Germany sees surge in weapon seizures from far right

An expert on right-wing extremism has warned of “massive rearmament” by neo-Nazi groups after German police seized 61% more weapons during raids on the radical right in 2018 than the previous year.

German public broadcaster ARD on Friday, citing Interior Ministry figures requested by the socialist Left party, reported that 1,091 weapons were seized during raids on far-right extremists last year. In 2017, 676 weapons were confiscated.

The weapons seized included handguns, rifles, and other conflict apparatus including explosives, detonators, knives, batons, projectiles and even replica guns.

Read more: Germany: Far-right murder suspect linked to stabbing Iraqi

The government figures were based on 563 right-wing-motivated crimes involving weapons, including 235 violent incidents.

‘Frightening’ sign of trouble ahead

The increase was described as “frightening and alarming” by Matthias Quent, an expert on right-wing extremism at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, or IDZ.

He said the figures showed “a massive armament and rearmament of Germany’s right-wing radical scene.”

Quent said neo-Nazi groups were preparing to stage fresh militant attacks on minorities, political opponents and representatives of the state.

“Their goal is to intimidate society and the displacement of certain groups of people. Parts of the scene even want a civil war,” he told ARD.

Read more: Europe’s right-wing extremists try recruiting from police, army

A separate Interior Ministry report released this month revealed that authorities had registered 8,605 right-wing offenses in the first half of 2019, an increase of 900 crimes.

The number of violent crimes committed by known right-wing extremists rose by 3.2%, from 1,054 to 1,088, according to the report.

Thousands recruited 

The domestic security agency (BfV) believes there are around 24,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, of whom nearly 13,000 are considered “violence-driven.” 

Police have been on high alert for possible attacks on lawmakers since the murder in June of German politician Walter Lübcke, who was shot dead outside his home in an apparent act of right-wing violence.

Lübcke had been a keen supporter of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy.

Read more: AfD: What you need to know about Germany’s far-right party

This week, Social Democrat (SPD) politician Uli Grötsch revealed that he’d received death threats from neo-Nazis.

Asylum-seekers and refugees, meanwhile, continue to be the targets of attacks in Germany and are the victims of most far-right violence.

Police registered 609 attacks on the newcomers to Germany during the first half of 2019, according to newspaper the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.

Earlier this month, German media reported that the federal criminal police agency plans to overhaul its structures to step up the fight against far-right groups and hate crimes.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland

  Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch – but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: “We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alice Weidel

  Alice Weidel generally plays the role of “voice of reason” for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians “pigs” and “puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Frauke Petry

  German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Björn Höcke

  The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year – leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Beatrix von Storch

  Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts – but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. “People who won’t accept STOP at our borders are attackers,” the European lawmaker said. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Marcus Pretzell

  Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Wendt

  The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Poggenburg

  Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to “get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus” — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland – again …

  During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be “disposed of” back to Anatolia. The German term, “entsorgen,” raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  … and again

  Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD’s youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a “glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andreas Kalbitz

  The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. “Der Spiegel” had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of “14 neo-Nazis” who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of “curiosity.”

  Author: Dagmar Breitenbach

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