German Right-Wing Party Leader: We Should Stop Feeling Guilty About Nazi Past
Adolf Hitler records a speech. Image by getty images
(JTA) — The head of Germany’s right-populist Alternative for Germany party has said it is high time Germany stopped feeling guilty about its Nazi past.
Alexander Gauland, speaking earlier this month with members of the party’s national-conservative branch in the former east German state of Thuringia, said Germans “don’t have to be held accountable any more for those 12 years [of the Nazi regime]. They don’t affect our identity today any longer. And we’re not afraid to say so.”
Gauland added that if the French and British were “rightly proud” of their 20th century military history, “we have the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”
The party now has legislators in 13 out of Germany’s 16 states, and is trying for seats in the national Bundestag in German’s Sept. 24 elections. With its anti-immigrant, anti-Europe platform the party has racked up more electoral successes than any other right-wing party in recent memory.
The comments unleashed a storm of criticism from mainstream parties, on the eve of Germany’s national election.
“I can’t possibly imagine how one can be even the slightest bit proud of millions of dead, barbaric war crimes and the destruction of Europe,” Thomas Oppermann, head of the Bundestag faction of the Social Democratic Party, told the Zeit newspaper.
Green Party legislator Volker Beck added he thought Gauland’s statements were becoming “increasingly disgusting.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
