People asking me today what they should do about American political rhetoric being so hateful and anti-immigrant, bring to mind how Germans have since tried to unwind Nazism. As just one example the Cologne section of an Alpine club has demonstrated their concerted effort, with the help of a historian, to confront an infiltration and degradation by hateful extremists.

They published “Antisemitism in the Rhineland-Cologne Section of the Alpine Club” (Der Antisemitismus in der Sektion Rheinland-Köln des Alpenvereins), which details exactly how Nazis did irreversible murderous harm to a sleepy recreational Cologne section of the German-Austrian Alpine Club.

Initially after its 1876 founding Jews were seen like any other members in the Cologne Alpine Club. In fact, 14% of founding members openly were Jewish and prominent citizens known for leadership, such as Moritz Seligmann. The infiltration of hate begins around the same time as the radicalized appropriation of the swastika by hate groups, around the 1890s. Vienna introduced a concept of “Aryan paragraphs” to deny membership based on racism alone. Then, due to the rampant antisemitism propaganda unleashed at the end of WWI to blame Jews for everything and anything, the Alpine Club failed to resist intensified racism. In Cologne, controversy erupted in 1921/22 when Jewish applicants suddenly were denied membership, which led to public protest by Moritz Bing and Ludwig Cahen. The club refused to admit it was about race, while making it about race. Then, when a few expelled Jews formed their own “Donauland” section as a means of compliance, it was attacked by Nazis in 1924 to force all Jews expelled as a group from the Alpine Club. After Hitler seized control and destroyed democracy in 1933, the Cologne section wrote its first “Aryan paragraph” in January 1934, and by 1936 it removed any exemptions, clearly denying club membership on race alone. Although some from the club who were Jews managed to flee Germany, others died in concentration camps, and some were murdered.

The modern German Alpine Club (DAV) acknowledges this history as their unfortunate role in progressively overt racism, a cultural group normalizing murderous violence against their own members. They offer documentation of the many wrongs over many decades as their expression of regret now.

The Cologne Alpine Club’s honest accounting of such a past demonstrates a helpful path forward through acknowledgment and documentation. They didn’t minimize their failures or hide within excuses of “different times” (although at times the tone used to describe Germans being persecuted sounds like a distant and extinct race, rather than just Germans). Instead, the club has meticulously documented individual stories and the institutional failures.

…the Alpine Club yielded to pressure from antisemitic sections and failed to protect its Jewish members and the non-Jewish members who supported them… In a time when xenophobia, violence and intolerance are again spreading in Germany, we must not only resist the beginnings. We must also honor the memory of all those women and men of the Alpine Club who became victims of exclusion, intolerance and persecution or who actively fought against such developments.

(…der Alpenverein dem Druck von antisemitisch eingestellten Sektionen nachgegeben und sich nicht schützend vor seine jüdischen und die sie unterstützenden nichtjüdischen Mitglieder gestellt… In einer Zeit, in der in Deutschland wieder Fremdenhass, Gewalt und Intoleranz um sich greifen, gilt es nicht nur den Anfängen zu wehren. Es gilt auch all jener Frauen und Männer des Alpenvereins würdig zu gedenken, die einst Opfer von Ausgrenzung, Intoleranz und Verfolgung geworden sind oder die tatkräftig gegen derartige Entwicklungen angekämpft haben.)

Their transformation path from inclusive and helpful in the 1890s to hatefully exclusive by the 1920s, and then genocidal by the 1940s, follows a simple pattern we should more easily recognize today:

• Infiltration at the margins – rotten ideas in specific sections (e.g. Vienna) can spread throughout the organization
• Exploitation of crisis – post-WWI economic drama spread with modern technology accelerating unregulated hate speech should have been blocked as inherently incompatible with timeless outdoor exercise, not rapidly embraced and interlaced
• Normalization – what was once totally unthinkable for an inclusive club became policy of exclusion
• Complicity through silence – even those who didn’t actively promote hate failed to oppose it as they should

Germany’s post-war reckoning with a Nazi past isn’t just about political change in government institutions, but about how our everyday innocent groups – from walking or book clubs to baseball games and parent meetups – also must resist complicity in enabling or causing mass suffering. The separation is purposefully evaporated by extremist groups forcing people to join or be killed, whether members like it or not. A comprehensive approach to accountability offers a model worth considering after the tragedy. However, sooner obviously is much, much better. An ounce of prevention… goes the saying, as any mountain climber knows well. It shouldn’t take decades to pass before meticulous investigators (historians) help climbers, of all people, to understand how holding a line (on human rights) prevents unnecessary deaths.

