Stuff Digital Edition

Far right’s disparate delusions

Telegraph Group/The Times

The pressure has been building for years. Since the 2015 migration crisis, German police have uncovered bizarre plots to bring the constitutional order crashing down through a civil war, often referred to as ‘‘Day X’’. One army lieutenant led a double life as a fake refugee from Syria, with the intention of assassinating ministers and unleashing fury against immigrants.

That investigation led to the discovery of the Hannibal network, a tangle of interlinked far-right chat groups in which dozens of police officers, soldiers, security officials and even judges discussed their plans for the impending collapse of the German social order.

What has changed in the past three years is that the pandemic restrictions have loosely soldered together an inchoate mass of resentment that these groups hope to mobilise into an uprising, fanned by the right-wing populists of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

In August 2020 a lockdown protest in Berlin boiled over into an attempt to seize the Reichstag building as 300 to 400 demonstrators broke through the barricades, aided and abetted from within parliament by a handful of AfD MPs.

This year, security agencies have been warning of a ‘‘hot winter’’ in which extremist factions would compete to channel public anger into an assault on the state.

In a country which is deeply ambivalent about all things military, the armed forces and security services do not always attract the most politically benign recruits.

As the judge in the trial last year of a KSK special forces soldier – charged after far-right material and a buried arsenal were discovered in his home – put it: ‘‘ You don’t find a lot of Greens or leftists in the military.’’

The mass dawn arrests yesterday reveal the sometimes bizarre diversity of Germany’s far right. The coup plot appears to have centred around Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, a minor aristocrat who planned to become kaiser in a renewed German Reich.

The idea, it seems, was to restore the German Empire of 1871-1918, forged by Otto von Bismarck in a series of 19thcentury wars but abolished in the aftermath of the World War I.

Though the Reichsbu¨rger group is organised enough to have ID cards replete with the flag and crest of Imperial Germany, its ideology is more scattergun. Many members back Heinrich XIII’s obsession with the

German Empire, while others insist Hitler’s Third Reich remains the legitimate state. They also hold to more modern conspiracies such as the ‘‘great replacement’’, which claims that elites want to replace white Europeans with minorities. Pre-war Germany was no stranger to coups, with the Weimar Republic fatally undermined by the fact that most of the right-wing parties it contained simply did not believe in democracy.

Today’s plotters don’t represent anywhere near the same threat, but they do perhaps reflect the dubious methods by which West Germany’s postwar democracy was secured. With the rapid emergence of the Cold War, the United States quickly ditched efforts at de-Nazification and quietly allowed tainted officials back into the civil service and military.

Germany’s security apparatus then spent the Cold War focused intently on the communist threat, to the exclusion of much else.

Such circumstances allowed the far right to retain substantial roots, which were only boosted post-1989 by an influx of recruits from the battered and economically marginalised East.

In Depth

en-nz

2022-12-09T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-09T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuff.pressreader.com/article/281865827508016

Stuff Limited