There is a version of Germany known around the world.
A liberal democracy, an economic powerhouse in Europe
and a country that atones for the Holocaust with memorials and history lessons
in every public school.
It’s the Germany that elected Angela Merkel and
admitted over a million refugees.
But in the shadows of this national image, far-right
extremism lurks. Over the past few years, the country has suffered a series of
deadly far-right terror attacks and uncovered what prosecutors say was an assassination
plot intended to bring down the German government.
On the Path to Day X: The Return of Germany’s Far
Right
Produced by
Lauren Jackson and Tara GodvinReporting by Katrin Bennhold, Melissa Eddy and
Christopher F. SchuetzeEdited by Peter Robins
Published
June 25, 2021
Updated
July 6, 2021
In 2017, a
German soldier was discovered living an elaborate double life. First Lt. Franco
A., whose surname is abbreviated in keeping with German privacy laws, faked a
Syrian identity and posed as a refugee, only to be arrested 16 months later
while retrieving a loaded gun in an airport bathroom. The mysterious case
cracked the door open to a network of far-right extremists inside the German
military and the police. They are preparing for the collapse of democracy — a
coming apocalypse they call Day X.
In our new
audio series, Day X, we explore the recent resurgence of the far right in
Germany. It’s a story about a changing national identity — and the backlash
against it — raising a question that democracies across the world are waking up
to: What happens when the threat is coming from within?
While the
series is focused on Germany’s present, it’s also a story inseparable from
Germany’s past. Below, we set out some key moments for the far right in modern
Germany, and highlight some earlier events that may help to understand the
threat is poses.
Listen to
our new series about the rise of the far right in Germany:
June 28,
1919: The Treaty of Versailles
Just over a
century ago, after accepting its defeat in World War I through an armistice,
the German government signed the Treaty of Versailles, in which the victorious
Allies set the terms and price of peace.
The treaty
declared Germany to blame for the war and ordered it to pay vast reparations,
limit its armed forces and surrender territory. These bitter concessions became
emblems of a powerful myth, particularly widespread among veterans: that
Germany’s military could have won the war, but instead had been betrayed and
humiliated by the civilian leadership.
This toxic
conspiracy theory, known as the “stab-in-the-back legend,” became a keystone of
Nazi propaganda, in which the civilian leaders were portrayed as the puppets of
leftists and Jews. It animated groups that plotted coups and assassinated
politicians in the decade before Hitler came to power. In Day X, Katrin
Bennhold, The Times’s Berlin bureau chief, interviews Franco A., a military
officer on trial on charges of plotting terrorism. Like the members of the
paramilitary groups in the 1920s, Franco A. believes in a Jewish conspiracy to
destroy the German nation, and he is accused of plotting one or several
assassinations meant to bring down the democratic government.
Feb. 24,
1920: The Nazi Party is founded
After the
war, many newly unemployed soldiers in Germany joined paramilitary groups that
eventually supported the rise of Nazism — a history that helps explain why
Germans are so alarmed by recent evidence of far-right sympathies among
soldiers. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, emerged
late in 1919 and took its notorious name in early 1920, quickly developing a paramilitary
wing itself. After years of building support on the fringe, the party found its
ultranationalist message — and the speeches of its leader, Adolf Hitler —
gaining new traction in the economic hardship of the Great Depression.
Jan. 30,
1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor
Hitler’s
Nazi Party became the largest in the German Parliament by July 1932, but it
would be six months before conservative parties joined it in a coalition,
betting that they could steer the resulting government.
Instead,
within weeks, Hitler began transforming Germany into a nationalist,
anti-Semitic dictatorship — censoring the press, installing his paramilitaries
in state roles, suspending civil liberties and purging Jewish civil servants.
In modern German politics, it’s remembered as a warning against any political
coalition that might grant extremists legitimacy — a taboo that has recently
come under strain.
September
1939: World War II begins
In the
years leading up to the war, Hitler expanded Germany’s military and undertook a
campaign of aggression that gloried in reversing the concessions of Versailles,
initially to little resistance from powerful neighbors like Britain and France.
Their breaking point came on the morning of Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler ordered
a ground offensive to invade Poland — triggering the start of what would become
World War II.
Feb. 13-15,
1945: Dresden is destroyed
Germans are
taught carefully about their country’s crimes during World War II — above all,
about the systematic murder of six million European Jews in the campaign of
genocide that became known as the Holocaust.
