German conservatives elect new ‘right-wing’ leader
After their devastating defeat in September year, the German conservative party CDU has chosen a new ‘right-wing’ leader.
66-year-old Friedrich Merz was for years seen as the main right-wing rival to long-serving Chancellor Angela Merkel inside the Christian Democrats.
Merkel’s retirement from German politics (which she dominated as CDU leader since 2000 and Chancellor since 2005) came in two stages: stepping down as party leader three years ago, then as Chancellor after this year’s federal elections.
Friedrich Merz was twice defeated in elections for CDU leader: first by Merkel’s chosen successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, then after this ‘mini-Merkel’ proved not up to the job, by another ‘centrist’ Armin Laschet in January this year.
It was Laschet who turned out to be a hopeless leader, taking the CDU to its worst ever federal election result.
Last week, at his third attempt, Merz easily won the CDU leadership with the backing of more than 62% of members in the first ballot, easily defeating centrist Norbert Röttgen and close Merkel ally Helge Braun.
Yet H&D readers should look carefully at exactly what sort of ‘right-wing’ policies the new CDU leader stands for. Friedrich Merz is not our sort of ‘right-winger’. He is a throwback to the pro-business, small-state, market capitalism of the Thatcher-Reagan era.
A former corporate lawyer, Merz spent years outside politics during which he led the German operations of the investment firm BlackRock, regarded as the world’s largest ‘shadow bank’ and headed by New York billionaire Larry Fink. In 2018 Merz showed his true political colours, rejecting the Ludwig Erhard Prize (named after one of the CDU’s founding fathers) because he found the views of the Erhard Foundation’s chairman Roland Tichy to be too right-wing.
While he will probably win back some support from the more conservative, bürgerlich wing of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), radical nationalists inside and outside AfD should be able to establish clear water between ourselves and the likes of Friedrich Merz.
The same applies here in the UK, where during 2022 we can define a distinct nationalist ideology, very different from the neo-Thatcherism and libertarianism on offer from Boris Johnson’s likely successors in the Conservative Party, or from increasingly irrelevant civic nationalists in parties such as Reform UK and the moribund UKIP.
During 2022 H&D will play its part in defining racial nationalism with a social (even ‘socialist’) dimension, relevant to our times and to voters who might have backed Brexit, UKIP, and even Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the false hope that these causes and parties would rescue our people and our nation from cultural decay and economic stagnation.
Thanks for reading, and we hope you will stay with us in the New Year.
German Federal Election – end of Merkel era
Results are being declared of today’s German election for the Bundestag (federal parliament). H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton has been in Germany during the campaign and will report here and in the November issue of H&D on the results and their implications for the racial nationalist and broad pro-White movement in Europe. (click here to view detailed NPD results from this year’s election)
The German electoral system is a combination of constituencies (which elect members of the Bundestag on a similar basis to the UK Parliament, i.e. first-past-the-post) and a proportional ‘additional member’ system. This means that parties polling more than 5% nationwide are guaranteed Bundestag members.
The main outcome was a strong result for the social-democratic SPD, whose leader Olaf Scholz seems very likely to become Chancellor. Meanwhile the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) slightly slipped back from 12.6% in 2017 to 10.3% this year.
The constituency held for thirty years for the CDU by retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel was among those lost to the SPD, who won every directly elected seat in Merkel’s Mecklenburg region.
Despite its vote declining nationwide, AfD has gained numerous constituency seats across its strongholds of Saxony and Thuringia (regions of the old East Germany), though once the proportional element is allocated AfD ends up with 83 seats in the new Bundestag, down from 94 last time.
Of the sixteen constituencies in Saxony, AfD retained two, also regained the seat won four years ago by former leader Frauke Petry who had since quit the party, and gained another seven (from the collapsing CDU). This makes ten Saxon constituencies for the AfD, while just four were retained by CDU (including the two Dresden constituencies), one (Chemnitz) gained by SPD, and one (in southern Leipzig) retained by the Left Party.
