Germany’s New Wannabe Führer

Posted by Thomas Klikauer and Danny Antonelli

Björn Höcke is most likely Germany’s most dangerous politician. He is the leader of the neofascist AfD, a regional Führer, a weird kind of trailblazer, and a far-right demagogic ideologue as well as, currently, the most powerful far-right (read: neo-Nazi) leader in the country. 

Cunningly, Björn Höcke – the wannabe new Führer of Germany – likes to tell his adoring crowds at his rallies, “now Björn Höcke is standing here in front of you … I am someone who is not really a politician … circumstances have driven me into politics.” Virtually nothing of this is true. But it is efficient propaganda.

Björn Höcke lives and breathes his own neo-Nazi dream persona. Yet, his “polit-show” is something very precisely planned out and it is planned “for him” and for him alone to rise to the top. The goal of Höcke and his henchmen is to take power – a Machtergreifung 2.0. 

First, he wants to be the Führer of his home state of Thuringia (in the former East-Germany), and after that in all of Germany. That is the master plan.

The wannabe Führer’s deeply authoritarian AfD is overtaking Germany’s democratic parties in Thuringia. The neofascist AfD is predicted to garner between 30% and 34% of votes in the upcoming election scheduled for 1 September 2024.

Björn Höcke [pronounced: beeyorn hockey] is not just an ideological zealot, but he is rhetorically extremely polished, and is also an excellent actor – perhaps the finest Germany has to offer. 

Like the suicidal Führer of the 1930s, many people inside his own party trust him to achieve great things. They see him as he imagines himself: “Björn Höcke, future chancellor of neofascist Germany.” 

Höcke claims (like Trump and Orban and Putin claim for their countries) that he is here to save Germany. About democractic forces he says that “they dissolve our Germany like a bar of soap under a lukewarm stream of water.” 

This far-right Savior is a guy who uses banned Nazi slogans, like the slogan of Hitler’s SA, “everything for Germany.” A court in Halle recently convicted him for using this slogan. Long before that, he lost another court case that now allows anyone to call him a Nazi. 

Playing the victim is part of the far-right playbook. In defence of his Nazi sloganeering, he claimed: “I am thinking of Jesus Christ. I’m thinking about the witch trials. 

Germany’s judicial club has always hit those on the head that are dissidents … now it has hit me on my head.” Apparently not hard enough because in his self-delusion he sees himself as the hero. And at the same time, also as the victim. 

Höcke is an extremely calculating, scheming, and a dangerous politician. This is someone who wants to fundamentally change Germany with the help of his far-right party. 

Originally run by neoliberal economics professors and petit-bourgeois conservatives, the AfD was cunningly infiltrated, penetrated by neo-Nazis like him. He and his stooges have successfully converted a neoliberal anti-EU party into a far-right, neofascist, and neo-Nazi party.

With the help of “his” party, Höcke has something very specific in mind for Germany. Yet, he is not alone in his quest. Behind him there are others, like there were behind Hitler. Björn Höcke and his flunkies follow a well-crafted plan to create a much more powerful movement. 

As in the case of the dead Führer from the 1930s – who was a ne’er-do-well with next to no education, no degree, a failed painter, daydreamer, a disastrous soldier, loner, and a social misfit – too many people have underestimated Björn Höcke, consistently, comprehensively, and for many years. As it was then, so it is today: a big mistake.

At a recent Mühlhausen rally Björn Höcke announced that he wants to become the state premier of Thuringia. Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies him as a right-wing extremist. This gives them extra powers of surveillance and control. If he takes one step in the wrong direction, it could even lead to his arrest as a terrorist.

This guy also regularly refuses to be interviewed and hates answering questions. Just like Trump, he prefers the big stage, rallies and talk-shows. In election rallies, Höcke repeatedly conjures up the image of an impending apocalypse for Germany (again following the right-wing playbook to the letter). It adheres to the far-right “I am your saviour” script. 

He likes to tell rally-goers: the “outdated parties, from the re-named SED to the conservative CDU can’t do it, and they don’t want to do it.” Do what, exactly? That is left up to the distorted imagination of his followers. 

He continues with: “their work is a work of destruction … they walk through Germany with a wrecking ball.” Of course what he is doing here is projecting onto others his own destructive program for Germany. 

He wants to make his audience paranoid, and make them believe that behind all the  smoke and mirrors of his rhetoric, it is the evil “elite” from business, politics and the media who are the enemy. 

