Holocaust survivor warns of 'very dangerous' far-right threat after AfD's Saxony-Anhalt victory

Charlotte Knobloch was born in 1932 and survived the Nazi era by living on a farm in Middle Franconia, hidden by a family acquaintance who raised her as her own daughter. Her grandmother was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and died there. Now, at nearly 94 years old, Knobloch is one of Germany's most prominent Jewish community leaders and one of the last living witnesses to the Holocaust. She has spent decades watching her people rebuild their lives in the country that nearly destroyed them.

On September 6, the Alternative for Germany party—classified by Saxony-Anhalt's constitutional protection office as "confirmed right-wing extremist"—won nearly 44 percent of the vote in the state election. The party's lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, fell short of an absolute majority but stands positioned to become the next state premier, which would make him the first head of a state government from a far-right extremist party since World War II ended. When Knobloch learned of the result, she was shaken. She told Deutsche Welle that the victory had alarmed her deeply, and that she knew of Jewish people in Germany who were now seriously considering leaving the country.

For Knobloch, the wound runs deeper than electoral politics. It took decades after 1945 for Jews in Germany to rebuild trust in their homeland, to create communities and institutions, to feel safe enough to call the country home again. That hard-won sense of belonging, she said, is now fracturing. Fear has returned. "That is, in sum, the biggest problem for me," she explained, "because we successfully tried to rebuild the Jewish communities after 1945, to give the Jewish people a home again, which they hadn't had for a long time." The thought that this work might unravel haunts her.

Knobloch has been warning about rising antisemitism in Germany for years, but even she did not anticipate the emergence of far-right extremist parties with this kind of electoral power. "There's a danger looming that did not exist in this form 10 years ago," she said. "There have always been Nazis, there have always been Jew haters, but not in the way as it's the case today." She believes the established political parties have failed to speak out decisively enough against the AfD. She called on them to address the threat jointly, not separately, and to engage directly with citizens about their fears—especially young people, who she said are being left out of meaningful conversation about what is happening.

Days after speaking publicly against the AfD's victory, Knobloch received death threats. On a Thursday, someone discovered the threats scrawled on a park bench and a rubbish bin in Munich's English Garden. Police were notified. A police statement confirmed the threats were directly linked to her comments on the election. Knobloch canceled her attendance at a scheduled event. The threats were not abstract warnings; they were a direct consequence of her voice.

She wakes up thinking about the Holocaust and goes to bed thinking about it. There were periods, she said, when these memories receded into the background, mentioned occasionally by the media but not constantly present. Those quieter years are gone. The past is urgent again. Knobloch still believes there is a chance—that people will listen, that dialogue is possible, that the established parties can find the courage to stand together against what she sees as an existential threat. But the window for that conversation, she knows, is narrowing.