• Acknowledge even simple and fun organizations are highly vulnerable to ideological capture
• Recognize silence against extremism is a form of enablement
• Document and preserve evidence of extremism to prevent normalizing it
• Raise alarms with early warning signs of immoral exclusion
• Support those who raise alarms, like Bing and Cahen in 1921/22 who wrote a letter that forced a club meeting, and chairman Günther publicly disavowed antisemitism as official policy (even though unofficially he then allowed it to grow far worse)

History has a way of repeating, such that historians are obliged to explain when and how. In the early 1930s, the organization called the Union of Nationalist German Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), led by Max Naumann, emerged as one of history’s most tragic examples of misplaced political allegiance.

Naumann, who had fought in WWI as a captain for the Bavarian Army and was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery, told Jewish Germans to support the anti-Semitic Hitler and even endorsed the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. His self-loathing platform assumed violent hate would simply melt away given a patriotic German identity, as if race-based targets wouldn’t be targets of racism. He berated Einstein as a traitor, and demanded assets of Jews be confiscated to help Hitler amass power. This idiotic miscalculation, of course, proved suicidal — in 1935 Hitler’s secret police threw him in jail, and his members murdered in concentration camps.

[Despite the fact that to Hermann Göring he] declared [1933] in an interview that Nazi action against Jews was in many ways justified […] Dr. Max Naumann, president of the Union of Nationalist Jewish Germans, was yesterday [in 1935] arrested by the Gestapo, Nazi secret police. The Union, comprising the so-called “Jewish Nazis,” was officially ordered disbanded yesterday.

Nearly a century later, in a return to the sad theater of European right-wing politics, few puppets embody this same pattern of contradictory allegiance more strikingly than Alice “Alles” Weidel.

As one of the lead candidates of Germany’s Anti-Gay for Deutschland (AfD), Weidel presents a fascinating case study in political incongruity: a lesbian woman in a registered partnership, propped up for a leadership position in a party that vocally opposes her gay marriage, opposes her adoption rights for same-sex couples, and that published a highly symbolic “death notice” for “the German family” when her same-sex marriage was legalized.

AfD’s internet site features on its front page a death notice, saying “In deep sorrow, we say good-bye to the German family, whose constitutional protection was buried by the ‘representatives of the people’ at the German parliament.” Instead of condolence notices, the AfD advises Germans to throw out the parliamentarians who voted for equal marriage rights in the upcoming elections.

The Anti-Gay for Deutschland platform literally campaigns on death for those supporting gay marriage, and Alice says “Hey, should I go lead a hate group that wants to kill the German family, I mean kill mine? Honey, fetch my Nazi “Alles” dagger and torch, I’m off to join the campaign that hates us.”

This reminds me of the Chappelle Show skit called “Clayton Bigsby Doesn’t See Color” about a Black man so blind he becomes a popular KKK leader.

Civilian Used as Shield is a War Crime

Weidel’s position in the AfD serves a cynical strategic function as a shield by assailants too scared to stand up without a disposable body to hide behind. Her very existence within the party leadership provides convenient insulation against accusations of homophobia, while being homophobic. When critics point to the AfD’s explicit anti-LGBTQ+ policies—opposing gay marriage, curtailing adoption rights, and proposing education reforms that would minimize information about homosexuality—party members can simply point to Weidel and ask, “How can we be anti-gay when we use this token lesbian shield to make us look like we care?”

This form of tokenism creates a powerful damaging effect on political dialogue. It allows hardline positions against LGBTQ+ rights to simultaneously claim inclusivity, without any actual basis other than short-term exploitation. Alexander Tassis, another gay AfD politician and head of the “Alternative Homosexuals” group, exemplifies this dynamic when he states that gay members are “fully integrated” in the AfD—while in the same breath declaring, “We’re not seeking equality.”

Oh, wait, it gets worse. Tassis is an immigrant too. He says the AfD really represents his desire to stop immigrants. Do you know who else was an immigrant who hated immigrants? Max Neumann. The Union of Nationalist German Jews knows exactly how this story ends for immigrants like Tassis, in jail and maybe even death camps. Tassis is preaching self-hate and destruction of his own community, just like Neumann. And Weidel? Her partner is also an immigrant.

Hierarchy Driven by Fear and Loathing

What drives someone to align herself with a political movement that works against her own community’s interests, and that refers to her in terms of a quick death? The answer likely lies in a hierarchy of political priorities and fears.

For Weidel and others like Tassis, anti-immigration hate appears to cloud their concerns about own survival, let alone LGBTQ+ equality. This echoes the Nazi propaganda forcing such fear as to convince millions to kill themselves and their own families. As the impatient, hot-headed General Rommel famously said after being continuously defeated on the battle-field by Montgomery, he would much rather take a suicide pill than finally be set free from Hitler by rapidly approaching Allied forces. The “Alternative Homosexuals” group explicitly frames opposition to religion and immigration as necessary for their “survival,” while supporting a group opposed to their survival. This suicidal positioning mirrors tactics used by other European right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, who have attempted to frame outsized campaigns of hate for others as a protective measure against the official hate for LGBTQ+ communities.

