The
far-right leader pushing Germans to forget the Nazi past
Hans-Thomas
Tillschneider could soon wield more power than any other far-right figure in
Germany’s postwar history to turn his radical ideas into reality.
By JAMES
ANGELOS
in Querfurt, Germany
Illustration
by David Szakaly for POLITICO
September
3, 2026 4:01 am CET
The man
leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow
Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.
Hans-Thomas
Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany
(AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little
known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position
to help realize one of the greatest ambitions of the party’s most extreme
faction: remaking his country’s postwar identity and steering Germans toward
leaving behind the Nazi past.
That
history “remains present in a peculiar way — yes, like a zombie,” Tillschneider
told POLITICO in July on the sidelines of an AfD conference in the eastern city
of Magdeburg. “It’s an undead entity. And that is not normal. That is not
good.”
Germany’s
much-vaunted Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, is
central to its self-conception — and long served as an existential imperative.
Though halting, West Germany’s reckoning with Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in
the decades after the end of World War II served to help restore the country’s
standing among democratic nations, making possible its membership in Western
alliances. The country’s constitution was shaped in repudiation of Nazism, with
safeguards intended to prevent its resurgence.
But for
the AfD’s most extreme leaders — many now concentrated in rural areas of the
former East Germany — the culture of remembrance has merely perpetuated what
some, including Tillschneider, call a “guilt cult” designed to instill self-loathing in the
German Volk, a term for “people” which is imbued with
near-mystical significance on the far right. Without openly denying Nazi
crimes, they argue the cultural and political reckoning with them has damaged
the Volk’s identity, leaving Germans weak, atomized, and
vulnerable to “globalist” forces such as the EU and the U.S., long viewed by
the far-right as a corrosive force due to the homogenizing influence of its
individualist, consumerist culture — at least until U.S. President Donald
Trump’s arrival.
Tillschneider’s
ideas aren’t new. The backlash against Germany’s culture of remembrance is as
old as the effort to reckon with the past itself. But as the intellectual
architect of the party’s blueprint for governing in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of a
Sept. 6 election in the state — where the AfD is so far ahead in the
polls it’s within striking distance of an outright majority in
parliament — he could soon wield more tangible power than any other far-right
figure in Germany’s postwar history to turn those ideas into reality.
Tillschneider, currently the AfD’s spokesperson for culture and education
policy in the state parliament, is a leading candidate to become the head of a
future ministry that would oversee school curricula and cultural funding in the
state.
“We want
to spread the joy of being German,” Tillschneider said at a pre-election AfD
“family fest” on an overcast August afternoon in Querfurt, a small medieval
fortress city in his Saxony-Anhalt constituency. “It’s a celebration. Celebrate
the fact that you’re German.”
This did
not mean, he added, that the AfD would eliminate school lessons on Nazi crimes.
Rather, it would “shift the emphasis,” he said, so the Nazi past loses its
contemporary urgency.
“Of
course, I’d also like to see history classes on the Third Reich,” he said, “But
good history classes. Good history classes convey a sense of the otherness of
the past.”
‘More
Bismarck, less Hitler’
In some
ways, Tillschneider, a bearded, bespectacled former university lecturer, seems
an unlikely figure to advance the revolution in German identity the far-right
has long sought.
Born in
Romania during the Cold War, Tillschneider grew up in a German-speaking
minority community whose roots in the region stretched back to Habsburg rule.
His family moved to West Germany when he was still a child. At university, he
became interested in Islamic studies, drawn — as he now explains it — to the
subject because it was foreign and unfamiliar. He later studied in Syria before
earning a doctorate and publishing a book on “the origins of legal hermeneutics
in early Islam.”
After
moving to eastern Germany in subsequent years, Tillschneider came to depict
Islam as fundamentally incompatible with German society and became a prominent
figure in the so-called “New Right,” a network of radical intellectuals known
for recasting old, extremist ideas in more culturally palatable terms. He also
became associated with an extreme faction within the AfD called Der
Flügel (“the Wing”) alongside Thuringian politician Björn Höcke, who
drew widespread condemnation in 2017 for calling Berlin’s prominent Holocaust
memorial, located near the Brandenburg Gate, a “monument of shame” and
demanding a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s memory politics. Der Flügel was
dissolved in 2020, but its members, including Tillschneider, have only grown
more influential in the party since then.
Tillschneider
was the main author of the AfD’s program for how it will wield power in
Saxony-Anhalt. At the root are myriad measures aimed at “stabilizing” German
identity by redirecting cultural funding and revising school curricula, over
which states have primary authority. Tillschneider has announced plans for
changing history lessons so that they are oriented toward “more Bismarck, less
Hitler,” — controversial phrasing that has recently been removed from the
governing manifesto. The party’s program also proposes cutting funding for
“anti-German art” and developing a “patriotic tourism” strategy for the state.