This “elite” is fighting against “the people.” Far-right propaganda always sets “the elite” against “the people” – a rhetorical trick that works well.

In the far-right playbook, he is the savior. He is also the leader of “the people”, fighting for “the people.” In the far-right “I-will-save-you!” propaganda, Germany is a patient on the verge of multiple organ failure. For Germany’s new wannabe Führer, it is all about the very survival of, as Björn Höcke says, “our people.” 

In his “doomsday-plus-I will save you!” scenario, it is about nothing other than the impending death of Germany. A grisly death his far-right policies will ensure, according to a number of economic forecasts.

The politics of fear demand that he needs to talk of an almost instantaneous collapse of Germany. This collapse will then prepare Germans for a completely different political system (read: authoritarian system). The goal is to get the majorities for such a different system. 

This is needed as, like Björn Höcke says, “we are on the verge of the destruction of Germany.” And if he has his way, the destruction will come fast and furious.

His rhetoric insinuates the need for doing something now to turn the tide. All fascists need to conjure up pictures of an enemy. This worked well in the 1930s and Höcke hopes it will work again today. The external enemy is the non-Aryan [there is no such thing as an Aryan race]. 

The internal enemy is what he calls “the cartel parties” – Germany’s democratic parties. In the hallucination that Björn Höcke manufactures for his adherents, Germany’s democratic parties are “part of a closed transatlantic elite.” 

While it is quite clear to anyone looking on from outside that he wants to belong to the East-looking “authoritarian elite,” for him and the other authoritarians, anything mildly cosmopolitan stinks of the enemy.

Höcke’s hatred of the imaginary “elites” comes from the phantasm that there are foreign powers that secretly rule Germany. In this far-right conspiracy narrative, the elites and indeed the global elites dominate and will destroy us all. 

‘Gloom and doom’ is the message which is also being spread now by the Republicans in the US election. This message is currently being successfully countered by “the politics of joy.”

History teacher Höcke grew up in a small rural town, Anhausen, in Rhineland-Palatinate, close to the river Rhine. However, his ideological roots are in the old German East. 

These roots shaped his far-right worldview and perhaps even his identity. His ancestors were mostly from primitive and underdeveloped, rural, and isolated East Prussia. His grandparents brought him up in the Germanic nostalgia of an imaginary East Prussian culture. 

His childhood was dominated by the dreamworld of his grandparents’ delusion about East Prussia. Today, he still waxes nostalgia about his “lost homeland” and that it once again should be governed by his beloved master-race [Herrenrasse]. Höcke , via his grandparents, feels displaced and betrayed, like they did after the Second World War. 

In rather common far-right and neo-Nazi delusions, losing the war and the death of Hitler are never viewed as “the liberation from Nazism,” especially because Nazism is regarded as a return to a mythical Germany where heroes find a home in Valhalla after they die gloriously in battle . Höcke still dreams of returning to “his” land – perhaps also imagining yet another war of conquest with Poland. 

In the projected imaginary world of Björn Höcke, the victorious powers have set up the much-despised new Federal Republic. He views present-day Germany from the ideological position of a deeply reactionary East Prussianism that encompasses both the old militaristic Empire and the Nazi Reich that destroyed Germany, and eventually ceded most all of East Prussia to Poland.

Still worse, Björn Höcke’s father subscribed to the reactionary neo-Nazi newspaper “The Peasantry” or Die Bauernschaft. This neo-Nazi rag was run by a German Holocaust denier and was banned in Germany. Still, through its influence, young Björn was infected with a hefty dose of Nazi ideology.

Furnished with this Nazi ideology, young Höcke became part of Germany’s neo-Nazi movement. It was around that time that Höcke met CDU-politician Martin Hohmann who made headlines because of an antisemitic speech. Hohmann was eventually expelled from the CDU, and today that antisemite is an AfD politician. 

Martin Hohmann was a kind of an ideological mentor for Höcke. Antisemitism fits well into Björn Höcke’s East-Prussian Nazism encompassing an Aryan race living in a Teutonic and rural Volksgemeinschaft cleansed of the Untermensch.

Way more important to Björn Höcke is the far-right and crypto-neo-Nazi publisher Götz Kubitschek. Höcke got to know Kubitschek during his early years as a young neo-Nazi. Far-right manipulator Kubitschek quickly became a most valuable source of far-right ideology and strategy for the rising star of neofascism. 

