Secret plan against Germany

Act 1, Scene 2: A masterplan to rid the country of immigrants

Sellner, author and a leading figure in the European New Right, is the first speaker of the day. In Mörig’s introduction, the audience are told that Sellner has “the masterplan”, which centres around one key idea: “re-migration”.

It’s Sellner’s idea of re-migration that should be the focus point of this gathering, Mörig says. Everything else – covid restrictions and vaccinations, the issues of Ukraine and Israel – are all bones of contention on the right. Their stance on re-migration, however, is what unites them. Mörig thinks it will be decisive in the question of “whether or not we in the West will survive.”

The majority of presentations and discussions held today will focus on this concept.

Now Sellner takes the floor. In his speech he details what re-migration would mean in Germany. There are three target groups of migrants, he explains, who should be extradited from the country  – or, as he puts it, “foreigners” who should undergo  “reversed settlement”. They are: asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens. It is the latter that, in his view, would pose the biggest “challenge”. In other words, Sellner’s plan would divide German residents into those who would be able to live peacefully in Germany and those for whom this basic human right would no longer apply.

The scenarios sketched out in this hotel room in Potsdam all essentially boil down to one thing: people in Germany should be forcibly extradited if they have the wrong skin colour, the wrong parents, or aren’t sufficiently “assimilated” into German culture according to the standards of people like Sellner. Even if they have German citizenship.

It’s a scenario that would contravene the citizenship rights and principle of equality between citizens which are a bedrock of the German constitution.

Act 1, Scene 3: No objections from the AfD, despite recent public discussion to ban the party on grounds of extremism

Many supportive questions follow this speech. There are no objections to the “masterplan” in principle, only concerns about its feasibility.

Silke Schröder, a property developer and board member of the right-leaning Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Association), wonders how re-migration would work in practice. Surely if a person has the “appropriate” passport it would be ” impossible”, wouldn’t it?

For Sellner, this is just a detail. A “high level of pressure” will be exerted on people to adapt, he says, via “customised laws”. Re-migration won’t happen overnight; it is “a project that will take decades”.

There is certainly no opposition to the idea from the AfD members in the room. On the contrary, MP Gerrit Huy emphasised that she had been pursuing this goal for years.

Huy claimed that she had presented the party with a “re-migration concept” when she first joined seven years ago. Plans for re-migration were the reason the party no longer opposed the government’s plan to lift the ban on dual citizenship, she said, “because then you can take away the German one, and they still have one left”. Huy’s statements suggest that immigrants with a German passport have the potential to be lured into a trap.

The AfD parliamentary group leader for Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, is also in the room. It is he who will, later on in the day’s proceedings, appeal for donations. He has considerable influence within the AfD; the party is currently polling in first place in Saxony-Anhalt. His sales pitch, very much in keeping with the “masterplan” of Sellner, details his ideas to change the image of German streets. Foreign restaurants would be put under pressure. Living in Saxony-Anhalt should be made “as unattractive as possible for this clientele.” And that could be accomplished very, very easily, he claims. His comments could have consequences for the region’s upcoming elections.