Of the eight constituencies in Thuringia four went to AfD, three for SPD, and just one for CDU. Moreover in a highly symbolic victory AfD took the largest vote share in Thuringia with 24%, ahead of SPD on 23.4% and CDU on 16.9%. This is all the more significant as AfD’s leader in Thuringia (Björn Höcke) heads the party’s most hardline nationalist faction.
Slightly to the north of Saxony and Thuringia, AfD gained two of the eight constituencies in the Saxony-Anhalt region. While it’s often assumed that the seats won by European racial nationalist parties are because of the proportional voting system, the fact is that today AfD has won sixteen seats in parts of the old East Germany under the “UK style” first-past-the-post system.
The CDU’s collapse means that in large parts of the old East Germany it will now be AfD that is the main voice of opposition to the likely new SPD-Green government. The great pity for AfD is that had they been able to continue concentrating on their popular policies on immigration and crime, these results could have been much better. It’s clear from today’s results that the party’s flirtation with Covid/vaccine conspiracy theory has been an electoral liability. Various candidates and parties focused entirely on anti-lockdown and/or anti-vaccine campaigning fared even worse, polling insignificant votes.
The big losers of this election seem to be both conservatives and the far left (with the ex-communist Left Party losing 30 seats, down to 39 in the new Bundestag): the big winners are Social-Democrats and Greens.
AfD polled 12.6% at the last federal election in 2017, winning 94 seats to become the third-largest party in the Bundestag, but their 10.3% vote this year left AfD in fifth place nationwide (overtaken by both the Greens and the liberal FDP).
More radical racial nationalist parties (of which by far the largest is the NPD) have been electorally eclipsed for the time being by AfD’s success and tend to concentrate more on local and regional elections where they stand a chance of winning seats. In the 2017 federal election the NPD polled just over 175,000 votes nationwide (0.4%). This fell to just under 65,000 votes (around 0.1%) this year.
The one certain result of this election is the retirement of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been in power since November 2005 (latterly leading a coalition government of conservatives and social democrats). Her successor as head of the conservative CDU/CSU – Armin Laschet – had a disastrous campaign and seems most unlikely to become Chancellor: his party polled a record low vote and will finish slightly behind the SPD. Merkel will remain in post until coalition talks have agreed a new government, probably involving three parties in the new Bundestag: the SPD, Greens and liberal ‘Free Democrats’ (FDP).
One consequence of this conservative disaster will be a bitter battle for control, with the more ‘right-wing’ leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party CSU – Markus Söder – likely to push his claim to lead the conservative alliance, and probably arguing that it should drop its traditional refusal to negotiate with the ‘far right’ AfD.
see also “Return of the Schleswig-Holstein Question!”
NPD results in detail – German nationalist vote shifts to AfD
As expected the NPD – Germany’s main racial nationalist party – lost votes again this year to the civic nationalist anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
For the time being NPD activists and candidates will concentrate their efforts more on local and regional elections. The NPD’s best Bundestag vote was in 1969 when they polled 1.4 million votes (4.3%). In the 2004 and 2009 elections the NPD won seats in the regional parliament of Saxony, as they did in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2006 and 2011. In 2009 they were only a fraction short of winning regional parliamentary seats in Thuringia.
Even regional parliamentary gains are unlikely while AfD remains a powerful force, yet NPD campaigning remains important both to build a core of radical nationalist support, and to continue influencing the radical faction of the AfD, some of whose leaders have a great deal in common with the NPD even while most AfD leaders are closer to the right-wing of CDU/CSU.
At this year’s Bundestag election the NPD put up party lists in every part of Germany but not constituency candidates. Every German has two votes – one for an individual candidate, and a second vote for a regional party list. It is for these second votes that the NPD was competing.
In the two states where AfD was the largest party this year – Saxony and Thuringia – the NPD vote fell to 0.3%.
The Thuringia NPD slate headed by Thorsten Heise polled 4,105 votes (0.3%), down from 1.2% in 2017. Bear in mind that AfD became the largest party in Thuringia this year, with a 0.6% lead over the SPD – so this AfD lead can be attributed to the transfer of previous NPD votes.
