The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel's bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It's one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what's happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they're using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let's deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you're liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as "self-victimization" — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It's just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don't have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

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The post The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

Joined by the presidents of Poland and Israel, it was the first time a German head of state took part in a commemoration of the uprising. Tensions between Poland and Germany, however, fermented on the sidelines. 

Before the ceremony, the Polish culture minister, Piotr Glinski, who is also the deputy prime minister, circulated a report tabulating Polish wartime losses to President Steinmeier. Poland has demanded $1.3 trillion in World War II reparations from Germany. For Glinski’s Law and Justice party, it was an opportune moment to press its claims that Germany is disrespecting Poland by refusing to engage with its call for reparations and to appeal to an electorate struggling with inflation and fearful of the war in Ukraine next door. For the government’s detractors, it was a schoolboy gesture staged to draw votes ahead of Poland’s parliamentary election this fall.

 The Polish government’s willingness to stress test the country’s public relationship with Germany may be part of an election strategy, but, behind the scenes, the real relationship between Poland and Germany continues to grow stronger. This throws into question the effectiveness of Poland’s efforts to muddy Germany’s reputation as a model for successfully reckoning with its past.

The two countries are becoming more economically intertwined. Poland is Germany's fifth-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade is reported to have grown by 14% in the last 12 months. Germany makes up around 20% of foreign direct investment in Poland.

It’s an economic closeness that is light-years away from the stark rebuke of German-Polish business dealings often seen in Poland’s state-controlled media. “On the governmental level, we see a real cold era, but, at the same time, German investors are coming to Poland, and more Polish companies are based in Germany,” said Agnieszka Lada-Konefal, an expert in Polish-German relations. In December 2022, Mercedes-Benz announced plans to invest over $1 billion in an electric van factory in Poland. But while the economic relationship is good, it could be better: Lada-Konefal added that Poland’s ongoing battle with the European Union over the country’s democratic backsliding has spooked some German investors.

While Poland’s government has said it is willing to wait out Germany’s current position on the reparations issue, the majority of Poles want to push the relationship into the future. According to the German-Polish Barometer, an annual polling project that has examined the relationship between the two countries since 2000, 64% of Poles in 2021 wanted to disconnect from the past.

Poland’s government is often accused of distorting the past. It has tried to center Polish heroism and sideline Jewish victims by arguing that the majority of Poles tried to protect Jews from Nazi forces.

Germany has taken the position that all financial claims from World War II were resolved in 1953, when Communist Poland said it would not pursue reparations at the behest of Moscow. This position was settled again, the German government says, in the Two-plus-Four Treaty of 1990, which led to the reunification of Germany. Poland counters that earlier calls for reparations were ignored. 

Calling for reparations may play out as a key tactic for the Law and Justice party in the Polish parliamentary election expected later this year, allowing it to take votes from the far-right Confederation party. “Only the very hard part of the Law and Justice electorate really want to hear anti-German slogans, and the party needs to give something to this group,” said Lada-Konefal. In Polish elections, addressing the concerns of small groups of the electorate can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. 

Germany’s hesitation to send lethal military aid to Ukraine has reinforced Polish perceptions of Germany as being too soft on Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Poland said it was disappointed by the immediate German response. And despite Germany signing off on historic military aid packages for the Ukrainian armed forces, Poland’s government continues to argue Berlin is not doing enough to protect Europe from a Russian threat. “The ambiguity around the German position on initial support for Ukraine and perceived sympathy towards Russia has affected the relationship,” said Maria Skora, a research associate at the Institute for European Politics, a policy research center.

Among the German public, Poland can be an afterthought in German politics, said Monika Sus, a visiting professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. “In general, there is a total lack of knowledge in Germany on Poland,” she said. “There is an education problem on modern Poland, especially when you compare this to the general understanding of France in Germany.” 