Kubitschek’s neo-Nazi ideology generating outfit is euphemistically and cunningly called the Institute for State Policy. Kubitschek’s far-right conspiracy fantasies repeatedly conjure up the downfall of Germany. 

Far-right orator Höcke carries this ideology to the marketplace of opinions. Kubitschek and Björn Höcke work together to further the mainstreaming of fascism.

Kubitschek also runs several online channels for his ideological followers. Success followed soon after more and more people started to vote for the AfD. 

Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies Kubitschek’s outfit as a “secured right-wing extremist” endeavor. It clearly violates the democratic basis of Germany. 

Equipped with far-right ideologies from Kubitschek, Björn Höcke also transports his neo-Nazism ever deeper into the AfD, because – as the ideological disciple of Kubitschek  – he wants to steer his political party, and ultimately Germany, to the extreme right. He has not been totally unsuccessful. 

Kubitschek’s right-wing extremist network has a great influence on the AfD – largely through Höcke and his ideological platoon inside the AfD. At the level of sheer political power inside the AfD, it is the person of Björn Höcke who embodies this power. 

Ideological influence on the AfD is maintained because Höcke keeps in “close contact” with Kubitschek and draws his ideological inspirations from reading Kubitschek’s demagogic pamphlets. 

Höcke and Kubitschek showed up together at some of the many so-called far-right “summer festivals” held in 2023. Höcke is the popular face of Kubitschek’s neo-Nazism, the perfect incarnation of what Kubitschek has come up with in his far-right essays as the strategist and ideologue working in the background. 

Meanwhile, the Höcke mob-like family has another special assistant: neo-Nazi Thorsten Heise. As an Aryan Brotherhood man, Heise is one of the leading German neo-Nazis. 

He is also the deputy-Führer of “The Homeland” – formerly known as the neo-Nazi NPD. When Höcke and Heise met, both already had a long “career” (!) in Germany’s neo-Nazi circles. 

Heise was convicted several times for grievous bodily harm and sedition wherein he served two stints in prison. And Heise had a “memorial” dedicated to Hitler’s Waffen-SS in his garden.

Thorsten Heise is a household name in Germany’s neo-Nazi circles. Anyone cultivating a friendship with him also thinks like a neo-Nazi. There is a close friendship between the neo-Nazi Höcke and Heise families. 

It was not only of a private nature. Around 2011 and 2012, several articles appeared in a leading German neo-Nazi journal, written under the pseudonym by a certain Landolf Ladig. 

It turns out that, after some linguistic analysis, Höcke’s language is strikingly similar to that of Landolf Ladig. Ladig/Höcke even speaks of two “preventive” wars against the German Reich. Ladig/Höcke also denies any German guilt for its wars. 

Delusionally reversing reality, Ladig/Höcke claims these “were wars of aggression against Germany.” Meanwhile, Ladig/Höcke dreams of a nationalistic revolution that ties in with Nazism. Even Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution assumes that Höcke is Ladig. 

In best neo-Nazi fashion, Björn Höcke continues to deny this even though at the beginning of 2010 in Dresden Höcke took to the streets with a troupe of neo-Nazis organized by the neo-Nazi kill squad the Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland (Young Homeland Association of East Germany – JLO). Höcke was right in the middle of the rally crowd screaming “We want to march. We want to march. We want to march. We want to march.” 

Barely three years later, Björn joined Germany’s newly rising neo-Nazi AfD party. Another year later, in the state election of 2014, the party won 10% of the vote, with him as the leading candidate in the state of Thuringia. With that, Germany’s new wannabe Führer entered the state parliament. 

Shortly after Björn Höcke entered parliament, the AfD-deputies Siegfried Gentele and Oskar Helmerich realized that Höcke was following a neo-Nazi plan of attack. 

The two moderates became suspicious when the AfD’s parliamentary group met at Kubitschek’s neo-Nazi foxhole at Schnellroda – at Höcke’s behest. For the most part, the non-AfD party member and neo-Nazi ideologue Kubitschek spoke. The rest “sat there and listened to him.” 

Other helpers Björn can count on are the AfD’s Hitler-Youth-like street fighting squad: “The Young Alternative”. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has deemed them to be a “right-wing extremist” group. 

Björn Höcke shows up frequently to woo them. He likes to be chummy with the party’s even more radical neo-Nazi offspring. The AfD’s youth wing is often referred to as “Höcke Youth” or “Höcke Jugend” or HJ, short for what used to be the Hitler Jugend. 

