ZDF traces the rise of the AfD. The report shows that public broadcasters also produce good journalism.

When German public broadcaster announces a program about the 2015 migration crisis and the AfD, bad feelings are hard to avoid. Will the program be accompanied by ominous music from the very first minute?, one wonders. Or will Anja Reschke and Georg Restle explain to the audience that the dark side of migration, such as increasing knife crime and Islamism, are merely the figments of racists' imaginations?

The ZDF documentary "AfD – Rise in the Refugee Crisis," broadcast Tuesday evening, exposes these concerns as prejudice. While the ominous music is present, the ZDF journalists refrain from moralizing. Instead, they trace the rise of the AfD by letting its protagonists speak.

That doesn't make them any more sympathetic. For example, when AfD MP Beatrix von Storch says with a dismissive wave of her hand that Germans simply want "people to leave. And quickly." Von Storch doesn't say how many foreigners she thinks should leave. But it's likely to be a lot. Von Storch is one of the radicals who took control of the AfD starting in 2015.

The uncontrolled wave of migration, as the ZDF report clearly shows, was the salvation of the then liberal-conservative party, which had actually been founded in protest against Angela Merkel's euro policy. Before the refugee crisis, it was polling at 3 to 4 percent. Former AfD politician Steffen Königer puts it this way in the program: "The phrase 'We can do it!' was the second birthing aid for the AfD."

At first, Angela Merkel was by no means the "We can do it" optimist who dismissed all objections to open borders as dire predictions from dark Germany. Rather, as recently as July 2015, left-wing media outlets like "Stern" portrayed her as an unsympathetic "ice queen." This was partly because she had explained to a young migrant on camera that Germany couldn't take in everyone.

Merkel likely only changed her mind under pressure from the media, which went into a "refugees welcome" frenzy that even the "Bild" newspaper couldn't escape. The AfD, on the other hand, was initially led by moderate economics professor Bernd Lucke in the summer of 2015. In the ZDF report, he can be seen being booed at the AfD party conference in Essen for warning against the exclusion of all Muslims.

Former AfD official André Poggenburg, who was considered too radical even for the AfD, reminisces with relish in front of the ZDF camera about how the Luckes in the party were told: "You eco-professors, get lost!" ZDF attributes the success of the radicalized AfD primarily to New Year's Eve in Cologne, which shattered many dreams of a perfect multicultural world. That night, hundreds of women were groped and harassed, some even raped. The suspects were mostly North African.

Unlike in 2016, when many media outlets and politicians downplayed the attacks or denounced any references to the perpetrators' origins as racism, ZDF now openly acknowledges these facts. However, the program lacks any reference to other factors that may have contributed to the AfD's rise. Such as the Islamist terrorist attack on Breitscheidplatz or the widespread unwillingness of many politicians to address migration-related crime or violence in schools.

The AfD's turn to Putinism is completely ignored, but it is likely to be important for its electoral success, especially in eastern Germany. The program remains worth watching, even though it offers more in-depth analyses of the AfD's rise.