In late May, Poland’s embassy in Berlin criticized the German government for issuing teacher training material that portrayed a fictional Polish mother as a “devout Catholic” and a person who “hates gays.” Speaking to Polish media, Poland’s ambassador to Germany, Dariusz Pawlos, said the material “reproduces anti-Polish stereotypes and harmful generalizations.” Despite Law and Justice presenting LGTBQ rights as an attack on so-called traditional family values since coming to power in 2015, a growing number of Poles in all categories, from young to old, are in favor of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage, according to a June 2022 poll.

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In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance. 

For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that? 

The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.

Over the past 25 years, the anniversary of the bombings has become a passionately contested date, one that sees clashes in the media and in the streets as the whole city is turned into a chaotic public laboratory for memory culture. The question of how to talk about Dresden becomes a conversation about victimhood and complicity, apology and pride, pacifism and justice — and ultimately, too, about the identity of the city.

Dresden is a gorgeous, captivating, contradictory place. The capital of Saxony, Germany’s easternmost state, it was built up in elegant style from the 15th century onwards. Its reputation as a city of culture and beauty — praised by Goethe, painted by Canaletto, epitomized by the name “Elbflorenz” (Florence on the River Elbe) — was secured during the Baroque-era rule of Augustus the Strong. And, despite the many developments that have shaped the city since — the industrial revolution, Nazi rule, the Allied bombing and its aftermath, 40 odd years of the Communist German Democratic Republic — it is this period of Saxon prestige that Dresden turned to in the 1990s as it sought to rebuild its urban center. Now, thanks to phenomenally expensive renovations, visitors to Dresden can experience the architectural beauty of the original Elbflorenz, provided they do not venture too far from the city center.

For a long while, the bombings hardly featured in any national conversation. The GDR accused the Western Allies, their Cold War enemies at the time, of terror bombing innocents, cynically redeploying a narrative coined by the Nazis, although this remained a relatively minor element of East German national public history. West Germans, meanwhile, were more focused on either reviving their economy or, especially from the 1960s onwards, on acknowledging their own national guilt. How, if you are committed to accepting the collective responsibility of “coming to terms with the past,” can you account for your own suffering? 

The answer has tended to be to not talk about it, a tactic that W.G. Sebald criticized as an “inability to mourn,” citing the lack of literature on Germany’s bombed-out cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Yet this national silence, as Gunter Grass and others have warned, risks ceding the terrain of remembering German wartime suffering — not just the bombings but the atrocities committed by Allied and Red Army soldiers, among other things — to extremist right-wing elements.

“For the far right, Dresden is a symbol that can be used to support a different approach to memory about the Nazi past,” said Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims.” According to Petzold, far-right activists and politicians have been drawn to Dresden since the 1990s on account of its symbolic status as a German “victim city.” In doing so, they have capitalized on older mythologies of German victimhood, which flourished in postwar West Germany, in the GDR generally and among German families in private.

The annual far-right “march of mourning” has drawn openly militaristic groups like the neo-Nazi Kameradschaften networks as well as politicians from the extremist NPD party, which peaked in the 2000s before falling away. More recently, the Alternative for Germany, the far more professional far-right party that currently receives 28% of the vote in the Saxon parliament, also participated in the march. The anti-Islam Pegida movement and the Covid-skeptic Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) networks have also been present. These commemorations are openly provocative in a nation whose constitution forbids the relativization of Nazi crimes (one sign seen at the march last year read: “Bombenholocaust,” or bombing Holocaust). But they have never been banned by city or federal governments.

Commemorations grew in size over the 1990s and early 2000s but it was not until 2005, when the bombings’ 60th anniversary was marked by what was then the largest far-right rally in postwar Europe, that Dresdeners began to publicly rally in opposition.

At that time, the municipal government policy had been the avowedly “apolitical” silent mourning, and anything else in the inner city was banned. Dresden’s conservative administration, Petzold said, attempted to position themselves between the far right and antifascists, suggesting that each side was politicizing the date for extremist purposes. Gradually, however, the city’s wreath-laying ceremony began attracting more far-right elements, so much so that the Jewish Community of Dresden decided to boycott the event. Leftist groups began trying to blockade far-right marches. Community organization campaigns pressured the city government to unambiguously resist far-right appropriation of the date and encourage an approach to memory culture that included perspectives from the victims of Nazi persecution and other marginalized groups.

