Because of controversial remarks about the SS, the AfD politician has a reputation for downplaying Nazi crimes. Now he has been to Israel to justify himself. Is that enough to clear the way for a rapprochement between the AfD and the Israeli right?
It was his first time back in Israel in 14 years, Maximilian Krah said in a video released on Tuesday and filmed on the beach in Tel Aviv. “It’s nice here,” said the member of the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “The people are cheerful, the weather is great,” and “the food is good, too.” He was visiting his son, who is currently doing an internship in Israel, Krah explained. And: “I also had a few things to clear up myself.”
Krah is referring to remarks he made in an interview with the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” in May 2024. In it, he said of the Nazi organization “Schutzstaffel” (SS): “I will never say that everyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal.” There was “certainly a high percentage of criminals,” Krah said, “but not all of them were criminals.”
In an interview with the widely read Israeli news site Ynet, Krah was confronted with his statement about the SS.
Among other things, the SS was responsible for running the Nazi concentration camps and was declared a “criminal organization” at the Nuremberg trials.
Krah’s remarks were widely criticized as trivializing the SS and triggered an international scandal that contributed to other European far-right parties – such as France’s Rassemblement National – increasingly distancing themselves from the AfD. Krah himself was temporarily sidelined within his own party because of the interview and other scandals. After the 2025 federal election, he moved from the European Parliament to the Bundestag and has since been largely rehabilitated within the AfD. In Israel, however, his reputation for downplaying Nazi crimes has stuck.
Israeli journalist satisfied with Krah’s disavowal
There, Krah now had an opportunity that is rare for AfD politicians: to explain himself. In an interview with the widely read Israeli news site “Ynet”, he was confronted with his statement about the SS. While he defended its substance, he also called it “completely stupid” and “a communication disaster.” The Israeli journalist Sharon Kidon, who conducted the interview, was satisfied: “It is enough for me that you say you regret it.”
“And with that, it’s over,” Krah declared triumphantly in his video from the beach in Tel Aviv. “It has been cleared up.” Anyone who still portrays him as someone who relativizes Nazi crimes is “a slanderer,” he said.
For Krah, this is about more than correcting a statement made more than two years ago that, in his view, was …