The terror cell of the National Socialist underground (NSU), the assassination of the Kassel district president Walter Lübcke - and now the attack on the synagogue in Halle: The series of murders and other right-wing acts of violence alerts the authorities. It raises questions about the development of right-wing extremism in Germany.
Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) regards right-wing extremism alongside Islamist terrorism as "the greatest threat in our country". The protection of the Constitution sees a high degree of violence among the right-wing extremists, in particular because of the heated discussion in the East about refugees.
With regard to anti-Semitism, the protection of the constitution speaks of a constant "field of agitation and ideological identification of right-wing extremists".
Hate crime against Jews
Recently, the authorities have recorded a significant increase in hate crime against Jews. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the total number of crimes recorded increased from around 1,500 in 2017 to around 1,800 last year - the second highest level since the start of the comparable survey in 2001.
The increase was particularly strong in acts of violence: their number has almost doubled compared to the previous year, from 37 to 69 cases. Most of the cases were assigned to the right spectrum by the police.
The figures of the BKA come from the Criminal Investigation Service Politically motivated crime. A crime is recorded if it becomes known first to the police and secondly to a political motive. The Independent Expert Panel on Anti-Semitism set up by the Bundestag assumes a high number of unreported cases. Anti-Semitic incidents would not always be recorded as such and probably systematically underestimated.
The official case numbers of political crimes are prepared once a year and published by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Regional differences do not emerge from this - if one understands them, one is dependent on the answers of the ministry to parliamentary inquiries.
The left-wing MP and Bundestag Vice President Petra Pau asks monthly for politically motivated crimes from the right-wing spectrum and can be the case numbers also broken down into federal states. The numbers are preliminary: Only the final, published in the following year statistics contains corrections and many late posts that are missing in the answers to pause requests. But the answers already show a clear tendency: measured in terms of population figures, especially in Berlin and the eastern German states, particularly many right-wing crimes against Jews have been recorded.
This regional trend also showed a list of anti-Semitic crimes between 2010 and mid-2018, the Ministry of the Interior published last year on a request by FDP MP Linda Teuteberg. Here, too, Berlin and the eastern German states had particularly high numbers of cases, measured by their number of inhabitants.
However, this regional tendency does not support a hatred of Jews of varying degrees of hatred: the center study by the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation finally concluded that anti-Semitism is approximately equally widespread in West and East Germany.
