August von Finck Jr.’s political funding was far less successful than his business investments. Then an opportunity arose that could benefit both areas of interest. In early 2013, the anti-euro AfD party was founded. Days after its first party convention, a think tank affiliated with chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU speculated in a memo that von Finck Jr. would become a major donor to AfD. To this day, there is no direct proof that their prediction came true, but the signs are there.
There are no limits on donations to political parties in Germany. But anonymous individuals and companies can donate only up to ten thousand euros (about $12,000) at a time to a political party. Any amount above that, and the party has to disclose annually the identity of the donor. In cases when more than fifty thousand euros (about $60,000) are given in a single contribution, the donation must be published immediately by the national parliament’s presidium, along with the donor’s name. It is easy to deduce, for example, that the Quandt heirs in control of BMW have donated millions of euros, mostly to the CDU, since at least 2002. But von Finck Jr., on the other hand, used more secretive methods to finance political parties at a sizable scale — while still trying to maintain anonymity.
Even before its failed first bid in a national election, in September 2013, the AfD was next to broke. It had precious few paying members or donors. At the time, an AfD spokeswoman, who financed some of its events and expenses, was also managing Degussa’s publicity. Der Spiegel followed the money trail and later reported that a portion of those bills seem to have been paid by von Finck Jr. via his trusted right-hand man: Ernst Knut Stahl. This, despite the fact that it would be illegal in Germany to act as a conduit to finance a political party. To raise more funds, the AfD also opened an online gold store while drumming up fears that the euro currency was collapsing. Still hot on von Finck Jr.’s trail, Der Spiegel discovered that Degussa was one of two producers of the store’s gold products.
The AfD’s online store sold two million euros’ worth of gold products in both 2014 and 2015, boosting Degussa’s sales. Meanwhile, the AfD reaped state subsidies; German political parties receive government financing if they manage to generate external funding from donations, membership fees, or other income. But in December 2015, an amendment to Germany’s law concerning political parties meant that the AfD’s online gold shop no longer sufficed to qualify for subsidies. German party law wasn’t the only shakeup in the works. The AfD’s own political platform was changing too. During Europe’s 2015 migrant crisis, the AfD rebranded itself: no longer an anti-euro party, it became an anti-immigrant party, stoking and exploiting fears that Merkel’s decision to accept more than a million refugees from predominantly Muslim countries would change Germany’s cultural identity.
In February 2016, two months after the AfD’s state subsidies were curtailed, the party started receiving a different kind of campaign help, seemingly out of nowhere. Thousands of billboards and posters began to pop up across two German states, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate; each was in the middle of an election cycle. A free newspaper was delivered to some two million households. The message was always the same: vote AfD. But the campaign material hadn’t come from the AfD itself. It was paid for by a mysterious organization, the Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Citizen Freedoms, a nonprofit similar to an American-style “dark money” interest group. The association could receive and spend unlimited amounts of money, and it wasn’t required by law to disclose its donors, so long as it didn’t directly collaborate with the political party or candidate it supported. If evidence ever emerged of any collaboration, the association’s campaigns would count as illegal donations. The AfD would get hit with massive fines, and the association’s donors would be outed. Over 2016 and 2017, this association staged election campaigns in support of the AfD across Germany. Meanwhile, the AfD denied any cooperation with the nonprofit.
The story got murkier. In September 2016, Der Spiegel revealed that the association’s campaigns were being designed by Goal, a Swiss-based political PR firm. The association’s letterbox company in Stuttgart had a forwarding address: it happened to be Goal’s address. Goal’s owner is Alexander Segert, a German campaign guru for the leading right-wing parties. He has designed election campaigns for Switzerland’s governing SVP, Austria’s FPÖ, and some of the AfD’s most prominent candidates, and his campaigns are notorious for their anti-immigrant messages and imagery. Goal is based at Segert’s modern villa, protected with heavy security, in the bucolic village of Andelfingen, near the German border. His home office happens to be a mere twenty-minute drive west of von Finck Jr.’s Swiss castle in Weinfelden.
The tangled web of coincidences ran deeper. Since September 2016, the association has been headed by David Bendels, who has been seen in public with Segert on occasion. In July 2017, Bendels also became editor in chief of Deutschland-Kurier, a newly founded newspaper that was initially published by the association and still serves as a mouthpiece for the AfD. Adding another layer to the conspiracy, Der Spiegel revealed that Ernst Knut Stahl, von Finck Jr.’s right-hand man, was involved with founding the Kurier. Stahl had tried to recruit a publisher during a May 2017 lunch in Munich. “There’s danger ahead,” von Finck Jr.’s lieutenant said in the meeting. “There’s a street in New York with lots of investment bankers, lawyers and so forth. Coincidentally, they are all Jews, but that’s not relevant here. They want to push Germany into ruin. They control everything.”
In September 2017, the AfD emerged as the major winner in Germany’s national elections. It went from controlling zero parliament seats to being Germany’s third-largest party. In no time at all, the AfD gained representation in all of the country’s sixteen state parliaments. The association’s countrywide campaigns had raised the national profile of the increasingly far-right party; meanwhile its big-money donors remain shrouded. Bendels has claimed that the association relied on grassroots donors but has never provided proof of it. According to an estimate by Germany’s LobbyControl, the association has so far spent more than ten million euros ($12 million) in electoral campaign support for the AfD.
Bendels and the AfD continued to deny any cooperation. But in 2018, the AfD became mired in multiple scandals related to donations. Two involved Segert’s Goal, which acted as a straw man to finance election campaigns for two prominent AfD politicians. In April 2019, the AfD was fined more than 400,000 euros ($500,000) for the affair. Days later, the public prosecutor’s office in Berlin announced it was investigating the AfD’s national treasurer because of the association’s Goal-designed election campaigns in support of the political party. If prosecutors can prove that the association and the AfD cooperated, it would be Germany’s largest political-donation scandal since the Flick affair. At the time of writing, in December 2021, the investigation is still ongoing. The AfD has so far been fined almost a million euros (some $1.2 million) for its various donation scandals.
Meanwhile, the AfD is becoming ever more radical. The party’s politicians are attacking the country’s culture of remembrance and its reckoning with the Nazi past. As the AfD’s then co-leader Alexander Gauland so delicately put it in a 2018 speech: “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history.” And he represents the party’s moderate faction.
The AfD’s extremist wing publicly embraces anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and historical revisionism, including the downplaying of Nazi crimes and denigration of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, threats and attacks against immigrants, Jews, and politicians are rising in Germany. Most prominently, the February 2020 shooting spree in Hanau, where a gunman murdered nine people, all of them immigrants or Germans from immigrant families, plus his mother. Before that was the October 2019 synagogue shooting in Halle, where an attacker killed two bystanders. And in June 2019, a local politician in Hessen who supported immigration was assassinated at home by a gunman. These attacks were all carried out by far-right extremists; some had ties to neo-Nazi groups.
That same June, von Finck Jr. was spotted sitting next to Bavaria’s prime minister, Markus Söder, at a festive dinner in Munich. There were ties between the men. Söder’s former right-hand man had recently joined Gustl’s family office. Now they were attending the seventieth-birthday party of a well-known lawyer and noted Euroskeptic politician. Gustl had paid the attorney more than eleven million euros (about $12.5 million) in legal “consulting fees” while the lawyer was serving in the German parliament. But though the former parliamentarian’s career was winding down, Söder’s was just now rising. In the spring of 2021, Söder bowed out of a leadership contest to succeed Angela Merkel as the Christian conservatives’ national candidate for German chancellor. But Söder isn’t going anywhere. In late November 2021, August von Finck Jr. died at age ninety-one in London.