“Reunification was a huge boost for the far right,” said Ingo Hasselbach, a former neo-Nazi. “The neo-Nazis were the first ones to be reunified. We laid the foundation for a party like the AfD. There are things we used to say that have become mainstream today.”Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
Mr.
Hasselbach in 1992, the year he left the neo-Nazi scene.
Germany’s Far Right Reunified, Too, Making It
Much Stronger
Thirty years after Germany came back together, the
former East has become the stronghold of a once-marginalized movement that now
sits in Parliament.
Katrin
Bennhold
By Katrin
Bennhold
Published
Oct. 3, 2020
Updated
March 5, 2021
BERLIN —
They called him the “Führer of Berlin.”
Ingo
Hasselbach had been a clandestine neo-Nazi in communist East Berlin, but the
fall of the Berlin Wall brought him out of the shadows. He connected with
western extremists in the unified city, organized far-right workshops, fought
street battles with leftists and celebrated Hitler’s birthday. He dreamed of a
far-right party in the parliament of a reunified Germany.
Today, the
far-right party Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials, AfD, is
the main opposition in Parliament. Its leaders march side by side with
far-right extremists in street protests. And its power base is the former
communist East.
“Reunification
was a huge boost for the far right,” said Mr. Hasselbach, who left the neo-Nazi
scene years ago and now helps others to do the same. “The neo-Nazis were the
first ones to be reunified. We laid the foundation for a party like the AfD.
There are things we used to say that have become mainstream today.”
As it marks
the 30th anniversary of reunification on Saturday, Germany can rightly
celebrate being an economic powerhouse and thriving liberal democracy. But
reunification has another, rarely mentioned legacy — of unifying, empowering
and bringing into the open a far-right movement that has evolved into a disruptive
political force and a terrorist threat, not least inside key state institutions
like the military and police.
“Today’s
far-right extremism in Germany cannot be understood without reunification,”
said Matthias Quent, a far-right extremism expert and director of an institute
that studies democracy and civil society in the eastern state of Thuringia. “It
liberated the neo-Nazis in the East from their underground existence, and it
gave the far-right in the West access to a pool of new recruits and whole swathes
of territory in which to move without too much oversight.”
For years,
German officials trusted that a far-right party could never again be elected
into Parliament and dismissed the idea of far-right terrorist networks. But
some now worry that the far-right structures established in the years after
reunification laid the groundwork for a resurgence that has burst into view
over the past 15 months.
Far-right
terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city
of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine
people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau.
This
summer, the government took the drastic step of disbanding an entire military
company in the special forces after explosives, a machine gun and SS
paraphernalia were found on the property of a sergeant major in the eastern
state of Saxony. A disproportionate number — about half — of those suspected of
far-right extremism inside that unit, the KSK, were from the former East, its
commander said.
Nationalism
and xenophobia are more ingrained in the former East, where the murderous
history of World War II was never confronted as deeply on a societal level as
it was in the former West. The AfD’s vote share is twice as high in the eastern
states, where the number of far-right hate crimes is higher than in western
ones.
Officially,
there were no Nazis in old East Germany. The regime defined itself in the
tradition of communists who had resisted fascism, giving rise to a state
doctrine of remembrance that effectively exculpated it from wartime atrocities.
Far-right mobs who beat up foreign workers from fellow socialist states like
Cuba or Angola were classified as “rowdies” led astray by western propaganda.
But a potent
neo-Nazi movement was growing underground. In 1987, Bernd Wagner, a young
police officer in East Berlin, estimated that there were 15,000 “homegrown”
violent neo-Nazis, of whom 1,000 were repeat offenders. His report was swiftly
locked away.
Two years later,
as tens of thousands took to the streets in anti-communist protests that
eventually brought down the regime, the pro-democracy activists were not the
only marchers.
“The
skinheads were marching, too,” Mr. Wagner recalled.
The battle
cry of those anti-communist protests — “We are the people” — later became the
battle cry for the far right at anti-Muslim Pegida marches during the 2015
refugee crisis, far-right riots in Chemnitz in 2018, and again at the current
anti-coronavirus protests.
Before
reunification, the far-right scene in West Germany was small and aging, but now
western neo-Nazis flocked east to offer “reconstruction aid” and unexpectedly
found a refuge. Behind the wall, the East had been frozen in time, a largely
homogeneous white country where nationalism was allowed to live on.
