by Thomas Klikauer and Danny Antonelli
In late November 2023, an unsavory group of people – members of the Germany’s far right AfD and Neo-Nazis – entered the brightly lit dining room of a local hotel near the East-Germany city of Potsdam.
Along with the top-level AfD cohort, a leading Führer of the neo-fascist Identitarian movement was also there.
As widely reported by all of Germany’s main news outlets – Tagesschau, ZDF, MDR, TAZ, Tagesspiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Rundschau, Deutschlandfunk, etc. – the secretive meeting was spiced up by two members of a reactionary CDU subgroup called Values Union (WerteUnion). Two influential men were behind this and had arranged the meeting:
- Gernot Mörig, a lifelong member of Germany’s far right – a former dentist from Düsseldorf, and
- Hans-Christian Limmer, an investor in the catering sector and shareholder of a hamburger chain. He is the visible wealthy man in the background.
How things have changed for Germany’s “wannabe” Nazis! Today, only a dodgy dentist and a second-tier investor can be mustered for the cause. One-hundred years ago (1924+), Hitler’s Nazis got serious industrialists like Krupp, Thyssen, etc., and powerful corporations like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Allianz, IG Farben, Miele – the list is long – to hand over cash to Hitler’s Nazi party.
On 20 January 1942, what has come down in history to be known as The Wannsee Conference was called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.
He wanted to ensure co-operation for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered.
Although the attendees were not from parties currently in power, and had no leaders from the armed forces with them, the goal of what can be described as their wished-for Wannsee 2.0 meeting – in a country villa called Landhaus Adlon, a downgrade from the imposing Wannsee mansion – was to plan (again) how “non-Aryans” can be expelled from Germany on the basis of racist criteria.
It was Nazi Rassenwahn II. Basically, their plan is to re-migrate non-Germans regardless of whether they have German citizenship or not.
The meeting was supposed to be kept secret. Communication between organizers and guests was carried out via actual snail-mail letters. However, a team of investigative journalists managed to send in a reporter who worked undercover and talked to several AfD members.
Later, journalists were able to reconstruct the meeting that planned the new ethnic cleansing – German style. In attendance was:
- AfD operative and federal member of parliament Roland Hartwig;
- the “right” hand of party boss Alice Weidel (fascism’s Swiss-based pretty face) – Gerrit Huy;
- AfD member, “right-wing extremist” and federal member of parliament Ulrich Siegmund;
- local AfD boss Tim Krause;
- Austria’s top-Neo-Nazi, hate-speech lover, and neo-fascist poster-boy Martin Sellner (just in case of another Anschluss!);
- Mario Müller, who has links to Germany’s Neo-Nazis;
- CDU Werte-Union board members Michaela Schneider and Silke Schröder;
- Alexander von Bismarck – a descendent of Germany’s 19th century founding chancellor. (Perhaps he too was dreaming of an Aryan Großdeutschland); and,
- Henning Pless – right-wing esoteric entrepreneur and blood-and-soil demagogue.
In the invitation letter, Mörig wrote that the meeting was being held to develop an “overall concept, in the sense of a master plan to remove non-Germans from German soil.” First speaker was the swastika-loving Martin Sellner – the long-standing face of the neo-fascist Identitäre Bewegung (IB).
The key discussion centered around what Germany’s right-wing extremists euphemistically call remigration – the expulsion of non-Germans, either to their countries of origin or to some designated area in North Africa.
The issue that unites the CDU’s far right fringe, the AfD, and the more openly Neo-Nazis, is the question of race [Rasse] – now reframed as remigration.
In the re-hallucination of Germany’s far right, this is – once again – a question of the survival of the Volk and the West – it is Oswald Spengler 2.0. Germany’s 21st century race fanatics envision three target groups for what they imagine to be the reverse settlement of foreigners:
- asylum seekers and migrants,
- foreigners (non-Germans) – even those with the legal right to stay, – and
- so-called non-assimilated people – anyone not fitting into the Volksgemeinschaft.
Germany’s right-wing extremists see migration and foreign blood as the biggest problem. Germany’s self-appointed new master race – the Herrenmensch 2.0 – divides the people (the Volk) into two groups:
- those who can live in Germany, and
- those for whom this should not apply – leading to selection 2.0.
The idée fixe is that people should be ousted from Germany if they have the wrong skin color or origin – as defined by Sellner. Austrian Sellner seems to follow another Austrian – Karl Lueger – who once said, “I decide who is a Jew.”
Yet, the planned removal of non-Germans would violate two provisions of Germany’s constitution or The Basic Law: the right of citizenship and the principle of equality.
While claiming to maintain “law & order”, Germany’s radical right-wing is scheming – with no objections from the AfD – to implement the ethnic cleansing that they have euphemistically renamed “remigration.”
CDU official Silke Schröder, for example, only wondered “how should this work in practice?” Sellner assured her that maximum pressure must be put on people through “new and tailor-made laws.”
Remigration will not be done in a hurry – it will be “a decade-long project.” Attending AfD members voiced no objections.
On the contrary, AfD mini-boss Gerrit Huy emphasized that her party had already demanded remigration seven years ago. East-Germany’s Ulrich Siegmund is powerful inside the AfD because of his high approval ratings. He too agreed to “the master plan” saying that “foreign restaurants” had to be put under pressure. Perhaps a new version of Kauft nicht bei Juden.
