Media reports: leaked AfD emails suggest Weidel knew of Swiss donation earlier

The hack and the published mailboxes

The AfD confirmed in September 2026 that an attack on a hosting provider led to parts of a few mailboxes being copied without authorisation. Most of those mailboxes are outdated, and the party said current accounts of its federal organisation were not affected. Unknown people have since published, by their own account, around 421,000 emails from ten mail accounts, and the authenticity of the material has not been fully verified. Around 30,000 of the mails carry a DKIM signature that the recipient's server confirmed at the time. Handelsblatt recalculated more than 16,000 of those signatures itself and found the messages unchanged since sending. The archive covers nine identifiable people, and the mailboxes of the federal treasurer's office are missing entirely.

The 2017 donation and the Bodensee district

In 2018, NDR, WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that the AfD district association at Bodensee had received 132,000 euros from Switzerland. Parties may not accept donations above 500 euros when the donor cannot be identified, and the Berlin-Brandenburg higher administrative court ruled in 2023 that accepting this one was illegal. The party had to pay a penalty of around 396,000 euros to the Bundestag. Weidel was the AfD's top candidate for the Bodensee constituency in the 2017 Bundestag election. Reports by ZDF, Der Standard and Der Spiegel, which evaluated the correspondence, say she appears to have misled the public about the donation. In 2018 Weidel said she only learned of the donations weeks after they arrived, in September 2017.

I was not involved in the day-to-day business of election campaign financing.

What the leaked mails show

According to the reports, a 10 July 2017 mail sent from Weidel's address asked the district treasurer to watch for possible donation receipts, because donations had been announced that would fund her social media campaign. The same mail reportedly asked for the account to be checked twice a week with a short written confirmation of receipts. In August 2017 the district treasurer wrote to the state treasurer that a Swiss donor was supporting Alice with several thousand Swiss francs every week. ZDF reports that the first part of the donation, 8,021.59 euros, arrived four days after Weidel's email, and further payments followed. Tagesschau describes 132,000 euros paid in 18 tranches in summer 2017, allegedly from a Swiss pharmaceutical company.

Authenticity, reactions and open questions

NZZ says the mails it has seen carry no digital signature, so later alterations cannot be ruled out, and that the report does not explain how NDR and WDR checked their authenticity. The AfD said it would not answer questions about whether the mails are authentic, warned of forgeries circulating online, and said using the stolen data amounted to approving a crime. Stefan Brink, the former data protection commissioner of Baden-Württemberg, told Handelsblatt that the party could face considerable fines and that affected people must be informed promptly.

The data leak brings not only personal risks, such as unwanted visitors at one's home, but also obvious risks of fraud and deception.

Handelsblatt also reports on registry data. In a 16 July email, the AfD politician Tschich requested group information under federal registration law for the state election on 20 September 2026, seeking names and addresses of people born between 27 September 2003 and 20 September 2010. At least eight registry offices sent personal data electronically, and the party's state office received about 5,480 records for which the municipalities charged 274.05 euros. Seven of the eight offices sent the data without password protection, and one sent an unencrypted PDF listing birth dates for 594 records. The state data protection commissioner said registry offices may not transmit birth dates in this way.