Party
leaders say they don’t intend to eradicate memorials to Nazi crimes but will
fund and restore those that “honor the sacrifices of soldiers” in both world
wars. “This support should benefit all monuments equally, without petty
political judgments,” the program reads. “Fallen soldiers gave their lives to
defend their country. Recognizing and honoring this great sacrifice is a first
sign of a patriotic turnaround.”
It’s
perhaps no coincidence that such a revolution in German identity would take
root in the former East Germany, where the AfD is ascendant. While West Germany
was attempting to undertake a confrontation with the past, imperfect as it was,
the state narrative in the former East Germany was that its people had
vanquished fascism, which in any case was a product of the West. Many of the
AfD’s supporters in the East believe a West German narrative about the Nazi
past was imposed on them after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But for
Tillschneider, there’s another reason the revolution will begin in the East —
because eastern Germans already know what it means to see a political regime
collapse.
“As a
result of the peaceful revolution, people have witnessed a change in systems
and, as a result, have gained some distance, are more reflective,” he said at
the AfD family festival, speaking in a breathless torrent. By contrast, he
added, western Germans “have been stewing in the same soup for 80 years.”
‘Love for
the homeland is not a crime’
As
attendees queued for beer and free bratwurst at the AfD family festival — held
on an arid field on the outskirts of Querfurt, beside an agricultural-machinery
plant — Tillschneider took the stage before an “Our Country First” placard and
declared that they had ample reason to celebrate: the establishment parties, he
said, were nearing their demise.
“We’re
celebrating the fact that the policies that are directed against us — which
take away our freedom, which strip us of our autonomy, which impoverish us —
will come to an end,” he yelled, his booming voice saturating the speakers. “On
Sept. 6, for the first time, we have a realistic chance — and this isn’t just
campaign rhetoric — a realistic chance to end this nightmare, to put an end to
this horror!”
Ulrich
Siegmund, the AfD’s top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt and its potential future
premier, then took to the stage to a rock-star reception. Charismatic and very popular online, his quick smile belies
the radical politics of the state branch of his party, which domestic
intelligence authorities have classified as an extremist organization seeking
“to abolish parliamentary democracy in its current form.” AfD politicians in
the state, including Siegmund and Tillschneider, deny being extremists,
portraying the label as state repression that undermines the democratic will of
their supporters.
If
Siegmund is the face of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, Tillschneider supplies much
of the brains. Siegmund alluded to this during his speech, thanking
Tillschneider for spending “hundreds of hours” on the party’s governing
manifesto.
“I’ll
need him over the next five years because we’re making history together,”
Siegmund said of Tillschneider. “The sun rises in the east, but it will shine
over all of Germany!”
As people
waited in line for hours to get Siegmund’s autograph, Tillschneider darted
frantically from tent to tent, making sure things were running smoothly. “Don’t
sell them for less than €10!” he shouted to a group of volunteers as he handed
them a box of tote bags emblazoned with Siegmund’s face.
One of
those volunteers, Gesine Sauer, a 48-year-old social worker from the area, said
she agreed with Tillschneider’s ideas about making Germans proud of their
history.
“People
always focus on just a very small part of German history — and that has nothing
to do with anyone trying to deny it, or trying to dismiss it — but German
history is so much more than that,” she said. “And time and again, from all
sides, we’re being forced to grapple with this question of guilt. That’s wrong,
and it’s not a positive development. Instead, we should reflect on what we were
once capable of achieving,” she added, going on to list German historical
accomplishments in medicine and industry.
Others
put it more simply. “I’d say that was all 90 years ago, and at some point we
should just let the past be the past,” said one woman in her 60s wearing a
bracelet in the colors of the German flag.
“With us,
if you say you love your homeland, you’re stamped as a Nazi,” said one man, a
51-year-old railroad track worker, as he waited in the long line for beer
wearing a shirt that read “Love for the homeland is not a crime.”
Most
attendees, however, cited other reasons for voting for the AfD: economic and
industrial decline; refugees receiving state support while Germans struggled to
pay their bills; the government’s refusal to accept cheap Russian natural gas
while sending billions in federal aid to Ukraine.
For
Tillschneider and his fellow far-right ideologues, these more tangible issues
are all connected to the crisis of German identity: the country’s reluctance to
pursue its own interests, they argue, stems from an “anti-German” strain of
thinking within the country.
“That’s
why we have policies that are self-destructive in every area — because we have
a cracked identity,” Tillschneider said from underneath a tent at the festival.
He
rattled off ideas for repairing the German soul: a “pride month” celebrating
German cultural heritage and a festival of German music — not “Baroque music or
European music,” he clarified, but “German music.”
He denied
the goal was to make Germans forget the Nazi past. Yet he went on to describe a
process that seemed to amount to just that.
The goal,
he said, was for this history to “no longer be so urgent, no longer so
intrusive, no longer so present.”
He added:
“Just because something is no longer present doesn’t mean it will be
forgotten.”
Nette
Nöstlinger contributed reporting.
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