Germany: New AfD Berlin senator is Nazi apologist

Via The Local:

The AfD party admitted this week that one of their newest elected politicians was once part of an extremist group. And his Facebook posts reveal more about his troubling thoughts on the Nazis.

One of the new members of Berlin’s state parliament from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party used to be a member of the German Defence League - an extremist right-wing, anti-Islam group - the party confirmed on Monday.

Kay Nerstheimer, who was elected to the parliament as a direct candidate for the eastern Lichtenberg district, had been a member of the group as recently as 2012, according to AfD regional chair Georg Pazderski.

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But as the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported on Tuesday, Nerstheimer’s extremist views did not start nor end with the German Defence League.

Nerstheimer has repeatedly posted on Facebook in recent years messages glorifying the Nazi time, trivializing the acts of Nazi war criminals, and using certain phrases often espoused by the Third Reich.

The politician wrote a post in July 2013 which seemed to defend SS captain Erich Priebke on his 100th birthday. Priebke had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy in 1998 for his role in the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine caves in Rome, in which 335 Italian civilians were killed, including 75 Jews.

In another post, Nerstheimer shared a photo of soldiers in Adolf Hitler’s army with the caption: “Each of them is a fine example to the people”.

And as recently as July, Nerstheimer shared a link to a video with the title “It’s all a LIE! The true cause of the war of 1939”.

The video showed a presentation by German author Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who disputes Germany's guilt in the Second World War, in one book even blaming Poland.

The day before this he had shared a post that posited an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that said “the forces that caused the First World War also caused the second one”.

“Now they are on the edge of starting a third one and are always finding idiots that will obey them.”

Nerstheimer referred to the civilian victims of German aggression as “guerrilla fighters” and said such people were not under the protection of the laws of war, SZ reports.

“Therefore the shootings were legal,” Nerstheimer wrote.

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