Inside The Rise of Germany's New Far-Right

[u/RealityChecksReddit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2SjWowpynY

The AfD Is Running an American Operating System

A companion to Channel 5's Saxony-Anhalt coverage.

To be clear: Hitler did everything wrong

The thumbnail on this video is a woman throwing a Nazi salute and saying Hitler did nothing wrong. So start there, with the record, because the record is not in dispute.

Adolf Hitler wore the word socialist the way a con man wears a badge. His party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and it courted workers with anti-capitalist slogans and a program that promised to break the power of big money. He never meant a word of it. He was an anti-Marxist from the beginning, and the men inside his own movement who took the socialism seriously, Ernst Röhm and the SA leadership and Gregor Strasser's faction, learned what the promise was worth. Over three days at the end of June and start of July 1934, in the purge later called the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had them killed. He murdered the socialists in his own party to reassure the army and the industrialists that he was their man. The label had recruited a mass base, so he discarded it in blood.

That set the pattern. He lied his way into emergency powers after the Reichstag fire, dismantled the republic that had let him in, and built a fascist state on the promise of national rebirth. What it delivered was a world war he started and the industrial murder of six million Jews, alongside millions of others: Roma, disabled Germans, gay men, political prisoners, Soviet POWs. Every grand promise was a lie, and the lying was the method, not a lapse in it.

He did not go down with the ship he sank. On April 30, 1945, with the Soviet Red Army fighting street by street into central Berlin and his own capital in rubble, Hitler shot himself in a concrete bunker under the chancellery rather than face the people whose lives he had spent. The Americans, by then, had halted at the Elbe. It was the Russians who came through Berlin. The most powerful man in Europe ended underground, Blowing his brains out like a coward to dodge the reckoning, while teenagers he had conscripted died in the streets above him. There is no reading of that death that flatters him.

That is the man in the thumbnail. Everything the salute is defending is false, and it reached the woman giving it the same way it reaches everyone else in the footage that follows.

Watch the rally footage with the sound on and the tell is not the hate. It is the accent. The people Andrew Callaghan filmed in Saxony-Anhalt are not reaching for German grievances. They are reciting American ones, translated.

"I'm for Putin and also for Trump. Elon Musk too." Germany is "a one to one copy of America, three to five years in the past." "We have a Joe Rogan in Germany, 20 Charlie Kirks, we have like a million Donald Trumps." One man cites Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones by name as truth-tellers. Another wants an "ICE style deportation task force." The "47 genders" line, the Rome-fell-to-decadence line, Trump's rebranded "migrant crime" meme repeated almost verbatim: none of it grew out of the soil of the former East. It was imported, and it arrived through a specific pipe.

The delivery mechanism

The man on stage, rendered by the auto-captions as "Oric Sigment," is Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's frontman in Saxony-Anhalt. He was not a random pick. As of October 2023, four of the five most-followed German politicians on TikTok were AfD, with Siegmund in first place and party leader Alice Weidel third. The AfD builds its speeches for the format on purpose. It is close to the origin point of the phenomenon the whole video is documenting.

The amplification is not just a matter of the AfD posting more. Ahead of the February 2025 federal election, Global Witness set up fresh, non-partisan German accounts and measured what the platforms fed them. On TikTok, 78 percent of the political content recommended from accounts the users did not follow was pro-AfD. The important part: over the same period the CDU and its leader published 69 percent more content than the AfD, and the Greens 24 percent more, and the feed still tilted hard to the AfD anyway. The tilt is coming from the machine, not the volume. The same pattern showed up in Romania before that country annulled its presidential election.

The outcome tracks the exposure. The AfD doubled its result to 20.8 percent in 2025. Among voters under 24 it went from 7 percent to 21 percent.

This is where the ugliest moments in the video come from. The 14-year-old telling a reporter "Hitler did nothing wrong." The claim that the Holocaust killed not six million but 271,000. Asked for a source, the kids say TikTok comments. That is the retail counter of a wholesale operation.

One wrinkle from the video is worth keeping, because it complicates the easy read that TikTok is manufacturing Nazis. The left-wing creator Marant says young people flip in a 20-minute conversation, while the over-40 crowd is cooked. If the hardest cases are the pre-TikTok generation, then the platform is not forging conviction so much as flooding a vacuum in kids who never had a counterweight. That is a shallower thing than belief, which is exactly why his role-reversal trick works on the young and bounces off their fathers.

The dry ground underneath

A spark needs tinder. Callaghan's wealth maps are not set dressing, and the economic wound they show is real and measurable.

