The
former neo-Nazi activists behind Germany’s rising far-right star
Four
former members of a banned organization modeled on the Hitler Youth are part of
the inner circle of the man who could become the AfD’s first state premier.
By NICHOLAS
POTTER
and FREDERIK SCHINDLER
in Berlin
Illustration
by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO
August
27, 2026 8:31 am CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/former-neo-nazi-activists-germany-far-right-ulrich-siegmund/
A generation after Germany banned a
neo-Nazi youth organization for seeking to cultivate a new extremist elite,
four of its former members now hold influential roles around the politician who
is on track to become the country’s first far-right state premier since the
Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949.
The four
men are staffers close to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right Alternative for
Germany (AfD) party’s candidate for premier in Saxony-Anhalt, where voters go
to the polls on Sept. 6. Two of them are among his closest advisers and two of
them helped draft the party’s election manifesto.
All four
were involved with the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, or HDJ, a group modeled in
part on the Hitler Youth and banned by the German government in 2009, according
to an investigation by WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer
Global Network. The ban order said the group’s aim was to train a “neo-Nazi
elite” steeped in National Socialist ideology.
The AfD’s
rules list the HDJ — the name roughly translates to Homeland-Loyal German Youth
— among organizations whose former members are barred from joining the
party.
The
federal government’s ban order, obtained by WELT, cited the group’s “affinity
with National Socialism” and concluded: “The actual objective of the
association is the training of a neo-Nazi elite.” The group, it said, saw
itself as standing “in the tradition of the Hitler Youth.”
Germany’s
Federal Administrative Court upheld the ban in 2010. The HDJ, the court wrote,
“is wedded to the blood-and-soil ideology and the racial doctrine of the
National Socialists and disseminates antisemitic ideas.” It “adopts an overall
militantly aggressive stance” towards the free, democratic order.
All four
men have resisted treating their HDJ pasts as disqualifying, either minimizing
their involvement or declining to comment on it.
Siegmund,
who is expected to win next week’s election comfortably, has declined to
distance himself from any of them.
“These
are outstanding people,” he told WELT. “They have a spotless record. I’m not
interested in what happened 20 or 25 years ago.” He added he would focus on
“entirely different problems in this country.”
The
spokesman
One of
the men, Patrick Harr, 44, is the AfD’s spokesman in Saxony-Anhalt and
executive director of its caucus in the state legislature. Internally, he is
being floated as the head of the State Chancellery — effectively the governor’s
chief of staff — in an AfD government. He served on a working group, chaired by
the party’s state deputy leader, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, set up in June 2025
to draft this year’s governing manifesto.
That
manifesto calls for confining the children of asylum-seekers and refugees to
“special classes” with curricula based on their home countries’ schooling,
ideally taught by refugees themselves. The stated aim is to signal to the
children that “their stay in Germany is only temporary” and to spare “our
children” from the “manifold burdens” of being taught alongside classmates from
“completely foreign cultures.”
Ulrich Siegmund debates with Sven Schulze, Saxony-Anhalt’s
premier and CDU main candidate, on Aug. 26, 2026. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via
Getty Images
It also
asserts that children with disabilities “paralyze the progress of instruction.”
And it describes Germany’s decades-long reckoning with the Nazi past as the
“perpetuation of a neurosis” and homosexuality as a “sexual deviation and
non-reproductive way of life.”
Siegmund
himself rarely says such things out loud. His campaign runs on good-humored
populism, and he is careful in interviews. “The atrocities of National
Socialism,” he has said, are “beyond doubt among the darkest chapters of German
history.”
On Oct.
3, 2002, Harr was elected unanimously to lead the HDJ’s “procurement
department,” according to minutes of the group’s national youth congress
reviewed by WELT. The minutes suggest he had already been working for the
department and reported on his previous activities within it. For the following
year, the group’s members were offered trips “on which we will get to know the
land and the people in the territories severed from the Reich,” meaning
locations in neighboring countries that Germany lost after World War II.
WELT
raised the HDJ history of the staffers with Siegmund and Harr last September,
during an off-the-record briefing with other reporters that cannot be quoted
from. Siegmund later told the Berliner Zeitung, a daily newspaper,
that Harr said in the briefing that he left the group “around 2003” and that
the job amounted to rounding up tents and crockery for youth camps. Siegmund
said he would not disavow anyone for having “been at a tent camp ages ago.”
Asked by
WELT on Tuesday how he now regards his time in the HDJ, Harr said simply: “I am
at peace with it.”
The
lawyer
Another
former HDJ member in Siegmund’s orbit is Laurens Nothdurft, general counsel to
the AfD caucus and a member of the state party’s arbitration court, which deals
with internal disputes.
Tino
Chrupalla, the AfD’s national co-chairman, told the German public broadcaster ARD on Sunday that Nothdurft had
distanced himself from the HDJ and called the episode a “youthful
indiscretion.” Asked days later by the public broadcaster MDR whether his views had changed,
Nothdurft said: “I have nothing to reproach myself for.”
