The former neo-Nazi activists behind Germany’s rising far-right star

Four former members of a banned organization modeled on the Hitler Youth are part of the inner circle of the man who could become the AfD’s first state premier.

By NICHOLAS POTTER
and FREDERIK SCHINDLER
in Berlin

^{Illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO}

A generation after Germany banned a neo-Nazi youth organization for seeking to cultivate a new extremist elite, four of its former members now hold influential roles around the politician who is on track to become the country’s first far-right state premier since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949.

The four men are staffers close to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s candidate for premier in Saxony-Anhalt, where voters go to the polls on Sept. 6. Two of them are among his closest advisers and two of them helped draft the party’s election manifesto.

All four were involved with the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, or HDJ, a group modeled in part on the Hitler Youth and banned by the German government in 2009, according to an investigation by WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Network. The ban order said the group’s aim was to train a “neo-Nazi elite” steeped in National Socialist ideology.

Advertisement

The AfD’s rules list the HDJ — the name roughly translates to Homeland-Loyal German Youth — among organizations whose former members are barred from joining the party.

The federal government’s ban order, obtained by WELT, cited the group’s “affinity with National Socialism” and concluded: “The actual objective of the association is the training of a neo-Nazi elite.” The group, it said, saw itself as standing “in the tradition of the Hitler Youth.”

Germany’s Federal Administrative Court upheld the ban in 2010. The HDJ, the court wrote, “is wedded to the blood-and-soil ideology and the racial doctrine of the National Socialists and disseminates antisemitic ideas.” It “adopts an overall militantly aggressive stance” towards the free, democratic order.

Ulrich Siegmund arrives for a debate on MDR regional TV in Magdeburg, Germany on Aug. 26, 2026. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images

All four men have resisted treating their HDJ pasts as disqualifying, either minimizing their involvement or declining to comment on it. 

Siegmund, who is expected to win next week’s election comfortably, has declined to distance himself from any of them.

“These are outstanding people,” he told WELT. “They have a spotless record. I’m not interested in what happened 20 or 25 years ago.” He added he would focus on “entirely different problems in this country.”

Advertisement

The spokesman

One of the men, Patrick Harr, 44, is the AfD’s spokesman in Saxony-Anhalt and executive director of its caucus in the state legislature. Internally, he is being floated as the head of the State Chancellery — effectively the governor’s chief of staff — in an AfD government. He served on a working group, chaired by the party’s state deputy leader, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, set up in June 2025 to draft this year’s governing manifesto.

That manifesto calls for confining the children of asylum-seekers and refugees to “special classes” with curricula based on their home countries’ schooling, ideally taught by refugees themselves. The stated aim is to signal to the children that “their stay in Germany is only temporary” and to spare “our children” from the “manifold burdens” of being taught alongside classmates from “completely foreign cultures.” 

Ulrich Siegmund debates with Sven Schulze, Saxony-Anhalt’s premier and CDU main candidate, on Aug. 26, 2026. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images

It also asserts that children with disabilities “paralyze the progress of instruction.” And it describes Germany’s decades-long reckoning with the Nazi past as the “perpetuation of a neurosis” and homosexuality as a “sexual deviation and non-reproductive way of life.”

Siegmund himself rarely says such things out loud. His campaign runs on good-humored populism, and he is careful in interviews. “The atrocities of National Socialism,” he has said, are “beyond doubt among the darkest chapters of German history.”

On Oct. 3, 2002, Harr was elected unanimously to lead the HDJ’s “procurement department,” according to minutes of the group’s national youth congress reviewed by WELT. The minutes suggest he had already been working for the department and reported on his previous activities within it. For the following year, the group’s members were offered trips “on which we will get to know the land and the people in the territories severed from the Reich,” meaning locations in neighboring countries that Germany lost after World War II.

Advertisement

WELT raised the HDJ history of the staffers with Siegmund and Harr last September, during an off-the-record briefing with other reporters that cannot be quoted from. Siegmund later told the Berliner Zeitung, a daily newspaper, that Harr said in the briefing that he left the group “around 2003” and that the job amounted to rounding up tents and crockery for youth camps. Siegmund said he would not disavow anyone for having “been at a tent camp ages ago.”

Asked by WELT on Tuesday how he now regards his time in the HDJ, Harr said simply: “I am at peace with it.” 

The lawyer

Another former HDJ member in Siegmund’s orbit is Laurens Nothdurft, general counsel to the AfD caucus and a member of the state party’s arbitration court, which deals with internal disputes.

Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s national co-chairman, told the German public broadcaster ARD on Sunday that Nothdurft had distanced himself from the HDJ and called the episode a “youthful indiscretion.” Asked days later by the public broadcaster MDR whether his views had changed, Nothdurft said: “I have nothing to reproach myself for.”

