AfD lawmakers in Bavaria's state parliament were sharply criticized for leaving during a speech by Jewish community leader Charlotte Knobloch. The Holocaust survivor had accused the party of downplaying Nazi atrocities.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Karmann
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Lawmakers with Bavaria's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) staged a walkout on Wednesday during a memorial service honoring the victims of the Holocaust.
Only four of the AfD's 22 lawmakers in Bavaria's state parliament remained in the plenary hall after Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said the party trivializes Nazi crimes.
"A party is represented here today that disparages these [democratic] values and downplays the crimes of the National Socialists and that maintains close ties with the far-right extremist scene," she said in her speech.
"This so-called Alternative for Germany bases its policies on hate and exclusion ... and is not based on our democratic constitution," Knobloch added.
In a video of the speech posted by local public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, several AfD lawmakers are seen exiting the plenary hall while lawmakers from the remaining parties give Knobloch a standing ovation.
Knobloch, who was narrowly saved from deportation to a concentration camp as a child and survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Bavarian countryside, previously served as the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Nearly all of the AfD's 22 lawmakers in Bavaria left the hall during Knobloch's speechImage: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Kneffel
AfD defends act as 'appropriate response'
Bavaria's state premier Markus Söder sharply condemned the actions of the AfD lawmakers during the Holocaust memorial, saying they were "disrespectful."
Katrin Ebner-Steiner, the co-leader of the AfD's parliamentary group in Bavaria, defended the protest as "an appropriate response."
In a statement posted to her Facebook page, Ebner-Steiner accused Knobloch of "abusing a memorial service for the victims of Nazism to defame the entirety of the AfD and its democratically legitimate parliamentary group by using awful general insinuations."
Katharina Schulze, co-leader of the Greens in Bavaria, came to Knobloch's defense, thanking her on Twitter for her "clear and true words."
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.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
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Backlash over Holocaust comments
The AfD, which frequently denies accusations of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, entered Bavaria's state parliament for the first time last October and is currently represented in all of Germany's 16 state parliaments as well as the Bundestag, the lower house of the federal parliament.
The party has faced backlash for a series of controversial statements by its members, including a remark last June by AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland who said Adolf Hitler and the Nazis "are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history."
In 2017, the head of the AfD in the eastern German state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, sparked controversy by describing Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "memorial of shame" and questioned Germany's culture of remembrance regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said it was putting the AfD under increased observation over concerns about public comments made by party members and possible links to extremist groups.
