Even if Volksbund is cautious in its treatment with AFD members, the German End right party is loud in connection with the support of the group and its mission. On the AFD website, the petition of her leader Alice Weidel cites the funding of the group as one of his legislative priorities, together with the establishment of a “national day for a unborn life” and a plan for blocking Gazan refugees to enter Germany. Jan-Phillip Tadsen, a member of the AFD State Parliament in the German northeast Mecklenburg-Vorpommn, told me that Volksbund’s donor was also liked to lie wreaths at her AFD ceremonies.
Volksbund has supporters in the political spectrum: several Volksbund of officials I spoke with said that their greatest political patrons belonged to the Christian Democratic Union, the German right of the right center. One member of the Green Party with which I contacted told me to support the group because she promoted peace and opposed the extremely right extremism.
However, the possibility that the extreme gum extremists could coop Volksbund, some care, including his former leadership. “I am afraid that this organization is exposed to a huge risk to be instrumentalized,” Markus Meckel, Volksbund’s president, told me until 2016, when I met him in Berlin. Mecckel, a former Protestant Pastor, grew up in East Germany, where the communist regime refused to build a World War I memorial because they were considered inherently pro-Nazi-Proposhal that Meckel said he did not agree because he had bypassed the difficult issues of history. When he came to lead Volksbund in 2013, he said he was astonished by a group of commemoration. “There was such an attitude” of our poor boys; Look at what happened to them on the battlefield, “he said. For an organization that deals so much of the past, it seemed that Volksbund had charged the” never again “mantra.
Meckel decided to take a reform project in Volksbund. After looking at the materials that the group distributed, he found that most of them were inappropriate – for example, commemoration of the Wehrmacht’s dead soldiers who spoke about their lives, but omitted all information about crimes committed by German soldiers or Christmas greetings sent to families who donated “sad stories from the Western front.” Volksbund flyers arranged on their cemeteries are focused mainly on architecture. “But there was nothing in the war, nothing about why the soldiers were there,” he said. Meckel ordered the publications to stop until they could rewrite them. Meckel also told me that Volksbund staff almost exclusively focused on recognizing the graves of German soldiers and neglected civilian remains.
Long ago, the new president looked at Volksbund’s finance. One concern was that there were more living widows for their contributions from each year, and the organization’s revenue was declining. But equally worrying, Meckel said, it was that some of the remaining donors had very questioningly. In one case, Meckel revealed that a great associate was actually an organization he suspected was founded by SS veterans. The group has now sent money through a charity fund to get the Nazi financing connections, Meckel told me. “The question is: Who sponsor this?” he said.