The prioritization reveals a toxic political reversal and bad gamble: sacrificing full equality and rights for one’s own community (“genetic unity“) in exchange for policies that target other marginalized groups first. Throwing away the lives of others comes wrapped inside deeply insecure competitive aspirations to be allocated a big fancy house with a lush garden, a ruthless plot just on the other side of a walled concentration camp filled with people it all was stolen from.

Selfish Short-sighted Exceptionalism

Alice Weidel stands with her “Alles” dagger and torch in hand, deliberately setting fires throughout a village, winds blowing unfavorably, that she somehow believes will spare her own straw house. As one of the few high-profile LGBTQ+ figures in a homophobic right-wing movement, her attraction to the AfD seems rooted not in spite of its destructive potential, but because it feeds into Naumann-like self-erasure. This paradoxical longing for the very flames that will destroy her community defines her whole identity—she doesn’t merely tolerate hateful contradictions; she embodies them. While the AfD presents her as evidence that their human shield means supposed inclusivity, Weidel stands like a barking dog left at the perimeter outside the AfD tent, mistaking limited guard duty for genuine power. She appears to even believe she’s the tail wagging that dog, rather than recognizing herself as something the dog could rid itself of at any moment. The fundamental nature of the movement is they let her ride along, all the while saying those who believe themselves exceptional will help feed an appetite for destruction.

The false hope of self-loathing Naumann-exceptionalism operates on the implicit understanding that while the party opposes rights for the LGBTQ+ community, certain individuals who demonstrate sufficient alignment with the party’s primary goals will be useful. And once they are discarded for being willful idiots, then what Alice? There’s likely a meeting in the future where she’s told “We don’t want you, you abandoned your own gay family and gay community, and such traitors are unwelcome.” It’s a political tragedy: transferring all credibility away to policies that ultimately harm the very community one belongs to, just for affirmation inherently designed not to last.

While the phrase “useful idiot” may capture the functional role that figures like Weidel play in foolishly legitimizing hate groups they should be fighting against, it perhaps understates the agency and calculation involved. Weidel and others have made very conscious decisions to align themselves with movements that oppose them and their own community’s interests, as they believe some other shared goals have precedence.

This represents a form of dangerous compartmentalization of ignorance, a “zone” where identity is subordinated to hatred of others—where being anti-immigration becomes more central to one’s political self-conception than being pro-gay. It’s not mere idiocy but rather a complex negotiation of competing identities and priorities, albeit one that ultimately serves to enable the worst crimes against humanity.

The most insidious aspect of this arrangement is how effectively it destroys political discourse and replaces it with hatred accelerants. The presence of contradictions—like an anti-gay party with gay leaders—creates confusion that benefits the party’s broader agenda to destroy law and order. Constant contradictions to destroy any semblance of stability make it harder for critics to form clear, coherent engagement with thoughtful people and easier to foment support around irrational emotional responses.

When the AfD threatened to sue over the legalization of gay marriage in 2017, Weidel’s presence in leadership created cognitive dissonance that served as a powerful rhetorical tool. It allowed supporters to dismiss critics as simplistic or reductive in their understanding of the party’s positions. Of course, looking like the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden of 2025 makes her an even more compelling story. Hitler was a huge proponent of irrational and abrupt self-sacrifice, frequently pushing his closest and most loyal staff to murder themselves or be murdered.

The case of Alice “Alles” Weidel demonstrates how right-wing populist movements exploit contradictions to generate destabilization, tactical information warfare steps rather than liabilities. Holding up members of marginalized groups as tokens in visible positions, while simultaneously opposing their rights, creates powerful shields for maintaining and ironically expanding hate-filled exclusion platforms.

This scenario mirrors armed terrorists who snatch children from their beds to use as human shields, with Weidel functioning as that captive child who inexplicably aids her captors rather than those attempting rescue. Her alliance with the AfD reflects not just Stockholm syndrome but a deeper delusion—she believes herself a strategist among hostage-takers rather than merely a useful shield. The tragedy lies not only in her failure to recognize her expendability, but in her active contribution to a movement that would ultimately mark her as different. Her apparent qualification to assess risk may be nothing more than the psychological adaptation of a hostage who has convinced herself she shares the terrorists’ interests, when in fact her utility exists only until the moment it doesn’t.

Far from moderating the Anti-Gay part of the Anti-Gay for Deutschland party, figures like Weidel enable them to maintain or even intensify exclusionary policies even more. They are not the evidence that a hate party is changing, rather they are the disposable asset that proves the rule — a life to be disposed of in a political gambit, absorbing the worst consequences of the AfD instead of the AfD itself.