It is not unusual for German politicians to receive intense and intense death threats, but this is what happened with Walter Lübeck, a member of the ruling CDU party and administrative official in the Kassel region in the central German state of Hesse, after the German politician decided to publicly defend the policy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugees during special tours in small towns in his region, during which he was keen to stress that welcoming the needy and refugees lies at the heart of German and Christian values, and that those who reject these values ​​“are the ones who have to leave the country, not refugees or foreigners,” as he put it, and as it was It was expected that Lubeck's statements spread virally on the Internet, causing great controversy, especially among supporters of the extreme right, and soon hundreds of messages loaded with threats began to flow into Lubeck's mail.His name was put on lists of neo-Nazis targeted on the Internet, and his detailed address was published on far-right blogs and websites.

On June 2, 2019, what everyone feared happened, and "Lubeck" was killed by a direct bullet to the head (1) while standing on his balcony in the first political assassination carried out by the far-right in Germany since the Nazi era, and despite the shock caused by the incident, the The details of the crime that were later revealed did not surprise almost anyone. Stefan Ernst, the first accused in the crime, had a long history of racist violence and close ties to far-right groups, and was previously accused of stabbing an immigrant to death in 1992, and later spent some time in prison. After he was accused of attempting to blow up a facility, he possessed at least five weapons, including a machine gun and a .38 caliber pistol, the weapon he used to kill Lubeck, and although the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the internal German intelligence service, kept Always with accurate information about "Ernst"Inadvertently or intentionally, it fell out of the bureau's intelligence surveillance systems because of the agency's exaggerated focus on the "radical Islamists" space.

Stefan Ernst, the first accused in the murder of Walter Luebck (Reuters)

Although Luebcke's murder put Germany at a turning point in which it was forced to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat posed by the far-right in the country rather than permanently downplay it, Luebck was not the first German politician to be subjected to violence because of his stances on refugees. In 2015, Cologne Mayor Henriette Reeker was stabbed in the throat by an unemployed person who wanted to protest against the country's refugee admission policy, and later in 2017, Andreas Holstein, Mayor of Altina in North Rhine-Westphalia, survived an attempt The refugee policy has also been challenged, highlighting an extreme and dangerous mood sweeping Germany recently, often attributed to Merkel's open-minded refugee policies since 2015.

Statistics (3) show that the number of violent attacks against immigrants and ethnic minorities in Germany doubled from 774 attacks in 2014 to 1,467 attacks in 2015, and although the number of attacks in 2018 decreased slightly to 1,200 attacks, it is estimated that these attacks have become more Violent and lethal. For example, in September 2019, Germany witnessed the trial of eight people accused of setting up a neo-Nazi cell that allegedly planned attacks on immigrants, politicians and journalists in Dresden, the state capital of Saxony. In the same month, a gunman tried to storm a synagogue in the city of Halle, and despite his failure to enter the building, he killed at least two men while trying to storm it. Finally, came the incident of a German extremist named "Tobias Ratten" who shot 11 Kurds in a cafe in Hanau, before returning to his home and killing himself and his mother, leaving a 24-page racist pamphlet listing the races that should be exterminated in Germany from his point of view.

Despite all this, the link between the emergence of right-wing violence in Germany and the influx of refugees in recent years lacks a lot of accuracy, and that link (4) simply ignores many obvious facts that many German politicians and some media like to turn a blind eye on. The end of the eighties and until today, Germany has witnessed successive waves of right-wing violence, which the security services have often ignored, whether inadvertently or deliberately in many cases, and some members of those services have been implicated at other times. SpiegelIn both localities, right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis have committed at least 169 direct murders since 1990, which sheds light on the ghosts of Nazism lurking in German society, and puts Berlin in the face of the fact that it may not yet be able to get rid of the effects of its dark past, and that measures to develop feelings of Collective guilt such as public memorials to the victims of the Holocaust and school trips to concentration camps consistently fail to counteract the remnants of ingrained racism and xenophobia, no matter how German politicians claim to the contrary.