But recent
years have seen growing public discussion of Germans’ own wartime suffering.
One focus is the eastern city of Dresden, devastated by a British-American
bombing raid in the war’s waning months.
The Nazi
propaganda ministry declared the bombing a “terror attack,” circulating reports
that up to 200,000 people had perished. The figure persisted for decades,
though researchers now put the casualties closer to 25,000.
Germany’s
far right has long leveraged a sense of German victimhood to promote a
revisionist view of the Nazi era. Every February, neo-Nazis march in Dresden to
commemorate the bombing. Franco A., who says his own grandmother witnessed the
Dresden bombing, weighs it against the Holocaust in voice memos he recorded.
May 7,
1945: Germany surrenders
After the
bombing of Dresden, Allied troops marched toward Berlin, liberating
concentration camps along the way. With defeat imminent, Hitler killed himself
on April 30, 1945. Soon after, on May 7, Gen. Alfred Jodl announced the
unconditional surrender of German forces.
Leading
figures in the Nazi regime were put on trial for crimes against humanity. The
Nuremberg Trials, as this postwar judicial process was known, were a public
reckoning for German war crimes followed around the world.
Sept. 21
and Oct. 7, 1949: West and East Germany are founded
After
Germany was defeated, its territory was divided and occupied by American,
British, French and Soviet forces. By 1949, the Western powers consolidated
their three zones into the Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany,
while the Soviets formed the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
The Western
powers advanced an agenda of democratization — but also allowed many former
Nazis to keep their jobs in government and in business. A more complete
reckoning with the horrors of the Holocaust wouldn’t come for over a decade.
In East
Germany, the Soviets were far more aggressive in hunting down former Nazis,
even as the new country came under increasingly isolated communist rule.
March 25,
1957: The Treaty of Rome is signed
In the
decades after World War II, western European countries sought to build systems
of cooperation that would make another war across their continent impossible.
The Treaty of Rome was the foundation stone of perhaps the most ambitious: The
European Economic Community, a common market across six nations that would
develop into today’s 27-country European Union. West Germany was among the
founders, reflecting a hope that limiting the power of single nations would
serve as an antidote to violent nationalism.
Aug. 13,
1961: The Berlin Wall rises
Germany’s
old capital, Berlin, sat within the new East Germany but was divided between
East and West, making it a front line in the developing Cold War. As millions
of East Germans fled through the city to the increasingly prosperous West, the
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev recommended the construction of a barrier
dividing Berlin. The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the “Iron Curtain” dividing
democratic Western Europe and communist Eastern Europe.
1968: A
youth movement spreads across West Germany
In the
decade after the construction of the wall, the divide between West and East
grew starker.
As
countercultural movements swept across the United States, West Germany had its
own reckoning. University students rebelled against the silence of their parents’
generation and forced the country to have a conversation about the country’s
Nazi past. We speak to Claudia Roth, a vice president of the German Parliament
and one of the alleged targets of Franco A., about her experience of this
moment in Episode 2 of Day X.
East
Germany never had a comparable societal reckoning. The eastern 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.
Behind the
wall, however, the East was frozen in time, a largely homogeneous white country
where nationalism quietly lived on.
Nov. 9,
1989: The Berlin Wall falls
Through its
history, at least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall, the vast majority of them
trying to escape.
When the
wall eventually fell in late 1989, the result of human error, spontaneity and
individual courage, East Germans crossed into the west, leaving a state of
informers and suspicions, public rigidity and private despair to emerge,
disoriented, into another world.
It was a
moment of national euphoria and liberation. But it also marked the beginning of
a wave of racist attacks that swept across the country as a predominately white
East met a multicultural West.
Abenaa
Adomako remembers that night. Joyous and curious like so many of her fellow
West Germans, she had gone to the city center to greet East Germans who were
pouring across the border for a first taste of freedom.
“Welcome,”
she beamed at a disoriented-looking couple in the crowd, offering them
sparkling wine. But they would not take it.
“They spat
at me and called me names,” recalled Ms. Adomako, whose family has been in
Germany since the 1890s. “They were the foreigners in my country. But to them,
as a Black woman, I was the foreigner.”
Oct. 3,
1990: Germany is reunified
A
unification treaty was ratified in the German Parliament in the fall of 1990,
bringing West and East Germany under one democratic government.
But
unification also brought far-right groups in the West and East together.
“Reunification
was a huge boost for the far right,” said Ingo Hasselbach, who was then a
clandestine neo-Nazi in East Berlin. After the fall of the wall, Mr.
