Coincidence or not, the party has timed its congress for the centenary of an infamous Nazi rally. But condemnation didn’t stop Hitler, and it’s not enough now

Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is different from its sister movements across the west.

In a country deeply conscious of its own history, the party, now riding high in the polls, has to decide whether it rejects or embraces Hitler as an ideological antecedent. Rather than answering definitively, the party is deliberately opaque. It flirts with the Nazi legacy without explicitly committing to it. Far from putting voters off, this strategic ambiguity cultivates a surprisingly powerful mix of outrage and plausible deniability.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is the author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe comes out in May.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.