Perhaps not everything Alexander Gauland says or does merits an analogy to what happened in 1933 | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images Berlin Calling Stop playing the Hitler card Comparing the AfD to the Nazis gives them more attention than they deserve.

BERLIN — A surprising thing or two happened last week after Alternative for Germany’s leader Alexander Gauland wrote an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. An anonymous tweeter found that Gauland’s piece had some likeness to a speech given by Adolf Hitler in 1933.

The Berlin daily newspaper Tagesspiegel then asked a couple of historians to compare the two speeches. Their verdict? The wording differed, but Gauland and Hitler had explored the same basic idea — a critique of global elites who move effortlessly across borders and have no sense of national belonging. Other media, national and international, picked up the story, duly reporting that the AfD leader had echoed the Nazi führer.

But then the story took an amusing turn. A Tagesspiegel reader discovered that Gauland’s op-ed showed even more likeness to an entirely different op-ed, written by a left-leaning blogger and published by, well, Tagesspiegel.

This all goes to show that raising the Hitler alarm gave Gauland more attention that he deserves. The AfD leader echoed Hitler, all right. And yet, his case against global elites has become so commonplace that loads of other people could have made it, too: conservative intellectuals fearing the demise of the old occident; frustrated union leaders battling the managers of powerful multinationals; anti-gentrification activists blaming foreign investors for the lack of affordable housing.

Even liberals have warned against the emergence of a so-called “global class.” It was the late sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf who coined the term in 2000 when he wrote about the rise of inequality in a globalized information economy.

The emergence of the AfD has provided lots of people who used to be apolitical with a sense of purpose — and, to an extent, that’s good.

The AfD — it should be noted — is closer to right-wing extremism than to Dahrendorf. It has become far more radical and belligerent over the past couple of years. There are good arguments for placing the party under surveillance if some of its members keep associating with neo-Nazis. But not everything Gauland says or does merits an analogy to what happened in 1933.

When Hitler raged against a “rootless international clique,” Germany was suffering from the fallout of a world financial crisis. Anti-Semitism was rampant. Talking about the elite, Hitler really meant a small group of Jewish bankers who, he alleged, were running the world.

Today, Hitler’s brand of radical anti-Semitism still thrives on the political fringes. When right-wingers — and left-wingers, too — talk about the power of Wall Street and of Jewish lobbyists in Washington, they echo Nazi ideology.

Mostly though, today’s populists target a far less exclusive group of globalists. When they launch their condemnations, they’re not thinking of Jewish cabals, but of the liberal and urban middle classes — of lawyers, journalists, professors and artists who derive a cosmopolitan outlook from their work and from frequent travels, and who look down on people with a strong sense of national belonging.

Gauland, accordingly, wrote about a “globalized class” that “dominates culturally and politically and whose members live almost exclusively in big cities, speak fluent English and when they change jobs and move from Berlin to London or Singapore, they will encounter the same kind of apartments, houses, restaurants, shops and private schools.”

The 2016 Tagesspiegel article that Gauland may have, um, used as inspiration, was written by Michael Seemann, a blogger and self-described member of Dahrendorf’s global class. In it, Seemann tried to look at himself and his cohorts through the lens of an AfD-type voter. Grudgingly, he seemed to admit that the anti-globalists’ emotions are, to an extent, understandable.

“We often forget that politics is a question of perspective,” he wrote, adding that “there is a new globalized class of information workers that most of us belong to and that is more powerful and more homogenous than we think.”

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This weekend, more than 200,000 people took to the streets of Berlin, protesting against racism and right-wing radicalism. Some of them carried posters saying “No pasarán” — a quote from the Spanish resistance against dictator Francisco Franco’s fascism. Others sang along to “Bella Ciao,” a summer hit based on the old Italian partisan song.

The emergence of the AfD has provided lots of people who used to be apolitical with a sense of purpose — and, to an extent, that’s good. But the case of the Gauland op-ed shows that historical analogies should not be made indiscriminately. In fact, it should serve as a warning to everyone who wants to save Germany from the right-wing populists.

Pick your battles wisely. Sometimes it’s better to ignore them. Make sure you’re on solid ground when you’re drawing analogies with Nazis. And stop pretending it’s 1933 all over again.

Crying “1933!” every time someone like Gauland opens his mouth makes them feel more powerful than they really are.

You’re not an embattled minority faced with an overwhelming surge. In the latest polls, the AfD hovers somewhere between 15 and 18 percent. Surveys show that a sizable majority of Germans abhor the party’s rhetoric.

The dangers posed by right-wing populists are there for everyone to see. Crying “1933!” every time someone like Gauland opens his mouth makes them feel more powerful than they really are.

Konstantin Richter is a contributing writer at POLITICO. He is the author of the German-language novel, “The Chancellor: A Fiction,” about Angela Merkel and the refugee crisis.