PBS’s newest Frontline documentary, “The Rise of Germany’s New Right” concerns the rise of the AfD in Germany (Alternative for Germany) party and its supposed links to Nazism and Putin’s Russia. Director and correspondent Evan Williams has also made the Frontline docs Germany’s Enemy Within (2024) and Germany’s Neo-Nazis & the Far Right (2021).
Germany’s migrant problem surged after 2015, when former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders to people (mostly fighting-age males, it seemed) fleeing the Syrian war. Over three million refugees and asylum seekers have entered Germany since, some bringing Islamic-style terrorism with them and causing understandable backlash toward the country’s open-border policy.
Yet terrorism involving migrants in Germany was barely noticed in the documentary and narrator Williams preferred to smear the AfD for noticing. He dredged up controversial statements and spurious links to Adolf Hitler. All the while, the main anti-Semitism on the ground in Europe today is coming from the pro-Hamas left.
A scene featuring Elon Musk talking by video to an AfD rally looked straight out of a movie version of 1984, and the scare-mongering filmmakers made the most of it.
Kai Arzheimer, political extremism scholar: This is absolutely unprecedented. A foreign billionaire using this platform that he owns to support a radical, if not extremist party during the election campaign was a first for Germany, and probably first for many European countries….
The hour-and-a-half documentary was filled with “far-right” and Nazi labels and, of course, Hitler references. Williams also noted “the Trump administration’s expressions of support for Europe’s far right” and lamented JD Vance’s condemnation of the “firewall” that keeps AfD from forming a German government no matter how many votes they get – in the name of “preserving democracy.”
Williams: In the fall of 2024, I was in Germany as the AFD swept to an election victory in the eastern state of Thuringia.
Since the January 6 riots there has been a suspicious amount of love from journalists for intelligence services in the U.S. Frontline used as their main “expert” Stephan Kramer, domestic intelligence chief in the German province of Thuringia. After stating that a party many people voted for would have no voice, Williams saw no contradiction about banning AfD as a threat to democracy.
Williams: Opponents of the AFD have long been warning that the party represents a threat to German democracy. Stephan Kramer is the domestic intelligence chief in Thuringia. He’s Jewish, and one of the AfD’s most vocal adversaries.
Talking heads were all stacked with the alarmist view. Kramer played the Nazi card.
Stephan Kramer, director domestic intelligence, Thuringia: ….We have a principle in Germany which is called defense of democracy. It comes out of the ideas and experiences that we had with Nazi dictatorship. Remember, Hitler and his Nazi (NSDAP) were elected into power. They didn’t do a revolution. People voted for the Nazis to take over the power.
Williams made sure the comparison took with viewers.
Williams: Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany without ever winning a majority in an election. In 1933, he formed a coalition government, and then legally obtained emergency powers, enabling him to ban all other parties.
Is that not what Germany is basically doing to the AfD?
Williams couldn’t even mention terrorism when noting the 2015 influx of asylum seekers, skipping ahead to “unintended consequences…..A rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.” Yet Williams discovered “a wave of far-right terror attacks in 2019 and 2020” which put the AfD under scrutiny.
Williams finally addressed migrant knife attacks in Mannheim, Solingen, and Magdeburg, albeit indrectly by archive news clip voiceovers. But even then Williams tried to muddy the waters.
Williams: The [Solingen] attacker’s motives were confusing. He was a Saudi who’d been granted asylum, had been critical of Islam online, and even expressed support for the AFD. Nevertheless, the AFD seized on it.
Williams played coy with statistics (as if “official crime statistics” can’t be stretched in the name of official purposes like not providing talking points to the AfD).
Williams: Throughout the campaign, the AFD would argue that immigration had led to exploding crime rates despite the fact that official crime statistics didn’t support the claim.
Kramer: If you look on the statistic, it’s simply not true that the majority of criminal acts have been done by migrants. That’s not true. If you look on the federal criminal statistics, it doesn’t give that evidence.
Per capita, anyone? Even the New York Times had to admit in an aside back in 2019 that “Of all crimes recorded last year, 39 percent overall were committed by non-German citizens, though they account for just 12 percent of Germany’s overall population.”
Kramer: But still the AFD is claiming it. And again, when emotionals [sic] are cooking high and when they prove, yes, they have some cases, very brutal where, yes, immigrants have done something, committed something, nobody is interested in the true story and nobody’s interested in statistics. Everybody’s interested in the blood and who is responsible for it. Whom can we hang?
Williams’ rebuttals were suspiciously vague.
Williams: German labor statistics show that over time, most Syrians able to work do get jobs but Bernhard and others continue to use the issue as a key talking point.
Frontline’s major complaint about deadly attacks by migrants were that they gave the AfD an opportunity to pounce for political advantage.
Unidentified voice-over: Things are very fraught here, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this somehow is leapt upon by those who can see a profit in using this for their campaign in the elections.
Williams let Kramer have the doc’s last anti-AfD rant.
Kramer: There’s a very nice phrase which is considered to be Goethe’s quote, but Goethe never said it. It’s, “If you sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship.”
The sources for this hit piece seemingly have no clue that perhaps people who surveil a popular political party and strenuously attempt to keep them out of government aren’t actually supporting democracy. Perhaps they’re the baddies, after all?
