Jürgen
Elsässer, the editor in chief of the far-right magazine Compact, put a giant Q
on the cover last month.
QAnon Is Thriving in Germany. The Extreme Right
Is Delighted.
As the U.S. conspiracy theory goes global, it has
found fertile ground in the putsch fantasies and anti-Semitic tropes long
popular on Germany’s far-right fringe. Counterterrorism officials worry.
By Katrin
Bennhold
Oct. 11,
2020, 12:01 a.m. ET
BERLIN —
Early in the pandemic, as thousands of American troops began NATO maneuvers in
Germany, Attila Hildmann did a quick YouTube search to see what it was all
about. He quickly came across videos posted by German followers of QAnon.
In their
telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President
Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government —
something they applauded.
“The Q
movement said these are troops that will free the German people from Merkel,”
said Mr. Hildmann, a vegan celebrity cook who had not heard of QAnon before
last spring. “I very much hope that Q is real.”
In the
United States, QAnon has already evolved from a fringe internet subculture into
a mass movement veering into the mainstream. But the pandemic is supercharging
conspiracy theories far beyond American shores, and QAnon is metastasizing in
Europe as well.
Groups have
sprung up from the Netherlands to the Balkans. In Britain, QAnon-themed
protests under the banner of “Save Our Children” have taken place in more than
20 cities and towns, attracting a more female and less right-wing demographic.
But it is
in Germany that QAnon seems to have made the deepest inroads. With what is
regarded as the largest following — an estimated 200,000 people — in the
non-English-speaking world, it has quickly built audiences on YouTube, Facebook
and the Telegram messenger app. People wave Q flags during protests against
coronavirus measures.
And in
Germany, like in the United States, far-right activists were the first to latch
on, making QAnon an unexpected and volatile new political element when the
authorities were already struggling to root out extremist networks.
“There is a
very big overlap,” said Josef
Holnburger, a data scientist who has been tracking QAnon in Germany. “Far-right
influencers and groups were the first ones to aggressively push QAnon.”
Officials
are baffled that a seemingly wacky conspiracy theory about Mr. Trump taking on
a “deep state” of Satanists and pedophiles has resonated in Germany. Polls show
that trust in Ms. Merkel’s government is high, while the far-right Alternative
for Germany party, or AfD, has been struggling.
“I was
astonished that QAnon is gaining such momentum here,” said Patrick Sensburg, a
lawmaker in Ms. Merkel’s conservative party and member of the intelligence
oversight committee. “It seemed like such an American thing. But it’s falling
on fertile ground.”
The
mythology and language QAnon uses — from claims of ritual child murder to
revenge fantasies against liberal elites — conjure ancient anti-Semitic tropes
and putsch fantasies that have long animated Germany’s far-right fringe. Now
those groups are seeking to harness the theory’s viral popularity to reach a wider
audience.
QAnon is
drawing an ideologically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, fringe
thinkers and ordinary citizens who say the threat of the pandemic is overstated
and government restrictions unwarranted. Not everyone who now aligns with QAnon
believes everything the group espouses, or endorses violence.
Until a few
months ago, Mr. Hildmann was popularly known merely for his restaurant and
cookbooks and as a guest on television cooking shows.
But with
80,000 followers on Telegram, he has since become one of QAnon’s most important
amplifiers in Germany. He is a noisy regular at coronavirus protests, which
drew more than 40,000 people in Berlin this summer, to bridle against what he
considers to be a fake pandemic concocted by the “deep state” to strip away
liberties.
He calls
Ms. Merkel a “Zionist Jew” and vents against the “new world order” and the
Rothschild banking family. He no longer recognizes Germany’s postwar democratic
order and darkly predicts civil war.
During a
recent interview at his vegan restaurant in an upmarket neighborhood of Berlin,
admirer after admirer — a civil servant, a mail carrier, a geography student —
approached to thank him, not for his food, but for raising awareness about
QAnon.
Experts
worry that activists like Mr. Hildmann are providing a new and seemingly more
acceptable conduit for far-right ideas.
“QAnon
doesn’t openly fly the colors of fascism, it sells it as secret code,” said
Stephan Kramer, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of
Thuringia. “This gives it an access point to broader German society, where
everyone thinks of themselves as immune to Nazism because of history.”
“It’s very
dangerous,” Mr. Kramer added. “It’s something that has jumped from the virtual
world into the real world. And if the U.S. is anything to go by, it’s going to
gain speed.”
The QAnon
conspiracy theory emerged in the United States in 2017, when a pseudonymous
online poster claiming to hold the highest U.S. security clearance — Q — began
dropping cryptic messages on the message board 4Chan. Global elites were
kidnapping children and keeping them in underground prisons to extract a
life-prolonging substance from their blood, Q hinted. A “storm” was coming,
followed by a “great awakening.”
For
historians and far-right extremism experts, QAnon is both a very new and a very
old phenomenon. Made in modern America, it has powerful echoes of the European
anti-Semitism of centuries past, which was at the root of the worst violence
the continent has known.
