today. The Covid pandemic wasn’t the Spanish Flu that circulated after the Great War alongside other horrific outbreaks of mostly respiratory diseases.

Germany today isn’t buried under a mountain of debt, defeat, humiliation and resentment. Its people haven’t lost a generation of young men in battle. Rents and house prices may be expensive but the housing crisis of the 1920s was on a different scale. Most important of all: the last, all-destroying world war is barely in living memory now when people in 1924 were all affected by the First World War. The list could go on, but you get the picture. 

The fact that the AfD chapters in Thuringia and Saxony have been classified as “definitely far-right extremist” by Germany’s domestic intelligence is often used as a counterargument by people who feel calling the AfD “Nazis” is justified. Also, Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD in Thuringia has been found guilty of using the SA slogan "Everything for Germany!" at an election rally. He has since deliberately alluded to it whenever there is an opportunity. His election manifesto was entitled “Everything for Thuringia”, for instance. In 2019, a court ruled that he could legally be called a “fascist” because there was a “verifiable factual basis” for that.

Few people would doubt that Höcke stands at the far-right end of a far-right party. He is controversial within the AfD itself for exactly that reason. But does that make him a “secret Hitler”? As far as I can tell, he hasn’t got an army of armed, fanatical followers with combat experience, intimidating voters at polling stations and murdering political opponents. He hasn’t got charisma either. His popularity rating in Thuringia is far lower than that of his party. He may be an extremist but he’s no Führer.

All of this leads me to conclude that using words like “fascist” or “Nazi” to describe the AfD or their voters is neither historically accurate nor particularly insightful. The AfD is not the Nazi Party. Höcke isn’t Hitler. 1924 isn’t 2024. The sooner moderate politicians acknowledge that the sooner they can come up with a strategy to address their electoral predicament.

Centrists shouldn’t think of this as a battle against the AfD but for their voters. They should focus on who voted for the AfD and why. Currently, that’s around a third of young voters in Saxony and Thuringia, for instance. To write them off as “Nazis” now strikes me as electoral self-harm for decades to come. Why would anyone return to a party that tells them outright it considers them akin to the people who launched the biggest war the world has ever seen, committed unspeakable war crimes and saw to it that 6 million Jews were murdered? The word “Nazi” should never be used lightly.

Centrists can’t just point to voters and ask them not to repeat the mistakes of the 1920s snd 30s while doing nothing to make their own programmes and personnel more attractive. Offering a new approach to things people worry about — above all migration — entails tackling sensitive, maybe uncomfortable issues, but it can be done in a constructive manner and without sliding into populism. As a historian, I don’t say this lightly, but the reasons for the rise of the AfD lie in the present, not in the past.

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