75 years since its liberation, Dachau still casts a shadow

75 years ago - on April 29, 1945 - the US army liberated the Dachau concentration camp, outside the medieval town of Dachau, 16 km northwest of Munich. Dachau was the first such camp set up by the Nazis, and served as a prototype and a template for what followed - its layout and building plans used for building other camps. For this, and other, reasons, Dachau continues to cast a long shadow, touching countless lives and weaving its way back into contemporary politics in unexpected ways.

The camp was opened by the Nazis on March 21, 1933 to imprison political prisoners - communists, socialists, trade unionists, anarchists and other “trouble makers”. In addition to the better known - and much greater - figures of Jews and Roma murdered in Nazi camps, more than 3.5 million Germans were imprisoned in concentration camps or prison for political reasons between 1933 and 1945, while approximately 80,000 (out of some 800,000 arrested for resistance activities) were killed for resistance or subversion against the Nazis.

Located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory, the camp at Dachau consisted of a barbed wire fence around the factory with numerous wooden huts built to house more prisoners. Along with the prisoners’ camp - which itself took up only 5 acres - an adjoining area of 20 acres was occupied by a Schutzstaffel (SS) training school and barracks. Railway tracks ran up to the gates, which carried the infamous phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work shall set you free") - later replicated at the other camps including Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

While Heinrich Himmler’s official announcement spoke of containing “threats to state security”, the SS men who arrived in the camp on 11 May 1933 were under no illusions about what the camp was for, their welcoming speech telling them: “We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are, but as second-class people … Therefore we have no room for sentimentalism … The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.”

In 1919 Dachau had been the site of one of the few victories the Bavarian “Red Army” - mostly members of the soldiers' and workers' councils - of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (“Räterepublik Baiern”) over the proto-facist Freikorps paramilitary militia, during the short-lived revolution. During the 1933 Reichstag election campaign, Hans Beimler - an prominent anti-Nazi activist, militant trade unionist, and leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) in Bavaria - made that historic victory central to his address to a KPD mass meeting in Munich, rallying his comrades against the Nazi threat with the words “we shall all meet again at Dachau!".

The words were darkly prophetic. While Beimler was re-elected to the Reichstag in March, in April both he and his wife were arrested by the Nazis. They never saw each other again. Along with other Communist Party members, Beimler was subjected to two weeks of police beatings in Munich before being sent to Dachau, where the SS guards - some of them former Freikorps members - threw his words back in his face.

Within four weeks, however, Beimler had escaped, strangling his guard, stealing his uniform and brazenly walking out the front door. He fled, via Czechoslovakia, to the Soviet Union, published an account of his experiences in the camp, and then became active in Rote Hilfe ("Red Aid") in France and Switzerland. In 1936, Beimler led the first brigade of German anti-fascist volunteers to Spain, and was appointed commissar of all International Brigades until he was killed in the Battle of Madrid that November. Over 2 million people came out to pay respect as his body was transported to the cemetery in Barcelona.

Another notable victim of Dachau was the lawyer Hans Litten. Born into a conservative, privileged family with a Jewish background, Litten’s idealism led him from the law to Berlin and left wing politics, where he became active in political trials and public speaking. In 1929, Litten sought an indictment of Berlin’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) police chief for incitement to shoot communist protesters at the infamous “Bloody May” May Day rally, where 33 people were killed and hundreds wounded, including Litten himself.

Litten also laid bare, in a penetrating cross-examination during the "Eden Dance Palace Trial", the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement. Litten used the prosecution of Sturmabteilung (SA) thug attacks on three workers to expose Nazi violence and puncture the veneer of legality Hitler had adopted. In a three hour cross-examination of the future dictator in May 1931, he humiliated Hitler - showing that SA violence was a central plank of the Nazi program - and forced him to commit perjury. It was an insult that Hitler would neither forget, nor forgive.

From then on, Litten was continually targeted by the Nazis, police and authorities, but when Hitler took power in 1933, Litten rejected advice from friends that he flee Germany. He refused to abandon his clients, arguing: "the millions of workers can't get out, so I must stay here as well". The night of the Reichstag fire, Litten was one of the first arrested when left wing lawyers and activists were rounded up and taken into "protective custody".

Litten spent the next five years in several concentration camps, enduring forced labour, beatings, torture, and endless interrogations. He twice attempted suicide to avoid revealing information under torture. Finally, in Dachau, unable to bear his physical and psychological scars any longer, Litten hanged himself in 1938. A communist anti-Nazi lawyer openly critical of Stalin - his legacy suited neither side of the Cold War, and he went all but forgotten during the following decades.

Over time, Dachau’s purpose expanded to include forced labor (both German and foreign) as well as Jews, criminals, “undesirables”, and foreign nationals from occupied countries - from Poland, France and the Balkans especially. In 1942, nearly 8,000 prisoners from Yugoslavia were sent to Dachau - including many who had worked with the partisans - and some 5,000 Soviet prisoners of war were interred there.

