Where Nazis first won office, Germans are voting for right-wing extremists

Just down a thickly forested road from the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial here in the historic city of Weimar, a young mother wrangling her three children at a church pizza party talks about the hopes and fears she has for their future.

This region shocked mainstream Germany by handing victory to the far-right extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in September state elections, and like many political conversations here, this one takes an unexpected turn.

“I spent a year in Israel working with Holocaust survivors,” says the mom, working to establish her progressive bona fides. “My circle is full of leftist voices, and we always say, ‘Never again – never could we ever let something like the Holocaust happen again.’”

Then, descending into a whisper, with a toddler clutching her leg, Caroline, who would share only her first name, says: “But, I’m still thinking about voting for the AfD.”

The AfD, which has been labeled by the federal government for suspected right-wing extremism, took 33% of votes, a first-place finish, in this state of Thuringia in September. Its leader in Thuringia has been fined for using banned Nazi-era language. Next door in the state of Saxony, the party took a close second with about 30% percent. (Nationally, polls show the party is second in popularity, at 17%, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union at 32%.)

As embarrassed as she seems, Caroline grounds her position in a feeling of displacement: “I just don’t feel at home in my country anymore.”

She recently found herself among women wearing headscarves in a market square in a nearby town: “They were talking in Arabic, and they didn’t make eye contact with me, and I felt foreign in my own country. I’m afraid of the Islamicization of Germany, when I think of what happened [on Oct. 7, 2023] in Israel, how brutal it can all be.”

Adjusting the toddler, who has migrated to a perch on her hip, she says, eyes downcast: “I know it’s taboo to say this.” And she clarifies that she knows that Muslim “refugees are not Hamas,” and that, more broadly, respected Muslim organizations in Germany have condemned Hamas violence.

And yet, Caroline – at the tipping point of sympathy for the AFD – shares a mood that has helped push the party into second place in German opinion polls ahead of the 2025 federal elections.

Dispirited Thuringia is an ideal place to study the influence of radicalization politics, not only because the Nazis first tasted power here a century ago, but also for the foothold the far right has gained now.

Mainstream parties have found it an uphill battle to establish themselves securely in Thuringia. The state’s communist past stripped it of the vibrant churches, independent trade unions, and other civic organizations that in west Germany served as the building blocks of democracy, says Daniela Schwarzer, an international affairs expert at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, an independent foundation.

“Thuringia is a place that sits at a significant distance from institutions, from Berlin, from politics, and I would say even from democracy,” adds Johannes Kieß, a sociologist at the University of Leipzig.

Lenora Chu

Jens-Christian Wagner is a historian and director of the Buchenwald Memorial, located near Weimar, Germany, at the site of the concentration camp erected by the National Socialists in 1937. The memorial attracts millions of visitors a year.

Displeasure at mass immigration, an east German identity still beleaguered 35 years after the fall of communism, and a dampened economic outlook all provide fertile soil for extremism – prompting one-third of Thuringian voters to choose the far-right ballot.

They are moved by broader doubts about the Western democratic model, says Jens-Christian Wagner, a historian and director of the Buchenwald Memorial.

“Right-wing, authoritarian, anti-liberal ideas and practices are gaining weight – that is a global phenomenon. It’s not just happening in Thuringia,” says Dr. Wagner. “We Germans … have lived under dictatorship; it’s not the same in the U.S., where there’s no historic experience of how a far-right government looks and acts. But we are all under threat.”

A training ground for the Nazis

A century ago, Thuringia was an ideal training ground for the National Socialists.

Sparsely populated, the region boasts the dense Thuringian Forest, an ancient mountain range around which small towns were scattered. Thuringia’s emerging industries were depressed after World War I, and the parties of the ruling Weimar Republic were constantly fighting among themselves.

Enter the Nazi party, adept at moving into politically unstable and economically depressed regions. “And, in 1924 came the original sin on the road to the National Socialist state,” says Dr. Wagner. Conservative nationalists in Thuringia, forced into the minority, cooperated with the Nazi-backed far right. That decision eventually allowed the Nazis to slip into the state parliament, gain control of the interior ministry, and ultimately enter the regional government.

“That was the end of democracy in Thuringia, and we all paid dearly for it,” says Dr. Wagner.

During that era, Nazi slogans scapegoated Jews and the ruling Weimar government. “Blood and soil” spoke to farmers; “For a strong Germany” stoked nationalist pride, and “Death to Judah” promoted antisemitic feelings.

Today, the AfD targets Germany’s mainstream parties and the country’s resident Muslims with slogans such as “Thuringia first,” “Protect our homeland,” and “We will stop the flooding of our country.” (Muslims number 5.5 million, or 7% of the population; more than half of them are German citizens.)

