On Thursday afternoon, the American vice president visited a former concentration camp, where he solemnly laid a wreath at the base of a statue, made the sign of the cross, and stood in reflection before a memorial wall. Inscribed in multiple languages, including German and English, were the words “Never Again.”
JD Vance told reporters that while he had read extensively about the Holocaust, witnessing its history firsthand at Dachau, where over 30,000 people perished under Nazi rule, reinforced the magnitude of its “unspeakable evil.” “It’s something that I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to see it up close in person,” Mr. Vance stated.
However, following Mr. Vance’s speech in Munich the next day, German leaders openly questioned whether he had truly grasped the significance of what he had witnessed.
Eighty years after American forces liberated Dachau, top German officials suggested that Mr. Vance—along with, by extension, President Trump—was lending credibility to a political party that many Germans view as dangerously linked to Nazi ideology.
That party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), currently holds second place in the polls ahead of next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with approximately 20 percent of public support. However, no other German party is willing to form a government with it due to the AfD’s history of downplaying Hitler’s crimes, with some members openly using Nazi slogans.
German intelligence agencies have classified segments of the AfD as extremist. Several of its members have been arrested in connection with plots to overthrow the government. Reports also indicate that some party affiliates attended a gathering last year where discussions included deporting not only asylum seekers but also naturalized German citizens who had immigrated to the country.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in Munich on Saturday morning, delivering a pointed rebuke of Mr. Vance.
“This ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day,” he added. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”
For decades, Germany’s legal and political framework has been shaped by the belief that preventing another Hitler requires banning hate speech and excluding extremist political parties. The country’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution employs intelligence tools to monitor radical elements, and a constitutional court has the authority to ban political parties in extreme cases.
Mr. Vance, alongside another Trump administration figure, Elon Musk, has recently engaged in Germany’s parliamentary election discourse, criticizing this approach. Both men argue that it is time for Germany to abandon its restrictions on speech and recognize the country’s hard-right movement as a voice for disenfranchised voters who share Mr. Trump’s opposition to mass immigration.
Mr. Musk has gone as far as publicly endorsing the AfD, telling party members last month that Germany has “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
JD Vance in Germany (Photo: AP)
The interventions of Musk and Vance have introduced a controversial and largely unwelcome narrative into mainstream German politics—particularly striking given that Germany has long credited the United States with ending one of its darkest historical chapters.
A writer for Der Spiegel, a leading German publication, described Mr. Vance’s remarks as a “Wahlkampfgeschenk”—a “campaign gift” to the AfD.
Even before Mr. Vance’s speech, analysts at the Munich conference were cautioning that the Trump administration’s approach risked straining transatlantic alliances.
“We have an American government that has different values and a different vision of what the West should be,” said Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, during a panel discussion on Friday.
During his speech, Mr. Vance asserted that Europe’s speech restrictions posed a greater threat to freedom than military aggression from Russia or China, likening them to Soviet-era censorship.
“I look to Brussels,” he remarked, “where E.U. Commission commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they judge to be ‘hateful content,’ or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny.’”
Whether intentional or not, Mr. Vance’s comments touched on two contentious political issues in Europe. Many nations are grappling with how to handle the rise of hard-right parties. In Austria and the Netherlands, such parties have entered government coalitions, while in France and Germany, mainstream politicians have so far managed to keep them isolated.
Still, some boundaries have begun to blur. Last month, Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate for German chancellor, faced criticism for pushing migration restrictions that required AfD votes to pass—an action long considered politically taboo. Mr. Merz defended the move but insisted he would never allow the AfD to formally join his Christian Democrats in government.
The White House did not immediately respond to German leaders’ criticisms of Mr. Vance.
Germany has also been embroiled in an ongoing debate over the extent of its speech laws, a discussion recently inflamed by the war in Gaza. The country’s restrictions prohibit antisemitic rhetoric, but some critics—particularly in Berlin’s art circles—argue that the definitions are too broad, effectively silencing any critique of Israel’s policies in the conflict.
Two key motivations appear to be driving Mr. Musk and Mr. Vance’s interest in Germany’s political landscape.
One is an attempt to forge new transatlantic alliances with parties aligned with Mr. Trump’s core beliefs, particularly a staunch opposition to large-scale immigration.
The other is a push to dismantle European laws and social norms that regulate speech, both online and offline, which governments argue are necessary to combat hate speech and misinformation but which conservatives claim are designed to suppress their views. Mr. Musk has repeatedly denounced these regulations as assaults on free speech and has used his platform, X, to amplify content that challenges these restrictions.
The AfD has steadily gained support over the past decade, fueled by its promises to implement strict measures against the millions of asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany from the Middle East and beyond. Its chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, has accused German and EU officials of censorship and met with Mr. Vance privately in Munich.
Ms. Weidel’s rhetoric mirrors that of Mr. Vance, as she attempts to reposition the AfD away from its associations with Nazi ideology while portraying mainstream political parties as the real threat to democracy.
“What Adolf Hitler did,” she told Mr. Musk in an X interview last month, “the first thing—he switched off free speech. So he controls the media. Without that, he would have never been successful.”