Over 200,000 prisoners, from more than 30 countries, passed through Dachau, one third of whom were Jews. After the Kristallnacht purges, almost 11,000 Jews were sent to Dachau before being expelled from the country. The camp also held Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, the physically and mentally handicapped, several thousand Catholic priests, and anyone else unlucky enough to fall foul of the Nazis.
  


As the number of prisoners grew, the greater Dachau system developed to eventually include over 100 sub-camps - mostly labour camps for producing munitions - dispersed throughout southern Germany and into Austria. Some of these sub-camps evolved into full-blown concentration camps themselves, such as the infamous Mauthausen camp in Austria. A weapons factory at Gendorf, near the Austrian border, where my Bavarian grandfather was forced into working in dangerous conditions, also used slave-labour from a Dachau sub-camp set up specifically for the purpose.

Although Dachau was not one of the six camps created specifically for industrialised mass murder, 32,000 deaths have been documented at the camp and its satellites, with an estimated further 10,000 undocumented. The Nazis also used prisoners in brutal medical experiments, including submerging them in tanks of ice water for hours at a time.

Liberation

The experience of the American soldiers in liberating Dachau and its sub-camps was harrowing. When the American army arrived, approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick, and some 7,000 had been driven on a last-minute “death march”, first south, and then eastwards towards the Austrian border, 1,000 of them perishing en route.

One account of the liberation of Kaufering IV slave-labor sub-camp - near the town of Landsberg - describes “the camp afire and a stack of some four hundred bodies burning”. American soldiers went into Landsberg, rounding up all the male civilians they could find and marching them back out to the camp. The former camp commandant was forced to lie amidst a pile of corpses, while the male population walked by under orders to spit on him as they passed.

As they reached the main camp in Dachau, soldiers found thirty-nine railway boxcars containing 2,000 skeletal corpses parked immediately outside, and the air was heavy with the stench of decaying bodies and excrement. Inside the complex, they found more bodies - lying where they had fallen days earlier. There were rooms full of hundreds of near-naked dead bodies piled high, a crematorium, a gas chamber - supposedly “unused”.

Despite an official surrender, many guards resisted the liberating forces, some of them fiercely. Outraged at what they had seen in Dachau and elsewhere, American troops shot some 30 or 50 of the camp guards after they had surrendered, while a similar number of guards are believed to have been killed by the recently freed prisoners themselves.

After liberation, Dachau became a prison facility for SS soldiers awaiting trial - the jailer made the jailed - and the site of the “Dachau Trials” of German war criminals. By January 1946, some 18,000 SS members were being held there, along with 12,000 others, including Soviet deserters. After 1948, it became a resettlement camp for 2,000 ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia.

The Americans converted the buildings used by the SS and camp guards into the “Eastman Barracks”, which served as an American military post for many years. When the Americans closed their barracks, the Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei - the police rapid-response units and riot police - moved in.

Germany’s ongoing struggle with timing and taste took a new turn on January 27, 2015 - the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The nearby city of Augsburg decided to convert a former sub-branch of Dachau into a centre to accommodate the growing influx of refugees. The asylum seekers would have lived in a building where thousands of people suffered and died under the Nazis, carrying out forced labour for the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt.

Facing public outcry, Augsburg backed down, but the town of Dachau itself did not, housing about 50 of its most vulnerable inhabitants – including homeless people and refugees – in buildings in the former slave-labour “herb garden” complex, just across the road from where the main camp still stands, and within sight of the towers and barbed wire fences.



A Red Thread in the Gloom

This harrowing history has made Dachau an indelible symbol for what took place when the Nazis took over, but it also deserves to be better remembered for what happened when they fell as well. In the brief interregnum after the Nazis were defeated, a strange three-way power struggle emerged in Dachau, that is emblematic of the direction German democracy took after the war.

In 1935, a local Social Democrat, Georg Scherer, was arrested for his stubborn dedication to working class sporting activities, and spent 6 years in the camp, where he was appointed “Lagerältester - responsible for all prisoners - until his release. On April 28, 1945, fearing the SS would escalate their atrocities before the Americans arrived, he led a short-lived - and violently repressed - armed insurrection in the town of Dachau, coordinated with other resistance action in Munich.

When the Americans did arrive, they made him deputy mayor. The tasks he faced were enormous - over 6,000 dead bodies in the camp, 30,000 survivors to be fed, a typhoid outbreak. Labour and transport, food, fuel, clothing and accommodation had to be organised. Within the camp, the Communists in particular had been able to establish their own organisational structures, and after liberation this experience became vital. With supply chains broken, the economy collapsed, and government all but dissolved, Scherer and his fellow communist and social democratic ex-prisoners divided the town into 17 districts, organising the 22,000 inhabitants into committees of 7, and set to work.

