Neo-Nazis in Saxony: Corona as a recruitment aid

The corona pandemic was a fire accelerator for the radicalization of young people in the extreme right-wing scene, as research by the MDR magazine fact demonstrate. In hot spots like Zwickau, youth clubs and street workers are fighting back.

A poster hangs on the wall in Zwickau’s “Lutherkeller” explaining right-wing extremist symbols that are banned here. The social worker Chris Schlueter tries to catch up on everything else through discussions. Again and again he is confronted with misanthropic statements. He patiently questions statements made, relies on his good relationship with the young people and tries to get them to think through the conversations. While schools and youth clubs had to close for long periods, extreme right-wing organizations had expanded their offerings. He could feel that in his youngsters, too.

Youngsters train for day X

Whether networking during the so-called Monday walks or targeted offers for young people from neo-Nazi organizations such as the micro-party “The Third Way”: The corona pandemic has made it easier for organized right-wing extremists to recruit. “The Third Way” is also active in Zwickau and Plauen. The party, co-founded by former NPD officials and activists of the “Freien Netz Süd”, which has been banned since 2014, regularly makes offers to young people.

“Yes, it’s like a small family there. Just the camaraderie. You just help each other,” says a 16-year-old who sympathizes with the “Third Way.” There is free tutoring for children and free martial arts training. He also does that himself. “They always say: ‘For the political street fight. For day X., the overthrow of the government.'”

“Day X implies the explicit use of violence,” says Theresa Richter from the Saxony Cultural Office. The neo-Nazi party specifically recruits young talent and sees itself as an “elite”. In order to keep young people with her, she acts as a caretaker and gives herself a social coat of paint.

The mistakes of youth work after the turn

Zwickau has long been a Hotspot of the right scene. The so-called NSU trio stayed here until 2011 lived hidden underground: Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos. The three met in Thuringia in the early 1990s.

A youth club in Jena played a central role at the time – it was the central meeting place for later right-wing terrorists. “For the NSU, and the core group around the later NSU, the youth club financed by the city, the winegrowers’ club, was the central place of radicalization,” says Matthias Quent, extremism researcher at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences.

People exchanged ideas there, listened to concerts, established a form of political subculture – and so more and more young people got sucked into neo-Nazism. Dissenters were scared off. “So that it wasn’t a place for everyone, but ultimately a right-wing extremist, a nationally liberated zone and then also the starting point for violence and terror.”

Youth work today does not want to repeat the mistakes of the past of leaving entire youth clubs to the right-wing scene. The challenge for Schlueter: allow right-wing young people to participate in the Lutherkeller and still set clear boundaries. That’s difficult when, for example, 16-year-old Gino says that he doesn’t have a problem with people with different skin colors being attacked.

The pedagogue admits that he moves in a field of tension and recognizes the limits of his work. Unlikely that he will convince Gino to stand up for an open society. “It’s then our job to say: ‘Okay, how can we perhaps find a way together so that you at least accept the open society.'”

Violence and Networking on the “Monday Walks”

How the ideology turns into violence was shown in Zwickau at the protest marches against the Corona measures, for which the “German Youth Zwickau” mobilized, among others – an Instagram channel from the neo-Nazi milieu that has since been deleted.

Young people in particular threw up slogans such as “Bambule, riots, right-wing extremists” at the demos. At a “Monday Demo” in November last year a team of MDR target of an attack. The two attackers were just 17 years old. Just a week after the attack, the so-called Monday walk escalated again. The police were surrounded and there were charges of detonating pyrotechnics and loudly chanting “Sieg Heil!” One of the juvenile perpetrators is now in custody. Among other things, because of dangerous bodily harm – he had almost killed someone of the same age.

“They are willing to use violence, they are well networked. And these are lines of development that definitely need to be monitored very closely,” says Richter, who observes the right-wing extremist scene in the Zwickau region. Because the example of the NSU and Zwickau has shown that “right-wing terror always occurs where people don’t look closely. Where security authorities don’t take action either.”

De-radicalization as a goal

According to deradicalization expert Peter Anhalt, it is often only a prison sentence that has an effect on radicalized offenders. The neo-Nazis who have committed crimes are isolated from their previous social environment and are looking for interpersonal relationships. “With most of the clients we work with, there is some kind of ambivalence between destructive parts and the desire for a completely different life. And to dock on to this ambivalence and say okay, there is also the side that has something too wants something else and who also sees that what he is doing is not right.”

In order not to let it get that far, it takes a lot of effort like that of Chris Schlueter. Matthias Quent criticizes that children and young people are far too rarely the focus of political debates. “It is a social and also a political failure that young people in particular are given so little attention and so little financial means to have offers that are not right-wing extremists,” says Quent. Spaces are needed in which young people can realize themselves, in which they can find confirmation, recognition and community without being radicalized. “That means right-wing extremism is always a response to weaknesses, to mistakes and always to the failure of society and politics.”