How Patriotic Is Germany? Right-Wing AfD Party Calls For End To Nazi-Era Guilt, Giving Importance To Other 'Historic Sites'

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party filed a motion to stop allocation of money by a southwestern state to places that remind Germans of Nazi crimes, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Instead, the right-wing party has sought to use the money for visits to “significant German historic sites.”

Baden-Württemberg state’s draft budget allocated $69,000 for educational trips to “memorials of National Socialist injustice.” However, AfD submitted a motion for the program to be scrapped, and called for the budget for historical places in the country to give a “balanced view of history,” according to the Journal.

“A one-sided concentration on 12 years of National Socialist injustice is to be rejected,” the motion stated.

No further details of the motion were immediately available.

The four-year-old party said that Germany’s fixation over Nazis’ World War II crimes has had an impact on how its citizens view the country’s history. Moreover, this has also left people with little place for national pride, according to AfD, which is the most successful right-wing party to have risen in the country since World War II.

“The negation of our own national interests is something that has become a political maxim in Germany since World War II," AfD leader Frauke Petry said, according to the Journal.

The move comes at a time when the country is preparing to hold federal elections in September.

AfD came under scanner in January after another party leader Björn Höcke said that Germany should “make a 180-degree turn” in the country’s practice of penance over Nazi crimes. He also described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame.”

“We Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” Höcke said at the time. “Until today, we are still not in a position to mourn our own victims.”

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel responded to Höcke’s statement by saying: “The fact that we faced our history and that we learned from the past was the prerequisite for Germany being respected around the world.”

Recent polls have shown that AfD’s supporters who believe in a distinct German character are likely to agree with statements such as “National Socialism also had its good sides” and “Hitler would be seen as a great statesman today if not for the extermination of the Jews.”