A central coordination committee of 8 was set up, with the broadest possible base. It contained 2 Communists, 2 Social Democrats, 2 from the conservative former Bavarian Peoples’ Party, and 2 with no affiliation. Named the “Anti-Fascist Action" committee (AFA), it set about coordinating the post-Nazi reconstruction work. Similar united front “antifa” organisations sprung up across Germany as the Third Reich collapsed, populated largely by members of the working class, but generally mistrusted by middle-class Germans. While the AFA could claim to be representative, however, it was unelected and had no claim to authority, and it carried out its work under cautious US military supervision.

While the AFA initially supported US “denazification” measures, tensions increased as it became clear that efforts were focusing on “little Nazis” - many of whom had joined Nazi organisations out of necessity or convenience - while more powerful individuals with better connections - and dirtier pasts - managed to evade punishment. The Americans also began to recruit new civil servants to run the administration, while the AFA continued its work more and more independently, resulting in the development of elements of “dual power” that had echoes of the situation in 1918-19.

The AFA and the new civil authorities soon ended up in competition for US support. Even before Germany’s capitulation in May, the Americans had decided to restore the pre-Nazi administrative system, and in Dachau they appointed Heinrich Kneuer to run the district. A conservative, mid-level bureaucrat, with a dubious history during the 1930s, Kneuer immediately set about trying to dissolve the AFA, which he considered to be a communist threat to the social order. His exchanges with the American commandant show he was - at the very least - a technocrat who considered democracy a threat, the people stupid, and advocated a government of “clever men”.

To Kneuer’s dismay, then, the Americans created a new town council on July 21, exactly half of whom were on the left - 5 Social Democrats and 3 Communists, with elections to follow. A return to democracy would be a mixed blessing for the Communists, however, and they knew it. From August 1945, the Americans had identified the AFA as “something of a problem”, not so much because of the ongoing inconveniences it caused Kneuer, but because of its dominant leftwing politics.

Local elections were scheduled for January 1946, deliberating forcing the Communists and Social Democrats into competition before they had settled on a common programme. The Communist Party ran the Social Democrat Scherer as their lead candidate, but his former SPD comrades ran against him, ensuring the left vote was splintered, and the KPD result was worse than before the war.

From a right-wing and anti-Communist perspective, the strategy was a success. The conservative silent majority - having sat in uncomfortable quietude as the crimes of Nazism were uncovered and investigated - was given an opportunity to reassert itself. The Bavarian Volksbund (later to become the Christian Social Union - CSU) won 59 percent of the vote in Dachau on a platform of conservative anti-Nazism, combined with opposition to the “Socialist-Communist common action programme”. The anti-Communist sentiment that had led many middle-class voters to support the Nazis had found a new, more “respectable”, outlet.

Meanwhile, disunity in left wing politics had been ensured. In the Soviet zone, the KPD and SPD had been merged, but similar attempts in the West failed. Applications from the KPD to register as either the "Socialist Unity Party" (SED) or the "German Socialist Peoples’ Party" were rejected, and they were forced to run as Communists. The AFA - even with its significant middle-class involvement - and the hopes of antifascist unity, were in tatters. The hard work of the AFA, its idealism, energy, even-handedness and dedication, had succeeded in reconstructing a world that rejected its values, and bourgeois normality - now shed of the memory of its disquieting accommodation with Nazism - had been restored.

Even 75 years on, the sheer magnitude of the horrors of Dachau and the other Nazi camps ought to serve as a stern correction for humanity’s moral compass for generations to come. Unfortunately, the span of history that has passed since they were closed has not served that memory any justice. The bloody violence and oppression we have seen since the Second World War may not have been carried out with the same calculating intensity, but it has been horrific nonetheless, and even now we run the risk of repeating some of the worst mistakes of humanity’s brief existence.

In the words of Milan Kundera, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. To truly succeed in this, however, we must preserve not only the memory of suffering and despair, but the memory of hope. For this reason, then, when I hear the word “Dachau”, the echoing screams of all those who perished in the nightmare machine are joined by the quiet, firm voices of those who said “Never Again”, who persevered in their struggle against fascism in all weather, and who sought against all odds to build a better world in the ashes of the old.

Germany: Liberals and conservatives join with fascists to oust the left from state government

(Elke Wetzig/ Creative Commons)

On February 5, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and free-market liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) joined forces with the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany - AfD) to remove a left wing government from power.

This major political upset is the first time since World War Two that a German government has assumed power with the help of a far-right party. It represents a first - but probably not last - breach of the “cordon sanitaire” that mainstream parties had placed around the AfD, rejecting all collaboration with a party that is being increasingly seen as a fascist threat.