AfD was already narrowly the largest party in Saxony but consolidated its position this year with a 5.3% lead over the SPD (the conservative CDU having collapsed to third place). Here the Saxony NPD slate headed by Maik Müller polled 7,489 votes (0.3%), down from 1.1% in 2017. The smaller Dritte Weg party (Third Way – no connection to the NF splinter group once led by Patrick Harrington and Graham Williamson!) also stood in Saxony this year, taking 4,285 votes (0.2%).
In Mecklenburg – Western Pomerania (on the north-east border of today’s Federal Republic) the NPD vote didn’t fall quite so dramatically, perhaps because this region was less intensely targeted by AfD than Thuringia or Saxony. Here the NPD slate headed by Michael Andrejewski polled 6,399 votes (0.7%), down from 1.1% in 2017.
These three remain the strongest racial nationalist areas of Germany. In remaining regional / city state results were as follows:
Brandenburg, the NPD slate headed by Klaus Beier polled 4,871 (0.3%), down from 0.9% in 2017
Saxony Anhalt, the NPD slate headed by Henry Lippold polled 3,003 votes (0.2%), down from 0.7% in 2017.
Saarland, the NPD slate headed by Otfried Best polled 1,375 votes (0.2%), down from 0.5% in 2017.
North Rhine-Westphalia, the NPD slate headed by Ariane Meise polled 8,959 votes (0.1%), down from 0.2% in 2017.
Baden-Württemberg, the NPD slate headed by Edda Schmidt polled 6,029 votes (0.1%), down from 0.3% in 2017.
Bavaria, the NPD slate headed by Sascha Roßmüller polled 5,768 votes (0.1%), down from 0.3% in 2017, with Third Way taking 3,545 votes (slightly under 0.1%).
Hessen, the NPD slate headed by Stefan Jagsch polled 4,528 votes (0.1%), down from 0.3% in 2017.
Lower Saxony, the NPD slate headed by Manfred Dammann polled 4,374 votes (0.1%) down from 0.3% in 2017.
Rhineland Palatinate, the NPD slate headed by Udo Voigt polled 2,773 votes (0.1%), down from 0.3% in 2017.
Schleswig-Holstein, the NPD slate headed by Mark Proch polled 2,015 votes (0.1%), down from 0.2% in 2017
Berlin, the NPD slate headed by Andreas Käfer polled 1,979 votes (0.1%), having had no slate here in 2017.
Hamburg, the NPD slate headed by Lennart Schwarzbach polled 651 votes (0.1%), down from 0.2% in 2017.
Bremen, the NPD slate headed by Heinz Seeger polled 290 votes (0.1%), down from 0.3% in 2017.
Nationwide the NPD’s list votes totalled 64,608 (0.1%), down from 0.4% in 2017.
Return of the Schleswig-Holstein Question!
In addition to the main parties mentioned earlier, it looks as though just one tiny party will make it into the Bundestag.
This is the ‘South Schleswig Voters’ Association’ (SSW), whose leader Stefan Seidler has won a seat, according to the preliminary results. This is the first time since the second Bundestag election in 1953 that a regionalist or national minority party has won a Bundestag seat. In those days the national minorities concerned were Germans who had been expelled from their homes in what had become Czech, Polish or even Russian territory, and had their own party – the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights.
By contrast the SSW represents a small Danish-speaking minority who have lived in Germany from the creation of a united German state in 1871.
Obviously they didn’t pass the 5% threshold – they are a tiny regional party – and neither did they win a constituency. This party hadn’t even contested a federal election since 1961.
There are 28 MPs in total elected from Schleswig-Holstein this time, 11 constituencies and 17 from the list. The SSW list polled 3.2% across Schleswig-Holstein, so that was just enough to get them one of those 28 seats, because as a party representing a ‘national minority’ they are exempt from the 5% threshold requirement.
Ideologically they are leftish-green, so I assume their MP would back the likely SPD-Green-FDP coalition.
But the reason they exist is to represent the Danish speaking population in Schleswig-Holstein, and the reason that exists is rooted in one of the most complex diplomatic disputes of the 19th century – the infamous ‘Schleswig-Holstein Question’.
