BERLIN — When a normal person is accused of being a Nazi, how do they respond? And how should they?
This is a dilemma facing millions of German voters who want their government to jettison its liberal politics in the face of illegal immigration, violent crime, and a struggling economy.
Berlin is a city in a nearly hysterical hunt for secret Nazis believed to be lurking in the shadows. Graffiti, street stickers, and paintings dot the streets, suggesting that millions of Berliners bike through an invisible Fourth Reich that is rising all around them.
The primary target of this left-wing hysteria is the Alternative for Germany, a right-wing party that just took second place in the Feb. 23 parliamentary elections.
AfD doubled its support, rising from 10.4% in 2021 to 20.8% in 2025.
The Washington Examiner followed the Berlin-Pankow chapter of the AfD in the days up to election night as the once-outsider party became the defining movement in German politics.
Ronald Gläser, a state representative in Berlin, spearheaded AfD’s efforts in the Pankow area as he ran for a higher position in the Bundestag, the nation’s federal parliament.
“This is very good,” the candidate told the Washington Examiner about gains in the polls. “We are like a surfer on the high of the wave.”
Gläser and his fellow AfD supporters were in good spirits as they distributed pamphlets outside a local train station. Some passersby smiled, gave thumbs-up, or offered a word of support. Others passed with visible scorn.
A middle-aged woman named Heike Meyer stood at the AfD table beside Gläser with a beaming smile. She complained about her area’s decline in quality of life, saying green energy policies make it too expensive to heat their homes.
But the defining issue is mass immigration, which polls show many citizens think is destroying the country.
“Overall, illegal immigration is the most important topic to all our people. You can’t go out at night. You can’t feel safe here anymore. You have to pay much more money for the welfare state. People don’t feel secure,” Gläser said. “In this district, we have 18 places where refugees are brought, and they live there — more than 8,000 people. This puts a burden on everyone’s life.”
Also handing out flyers was Frank Behnke, a 59-year-old who was a Green Party member in his youth.
“I was not interested in politics at all. Then I married an Arabic woman from Lebanon, and I had two kids and was visiting Lebanon once per year,” Behnke said. “I realized every time I came back to the German airport, I was very happy to be in Germany again because everything was working here.”
Despite his work for a party accused of being “far right,” Behnke paradoxically described his nostalgia for a time when Berlin was more socially progressive.
“It was [progressive]. It is not anymore. I am deeply sad about it. You see it in the streets. We have areas where if you are a Jew, don’t wear a kippah. It’s too dangerous. We had attacks on Jews,” he lamented. “And if you are gay, don’t walk with your partner in some areas.”
He doesn’t oppose bringing high-skilled immigrants to Germany, but the quality of most migrants, their inability to integrate, and the rise in violent crime made him fear for his children’s safety. “These areas are Muslim areas now … not normal German areas anymore.”
The link between migrants and violent crime is real.
Days before the election, a 30-year-old Spanish tourist was reportedly stabbed at the Berlin Holocaust memorial by a 19-year-old Syrian migrant who, police said, had been “planning to kill Jews for several weeks.”
The most brutal violence occurred at the Magdeburg Christmas market in December when a Saudi Arabian man injured just under 300 people and killed six by ramming his car into a crowd of shoppers.
Asked why left-wing parties sacrifice progressivism for the importation of retrograde Islamic culture, Behnke said it’s the same all over the globe. “It’s power, just power, like in the U.S. … If you want to get paid, be woke. This is what is happening in Berlin, too. This wokeism kills liberty,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“When [my] kids were born and grew, and I saw in 2015 that they were promising us these engineers that were coming, and rocket scientists, whatever … I saw the people here that Ms. Merkel told, ‘Please come,’ and I said, ‘This will not work.’”
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel is persona non grata among AfD supporters due to her centrism and role in initiating current immigration trends.
“She was the wrong person playing something like this mother of the country but putting the dagger into the back of the people,” Gläser said.
Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, has vowed not to work with the AfD, putting a “firewall” between establishment parties and those labeled “far right.”
But the firewall is becoming more difficult to maintain as the Right attracts voters, forcing the CDU to cooperate more with the leftist Social Democratic Party and Greens. This centrist alliance and sense of uniparty rule, irrespective of election results, enrages those demanding change.