For the past five years, the small former East German state of Thuringia has been governed by a rare “Red-Red-Green” coalition of the socialist Die Linke (“The Left”), the Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens. Even more unusually, the largest party in this formation was Die Linke, and their leader Bodo Ramelow took on the role of state Premier.

In last year’s state election, while Die Linke’s vote increased a further three points to 31 percent - and 29 seats - their allies slumped. The SPD fell to 8 percent and lost a third of its seats, while the Greens also went backwards, only narrowly crossing the 5 percent threshold required to enter parliament. As a result, the three-party left-coalition government lost its majority.

On the other hand, the AfD surged to 23.4 percent, doubling their seats to 22, while the CDU, whose election campaign was centred on one removing the socialist Ramelow and his left coalition from power, fell 12 percent to an historic low, and lost 13 seats. The FDP, who had spent the previous five years in the political wilderness, scraped over the 5 percent threshold by only 73 votes.

With the far-right on the ascendant, there was some pressure on both the CDU and FDP to provide external support to allow the governing left coalition to return to work. Both parties refused.

The vote on February 5 was therefore a key test for finding a formula for government. The first two rounds proved inconclusive, with Ramelow winning first 43, then 44 votes - more than the Red-Red-Green coalition but still short of the 46 seat majority in the 90 seat parliament.

His rival, the AfD candidate Christoph Kindervater, scored 25 and then 22 votes. While the AfD holds only 22 seats it seemed that three members of the CDU had voted for the fascists’ candidate in the first round, while the rest of their party abstained.

A strong taboo is attached to the AfD, whose leader in Thuringia - Björn Höcke - is particularly notorious. In a 2014 email to colleagues, Höcke advocated abolition Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalises "incitement of hatred towards other groups of the population”, a  move that would have legalised Holocaust denial.

Höcke - who leads an extreme-right wing within his party - has marched along side open Neo-Nazis and repeatedly criticised Germany for its “moronic” commemoration of the Holocaust, advocating a "remembrance policy change by 180 degrees”. In September 2019 a court in Thuringia ruled that it was not only legal - but also “based on a verifiable factual basis” - to describe Höcke as a “fascist”.

Despite this, there is an ongoing debate in the CDU - both in Thuringia and across Germany - about how to deal with the rise of the AfD. One wing of the party supports the “cordon sanitaire” and refusing any form of collaboration with an increasingly openly fascistic AfD.

Others in the party, however, are concerned that after nearly a decade of a federal “Grand Coalition” with the centre-left SPD, the CDU is losing its right-wing supporters to the insurgent AfD. They therefore advocate working with the AfD to “bring them inside the tent”, and thereby - they hope - moderate them.

With no candidate winning in the first two rounds, the vote went to a third round, in which a simple majority of votes in favour would be enough to win. With Ramelow 20 votes ahead of the AfD candidate, and with the CDU abstaining, it looked likely that his Red-Red-Green alliance would be returned, albeit as a minority government.

Then, out of the blue, the FDP put forward their candidate, 54 year old Thomas Kemmerich, for the position. While Ramelow again won 44 votes, the AfD unexpectedly abandoned their candidate, throwing their full support - and votes - behind Kemmerich.

The CDU, too, abandoned their previous position of abstention to vote for the FDP candidate, who was narrowly victorious with 45 votes. It is difficult to consider these moves as coincidence, even if no formal coalition negotiations between FDP and CDU were conducted.

So, despite the party winning barely 5 percent of the vote, the Free Democratic Party’s candidate was elected Premier, thanks to an unholy alliance with the CDU and the fascists, effectively tearing down the 75-year post-war cordon sanitaire against the fascists.

Reaction

The negative reaction was immediate, and visceral. Emergency demonstrations were called outside the FDP's national offices in Berlin and in other cities around the country.

Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, Die Linke’s Chair in Thuringia, dumped the congratulatory bouquet unceremoniously at Kemmerich’s feet and turned on her heel. She later described the vote as a “clear pact with fascism”.

Die Linke co-chair Bernd Riexinger said the decision was “a bitter day for democracy” and "a taboo-breaker that will have far-reaching consequences",  while Bundestag group leader Dietmar Bartsch called on Kemmerich to resign and for fresh state elections to take place.

The Greens also called for Kemmerich’s resignation, while SPD General Secretary Lars Klingbeil described the election as "the historic low point in German post-war history”. Germany's foreign minister Heiko Maas, also from the SPD, described the election as "completely irresponsible".

The reaction from the centre-right, however, was much more mixed.

Federal lawmakers from Kemmerich’s own party criticised the result, calling on him not to accept his election because of the AfD support.

Markus Söder, chair of the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), condemned the CDU’s actions in Thuringia as "unacceptable”, while CDU national leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer also criticised the Thuringia chapter of her own party, also calling for Kemmerich to resign and for new elections.