Nothdurft, attends a press conference on Aug. 15, 2024 in Berlin, Germany. | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

Born in 1981, Nothdurft was a fixture of the organization for the better part of a decade. Meeting minutes show he was elected the HDJ’s deputy national leader in 1999 for a three-year term. Brandenburg state’s 2002 domestic intelligence report also describes him as an activist of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.

In 2003, Nothdurft presented the HDJ’s “golden badge of honor” to Lisbeth Grolitsch, a former regional officer of the Nazi-era League of German Girls who went on to help found neo-Nazi groups. Writing afterward in the HDJ magazine Funkenflug, Nothdurft said Grolitsch was “immensely” pleased that the group’s youth work remained “still committed to the same ideals.” He added: “We young people must strive all the more to occupy decisive positions in school, training, university and career, with ambition and perseverance.”

Advertisement

An internal document from November 2005, seen by WELT, records Nothdurft’s reelection as deputy national leader of the HDJ for three more years — through 2008, when he was 27.

None of this slowed his rise within the AfD. Despite the party’s ban on former HDJ members, he joined the AfD, worked for its caucus in Baden-Württemberg in 2018 and then in Bavaria. In 2024, he was elected mayor of the district of Roßlau in Saxony-Anhalt. A practicing attorney, he represented Siegmund that same year before the state constitutional court in a challenge to a parliamentary disciplinary measure after Siegmund insulted a member of the Left Party.

An election poster featuring Siegmund damaged with a graffiti in Magdeburg, eastern Germany on Sept. 6, 2026. | Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images

Reporting this year by taz, a German left-leaning daily, found that several of Nothdurft’s children have attended gatherings of Jungadler, an ethnonationalist youth group that authorities are examining as a possible successor to the HDJ. Through a lawyer, Nothdurft told the paper he is not in contact with the Jungadler and denies any knowledge of HDJ successor organizations. He did not respond to a request for comment by WELT via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in Saxony-Anhalt.

Andrea Röpke, a political scientist who has written on the HDJ’s methods of raising children and on far-right violence, told WELT the aim of such groups is generational. “Ethnonationalist youth leagues like the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend [HDJ] or the Jungadler aim from the very outset at having the next generation from their own ranks one day belong to the political elite,” she said. “They have learned conspiratorial solidarity, absolute loyalty, and thinking in terms of political enemies from an early age.”

The author

Eric Kaden, born in 1976, has been an AfD policy adviser on education, culture, and science since 2022. In 2005 he devoted an essay in the HDJ magazine Funkenflug to Kurt Eggers, a Nazi cultural functionary and Waffen-SS member, calling him an “unwavering champion of the German cultural revolution” who fell on the Eastern Front “in the greater German struggle for freedom.”

Advertisement

In an internal document of Germany’s domestic intelligence service from 2008 seen by WELT, Kaden, who was 32 at the time, is referred to as the owner of an HDJ post office box. In the same year, he was swept up, along with Nothdurft, in nationwide police raids on HDJ activists that preceded the group’s ban.

By then he had published a book-length biography of Eggers while working for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party caucus in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania legislature. The state’s domestic intelligence office wrote in January 2009 that the book “lacks any critical distance from the Third Reich” and that “racial struggle and national-revolutionary ideas are described as exemplary.”

A supporter wearing a t-shirt that shows Siegmund in Dessau-Rosslau on Aug. 19, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Later that year, Germany’s Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors placed the book on its restricted index. “The content is an homage to National Socialism in all its facets,” the decision, obtained by WELT, states. “The depictions are marked by a violence-affirming antisemitism, the glorification of Adolf Hitler, a positive assessment of the Nazi racial doctrine, and the totalitarian imposition of one’s own interests on one’s fellow human beings.” Eggers’ violent antisemitism, it found, appears “often in a positive light,” and the book has a brutalizing effect that incites violence.

Kaden’s doctoral dissertation was published in 2018 by a far-right publishing house whose catalog is dominated by National Socialist and neo-Nazi titles. His ties to old comrades appear to have held: His 2022 book about Adolf Hitler’s chief pilot was published by Dankwart Strauch, another former HDJ activist.

Advertisement

Oliver Kirchner, the AfD’s caucus leader in Saxony-Anhalt, told MDR through a lawyer at the time that Kaden’s record was “impeccable,” and that security agencies had “examined and confirmed” as much.

Kaden did not respond to a request for comment via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in Saxony-Anhalt.

The adviser

Nothdurft’s brother, Felix W., belonged to the HDJ from 1999 to 2004 and became head of its “homeland-loyal equipment and camp technology” department in April 2003, documents show. WELT has granted him anonymity because, under German privacy laws, he is a private individual who has not sought public attention.

He now handles federal and European affairs, media and culture for the AfD’s parliamentary faction in Saxony-Anhalt and also sat on the 2025 group that drafted the governing manifesto. He did not respond to a request for comment via the AfD’s spokesperson’s office in Saxony-Anhalt.

Nicholas Potter is chief reporter at WELT. Frederik Schindler is political editor at WELT.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

Advertisement