Until 1871 Germany was divided into many different states/principalities/etc. that were a relic of the medieval age and the Holy Roman Empire: a patchwork of princes, dukes and dynastic traditions.
For centuries the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein (either side of the Holy Roman Empire’s northern border) had both been ruled by the Danish king, but with semi-independence as the Holstein part was German (and part of the Holy Roman Empire) and the Schleswig part was semi-German, semi-Danish.
Eventually there were two mid-19th century wars between Denmark and Prussia, one (1848-51) effectively won by Denmark; the second (1864) won by Prussia and its Austrian allies.
After the First World War, Germany lost the northern part of Schleswig to Denmark, but the southern part of Schleswig has remained German to this day, and is part of the German region of Schleswig-Holstein.
As with all these border disputes, a substantial community was stuck on the wrong side of the border, and since there was no IRA-type situation many of them stayed put, hence the need for a party representing their particular interests.
The British statesman Lord Palmerston, who was Foreign Secretary during the First Schleswig War and Prime Minister during the Second, famously said:
“Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort [i.e. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert], who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.”
More than 150 years later, the question has returned to contribute to the most divided German parliament since the Weimar Republic. But this time the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein are amongst the least troublesome of Germany’s ethnic minorities!
Setbacks for AfD in latest German elections
Regional elections in two areas of Germany yesterday resulted in setbacks for the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD).
For several years the party had seemed to be making steady advances in every area of Germany, especially after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in August 2015 to admit more than a million ‘asylum seekers’.
Yet the Covid pandemic seems to have knocked AfD off course. At the start of the crisis there was a tendency for conservative German voters to rally behind Merkel and her centrist-conservative CDU. In recent weeks that support has begun to crumble, partly because of a perception that the German government had bungled vaccine procurement, and partly because of a couple of scandals involving pandemic-related contracts.
Yet none of this swing against the government has benefited AfD, whose leaders allowed the party to become associated with anti-lockdown protests. This seems to have distracted from the party’s core messages: far fewer German voters are radically sceptical about Covid than are radically anti-immigration.
For the past year AfD has failed to poll above 12% in any national opinion poll, where previously it was often reaching 15% or more. This decline took concrete form in both of yesterday’s elections.
In Baden-Württemberg (traditionally conservative but ruled by a Green-CDU coalition since 2016), AfD’s vote fell from 15.1% to 9.7%, losing six of their seventeen seats in the regional parliament or Landtag. This result will embarrass AfD’s national co-leader Jörg Meuthen, since Baden-Württemberg is his home state.
Yesterday’s other election in Rhineland-Palatinate, best known as the centre of German wine production, saw another sharp fall in AfD’s vote from 12.6% to 8.3%, losing five of their nine seats.
In both of these regions the ‘centre-right’ CDU and the ‘far right’ AfD lost support, and in both the Greens were the big winners. In neither case were there any more radical nationalist parties standing, which isn’t surprising since neither region is a traditional stronghold for the racial nationalist NPD or for any of the smaller parties of similar outlook.
The only good news from these elections is that German mainstream parties are still struggling for credibility. Chancellor Merkel retires this year, and the federal election in September is likely to lead to some sort of CDU-Green coalition, further damaging Merkel’s party in the eyes of traditional conservatives. It’s not too late for AfD to get back on track and for German nationalists to escape from the cul-de-sac of pandemic politics.
The spy story that helped derail Lady Renouf’s Dresden trial
H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton today reveals an extraordinary Second World War spy story – previously unknown to military and intelligence historians.
This story was one of the reasons for Dresden prosecutors’ abandonment of their prosecution of Lady Michèle Renouf three months ago. It had taken two and a half years for this prosecution to come to court.
Lady Renouf was charged with having committed ‘holocaust denial’ during an impromptu speech at a public commemoration in Dresden in 2018. Part of her ‘crime’ was to state that it had not been “exceptionally cruel” for Germany to intern Jews, given the fact that organised Jewry had declared war on Germany and that its representatives were closely involved in various forms of overt and covert warfare on the British (and later Soviet and American) side.
H&D‘s Peter Rushton was a research consultant to the Renouf defence, and today he releases part of a dossier that would have caused great embarrassment to the German and British authorities had the case come to trial.
