A generation after Germany banned a neo-Nazi youth organization for seeking to cultivate a new extremist elite, four of its former members now hold influential roles around the politician who is on track to become the country’s first far-right state premier since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949. The four men are staffers close to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s candidate for premier in Saxony-Anhalt, where voters go to the polls on Sept. 6. Two of them are among his closest advisers and two of them helped draft the party’s election manifesto.
All four were involved with the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, or HDJ, a group modeled in part on the Hitler Youth and banned by the German government in 2009, according to an investigation by WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Network. The ban order said the group’s aim was to train a “neo-Nazi elite” steeped in National Socialist ideology. The AfD’s rules list the HDJ — the name roughly translates to Homeland-Loyal German Youth — among organizations whose former members are barred from joining the party.
The federal government’s ban order, obtained by WELT, cited the group’s “affinity with National Socialism” and concluded: “The actual objective of the association is the training of a neo-Nazi elite.” The group, it said, saw itself as standing “in the tradition of the Hitler Youth.” Germany’s Federal Administrative Court upheld the ban in 2010. The HDJ, the court wrote, “is wedded to the blood-and-soil ideology and the racial doctrine of the National Socialists and disseminates antisemitic ideas.” It “adopts an overall militantly aggressive stance” towards the free, democratic order. All four men have resisted treating their HDJ pasts as disqualifying, either minimizing their involvement or declining to comment on it.
Siegmund, who is expected to win next week’s election comfortably, has declined to distance himself from any of them. I’m not interested in what happened 20 or 25 years ago.” He added he would focus on “entirely different problems in this country.” One of the men, Patrick Harr, 44, is the AfD’s spokesman in Saxony-Anhalt and executive director of its caucus in the state legislature. Internally, he is being floated as the head of the State Chancellery — effectively the governor’s chief of staff — in an AfD government.
He served on a working group, chaired by the party’s state deputy leader, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, set up in June 2025 to draft this year’s governing manifesto. That manifesto calls for confining the children of asylum-seekers and refugees to “special classes” with curricula based on their home countries’ schooling, ideally taught by refugees themselves. The stated aim is to signal to the children that “their stay in Germany is only temporary” and to spare “our children” from the “manifold burdens” of being taught alongside classmates from “completely foreign cultures.” It also asserts that children with disabilities “paralyze the progress of instruction.” And it describes Germany’s decades-long reckoning with the Nazi past as the “perpetuation of a neurosis” and homosexuality as a “sexual deviation and non-reproductive way of life.” Siegmund himself rarely says such things out loud.
His campaign runs on good-humored populism, and he is careful in interviews. The minutes suggest he had already been working for the department and reported on his previous activities within it. For the following year, the group’s members were offered trips “on which we will get to know the land and the people in the territories severed from the Reich,” meaning locations in neighboring countries that Germany lost after World War II.
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