‘We speak the uncomfortable truth, but German thought police are silencing us'

Telegraph

24-05-2025

It was supposed to be the killer blow to a party which has stalked the nightmares of Germany's political elite: a bombshell intelligence report with proof that Alternative for Germany [AfD] was a Nazi-style extremist group.
Running to more than a thousand pages, the report by Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency announced that the AfD was a 'confirmed Right-wing extremist organisation', opening the door to a total ban on the party.
But instead of turning the AfD into a pariah, the report has triggered a furious row over the rise of censorship in Germany, and damaged relations between its new government and the Trump administration.
The 'Right-wing extremist' label is particularly explosive as the AfD came second place in February's elections, making it the de-facto opposition party in Germany. The new classification will also permit the BfV to intercept the party's phone calls and plant undercover agents.
The Trump administration, which has already warned that a crackdown on free speech is under way in Europe, cried foul when the findings of the report were disclosed earlier this month.
AfD leaders also claim it is an attempt to silence a party which could potentially defeat Germany's ruling centrist parties in the next election and form a government.
Drawing on hundreds of statements, speeches and social media posts by AfD members over the past decade, the BfV's report accuses the party of holding views on immigrants that would not be out of place in the Third Reich.
It is the culmination of a years-long process where the BfV has gradually upgraded the AfD's security status, from having 'suspected extremist' factions in some regions of Germany, to being a 'confirmed extremist' group nationwide.
To back up its new status for the AfD, the BfV cites party members who have used Nazi slogans in speeches, have referred to non-native citizens as 'passport Germans', and have claimed that violent immigrants are waging 'jihad' on the country. One much more lurid example cites an AfD youth wing which distributed stickers claiming that Muslims were an 'invasive species.'
But the BfV's actions have also raised questions about the state of free speech in Germany, which is struggling with unprecedented anger over mass-migration, as well as tensions linked to wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Speaking to The Telegraph this week, Martin Hess, a senior AfD MP, warned that the German state was trying to punish the AfD for speaking 'uncomfortable truths' about mass migration, which he said were also held by '60 to 70 per cent' of the population.
The tactic amounted to the German intelligence services acting as a modern-day 'gedankenpolizei,' he said, using the German phrase for the Orwellian term 'thought police.'
'I'm grateful the report has been made public, so that every citizen can read for themselves how you can be labelled Right-wing extremist for presenting the facts, which is what the AfD does,' Mr Hess, a former police officer and party spokesman for interior affairs, told The Telegraph.
'We speak uncomfortable truths, that migration has led to a massive deterioration in the security situation for Germany, and that migration, since 2015, has made Germany more unsafe than ever before in its history,' he added.
The BfV's report has deeply irritated the Trump administration, members of which backed the AfD in the February elections and has repeatedly expressed concerns about the erosion of free speech in Europe – with particular emphasis on Germany and the UK.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the BfV's conduct ' tyranny in disguise ', while JD Vance, the US vice-president, accused the German 'establishment' of 'rebuilding' the Berlin wall by demonising the AfD.
It comes after Mr Vance snubbed a meeting in February with Olaf Scholz, the then-chancellor of Germany, at the Munich Security Conference, instead holding a meeting with Alice Weidel, the AfD leader.
As the meeting was held just days before the German elections, it was viewed as the US in effect endorsing Ms Weidel as the country's next Chancellor.
Germans are no strangers to having their language tightly controlled by the state, which is partly a legacy of postwar censorship rules aimed at preventing the return of a new fascist regime.
All symbols and signs associated with Nazi Germany are banned, while playing down the scale and severity of Nazi war crimes is a criminal offence.
But there are other examples which may seem excessive to British and US eyes: Rudely addressing a German policeman with the informal pronoun 'du' [you] carries a fine of €600 (£500). Making rude gestures, such as giving someone the middle finger, can lead to a fine of potentially thousands of euros.