Since the end of World War II, armed violence in Germany has tended to be associated primarily with the left, specifically the Red Army group or "Baader-Meinhof", the most prominent and most active left-wing armed group in West Germany that launched its attacks against the German state from the beginning of the seventies until the mid-nineties approximately . Although right-wing violence appeared in waves during this period, the security forces busy fighting leftists tended to downplay the seriousness and impact of this extremism.

The unification of Germany in 1989 sparked a new and different wave (5) of right-wing violence. The Cold War regime familiar to the Germans collapsed, and a new era of uncertainty began. With the collapse of the East German economy, unemployment rates reached an unprecedented level, and widespread unemployment Security and the aggravation of the crisis of open borders, which led to a massive influx of immigrants, many East Germans showed early dissatisfaction with the constitutional system of the Federal Republic, and with the transfer of the country's capital from the relatively modest city of Bonn to the huge city of Berlin, and the dominance of modern social values ​​and Western economic concepts in German society, East Germans in particular, exacerbated the sense of threat, and prompted them to develop a mutual sense of solidarity based on “German identity” in the face of everything “foreign” or foreign, a feeling that eventually nourished the latent Nazi organizations and emerging right-wing parties and groups.Skinheads" against immigrants, and all this resulted in a new wave of racist and xenophobic attacks, primarily targeting Turkish immigrants who flocked to work in a reunited Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Anti-immigrant "skinheads" groups (Reuters)

One of the worst atrocities occurred at that time in 1992 when a mob of far-rights gathered in Rostock, a small town on the Baltic coast, in front of an apartment building housing Vietnamese workers. Germany for the Germans” and “Expel the Foreigners”, which led to the building on fire, of course, and although hundreds of people were arrested at the time, only a few of them were convicted of violence against the police forces and not against the residents of the building.

The Rostock attacks were the culmination of the 1990s wave of racist and xenophobic attacks in Germany, a wave that began to decline due to the remarkable recovery of the German economy following unity in a way that faded and faded calls for cultural despair and ideological militancy, which prompted right-wing and Nazi groups to retreat underground, despite Some of these groups, such as the German branch of the far-right Combat 18 group founded in Britain in the 1990s, continued to commit some acts of anti-foreign violence by taking advantage of their large networks of members, most of whom were by name known to the country's law enforcement, including Stefan. Ernst, accused of the aforementioned assassination of politician Walter Luebck

With the early 2000s, right-wing violence returned to the fore again in a more organized manner with the emergence of the “kebab dead” issue (6), and there were not many common denominators among the victims other than that they were all of immigrant origins (mostly Turks) and run modest shops or establishments, and they were The beginning of 2001 with the killing of "Anwar Simsek", a 38-year-old Turkish-German man who runs a flower importing company in the southern city of Nuremberg, by two gunmen who shot him inside his truck, and he died in a hospital two days later.

A picture of a German newspaper that talks about the deaths of kebabs (communication sites)

Later, as indicated by the Guardian investigation (7), which followed the details of the case, another named "Abdulrahim Ozodogro" was killed in the same city in June, and two weeks later "Süleyman Tashkobro" was killed in Hamburg by three shots in his vegetable store, and two months later , August 2001, a vegetable seller, "Abel Keeling", was shot twice in his shop in Munich, and the killers, as investigations later revealed, preferred a particular method of killing, as the bullets were fired from a close distance from the target person, and in almost all crimes a pistol was used A CZ 83 muffler (the civilian version of the military CZ82), which initially led police to believe the crimes were the work of Turkish mafia gangs fighting for influence.

Crimes calmed down relatively during the following years, but they returned again in the same pattern in 2004, and the beginning was with "Muhammad Turgut" who was shot dead in a kebab shop in the city of Rostock on the Baltic coast. In the same year, a bomb exploded in the Cubestrasse area in Cologne, inhabited by Turkish immigrants, injuring 22 people, and in June 2005, Ismail Yashar, 50, was shot in his kebab shop in Nuremberg, and the following year A 41-year-old Greek-German locksmith named Theodoros Boulgarides was murdered in his Munich workplace, becoming the first non-Turkish victim. In 2006, a kiosk seller named Muhammed Kobascik, 39, was murdered in the western German city of Dortmund, and just two days later, Khaled Yozgat, 21, was killed in an internet cafe he ran in the central German city of Kassel.