But Federal Government Commissioner for the East, Christian Hirte (who is also Vice-President of the CDU in Thuringia), congratulated Kemmerich for ousting the Red-Red-Green alliance.

CDU member, and former head of the Germany’s domestic spy agency, Hans-Georg Maaßen, celebrated the result as a “huge success”, saying “the main thing is that the socialists are gone”. He saved his criticism for his own party instead, accusing the CDU of abandoning its own members, and advocated an immediate political shift to the right.

A controversial figure, Maaßen was placed on “early retirement” from his role as spy chief in 2018 after he openly criticised the government and was accused of passing sensitive information to the AfD. In fact, the AfD even considered nominating Maaßen for the head of government in Thuringia, but he declined.

Thuringia's CDU state leader Mike Mohring responded to criticism of the vote by saying: "We are not responsible for the voting behaviour of other parties”, and the CDU in Thuringia has rejected calls for fresh elections, which would require a two-thirds majority to call.

It would also be conceivable that Kemmerich himself calls for a vote of confidence that he would hope to lose. To survive, he would need an absolute majority - 46 votes. If he lost, the parliament could vote for a new Premier. Neither of these options seem certain, and the AfD has indicated it would be happy to lend its ongoing support to a CDU-FDP minority government.

Although both the CDU and the FDP immediately ruled out a coalition with the AfD, the vote was a dangerous step towards the normalisation of a fascist force in Germany, with consequences that go far beyond one state.

The vote in Thuringia has an even more worrying precedent. Exactly ninety years ago, Thuringia was the first German government to incorporate the nascent Nazi Party into its ministry. Then - as today - the conservatives wanted to “tame” the Nazis by involving them in government. The rest is history.

As right-wing extremism expert Matthias Quent told newspaper Vorwärts immediately after the vote, unless the major parties and civil society react firmly and decisively, “a stream of [fascist] brown will pour out of little Thuringia into the rest of the Republic”.

Germany: SPD wins Bremen election amid record low voter turnout

The German city-state of Bremen went to the polls on May 10

Germany’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has narrowly held on to power in the city of Bremen, Germany’s smallest state, after elections on May 10 saw the governing coalition returned with a diminished majority amidst a record low voter turnout.

While the SPD still topped the poll with 32.9 percent, its vote share was down 5.7 percent on the 2011 election, and marks its worst ever result in Bremen.

The SPD has governed the city-state – one of Germany’s main industrial centres – continuously since the end of World War Two. Bremen, with a population of only 655,000, has been hard hit by a gradual decline in the local shipbuilding industry and by weakened public finances.

It now suffers from Germany’s highest unemployment rate, at 11 percent, as well as high levels of debt. According to a recent report by German charity Der Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband, nearly a quarter of people in Bremen live in poverty, more than any other German state.

The level of political engagement has suffered as a result, with barely fifty percent of the electorate turning out to vote in this election – the lowest turnout in any poll in modern Germany history. 

Germany: Hamburg elections a win for SPD and smaller parties, but a blow against Merkel

State elections in Hamburg on February 15 saw the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) retain control of the traditionally left-wing city-state, while smaller parties of the left and right also made gains.

The SPD won 45.7 percent of the votes, equal to 58 seats in the city legislature – a result down 2.7 percent on the record margin it won in 2011. Having now lost the absolute majority the party held prior to the vote, SPD Mayor Olaf Scholz will need to find a coalition partner in order to form government.

The most likely candidate for this role is the Green Party, which has already indicated its willingness to enter a coalition. The Greens took 12.2 percent of the vote, a slight increase on the 2011 result.

On the other hand, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the biggest loser, dropping by 6.1 points to only 15.9 percent of the vote – barely enough to keep second place ahead of the Greens.

It was the party’s worst ever result in Hamburg and its worst result in a state election since 1959, and – when viewed in light of the 20 percent the CDU lost in 2011 – the result suggests that the conservatives are truly in crisis in the Hanseatic port city.

25 years after the Berlin Wall, socialists set to form government in Thuringia

Nearly twenty-five years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist party Die Linke (“The Left”) looks set to form government in the eastern German state of Thuringia for the first time.

After two months of uncertainty following state elections held on September 14, the way has been cleared for Die Linke to enter government as senior coalition partner in December, alongside the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, after nearly 70 percent of SPD members in Thuringia voted to enter a coalition government on 4 November.

While Die Linke has governed at a regional level before, as a junior partner to the SPD in Berlin and Brandenburg, this marks the first time they will lead a government.

It also marks the first time since German reunification that a socialist party will take charge of a government – a breakthrough for a party that has been treated as a pariah by the political and media establishment.

