German Government Promotes Antifa With Publicly-Funded Guides to Political Violence

While some European countries have hastened to follow US President Donald Trump’s example in designating Antifa as a terrorist organisation, Germany is not one of them. In fact, the German Government actively promotes Antifa.

Thus, as first disclosed by German journalist Stefan Frank on the Achse des Guten (‘Axis of Good’) blog, last year the German Government funded a full-fledged “guide for Antifa thugs”, as the title of Frank’s piece puts it. The description alludes to the Antifa movement’s well-known proclivity for violence. The brochure itself is titled Nazis Hate These Tricks: 20 Reflections on How to Combat Right-Wing Extremism. It was funded, believe it or not, by the German Ministry of Family Affairs – or, per its full title at the time, the Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth – as well as one other German public agency.

The Ministry made the brochure available on its website as part of its ostensibly pedagogical Democratie Leben! (Live Democracy!) programme, describing the document more daintily as Practical Tips for Combating Right-Wing Extremism. (The Ministry’s download link no longer works, perhaps as a reaction to Frank’s article, but the brochure is still available here, for instance.)

As Frank’s description suggests, and as is evident on every page, the brochure is explicitly conceived as a guidebook for “Antifa”. Thus, it is addressed to “Dear Colleagues, Dear Antifascists” and the preface explains that: “The ‘tricks’ in this brochure are based on the many years of experience of numerous active anti-fascists, and thus represent collective knowledge of the movement.”

Moreover, in an apologia for the “movement”, the unnamed authors even note that “the former American President Donald Trump wanted to designate them [Antifa] as a terror organisation,” i.e., already in his first term, and the former head of German domestic intelligence, Hans-Georg Maaßen, wanted Antifa banned. They go on to explain that: “In many cases, the motivation [for the opposition to Antifa] is relatively clear: The far-Right and its supporters are working to demonise and delegitimise those who are standing in their way again and again.”

“Antifascism,” they conclude, “is absolutely necessary!’”

But the very title Nazis Hate These Tricks: 20 Reflections on How to Combat Right-Wing Extremism reveals the main problem with contemporary so-called “Antifa”. The original anti-fascists from the 1930s, whose name and flag contemporary Antifa has appropriated, were, of course, combatting real fascists, i.e., people and organisations who called themselves fascists or, more precisely, in the German case, Nazis. These real Nazis, moreover, famously included the Nazi party’s own dedicated ‘thugs’, in the form of the Schutzabteilung or SA: the infamous ‘brown shirts’ who used violence to intimidate, or even eliminate, the party’s political opponents and other perceived ‘enemies’.

Contemporary self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ have adopted the same street-fighting tactics, but to combat people and organisations that they call ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’, even though those so identified by Antifa do not identify as fascists, much less Nazis, themselves – and, incidentally, as a rule do not themselves, unlike Antifa, employ violence as a political tactic.

Stefan Frank’s discussion of Nazis Hate These Tricks highlights this issue by noting that the brochure identifies the contemporary “far-Right” with opposition to the Green political agenda and, in particular, the fight for what the brochure calls “climate justice”. Thus, the authors allude to the supposedly “far-Right” idea that “Left-green infested circles” are staging climate change in order to establish an “eco-socialist dictatorship”. And they explain further that “what is behind this is an attempt to deflect responsibility for the climate catastrophe away from industrialised countries”.

But what on earth does this have to do with historical Nazism? As is well known, at least to historians, the Nazis were themselves in fact committed environmentalists. This has been the subject of extensive scholarly research, including, for instance, Frank Uekoetter’s The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, published by Cambridge University Press. Indeed, as journalist Michael Miersch discusses in his article Green with Brown Spots, several ex-Nazis figured among the founders of the German Green Party.

What is less known is that even the theory of allegedly ‘man-made global warming’, the centrepiece of contemporary Green activism and policy, has its origins in part in Nazi Germany: namely in the work of meteorologist Hermann Flohn, and in particular his 1941 treatise on Die Tätigkeit des Menschen als Klimafaktor (Man’s Activity as Climatic Factor). That same year, per his curriculum vitae, Flohn was appointed as counsellor in the weather service of the Supreme Commander of the German Luftwaffe. The Supreme Commander of the German Luftwaffe was Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring.

In the meanwhile, the German alternative news site Nius has discovered yet another Antifa handbook that has benefited from German public largesse – or perhaps, in this case, more exactly, been rewarded with it. This one is titled Tips and Tricks for Antifas and Antiras. “Antira” is short for ‘anti-racist’. The volume was published in 2023 by the Unrast publishing house. The Antifa logo figures right on the volume’s cover.

Nius reports that Unrast has received over €42,000 in de facto public subsidies from the German government since 2023. The subsidies took the form of ‘German Publishing House Prizes’, which are awarded annually to numerous publishing houses by the German government’s Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

It is unclear why Nius cites the €42,000 figure. According to the Culture Commissioner’s website, Unrast received €24,000 in prize money in 2023 and €50,000 this year as one of the three top prize winners. This brings the total to nearly €75,000.

The current German Culture Commissioner is Wolfram Weimer of Chancellor Merz’s ostensibly ‘conservative’ Christian Democratic Union party. The awards page on the Commissioner’s website notes that Unrast has published over 528 titles, “from anti-fascist and feminist social theory to international fiction and graphic novels”.

Nius has posted a selection of photos of choice passages from the Antifa book. The passages include, for instance, advice on the most appropriate “self-defence weapons” for Antifa to use:, e.g. “pepper spray, telescopic batons, kubotans (a self-defence keychain weapon), electro-shockers, and, in exceptional cases, gas pistols”. Plus tips on defending occupied buildings: “People can be posted in the upper floors. … Then they either throw things out the windows or shoot fireworks to prevent the assailants from reaching the house. But you have to be careful: a bottle thrown from the third floor can be deadly.”

And suggestions of possible “actions” to undertake: “Depending on the opportunity, stationary demonstrations, flash mobs and so-called ‘shards[-of-glass] demos’ (demonstrations in which shop windows and the like get broken)” are also organised and carried out.

In the reference to “shards-of-glass demos” (Scherben-Demos), it is difficult not to hear a chilling echo of the infamous Kristallnacht or ‘Night of the Broken Glass’, so-named for the Jewish shop windows that were smashed by SA thugs during the November 1938 pogroms that heralded a major escalation in the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

John Rosenthal is a journalist specialising in European politics. His writings have appeared in such venues as World Affairs, World Politics Review and Brussels Signal. This article was first published in Brussels Signal: www.brusselssignal.eu.

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