Jewish leaders have reacted with horror after a German far-right leader who has been compared to Adolf Hitler captained the nationalist AfD party into second place in a state election last night.

Björn Höcke’s party surged to 23 per cent of the vote in Thuringia, beating Angela Merkel’s CDU into third place.

Mr Höcke, who has criticised Berlin’s Holocaust memorial and questioned whether Hitler was ‘entirely evil’, stormed out of a TV interview during the campaign after his rhetoric was compared to that of the Nazi dictator.

Click to expand...

Today a series of Jewish community leaders voiced alarm over the results.

Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused the AfD of using ‘cheap racist propaganda’.

‘Anyone who voted for the AfD on Sunday shares responsibility for the gradual undermining of the foundations of our democracy,’ he said.

The AfD’s success could no longer be dismissed as a ‘protest vote’, because there was no denying the hard-right ideology of the party’s Thuringia branch, he said.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who heads Munich’s Jewish community, said that ‘something fundamental has gone off the rails in our political system’.

Click to expand...

AfD supporters had 'backed a party that has for years prepared the ground for exclusion and violence of the far-right,' she warned.

Christoph Heubner, deputy president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents survivors of the Nazi death camp, also voiced fears over the result.

'For survivors of German concentration camps, this strong increase in votes for the AfD is a new terrifying sign that raises fear of a further consolidation of right-wing extremist trends and attitudes in Germany,' he said.

Thuringia is in the former East Germany where far-right extremism has flourished in recent years and where the far left is also strong.

Many East Germans still feel disadvantaged nearly 30 years since the Berlin Wall came down and the West's traditional parties never had deep roots there.

Founded in 2013, the anti-immigrant AfD has profited from anger over Angela Merkel's refugee policies and entered the German national parliament for the first time in 2017.

The party's strong result last night came just weeks after an anti-Semitic attack in Halle - also in the East - in which two people were shot dead near a synagogue.

After the attack, Germany's anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein warned that the AfD had trafficked in incendiary anti-Jewish sentiment.

Click to expand...

Mr Höcke is a particularly divisive character and AfD party bosses had been urged to cut him loose before Sunday's election.

The 47-year-old has previously described the Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin as a 'monument of shame'.

He has also called for a '180-degree shift' in the way Germany handles remembrance of its past.

During the campaign he stormed out of an interview after a TV presenter compared his rhetoric to Hitler's.

As part of the programme, several AfD politicians were asked to guess whether a particular quote had come from Hitler or Höcke - and some guessed wrongly.

The result also deals a major blow to the CDU and to party chair Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is hoping to succeed Angela Merkel in the top job

Click to expand...