Alexander Gauland says Germans ‘have the right’ to be proud of the achievements of nation’s soldiers in two world wars

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Germans should be proud of what their soldiers achieved during the first and second world wars, the top candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has said in the run-up to elections on 24 September at which the party is expected to enter parliament.

Opinion polls show the anti-immigrant AfD iwinning up to 12% of the vote, meaning it could become the third largest party in Germany’s lower house behind Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

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“If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars,” Alexander Gauland, 76, said in a speech to supporters on 2 September that has since been uploaded to YouTube.

“If I look around Europe, no other people has dealt as clearly with their past wrongs as the Germans,” he said.

The Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, during which time they killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

“People no longer need to reproach us with these 12 years. They don’t relate to our identity nowadays,” Gauland said.

He said the battle of Verdun during the first world war belonged to German history, as did Erwin Rommel, the second world war field marshal celebrated as the Desert Fox and the army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who led an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.

Gauland said Germany needed to reclaim its history.

The AfD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In January, Björn Höcke, the AfD’s chief in the eastern state of Thuringia, provoked outrage by describing the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and demanding a “180-degree turnaround” in the way Germany seeks to atone for Nazi crimes.