New German MP with rising Right-wing party once described Churchill as a war criminal
A newly elected member of Berlin’s regional parliament once described Winston Churchill as a “war criminal”, it has emerged.
Ronald Gläser of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party accused Churchill of responsibility for 50m deaths.
Another of the party’s victorious candidates is a former leader of a German extremist group modelled on the English Defence League (EDL).
The AfD inflicted damaging losses on Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat (CDU) party in regional elections in Berlin at the weekend, winning 14.5 per cent of the vote and 25 seats in the state parliament.
A visibly shaken Mrs Merkel signalled for the first time she was prepared to reconsider changes to her refugee policy in the wake of the result.
The AfD, which campaigned on an openly anti-Muslim platform, insists it is not far-Right or extremist.
But the backgrounds of some of its victorious candidates have come under scrutiny following the Berlin vote.
Mr Gläser, the party’s spokesman in Berlin and one of its new MPs, is a senior journalist at Junge Freiheit, a far-Right newspaper.
“What would have happened if the English had not declared war on us Germans for no good reason in 1939?” he wrote in a 2010 article comparing Churchill with Hitler.
“The two warlords are not treated equally as war criminals, which they both were,” he wrote.
“Fifty million people dead. Half of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic States, the Czech and Slovak Republics under communist rule. This is the world that Churchill gave us. Of course not alone. But with his blindness to the real war aims of Stalin and his war against Germany he greatly contributed.”
Kay Nerstheimer, another of the AfD’s new MPs, is a former regional leader of the German Defence League (GDL), a group explicitly modelled on the EDL.
A German intelligence report published in 2014 described the GDL as “extremist” and accused it of endorsing the use of physical violence against its political opponents.
The GDL claims it was founded to “protect the Judaeo-Christian tradition” and “defend against the encroachments of radical Islam”.
Georg Pazderski, the AfD’s regional leader in Berlin, says Mr Nerstheimer left the GDL in 2012 and has since distanced himself from the group.
A veteran military officer who served in Nato’s joint command, Mr Pazderski is a relative moderate who has been described as the acceptable face of the party.
The new AfD MPs also include defectors from Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
While the Berlin result is not the AfD’s strongest election showing this year — it won over 24 per cent in an east German state in March — it is likely to give the party its first taste of real power.
Rival parties have united to keep it out of government elsewhere, but Berlin is a special case. The city is a federal state in its own right, and its unusual election rules mean that, at least by convention, the AfD is entitled to councillors in at least seven of its boroughs.
If the other parties honour that convention, it could give AfD a degree of power over refugee policy and budget decisions in the German capital.