Is Germany the European Hotspot for Far-Right Extremists?
According to a recent report by leading peace research institutes, the country has the highest number of extreme right-wing violence cases in Europe
On 16 June, a German court in Frankfurt opened the trial of two alleged neo-Nazis suspected of murdering the local politician Walter Lübcke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic party. A pro-refugee advocate, the former president of the Kassel district, in Hesse, had been on the receiving end of threats from right-wing extremists for years.
Lübcke’s killing, however, is just one of many recent high-profile cases of far-right violence in Germany. In October 2015, for instance, a man stabbed the Mayor of Cologne in the neck. Henriette Reker, another supporter of Germany’s refugee policies, survived the attack.
There are many other lesser-publicized cases, though. According to The Peace Report 2020, authored by four leading German peace research institutes, Germany has the highest number of extreme right-wing violence cases in Europe, with at least 16 victims between January 2016 and December 2019. Add to this number the racially motivated murders of nine people in Hanau by an extremist (who also killed his mother and committed suicide) in February 2020.
Between January and August 2019, the German police registered 12,493 offenses with “a political right-wing motivated background”, including 542 acts of violence.
In 2016 alone, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) recorded 988 attacks on asylum accommodations. According to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, 24,000 right-wing extremists live in the country. From these, 12,700 are “oriented towards violence”.
To better understand Germany’s right-wing extremists and how the authorities can deal with them, I spoke with three German experts: Julian Junk is the Head of the Berlin Office of the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (HSFK) and a co-author of the Peace Report 2020; Hans-Jakob Schindler is a senior director at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) who also worked at UN, and for the German government monitoring ISIS, al-Qaeda and Taliban; and Fabian Virchow is the director of the Research Unit on Right-Wing Extremism at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf.
Parts of these interviews have been edited for clarity.
According to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, 12,700 right-wing extremists living in the country are “oriented towards violence”. Is there an official profile of these individuals?
Julian Junk: There is hardly one or a few clear profiles. Increasingly, far-right extremists recruit from diverse backgrounds across classes, genders, etc. Thus, monitoring is challenging. Geographically, we have some hotspots with more organized groups. Perceived or actual economic or social marginalization plays a role. However, the factors are diverse and explanations are multi-causal.
Hans-Jakob Schindler: There is no profile for right-wing extremists in Germany. You won’t have right-wing extremists with a non-European background, though. What I find very interesting is that we have a network of these groups across Europe that, despite being ultranationalists, do not believe in the old nationalistic interests we had in Europe 5o years ago. So it’s not like the French [extremists] don’t talk to their German counterparts, they support and network with each other. They help each other financially, with ideas and resources, and attend each other’s events. We are not looking at a German right-wing cohort, versus an Austrian, versus a French, versus a Finish. We’re looking at a European network that seems to go pretty evenly all over Europe. In Germany, they are predominantly male, and, obviously, of German descent.
Fabian Virchow: As far as I know, this number is from people in organized networks, being active and connected to more organized political structures. We have many more if we just look at right-wing attitudes. So many more. We have more when we look at all the anti-Muslim groups and movements, many of which are very much interlinked to what the secret services call right-wing extremists.
Often, the image associated with a German right-wing extremist is that of a neo-Nazi. Is this still the case?
Julian Junk: It depends on how you define neo-Nazi, but the image is much broader than the narrow picture one has in mind about German far-right extremists. The Identitarian Movement, for instance, has very different strategies of presenting themselves than those of the typical neo-Nazi stereotype. They use pop culture elements skillfully.
Hans-Jakob Schindler: It’s no longer the typical neo-Nazi profile from 20 years ago. You know, unemployed and relatively young males. It’s now a more diverse crowd. There’s a group now monitored by the German intelligence service: the Identitarian Movement. This is a new generation of right-wing guys who understood that the old image of the biker gang, bald tattooed neo-Nazis with baseball bats, no longer gets enough public support. They’ve rebranded into a very slick, well-spoken, educated propaganda machinery. The ideas are the same, they just changed words. Where it was once racism, it’s now a cultural issue. They want a homogeneous culture rather than a homogeneous nation-state. They tweaked a bit of the wording, cleaned up their looks, and the way they act. They have jobs, are very young, look good, are well-groomed. They wear suits and ties and sell a more media-savvy image. There’s still a larger following in former East Germany than in former West Germany, although that difference is slowly eroding.
