Germany’s far right in turmoil after its top candidate defends SS

The far-right Alternative for Germany’s lead candidate in EU elections has stopped campaigning and stepped down from the party’s board after a controversial interview with the Financial Times in which he said not all people who served in the SS were criminals.

Maximilian Krah on Wednesday said he had resigned from the AfD’s executive committee and would no longer appear at the party’s campaign events ahead of next month’s vote for the European parliament.

His comments on the SS have prompted the AfD’s French ally, the far-right Rassemblement National, to say it is severing ties with the German populists. The two parties sit in the same group in the EU parliament, Identity and Democracy.

“Enough is enough now: the AfD is just going from one provocation to another,” Marine Le Pen, the RN’s leader, told Europe 1 radio on Wednesday, explaining the party’s decision.

Prior to the SS comments, Krah made headlines after German police arrested one of his staffers, Jian Guo, on suspicion of spying for China.

In his interview with the FT, Krah said of the SS, which ran Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps: “Before I call someone a criminal, I’d really like to know what he did personally.”

He added that many of the 900,000 SS members were “simple farmers who didn’t have another choice”. He also noted Günter Grass, the celebrated German writer, had been a member of the Waffen-SS.

“It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a particularly high proportion of criminals in these units and that on the whole it was the SS that took part in crimes — that is clearly true,” he said. “But I won’t say that [someone] was automatically a criminal because he wore the wrong uniform.”

The SS was declared a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Krah said “objective and nuanced statements of mine have been used as a pretext to damage our party”.

“The last thing we need right now is a debate about me,” he went on. “The AfD must preserve its unity. For this reason I am refraining with immediate effect from further election campaign appearances and resigning as a member of the [AfD’s] executive committee.”

Krah’s move throws the AfD’s European election campaign into disarray. The number 2 on the party’s list, Petr Bystron, is also in trouble: German authorities last week opened a corruption and money-laundering investigation into the MP, who is accused of being part of a covert Russian influence operation ahead of the EU vote.

The RN’s rupture with the AfD marks the culmination of months of tensions between the two parties. In January, Le Pen distanced herself from the German ally after news reports that AfD functionaries had discussed plans for the mass deportation of Germans with immigrant background, including those with German passports.

The RN’s links to the AfD have become increasingly problematic for Le Pen, who spent more than a decade seeking to “detoxify” the image of the party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted of hate speech for denying the Holocaust.

An RN official in Brussels, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a realignment of the groups in the European parliament after the elections was inevitable and predicted the AfD’s radical elements including Krah would leave the party “very isolated”.

“Given the reputation they are building in Europe, the AfD will be untouchable and could even end up getting banned in Germany,” the person said.

The RN official said Le Pen’s appearance in Madrid on Sunday at a conference hosted by far-right Vox and involving other nationalist leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, was a sign of closer ties and what might be possible after the elections.

Following the June 6-9 election, it is possible that the ID group dissolves or that it is reconfigured with different members. The RN is also hoping to overcome fractures between nationalist parties to better influence Brussels, including by moving closer to the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists, currently dominated by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

Asked about a potential tie-up with Meloni’s MEPs, Le Pen suggested change was possible. “There is no war between the groups. There is ongoing debate on how we can overturn the majority in the European parliament.”