These killings took place in 7 different cities across Germany from east to west, and were usually separated by long periods of time, sometimes even years, and all this made the link between the perpetrators so difficult that the German authorities were not convinced that these crimes were related to each other Only in 2006, and the security services had to wait another five years, specifically until 2011 to reveal more details about mysterious cases, after a group of German newspapers obtained DVDs containing an interesting video clip of an episode produced from the famous cartoon series "The Pink Panther." The episode showed the tiger roaming the streets in front of posters reading "Stand up with your people," before blowing up a grocery store, suddenly cutting the video and replacing it with news footage of a similarly attacked store in Cologne in 2001.

Secret National Socialist Group (networking sites)

The clip then returned to show the Pink Panther lying on his sofa watching real news reports about the mysterious murders that spanned over a decade, before a logo appears on the screen indicating that these acts were committed by a group calling itself the "Secret National Socialists." . While the press and police were at a loss to gather any possible information about the new group and its identity, this confusion finally dissipated in November of the same year when police chased two men who tried to rob a bank in the central German state of Thuringia, while trying to arrest them. The police surrounded the truck that the two men were riding in on their motorcycles, to discover a huge stockpile of weapons and ammunition inside the truck, but the surprise is that the two men did not surrender to the police and did not try to escape, but they killed themselves and set the truck on fire in a cinematic scene par excellence.

Soon, the bodies of the two men were identified as Uwe Mondelus and Uwe Bohnhardt, both of whom are the oldest members of the German far-right, and with a third friend of theirs, Beth Schabe, they escaped from the police 13 years ago to live in an apartment in the town of Zwickau in Saxony. , before Cappie burns down the entire apartment after learning of the murder of her two companions. When police later searched the remains of the scorched apartment, they found surviving newspaper clippings about the Turkish murder cases, copies of the Pink Panther video tapes, and a CZ 83 pistol.

Despite this large influx of information about the case, many fundamental questions about the “kebab crimes” as they were called remained unanswered, chiefly how only three people were able to acquire the knowledge and ability to carry out this number of crimes in several different states, including Detailed knowledge of the victims, their daily routines, escape routes from various crime scenes, and a large logistical capacity that includes weapons and forged identity cards, all indications that the underground National Socialists would not have operated so professionally without a wide support network of powerful sympathizers, was the key to the solution of all these mysteries It is Andreas Thiem, a German intelligence agent who was present at Khaled Yozgat's Internet cafe when he was killed by extremists in 2006.

According to the Guardian, "Tim" claimed during his 2013 testimony that he did not hear the silent bullets that killed Yozgat, nor did he notice the blood spray on the wall behind the billing desk as he was leaving, stressing that his presence at the crime scene at the time of the accident was purely a coincidence, In a succession of paradoxes that were difficult to believe, especially when they came from an intelligence agent, not an ordinary German, but most importantly, the information that became available later about the personality of "Tim" himself made it difficult to believe his account about his presence by chance, and indicated a completely opposite trend that "" Tim" may have been involved, or at least complicit in the crime.

Prosecution witnesses explained, while describing the character of "Tim", that he has Nazi tendencies that cannot be hidden, to the extent that he was known as "Little Adolf" in relation to "Adolf Hitler", and other than that, the personal library of Tim contained Nazi literature and special brochures on the modus operandi of various weapons. , Despite the clear indications, the German prosecutor failed to convict Tim of involvement in the crime, and contented himself with accepting his resignation from the intelligence agency and his departure from the front.