Fabian Virchow: The focus of the groups, but also individuals, is much more diverse than in the 1990s. We have the classic neo-Nazi who is not necessarily a skinhead type, but someone who is an admirer of Rudolf Hess or Adolf Hitler, or something like that. We can have groups that see themselves as the protectors of the German identity and the German lifestyle, whatever that is. And then we have the anti-Muslim groups. Often, there are no obvious distinctions between these groups anymore. For example, if you look at Pegida’s (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) demonstrations in Dresden, there is also a huge mix of right-wing hooligans showing up. There is a broad range of types of individuals and groups. Although what they share is the idea that the growing number of refugees coming into the country and large-scale migration are about to destroy the German people.
Why are these groups coming out of the closet? Is it related to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) recent electoral success?
Hans-Jakob Schindler: They have very open marches now. This is no longer their little secret in their tiny gathering place. It’s in the center of the town.
Julian Junk: This is the chicken and the egg problem. I don’t know what reinforces what. Surely, there is now a voice in the parliament that at least takes much more nationalistic, sometimes extremist, positions in the heart of Germany’s political debate. There is more fertile ground and, thus, some shifts in what seems to be acceptable. Conspiracy theories and online dynamics contribute to that.
How can the government monitor suspicious groups? What are the challenges of doing so?
Julian Junk: There are different avenues of monitoring. Some are more promising than others, as we discovered in our research: for instance, there is a desire to monitor discourses and profiles on social media platforms automatically, but platforms keep shifting, and so do language. And the various audiovisual formats make tracking harder. It’s more promising to focus on a more qualitative, context-specific human monitoring. Also, there are many local and diverse structures. Most of those categorized by the government as right-wing extremists don’t belong to some extensive structures. This means one needs a presence and knowledge on the local level too.
There are also some structural challenges: Germany has a deeply federal system concerning internal security, which means the prime reference points are the states, the Bundesländer. Despite increasing coordination and exchange mechanisms, they still have different methods and categories of observing, monitoring, and scanning depending on the government, on bureaucratic cultures and traditions. With Islamic extremism, you have a clear category of when something belongs to a terrorist group. With right-wing extremism, often the police are unsure whether to classify a case as politically motivated. So, we have a gray zone or a dark number that is not being reported as expected. The same plurality is true for the civil society based prevention landscape. This is a strength of the German system: its plurality of actors and approaches. There is not just one monitoring or prevention strategy.
Hans-Jakob Schindler: First, it’s a question of scale. 12,000 is quite a scary number. Question two: differently of Islamist networks, we still don’t see any kind of hierarchical/organizational structure with right-wing extremist groups. There are all kinds of separate groups that know each other but are not connected in an organized manner. You have The Reichsbürger, a group that doesn’t accept the legitimacy of the German state as founded in 1949. Then you have the Identitarian Movement, the Pegida, and the AfD. There are movements not following a central command and acting independently of each other. Germany has legal barriers preventing the monitoring of political movements because, historically, the country had the fascist way of suppressing political opinion, and then East Germany faced the communist way of suppressing political opinion. Powerful guardians make sure that the state machinery will not monitor movements just because a government dislikes it. There is a process and you need to prove to a judge why a certain movement is a danger to the Constitution.
There are two kinds of monitoring. The internal intelligence monitors, documents, and analyzes the movements. This means you have court orders, you can tap telephones, infiltrate groups, monitor mail, etc. But that’s just the monitoring and analysis. If then the intelligence realizes a serious crime is likely to happen — e.g. theft, murder, or a terrorist attack preparation -, it will handover the work to the Federal Police. For historical reasons, the intelligence services and the police are independent of each other in Germany. Then the police will take over the monitoring.
Fabian Virchow: One point is the numbers. You can monitor or try to monitor a scene, but you can’t monitor every individual and observe if some are radicalizing. That’s a monumental task. Second, some of them use encrypted WhatsApp groups to organize or to even plan violent attacks. You must know who to monitor and which WhatsApp groups to infiltrate to get detailed information about their plans. The security services still underestimate the power of these groups. Sometimes, it’s not the police or the Secret Service, but journalists or NGOs, that reveal information about what these groups are doing.
The focus of the security services and the police had always been on the more traditional form of right-wing or extreme right-wing organizations. But over the last few years, we also have cases involving average civilians. For instance, I remember a case from a town near Hamburg where a father of two set fire to a building that would be a shelter for refugees near his home. And he had nothing to do with the organized extreme-right. He turned to this kind of action after media coverage that refugees are dangerous, etc. This man was not on the fringe of society, he was in the very middle of it.
What’s the potential of harm of unorganized, smaller groups? Should we worry about them?
