TerrorismSmall increase in far-right extremist violence in Germany

The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, said that violent crimes driven by xenophobia rose slightly in Germany last year.

In a new report, BfV says that there were 24,100 right-wing extremists in Germany — 100 more than in 2017 — of whom 12,700 were considered “violence-oriented.” The overall number of right-wing extremist crimes dropped by 0.3 percent in 2018, but the number of violent crimes committed by known right-wing extremists rose by 3.2 percent (from 1,054 to 1,088), according to the report.

These numbers show that there has been a new upturn in violent right-wing violence, following a decline in such violence toward the end of 2016, when the “refugee crisis” of 2015-2016 was past its peak.

The Express reports that this year’s BfV report was released at a sensitive moment, with the police announcing the arrests of two more suspects in the assassination of Walter Lübcke, a conservative pro-immigration politician from Chancellor Angela Merkle’s party.

The main suspect, a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Stephan Ernst, has confessed to the killing this week while in custody. He has been in trouble with the police before for violence against immigrants.

The two new suspects were arrested for supplying Ernst with weapons. The three appear to have formed a terrorist cell modeled after the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a 3-member neo-Nazi terrorist cell; whose members were convicted for committing ten murders, as well as several bombings and bank robberies, over an eight-year period.

At a press conference on Thursday, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer tried to push back against accusation that the BfV was slow to recognize the danger of right-wing terrorism in Germany. “The problem we have is when we say we will improve, it is understood as a criticism of the past, or that we were asleep before,” he told reporters. “Of course, it’s natural that one always tries to improve, to stay good.”

BfV director Thomas Haldenwang said that a number of reforms inside the BfV had been introduced in the wake of the NSU murders. Those reforms, he said, took place under his predecessor Hans-Georg Maassen — who was dismissed amid controversy over his allegedly lax stance toward the far-right amid the fallout when investigative failings were revealed in the NSU murder series.

“There is a more intensive cooperation with other security forces,” Haldenwang said. “Since I came to office, I have always emphasized that in the last few months we are seeing a new and intensified development in far-right extremism.” The agency is reacting, he said: “We are intensively addressing the issue of networks in far-right extremism. We are very alert to the activities of far-right extremists in the internet.”