The charged rhetoric taps fears in Thuringia, where the party’s hard-line stance on immigration resonates, says Dr. Schwarzer, the international affairs expert. “One thing is clear: Unlike in the past, the majority of AfD voters are no longer casting protest votes. They are genuinely convinced by the party’s offering.”

Lenora Chu

Holger Klopfleisch raises corn, wheat, and potatoes on land in Niedertreba that his parents also farmed. His ancestors have been in the eastern German state of Thuringia for more than 500 years.

“We want respect”

Holger Klopfleisch’s family line goes back 500 years in Thuringia.

The reasons for the far right’s rise are manifest in his hometown of Niedertreba. As Mr. Klopfleisch walks down the town’s sedate streets, his body battered by a lifetime of farming, he passes his childhood schoolhouse that no longer has any pupils. The majestic town church with its tar-black spires, dating to the 1700s, is attracting fewer and fewer faithful. The town dentist and doctor moved on long ago.

“There used to be two grocery stores, too,” he says.

Yet Mr. Klopfleisch stays in his town in the German heartland, population 749, his head held high. “The Klopfleisches in Thuringia were pastors, and farmers, and an archaeology professor who has a street in Jena named after him,” he says, proudly.

As a young adult when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he watched dozens of his former schoolmates decamp to seek opportunity in West Germany or in larger cities in the east, while East German-era state run industries collapsed.

He toiled alongside his parents to breathe new life into the family farm in a market economy, only to see mainstream politicians now remove diesel subsidies, slap demanding environmental regulations on farmers, and fall short in managing an influx of 4.5 million immigrants in 2022 and 2023.

“The AfD’s victory is a warning shot to the mainstream parties to act,” says Mr. Klopfleisch, who votes center-right. “I understand why people are dissatisfied. West Germany looks down on us. I want them to look at Thuringia at eye level. I want more respect for the people in Thuringia.”

And, there’s plenty to be proud of, he says. West German farmers learned about collective farming from their eastern cousins, and nearby Weimar, Thuringia’s shining jewel of a city, is dotted with UNESCO world heritage sites that draw 8 million tourists a year. Martin Luther often preached in the city church, and the city became the birthplace of the German Enlightenment, home to writer-philosophers Goethe and Schiller, and the namesake of the Weimar Republic.

Mr. Klopfleisch will often argue with his daughter by invoking Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

“I tell her to ‘Go into the lonely corner, broom!’” says Mr. Klopfleisch, chuckling. “My daughter laughs and says ‘Yeah, Papa!’”

Lenora Chu

Tattoo shop owner Maik Baier is an elected Bautzen city councilman from the far-right political Alternative for Germany, which took 30% of the vote in Saxony state elections this year.

Echoes of Germany’s past

Maik Baier decided a decade ago to cast his lot with the AfD, and he was elected this year to the city council in Bautzen, in Saxony.

He ditched the center-right conservatives because they have long neglected education and the economy in his corner of east Germany, and never cared for “the people at the bottom,” he says. Those were regular folks like himself with his struggling tattoo shop, his parents who were devastated during the reunification years, and his teenage son who is now seeking construction work.

“Everything in Germany is going downhill,” he says, sitting in his empty tattoo parlor.

“I tell my son ‘Work with your hands,’ because craftsmen can’t be replaced by digitization. We [in the east] have had this experience of how quickly something can disappear, and we’re very, very sensitive to that possibility.”

Unlike Caroline, the young mother at the church, however, Mr. Baier, doesn’t whisper when he expounds on a far-right talking point: that refugees from Muslim countries are to blame for Germany’s problems.

Bautzen is considered a “hotspot” for hate crimes and tension between migrants and ethnic Germans. Mr. Baier says his girlfriend feels unsafe walking the streets alone and is fearful of migrant-related crime.

Torben Braga, an AfD member of Thuringia’s state parliament, insists the party’s anti-migration platform isn’t “Islamophobic.” Rather, he says, the party rightly describes Islam as a “state-related, political, social idea that is incompatible with German basic law.”

A century ago, the Nazis’ rise from the forests of Thuringia to the German chancellorship – which Adolf Hitler assumed in 1933 – would take a decade. While today’s police and military are more democratic, says the historian Dr. Wagner, he is concerned about the far right’s momentum. The AfD has expanded its voter base steadily since the party won just 10% of the vote in state elections a decade ago.

“I don’t think anyone in the AfD is planning to murder 6 million Muslims,” Dr. Wagner says. But he notes, that Thuringia’s AfD leader Björn Höcke has written that Germany will have to undertake a major ‘"remigration" project once his party is in government, and that it will require “human hardship” and a policy of "well-tempered cruelty.”

“They are antidemocratic, authoritarian plans,” Dr. Wagner says. “That isn’t exactly National Socialism, but it is ethnic right-wing extremism that will then show itself not only in plans, but also in practice.”

“And that,” he warns, “is dangerous.”