What has resulted since is a wide array of often competing activities around February 13. One of the numerous city-sponsored events is a “human chain” of remembrance, which symbolically encircles the historic downtown as a statement against xenophobia and a gesture of protection against far-right incursion. Many left-wing and civil society groups have gone further, organizing further blockades and counter-protests against the far right in addition to commemorative events around local Jewish sites and attempts to publicly draw attention to the city’s Nazi past.

Petzold explained that Dresden’s historic downtown has become an important element of local memory politics. “The competition over space, over who gets to be visible in public space, is really key,” he said. Far-right groups “were being allowed to use iconic sites like the opera house to create good images of themselves, which also makes them appealing to the media. There’s an appropriation, perhaps, not only of that space but also of those iconic buildings, which have become enshrined in local Dresden identity.”

I walk among these iconic buildings when I arrive in Dresden on February 11, the first day of commemorations. There are helicopters in the air and hullabaloo on the streets. Slipping around a group of police, I join what appeared to be an antifascist block party. A brass band is playing, while rainbow flags and antifa banners billow in the wind. People young and old stay warm by drinking coffee, tea and punch from the nearby kiosk. Right at the front, beside the cordoned-off street, stands a group of old women with a sign reading, “Omas Gegen Rechts,” — Grannies versus the (far) Right. I observe a few gruff middle-aged people, all alone, many small groups of fashionable 20-somethings and five or six clusters of rather hard-looking antifa, all dressed in black and with face masks, including one bloke with a hoodie that boasts of “German Punk Terror Since 1990.” A few people arrive dressed as sparkly unicorns. It is, to put things mildly, a difficult crowd to get a read on. Sensing my confusion, somebody turns to me and says: “We’re waiting for the Nazis.”

After an hour they arrive, on the other side of a police cordon. Most are dressed in black. They carry banners that read “Dresden 1945: Unforgotten” and “350,000 Europeans murdered.” A float goes past playing Vivaldi, with a sign in a Gothic-style font that reads: “That they do not lie in their graves in vain // is solely up to our will // our actions.” There seems to be about a thousand of them. Some wave black flags. I think I can make out a snatch of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party. A rumor spreads that the police have been confiscating sap gloves.

Here, on the counter-protest side, somebody is handing out whistles. Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch” comes on over a loudspeaker, effectively drowning out Vivaldi. A number of chants go up: “There is no right to Nazi propaganda,” “Nazis piss off, nobody will miss you,” “German policemen are protecting the fascists.” Suddenly a 20-something with short pink hair and overalls surges to the front and shouts, in a strong Saxon accent: “Your kids are gonna be like us! Your kids are gonna be like us!” The rest of the crowd nearby joins in.

Afterwards, I meet up with Claudia Jerzak. A 43-year-old sociologist born and raised in Dresden, Jerzak has been documenting the far-right protests and counter-protests for over a decade — first for her Master’s degree on the topic and now for a doctorate she is completing part-time alongside her work as a researcher for an initiative on social work with refugees. She also co-wrote a 2012 film, “Come Together,” about Dresden’s contested memory culture. In her writing, Jerzak is critical of the city’s “silent commemoration” policy, which she believes has too easily tolerated the presence of far-right groups and obstructed any discussion of Dresden’s own perpetrator past. 

Jerzak wants to explain everything — she has the enthusiasm and eye for detail of a city tour guide — but on this day she has to rush off to see where the far-right demonstration ends up. We agree to meet again later. Before I let her go, I want to ask her a personal question. How does it feel, as a Dresdener, to see your hometown transformed at least once every year into a political battleground of international interest, a place where various factions squabble over the legacy of a long-past local wound? She gives an ironic laugh. “It’s exhausting,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“We’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Michael Hurshell, the vice president of the Jewish Community of Dresden. February 13 is a difficult day for the community every year, he explained. “We tell our community members that maybe this isn’t the best day to be out and about in the inner city.’”

