Your report that German historians found similarities between the leader of the AfD’s opinion piece and a speech given by Hitler in 1933 is chilling (German party leader ‘echoed Hitler’ in newspaper opinion piece, 11 October). But what about the words used by Theresa May in a speech that followed the Brexit referendum: “Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street ... but if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.”
Compare with Alexander Gauland, leader, AfD, 2018: “The globalised class ... [live] ... almost exclusively in big cities, speak fluent English, and when they move from Berlin to London or Singapore for jobs, they find similar flats, houses, restaurants, shops and private schools”.
And Adolf Hitler in 1933: “[the] clique ... people who are at home both nowhere and everywhere, who do not have anywhere a soil on which they have grown up, but who live in Berlin today, in Brussels tomorrow, Paris the day after that, and then again in Prague or Vienna or London, and who feel at home everywhere”.
Jonathan Davis
Haute Savoie, France
• According to your article, Hitler referred to the international clique (Jews) as being both home “nowhere and everywhere”. The words resonated. After all, we remainers were told in no uncertain terms in 2016 that we were citizens of the world and therefore “citizens of nowhere”. I couldn’t help wondering why this piece was in the World section of the paper and not under National.
Andy Hollis
Todmorden, West Yorkshire
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