While the Weidels’ history is not unique in a country where the Nazi past touches nearly every family, these revelations are relevant given the AfD’s positions on Germany’s efforts to atone for the actions of previous generations.
In 2018, the party’s co-leader Alexander Gauland shocked the country when he minimized the Nazi period as “just bird shit” in a millennium of glorious history. The previous year, Björn Höcke, one of the party’s more extreme figures, described a Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and called for a 180-degree reversal to the country’s approach to remembrance.
Despite its overt radicalism and warnings by authorities that it is an extremist organization, the AfD has surged in popularity. In September, it achieved the most significant electoral win for the far right since WWII, capturing its first regional election victory. Now, with Alice Weidel as its top candidate, the AfD is preparing to push its nationalist agenda in the upcoming federal election.
Military judge
It’s not that Weidel is completely opposed to talking about her family history. She has recounted how it was expelled from what used to be Silesia, now Poland — but she’s remained silent on her grandfather’s prominent role in the Nazi regime.
Through a spokesperson, Weidel said she had no knowledge of her grandfather’s Nazi past. “Due to family discord, there was no contact with the grandfather, who died in 1985, nor was he a topic of conversation in the family,” the spokesperson said.
Weidel was six years old when her grandfather Hans died. Her grandmother, also a member of the Nazi party, passed away two years later.
