Far-right politics in Germany (1945–present)

In the report of the second Committee, issued to parliament in October 1990, West German Social Democrat Willi Rothley argued that economic and social changes arising from "modernizing society" were responsible for the recent rise of right-wing extremism, particularly a weakening cohesion among family, work, and religious association leading to a "growing susceptibility to political platforms offering security by emphasizing the national aspect or providing scapegoats (foreigners).

"[3][4] The report notes the "meteoric" rise of the Republikaner Partei (REP) in 1989, whose leader Franz Schönhuber had been a member of the Waffen-SS, and who "proudly admits his Nazi past."

The party won two million votes in the 1989 European Parliament elections on a platform that "openly advocated the abolition of trade unions, the destruction of social welfare, censorship, and the wholesale 'de-criminalization' of German history.

[citation needed] In 2009, the Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland youth group and the NPD organised a march but surrounded by policemen, the 6,000 neo-Nazis were not allowed to leave their meeting point.

At the same time, some 15,000 people with white roses assembled in the streets holding hands to demonstrate against Nazism, and to create an alternative “memorial day” of war victims.

Extremists belonging to Der Dritte Weg (the third way) marched through a town in Saxony on 1 May, the day before the Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust, carrying flags and a banner saying "Social justice instead of criminal foreigners".

[24] In February 2020, following an observation of a conspiratorial meeting of a dozen right-wing extremists, those involved were arrested after agreeing to launch attacks on mosques in Germany to trigger a civil war.

They criticise the lack of profession-specific surveys, which allowed the responsible supervisory bodies and ministries to adopt stereotypical defensive reaction patterns, such as "the same standard phrase about regrettable individual cases".

[63] In 2015, the far-right blog "Halle Leaks" published excerpts from Berlin police investigation files containing the names and addresses of visitors and residents of a squat in the Rigaer Straße.

At the end of December 2017, six left-wing organisations in Berlin, including the house on Rigaer Straße, received a letter containing the private data of 42 people from that part of the city: personal photos, names, addresses, nicknames, favourite travel destinations, pets and illnesses.

[64] The latter found out that a female detective inspector, responsible for politically motivated crime - left-wing in the State Office of Criminal Investigation, had searched the police system for data that appeared shortly afterwards in the threatening letters.

[65] In January 2016, police inspector Marco G. founded a prepper group in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania called Nordkreuz, whose 60 to 70 members prepared for an expected collapse of the state order on "Day X" with weapons, ammunition and food depots as well as shooting exercises.

[67] In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), investigators discovered a chat group in the Aachen-West police station in January 2020 whose members were exchanging racist images, such as a black man with wide open eyes and the sentence "The social welfare office is broke, starting today we will work" or a photo of an imperial eagle with a swastika.

[70] In September 2020, investigators found right-wing extremist photographs on the private mobile phone of a police officer in Essen who had allegedly passed on official secrets to a journalist.

Investigations into this were only initiated after a victims' lawyer filed a complaint, but were closed without results until 2017 because the three suspected police officers remained silent and their mobile phones with the alleged chats were not found.

The Saxon justice official Daniel Zabel revealed himself as the source and claimed that he had wanted to counter media lies by copying and passing on the arrest warrant.

[83] On 11 January 2016, the first anniversary of Legida, up to 300 right-wing hooligans and neo-Nazis attacked the Connewitz district in Leipzig, which is inhabited by many left-wingers, armed with iron bars, batons, tear gas and a hand grenade.

After the attack, the police collected all discarded items in a box and thus covered up DNA traces, left balaclavas and weapons lying around, allowed detainees to communicate on their mobile phones for hours and thus made it possible to delete arranged chats.

From the second of around 112 Connewitz trials, the Leipzig district court, in agreement with neo-Nazi lawyer Olaf Klemke, only handed down suspended sentences to confessed offenders in order to avoid time-consuming witness interrogations.

Trial observers criticised the cooperation of some right-wing police officers and district judges with neo-Nazis and the exploitation of staff shortages in the Saxon judiciary for the lack of prosecution of organised political crime.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office then found eight men or young people in various places in Saxony in the early morning of November 5, 2024 in Germany and Poland and arrested the suspects.

In response to enquiries from police authorities in all federal states, Deutschlandfunk received information on around 200 such cases across Germany in 2018 and 2019, including racist and inciting statements, contacts or affiliation with the "Reichsbürger", the use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations and others.

The enquiries were prompted by the faxes and emails signed "NSU 2.0" containing death threats and private data from Hesse police registers, which a victims' lawyer in the National Socialist Underground trial has been receiving since August 2018.

Hessian Interior Minister Peter Beuth, who had been aware of the suspicions against Frankfurt police officers for months but had concealed them, denied that it was an extreme right-wing network.

In Bavaria, there were 30 mostly unresolved disciplinary proceedings regarding right-wing extremist incidents, 26 cases in Schleswig-Holstein, 21 in North Rhine-Westphalia, 18 each in Baden-Württemberg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, five in Hamburg, two in Brandenburg, one in Saarland and none in Bremen.

They called for Germany to include mandatory courses on racism and discrimination, human rights and equal treatment in education laws and curricula in schools, universities and especially in police training.

Sebastian Fiedler (Association of German Criminal Investigators) called for police officers to be banned from setting up chat groups for official matters on private phones in future.

[93] Tobias Singelnstein called for anonymous reporting procedures for internal grievances in the police force, because 'blackening the colours' of colleagues through official channels is generally rejected there.

Some notable examples in recent years include The German Criminal Code forbids the "use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations" outside the contexts of "art or science, research or teaching".

[citation needed] Homeland-Faithful German Youth claimed that it was centred primarily on "environment, community and homeland", but it has been argued to have links to the National Democratic Party (NPD).