Björn Höcke said he would "like to apologize" for criticizing Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance. Leaders of his Alternative for Germany party have called for his ouster.
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo/J. Meyer
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Right-wing politician Björn Höcke backpedaled on his controversial statements about German Holocaust memorials. Speaking at a state meeting of his Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Saturday, Höcke said he had made a "mistake" and taken the wrong tone with what is a very serious subject.
"I took a big, important topic and unfortunately turned it into beer hall talk," said Höcke at the meeting in Arnstadt, Thuringia, in the east of Germany. "That was a mistake. For that, I would like to apologize here."
Höcke is the leader of the AfD in the federal state of Thuringia and one of the more conservative members of Germany's far-right political party. No stranger to controversy for his strong stance on border control and euroskepticism, Höcke sparked a nationwide outcry in January when he criticized Germany's strong culture of Holocaust remembrance.
'Monument of shame'
"These stupid politics of coming to grips with the past cripple us - we need nothing other than a 180-degree reversal on the politics of remembrance," Höcke told members of the AfD youth wing at a January event in Dresden.
Referring to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, he said: "We Germans, that is to say, our people, are the only people in the world who planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital."
After initially standing behind Höcke, last week the AfD announced it had asked the regional party leadership in Thuringia to expel him from the party. National AfD leader Frauke Petry called him a "burden" and slammed his comments as "unauthorized solo actions."
Höcke is now awaiting an arbitration panel of the AfD Thuringia to decide on whether he will be permanently ousted from the party. In the meantime, Höcke has said he will not be a liability for the party because he has no aspirations to run for the Bundestag in September's federal elections.
As he spoke at the party meeting in Arnstadt on Saturday, he appeared to have no fear of dismissal. "I promise you, I have no intention of leaving the AfD," he told the group, who responded with cheers of "Höcke, Höcke."
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.