“The
leaders of the western scene thought they were in paradise,” Mr. Hasselbach
recalled.
Since then
the East has become the home of choice for several prominent western
extremists. Götz Kubitschek, a leading far-right intellectual from Swabia who
wants to preserve the “ethno-cultural identity” of Germany, bought a rural
manor house in the East, which serves as the headquarters for his far-right
publishing house and research institute. So did Björn Höcke and Andreas
Kalbitz, two westerners who became leaders of the most radical factions of the
AfD in the former East.
“The East
has become a sort of retreat for the far right,” Mr. Quent said, “a place where
Germany is still Germany and where men are still men.”
But the
infatuation with the East is also strategic, he said. “There is a sense among
far-right extremists: ‘We can’t win in the West, but we can win in the East and
then, from a position of strength, we will take on the West.’”
Reunification
also provided a physical space in which far-right members could move and train.
Secret neo-Nazi training camps were held at abandoned Soviet military bases. At
one of them, on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, Mr. Hasselbach took part
in workshops on forging identity papers, bomb making, guerrilla warfare and
“silent killing.”
The initial
years after reunification were so tumultuous that security services were
incapable of controlling this coalescing extremist movement.
“In the
eastern states there was no mature structure for a domestic intelligence
service,” Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the domestic intelligence office,
said in an interview. “The agencies in the new states had to be built from
nothing.”
During the
early 1990s, a wave of racist violence swept through Germany, much of it in the
East. Foreigners were chased, beaten up and sometimes killed. Asylum homes were
firebombed. Buses of immigrants were attacked. Sometimes eastern onlookers
would watch, clap or join in.
“You could
see that something was shifting and not just on the fringes,” said Volkhard
Knigge, a historian. “Otherwise the AfD would not be so strong today.”
In the
early 1990s, Mr. Knigge moved east to run the memorial at the former
concentration camp in Buchenwald. He was startled by the abundance of Nazi
memorabilia like Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale at flea markets and by the mob
of angry young neo-Nazis who would gather on the historic theater square,
shouting xenophobic slogans.
“We thought
democracy had won,” Mr. Knigge said. “The West thought this was the end of
history. But for nationalists, this was a revision of history.”
Reunification
brought two strains of nationalism together, said Anetta Kahane, a Jewish
anti-racism activist — western-style nationalist conservatism and a more
radical eastern social-revolutionary variety. On their own, neither had been
powerful enough to stir a political movement.
“It was the
marriage of the two that made the AfD possible,” said Ms. Kahane, who runs the
Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, named after a Black Angolan who was beaten to death
with a baseball bat by neo-Nazis less than two months after reunification.
For most
Germans, the new century was defined by progress. Chancellor Angela Merkel, an
easterner, has personified western liberal values. When the country was host to
the soccer World Cup in 2006, a confidently multicultural Germany was on
display, in what many at the time called “a summer fairy-tale.”
“I wanted
to believe that that’s who we are as a country — and I did believe it,” said
Tanjev Schultz, an author and journalism professor. “But it wasn’t true.”
That
summer, the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group that
had come out of the extremist networks formed in East Germany, was engaged in
an immigrant killing spree that the police would not discover until 2011.
From 2000
to 2007, the group killed nine immigrants and a police officer, even as paid
informers of the intelligence agency helped hide its leaders and build up its
network.
Mr.
Hasselbach said he was not surprised to see the recent revelations of far-right
infiltration of security services. When he was still a neo-Nazi, he said,
friendly police officers would warn them before raids or hand them files of
leftist enemies.
It was the
deadly violence in the early 1990s that made Mr. Hasselbach leave the neo-Nazi
scene in 1992. An arson attack on the home of a Turkish family killed two girls
and their grandmother. He spent years underground to escape threats from his
former far-right compatriots. Then, with Mr. Wagner, the former eastern police
officer, he co-founded Exit Germany, an organization that helps extremists
leave their networks.
The
fortunes of the AfD have ebbed and flowed in recent years. Polls show that
voter support has dipped to around 10 percent during the pandemic. But the
fringes are radicalizing, intelligence officers say.
It worries
Mr. Hasselbach and Mr. Wagner.
“The readiness
to commit violence today is greater than it’s ever been,” Mr. Hasselbach said.
“Westerners
have no feel for how fragile things are,” Mr. Wagner said. “The elites don’t
see the post-democratic decline. Easterners have seen a system collapse
before.”
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. @kb
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