BERLIN — As she was climbing the ranks of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) a decade ago, Alice Weidel privately denounced one of her party’s most influential figures for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled. Years later, she praised his leadership, said a bid to ban him from the party was “exaggerated” and that he was suitable for a federal cabinet position. That striking reversal emerges from a massive leak of internal AfD communications, including emails in which Weidel condemned Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, and warned that extremists were driving away mainstream conservative voters.
The revelations come from more than 420,000 emails and roughly 48,000 documents released by hackers this week, providing a rare glimpse inside Germany’s largest far-right party. An anonymous spokesperson for the hackers told Die Zeit the attack was not “politically” motivated “in the sense that [they] support another party,” but that they published the allegedly stolen material to promote “transparency and public accountability.” The AfD confirmed the breach, saying hackers had attacked a hosting provider in late September. It condemned the leak as “an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.” WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, examined emails from one of Weidel’s accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party’s leadership.
Asked by WELT to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson. A spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent by POLITICO on Saturday. The messages seen by WELT show a politician deeply alarmed by the growing influence of Höcke, who championed an ethnically defined German nationalism drawing on ideas associated with the Nazi era.
In October 2015, Weidel warned colleagues that the party’s proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islam street movement, and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as The Homeland) was alienating the conservative voters it needed to attract. Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech from Höcke that same year, where he contrasted a “life-affirming African expansionary type” with a “self-negating European placeholder type,” “This is deeply problematic, because the reasoning here is racial. It is fundamentally wrong,” she wrote to the AfD’s federal executive board.
The classification, which grants authorities broader surveillance powers, was provisionally suspended by a court in Cologne last February. The leak also features emails about a speech Höcke gave in January 2017 to the AfD’s youth wing, attacking Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance. Höcke described Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “memorial of shame,” criticized the country’s efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a “180-degree turn in the politics of memory.” Weidel herself brought a motion to expel him from the AfD.
The motion, obtained by WELT, accused Höcke of using “vocabulary from Adolf Hitler” and endorsing the “Führerprinzip” — the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority. It described him as displaying an “affinity in essence with National Socialism.” In an internal message, Weidel urged colleagues to recognize the implications of Höcke’s language. As Weidel prepared to seek the party’s nomination as lead candidate for the 2017 federal election, the leaked correspondence shows that she blocked the recording of her own motion against Höcke in the minutes of a party leadership meeting, arguing that further controversy would damage the party.
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