Born in
1981, Nothdurft was a fixture of the organization for the better part of a
decade. Meeting minutes show he was elected the HDJ’s deputy national leader in
1999 for a three-year term. Brandenburg state’s 2002 domestic intelligence
report also describes him as an activist of the neo-Nazi National Democratic
Party.
In 2003,
Nothdurft presented the HDJ’s “golden badge of honor” to Lisbeth Grolitsch, a
former regional officer of the Nazi-era League of German Girls who went on to
help found neo-Nazi groups. Writing afterward in the HDJ magazine Funkenflug,
Nothdurft said Grolitsch was “immensely” pleased that the group’s youth work
remained “still committed to the same ideals.” He added: “We young people must
strive all the more to occupy decisive positions in school, training,
university and career, with ambition and perseverance.”
An
internal document from November 2005, seen by WELT, records Nothdurft’s
reelection as deputy national leader of the HDJ for three more years — through
2008, when he was 27.
None of
this slowed his rise within the AfD. Despite the party’s ban on former HDJ
members, he joined the AfD, worked for its caucus in Baden-Württemberg in 2018
and then in Bavaria. In 2024, he was elected mayor of the district of Roßlau in
Saxony-Anhalt. A practicing attorney, he represented Siegmund that same year
before the state constitutional court in a challenge to a parliamentary
disciplinary measure after Siegmund insulted a member of the Left Party.
An election poster featuring Siegmund damaged with a graffiti
in Magdeburg, eastern Germany on Sept. 6, 2026. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty
Images
Reporting
this year by taz, a German left-leaning daily, found that several of
Nothdurft’s children have attended gatherings of Jungadler, an ethnonationalist
youth group that authorities are examining as a possible successor to the HDJ.
Through a lawyer, Nothdurft told the paper he is not in contact with the
Jungadler and denies any knowledge of HDJ successor organizations. He did not
respond to a request for comment by WELT via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in
Saxony-Anhalt.
Andrea
Röpke, a political scientist who has written on the HDJ’s methods of raising
children and on far-right violence, told WELT the aim of such groups is
generational. “Ethnonationalist youth leagues like the Heimattreue Deutsche
Jugend [HDJ] or the Jungadler aim from the very outset at having the next
generation from their own ranks one day belong to the political elite,” she
said. “They have learned conspiratorial solidarity, absolute loyalty, and
thinking in terms of political enemies from an early age.”
The
author
Eric
Kaden, born in 1976, has been an AfD policy adviser on education, culture, and
science since 2022. In 2005 he devoted an essay in the HDJ magazine Funkenflug
to Kurt Eggers, a Nazi cultural functionary and Waffen-SS member, calling him
an “unwavering champion of the German cultural revolution” who fell on the
Eastern Front “in the greater German struggle for freedom.”
In an
internal document of Germany’s domestic intelligence service from 2008 seen by
WELT, Kaden, who was 32 at the time, is referred to as the owner of an HDJ post
office box. In the same year, he was swept up, along with Nothdurft, in
nationwide police raids on HDJ activists that preceded the group’s ban.
By then
he had published a book-length biography of Eggers while working for the
neo-Nazi National Democratic Party caucus in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
legislature. The state’s domestic intelligence office wrote in January 2009
that the book “lacks any critical distance from the Third Reich” and that
“racial struggle and national-revolutionary ideas are described as exemplary.”
Later
that year, Germany’s Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors placed
the book on its restricted index. “The content is an homage to National
Socialism in all its facets,” the decision, obtained by WELT, states. “The
depictions are marked by a violence-affirming antisemitism, the glorification
of Adolf Hitler, a positive assessment of the Nazi racial doctrine, and the
totalitarian imposition of one’s own interests on one’s fellow human beings.”
Eggers’ violent antisemitism, it found, appears “often in a positive light,”
and the book has a brutalizing effect that incites violence.
Kaden’s
doctoral dissertation was published in 2018 by a far-right publishing house
whose catalog is dominated by National Socialist and neo-Nazi titles. His ties
to old comrades appear to have held: His 2022 book about Adolf Hitler’s chief
pilot was published by Dankwart Strauch, another former HDJ activist.
Oliver
Kirchner, the AfD’s caucus leader in Saxony-Anhalt, told MDR through a lawyer
at the time that Kaden’s record was “impeccable,” and that security agencies
had “examined and confirmed” as much.
Kaden did
not respond to a request for comment via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in
Saxony-Anhalt.
The
adviser
Nothdurft’s
brother, Felix W., belonged to the HDJ from 1999 to 2004 and became head of its
“homeland-loyal equipment and camp technology” department in April 2003,
documents show. WELT has granted him anonymity because, under German privacy
laws, he is a private individual who has not sought public attention.
He now
handles federal and European affairs, media and culture for the AfD’s
parliamentary faction in Saxony-Anhalt and also sat on the 2025 group that
drafted the governing manifesto. He did not respond to a request for comment
via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in Saxony-Anhalt.
Nicholas
Potter is chief reporter at WELT. Frederik Schindler is political editor at
WELT.
The
Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s
newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion
pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO,
Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories
for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online,
print, TV and audio.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário