‘Not a swimming place for Nazis’: A far-right lawmaker had his clothes stolen at the lake

Police have yet to find the man who stole Alexander Gauland’s clothes while he swam in a lake last week, forcing the co-leader of the German Parliament’s most far-right party to walk half-naked through the streets — an image that is going viral on social media.

At least the motive for the crime seems clear. “Nazis need no bathing fun!” Gauland said the thief shouted as he stole the 77-year-old lawmaker’s shirt and pants.

Gauland has never publicly defended the German Nazis, who during their 12-year rule started World War II, killed millions of people and tried to exterminate all Jews. But he has repeatedly suggested that it’s time to stop apologizing for the past.

“If the French are rightly proud of their emperor, and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars,” Gauland said in September, according to the Guardian. “People no longer need to reproach us with these 12 years. They don’t relate to our identity nowadays.”

A week and a half after he made that speech, Alternative for Germany — a party co-led by him — came third in a six-way national election, becoming the first far-right party to join the German Parliament since the Nazis.

The party’s other leader, Alice Weidel, once wrote an email peppered with “Nazi-era connotations,” according to Deutsche Welle — words such as “Überfremdung,” or “foreign infiltration,” which Weidel applied not to Jews but to “culturally foreign people such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma,” as well as to “puppets of World War II allies” in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

Weidel is generally considered the more moderate of the party’s two leaders.

SOURCE: Washington Post