Outside the hall, Bettina, the mother of eight, took a drag from her cigarette and said that, due to her upbringing in East Germany, she was skeptical of what the state told her. (She, like others interviewed in Magdeburg, refused to give her full name for fear of repercussions for making her views public.)
“You should always ask the question: Who benefits from what is happening?” she said of the accusations surrounding Krah. “If I don’t use my head and question it and allow myself to be influenced, then I’m just as much a puppet as everyone else.”
A friend of hers, a man with a pointy beard tied with an elastic band, then pulled up in a white BMW decorated with political slogans, one of which said: “Financial capitalism threatens the values of civilization.” They said they would both be attending a rally the following day, on the square next to Magdeburg’s gothic cathedral, an event Bettina described as “all about sovereignty” where people can “talk about the coronavirus measures.”
The next day, hundreds of people attended the protest, which brought together an assortment of marginal groups, many protesting NATO and military support for Ukraine. Some demonstrators waived Russian flags, others blue flags with dove designs on them.
Local AfD politicians handed out brochures under a canopy that read: “Take your country back.” Among them was Kirchner, who once again claimed the current German government is employing East German-style repression.
“To get the domestic intelligence agency on board for the election campaign so they can try to discredit us, to infiltrate us and destroy us, I already had that with the Stasi,” he said. This explains why the AfD is particularly strong among people living in the former East Germany, he said. “They’ve seen it all before.”
One supporter of the party, a large man who refused to give his name for “privacy reasons,” concurred with the assessment, saying the investigations — including the one against Krah — were all politically motived.
“I believe it’s a witch hunt,” he said. “They want to defame the AfD.”
