Alternative for Germany | AfD hack confirms research – evaluation will take months

The AfD hack is increasing calls among some observers for the party to be banned. Photo: Marcus Golejewski/dpa Since Monday, more than 400,000 emails and 50,000 internal documents from the AfD have been online. Hackers stole the data. The email traffic goes back to 2014 and ended a few weeks ago. There are now several websites where the emails are available without having to download the original, almost 300 gigabyte data set. The AfD has now confirmed the hacker attack and the data leak, but does not want to comment on the content.

The most prominent victims of the hack include Alexander Gauland and the incumbent AfD leader Alice Weidel. Emails from Weidel also suggest news about the AfD's donations scandal. As a reminder: Weidel received donations totaling 132,000 euros for the 2018 federal election campaign, divided into 18 transfers. The donations came from Swiss real estate billionaire Henning Conle. Because the donations were denominated, the origin was concealed and the money came from a non-EU country, they were illegal; The AfD later paid a fine of almost 400,000 euros for this. Weidel always claimed that he only found out late that the donations had been received. As a team from ARD has now reconstructed from the hack data, that is not true. Weidel wrote to party colleagues that she was expecting donations and that they should keep an eye on her district association's account to see how much they were. A spokesman for Weidel has now stated that she is not withdrawing any statement about the donation affair. “Mrs Weidel neither expected any specific sums nor was she sure that individuals would actually donate,” said the spokesman.

The research into Weidel and the donation affair is symbolic of the findings so far from the AfD hack. They confirm and complete research about the extreme right-wing party. In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, the email address of the party arbitration court was affected by the hack. Countless emails about exclusion procedures and disciplinary measures against party members such as the ethnic-nationalist Bundestag member Matthias Helferich confirm the image of war within the party.

Two fake emails that were distributed on platform In an email, state parliament member Andreas Keith is said to have described Adolf Hitler as a “great German man.” The other email is said to have come from Cologne AfD chairman Christer Cremer, in which he is said to have trivialized a Hitler salute and expressed rape fantasies against migrant women. Cremer himself stated on X that he had filed a criminal complaint. The fake email was published by “interested parties” “in order to harm me personally.” Cremer pointed out that the “conflict lines” in the AfD NRW were known. Neither Cremer's nor Keith's email can be found in the hack's data set. So they are most likely fakes.

Data from population registers that the AfD requested from the local authorities for the purpose of election advertising are not forgeries. The municipalities sent the lists of first-time voters unencrypted to the party by email. This personal data is now open on the internet.

Politicians such as the SPD member of the Bundestag Carmen Wegge and the left-wing domestic politician Clara Bünger are calling for findings from the AfD hack to be included in a possible party ban process. The legal specialist medium “Legal Tribune Online” addressed the question of whether this is even legally permissible. The conclusion of the research: If the data was not illegally obtained by the state, it can certainly access it. The Federal Constitutional Court could also include findings from the hack in its judgment.

With us, no one has to pay to be informed. Sounds like a bad business model? It is too. But independent journalism and participation for everyone are more important to us than profit. Journalism still costs money: research, printing and all the people who do it. That's why we depend on you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

Donate once or regularly, every amount counts. So that nd remains.