On Tuesday night in Saxony, the Federal Prosecutor General had a Chinese-born German employee of the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, arrested in Saxony.
The reason was the suspicion of secret service agent activity in a particularly serious case, which carries a prison sentence of up to ten years. Compared to American standards, this is still quite lenient, but it was handled similarly in the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War.
Jian G. is said to have passed on information about negotiations and decisions from the European Parliament to a Chinese secret service. Krah is a member of parliament there and stated in 2023:
25 percent of the Chinese car market is in the hands of German automobile companies. If we compare the economic growth rates in Asia, especially in China, with those we have in Germany and Europe, then the gap is widening rather than narrowing. So when we talk about politics, there is something to be said for remaining realistic and also taking your own strengths and potential into account. And that doesn’t allow us to fully believe that if we decouple, then we will only harm others, but above all we will harm ourselves again, and that at a time when we are already suffering from deindustrialization and economic stagnation. In Germany there is even a recession.
Jian G. is also said to have spied on Chinese opposition members in Germany. The German investigators assume that Jian G. had been working for a Chinese secret service for a long time. It often happens that the British and Americans collect information and then hand it over to the German authorities. The NSA can put people in Germany on the surveillance list. In theory, this also works for people like Krah who run counter to U.S. security interests. Krah explained:
“At the moment there is no alternative to NATO, but we would like it to no longer be without alternative.”
According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, findings by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution led to his arrest. The authority has had close ties to the British and Americans since the occupation phase after the Second World War.
Jian G. is now to be brought before an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice. Jian G.’s defense attorney and Maximilian Krah could not initially be reached for a current statement.
An AfD press spokesman cautiously announced:
The reports about the arrest of one of Mr. Krah’s employees on suspicion of espionage are very disturbing. Since we currently have no further information about the case, we have to wait for further investigations by the Federal Prosecutor General.
In the past, it was often seen that those arrested assumed that it was all a smear campaign by the Americans. If substantial evidence is presented, the party would have to distance itself from Krah as much as possible.
According to SPIEGEL research, Jian G. used to work for the branch of a Chinese solar company in Dresden and an LED trading company. Krah even represented him as a lawyer.
According to SPIEGEL research, Jian G. offered trips to China to several young politicians from the AfD youth organization last year. It is standard behavior to recruit people on such trips.
In November 2019, Krah traveled to Beijing and other cities and visited a research center run by the telecommunications company Huawei.
Shortly after the trip, Krah complained to members of the AfD parliamentary group about their tough stance towards Huawei. In an interview with the magazine “First!” Krah later complained that communist China was the West’s new “favorite enemy.”
For Krah, German jobs are more important “than any NGO in Hong Kong.” But an NGO is not a superpower that can conquer us.
He traveled to China in the early 2000s. After studying law and completing his doctorate in Dresden, he completed an international management degree, spending periods abroad in Hong Kong and Shanghai. This was still common practice for many business people back then.
“I have friends in China,” he wrote on Facebook in October 2018. His lecture took place under the auspices of the “Silk Road Think Tank Association” (SRTA), which is supposed to establish contacts abroad on behalf of the “International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” (IDCPC).
The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution now describes the IDCPC as part of the Chinese secret service apparatus. A security notice that the Federal Office sent to all German politicians and administration in July 2023 says:
“When interacting with IDCPC members, avoid all actions that could be considered as offenses within the meaning of Section 99 of the Criminal Code.”
Krah congratulated the founding of the communist People’s Republic via video message. He traveled repeatedly to China. He couldn’t have been completely stupid. It is intended to give the impression that the AfD can appear on the international stage and has powerful friends. Are we Germans ultimately the new Uyghurs?
His father Peter Krah is a CDU member and was a consultant in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior after 1990. Maximilian studied jointly by the London Business School and the Columbia Business School (New York).
For years, Krah had carried out asset transactions worth millions for the Pius Brotherhood. It is a Catholic association that appears to be clearly influenced by classic conspiracy literature.
Pius leader Lefebvre wrote to Pope John Paul II on August 31, 1985 that the enemies of the church were Jews, communists and freemasons. The Belgian website Joods Actueel quoted a passage from the US website of the Society of St. Pius X that said “international Jewry” wanted to destroy the Christian-Catholic order:
“The money, the media and international politics are largely in the hands of the Jews.”
Richard Williamson, who has since been excluded from the brotherhood, represented the corresponding views in speeches and sermons. He has repeatedly described the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic source of information. Krah was also active as a lawyer in the Richard Williamson affair. Krah joined the CDU, then the AfD in 2016.
Krah has been attracting attention for years with particularly China-friendly positions. There were two congratulatory videos on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and the 70th anniversary of the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
“As you celebrate 70 years of the Tibet Autonomous Region, I think you have every reason to be proud of what you have achieved,”
said Krah there. Then there is a network of Chinese relationships in Krah’s environment in his hometown of Dresden: Krah’s confidant Torsten Voß sits on the board of an association “Neue Seidenstraße e.V.”, in whose proximity a Brussels MP employee of Krah’s ethnic origin also moved. In 2019, both tried to organize a town partnership and investments from China for Pirna in Saxony.
In November 2022, the “Global Times” published a long interview with Krah.
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel speaks Mandarin, has worked and researched in China for years and originally received her doctorate with a thesis on improving the Chinese pension system. She wrote this work under Peter Oberender, who had been a guest scholar at the powerful American Brookings Institution. The money for Brookings came from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The Brookings President from 2002 to 2017 was Strobe Talbott (Rhodes Scholar Oxford, Yale), a close confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Oberender was also one of the 68 main cartoonists of the 2013 election alternative, a forerunner of the AfD.
Weidel received funding from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for her academic work on China. For her research stay in China, she received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Her Bundestag profile confirms that she spent years in China. It was said to have been six years in total.
After completing her studies, Alice Weidel looked after start-ups for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, among other places, and she also worked for the Bank of China. In March 2013, Weidel moderated the congress “China – From the Workbench to a World Power?” as a former KAS scholarship holder in Hamburg.
At the AfD party conference in Cologne’s Maritim Hotel, she told the press that Germany could learn a lot in the Middle Kingdom. In this very impulsive country, she explained, “everyone wants to move forward, everyone works there, there is an enormous entrepreneurial spirit.” After a short pause, Weidel added: “And one more thing: the Chinese attach great importance to border security.”
In addition to the extremely exploitative Laogai system for forced labor, there are now also internment camps for minorities such as Uighurs.
It is not surprising that China has increasingly combined nationalism and socialism and marketed itself accordingly with a history of several thousand years and a blood and soil ethos.
The English-language Beijing regime newspaper “Global Times” reported in March that the Chinese Foreign Ministry praised Weidel’s statement that the West had made a “historic mistake.”
to promote NATO’s eastern expansion. Russia itself contractually agreed to NATO’s eastward expansion in 1997.
Peter Felser
Felser completed a degree in education at the University of the Federal Armed Forces and at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. In 2001, together with the new right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek, Felser published a book with reports on the Bundeswehr’s war mission in Bosnia. Kubitschek was stationed in Sarajevo as a reserve lieutenant and was used as a platoon leader of the Tactical OpInfo Platoon, which means psychological warfare.
Felser was active in various right-wing media. Today Peter Felser is deputy chairman of the German-Chinese parliamentary group for the AfD.
