Germany has been "overrun by Arabs, Sinti and Roma" states an email written by the AfD's Alice Weidel. If real, the email has sullied Weidel's image as her party's more moderate voice.
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Welt am Sonntag reported it had a 2013 email containing "racist remarks and democracy-scorning theses" sent by the Alternative for Germany's (AfD) top candidate Alice Weidel.
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The paper reported that the email, dated February 24, 2013, was sent from Weidel to a confidante while she was living in the German city of Frankfurt and working as an asset manager for Allianz.
"The reason why we are overrun by culturally foreign people such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight from the enemies of the constitution by whom we are governed," the newspaper quoted the email as saying.
The email described German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government as "pigs" who were nothing more than "puppets of WWII allies." It continued to say Merkel's government was given the task of limiting the population of the German "Volk," or people.
The email's original text in German uses several words with strong Nazi-era connotations, including "Überfremdung," which roughly translates to "foreign infiltration" and is used in far-right circles to stir xenophobic sentiment.
Prior to the email's release, Welt am Sonntag said Weidel tried to stop the report from being published. The paper was contacted by Weidel's lawyers, who said the AfD politician was not the email's author.
Her lawyers told the paper that it was incorrect and unlawful to "publically claim that our client wrote this text or to even express that suspicion."
Weidel's populist party also backed her. AfD spokesman Christian Lüth told German news agency DPA that Weidel had assured him that she did not write the email, calling it "a fake."
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Several days later, however, Alice Weidel changed her tune. She no longer claimed the mail was a fake, confirming the Welt am Sonntag, which had said it had an affidavit and other statements from people who were part of Weidel's personal and professional network at the time that proved the mail was not a fake.
At the bottom of the email, sent via iPhone, the author signed off with the name "Lille" – which was Weidel's nickname at the time, according to both Welt am Sonntag and DPA.
At the time the allegedly Weidel-penned email was sent, she became politically active in a party called "Wahlalternative 2013" or "Electoral Alternative 2013," the precursor to the AfD.
Weidel, an economist, is often regarded as the AfD's more moderate face. She's known for sidestepping journalist questions about the racist and xenophobic remarks from other leading party members.
"I have no use for nationalistic ranting," Weidel told the Südwest Presse in 2016.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
