The hidden Nazi heritage of Germany’s far-right leader

Alice Weidel’s grandfather was a military judge in Hitler’s regime.

By DIRK BANSE,
UWE MÜLLER
and NETTE NÖSTLINGER
in Berlin

^{Illustrations by Andrei Cojocaru for POLITICO}

Alice Weidel likes to talk about Germany’s past — but she’s talked less about that of her own family.

As co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Weidel has urged her country to move on from what her party calls a “cult of shame” over its Nazi-era atrocities. Yet, despite her calls for Germany to look forward, her own family’s history has remained in the shadows.

An investigation by Welt am Sonntag, drawing on extensive documents from German and Polish archives, reveals that Weidel’s grandfather Hans Weidel was a prominent Nazi judge, appointed directly by Adolf Hitler, responsible for sentencing opponents of the Third Reich.

While the Weidels’ history is not unique in a country where the Nazi past touches nearly every family, these revelations are relevant given the AfD’s positions on Germany’s efforts to atone for the actions of previous generations.

In 2018, the party’s co-leader Alexander Gauland shocked the country when he minimized the Nazi period as “just bird shit” in a millennium of glorious history. The previous year, Björn Höcke, one of the party’s more extreme figures, described a Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and called for a 180-degree reversal to the country’s approach to remembrance.

Despite its overt radicalism and warnings by authorities that it is an extremist organization, the AfD has surged in popularity. In September, it achieved the most significant electoral win for the far right since WWII, capturing its first regional election victory. Now, with Alice Weidel as its top candidate, the AfD is preparing to push its nationalist agenda in the upcoming federal election.

Military judge

It’s not that Weidel is completely opposed to talking about her family history. She has recounted how it was expelled from what used to be Silesia, now Poland — but she’s remained silent on her grandfather’s prominent role in the Nazi regime.

Through a spokesperson, Weidel said she had no knowledge of her grandfather’s Nazi past. “Due to family discord, there was no contact with the grandfather, who died in 1985, nor was he a topic of conversation in the family,” the spokesperson said. 

Weidel was six years old when her grandfather Hans died. Her grandmother, also a member of the Nazi party, passed away two years later.

The elder Weidel was nearly 40 when he became a military judge at the Warsaw commandant’s office in July 1941, joining about 3,000 Wehrmacht judges in enforcing Hitler’s military rule. 

His superiors praised him for “carrying out his work with great interest and understanding,” the documents showed.

Under Hitler, who ruled as commander in chief of the Wehrmacht, military courts issued an estimated 50,000 death sentences, of which over 20,000 were carried out, according to the findings of historian Claudia Bade, who wrote that such a record “far exceeded that of the civilian Nazi courts.”

Three years into the job, Hans Weidel was appointed Chief Staff Judge. His appointment passed through the Führer’s headquarters, according to an official document from Oct. 12, 1944 that reads: “Der Führer, signed Adolf Hitler.”

Before his steep rise in the Nazi system, Hans Weidel had studied law in Munich and Breslau. He was a member of the Nazi party since 1932, joining before Hitler’s rise to power and serving in the Waffen-SS from 1933 as a legal advisor. “Even before the September 1930 election, I voted National Socialist and actively campaigned in the movement’s election propaganda,” he wrote in a document preserved in German archives.

Hans Weidel would later tell investigators that he had no knowledge of the Nazi’s treatment of Jews. He lived in a small town, he said : “I didn’t hear anything there other than what was in the newspapers or on the radio.” 

“I must stress, however, that I never heard anything about the SS’s crimes,” he added. 

The aftermath

After Germany’s defeat and its division into four occupied zones, the victorious powers set about cleansing the country from the Nazis. Supporters of the dictatorship were not to hold important positions in the new state. To this end, tribunals were set up by the military governments of the allied powers.

Hans Weidel, who had moved with his family to East Westphalia after the war, faced three investigations for his roles during the dictatorship.

In Nov. 1948, a tribunal in Bielefeld, part of the British-occupied zone, opened a case against him for “membership of a criminal organization.” But the case was closed within a month, with prosecutors citing a lack of evidence, the investigation file in the federal archives showed.

That decision, while not an outright acquittal, spared him from being disbarred. He went on to open a law firm in the Western city of Gütersloh, where he became active in an association of displaced persons and sought compensation for his lost property in Upper Silesia.

Two decades later, his Nazi past caught up with him again. In the late 1970s, police in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hamburg reopened investigations into his wartime role. Requests for documents were sent to East Germany, then under communist rule. However, both attempts to prosecute him failed. In the Federal Republic, not a single military judge was brought to justice for imposing arbitrary death sentences.

The revelations are unlikely to damage Alice Weidel’s standing with her base as she prepares to lead her party in the election next year.

However, as the AfD struggles to shake off accusations of Nazi sympathy, how she chooses to confront her grandfather’s prominent role in the regime could influence how voters see the party’s commitment to moving beyond its past. 

WELT is a sister publication of POLITICO in the Axel Springer Group.