In one recent bizarre case, police raided a Bavarian man's house after he called former Robert Habeck, the former vice-chancellor, a 'schwachkopf' [moron] in a post on social media.
But the BfV's new report is a step too far for the AfD, which says that censorship laws designed to block the return of Nazism are now being misused against critics of immigration policy.
Mr Hess also suggested that the BfV drew up its report under pressure from Germany's ruling centrist parties, which are concerned that the AfD could emerge from the next general election as the largest party.
'The Verfassungsschutz [BfV] is currently being abused by those in power. It is a fact that the Verfassungsschutz is subject to the administrative and technical supervision of the interior ministry,' he said. 'It is therefore a fact that the Verfassungsschutz is bound to its instructions, and it's a fact that the Verfassungsschutz is led by so-called political officials.'
Immigration views prove key
Extracts of the BfV's controversial report, leaked to the German tabloid Bild, show that the AfD's views on immigrants were a key factor in its decision to declare the party a 'confirmed Right-wing extremist organisation.'
But there were other factors: the party's track record of playing down Nazi war crimes, its uses of anti-Semitic 'ciphers and innuendo', and its links to the extreme-Right Identitarian movement in Europe.
The report also accuses the AfD of violating Germany's postwar constitution, by drawing a distinction between native Germans and 'passport Germans,' meaning citizens of foreign origin.
A key piece of evidence for this was a statement by Hans-Christoph Berndt, an AfD leader in Brandenburg state, that only ' 20, 30, 40 million Germans' were left in the country. The BfV interpreted the statement to mean that the remainder of Germany's citizens were not true Germans.
BfV officials also included statements from Ms Weidel, such as her claim that 'cultural circles in Africa and the Middle East' were the cause of a surge in violent crime in Germany. Another remark labelled extremist by the BfV was Ms Weidel's view that violent migrants were waging a 'religious war' on Germany.
The AfD denies such remarks are extremist as they refer to specific violent crimes committed in Germany by migrants, rather than migrants in general.
Germany was hit by a string of terror attacks committed by rejected asylum seekers in the run-up to the February federal elections. In one of the most serious attacks, a rejected Syrian asylum seeker went on a stabbing rampage in a west German city's 'festival of diversity', killing three people.
Mr Hess was speaking to the Telegraph three months after the AfD won 20 per cent of the vote in the federal elections, making the party the de-facto opposition in Germany.
The party was frozen out of coalition talks by the centre-Right Christian Democrats and centre-Left Social Democrats, as both believe that the AfD is too extreme to govern.
The election result was a major coup for the AfD, which started in 2013 as an obscure Eurosceptic movement but has since shifted ever further to the Right, largely in response to the 2015 refugee crisis.
In the same interview, Mr Hess endorsed a German 'Dexit,' or exit from the European Union, and the deployment of the army at land borders to deter mass migration.
He said that Dexit remained a long-term goal for the party, but stressed it was opposed to a British-style 'hard break' as it would cause significant turmoil to the German economy.
'We would send all available [border police] forces to the border, and if that does not suffice there is the possibility to temporarily resort to state police forces, and if that also does not suffice, we would temporarily deploy the armed forces,' Mr Hess added, addressing migration.
Experts note that the rate of asylum seekers coming to Germany has decreased by 30 per cent, but the issue remains extremely sensitive due to the string of terror attacks committed by asylum seekers in the run-up to the elections.
As for the censorship row, there are some signs that the BfV may be hesitating to go forward with its new 'extremist' label for the AfD. After its initial announcement, the BfV said it was pausing the process of formally designating the AfD as extremist, awaiting a court ruling by the administrative court in Cologne.
German officials say this was a purely routine procedure, and that the extremist ruling will still be issued. But Ms Weidel has already claimed a victory over the German establishment.
'This is a first important step toward our exoneration and toward countering the accusation of Right-wing extremism,' she said, in a joint statement with Tino Chrupalla, the party's co-leader.