There is something deeply and viscerally disorienting about the resurgence of the German far right; about how the timeline of this return mirrors the events of the previous century. AfD is bloodcurdling in that it is manifestly and blatantly extreme, fanatical, mercurial; a confederacy of nostalgic, single-minded agitators eager to revive a past they admonish the German establishment for quelling through “guilt politics.”
AfD has been soaring across all German states, but nowhere has its agenda and worldview landed as well as it has in states that were once part of the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic (GDR). In those regions, AfD has craftily and cogently navigated singular political dynamics punctuated by a sense of abandonment, contempt, neglect and dereliction of duty from Berlin. Today, one may print a map of Germany before 1989, and an electoral map from 2026, and would discern that the areas once part of the GDR almost flawlessly map onto AfD’s strongholds. Saxony-Anhalt, which just delivered AfD a landslide triumph and the prospect of a first far right regional government since 1945, exemplifies this.
There is not one single, universal explanation for this phenomenon; rather, it is a combination of social, economic, cultural and political reasons spanning decades. But one reason for the German east’s increased proclivity to trust the far right, as opposed to a more reticent west, traces back to the policies that the Soviet Union pursued and implemented in the aftermath of World War II, and what those policies effectuated.
When the Allies occupied most of Western Europe in 1945, denazification became a priority. Nazi officials were prosecuted, jailed, executed, hunted down. School curricula, infested with Nazism, were tossed and rewritten from scratch; the Allies understood that, in the same way authoritarian regimes cement their rule by weaponizing education to condition the next generations for totalitarianism, education could also be leveraged to reverse this conditioning and substitute it with a different form of conditioning — one that made totalitarianism, Nazism, antisemitism, persecution, imperialism unacceptable. While the Allies botched that work and quickly moved away from it, that work still had its perks.
Across the Iron Curtain, denazification was also enacted, sometimes more thoroughly than in the West. But Soviet denazification was more hollow: it was predicated on the notion that Nazism was a predominantly West German phenomenon. Instead of proper, comprehensive denazification, the GDR opted for state-mandated “antifascism” as a political identity. GDR leaders portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism rather than successors to part of the Third Reich with attendant obligations. They explicitly rejected any acknowledgment of guilt, instead projecting it onto other actors in the West. Antifascism morphed into a founding myth and central component of the East German folklore, invoked to legitimize the new regime and re-indoctrinate the population.
Instead of grappling with the specificities of Nazi persecution, the goal was to depict all Soviets as victims of Nazism. In so doing, the Soviets concocted a narrative that the masses could relate to, one that did not center the Jewish victims many of them still detested and distrusted. In parallel, the State made laudatory propaganda omnipresent: another founding myth, that of the Great Patriotic War, of the heroic sacrifice of Communist fighters. Naturally, the reality of complicity, collaboration, widespread antisemitism was never even considered. The GDR was not to accept any responsibility for Nazi atrocities because it was an entirely new socialist entity that had already defeated fascism.
This propensity to universalize the Holocaust is well-documented. In 1958, the GDR unveiled its flagship site of Nazi-era commemorations in Buchenwald with the “Nationale Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Buchenwald.” In that exhibition, the area where thousands of Jewish deportees had been herded and massacred was excluded. Instead, the dominant narrative superimposed at the site relied on two notions: one, that antifascist resistance prevailed; two, that Western capitalist greed was at the source of all suffering. No real, meaningful mention of the Holocaust, of Jewish or Romani victims. Only of uniform, all-encompassing Soviet victimhood and redemption through heroic resistance and socialism.
That ideology is not confined to remembrance sites; it extended to reparations too. While West Germany began paying reparations soon after the end of the war, with up to 3.45 billion marks paid to Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference, the GDR paid no equivalent Holocaust-specific compensation, opting for pensions to “victims of fascism.”
Soviet denazification was also heavily conceptualized to fit the propaganda of the regime; as such, Nazi persecution was reframed as a matter of class, not race. In the meantime, the GDR clamped down on those in its ranks swimming against the tide: in the 1950s, the regime carried out “anticosmopolitan” purges — a euphemism tapping into Stalin’s derogatory characterization of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” These purges saw scholars, like Paul Merker, who advocated reparations to Holocaust survivors, be expelled from the party. The small Jewish community that had remained in East Germany after World War II fled.
