02/26/2025February 26, 2025
AfD politicians who played down Nazi past to return to parliament
Having won just over 20% of the vote in Sunday’s federal election, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will have approximately twice as many seats in the country’s new parliament. That means a raft of new faces — but also some controversial old ones.
Among the new additions to the far-right block are Maximilian Krah and Matthias Helferich, two figures whose previous comments on Germany’s Nazi past were too revisionist and too extreme even for the AfD.
Krah, a former lead AfD candidate in European elections, was banned from campaigning by his own party in 2024 after telling an Italian newspaper that “not everyone in the SS” — the Nazi paramilitary organization which was chiefly responsible for carrying out the Holocaust during the Second World War — “was automatically a criminal.”
He was then placed under investigation over “alleged payments” received from Russian and Chinese sources.
Helferich, meanwhile, is on the record as having described himself in WhatsApp messages as “the friendly face of national socialism” and “democratic Freisler” — a reference to Roland Freisler, a senior Nazi lawyer who took part in the 1942 Wannsee Conference at which the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was discussed, leading to the ramping up of the Holocaust.
After meeting his new parliamentary colleagues this week, Helferich told reporters that he wanted to be on the culture select committee in order to carry out “patriotic cultural politics” and encourage “a positive approach to nation and people.”
Sebastian Münzenmaier, vice-chairman of the AfD’s parliamentary grouping and a close ally of party leader Alice Weidel, said: “I consider Matthias [Helferich] a very good speaker. He is intelligent and smart and does good work.”