“The CDU of today has no idea how to counter the … AfD, [only] this Stalinist firewall, which is brought to them by the political Left,” Gläser said. “So the CDU has no other option than working with Greens or Social Democrats. For Greens and Social Democrats, this is very good, but CDU gains nothing from it.”
The AfD invited the Washington Examiner back to its Pankow headquarters as Christian Buchholz, another former member of the Berlin state parliament, arrived in the group’s campaign vehicle — a bright red firetruck.
Buchholz, a 58-year-old former military officer, presents himself as an average working man but rhapsodizes at length about a country that no longer exists.
“What has made Germany great? That was the former Kingdom of Prussia and the Prussian traditions, which means discipline and the interest to keep everything in order,” he said. “When Prussia became Germany — the German Empire from 1871 until 1918 — that was the absolute climax of our culture and economical performance.”
He attributes Prussian values to the postwar glory of Germans as engineering wunderkinds and Nobel laureates. He thinks that time has passed.
One criticism that cannot be lobbed at the AfD is that it is unwilling to talk frankly about its opinions.
Gläser does not yearn for the Prussian Empire but for the post-unification era. “I think Germany, at the point of the unification, 35 years ago, was really on the high of its development because West Germany was such a strong economic power, and [German Democratic Republic] was not economic but had a lot of young educated people. So, together, it could be a success story, but we ruined it,” he said.
In the East side of Berlin, the scars of communism are still deep. Tourists don’t need to visit the museums and monuments to see glimpses of the Soviet era. Fragments of the Berlin Wall still dot the city.
“I always hated communism and all what it stands for,” Gläser said. “My dad would take me to … the center of the city and show me the wall. ‘Look at it on the other side.’ ‘People are shot for trying to cross the border’ and all these things. So, I hated [communists] from the beginning, when I was a small schoolboy.”
This distaste stokes opposition to the Social Democrats and the Greens. Buchholz explained with deadly seriousness: “They call themselves socialists, but in fact, it is communism. The difference is the socialists take away 50% of your money, and the communists, 100% of your money.”
Gläser also believes Germany has a distinctly Romantic heritage, citing as an example the Brothers Grimm: “I think being Romantic is part of our culture, which makes us a bit naive about political questions because we tend to think in fairy tales and things like that, about heroes and bad guys.”
The former Berlin parliament members think these precious aspects of German character have been swept away by leftist sentiments rejecting the past, as in America.
“It has developed at the same time in the U.S. and in Europe, but it’s really hard to say which was the real origin,” Buchholz said. “The name ‘woke’ is new, but it comes from 1968 with … cultural Marxism, and in the U.S., the anti-Vietnam movement, Woodstock, and this drug liberalization. It’s the same thing that we have had here in Germany, but here in Germany, it has been combined with communist social ideas, with a cultural destruction.”
This is why the AfD adores President Donald Trump, who they believe upended the entire Western world by rejecting progressivism. “He has no fear to attack this wokeism, communism, leftism, directly — straight, like a tank into the center,” Buchholz said.
AfD supporters had a near-religious experience when Vice President JD Vance spoke at a security conference in Munich in February, at which he seemed to articulate their decades of frustration directly in the face of the German government.
“What no democracy — American, German, or European — will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered,” Vance said. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for ‘firewalls.’ You either uphold the principle, or you don’t.”
If America’s “woke” movement is propelled by an obsession with past sins such as slavery, the German movement has left citizens frozen in a state of self-hatred over their war crimes. This self-hatred, Gläser said, fuels societal collapse.
“Wokeism and critical race theory, what you have in [the U.S.], toxic masculinity. Well, the kind of German guilt is just this, but cultural — the German guilt about World War II and these things,” he said, explaining that the societal guilt has now reached further back in time. “It is now also about the Kaiser — the years before, under the emperor. Well, then, we had a small chapter with colonial history. It was a really small chapter. But this is put up as a big crime against humanity. … This is the German way … with wokeism, critical masculinity, white guilt, Christian guilt.”