Meanwhile, Holocaust memory was occasionally brandished by the GDR for political purposes: the Eichmann Trial was extensively covered by local press, used to cast West Germany as the true heir to Nazism. Simultaneously, the GDR, under Soviet influence, enacted increasingly oppressive and tyrannical laws against Soviet Jews. On the Western side, denazification was flawed: some former Nazis were integrated into government and authorities often dragged their foot when it came to prosecutions, but ultimately, a national framework of collective shame and reparations arose.
Inevitably, insofar as the GDR did not undertake any substantive work to stamp out Nazi and antisemitic ideology in East Germany, that very ideology did not just vanish at the sight of the GDR’s antifascist grandiloquent gestures. As political scientist Manès Weisskircher documented, East Germany retained strong, organized far right youth networks, especially in the 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, these networks were empowered by the arrival of prominent Western far-right activists who relocated east to prop up the far right there; by the early 1990s, arson attacks on migrants and refugees surged and hate groups began to pop up and spread in major eastern cities like Dresden. A far right political scene that had not been dismantled before reunification consolidated after it in favorable ground.
When AfD emerged in the 2010s, it was not long before it found an interested base in the east, one that it has spent the last decade cultivating, expanding and consolidating; the breakthrough in Saxony is part of this strategy, one that the party fully owns as it claims to speak for the forgotten people of the former GDR. A study from 2022 indicated that many eastern Germans, despite harboring negative views of the GDR as such, do not associate Russia or the former Soviet Union with the Republic’s oppressive machinery; it showed that the narrative that the Soviet apparatus pushed in the decades after the war instead of pursuing cultural denazification, continues to influence how eastern Germans view the Soviets as liberators from Nazism rather than occupier or, in modern geopolitics, adversary. It is not a coincidence that the AfD’s electoral map tracks the old east-west partition with near-flawless precision.
Naturally, several caveats are to be taken into account. The first is that denazification in West Germany was not perfect either; it was far better, more efficient and lasting in the sense that Nazi atrocities were acknowledged as such and subject to continuous reckoning; they were not buried under layers of ideology or sugarcoated to woo the local population. But it was messy, sometimes cynical: by 1951, amnesty laws were being enacted as the Allies grew bored with prosecutions, and many former Nazi officials were reinstated, with some fully rehabilitated and allowed to re-enter the political apparatus. It is therefore bewildering that the man who co-authored the legal commentary of the Nuremberg Race Laws could serve as Chief of Staff to the Chancellor through 1963. But even that imperfectness did not go unaddressed: the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial of 1958, the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trial in 1963 ignited widespread cultural reckoning.
Therein lies the fundamental difference: West Germany’s denazification was incomplete but contested, an open wound that generations kept reopening; East Germany’s was incomplete and closed due to ideology. For the GDR to be legitimate, it needed to assert the Nazi issue as a story of the past, a solved problem, structurally eliminated along with capitalism.
The second is twofold: one, AfD has also been rising substantially in the territories of the former West Germany; two, that there are other reasons factoring into increased eastern support for AfD. Both of these are valid. But the former is smaller in scale and later in onset than the eastern surge. The Western numbers still trail the eastern ones by a wide margin. The second point is serious but does not disqualify the argument of this piece: there are other factors, but denazification — and lack thereof — is one worth examining as a standalone factor. This variable is one of many, a supplementary cultural factor that shows how under the red veil that covered East Germany for half a century, there was still the blackness and rot of Nazi ideology permeating every level of society, especially the pervasive and genocidal antisemitic ideology that was not only never rooted out or addressed, but instead recycled and revived to serve the new regime’s worldview.
It is therefore unsurprising that the AfD’s anti-Holocaust remembrance crusade resonates particularly with East Germans; since reunification, and after decades of hearing about the atrocities their country committed through a specific ideological lens — fascism as an outgrowth of monopoly capitalism, the perpetrators as capitalist elites, no meaningful education on the specificity of the Nazis’ genocidal machinery —, East German children have been taught profusively about the history of the Holocaust, of Nazi crimes, of genocide. After decades of what the regime deemed a settled issue, this saturation has alienated many easterners who feel that a curriculum taught in a language of guilt and deep soul-searching — which they were entirely unfamiliar with prior to 1989 — has been imposed on them by a different political culture.
The answer is not to reconsider how Germany envisages its Holocaust education. It is to double down on Holocaust education, on teaching about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. In so doing, Germany is not guilt-tripping generations that have no direct relation to these atrocities; rather, it is compelling the German youth to grapple with the kind of political community it aspires to be part of by fostering civic responsibility.
