The offense Bjorn Hecke is alleged to have committed is written in the most official bureaucratic language: “Using emblems of a former National Socialist organization.” This is the indictment in the trial that begins on Thursday in the Court of First Instance of the city of Halle. Specifically: Heke appeared at a pre-election rally on December 12, 2023 in the city of Gera in Thuringia. There was no standing room in the Waldhaus restaurant, according to the local organization of the AfD, Hecke’s party. During the event Heke plays something like a game with the attendees. He tells them that he has to answer in court because of a charge from 2021. “Because I once closed an election campaign with a rhetorical triptych: ‘All for our country! All about Saxony-Anhalt! All for…” and gesturing, Hoke encourages his audience to complete the slogan. They clap back and say “… Germany!”. Heke stands on stage and laughs visibly satisfied.

SA: Hitler’s paramilitary organization

“All about Germany.” It is the second time he has used this slogan in the same day. It is the motto of Hitler’s infamous paramilitary Sturmabteilung, assault battalions, SA for short. The SA was particularly active at the beginning of National Socialism, around the time Hitler and his party, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), came to power in 1933. In this early phase they terrorized, killed, tortured and intimidated mainly Jews and Communists. After the fall of the self-proclaimed Third Reich and the end of mass killings across Europe in 1945, the SA and other Nazi organizations were banned. Later in the newly formed Federal Germany, all propaganda related to National Socialist ideology and its organizations in Germany was banned, including the use of the SA slogan “Alles für Deutschland”, (All for Germany).

But did Heke know what kind of slogan he was shouting? Of course he knew. At least the second time in the city of Gera. He also mentions it in the indictment. Because Heke is a history teacher. He studied and taught history for many years before entering politics in the far-right Alternative for Germany party and becoming one of its most radical representatives. It is worth mentioning how much Hecke’s work directly or indirectly refers to the Nazi era. He criticized the construction of a Holocaust Memorial in memory of the murdered 6 million European Jews and called it a “Monument of Shame.” Another time in 2016, at an AfD rally, Hecke expressed his sympathy for notorious Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, who was sentenced to several years in prison as an accomplice.

“Heke is a fascist»

In 2017 Heke went further. In a speech to his party’s youth he criticized the way Germans were dealing with the Nazi dictatorship as a “stupid policy of confrontation”. And then he demands: “We need a 180-degree turn in memory politics.” Where turn means a positive policy in any form. In 2018, Hecke published his thoughts in a book, a “dialogue volume”. In it he mischaracterizes the fact that “Hitler is presented as the absolute evil” and says that things are not only “black and white”. The book is full of radical statements: Hecke says, as the administrative court of Meiningen also assessed, that a new Führer is finally needed, that Germany is threatened with “national death through the exchange of populations”. And of dissidents in German society, he says: “Burnt limbs are not cured with lavender water, as Hegel already knew.”

The content of his book is so radical and extreme that a German court used it as the basis for its ruling that the characterization “Hecke is a fascist” is not a figment of the imagination, but based on verifiable factual basis, according to a decision by the administrative court of Meiningen on 26 September 2019. What is remarkable about the media attention to Hecke and the discussions about him as a political figure is that he is a politician who does not hold any political office in Germany and has never held one. He is not even the president of a party, not even a member of its central administration. Nevertheless, he has managed to become the ultimate center of attraction in German politics, and the country is divided over his thoughts, worldview and political action.

He wants to be a local prime minister

The reason; With or without radicalism, Hecke led the AfD to such success in his home state of Thuringia that it became the strongest political party in the polls. And the fact that he does not hold high office may change this year. Because Hecke wants to become prime minister of the federal state of Thuringia. He has long been a driving force in his party, even without office at the federal level.

When it comes to filling positions and positions, Hecke is almost unbeatable in a party increasingly classified by German security authorities as “suspected of far-right extremism”. The local organization of the AfD in Thuringia under the leadership of Bjorn Hecke is not only on the list of suspicious cases by the state agency for the protection of the Constitution. It is already being referred to as a “confirmed case of far-right extremist”.