German far-right party ousts regional leader for membership in extremist group

The far-right Alternative for Germany party has expelled one of its regional leaders following a lengthy standoff over her support for a group described by intelligence officials as extremist.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) said a national party tribunal decided Wednesday to boot Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein because of “behavior damaging to the party.”

Von Sayn-Wittgenstein resigned as party leader in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state, in December. She won the job back at a party congress in June, despite ongoing expulsion proceedings over her past support for the group Gedaechtnisstaette, or Memorial Site. The group was co-founded by convicted Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, popularly known as the “Nazi grandma.”

Von Sayn-Wittgenstein said she would take legal action against Wednesday’s decision.

The AfD is supportive of Israel but most German Jews repudiate the party as anti-Semitic, pointing to its anti-immigration and anti-Muslim platform and arguing that whoever targets Muslims and other minorities will eventually seek to harm the Jews’ religious freedoms.

This is not the first time that issues of Holocaust denial have split the AfD. The far-right party went through a brutal internal struggle in 2017 after lawmaker Wolfgang Gedeon labeled Holocaust deniers “dissidents” in his pamphlet “Green Communism and the Dictatorship of Minorities.”

In the text, Gedeon also criticized the fact that one of Germany’s biggest memorials, in Berlin, is dedicated not to the nation’s heroes, but to victims of the Holocaust, which he referred to as “certain misdeeds.”