High ranking German government officials were outed this year for secretly supplying advice and assistance to the xenophobic, violent, far-right extremist Alternative For Germany (AfD) party.
Now, information about the party's secret financial backers is emerging: according to sworn affidavits reviewed by Spiegel, the party has long been backed by reclusive billionaire August von Finck through his trusted lieutenant Ernst Knut Stahl, who, in 2017, courted a publisher with an offer to work on a new anti-Merkel newspaper called Deutschland Kurier, aimed at countering the influence of "a street in New York with lots of investment bankers, lawyers and so forth...they are all Jews...They control everything. Merkel and also Ralf Stegner from the SPD."
Deutschland Kurier is now a going concern, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were mailed to voters in the runup to the last German federal elections, warning of "exploding migrant crime" and briefing against Merkel, while throwing heavy support behind AfD.
The Kurier's parent organization is the "Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Citizen Freedoms," whose PAC has provided generous support to the AfD -- at least €10,000,000 worth of posters, and free newspapers.
AfD won seats in all 16 German state Parliaments in that election.
The AfD campaigns as an anti-establishment party that says it rejects corporate money and calls for restrictions on big money donations in politics, and accuses the established parties of being creatures of "big money."
The revelations about Stahl and von Finck's possible financial links to AfD come amidst a scandal about huge pools of dark money flowing into AfD campaign coffers through dodgy Swiss bank accounts and cutout "foundations" in the Netherlands. Read the rest
