Nazi-Adjacent German Party Begged Trump to Fix a UN Clause Written to Stop Nazis

The Leak That Keeps On Giving

The trove comes from the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets and was shared with reporters, including at The Guardian. It covers more than 420,000 emails, plus documents and personnel records, stretching from the party's founding in 2013 to the present, though most of it predates 2019.

The AfD's response was a masterpiece of the genre. It said a hosting provider had been attacked at the end of September and that "only a few mailboxes" had been copied, most of them unused for years. Party sources then conceded the published material appeared to be authentic. So: small leak, totally real.

This is not a fringe group of cranks sending fan mail from a basement. The AfD took 20.8% in the February 2025 federal election and now leads national polls at about 30%. In September it won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt and is trying to form the first far-right state government in Germany since the Second World War.

Eleven Out of Thirteen Board Members Love a Good Telegram

The day after Trump won in 2016, then-leader Frauke Petry emailed the party's federal board proposing "an official and brief congratulatory telegram to the future US president." Her pitch was that German politics was "once again outdoing itself in politically unacceptable behaviour" and that the AfD should be "the only German party welcoming a new beginning in the US."

Eleven of the 13 board members replied. All in favor. Current leader Alice Weidel wrote "Yes:-)" with a little smiley face, like she was RSVPing to a barbecue. Beatrix von Storch, now deputy leader of the party's Bundestag group, went with "Couldn't be more of a yes."

Board member Dirk Driesang had a further idea: Trump should also get the party's manifesto in English, "by post (?)." The question mark is doing a lot of work. Somebody at the AfD was genuinely wondering whether you could just mail a political program to the White House and hope for the best.

Agonizing Over the Fan Mail

The telegram went out on November 11 under Petry's name and was released to the press. It told the president-elect, "We are confident that you will readjust the transatlantic relationship and end the wars in Syria and Ukraine by mutual agreement with Russia." The party also wished that his "hopes as a person be fulfilled," which reads like a greeting card written by someone who has never met a human being.

Compare that to the mainstream German reaction. Angela Merkel offered "close cooperation" only "on the basis of" shared values, including respect for human dignity regardless of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. That is a polite way of saying we will be watching you. Ursula von der Leyen called the result a "huge shock." Vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel reportedly called Trump the "forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international" and counted the AfD among its forces.

The AfD looked at that list of concerns and saw a dating profile.

The Favor Request From Hell

For the inauguration, the party wanted to do things "faster and better prepared." Driesang proposed adding a concrete ask: "Please support us in our efforts to remove the enemy-state clause from the UN charter."

Here is what that clause is. The "enemy state" provisions were written into the UN charter in 1945 and exempt action against any state that was an enemy of a signatory in the Second World War from the charter's normal rules. The point was to let the wartime allies move against any "renewal of aggressive policy" by Germany, Japan or their allies. The UN General Assembly later declared the clauses obsolete, so this is largely symbolic.

Symbolic is exactly the point. Of all the things a German political party could ask the new American president for, the one it picked was help erasing a provision designed to keep Germany from doing it again. A party that Germany's own domestic intelligence agency monitors as a suspected rightwing extremist organization asked for the Nazi-era safety latch to be removed. No, seriously, pay attention here.

Bannon Gets the Full Courtship Treatment

The leak also documents a slower romance between Weidel and Steve Bannon, the Trump ideologue who has spent years trying to build a global network of nationalist parties. The emails show a burgeoning political courtship between senior AfD figures and Bannon, with the German side doing most of the pursuing.

That tracks with everything else in the trove. This was never a case of Trump stumbling into friendship with a European fringe party. The AfD saw him from the beginning as a potential ally and chased him like a teenager refreshing a phone for a text back.

And It Worked, Sort Of

When the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt in September, Trump posted his congratulations on Truth Social and signed off with a German version of his slogan: "MGGA!!!" Make Germany Great Again, three exclamation points, no further questions.

The Guardian and other outlets have also reported on friendly contacts between the AfD and the US state department during Trump's second term. The telegram begging for attention in 2016 has become a full-on relationship, and the party that once sweated over the wording of a greeting now gets a victory lap from the Oval Office.