HDJ — Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend, roughly “Loyal to the homeland German youth” — was banned by the German government in 2009. Germany’s Federal Administrative Court upheld the ban in 2010; the court decision stated that the organization was linked to National Socialism, antisemitic ideas, and hostility toward the free democratic order.
Under AfD rules, former HDJ members are explicitly listed among those barred from the party. Siegmund did not distance himself from these people and said: “These are outstanding people. They have an impeccable biography. I am not interested in what happened 20 or 25 years ago”.
Patrick Harr, 44, is now AfD spokesman in Saxony-Anhalt and executive director of the party faction in the state parliament. Inside the party, he is seen as a possible head of the State Chancellery if AfD comes to power, and HDJ congress minutes show that on October 3, 2002, he was unanimously elected to lead the organization’s “supply department”. The following year, participants were offered trips to territories “cut off from the Reich”.
Laurens Notdurft now works as chief legal counsel for the AfD faction and is a member of the party arbitration court. In HDJ documents, he appears as deputy federal leader of the organization in 1999, and an internal report by the Brandenburg state domestic intelligence service from 2002 described him as an activist of the National Democratic Party of Germany, which the authorities consider far-right. In 2024, Notdurft was elected mayor of the Rosslau district, and AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla called his past a “youthful prank”; Notdurft himself replied: “I have nothing to reproach myself for”.
Eric Kaden has worked since 2022 as an AfD adviser on education, culture, and science. In 2005, he published an essay on Kurt Eggers in the HDJ magazine, and an internal document of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2008 identified him as the owner of an HDJ post office box. Kaden did not respond to a request for comment through the AfD press office in Saxony-Anhalt.
Felix W., Notdurft’s brother, who remained anonymous as a private individual, also took part in the working group that prepared the party program in 2025. According to HDJ documents, he was a member of the organization from 1999 to 2004 and in April 2003 headed the equipment and camp technology section, and now he is responsible in the AfD faction in Saxony-Anhalt for federal and European affairs, media, and culture. This program project proposes keeping children of asylum seekers and refugees in “special classes”, explaining to them that their stay in Germany is temporary, and also claims that educating children with disabilities “paralyzes the progress of learning”, Germany’s Nazi past is “the perpetuation of neurosis”, and homosexuality is a “sexual deviation and non-reproductive way of life”.
Sources