Hurshell, an American conductor and orchestra leader born in Vienna but educated in the U.S, moved to Dresden in 2002. Since 2020, he has led this Jewish community of some 700, a majority of whom are Russian speakers from Ukraine. When we met, he invited me to the ostentatious Cafe im Coselpalais, which is housed in a complex that Augustus the Strong built for his mistress. When I arrived, he asked if I had come to report on neo-Nazi protests. That, I said, but also the whole range of rituals and memorials around February 13, the diversity and enthusiasm of which surprised me. “Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “That’s Dresden.”

The city’s Jewish community is based in the New Synagogue, a blocky Modernist building erected on the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is currently locked behind a fence, undergoing safety upgrades, recommended by the German authorities after a synagogue shooting elsewhere, that may last for up to two years.

Hurshell described the bombings as a “terrible, terrible act of suffering,” but took issue with the myth of victimhood some Dresdeners have adopted on the topic — which the far right has instrumentalized. Only recently did Hurshell learn that Dresden enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime, being among the first cities to engage in public book burnings. “And when it comes to the question of whether bombing Dresden was merely an act of reprisal, with no military significance,” he added, “the Jewish community likes to remind people that a number of our members are only alive because of the bombings.” Hurshell’s late friend Hans-Joachim Aris was one of these people: He and his sister were scheduled to be on a transport headed east days later when the Allied attack saved both of their lives.

A far-right party in 2004 won almost 10% of the vote in a Saxon state parliament election. Hurshell and his Jewish friends got together to discuss what to do: “Does this mean it’s time to get out of here?” Hurshell remembers how, in one of those early years, the far-right demonstrations around February 13 brought people from all across Germany for a march that was scheduled to go over the Carola Bridge and right past the synagogue on its way into town. Dresden's city government insisted that it could not prevent a legally registered demonstration. Jewish community members had decided to stand in front of the synagogue arm in arm, following the progress of the oncoming far-right march by observing the police helicopters overhead. But the march never made it to the synagogue because a huge crowd of Dresdeners had come to the bridge and simply sat down, even though it was illegal to block a registered demonstration. "And that impressed me. It was an act of solidarity with us, which I hadn't expected, and it was one of the reasons those demonstrations eventually petered out” Hurshell said. He, of course, decided to stay.

On February 13, 2023, I find myself losing my bearings. What I had expected, in Dresden, was a memory war with two sides: the far right against civil society and the leftists. Instead, as I enter town in the early afternoon, a vast spectrum of arguments and performances are taking place across the city.

At one square, there is a huge “peace” demonstration where several Russian flags are flown. One sign at this protest compares the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s call for an “economic war” against Russia to the “total war” of Josef Goebbels. Down by the Kreuzkirche, one of Dresden’s two main churches, there is a memorial plaque for the victims of the Holocaust. By the time I arrive there, seven women are holding a vigil. They are part of the Dresden chapter of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right), which has been holding vigil at the site since 10 a.m.

This year, the Omas Gegen Rechts demonstrators are carrying a banner that reads: “For peace, against violence and war everywhere.” “We are against war,” explains Helga, a long-time Dresdener. I ask if they are saying they oppose Germany delivering tanks to Ukraine. “Well,” Helga hesitates, “we don’t all agree about that.” At the mention of Ukraine, one or two other Omas look over. Helga explains that they often argue about the situation — but always in a respectful manner. A fellow Oma, Christine Weimann, admits that, while her pacifist beliefs are unwavering, she has found herself uncertain in this instance. “I think it’s good that we’re always in conversation,” she adds. “And I wish our group did even more of it, because people need to stay in conversation and not divide people up into pigeon holes. It’s our only chance.”

I meet again with Claudia Jerzak, who has agreed to show me some memorial activities around the city. She describes Dresden on February 13 as a turbulent public stage for memory culture — a big meet-and-greet, almost, for the city and its histories. Dresden, in Jerzak’s view, generally lacks an earnest and thorough engagement with its past. The anniversary offers an opportunity to change that, and the “friction,” she says, is part of the process.