The ambiguous role of Andreas Thiem, and possibly other agents of the German intelligence and security services in the kebab crimes, has shed light on the way in which the (8) security services have fueled right-wing violence in the country, and it appears that it began as early as the eighties, When intelligence agents hired paid informants already involved in far-right circles to gather information, but in contrast to the traditional way of recruiting agents, these Yemeni informants were not mere whistleblowers who relayed information about their colleagues in exchange for money, but were lavishly and efficiently trained sources who were recruited and upgraded at intervals For a long time, they were promised legal protection, and they were provided with money they used to raise their profile at the heart of the right-wing movement.

Andreas Thiem testifying (Getty Images)

To justify this, the German intelligence agency claimed that by distributing money to informants, it would be able to make a clear map of right-wing violence in Germany, but this money that the security services lavished on right-wing extremists actually fueled their groups, and provided them with an unprecedented level of funding, to the point that One such extremist, Tino Brandt, openly boasted on German television that the state had given him 200,000 marks in the early 1990s, which he used to print leaflets and organize events.

A well-known neo-Nazi, "Ralph Marchner", was one of the hired informants who worked for the German intelligence service between 2000-2002, and had a close relationship with the secret National Socialist cell, and strangely enough, when a government committee tried to obtain the Marchner file, the prosecutor In Saxony he told her that the file had been "damaged", and later the judge assigned to investigate the case of the National Socialists dismissed attempts to explore Marchner's role in the case as "irrelevant".What was described as a deliberate attempt to avoid disclosing suspicious links between the National Socialists and the security services, which have not ceased to provoke controversy in Germany over the past years, with these agencies continuing their reluctance policy to contain right-wing extremists, a failure to the extent that the German Interior Ministry received A parliamentary questioning of the Left Party at the end of 2016 about the existence of more than 600 unexecuted arrest warrants against members of neo-Nazi organizations.

In this context, there is a common anecdote (9) inside Germany that reads: “The German security forces are blind in their right eye,” an ironic reference to the state’s indifference to the threats of right-wing extremism, and this is not only limited to some members of the security services embracing far-right beliefs. Such as racial homogeneity and their involvement in facilitating right-wing violence, but this indifference or willfulness also includes the German justice system's involvement in turning a blind eye to these crimes and preventing the presentation of evidence that proves the involvement of German officials in facilitating this type of armed violence.

Left-wing demonstrators take part in a march against neo-Nazis (Reuters)

As a result of this institutional culture of impunity for right-wing extremists, far-right ideas and neo-Nazi ideology have been slowly infiltrating the heart of Germany’s security and military services, and to be precise, the German intelligence service has always been considered to have natural right-leaning tendencies since it was founded by the Americans in the aftermath of World War II, when the service was forced to welcome With the Nazis and former members of the German secret police "Gestapo" within its ranks, and the main task of the device was to spy on members of the German Communist Party, and these unhidden Nazi tendencies were the reason for the defection of "Otto John", the first head of the device, and his escape to East Germany in 1954 He was succeeded by Hubert Schroppers, a former member of the SS Waffen units.The famous paramilitary affiliate of the Nazi Party, during which the German Communist Party was banned, and with frequent reports about Nazi tendencies at the heart of the German intelligence service, a number of major political parties in the country such as the Green Party and the Left Party had previously called for the abolition of the country’s internal intelligence agency .

But this clear presence of the new Nazism in Germany did not stop at the intelligence service only, but these ideas probably penetrated into all the joints (10) of the new German army known as “Bundeswehr”, although the rejection and criminalization of the Nazi legacy was one of the basic requirements for rebuilding The German army, the political leadership in West Germany did not find it necessary to draw on some of the experiences of the leaders of the Nazi era. As a result, as the 1950s drew to a close, the Bundeswehr had drawn about 12,000 Nazi army officers and about 3,000 SS Waffen units.

Despite this, these Nazi tendencies within the security and military services remained largely under control until the moment the Berlin Wall was demolished in the late 1980s, and the East Germans joined the unified Germany to represent a fifth of the country's population, despite the fierce hostility between the communists from East Germany and the Nazis The identity crisis created by the post-Cold War world, and the discontent of many East Germans with Western modernist values, caused many East Germans to turn to right-wing extremism.