This reveals the existence of a previously unreported spy at the heart of the Third Reich – half-Jewish banker Robi Mendelssohn, partner in his family bank Mendelssohn & Co., the largest private bank in 1930s Germany.
Mendelssohn was an MI6 agent in wartime Berlin, meeting with British intelligence officers during his business trips to neutral Stockholm.
The case raises numerous previously unreported questions about the state of British intelligence regarding wartime Germany, including the so-called ‘Holocaust’.
And it is of special relevance to the Renouf case because for complex reasons it turns out that MI6 spy Robi Mendelssohn was the man who convinced British occupation authorities to reinstal accused ‘war criminal’ Hermann Abs at the centre of reconstructing Germany’s postwar banking system.
Abs went on to be the closest colleague and friend of Lady Renouf’s former husband Sir Frank Renouf, who was awarded the Verdienstkreuz (Germany’s highest civilian honour) for his work with Abs in transforming German investment banking.
Click here to read today’s extraordinary story at the Renouf trial blog: modeltrial.blogspot.com
Further details will appear in the March edition of H&D.
Rolf Hochhuth – ally of David Irving and target of secret British propagandists – dies aged 89
Provocative German playwright Rolf Hochhuth died on May 13th at his home in Berlin, aged 89.
His death came just as the latest edition of Heritage and Destiny was going to press, featuring a two-part exposé of the conspiracy by secret British agencies at the end of the 1960s to smear Mr Hochhuth and the British historian David Irving.
This full extraordinary story is based on very recently released documents from the Information Research Department, a secret Cold War propaganda unit that was dissolved in 1977 and whose records remained highly classified until earlier this year. The IRD files were read by H&D‘s assistant editor days before the UK’s National Archives closed down due to Covid-19.
Hochhuth had made himself a target of IRD and associated agencies including MI5 and MI6 because of a play in which he alleged official British complicity in the death of Poland’s wartime leader Gen. Sikorski, in what was officially declared an accidental plane crash off Gibraltar in July 1943.
David Irving carried out extensive research to assist Hochhuth in writing this play Soldaten (‘Soldiers’). It was commissioned by London’s National Theatre but banned by the theatre’s board (and later by the Lord Chamberlain) in 1967 at the instigation of prominent establishment figures.
Soldiers also explored the morality of RAF area bombing strategy and the culpability of Winston Churchill and his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell).
Rolf Hochhuth’s death has been widely reported in the German press, though so far only by the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Despite his friendship with Irving, which dated back to 1965, Hochhuth was very much a man of the left. His best-known play The Representative (Der Stellvertreter) dealt with the Vatican’s alleged knowledge of the presumed wartime murder of six million Jews in the ‘Holocaust’. It is presumably for this service to ‘Holocaust history’ that the German government paid tribute to the “iconoclastic” playwright, saying he had “never ducked a confrontation” while “loving provocations and remaining true to himself”.
Similarly the Central Council of German Jews called Hochhuth a “courageous taboo-breaker” who had “touched off an overdue debate in Germany” about the Vatican’s role. Notably the AFP press agency report on Hochhuth’s death avoids all mention of the Sikorski saga.
These official German and Jewish spokesmen might change their tune once they get to see H&D‘s new two-part series about Hochhuth and Irving. Will official spokesmen – Jewish or Gentile – welcome re-examination of Sikorski’s death; the various associated issues of murderous rivalries and official lies concerning Poland’s exile government; its military, intelligence and propaganda forces; and the Faustian pact with Stalin?
And who was the Hungarian Jewish journalist who began his propaganda career inventing stories about Adolf Hitler as early as 1932, then worked for IRD in their campaign against Hochhuth and Irving in the late ’60s and early ’70s?
The first episode of this stranger-than-fiction tale, based on top secret documents many of which have never been reported before, is in the May edition of Heritage and Destiny, available now.
The latest Holocaustian testimony
Today’s testimony in a Hamburg state court room might well be the last time that an accused ‘war criminal’ gives evidence about the functioning of supposedly homicidal gas chambers.