Up at the Neumarkt, the human chain is about to form. Dresden’s mayor and the rector of its main university give speeches about the importance of friendship, peace and solidarity, rejecting outright any switching of the victim and perpetrator roles. When the bells ring out at 6 p.m., people get into position and begin linking arms.

I ask Jerzak if she ever joins in. She says no. “If the idea is to protect the city, then why are we just protecting the historical buildings downtown — wouldn’t it be more valuable to protect the values of the city everywhere, to protect its vulnerable citizens and people of color, on this day and throughout the year?”

Jerzak leads me to a different square, a few blocks south and east, to show me some more explicitly political public memory activities. Here, a far-right rally is expected to arrive in the next hour or so. Since this year’s anniversary falls on a Monday, the “mourning march” has combined with the regular weekly Querdenker protests that lean more Covid-skeptic, libertarian and respectably suburban than the hardcore-looking cadres from Saturday. What is happening now is a counter-demonstration, a Gegendemo, designed to block far-right actors from marching into downtown Dresden. Once again, we are listening to a brass band.

Jerzak gets cold and heads home, while I follow the action to the decidedly un-baroque Pirnaischer Platz. Here a number of anti-right Gegendemos have combined to blockade the rally. The police presence is heavy, with some officers moving through the Gegendemo trying to find someone with whom they can negotiate a withdrawal. 

The withdrawal doesn’t happen, and suddenly the far-right demonstration arrives, separated by a long line of police vans. Unlike Saturday’s solemn procession, this group seems upfront about its desire to provoke. Because the police are now rerouting them, they each have a turn to face the Gegendemo crowd before turning down Saint Petersburg Street. Many of them point and laugh, while others mock-conduct antifa chants. Almost everyone takes a selfie. Some hold up peace flags and commemorative candles — a surreal act of coded provocation.

Later I learned that the blockade went down as a success. The far-right march was rerouted, and its estimated 500 to 1,000 attendees were outnumbered more than two to one by the counter-protesters. The arithmetic stays with me for a long time. If you include the reported 10,000 people in the human chain — plus all the other various community events — then February 13 has, per capita, been a day overwhelmingly defined by resistance to the pull of German victimhood and xenophobia. What the far right has triggered is a very public process of self-clarification for the city: Every year, every February, where do we stand? It must be utterly exhausting, and not just for Claudia Jerzak, but at least it gets everything out into the open.

Back at the Neumarkt, the human chain has ended and people are milling about. The last official event for the day is Nacht der Stille, “the Night of Silence,” to be held in the basement of the Frauenkirche from 10 p.m. onwards. I join the crowds filing in.

“Wars,” says the Frauenkirche’s pastor, Angelika Behnke, “do not begin or end with bombs.” Instead, she intones, they find their roots in envy, resentment and arrogance. Behnke somberly describes how the Frauenkirche collapsed in 1945 from the damage it sustained during the bombing. Yet with the memory of destruction comes hope, she continues: “We cannot do anything about what happened back then, but we can look around at what is happening today.”

For the rest of the evening, interspersed with music, a series of Dresdeners give short speeches about what they are lighting a candle for. We hear from the Jewish Community of Dresden’s Michael Hurshell and then from a Ukrainian-born Dresdener, a young woman from Iran and a Russian university student who opposes the war. The shift in context is surprising, but I begin to see its logic. If Dresden is now an open, multicultural city — if Dresdeners, now, bring with them a whole diverse array of remembered wartime suffering — then surely it’s not just the Dresden of 1945 that belongs to the city’s memorial duties but also 1938’s Kristallnacht, and 2022’s Ukraine.

The same goes for Syria in 2015, when its civil war changed the population of Germany, much to the ire of the far right. In 2017, Damascus-born Dresden artist Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in front of the Frauenkirche, a visual homage to Aleppo civilians’ use of city buses as protective barricades during the Syrian civil war. Right-wing activists responded with outrage, but Halbouni, when we spoke on the phone, said that he was simply building a bridge between two destroyed cities, only one of which had yet had the chance to build back up. As to whether he might be accused of taking the date out of context, of instrumentalizing it to his ends, he replied sharply: “You could accuse anyone of that. Everyone is always instrumentalizing this day.”

