A German Far-Right Party’s Campaign Tactic: Fake ‘Deportation Tickets’

Leading up to Germany’s 2025 federal election, many people in the country’s southwest opened up their mailboxes to see something startling.

Inside, they found fake tickets for a one-way flight out of Germany on election day, designed to look like real airline boarding passes.

In the field where a passenger’s name would ordinarily appear, the fake tickets read instead: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT.

As the above video reports, the “deportation tickets” were part of an ad campaign by Germany’s far-right, nationalist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. Tens of thousands of the flyers were distributed in mailboxes and at election campaign stands  — sparking accusations that the AfD, known for its polarizing use of rhetoric, was promoting racial hatred and echoing a grim Nazi-era history in which fake one-way tickets to Jerusalem targeting Jewish people were reportedly distributed as propaganda.

“It has been reported that this particular type of ticket was very reminiscent of what the Nazis did with the Jews,” FRONTLINE correspondent Evan Williams says in the video to Marc Bernhard, the AfD official behind the campaign. “This hasn’t come from nowhere in the German context. How do you respond to that?”

“Yeah, well, I’m not familiar with these actions,” Bernhard responds. “To be honest, I don’t know them, nor was I aware of them.”

It was not the first time the AfD had employed rhetoric or tactics accused of mirroring the Nazi era — and the party has been on the ascent in German politics. The Rise of Germany’s New Right, a 90-minute FRONTLINE documentary premiering Nov. 4,  chronicles how far-right leaders in the country have risen to the brink of power for the first time since World War II, with the AfD now the second-biggest party in Germany’s federal parliament. Directed by Williams, who has been reporting on Germany’s far right for years, the film examines how Germany reached this point, and the reasons behind the surge in support for hardline nationalist parties in both Germany and Europe more broadly.

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In the above video, Williams asks Bernhard about the purpose and message of the fake tickets.

“It’s for voters, because it’s part of the voting campaign, so it’s for voters,” Bernhard says. “And it’s supposed to bring one important problem back on the agenda. And it’s very, very strange— I mean, everybody talked about the ticket, but nobody talked about the problem.”

Bernhard goes on to point to high-profile terror attacks in the German cities of Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg, and Mannheim carried out by migrants. The AfD has argued that immigration has led to exploding crime rates, despite the fact that official crime statistics don’t support the claim. That argument is part of the party’s increasing calls for “remigration.” In fact, Bernhard tells Williams the AfD wants to “remigrate” over a million people— some immigrants that German courts have already ordered to be deported, but mostly Syrian refugees.

“We’re talking about 1 to 1.2 million Syrians, who are in Germany. And of course, the war, the civil war is over, so they have to go back,” Bernhard says.

Williams points out that “those people have now formed established lives. They’ve got children in school. They’ve got jobs.”

Bernhard counters, “Most of them don’t have jobs. Most of them are not well integrated. That’s exactly the issue.”

As the video reports, German labor statistics show that over time, most Syrians able to work do get jobs — but Bernhard and others continue to use the issue as a key talking point. The AfD’s messaging has resonated. Though it’s not part of a governing coalition due to a longstanding “firewall” in which Germany’s mainstream parties have vowed not to work with far-right parties to govern, the AfD won almost 21 percent of the vote in Germany’s 2025 federal election and nearly doubled its number of seats in parliament. Those gains are part of a larger trend of rising support for nationalist, anti-immigrant parties across Europe that’s explored in The Rise of Germany’s New Right.

In the video, Williams asks Bernhard about the impact of the fake deportation tickets on people who received them.

“Let’s say a migrant family who may be paying their taxes and working and been here for many, many years, receives that in the mail. It’s a one-way ‘remigration’ ticket, for illegal migrants. That’s a very scary thing to get,” Williams says.

Bernhard says otherwise.

“Yeah, it clearly says ‘illegal migrant,’” he tells Williams. “So everybody who is here legally has nothing to fear.”