Germany: Free marketeers made to walk plank, Pirates gain

Elections in the German state of Saarland on March 25 have dealt a heavy blow to the federal coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) retained its 12-year hold on power, holding steady at 35.2% of the small state’s voters. But Merkel's allies at a federal level - the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) - were wiped out at the state polls.

The FDP’s share of the vote dropped from 9.2% in 2009 to a tiny 1.2%, well below the 5% required to enter parliament.

Nationally, the FDP is polling at barely 3% - down from a high of 14.6% at the last federal elections. It was booted out of five state parliaments last year, a trend that seems set to continue.

The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) increased its vote by 6% to 30.6% - not enough to dislodge the CDU from government, but enough to force it into a power-sharing “grand coalition”.

The vote for the anti-capitalist party Die Linke (“The Left”) dropped from 21% to only 16.1%, giving it 17 seats in parliament.

This relatively poor result came despite Saarland being home to Die Linke’s popular and outspoken former leader Oskar Lafontaine, once dubbed “the shadow Chancellor” for his ability to influence German politics.

Germany's presidency: corrupt incumbent out - obnoxious right-wing ideologue in.

German President Christian Wulff resigned on February 17 after prosecutors applied to have his presidential immunity stripped in a corruption scandal.

Wulff has been accused of having received a series of kickbacks from businessmen, including a home loan of 500,000 euros (paid via an anonymous bank cheque) in 2008.

He is also accused of receiving favourable car deals, free hotel-stays, free airline upgrades and other perks during his time as premier of the state of Lower Saxony.

When German tabloid Bild threatened to publish the allegations, Wulff left voice messages on the editor's phone threatening "war".

As more corruption accusations surfaced, prosecutors in Hannover, capital of Lower Saxony, asked the Bundestag (federal parliament) to lift Wulff's presidential immunity.

Faced with the destruction of his credibility, Wulff resigned. He now faces possible charges and the loss of his parliamentary pension.

Under the German system, a new president must be elected within 30 days of the resignation of his predecessor.

Pirates plunder Berlin as Merkel’s government founders

Elections in the city-state of Berlin on September 18 delivered another serious blow to the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, even as her party’s vote increased.
 

Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came in second place in the Berlin election, winning 23.4 percent of the vote – up from 21.3 in 2006.

The ruling centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) dropped slightly, from 30.6 to 28.6 percent, but will remain in government in Germany’s capital. SPD leader Klaus Wowereit – Germany’s first openly gay premier – is likely to replace his “red-red coalition” partners, the socialist Die Linke (“the Left”), with the more moderate Greens.

The Greens came third in the vote, winning 17.6 percent – a swing of 4.7 percent – while Die Linke slipped slightly from 13.4 to 11.7 percent.

During five years of coalition government, Die Linke has become implicated in the Berlin government’s antisocial policies and a 13 percent unemployment rate, damaging its social justice credentials.

The hotly contested question of whether – and under what conditions – Die Linke should enter into future coalitions will be debated in late October, when the party holds its national “Program Congress” in the city of Erfurt.

The surprise winner at this election was the Pirate Party, which took an astounding 8.9 percent of the vote, entering parliament for the first time with 15 seats.

State election defeat humiliates Merkel

Elections in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on September 4 have handed the conservative government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel another humiliating defeat. 

Merkel's centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had already suffered five election defeats this year, in Hamburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Rheinland-Pfalz, Bremen and the highly embarrassing loss of the wealthy conservative southern state of Baden-Württemberg – held by the CDU for sixty years – to the Greens.

The Mecklenburg-Vorpommern defeat was particularly galling for Merkel – who was born in Hamburg and raised in Brandenburg in the former East Germany – because the state includes her own electoral constituency.

On polling day, the CDU could only muster 23.1 percent of the vote, down by more than 5.7 percent since 2006 and its worst result in the state since German unification in 1990.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) were the clear victors, with 35.7 percent of the vote, an increase of 5.5 percent.

The socialist Die Linke ("The Left") – campaigning on a platform of social justice, democratic rights and action on the environment – won 18.4 percent of the vote.

Germany announces the phase-out of nuclear power

On May 30, the German government announced that all of Germany’s seventeen nuclear power stations would be permanently shut down by 2022.

Germany’s seven oldest nuclear power stations – temporarily switched off after public outcry and protests in the aftermath of the disaster in Fukushima – will remain offline, and will be permanently decommissioned.

An eighth plant – in northern Germany – is already offline because of technical problems, and will remain shut down for good.Six of the remaining 9 power stations will be shut down in 2021, and the final three will be turned off in 2022.

"It's definite: the latest end of the last three nuclear power plants is 2022," Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen told reporters. "There will be no clause for revision."

The announcement has been greeted with critical support from anti-nuclear and environmental organisations such as Greenpeace, who have maintained their call for an earlier phase out date of 2015.