After the Wannsee 2.0 meeting, AfD politicians claimed to have been there as “private persons” of course. Strangely, they all agreed to expel “illegal people.” After the meeting, Gernot Mörig distanced himself. He claimed to remember Sellner’s statements “differently.”
Meanwhile, and given recent polling for upcoming state elections, particularly in the former East-Germany, the AfD feels as if it is on the high road to success. Worse, there is a current shift to the right that has inspired the AfD. According to recent polls, the AfD will soon be the strongest party in East-German states such as Saxony and Thuringia.
The AfD is set to received well above 30% of voter support, well ahead of the CDU, SPD and the Greens. At the same time, the AfD is also under pressure. Germany’s Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) is targeting the AfD in Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. Most recently, it classified the AfD’s “Young Alternative” in North Rhine-Westphalia as suspected extremists.
One of the reasons the Young Alternatives can be regarded as right-wing extremists is because of their closeness to the aforementioned neo-fascist Identitarians (IB) and what the Young Alternatives euphemistically call, “völkisch-ethnic understanding of the people”, i.e. the myth of the Aryan race.
Meanwhile, a ban of the AfD is still being discussed in Germany, and in some cases actually called for. More than 400,000 people signed a petition to ban the AfD. Marco Wanderwitz (CDU) is gathering support in Germany’s parliament – the Bundestag – to ban the party.
To counter the movement to ban the party, the AfD claims to be a democratic force standing by “the rule of law.”The AfD tactics seem to follow Joseph Goebbels’ proven strategy: “we [the Nazis] are entering the Reichstag in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal.
We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it”. It worked once – so why not try it again!
Like its predecessors, the AfD sees two kinds of Germans: a) the Biodeutsche – those who are racially German; and the so-called Passport-Germans: those who are Germans because of a passport, i.e. citizenship.
For the Wannsee 2.0 attendees, so-called immigrants with a German passport and those who are the descendants of a family living in Germany are merely “second-class citizens.”
The AfD/CDU/IB dystopia also envisions a so-called “model state” in North Africa where up to two million people could live. One Neo-Nazi explains, “then you have a place where you can move these people to.”
Sellner’s master plan is reminiscent of Hitler’s (1940) plan to deport four million Jews to the island of Madagascar. It might well be that Sellner had something like this in mind.
Perhaps it is also no coincidence that the organizers of the conspiratorial meeting knew that their gathering in the Landhaus Adlon was barely five miles away from the location of the infamous Wannsee Conference.
That massive villa was the place where German Nazis coordinated the industrial-style extermination of Europe’s Jewish people in the 1940s. Neo-Nazis know and celebrate January 20 until this day.
Of course the Landhaus Adlon, which was in the Adlon family until 2011, was where famous hotel owner Louis Adlon would spend time with his American second wife. “In December 1939, he applied for membership of the NSDAP and was accepted on February 1, 1940 (membership number 7.463.047). His second wife Hedda also became a member.”
Meanwhile, Neo-Nazi Sellner is also fighting with terminology to mask his Neo-Nazi intentions – at least in public and for now. He even fabricated something called “ethnic choice.”
Sellner says, “these strangers live here” … they have an “ethnic choice” to remain in a Germany defined by the Volksgemeinschaft or move to what he called a “migration-friendly place” – implying German Neo-Nazis will make their lives even more hellish than they already do. One can rest assured, his IB squad will “assist” people to make the right choice.
Assisting non-Germans to make the right choice is also Mörig’s “panel of experts.”This panelwill work out a detailed plan for the expulsion of migrants, including those who are German citizens. Selection will be done from an ethical (read: racial), legal, and logistical point of view.
Mörig’s preferred head of the panel is far-right poster-boy Hans-Georg Maaßen – the AfD’s new Carl Schmitt, though without Schmitt’s cunning.
The ghastly show was a mixture of Neo Nazis, AfD officials, CDU politicians, and entrepreneurs working in unison on their Master Plan for the harassment, expulsion, and mass deportation of non-Germans. A couple of wealthy men and a group of Neo-Nazis organized the meeting with the goal of promoting “white supremacy in Germany.”
What is truly scary – barely one year after the Reichsbürger came close to a coup d’état – is that this will not be the only project of its kind that Germany’s right-wing extremists and money can come up with.
The old slogan “capital stands behind fascism” still seems to work – albeit with very limited success in Germany, while in the United States there is a whole network of oligarchs who support the destruction of democracy. In the case of the AfD’s late 2023 Wannsee 2.0 meeting, an extremely tiny part of German capital was sponsoring the return of fascism.
Right-wing entrepreneur Hans-Christian Limmer organized the secret meeting between AfD representatives and the far-right IB but claims he wasn’t present. Recently, Limmer was forced to divest himself of his investments in at least two companies.
What is worse by far, but is however consistent with the past and present authoritarian character of the parties, is the ever-closer approach of Germany’s CDU and Bavaria’s CSU to the Neo-Nazi AfD and neo-fascist IB, who provided the conceptual layout for the Wannsee 2.0 meeting.
Documentation exists for Putin’s funding of the neofascists in Europe, so at least one major oligarch has skin in the game and will do whatever he can to undermine democracy in Europe.
And should the ever-dangerous Republicans win the presidency in the USA, democratic Europe will find itself “between a rock and a hard place.”
Thomas Klikauer is the author of Alternative Für Deutschland – The AfD: Germany’s New Nazis Or Another Populist Party?
Danny Antonelli grew up in the USA, now lives in Hamburg, Germany and writes radio plays, stories and is a professional lyricist and librettist.