Anti-Nazi protesters walk with banners showing pictures of immigrants killed by a group of neo-Nazis, during a demonstration in Munich 2011 (Reuters)

At the same time, (11) the abolition of compulsory military service and the tendency to rely on a professional military force affected the balanced representation of the various segments of German society within the military apparatus, and opened the way for right-wing enthusiasts and the poorest segments seeking to obtain the material benefits of military service to increase their presence within the army. As a result, the proportion of people who joined the army in the East German population increased to about one third, and the "Nazi dilemma" began to impose itself little by little on Germany, not only in the army and security services, but in society as a whole.

The effects of this right-wing trend in German society began to draw attention since 2014, coinciding with the wave of the extreme right that swept all of Europe as a reaction to the economic crisis in the eurozone, and to the Syrian refugee crisis and their influx into Europe, especially with German Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open the doors To receive hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the bloody conflict on Syrian soil.

At that time, the military conflicts that swept the Middle East began to impose themselves within immigrant communities in Germany, this time in the form of cultural conflicts, the most prominent example of which was the street clashes that took place in Hamburg in October 2014 between supporters of “jihadist groups” and supporters of “jihadist groups” Kurds and Yazidis who were organizing a special demonstration in solidarity with the besieged Syrian town of Kobani, a scene captured by Lutz Bachmann, owner of an advertising company that advertises for nightclubs in Dresden, Saxony, to launch a Facebook group called “Peaceful Europeans against the Islamization of the West.” In it, he took to the streets to deliver a message to politicians in protest against what he described as the policies of "Islamisation, patriarchy, political correctness, insulting patriots and describing them as Nazis for defending their country."He likened his call to the historic outcry of protesters in East Germany in the weeks before the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Supporters of the Peaceful Europeans Movement Against the Islamization of the West (pegida) hold a poster depicting German Chancellor Angela Merkel with text reading "We are coming, Mom!"

During a demonstration in Germany 2016 (Reuters)

The group (12) quickly transformed - within days - into a political movement that identified itself as "PEGIDA" or "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West", and within a few additional days "PEGIDA" succeeded in gaining great momentum, organizing weekly demonstrations in Dresden, and inspiring movements Similar in many cities and eastern states such as Leipzig and Kassel, and even in some western regions such as Würzburg, Bonn and Frankfurt, by December the PEGIDA demonstrations had attracted more than 20,000 participants, the movement seemed to have gained an unstoppable momentum, and it was in Its way to inaugurate a major political transformation.

But in just three weeks, PEGIDA's momentum was suddenly dashed by much larger counter-demonstrations by left-wing groups, greens, social democrats, immigrant organizations and churches, and by mid-February 2015 the size of the PEGIDA demonstrations had dwindled to just a few hundred, to the point that some believed (13) that it was only a temporary cultural phenomenon generated by the unique situation of Saxony, which bears a historical legacy of hostility to immigrants and foreigners.

But this belief was quickly eroded by the significant political rise of the Alternative for Germany (AFD), a far-right political party that espouses a protectionist, anti-immigrant and anti-EU agenda that was founded in Berlin in early 2013 as a response to the economic crisis in the eurozone, but it did not. He succeeded in exceeding the threshold of 5% of the required votes in the elections of the year of his founding itself, but he succeeded in obtaining 7 seats in the European elections the following year, and he also succeeded in achieving remarkable victories in the state elections during the following years, to secure representation for himself in 14 parliaments from The 16 parliaments of the German states, before the alternative crowned its rise in the federal elections that took place in 2017, garnering 94 seats in the German parliament, the “Bundestag,” according to which the extremist party became the third largest party in it.

The AfD was the first right-wing populist party to achieve electoral success in Germany since World War II, and its success represented the first political breach of the German liberal consensus after the war. Despite the party's denial of these links, as well as the fact that the rise of the party gave the kiss of political life to these ideas after everyone thought that they had faded by the effects of the economic recovery during the first decade of the millennium.