Neither man wants Germany’s Nazi history buried, but both reject pressure to teach children to feel personal responsibility for it. AfD supporters are among a minority of Germans willing to speak highly of their country and its long history. For a German to express love for his or her culture invites accusations of bigotry, racism, and fascism.
This was seen on full display during an AfD rally at the Linden-Center shopping district, where Gläser was among four speakers.
Hundreds of supporters were there, waving German flags and singing the national anthem. The rally was confronted by equal numbers of antifa protesters flying communist flags, blasting music, and chanting, “Nazis raus!” (Nazis out!)
Dozens of police officers stood in the narrow gap between the warring groups. Private security hired by the AfD wore yellow fluorescent jackets and stood guard backstage.
Beatrix von Storch, deputy parliamentary leader of the AfD, told foreign journalists and rally attendees over the cries of the protesters: “A very warm welcome — you’ve got a very clear view on our side here. And if you want to see, look in our faces — this is love. Go over there, you will meet hate.”
AfD supporters cheered, chanting along with von Storch the same slogan lobbed at them by antifa: “Nazis out! Nazis out! Nazis out!”
“Nazi” was once the most taboo word in the German language. It is now an increasingly common slur lobbed in both directions, divorced from its all-too-real history.
Some voters aligned with the Greens, SPD, and the Left accuse AfD of taking the country back to the 1940s with its calls for the deportation of illegal migrants and an end to multiculturalism. Meanwhile, AfD supporters accuse those critics of embodying the Nazi spirit by smashing windows at rival parties’ offices and setting fire to their campaign vehicles.
The issue bringing conservative Germans face-to-face with police most often nowadays is censorship. Officers interrogate, fine, and even arrest people suspected of posting offensive or harmful content online.
This campaign is not just about racism, antisemitism, or bigoted rhetoric. It is a crime to insult another person online in Germany. Even reposting a statement found to be “hate speech” or “misinformation” opens a social media user to prosecution.
On the evening of Feb. 23, AfD members gathered at headquarters for an election watch party, during which they ate sausages, drank beer and hot wine, and smoked countless cigarettes.
A 20-year-old salesman told the Washington Examiner that he became interested in more traditional values through social media and is now converting to Catholicism. His parents, who are neither conservative nor Catholic, find his choices bizarre.
A married couple said the area they live in has become so dangerous that they no longer allow their children to run out and play in the neighborhood as their own parents did when they were young.
Everyone at the watch party was hoping for a miracle. There was never a real chance of the AfD taking first place, but if the party outperformed the preelection polls, a 25% vote would fundamentally change operations at the Bundestag. Reaching that threshold would mean the AfD could unilaterally vote for inquiries into government affairs, giving its base an effective voice.
But as results poured in, it became apparent the preelection polls were accurate. AfD walked away with twice the support it had received in 2021, but still not enough to upset the balance of power.
Reactions were mixed. Such massive growth in three years is remarkable and signals a changing tide in Germany. But now, AfD must wait another four years for a day that always seems just out of reach.
“We’re running out of time,” one distressed woman told the Washington Examiner.
Gläser seemed to embody this mix of optimism and pessimism.
He was bombastic immediately after the preliminary results, telling those unsure of how to feel he didn’t want to “see any long faces!” As it became apparent the AfD underperformed in Berlin, he became a bit more stoic — even though he won enough votes to move from the state parliament to the Bundestag.
Buchholz remained cheerful throughout the event, saying there is nothing to complain about when a party doubles its support.
The CDU remains its biggest irritation. One attendee called it a “relic,” no longer attached to its religious beginnings.
“The Christian Democratic Union?” Buchholz laughed. “You mean the ‘Islamic Undemocratic Rebels?’”
After hours of debate about the results and their immediate implications, the AfD’s campfires were extinguished, and the grill shut down as the night wore on.
AFD AND ANTIFA BOTH WANT ‘NAZIS OUT!’ IN BERLIN
A final round of beer was brought out, and the remaining AfD members sat, drank, and ruminated on how the nation would continue to decline.
They took solace in their self-assurance that the continued collapse would only bring more Germans into their movement.
Timothy Nerozzi is a foreign affairs reporter for the Washington Examiner.
