German Protests Againtst Neo-Nazi Party's Plan for Mass Deportations

Demonstrations against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party swept across the country this weekend, strengthening calls to ban the party, following a report that its members had discussed plans for mass deportations. 

In Hamburg and Munich, rallies had to be dispersed due to significantly more people attending than expected. Aerial images from around the country showed masses of people braving Germany’s bitter January temperatures to fill city squares and avenues. According to police figures, in Berlin alone on Sunday, some 100,000 people gathered on the lawns of the Reichstag, which houses Germany’s lower house of parliament.

Placards at the protests stressed Germany’s particular responsibility to stand up to the far right, given the country’s dark history under Nazi rule, which led to the Holocaust. “Never again is now” and “Now we can see what we would have done in our grandparents’ position,” read some banners.

The protests were prompted by an investigative report earlier in January, revealing that AFD members met with far-right extremists in Potsdam in November to discuss a “remigration” plan should the AFD come to power. According to report by nonprofit research institute Correctiv, Martin Sellner, a far-right extremist and leader of the Austrian “Identitarian Movement,” proposed a “master plan” that would “reverse the settlement of foreigners.” The focus would be asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights and “non-assimilated” German citizens, the report said. The idea of sending people to a “model state” in North Africa was also discussed — similar to a 1940 Nazi plan to deport millions of Jews to Madagascar.

Following publication of the report, comparisons were immediately drawn with the 1942 Wannsee Conference, also in Potsdam, at which senior Nazi officials formulated the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Leading legal organizations in Germany strongly condemned the extremist plans. “It is an attack on the constitution and the liberal constitutional state,” a group of six organizations, including the German Judges’ Association and the German Lawyers’ Associationx, said last week. “The legal legitimacy of such fantasies [of mass deportation] must be prevented by all legal and political means.” 

Large-scale protests against the AfD were last seen in 2017 and 2018 after the party was elected into the Bundestag — marking the first time in nearly six decades that a far-right party entered parliament. The turnout then, however, was dwarfed by the numbers over this weekend.