Hasselbach, who has since disaffiliated, connected with western extremists and
organized far-right workshops, fought street battles with leftists and
celebrated Hitler’s birthday. Together, they also dreamed of a far-right party
in the parliament of a reunified Germany — a dream that would come true nearly
three decades later.
Nov. 24,
1990: The new Germany witnesses an anti-immigrant murder
Seven weeks
after reunification, a group of young skinheads went in search of foreigners
overnight in the eastern town of Eberswalde. They came upon an Angolan guest
worker, Amadeu Antonio Kiowa, 28, beating him and others with baseball bats.
According to Human Rights Watch, several police officers looked on during the
violence.
Mr. Kiowa
died 12 days after the attack, and his death, as well as the light sentences
for his murderers, prompted a political debate in the newly reunified Germany
over how the state would respond to right-wing violence. He is commemorated in
the name of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti-racist organization whose
leader, Anetta Kahane, is among those Franco A. is accused of targeting. We
speak to Ms. Kahane about her experiences in Episode 2 of Day X.
Early
1990s: A series of anti-immigrant attacks shock the country
There were
other far-right attacks in the years immediately after reunification. In August
1992, a crowd estimated at 1,000 youths from both eastern and western Germany
and described as mostly neo-Nazis firebombed a 10-story refugee hostel in the
northern town of Rostock.
Then, on
Nov. 23, a woman and two girls, all of Turkish nationality, died after
firebombs were thrown into their home in Mölln, another town in northern
Germany. Minutes after the bombs were thrown, anonymous callers telephoned
local police and fire departments, taking responsibility for the fires and
crying, “Heil Hitler!” Two far-right extremists were later convicted.
And on May
29, 1993, five members of a Turkish family, two young women and three girls,
burned to death in their house in Solingen, in a fire set by neo-Nazis.
2000-11: A
neo-Nazi terror cell murders immigrants, while the police look for Turkish
gangsters
For over a
decade, a series of murders in Germany went unsolved. Of the 10 victims, nine
were immigrants. Newspapers referred to the killings as “döner murders,” which
the families of the victims found demeaning and even racist. The police ignored
suggestions that the murders might have been hate crimes and narrowly focused
their investigations on Turkish organized crime.
The case
went nowhere. Until, one day in 2011, a botched escape after a bank robbery
revealed that a neo-Nazi terror group, the National Socialist Underground, was
responsible for the killings.
Chancellor
Angela Merkel said the case revealed “structures that we never imagined.” And
after the German intelligence service shredded documents salient to the case,
some questioned whether the agency may have been infiltrated by double agents
loyal to the far right. Later, in 2018, a lawyer for one of the victims’
families, Seda Basay-Yildiz, received a death threat linked to a police
computer. We speak to Ms. Basay-Yildiz in Episode 3 of Day X.
November
2003: A special forces commander is dismissed
Gen.
Reinhard Günzel, the commander of the KSK, Germany’s most elite and highly
trained military unit, was dismissed after he wrote a letter in support of an
anti-Semitic speech by a conservative lawmaker.
General
Günzel subsequently published a book called “Secret Warriors.” In it, he placed
the KSK in the tradition of a notorious special forces unit under the Nazis
that committed numerous war crimes, including massacres of Jews. He has since
been a popular speaker at far-right events.
Nov. 22,
2005: Angela Merkel is elected as German chancellor
Angela
Merkel, leader of the center-right party, the Christian Democrats, took office
in a left-right coalition in Germany in late 2005, becoming both the first
female chancellor and reunified Germany’s first leader to have grown up in the
East. She moved her party firmly to the center, becoming recognized worldwide
as a face of democratic tolerance and pragmatism.
Feb. 6,
2013: A new party takes shape on the right
It was
frustration with Ms. Merkel’s centrism — and especially her decision to commit
German taxpayer money to a bailout of Greece — that a group of elite
conservatives cited when they began a party of their own, one that initially
made skepticism of European integration the center of its message: the
Alternative for Germany, widely known by its German initials, AfD.
2015-16:
Over a million migrants arrive in Germany
The Syrian
War, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and widespread poverty fueled a
wide-reaching migrant crisis in 2015. More than 1.3 million people applied for
asylum in the European Union that year, after dangerous and sometimes deadly
journeys.
Faced with
a test of compassion, Ms. Merkel’s response was dramatic. She welcomed more
than one million asylum seekers into Germany.
