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AfD party chairwoman Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla
Photo: Christian Spicker / IMAGO
The office of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been searched by the Berlin public prosecutor.
This emerges from press releases by the party and the public prosecutor's office.
It is about the suspicion of violating the party law and infidelity.
The investigations are directed against the former party leader Jörg Meuthen and the ex-Federal Treasurer Klaus-Günther Fohrmann, as the public prosecutor announced.
From the searches, the investigators apparently hope above all to find evidence of secret agreements between the AfD and anonymously financed election campaign supporters such as the dubious "Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Civil Freedom" or the Swiss PR company Goal AG.
So far, the party has always claimed to have known nothing about the millions in support that its patrons organized in numerous election campaigns.
However, it is questionable whether this claim can be upheld: According to research by SPIEGEL, "Correctiv" and "Frontal 21", large-scale poster campaigns by the dubious AfD supporters' club were sometimes booked with the advertising space marketer Ströer under the same customer number as the party's official campaigns.
According to the public prosecutor's office, searches were carried out at a total of seven locations in Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia in the course of the investigation.
Documents and data carriers were secured, which are now to be evaluated.
As SPIEGEL learned from judicial circles, the search locations also included the addresses of the Ströer company in Cologne and those responsible for the association, which has since been dissolved.
The Ströer company confirmed the searches.
The chairman of the now-defunct "Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Civil Liberties," David Bendels, confirmed when asked that his living and business premises had been searched on Wednesday morning at the behest of the Berlin public prosecutor's office.
In the proceedings he will be led as a witness.
He described the searches as "unjustified and disproportionate".
When asked by SPIEGEL, Meuthen explained that there had been no searches on him so far.
At the same time, he welcomed the investigations now underway by the Berlin public prosecutor's office: He expected that the allegations made against him would turn out to be "unfounded and inaccurate" in the course of the proceedings.
Suspicion of illegal election campaign help from Switzerland
At the beginning of August, the Berlin public prosecutor's office applied to the district court for search warrants.
According to the documents, the investigators expected to find written and digital documents during the campaign, the exclusions of “contacts and agreements between those responsible for the club and representatives of the AfD”, “connections and dependencies” of the club people with the Swiss Goal AG and Services of the association for party branches, officials and candidates of the AfD can give.
The investigators were also looking for documents on the "financing and distribution of the magazines 'Extrablatt' and '
Deutschland Kurier
'
for the AfD election campaigns in the 2016 to 2018 state elections and the 2017 federal election"
.
The investigations led to the suspicion that the association "controlled and carried out advertising measures for the AfD election campaigns with funds from Switzerland".
Thousands of free copies of the newspapers mentioned were used by the AfD as campaign material in the Bavarian state election campaign, among other things.
So far, it has been a mystery who financed the newspapers and the association.
Traces lead to Switzerland and to the controversial real estate billionaire Henning Conle.
»Need for clarification on the annual reports from 2016 to 2018 and on the financing of the 2017 election campaign«
A party spokesman told SPIEGEL on request that the house search in the party office was "mainly about preliminary proceedings by the Berlin public prosecutor's office against the former party leader Jörg Meuthen, with a few points apparently requiring clarification on the reports from 2016 to 2018 and on the financing of the election campaign 2017 there«.
As early as June 2021, the Berlin public prosecutor had applied for the immunity of the then party leader Meuthen as a member of the European Parliament to be lifted.
In February, Parliament voted to withdraw.
The party leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla criticized the unannounced action of the public prosecutor's office - however, the announcement of a search is neither mandatory nor usual.
Weidel spoke of an "extremely disproportionate measure of intimidation", Chrupalla said that "entire hard drives, mailboxes and file folders are copied".
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