An Alternative for Germany politician is in trouble over a photo of her posing in front of wine bottles featuring Adolf Hitler. The stunt may now cost her a seat in the Berlin parliament.
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is considering forcing out Jessica Biessmann, a regional lawmaker who posed in front of wine bottles featuring pictures of Adolf Hitler. The infamous ‘Fuhrerwein’ bottles appeared in a post on the social media site ‘MySpace' that Biessmann says is a decade old.
The photos show the woman posing on a kitchen counter, while a closer look reveals an array of bottles on a shelf in the background – which have pictures of Hitler on them.
The public display of Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, and bottles featuring Hitler cannot be bought in the country. However, they are available for purchase in Italy and a number of other countries, and can easily be delivered to Germany via mail order.
It remains to be seen if Biessmann could face criminal charges apart from being potentially suspended from the party.
Biessmann herself says she regrets taking the bizarre photos, but claims the flat belonged to a friend of hers living in the eastern city of Chemnitz, according to Berliner Zeitung. Chemnitz recently saw massive far-right rallies after a local was stabbed and killed by several asylum seekers.
The AfD member says she didn’t notice the bottles in the background at the time the photos were taken. The former car saleswoman and a mother-of-three was elected to Berlin’s House of Representatives in 2016 and is the parliamentary group’s family spokeswoman.
Established in 2013, the AfD is no stranger to widespread controversy relating to the darkest part of Germany’s past. In the most recent example, co-leader Alexander Gauland alleged the Holocaust was “a speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”
Other AfD leaders have not minced their words either. Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD leader in Thuringia, had famously called the Holocaust monument in Berlin a “monument of shame in the heart of the capital.” The AfD considered suspending him from the party but later changed its mind.
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