When I depart Dresden the following day, I find myself thinking about what purpose memory culture serves. Even the best public monuments run the risk of growing stale, assuming as they do that everyone is on the same page. This anniversary, by contrast, sets the whole thing in motion. It demands a constant trying-out of new contexts and connotations. When the far right wanted to turn the city into a one-dimensional symbol of suffering, Dresdeners have responded with an ongoing public renegotiation of their history — a rowdy play of the past and the present against their ornate, Baroque stage.

At the very least, they’re having arguments. As my train pulls away, one particular image from the anniversaries stands out. It is 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, the town square is filled with people and two old men are simply standing there and arguing — arguing about Russia, arguing about the bombings, arguing about their city and about what should be done.

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Russian bio labs 

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the internet was set alight with a pro-Russia conspiracy theory that the U.S. was running secret bioweapons labs on Russia’s borders. The theory was used as part of Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, and was pushed by Russian state media before being picked up by online conspiracy theorists and QAnon adherents, as well as influencers like Alex Jones. Even British comedian and social commentator Russell Brand ran with the narrative, weighing in on the lie to his five-million-strong following. The myth that the U.S. is building bioweapons on Russia’s borders goes back years. Chinese officials and state media also promoted the conspiracy theory, using it as an opportunity to parrot its long-running claim that the U.S. was behind the Covid-19 pandemic.

The U.S. bioweapons narrative is nothing new. For years, the Kremlin has made extensive claims that the U.S.-owned Lugar Lab in Georgia — which monitors infectious diseases — was secretly running “germ warfare” operations, and has said it’s responsible for everything from Covid to the Zika virus to plagues of stink bugs. Thanks to this conspiracy theory, even biolabs in the U.S. itself are facing opposition and conspiracy claims. A new biolab in Kansas opened recently to study some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Though some concerns about the lab were legitimate, they were accompanied by a torrent of conspiracy theories, reminiscent of those in Ukraine, pushing the notion that the lab was really building bioweapons. 

Anti-vaxxers refuse to back down post-Covid 

At the outset of the year, Canadian truckers drove cross-country to participate in a standoff with the Canadian government, protesting Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates. Their action inspired motorists in France, Israel, Finland, Australia and the Netherlands to stage similar protests demanding an end to pandemic measures. Many of the “Freedom Convoy” social media groups were being run by fake accounts tied to content farms in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Romania. They were heavily endorsed by QAnon influencers, and QAnon logos were seen emblazoned on trucks during the protests, while other organizations among the truckers claimed that the pandemic had been orchestrated by Bill Gates with the intention of injecting 5G microchips into the population. 

As most of the world returned to some semblance of normality after two years of Covid restrictions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that anti-vaccine activists might quiet down. But a new and terrifying trend emerged, in which hardline anti-vaccine adherents the world over staged a “battle over blood” and began refusing blood transfusions from vaccinated donors. Perhaps the most extreme example of this strange and scary phenomenon was a case in New Zealand, in which two sets of parents refused donor blood for their seriously ill children. 

QAnon goes mainstream

The U.S. midterms saw record numbers of QAnon-linked candidates running for office. And  candidates, including Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Arizona State Representative Leo Biasiucci, who have all been linked with the conspiracy movement or spoken at QAnon conventions, managed to win seats. Two darlings of the digital disinformation scene — Christian nationalist and QAnon devotee Doug Mastriano and Covid skeptic and celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz both lost their bids. In the recesses of Telegram and other social media platforms, QAnoners celebrated Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and began returning to the platform in their droves. Musk himself began tweeting QAnon-aligned messaging and using QAnon tactics, like accusing his critics of pedophilia, to bolster the support from his conspiracist fans. 

