🇩🇪 This week hackers stole about 420,000 emails from AfD politicians.
Party representatives confirm that hackers attacked a hosting provider at the end of September and condemn the leak as "an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself."
WELT journalists analyzed Alice Weidel's old emails, and what they discovered is very interesting and shows who she is.
In October 2015, Weidel warned her colleagues that the party's proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islamic street movement, and Germany's neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as the Fatherland) alienates the conservative voters the party needs to attract.
"In the West we are completely losing the mainstream conservative electorate because of our proximity to Fida, and in the East because of our proximity to the NPD," she wrote. Widel also strongly opposed Björn Höcke's speech from the same year, in which he contrasted a "life-enhancing African type" with a "self-deluding European type".
"It is very problematic, because the logic here is racist. It is fundamentally wrong," she wrote to the AfD's federal board.
In another message, she warned that extremists are deliberately blurring the line between the AfD and neo-Nazi politics, alienating mainstream conservatives "in terror."
It also feared that Höcke's rhetoric could expose the party to scrutiny by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence service that monitors threats to the constitutional order. "Hucka's statements alone and the use of the term Volksgemeinschaft" — the Nazi-era concept of an ethnic national community — "are enough to land the AfD in this report," she wrote, referring to the intelligence service's annual assessment. "It seems that some of our party are in a hurry to put the AfD, intentionally or not, into oblivion."
The leak also includes emails about Höcke's January 2017 speech to the AfD's youth wing, in which he attacked Germany's Holocaust memorial culture.
Hack described Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "memorial in shame", criticized the country's efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a "180 degree turn in the politics of memory".
Weidel herself filed a request to be expelled from the AfD. The request, obtained by WELT, accused Höcke of using "vocabulary from Adolf Hitler" and supporting the "Führerprinzip" - the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority. He described him as exhibiting an "essential affinity for National Socialism."
In May 2017 she condemned an AfD election poster featuring a pregnant woman with the slogan "'New Germans? "We will make our own" as a Nazi poster.