In
response, the AfD shifted its policies and messaging to focus on domestic
security and immigration. Its popularity grew, especially in eastern cities, as
its tone became increasingly nationalistic, populistic and — its critics said —
racist.
Oct. 17,
2015: A pro-refugee politician is stabbed
Henriette
Reker, a candidate to be mayor of Cologne, was handing out flowers to voters at
a bustling market when a man who wanted to punish her for her pro-refugee
stance took a rose with one hand and rammed a kitchen knife into her throat
with the other. The attack put her in an intensive care unit; she awoke from a
coma to find herself elected.
April 27,
2017: A German military officer is arrested — and nationwide far-right networks
begin coming to light
In 2017, a
mysterious gun was found in an airport bathroom. The gun ultimately led to the
arrest of a German military officer, Franco A. He is accused of posing as a
refugee in what investigators say was an assassination plot intended to take
down the German government. Franco A. denies this, and has said he was trying
to expose flaws in the asylum system.
His case
set off a sprawling investigation that led the German authorities into a
labyrinth of extremist networks at all levels of the nation’s security services
— a threat that, they acknowledged in 2020, was far more extensive than they
had ever imagined.
One group,
run by a former soldier and police sniper in northern Germany, hoarded weapons,
kept enemy lists and ordered body bags. Another, run by a special-forces
soldier code-named Hannibal, put the spotlight on the KSK, Germany’s most elite
force.
Sept. 24,
2017: The far right is elected into Germany’s Parliament
The first
federal elections since the arrival of over a million migrants returned Ms.
Merkel to office. But voter anger over immigration and inequality showed in a
drop in support for the two main parties, and a shocking surge for the AfD,
which received nearly 13 percent of the vote on an anti-migration platform. It
was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had gained enough
support to enter the German Parliament.
August
2018: Anti-immigrant riots attract both neo-Nazis and far-right voters
Days of
neo-Nazi protests broke out in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany, after word spread
that an Iraqi and a Syrian asylum seeker were suspected in a knife attack that
had killed a German man. While neo-Nazis had a long tradition of demonstrations
in Chemnitz, these riots were different.
The crowds
were at times 8,000-strong. Led by several hundred identifiable neo-Nazis, they
also appeared to be joined by thousands of ordinary citizens.
“This mix
of far-right extremists and AfD voters was new,” said Hajo Funke, a political
scientist at the Free University of Berlin and a veteran expert on the far
right.
The country
was shocked by images of the angry mob marching through the streets, chasing
after bystanders they thought looked foreign. Police officers, vastly
outnumbered, were too afraid to intervene.
“Wir sind
das Volk.” In German it means, “We are the people.” This chant echoed through
the streets of Chemnitz, Germany, this week, as far-right protesters set out to
vent their frustrations, create mayhem and attack refugees. It was also heard
in Clausnitz in early 2016, as a mob of Germans surrounded a bus of refugees
entering their town. And later that year in Bautzen, as 80 Germans chased some
20 teenage refugees through the streets. The chant has become a go-to for the
German far right. But it wasn’t always an extremist rallying cry. “Leipzig is a
city of protest again tonight.” In 1989, people in East Germany took to the
streets to demand more freedom, after living under an oppressive communist
regime for decades. Their movement was neither of the right nor the left. It
was a cry for democracy. After German reunification, the chant largely
disappeared. But in recent years, it has been co-opted by far-right groups who
violently oppose Angela Merkel’s open border policies.
Sept. 18,
2018: A spy chief is removed from office
Hans-Georg
Maassen, Germany’s chief of domestic intelligence, was removed from his post
after he questioned the authenticity of a video showing an immigrant being
chased by far-right protesters in Chemnitz, directly contradicting Ms. Merkel.
Their public rift renewed questions about whether Germany’s security apparatus
had minimized the threat of the far right — especially as Mr. Maassen was
appointed to overhaul the service after the National Socialist Underground
murders came to light.
June 2, 2019:
A politician is assassinated
Walter
Lübcke, a regional politician representing Ms. Merkel’s party, became a target
for far-right death threats because of his uncompromising defense of her
refugee policy.
Then, after
years of abuse from extremists, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his
terrace, in what was Germany’s first far-right political assassination since
the Nazi era. His murderer had a violent neo-Nazi past and police record; he
was convicted of the murder in January and sentenced to life in prison.