The success of the AfD reflected - in essence - the rise of a new intellectual culture in Germany that was no longer satisfied with the economic and social policies of the Christian Democratic Party under the leadership of Angela Merkel, especially with regard to the party's positions on immigrants and Islam, but what is new is that the new right-wing wave that accompanied the rise of the party was not It is confined to the traditionally anti-immigrant eastern regions (although more prominently present in these areas) or linked to the lower classes of the economic ladder, but it appears more associated with an educated conservative neo-bourgeoisie and radical right-wing circles, some of which are former supporters of the CDU itself.

But the most important thing that makes (14) this environment different from the traditional conservative circles of the past is that it includes different ideological groups that, until recently, did not seem to have much in common with them, on top of these traditional far-right thinkers in West Germany such as Karl-Heinz Webmann and Hemo Schuylick, Ulrich Schacht and Gotze Kubiczek, who had been lobbying since the 1970s for a right-wing fanatic and to prevent Germany from becoming a multicultural society, had a significant presence during the rule of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s and 1990s, although their political influence remained limited while they remained on the sidelines of German politics.

Thelo Sarrazin, Social Democrat member of Germany (Reuters)

But this situation has recently changed after they were joined by another group of prominent representatives of the intellectual class prevailing in West Germany of thinkers who were previously close to the circles of power but who lost their influence in the media, politics and culture due to social changes, multicultural politics and the rise of minorities, the most prominent of them is Hans Georg Mabeen, the former head of both the National Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the German Internal Security Agency, as well as Thelo Sarrazin, a member of the Social Democrats in Germany, and others.

They are joined by another group that completes the trinity of the new right-wing elite in Germany today: East Germans who were marginalized in the former East German Republic, who assumed leadership positions in civil society during the transitional period and were disillusioned by the ways in which the two parts of Germany were unified and by the hegemony of Western culture , and these see that the rise of right-wing ideas today is a kind of extension of the East German revolution in 1989, and although these groups were not linked in the past by any political networks, they all share today their rejection of the ideas of cultural pluralism and acceptance of the other, and their exaggeration in warning against The immigrant threat and the alleged attempts to “Islamize” Germany.

Although these disparate groups still exhibit a great deal of variance among themselves, and most reject violence against minorities and immigrants as a means of promoting their ideas, the ideological and political environment that collectively fuels the rise of violent far-right forces and neo-Nazi groups is today the risk The biggest threat to Germany’s future as a liberal, pluralistic state, a danger that most decision-makers in Germany seem to be still underestimating, either intentionally or underestimated, and forgetting that today’s prosperous and politically stable Germany was only three decades ago living in the midst of a deep economic and social crisis, And that despite the amazing changes that the country has undergone since the beginning of the nineties until today, the ghosts of the tensions of the past and the fault lines they created still resound in the sides of politics and society in Germany to this day, ghosts that if Berlin continues to ignore them, it will continue to growNazi principles are reproduced in a new, more modern guise, and fortunately, many still remember the price the world paid to get rid of the first Nazis nearly 6 decades ago.

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Sources

  • A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: (1) Germany's New Hateful Reality

  • German politician stabbed for political reasons

  • In Germany, Right-Wing Violence Is a Problem No One Wants to See

  • Germany Has a Neo-Nazi Terrorism Epidemic

  • Germany's New Politics of Cultural Despair

  • 10 MURDERS, 3 NAZIS, AND GERMANY'S MOMENT OF RECKONING

  • The neo-Nazi murder trial revealing Germany's darkest secrets

  • Germany |

    Implications of right-wing extremism in security forces

  • A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany's New Hateful Reality

  • Franco's mystery.. the specter of Nazism lurking in the barracks of the Germans

  • “Citizen in Uniform:” Democratic Germany and the Changing Bundeswehr

  • Where Did Germany's Islamophobes Come From?

  • Among the Hate Poets: The (Surprisingly Recent) Historical Roots of Germany's Pegida Movement

  • Germany's New Ultranationalist Intelligentsia