Government Apparently Unprepared To Face Threat
During a recent ceremony in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the Nazis, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, issued a grim warning: “Hate and abuse are spreading,” he told a audience that included his Israeli counterpart. Having imagined that “the specters of the past would disappear over time”, the Germans now see them “raising their ugly heads in a new light”.
A shooting in the town of Hanau, near Frankfurt, seems to have depressed Mr. Steinmeier. On the night of February 19, an gunman attacked two shisha bars, killing at least nine people. All had, in German slang, a “migratory background”, like most of the wounded. Five of the dead are said to be Turkish nationals. The federal prosecutor stated that the attacker had acted on racist grounds. Hours after the bombing, police found the body of the suspect, and of a woman who is said to be his mother, in his apartment.
Several German politicians have noted that the massacre was part of a dark pattern of recent far-right violence. Last June Walter Lübcke, a regional Christian Democrat Union (CDU) politician from Angela Merkel, who had supported his refugee policy, was shot dead at his home in Kassel. In Yom Kippur, in October, a young man armed himself with homemade grenades and assault rifles and attempted to commit a massacre in a synagogue in Halle. Annoyed by its locked doors, he turned his arms on two innocent passers-by. Weeks later, in the same city, unidentified gunmen shot at the (unoccupied) office of Karamba Diaby, a black Social Democrat MP who receives a constant stream of death threats. Last week, German police disrupted a network of extremists who they said were planning a series of deadly raids on mosques across the country. Merkel linked the Hanau attacks to some of these events. “Racism is a poison, hatred is a poison … and it is responsible for too many crimes,” she said.
German security officials are accused by leftists of responding too slowly to the threat from the far right. Some remember the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi gang that, between 2000 and 2007, killed ten people, bombed and robbed banks, while the police botched the response. A subsequent increase in Islamist violence has undoubtedly diverted attention and resources, for good reason: Islamist terrorists have killed 17 people since 2011, including 12 in an attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 But the Islamist threat is overshadowed by that of the far right. National intelligence agencies counted 32,200 far-right extremists in Germany last year. The military itself is suspected of harboring hundreds of them.
A separate concern centers on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Since the refugee crisis in 2015-2016, the AfD has moved to the right, maintaining racial tensions which, according to some, contribute to an atmosphere in which violence develops. Its politicians like to portray shisha bars as shady dens for money laundering and other harmful activities. Hanau’s attacks are expected to strengthen the cordon cordon that other parties have erected around the AfD, which was recently damaged after the CDU voted with the party to eject a left-wing government in eastern Thuringia. (The scandal overthrew Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the leader of the CDU and the alleged heiress of Mrs Merkel.) The political problem is more delicate in the east, and yet, apart from Halle, the incidents of extreme violence the most recent right occurred to the west.
Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, distinguishes between organized neo-Nazi groups – who often have long experience of violence but, with the exception of the NSU, have rarely engaged in true terrorism – and more recent attacks by individuals who have assembled their own “do-it-yourself” ideologies on the Internet. Like the author of Halle, the suspect in Hanau seems unknown to the authorities and apparently unrelated to the organized groups. Instead, he was marinated in an online world of racist fantasies and conspiracy theories. A “manifesto” he allegedly wrote last year, of which The Economist saw a copy, advocates the total destruction of most countries in North Africa and the Middle East, but is largely devoted to the paranoid allegations of surveillance and dark plots.
The German authorities, resolutely determined to eliminate far-right violence directed against traditional neo-Nazi groups, may not have all the tools necessary to deal with such amorphous threats. Indeed, says Neumann, the German experience does not seem particularly distinct from that of other countries, citing recent attacks in America and New Zealand. The suspects in Halle and Hanau addressed an imaginary audience in English; they “see themselves as part of a global community of like-minded people,” said Neumann.
A particular danger in Germany is that the worlds of organized neo-Nazis and terrorists connected to the Internet can start to mix. The terrorist cell dismantled last week had been established largely through chat rooms and courier services; many of its members had never met. The German intelligence services woke up belatedly to face this danger. As Mr. Steinmeier pointed out, old threats can take on a new appearance.