The announcement is not an entirely new proposition, either. In 2001, the then coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the German Greens passed legislation to phase out nuclear power in Germany by the end of 2021.

Germany: Greens win historic electoral triumph

State elections on March 27 saw the German Greens win an historic victory in Baden-Württemberg – where they will form Germany’s first-ever Green-led government – and triple their vote in the Rheinland-Pfalz.

Riding on widespread public opposition to nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Greens doubled their support to 24.2 percent of the vote in Baden-Württemberg.

The centre-left Social-Democratic Party (SPD) won 23.1 percent of the vote – a small drop on their 2006 result – while the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won 39 percent of the vote, down by over 5 points.

The CDU’s ruling coalition partner – the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) – lost more than half its support, dropping to 5.3 percent – barely enough to remain in the Landtag (state parliament).

The socialist party Die Linke (“The Left”), which took 24 percent in state elections in the eastern state of Sachsen-Anhalt on March 20, won only 2.8 percent of the vote – not enough to enter parliament.

The results mean that Baden-Württemberg will be governed by a Green-SPD coalition, led by the Greens’ Winfried Kretschmann – a founding member of the party in Baden-Württemberg and now the first ever Greens state Minister-Präsident (Premier).

Germany: State election weakens Merkel

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) survived a narrow vote in elections for the eastern state of Sachsen-Anhalt. 

The right-wing CDU lost 3% of the vote from the previous elections, dropping to 32.6% support. The two other big parties in the state, the far left Die Linke and the centrist Social Democrats (SPD), remained steady on 23.8% and 21.5% respectively.

Merkel’s allies at a federal level - the pro-free market Free Democrats - failed to cross the 5% threshold needed to win a seat, as did the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD). 

The lead NPD candidate Matthias Heyder is under investigation for discussing terrorist methods and bomb-making techniques on an online forum. Right-wing and racist violence nearly doubled in Sachsen-Anhalt in 2010.

Germany: Protests force nuclear closures after Fukushima disaster

Facing public outrage and concern over the nuclear meltdown unfolding in Japan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced the temporary shutdown of several of that country's nuclear reactors.

On March 12, over 60,000 anti-nuclear protesters in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg formed a 45 kilometre human chain, stretching from Stuttgart to the Neckarwestheim 1 nuclear plant.

Smaller protests took place in more than 450 towns and cities across Germany, according to anti-nuclear organisation "Ausgestrahlt" (Irradiated), and more protests are planned for March 26.

Merkel responded by announcing on March 15 that all 17 German nuclear plants would undergo safety checks. Of these, the oldest seven – all of which began operating before 1980 – would be shut down for three months, beginning immediately with the Isar 1 power plant in Bavaria.

Two of the seven older plants are already shut down – one is undergoing maintenance, while the other was taken offline in 2007 after an accident.

The move has been criticised by anti-nuclear groups and opposition parties as inadequate, and as a cynical, dishonest manoeuvre, designed only to arrest the desperate decline in support for Merkel’s ruling part, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Germany: Christian Democrats crushed in Hamburg poll

The ruling party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was resoundingly defeated in state elections in Hamburg on February 20. 
 

The right-wing Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) vote nearly halved, down from 42.6% to only 21.9%. The "centre-left" Social Democrats (SPD) won 48.3% - a massive swing in their favour and enough for them to govern in their own right.

The result - after 10 years of rule - was the worst for the CDU in Hamburg since World War II.

The Green Party, which had been in coalition government with the CDU in Hamburg, won only a modest increase to 11.2%. The result was doubly disappointing for them as they had been hoping to skip from one coalition government to another, without so much as blinking.

The SPD's high vote has banished them to opposition.

Germany's ‘hot autumn’ of protests

Germany’s centre-right government is facing what many have dubbed a “hot autumn” of protests, as conflict over a range of social, political and environmental issues come to a head across the country.

As the governments of Europe attempt to offload the costs of the financial crisis onto working people, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has initiated a series of “austerity” measures aimed to undermine Germany’s social welfare system.

About 100,000 trade unionists took to the streets on November 13 to protest cuts to social welfare, including government plans to raise the pension age from 65 to 67.

On November 15, Merkel was successfully re-elected leader of her party - the right-wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - with the support of over 90 percent of the party conference.

Facing criticism from the party's influential right-wing, Merkel has shifted her rhetoric rightwards, claiming that multiculturalism had "utterly failed", and calling on Germans to return to their "Judeo-Christian values".

The day before the CDU conference began, tens of thousands of protesters in Stuttgart, Dortmund, Nürnberg and Erfurt came out to oppose her government’s cuts.

Minister for labour Ursula von der Leyen has tried to defend the attack on pensions. Claiming it was necessary because of Germany’s low birth rate and high life expectancy, Von der Leyen described the move as “a question of fairness”.

