Even if the Volksbund is cautious in its dealings with AfD members, Germany’s far-right party is vocal about its support for the group and its mission. On the AfD website, a petition by its leader, Alice Weidel, lists funding the group as one of its legislative priorities, along with establishing a “National Day for Unborn Life” and a plan to block Gazan refugees from entering Germany. Jan-Phillip Tadsen, an AfD state parliament member in Germany’s northeastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, told me that he is both a Volksbund donor and that he likes to lay wreaths at its ceremonies from the AfD.
The Volksbund does have supporters across the political spectrum: Several Volksbund officials I talked to said their biggest political patrons belonged to the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s center-right party. One Green Party member I contacted told me she supported the group because it promoted peace and was opposed to far-right extremism.
Still, the possibility that far-right extremists could co-opt the Volksbund is a concern for some, including its former leadership. “I fear this organization is at huge risk of being instrumentalized,” Markus Meckel, the Volksbund’s president until 2016, told me when I met him in Berlin. Meckel, a former Protestant pastor, grew up in East Germany, where the Communist regime refused to build World War II memorials because they were seen as inherently pro-Nazi — an approach Meckel said he didn’t agree with because it sidestepped the hard questions of history. When he came to lead the Volksbund in 2013, however, he said he was startled by the group’s emphasis on commemoration. “There was this attitude there of ‘Our poor boys; look at what happened to them in the battlefield,’” he said. For an organization so concerned with the past, the Volksbund had seemed to sideline the mantra of “never again.”
Meckel decided he would undertake a reform project at the Volksbund. After having a look at the materials being distributed by the group, he found most of them to be inappropriate — for example, commemoration books for dead Wehrmacht soldiers that told about their lives but left out any information on the crimes German soldiers committed, or Christmas cards sent to families who had donated that told “sad stories from the western front.” The fliers the Volksbund distributed at its cemeteries focused mainly on the architecture. “But there was nothing about the war, nothing about why the soldiers were even there,” he said. Meckel ordered the publications to cease until they could be rewritten. Meckel also told me that the Volksbund staff almost exclusively focused on identifying the graves of German soldiers and ignored civilian remains.
Before long, the new president was looking into the Volksbund’s finances. One concern was that with each year, there were fewer war widows still alive to make contributions, and the organization’s income was declining. But equally troubling, Meckel said, was that some of the remaining donors had very questionable backgrounds. In one case, Meckel found that a large contributor was actually an organization that he suspected was founded by SS veterans. The group now sent money through a charitable foundation to obscure the funding’s Nazi ties, Meckel told me. “The question is: Who is sponsoring this?” he said.