Across the Rhine, the challenge to health restrictions and the anti-Covid vaccine is taking worrying forms, say the authorities. On Thursday, German justice announced that it had foiled plans for attacks fomented by a radicalized fringe of the “antivax” movement, close to the far right, who wanted to attack the democratic order.
What was the threat?
In Germany, following an investigation carried out since October 2021, five Germans belonging to the anti-sanitary restrictions movement and part of a messaging group entitled “United Patriots”, were suspected of planning terrorist attacks. far right. Of the five individuals, aged 41 to 55, four were arrested. Their network, organized on the Telegram platform, notably envisaged the kidnappings of public figures such as the Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, a supporter of restrictions in the face of Covid-19.
The group gathered around 70 people across the country. They spoke among themselves “from a reversal of the democratic order, the establishment of a new government, to statements that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin should also succeed here in Germany to allow the advent of a new system”, summarized the Minister of the Interior of Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz.
These suspects had notably planned to attack the electricity networks to cause “a long-lasting power outage throughout the territory”, which would have, in their minds, created the conditions for a “civil war”.
The troops seemed well prepared. During searches in nine regions on Wednesday, investigators seized firearms and ammunition, gold bars and silver coins, currency worth more than 10,000 euros, as well as mobile phones including analysis still needs to be done. They also found false Covid-19 vaccination certificates, or several written documents concerning their plans to overthrow the state.
Are there any precedents?
As unlikely as that may seem, this is not the first time such a threat has been detected. In December, the police had carried out searches and seized several weapons, including crossbows, in Dresden, from a group of opponents who threatened the Prime Minister of Saxony Michael Kretschmer with murder.
Some activists seem capable of taking action, in a more or less organized way. In late March, in Zürich, Switzerland, a senior immunization official in the country was briefly kidnapped. A suspect, a 38-year-old German national, was arrested in the area last week by local police. Armed, the man shot at the police, who responded. The kidnapper died during the intervention, as well as a woman, also hit by gunfire. According to the Swiss press, this man would have been in contact with conspiratorial supporters of the flat earth theory, the “Flat Earthers”.
Last September, a 50-year-old man shot and killed a 20-year-old cashier at a gas station in Idar-Oberstein, western Germany. The young cashier had refused to serve him because he was not wearing a mask. Faced with the authorities, the assailant admitted to being openly opposed to the anti-Covid-19 restriction measures.
What do the German authorities say?
They do not hesitate to qualify these projects as terrorism. The Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, thus compares the projects of this group to “fantasies of a coup d’etat”, which demonstrate that Germany is facing “a new dimension of the terrorist threat”.
Personally targeted by the group arrested on Thursday, the German Social Democratic Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, also denounced a drift of certain “Querdenker” (non-conformist thinkers), as these opponents of the government’s policy of fight against the pandemic. This “shows not only that the protests against the anti-Covid rules have become radicalized, (…) but that there are parallel attempts to destabilize the state”, he reacted to the press, deploring the actions “of a small but very dangerous minority”.
What does the German antivax movement look like?
In Germany, the anti-vaccine and/or conspiratorial movement, sometimes gathered under the term “Querdenken” (free thought, or anti-conformism, in German) has been particularly mobilized since the start of the pandemic. As in other countries, she communicates through social networks, including Telegram. She was noticed across the Rhine by threats made against elected officials, or during demonstrations, raising fears of a radicalization approaching extremist circles.
“Conspiratorial ideology and far-right mobilization against anti-Covid protective measures are also accompanied by an increase in direct violence”, already worried the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a think tank German specialist in research on the far right and conspiracy, in a report published in 2021.
While the restrictions linked to the pandemic are lifted further, these movements continue the mobilization on the Internet, testifies the center. “Even if the Querdenken and other movements bring fewer people to the streets, they have a dense, organized and professionalized communication network online, which can be frequently reactivated,” he adds.
These threats grow in a context where, more broadly, the threat of far-right violence is growing in Germany. In June 2019, a neo-Nazi militant shot in the head the elected Walter Lübcke, a member of the conservative party of Angela Merkel who defended the policy of welcoming migrants of the former chancellor. A murder which triggered an intensification of police operations against far-right movements: the violence of these circles is also erected there at the forefront of threats to public order in Germany, before the jihadist risk.