Oct. 9,
2019: A synagogue is attacked
On Yom
Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a heavily armed nationalist and
white supremacist tried to storm a synagogue in Halle, eastern Germany, while
streaming it live online from a head camera. Foiled by a locked door, he killed
two people outside and wounded two others; 51 people were inside.
The
attacker, who was 28, received a life sentence for murder and attempted murder
the following year.
Feb. 19,
2020: Another far-right gunman strikes, this time in the West
A far-right
extremist opened fire at multiple locations in Hanau, east of Frankfurt, in the
winter of 2020, killing nine mostly young people in Germany’s deadliest
far-right attack in recent memory. He later returned home, where he shot and
killed his mother and himself.
The attack
shocked Germany and drove home a fear that no part of the country is immune to
the potential for far-right violence.
July 2020:
Germany’s defense minister disbands a company of the special forces
Germany’s
defense minister announced that she would partially disband the KSK, Germany’s
elite special forces unit, saying it had been infiltrated by far-right
extremism.
The defense
minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, said far-right extremism had become so
pervasive in one of four fighting companies inside the special forces that it
would be dissolved, and the rest would be overhauled.
“The KSK
cannot continue in its current form,” Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer told a news
conference, describing “toxic leadership” inside the unit, which, she added,
had “developed and promoted extremist tendencies.”
The
announcement came seven weeks after investigators discovered a trove of Nazi
memorabilia and an extensive arsenal of stolen ammunition and explosives on the
property of a sergeant major who had served in the KSK since 2001.
Aug. 29,
2020: Far-right protesters attempt to storm the German Parliament
Hundreds of
far-right activists waving the black, white and red flag of the pre-1918 German
Empire broke through a police barrier and tried to force their way into the
German Parliament building during a protest against Germany’s pandemic
response.
It took
only a few tense minutes before the police, soon aided by reinforcements,
managed to push them back. But the events were an alarming escalation of
pandemic protests that have grown steadily bigger and — on the fringes at least
— angrier. The AfD has tried to exploit the pandemic in the same way it used
the refugee crisis in 2015.
.
Sept. 16,
2020: 29 police officers are suspended on suspicion of sharing violent neo-Nazi
propaganda
A police force
in Germany suspended 29 officers suspected of sharing images of Hitler and
violent neo-Nazi propaganda in at least five online chat groups, adding to
concerns about far-right infiltration. The 126 images shared included
swastikas, a fabricated picture of a refugee in a gas chamber and the shooting
of a Black man, officials said.
After an
investigation, additional officers in the unit were suspended, bringing the
total to 44. Currently, 24 of those officers are still suspended.
Several
other cases have since emerged. The authorities recently disbanded an elite
police unit in Frankfurt and suspended 18 of its members after they were also
found to have been involved in a chat group that exchanged racist messages and
glorified the Nazis.
March 2021:
The German intelligence service declares the AfD a threat
For the
first time in its postwar history, Germany placed its main opposition party,
the AfD, under surveillance. While the country’s domestic intelligence agency
hoped to tap phones and other communications and monitor the movements of AfD
members, the party legally challenged this decision. A court forced the
intelligence agency to suspend surveillance activities in the interim.
Still, the
decision was among the most sweeping efforts yet to deal with the rise of
far-right and neo-Nazi political movements within Western democracies.
In May,
federal prosecutors laid out their case against Franco A. in the opening of one
of postwar Germany’s most spectacular terrorism trials. They said he had been
motivated by a “hardened far-right extremist mind-set” to plot political murder
in the hope of provoking a backlash against refugees meant to bring down the
Federal Republic of Germany. Franco A. denies the terrorism charges against
him.
However,
long before Franco A. ever walked into the courtroom, he talked to The Times.
In our new series, Day X, we spoke with him and heard what the threat of the
far right in Germany can sound like today.
You can
listen to that interview, and our investigation into the reach of far-right
networks within the German military and police, now.
Day X was
made by Katrin Bennhold, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Kaitlin Roberts,
Larissa Anderson and Mike Benoist. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.
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
Melissa
Eddy is a correspondent based in Berlin who covers German politics, social
issues and culture. She came to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1996, and
previously worked for The Associated Press in Frankfurt, Vienna and the
Balkans. @meddynyt • Facebook
Christopher
F. Schuetze covers German news, society and occasionally arts from the Berlin
bureau. Before moving to Germany, he lived in the Netherlands, where he covered
everything from tulips to sea-level rise. @CFSchuetze
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