section_path: Ideology and platform/German nationalism/Antisemitism
section_name: Antisemitism
paragraph_text: Antisemitism
  
  Although AfD leaders have repeatedly denied accusations of antisemitism, some AfD members and candidates have expressed antisemitic attitudes. According to a study conducted by the Forsa Institute in 2019, while 2% of the German population agreed with the statement that "the Holocaust is propaganda of the Allied Powers ", that proportion was 15% among AfD supporters. In 2001, 12 years before the founding of AfD, the former AfD Bundestag member Wilhelm von Gottberg expressed his views on the remembrance of the Holocaust by quoting the Italian neofascist Mario Consoli in saying "Any pretext, no matter how flimsy, is good enough to remind people of the Holocaust. The propaganda steamroller is getting stronger rather than weaker over the years, and in more and more countries the Jewish 'truth' about the Holocaust is being given legal protection. The Holocaust must remain a myth, a dogma that is beyond the reach of any free historical research." In 2017, ten AfD Bundestag members were found to have participated in a closed Facebook group named "the Patriots" in which, among other things, antisemitic, racist, pro-Nazi and conspiratorial posts were widespread. One meme posted therein, which showed the Holocaust victim Anne Frank 's face edited on a pizza box labelled with the German equivalent of "fresh from the oven", gained particular media attention. While some AfD officials stated that they had been unknowingly added to the Facebook group without consent and that they had now left it, the Bundestag member Stephan Protschka remained, saying "I am a member of this group because I also see myself as a patriot."
  
  According to a 2019 report by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, statements by leading AfD representatives such as Alexander Gauland and Björn Höcke, who exonerate Holocaust perpetrators and discredit the reappraisal of the Nazi era as "anti-German", create a "connectivity" to right-wing extremist historical revisionism and could "ultimately lead to denial of war guilt and the Holocaust ". In 2023 Felix Klein, the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against antisemitism, stated that leading forces within AfD relativize the Holocaust and that the party condones antisemitism.
  
  Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, stated in 2024 that he is "concerned that the AfD would deliberately act against Jewish life, if it fits into their concept", and that the party offers antisemites a home. A study commissioned by the American Jewish Committee in 2021 came to the conclusion that antisemitism belongs to the "programmatic core" of the AfD. According to the study, the party conducts "targeted campaigns" against Jewish celebrities. The study's author, Lars Rensmann, stated that "despite some lip service to the contrary, hostility towards Israel, Holocaust relativization, antisemitic conspiracy thinking and anti-Jewish images occupy a prominent place" in AfD.
  
  AfD supports a ban on kosher slaughter within the country, as well as the "import and sale of kosher meat". AfD instead wants to require the stunning of animals before slaughter which is against both Jewish and Muslim religious law that both require animals to be conscious when their necks are cut.