On Christmas Eve 1959, two members of a small far-right west German political party daubed swastikas and an anti-Semitic slogan on the synagogue in the Rhineland city of Cologne. Coming only 14 years after the end of the second world war, the outrage caused deep embarrassment to West Germany, then a young democracy anxious to win respectability.
Decades later, this incident and others like it around the world, were discovered to have been part of an operation instigated by the Soviet KGB intelligence agency and its East German communist partners to smear West Germany and its allies. At the time, however, the episode in Cologne so worried the authorities that the Bundestag passed a law against “incitement of the people” that remains in force to this day.
The KGB’s involvement serves as a reminder that not every far-right incident is necessarily what it looks like on the surface. But there is overwhelming evidence that extreme rightwing violence is on the rise in many western democracies. Germany is among those most seriously affected.
Despite pressure on its budget from the pandemic, the German government has decided to spend more than €1bn over the next four years on tackling rightwing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism. Measures will include action against disinformation, help for victims, educational and cultural programmes and, possibly, the removal from the German constitution of the word Rasse, usually translated into English as race, which has specific Nazi-era connotations.
Germany has earned a justified reputation as one of Europe’s most stable, mature and moderate polities. Despite the breakthrough of the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany, which has been the largest opposition party in the Bundestag since 2017, most voters remain attached to mainstream parties and peaceful, liberal values. Yet an undercurrent of ultra-right violence has gathered pace since unification in 1990. After a gunman killed 10 people in the city of Hanau in February, interior minister Horst Seehofer said far-right extremism was “the biggest threat” facing Germany.
The authorities are starting to address the disturbing degree to which elements in the armed forces and security services harbour sympathies for the far right. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, defence minister, ordered the disbandment in July of a company of elite commando forces on grounds that soldiers had covered up the extreme rightwing activities of some of their comrades.
If Germany has been slow to wake up to the far-right threat, one reason is that much attention has been focused on Islamist terrorism, especially since a 2016 Christmas market attack in Berlin that killed 12. In its latest report on global terrorism, the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think-tank, wrote last week that far-right violence tends to be “not as lethal as Islamist terrorism in the west”. But it also estimated that while, between 2002 and 2014, the far-right never accounted for more than 14 per cent of annual terror attacks in western countries, this had risen to 46 per cent last year.
Many extremist attacks are the work of “lone wolf” individuals rather than organised groups. Yet such rightwing groups do exist — some originating in shadowy neo-Nazi networks in the former communist east. Germans were stunned a decade ago to learn that one such group, the National Socialist Underground, had gone undetected for years, killing nine immigrants and a police officer between 2000 and 2007.
The government’s new initiatives against far-right extremism appear sensible but will undoubtedly take time to have an effect. Ultimately, the best protection against violent political extremism of any sort is a society that is alert to the danger.
tony.barber@ft.com