New Delhi: Hundreds of thousands of emails stolen from Germany’s far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have been leaked. The hackers have not been identified yet. The party confirmed the breach on 19 October, and has said that a hosting provider used by a small number of members was targeted.
More than 421,000 emails linked to Germany’s AfD party, one of the country’s most polarising political forces, have been released. According to a report by DW, the emails totaled around 281 gigabytes and included private messages attributed to co-leader Alice Weidel and other senior figures.
Personal documents such as ID photos, bank statements, membership lists, and internal correspondence were also released.
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Leaked info shows Nazi-era ideology
The AfD, a far-Right, anti-immigration party that has topped national opinion polls in recent months (around 28 per cent in some surveys) and scored strong results in state elections, confirmed a cyberattack took place in September 2026.
A party spokesperson told Reuters that hackers targeted a hosting service provider used by the party and copied data from a small number of email accounts. AfD said most of them had not been used for years.
Current email accounts belonging to the federal party organisation were not affected, the party stated.
“The recent online publication of what is presumably a portion of this data is currently being investigated,” the AfD spokesperson told Reuters. “A preliminary assessment can only be provided once this investigation has been concluded.”
They did not confirm the amount of data stolen.
Reuters cites reports from Bild, a German newspaper, that indicate the leaked material spans roughly 10 mailbox and covers a period from about 2014 into September 2026.
Some of the published material, according to early reviews by German media, includes AI-generated summaries of messages that allegedly contain references to racism, antisemitism, Nazi-era ideology, internal party disputes, and exclusion proceedings.
The authenticity of the full dataset has not been independently verified in full, though some journalists who sampled portions found matching past press inquiries and other corroborating details.
The anonymous hackers, who made the data available via a website (with summaries) and BitTorrent, said their goal was to expose the AfD’s “degeneracy and hypocrisy.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)