Veering to the Reich

A slicked-up neo-Nazi party is making noise again in Germany, exploiting rising immigration fears in Europe. Are voters starting to listen?

By Michael Scott Moore

Aug 16, 2005 | Holger Apfel is a burly, fat-cheeked 35-year-old with glasses, given to wearing brown suits. He leads a delegation of the neo-Nazi NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) in the German state parliament of Saxony. In January, he stood up in the chamber to rage about the firebombing of Dresden. His timing was sharp: The parliament was trying to recognize the liberation of Auschwitz, but Apfel and his comrades had just caused a scandal by walking out of a minute's silence observed for the victims; now he wondered out loud why there was no minute of silence for all the dead Germans. He filibustered about "anti-Germanism" and the "German holocaust," and the Allied "air-gangsters" as terrorists and mass murderers, before someone turned off his microphone.

"He knew what he was doing," says Richard Herzinger, a German political essayist and journalist who watched Apfel's tantrum from the public gallery. "It was straight out of the playbook -- using the term 'holocaust' in a new way, casting Germans as victims. It was somehow postmodern. And absolutely calculated."

For the first time in more than three decades, Germany faces a national election with neo-Nazis sitting in a regional parliament. Most Germans find this embarrassing. The NPD won 12 seats in Saxony last fall -- about 9 percent -- and another far-right party called the DVU holds six seats in the state of Brandenburg. Few experts think even the stronger NPD can win seats in the national parliament this September, but the stirring of neo-Nazism in the countryside is a symptom of discontent not just in Germany but across Europe, where many voters feel threatened by the rise of Islamist terrorism, Turkish immigrants taking their jobs, and the idea that their culture might be losing ground to foreigners who don't understand its traditions. Charles Kupchan, an expert on Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, thinks the EU experiment is swinging away from enthusiasm for "Europe" and back toward old-fashioned nationalism. "The concern is not just about immigration and unemployment," he says, "but also a dilution of European identity and community."

The NPD is all about German identity. It represents the extreme, stumpy end of the debate over multiculturalism. It used to be a postwar party with a single idea -- Germany for Germans -- but now it also makes noises against the EU, American imperialism and the standing government in Berlin. It insists that Germans were victimized in World War II. It pushes a cocktail of hard-right and hard-left "revolutionary" politics that plays well in the ex-communist east; and by hammering these new points, oddly, its members sound more than ever like members of Hitler's NSDAP.

"Germany has a legally operating Nazi party again," says Herzinger. "The mixture of anti-Semitism, anti-Westernism and anti-capitalism resembles the Nazi movement of the 1920s. Not everyone recognizes this. In Saxony, for example, the NPD is organized on a local level; they get involved in community work. So when anti-fascists come and say, 'But these people are Nazis,' the locals say, 'Well, maybe Nazis aren't so bad.'"

Small as it is, the NPD has the question of patriotism virtually to itself. Its leaders push German pride in a society where love of country is still taboo. "When you talk about patriotism here, you get tarred with the far-right brush," said Günther Waltz, a 40-ish man standing in a bar down the street from the NPD's headquarters in Köpenick, a depressed eastern suburb of Berlin. "And I think young people now are sick of hearing about the past."

Since outright Nazism is against the law in Germany, the NPD has to declare its blood pride without seeming racist. The party's national chairman, Udo Voigt, told me, "We are not a racist party, and not an anti-Semitic party. We don't use the motto, 'All foreigners must go.' That's nonsense. But we do think all foreigners should get out of German public welfare and the public health systems."

Voigt is a plain enough man in his early 50s, with a peppery mustache and a full head of gray hair. He looks and sounds -- at first -- like any brisk, assured conservative. He wears neat suits and holds a degree in political science. He's the son of a Nazi S.A. officer (the S.A. was the predecessor to the Nazi S.S.) and has belonged to the NPD since its early days in the 1960s, when he was a teenager. He knows how to talk to the press. You hear very little official anger from him toward Turks or Vietnamese or Jews. "Sometimes we don't shrink from saying Jews should shut up," says Voigt. "But that's not anti-Semitism."

Maybe not. But he's been known to slip. Last spring he gave a speech to a group of Young Nationalists and happened to mention Berlin's new Holocaust memorial, without realizing that a tape from the speech would be broadcast on national TV. "For us it isn't a Holocaust memorial," he quipped to the youngsters, "but we'd like to thank the government for laying the foundation for the chancellery of the next German Reich."

Next Page: "West Germany was a child of America and the Allies," Voigt says. "That's unacceptable to us"

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