If so, it is consistent with Holocaustian tradition that this contradictory and by any reckoning unsatisfactory ‘evidence’ has been trumpeted today by the mainstream media with conclusive headlines such as the Guardian‘s ‘Ex-Nazi camp guard admits seeing people taken to gas chamber’.
Bruno Dey – now aged 93 but 17 when he served as a sentry in the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig – stated in today’s testimony that from his watchtower he saw on one occasion 20 or 30 “people were led in, into the gas chamber, then the door was locked”. He then heard screams and banging, but added “I didn’t know that they were being gassed.”
How in that case, one might ask, did he know that it was a gas chamber – especially given that elsewhere in his evidence Mr Dey mentions that on another occasion he saw 10 or 15 people taken into the same building, who later walked out again?
But of course Mr Dey, like the rest of us, has been told for the past seventy-odd years that there were gas chambers in Stutthof and elsewhere. And he no doubt believes that his best chance of acquittal is to say – yes, I now realise there was a gas chamber, but I didn’t know at the time and I was only a 17-year-old guard…
Cross-examination will inevitably focus not on the question of whether Mr Dey indeed saw a homicidal gas chamber in operation, but on the extent of his share in collective guilt.
In the Introduction to his four volumes of Écrits Revisionnistes, first published in 1999, the late, great Professor Robert Faurisson wrote:
It is a good thing that the exterminationists have finally (or very nearly) come to abandon, in practice, the charge, based on “testimonies”, according to which there existed execution gas chambers at the camps of Ravensbrück, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Struthof-Natzweiler, Stutthof-Danzig, Bergen-Belsen…
It had indeed seemed in recent decades that orthodox historians had given up some of their wildest claims. Yet still it goes on. We will look in vain for any attempt by the Hamburg court to examine forensic or documentary evidence as to whether this ‘execution gas chamber’ at Stutthof (or any other) actually existed.
After all, the court has just heard a 93-year-old eyewitness. What further proof could be required?
One more brick in the Holocaustian edifice. Whether this amounts to history or justice is a question one dare not ask in Hamburg, nor across most of 21st century Europe, on pain of imprisonment. In a few weeks time, for example, Ursula Haverbeck will celebrate her 91st birthday in a Bielefeld prison, 150 miles south of the Hamburg courtroom. Her crime – to have asked the questions that the Hamburg court avoids.
German lawyer arrested again: faces 18 months in jail
German lawyer Sylvia Stolz was arrested again today for what George Orwell would have called ‘thought crimes’ – in the supposedly ‘democratic’ Federal Republic.
Her ‘offence’ is to have given a speech in Switzerland in 2012 where she spoke about her earlier conviction in 2008 for offences against Germany’s notorious ‘Paragraph 130’ law that forbids discussion of or research into forbidden historical topics.
Sylvia Stolz was imprisoned from 2008 to 2011. For her speech in Switzerland she was convicted again in February 2015 and sentenced to 20 months imprisonment, later reduced on appeal to 18 months.
It is this 18 month sentence that she must now serve following today’s arrest.
Less than two weeks ago the host of the Swiss conference where Sylvia Stolz gave her ‘offending’ speech – religious broadcaster and author Ivo Sasek – was represented at an alternative media conference in the Bundestag (Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin) held by the civic nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Despite the climate of fear engendered by ‘liberal dictatorships’ across Europe (seen at its worst in Germany), voters in this week’s European elections are set to defy political elites.
Not only AfD but a host of anti-establishment parties are set to win seats in the European Parliament. Voters in the UK went to the polls today, but because most countries do not vote until Sunday, there will be no counting until Sunday night and Monday morning.
This website will bring up to date coverage and analysis of results as they are declared. The present May-June edition of H&D contains a detailed analysis of the many different populist or nationalist parties standing in different European countries; the July-August edition will have reports on the results and on the widening division between Europeans and their rulers.
Paul Fromm on Dresden – 1945-2019
74 years ago a terrible war crime was committed in the ancient city of Dresden.
In the video below, Canadian broadcaster and free speech activist Paul Fromm remembers the slaughter at Dresden, and comments on its significance for Europeans worldwide.