Protesters, led by Germany’s largest union IG Metall, rejected the claim. They condemned the changes as an attack on working people designed to maximise corporate profits during the German economy’s current upswing.

Berthold Huber, head of IG Metall, told demonstrators in Stuttgart: “We don’t want a republic in which powerful interest groups decide the guidelines of politics with their money, their power and their influence.”

Germany: Two party system unraveling

Coasting on the back of environmental protests and a hemorrhaging two-party system, the German Greens have sent shock waves through German politics, surging into the position of main opposition party for the first time.

The Greens, who were part of a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1998-2005 at the expense of many of the party’s principles, are benefiting from the unraveling of Germany’s tradition two-party system.

Nevertheless, the two major parties - the centre-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union coalition (CDU/ CSU) and the centre-left SPD - retain a monopoly over government in Europe’s biggest economy.

But the facade appears to be truly falling apart at last. Opinion polls in early October put the Greens on 24%, one point ahead of the SPD.

At the 2009 federal elections, the Greens scored 10% of the vote. The far-left Die Linke won 11.9%.

In recent polls, the governing CDU were at 32%, while their neoliberal fundamentalist Free Democratic Party (FDP) allies only reached 6%. Die Linke remained steady on 11%.

The Greens’ poll surge comes amid a rise in environmental and community protests.

German court approves spying on Die Linke

Germany’s Federal Administrative Court ruled on July 21 that the Verfassungsschutz — Germany’s domestic spy agency — had a right to spy on the left-wing party Die Linke.
 
Bodo Ramelow, Die Linke’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia and others were appealing against the agency spying on them. The justification for the spying are claims Die Linke contained “anti-constitutional” elements because of its origins in the former East German state.

Die Linke was formed after 2005 by a merger between disaffected western Social Democratic Party members, left-wing academics and trade unionists, and the eastern-based Party of Democratic Socialism. The PDS was made up of members of the former East German ruling party. 

Die Linke won almost 12% in the last national election, making it the fourth largest party in parliament. It has won seats in almost every state parliament. Polls consistently show it is the most popular party in eastern Germany and its social justice policies are making it increasingly popular in the west.

Die Linke is the only party with parliamentary representation to support the view of a large majority of the population by callings for German soldiers to leave Afghanistan.

Merkel embarrassed in presidential election

On June 30, the German parliament met to elect the country’s largely symbolic president. What should have been a fairly straightforward affair, however, may spell the beginning of the end for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The new election was made necessary by the resignation of Horst Köhler on May 31, after his comments suggesting German military deployments were commercially motivated caused a public outcry.

Köhler’s resignation came at a particularly bad time for Merkel, whose governing rightwing coalition has been struggling in recent opinion polls.

Support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has dropped to just 32 percent, while their free-marketeer coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP) – who had surged around 15 percent support at the federal election in September last year – have dropped to barely 4 percent, the July 4 Angus Reid Global Monitor reported.

Popular opposition and protests continue to build against Merkel’s austerity measures, the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the economic bail-out of Greece as German standards of living continue to decline.

Germany in turmoil as president quits

The government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in crisis, following the resignation of Germany’s President Horst Koehler on May 31.

Koehler – a former head of the IMF, and German president since 2004 – resigned after public backlash against comments he made connecting the German economy with increased military deployments.

On a May 22 visit to the German military mission in Afghanistan – something which eighty percent of the German population are opposed to – Koehler told German radio that further military deployments were necessary “to protect our interests, for instance trade routes … or preventing regional instabilities that could negatively impact our trade, jobs and incomes."

Constitutional lawyer Ulrich Preuss called it a “discernably imperialist choice of words”, while Klaus Ernst, co-leader of the antiwar leftwing party Die Linke claimed that Koehler had “openly said what cannot be denied”. Ernst asserted that Afghanistan is a “war about influence and commodities” and defending the export interests of large corporations.

Facing enormous public outcry, Koehler resigned as President, citing a “lack of the necessary respect” for his position. A new president must be appointed within 30 days.

Germany: Left party conference renews leadership, steadies course

On May 15, the far-left German party Die Linke held its national congress in the eastern city of Rostock, electing a new national leadership and debating a new draft program. 

At the conference, charismatic and popular left-wing firebrand – and renegade Social Democrat – Oskar Lafontaine, 66, stepped down as the party’s co-leader due to health reasons after a cancer operation.

Lafontaine helped co-found Die Linke, formed in 2007 from a merger of the Electoral Alternative for Jobs and Social Justice (WASG – an amalgam of disgruntled Social Democrats, militant unionists and various left groups and individuals) and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS – the successor to the old East German ruling party). Party co-leader and East German moderate Lothar Bisky, 68, a former leader of the PDS, also stepped aside.

While both men were instrumental in the merger that created Die Linke, they represent widely differing views in the new party.