HALLE, Germany — From the stage of a tavern in a wooded town in eastern Germany, right-wing ideologue Björn Höcke regaled his followers late last year with the story of his impending trial. He faced charges of saying “Everything for Germany” at a political rally — violating German laws against uttering Nazi slogans.
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He gestured to the crowd with a mischievous grin. “All for?” he asked. “Germany!” they shouted.
After a decade of testing the boundaries of political discourse in Germany, Höcke, leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, no longer needed to push the boundaries himself. The crowd did it for him.
That moment crystallizes why, for his detractors, Höcke is not simply a challenge to the political order, but a threat to German democracy. For years, Höcke has been methodically chipping away at the free speech bans Germany has put in place to prevent extremists from ever coming to power again — as happened in the 1930s, when the Nazis used democratic elections to do so.
The knives of Nazi stormtroopers were engraved with the phrase “Everything for Germany.” By reviving these slogans, Höcke’s opponents say, he has sought to make fascist ideas more palatable.
In May, judges found Höcke guilty of deliberately using a Nazi slogan and fined him the equivalent of $13,000. It was one of a series of legal cases he faces — none of which appear to have slowed Höcke or his party. In the recent European Parliament elections, the AfD came in second in Germany, beating out any of the country’s governing parties.
To his opponents, he personifies a hateful effort by the far right to destigmatize the country’s Nazi past. To his supporters, he is a freedom fighter, trying to reclaim unfairly maligned words and preserve his conception of an ethnic German culture.
On his final day in court in May, Mr. Höcke, 52, a former history teacher, insisted he did not know he was using a stormtrooper slogan. The words came to him unplanned, he said, ignoring the fact that since being charged, he has twice persuaded crowds to repeat the Nazi phrase to him. Before the trial, Mr. Höcke appeared in a televised debate, where he insisted it was intentionally misleading. He deplores the Nazis, he insisted. And besides, he argued, many before him had wrongly used “Everything for Germany.”
In early May, he gave a speech in the western city of Hamm ahead of the European elections. Times are changing in the homeland, he said, adding: “The signs point to a storm.”
That phrase was used by a Nazi newspaper in 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power.
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