Julian Junk: Yes, definitely. Many violent acts are not as prominently covered as the Lübcke case. Many local politicians are being pressured or receiving threats for years now. We have stories about that on the local level, but they are not as prominently and continuously covered. There continue to be violent attacks against refugees and refugee housing, which are reported only occasionally. However, we need to have those cases always in the limelight. There is now more attention to right-wing extremism after Lübcke, Halle, and Hanau.
While we do not witness a stark increase in the numbers of these groups, they are increasingly visible in the public light. We have had open demonstrations, protests, and marches with symbols associated with right-wing groups and neo-Nazis unmistakenly displayed in public. There seems to be a tendency for them to feel emboldened enough to display their positions to the public. This is what I consider a major challenge.
Hans-Jakob Schindler: Fairly. In the public perception, a large scale terror attack with many victims sticks on people’s minds. What does not have the same impact on people’s perception is the continuous violence that emanates from those groups. At least so far, they are not looking for mass casualty attacks of the likes of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. However, there is a continuing level of violence from these groups against foreigners, migrants, journalists.
Fabian Virchow: I think it’s huge. The authorities detected small groups that had been preparing for violence, like stockpiling weapons, recently. In most cases, the police intervened before they could act. And then we had some cases like the guy who attacked the now major of Cologne. Or cases involving neo-nazis who hadn’t been as active as they in the past, so the security services didn’t monitor/observe them any longer. And now in this political situation, they are coming back and turning to deadly violent action. So that’s dangerous.
Would you say that Germany is failing in dealing with right-wing extremists?
Julian Junk: The last two widely covered and horrific attacks were not on prominent politicians but German citizens from minorities (in Halle and Hanau). We now have a lot of attention from politics, the media, the civil society, and research on countering right-wing extremisms. For the moment, I am optimistic, but one needs to sustain this attention. Not long ago, everyone was talking, researching, and acting to counter Islamist extremism. However, the right-wing extremism problem was always there and, probably, it has always been more challenging for our society and our institutions. I think the biggest wake-up call was the National Socialists Underground and the trial of their nine murders [of Germans with an immigrant background and a police officer]. But I would still say we need much more constant funding in this area for prevention work and research.
Hans-Jakob Schindler: It’s very difficult to prevent someone from going out and just randomly beating up a foreigner because there’s no planning involved. There’s no communication involved. Yes, these guys are violent, but unless they commit a crime, it’s hard to bring any court action to them. So how do you prevent a guy who one day, inspired by hateful propaganda from social media — and my organization frequently highlights the connection between these materials being openly accessible in mass platforms and people being motivated to take up violence — and then decide on Saturday morning that it’s now time to kill a man? In a free society, you cannot investigate or arrest individuals just because of what they read on the internet. There needs to be concrete and active preparation of a crime for the police to act.
ISIS and Al-Qaeda always had this urge to tell people they did it and why they did it. With right-wing extremists, it’s more subdued. They instigate violence but never take responsibility for that. A documentary on German television showed politicians who received death threats via songs of right-wing hardcore groups. The songs were about killing a particular politician and those songs now play at concerts, on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. And that is a problem, because someone may feel encouraged to kill the politician by that song. But would then a right-wing organization say they did this? That is very unusual. Interestingly, as long as they were operating, the National Socialist Underground made videos saying they did it. That was the only right-wing group that has done that for quite a long time.
Fabian Virchow: The government is not doing enough. Although there is an order to bring them to prison, the police don’t know the location of 500 right-wing extremists. Some of them will hide with a friend or someone else. Not all of them are being searched for political crimes, some drove without driving license, etc. But it shows that these men, or the people from this movement/political scene, can hide not only in small numbers but in bigger numbers. Many of them are holding guns with a legal permit. Sometimes, they also have additional illegal weapons. So there’s a lot to do.
Does the internet have a significant role in stimulating violent right-wing behavior?
Hans-Jakob Schindler: Unfortunately, it’s a similar situation as with Al-Qaeda and ISIS. There is, unfortunately, a time lag between [inflammatory] materials being openly available online and large social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube to react. We had the same thing with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. As long as these companies don’t perceive this to be a reputational problem, or as long as they don’t have to comply with a law forcing them to remove harmful content, they won’t take action. I find it tragic that after the Christchurch attacks Facebook put out a statement [suggesting] that they now understood that right-wing extremism can lead to violence. After the big outcry about the video of the Christchurch attacker being available for so long, Facebook realized that right-wing extremism leads to violence. It’s like making a mockery out of the public debate.