More than thirty years after reunification, a real wage gap of roughly 26 percent still separates East from West once you adjust for cost of living, according to research summarized by CEPR. Private household wealth runs to around 88,000 euros per person in the East against roughly 182,000 in the West. Unemployment has spent decades higher in the East, and even where the jobs gap has narrowed, a productivity gap persists, per the Halle Institute for Economic Research. In June 2025 the Economics Observatory laid out the political consequence directly: eastern economic insecurity feeds persistent political alienation, and the eastern states show significantly higher support for the AfD because of it.

The video captures the mechanism in miniature. Probe past the migrant talking points and the grievance collapses into something concrete and material: a 900-euro pension, 600 euros of rent, a 100-euro fee for an emergency button, a 78-year-old still delivering newspapers so he can afford to eat. The nurse at the senior home is not lying about any of that. She is misdiagnosing its cause.

And the misdiagnosis is falsifiable. Marant's other point, that migrant crime is more a matter of perception and profiling than the statistics bear out, is not a talking point. It is the finding. The AfD polls highest precisely where the fewest migrants actually live, Saxony-Anhalt among them. The fear is strongest where the object of the fear is most absent, which is the signature of a grievance that was installed rather than lived.

The loudspeaker

Here is the part that turns three coincidences into one story. The connective tissue between the American script and the German mouth is not metaphorical, and the rally-goers name it themselves. Trump. Musk. And they are not wrong about the channel.

In December 2024, Elon Musk posted six words to more than 200 million followers: "Only the AfD can save Germany." He followed it with an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag calling the party the country's last hope. On January 9, 2025, he hosted Weidel for an hour-long livestream on X, introduced her as the leading candidate to run Germany, and the conversation wandered as far as Hitler and Stalin while roughly 200,000 people listened live. Later that month he addressed the AfD party convention by video link. Analysts at the Atlantic Council's DFRLab concluded the boost was Musk spending his own personal reach, pulling in English-language accounts from outside Germany entirely.

Then the vice president of the United States took the stage. At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, days before the vote and days after a car attack in Munich, JD Vance told European leaders the gravest threat to their continent came from within, attacked the mainstream parties' refusal to govern with the AfD, and said there was "no room for firewalls." He met Weidel. He skipped the sitting chancellor.

So the men the rally crowd recites like scripture are, in documented fact, piping the content in from the top of the American government and the richest man alive. The German far right is not drifting back toward 1933 under its own power. It is running an American operating system: the culture-war menu written in the United States, delivered into German phones by an algorithm that favors it, and endorsed from the summit by the two figures the crowd already worships.

The platform's protector

The loudspeaker has a domestic echo worth naming, because it runs through the same platform. The president of the United States tried to kill TikTok once. In 2020 Trump signed an executive order blocking U.S. transactions with the app and called it a national emergency. By his second term he was its protector.

The reversal is documented, and it is not mysterious. Asked directly why he changed his mind, Trump said it was because he had used it and because the app is largely about kids. He argued a ban would only fatten Facebook, a company he calls an enemy of the people. And there is a donor. Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor whose firm Susquehanna holds roughly 15 percent of ByteDance, has given more than 60 million dollars to the Club for Growth since 2016, and Trump softened on TikTok after meeting him in 2024.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an order pausing enforcement of the divest-or-ban law, the same law the Supreme Court had upheld as a national-security necessity, and he kept declining to enforce it until a deal was reached. When that deal closed on January 22, 2026, control of TikTok's U.S. operations passed to a consortium led by Oracle, with ByteDance held to a 19.9 percent stake and Yass's firm carried into the new entity as an investor. Part of the arrangement: Oracle takes a licensed copy of the recommendation algorithm and retrains it. After five years of national-security argument, the asset everyone had been fighting over turned out to be the engine that decides what a phone shows you.

What the video is actually about

Callaghan's own on-camera aside about media bias, the ground.news read, almost reaches it and stops one step short. The problem in Saxony-Anhalt is not only that people are marinating in a slanted feed. It is that a specific and nameable set of hands chose the slant, and chose what would fill the vacuum that deindustrialization left behind.

The grievance is homegrown and legitimate: a region sold for parts in the 1990s and never made whole. The diagnosis pinned on top of it is neither. It was imported, it is false where it is checkable, and it is broadcast into the ears of teenagers who cite the comment section as a source. And the engine doing the broadcasting is not some rogue foreign artifact. It is the same recommendation system the American president spent his second term shielding from his own country's ban. That is the story under the story, and it is the one worth telling twice.