The idea of
a bloodsucking, rootless elite that abuses and even eats children is
reminiscent of medieval propaganda about Jews drinking the blood of Christian
babies, said Miro Dittrich, a far-right extremism expert at the Berlin-based
Amadeu Antonio Foundation.
“It’s the
21-century version of blood libel,” Mr. Dittrich said. “The idea of a global
conspiracy of elites is deeply anti-Semitic. ‘Globalists’ is code for Jews.”
The
ignition switch for QAnon’s spread in Germany was “Defender-Europe 2020,” a
large-scale NATO exercise, said Mr. Holnburger, the political scientist.
When it was
scaled back this spring because of the coronavirus, QAnon followers contended
that Ms. Merkel had used a “fake pandemic” to scupper a secret liberation plan.
Then one
far-right movement, known as the Reichsbürger, or citizens of the Reich, jumped
onto the QAnon traffic online to give greater visibility to its own conspiracy
theory.
The
Reichsbürger, estimated by the government to have about 19,000 followers,
believe that Germany’s postwar republic is not a sovereign country but a
corporation set up by the allies after World War II. The QAnon conspiracies
dovetailed with their own and offered the prospect of an army led by Mr. Trump
restoring the German Reich.
On March 5,
the elements of the two movements fused into a
common Facebook group, followed a week later by a Telegram channel.
“That’s
when QAnon Germany first started taking off,” Mr. Holnburger said.
Two weeks
later, in the middle of the lockdown, the German pop star Xavier Naidoo, a
former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol,” joined a QAnon group
and posted a tearful YouTube video in which he told his followers about
children being liberated from underground prisons. A far-right influencer,
Oliver Janich, reposted it to his tens of thousands of Telegram followers.
Since then,
the biggest German-language QAnon channel on Telegram, Qlobal Change, has
quadrupled its followers to 123,000. On YouTube, it has more than 18 million
views. Overall, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts on all
platforms has risen to more than 200,000, estimates Mr. Dittrich of the
Amadeu-Antonio Foundation.
On Tuesday,
Facebook said it would remove any group, page or Instagram account that openly
identified with QAnon.
In the
country of the Holocaust, promoting Nazi propaganda or inciting hatred is
punishable by up to five years in jail, and two years ago the government passed
strict legislation designed to enforce its laws online.
But
conspiracy theories and lies are not illegal unless they veer into hate speech
and extremist content, and officials admit they have found QAnon’s spread hard
to police.
Some QAnon
followers are well-known extremists, like Marko Gross, a former police sniper
and the leader of a far-right group that hoarded weapons and ammunition.
“Trump is
fighting the deep state,” he told The New York Times in June. Merkel is part of
the deep state, he said. “The deep state is global.”
But many
are people who in the early days of the pandemic had nothing in common with the
far right, Mr. Dittrich pointed out.
“You could
see it in real time in the Telegram channels,” he said. “Those who started in
April with worries about the lockdown became more and more radicalized.”
These days
you see it on the streets of Germany, too.
Michael
Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based software entrepreneur who founded Querdenken-711,
the organization that has been at the center of protests against coronavirus
restrictions, recently started referencing QAnon.
An eastern
youth chapter of the AfD has used “WWG1WGA,” an abbreviation for Q’s motto
“Where we go one, we go all,” on its Facebook pages.
Even those
on the far right who do not buy into the conspiracy theory have found it
useful.
Compact, a
magazine classified as extremist by the domestic intelligence agency, has
dedicated its last three issues to QAnon, pedophile scandals and the
Reichsbürger movement. In August, it had a giant Q on its cover — and had to be
reprinted because of high demand.
“Q is a
completely novel attempt to structure political opposition in the era of social
media,” Mr. Elsässer said in an interview.
After the
pandemic, “the far right will reconstitute itself differently,” Mr. Elsässer
said. “Q could play a role in this. It’s about elites, not foreigners. That
casts the web more widely.”
Asked about the dangers of QAnon, the federal domestic
intelligence service replied with an emailed statement saying that “such conspiracy theories can develop into a
danger when anti-Semitic violence or violence against political officials is
legitimized with a threat from the ‘deep state.’”
The biggest
risk, say experts like Mr. Dittrich and Mr. Holnburger, may come when the
promised salvation fails to arrive.
“Q always
says: ‘Trust the plan. You have to wait. Trump’s people will take care of it,’”
Mr. Holnburger said. “If Trump does not invade Germany, then some might say,
‘Let’s take the plan in our own hands.’”
Mr.
Hildmann already has some doubts.
“It’s
possible that Q is just a psyop of the C.I.A.,” he said.
“In the
end, there are no external powers that you can rely on,” Mr. Hildmann said.
“Either you deal with it yourself or you don’t bother.”
Christopher
F. Schuetze contributed reporting.
Katrin
Bennhold is the Berlin bureau chief. Previously she reported from London and
Paris, covering a range of topics from the rise of populism to gender.
@kbennhold • Facebook
A version
of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Fertile Ground: QAnon Thrives With Germans. Order
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