Tag: history

AfD in the German Bundestag. Hitler, Hate and Hooligans

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 2.26.2025

The gang of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) Neo-Nazis are the type people The Felon Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance cheered on during the recent German election.

AfD the descendants of The Third Reich

Deutsche Welle continues to report on last Sunday’s German elections.

The far right “Nazi Curious” Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) captured 152 seats in the 630 member Bundestag.

Deutsche Welle found several of the most incendiary AfD members who will now have an outsized influence in formulating German policy; some of which involve hate speech and neo-Nazi activity in a country ravaged by Adolf Hitler during his 12 year reign.

Deutsche Welle 2.26.2025

https://www.dw.com/en/afd-in-the-bundestag-hitler-hate-and-hooligans/g-71754221

Details about each AdF Bundestag member were found on Wikipedia.

MATTHIAS HELFERICH. During his election campaign, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) banned Helferich from holding political office. Helferich had described himself in messages as the “friendly face of the ns [sic],” referring to National Socialism. Helferich also called himself a “democratic Freisler,” referring to a Nazi-era judge. Helferich later said that his statements were meant as parody: “If you are confronted with Nazi accusations as frequently as AfD politicians, you compensate for that in private spheres. You ridicule it.”
MAXIMILLIAN KRAH: is a German lawyer and politician. He has served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019 as a member of right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). In April 2024, Krah gained international attention when the German Prosecutor General arrested his assistant, suspected of spying for China by passing on information about negotiations and decisions in the European Parliament to China’s intelligence service. This and comments Krah made about the Nazi era in a subsequent media interview were seen by observers as having triggered the decision by the European parliamentarian group Identity and Democracy (ID) to exclude the AfD from membership on 23 May 2024. Since then, Krah has sat with the non-attached members.
JAN WENZEL SCHMIDT became member of AfD in 2014. One year later he was co-founder of the rightwing extremist youth organization Junge Alternative (young alternative for Germany) and became their first chairmen. In 2016 he was elected to the Landtag of Saxony Anhalt. He became member of the Bundestag in 2021.
STEPHAN PROTSCHKA became member of the bundestag after the 2017 German federal election. He is a member of the Committee for Food and Agriculture. In 2019 he was involved in controversy after funding and supporting a memorial in Poland honoring German soldiers in WWII and the Nazi paramilitary organization Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. The construction of the memorial was partially initiated by the neo-Nazi organization Junge Nationalisten which is being monitored by the German intelligence services. Polish courts started an investigation against Protschka for supporting Nazism and defamation of victims of the Holocaust. In 2024, Protschka agreed to pay a 12,000 euro fine in exchange for prosecutors dropping charges related to his calling Bavarian state premier Markus Söder “a traitor to the country” and “Södolf” at a political event in 2023.
DARIO SEIFERT a German politician who was elected member of the Bundestag in 2025. From 2012 to 2014, he was a member of the Junge Nationalisten, The youth wing of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
SEBASTIAN MUNZENMAIER. German politician  AfD and a member of the German Bundestag since 2017. Since 2023 he has been deputy parliamentary group leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the BundestagIn July 2017, Münzenmaier and many other people were charged with  grievous bodily harm and attempted theft of fan trophies at the Mainz District Court . In 2012, he was alleged to have been involved in an attack by members of the 1. FC Kaiserslautern ultra and hooligan scene on fans of 1. FSV Mainz 05. This was preceded by a series of insults by Mainz ultras that had been practiced for years to denigrate the Kaiserslautern idol 
Fritz Walter. The masked hooligan group had ambushed and attacked buses of Mainz fans, which also contained children. The Kaiserslautern fans were chased away by the defensive Mainz fans with sticks and bottles. During the scuffle, Mainz fans are said to have suffered lacerations and broken fingers from punches. A representative of the Mainz ultras testified in court that the incident was a typical “beating” among ultras. The press has been critical of the legal investigation . According to Münzenmaier’s defense attorney , the defendant’s apartment was searched immediately after the crime . The police found 
a telescopic baton , a balaclava and “trophy” photos of masked hooligans with opposing fan paraphernalia. Three of Münzenmaier’s co-defendants pleaded guilty at the beginning of the main hearing,  Münzenmaier denied the charges. 
 On 18 October 2017, the district court sentenced him to a suspended prison sentence of six months with a probationary period of three years and a fine of 10,000 euros. Both Münzenmaier and the public prosecutor’s office appealed against the verdict .  In December 2017, the German Bundestag lifted Münzenmaier ‘s immunity to allow the proceedings to continue.  On 17 December 2018 , he was sentenced in the appeal proceedings before the Mainz Regional Court to a fine totaling 16,200 euros.
Elon Musk the AfD Neo-Nazi cheerleader

Top photo: Trump and Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). Kindred souls of Neo-Nazism

The Third Reich of Dreams. Coming to our neighborhood

The Third Reich of Dreams. How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism

SAN FRANCISCO RICHMOND DISTRICT

Lee Heidhues 11.20.2024

After 22 percent of my neighbors (179 allegedly intelligent people) in our precinct voted for Trump I have been thinking hard about what the future will bring on January 20, 2025.

Trump was President in 2019 when I posted a story about “The Third Reich of Dreams: How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism.” Well, terrifyingly here we are again. In America and in my very own neighborhood in a City which likes to think itself “Progressive” and “Tolerant.” I have learned it’s not true.

Street camera for surveillance. Omnipresent in San Francisco 2024

I need not look far. I am surrounded by neighbors with surveillance cameras and high intensity security lights. These insidious tools monitor the comings and goings of everyone and at night pollute the sky. What are these people fearful of in our quiet neighborhood? The families of raccoons who forage in their trash cans?

Perhaps this is why the classic book “The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation” published in 1966 and long out of print is being republished next April.

A warning shot about the dangers of rampant paranoia. Only this time it’s not Nazi Germany. It’s right here on my block.

Excerpted from The New York Review of Books 12.5.2024

Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Weltbühne.In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night.

She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” She did this because “dreams like this should be preserved for posterity,” and she wrote down hundreds before fleeing to New York in 1939. There she worked as a hairdresser for fellow émigrés, sometimes spending time with her friend Hannah Arendt.

In 1966 she finally brought her collection together, arranging the dreams by theme, offering her own light commentary, and bolstering each short chapter with epigraphs from the likes of Kafka and Brecht and Arendt herself. She gave the resulting slim volume a memorable title: The Third Reich of Dreams. The book had some modest success but never penetrated the American consciousness like the work of Arendt, perhaps because Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

by Charlotte Beradt, translated from the German by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail

Princeton University Press, 124 pp., $24.95 (to be published in April 2025)