Nothing pleases him more than when everything goes in his neo-Nazi direction. The AfD is increasingly making a name for itself as a xenophobic, anti-Islam, and anti-migration party. 

Höcke sends a clear message to those he believes to be “multicultural madmen” since he is an adherent of the biological race theory, a racial nonsense theory that comes directly from the Nazis.

Like all racists, Höcke denies that his ideology is racist. However, he caused a nationwide outcry at the beginning of 2017 when he called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin “a monument of shame” demanding “a 180° degree turn in memory policy.” 

In the neo-Nazi fantasies of Björn Höcke, this would mean the SS is the victim and the Jews are the killers. If he were in charge, then Berlin would have a memorial honoring Hitler, Himmler and the SS, instead of the Holocaust memorial.

Obviously, this type of idiocy gets applause from right-wing extremists and adjacent neo-Nazis. Due to the departure of many moderates like Lucke, Petry and Meuthen from the AfD, the influence of the Höcke gang continues to grow. 

Kubitschek’s plan to convert the AfD from a neoliberal into a neofascist party is working out inside the party, but perhaps not so much outside the AfD. 

In early 2024, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated throughout Germany against right-wing extremism. The trigger was the secret meeting at Potsdam’s Wannsee where there was a discussion about how to create a new master race in Germany. 

The secret meeting included AfD members and Uber-Nazi Martin Sellner – the poster boy of the far-right identitarian movement. 

The Sellner/AfD meeting was about large-scale deportations of anyone who doesn’t look like their imagined Aryans (code for white Europeans). 

Höcke already outlined this in his 2018 book, referring to migrants who, according to Höcke, are unable to be integrated, therefore are to be deported – re-migrated – back to their homeland. 

That this violates Germany’s constitutional principle of human dignity is of no concern to the man who, incidentlially, says he represents law and order. Obviously, like Hitler, that means “his law” and “his order.”

In spring 2024, law-&-order man Björn Höcke was standing trial again. Höcke publicly used a forbidden Nazi slogan at a party event. In court, he had to answer for a speech he had made three years previously. At that time, Höcke was the guest speaker in the state election campaign in Merseburg. 

The main focus of his speech was on “immigration to Germany” – what else! Höcke ended the speech by shouting “everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany.” 

“Alles für Deutschland” – everything for Germany – was the slogan of Hitler’s thuggish SA. Immediately, he  claimed that “he did not know anything about the meaning.” 

Neo-Nazi Höcke is a history teacher who likes to trivialize Nazism. Up until that speech in Merseburg, he rather cunningly always “only” used Nazi rhetoric which was not banned. 

At that Meresburg point, he finally moved on to using forbidden language, knowing it would forever endear him to the hard core of his movement.

“Everything for Germany” is an expression punishable by law because it is part and parcel of Nazi rhetoric which is forbidden under the constitution. 

Neo-Nazi Höcke was sentenced to a fine of €13,000 ($14,500). In sentencing, the judge addressed Björn Höcke explicitly and said, “Mr. Höcke, a teacher and a judge have one thing in common. They have to be very careful with their language.” 

The judge said that Höcke knew that his words were a forbidden SA slogan. The judge did not buy Höcke’s “I did not know” defence. As always, Höcke sees himself as a victim, claiming, “I am a victim … I am completely innocent.”

The mocking laughter from all those dead Nazis echoes through Valhalla and through the streets of the former East-Germany because, of course, real Nazis and today’s neo-Nazis are always innocent! 

A few years earlier, in 2019, the same innocent neo-Nazi talked of “wohltemperierte Grausamkeiten” – well-tempered atrocities.

Björn Höcke, the current Führer of the AfD’s Thuringia contingent, is set to gain above 30% of voter support in the upcoming election in the state of Thuringia. 

The AfD is set to become the strongest political party in Thuringia. In other words, roughly 1/3 of all voters in Thuringia of the former East-Germany want a neo-Nazi as their new leader.

This should be a red flag for every democratic party in Germany. Now let’s see how long it will take for the AfD to bite (betray) the hand (people) who fed it.

Source: Björn Höcke + www6.lunapic.com/editor

Born on the foothills of Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of over 1,000 publications, including a book on “The AfD”. 

Danny Antonelli grew up in the USA, now lives in Hamburg, Germany and writes radio plays, stories and is a professional lyricist and librettist. 

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