The high tide of antisemitism 

After antisemitic incidents in 2021 reached an all-time high, 2022 was no better. The rapper Kanye West faced a growing backlash after he spiraled into a public embrace of antisemitism with an ever-escalating series of outbursts targeting Jewish people. On conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, he repeatedly praised Hitler and the Nazis, to the extent that Jones had to make a rare intervention by admitting “the Nazis did a lot of very bad things.” During his outburst, Kanye mentioned that 300 Zionists ran the world — borrowing directly a fringe conspiracy theory called “the Committee of 300” that is over a century old and was commonly used by the Nazis to justify their persecution of the Jews.

Reichsburger 

The late-breaking entrant award among the conspiracy theorists of 2022 goes to the Reichsburger movement behind the attempted coup in Germany at the beginning of December. The hard-right movement, accused of plotting against the German government, adheres to a grab bag of conspiracy theories. It’s not unlike QAnon, but it also has uniquely German ideas, namely that the country should return to having a Kaiser and go back to the Germany of the 1800s. As a result, adherents to this moment call themselves “sovereign citizens” and don’t recognize the current state of Germany or its laws. The movement came into its own during the pandemic, when Reichsburger followers protested against Covid laws, and in doing so, merged with QAnoners and anti-vaccine advocates.

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Alderney itself was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.” 

On this deserted island, the Germans left a fingerprint of the Holocaust: SS concentration camps run on U.K. soil.

Today, residents are finally asking: Why has the British government done nothing, when it has evidence of German war crimes on its soil?

Battling History

The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget

Most years, when the Channel Islanders of Alderney come together on May 22 to memorialize the victims of the Nazi occupation, it rains. A chilly wind whips up from the sea as a congregation gathers to pay tribute to the thousands of people who toiled and died in forced labor camps on this tiny island.

But today, it’s bright and clear.

Fluttering above us, with the sea and the sky beyond, is a blue-and-white striped flag. It represents the uniforms of the prisoners. There are plaques in Russian, Hebrew, French, Polish and Spanish to commemorate the victims of the German occupation of this island in the English Channel between 1940 and 1945. The Channel Islands, an archipelago belonging to the British Crown, were the only piece of British territory Adolf Hitler managed to conquer during the Second World War. And on Alderney, the Nazis built a series of labor camps — including two concentration camps run by the SS.

In the U.K., this story is far from common knowledge, confined to the obscure recesses of the British collective memory. Even when I ask other Channel Islanders from the nearby island of Jersey if they knew Nazi camps existed on British soil, they’re hazy on the details.

In recent months, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel declared the government’s plan to transfer asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. on small boats to detention centers in Rwanda. But before this policy was introduced, Alderney was floated by a right-wing think tank as a possible destination for detainees. “Its location and topography make it suitable in many respects,” the report read, before noting that the island was “gravely misused during World War II by the Nazis.” The think tank’s authors added that while the difficulty of the island’s tiny airfield might be overcome, “the problem of bad associations may be less tractable.”

The suggestion was quickly squashed — perhaps, some islanders thought, because international attention on Alderney would open an enormous Pandora’s box.

Now, as a £100million ($120 million) Holocaust Memorial is planned to be built next to the Parliament building in London, there’s a fight underway over precisely what happened in Alderney, and how Britain should face up to the Nazi atrocities that occured on its territory.

When the British began their investigations on the island after the war it gradually dawned on them that the scale of atrocities could warrant full-scale war crimes trials. As this realization took hold, there was a shift in the tone of the investigations, says Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University who has studied the island for more than a decade. The official narrative changed, skating over the fact that 27 different nationalities were thought to have been brought to the island, among them hundreds of French Jews. Instead, the Foreign Office simply said that “for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps.”

“That enabled the British authorities to hand over the investigation to the Soviets. And that meant they could wash their hands of the whole cost and everything else of war crimes trials,” said Sturdy Colls. It was cleaner and easier to say the prisoners were Russian, and the Soviet Union’s responsibility. The enduring legacy of that decision was that the stories of other prisoners — Jews, other Europeans, North Africans — were largely erased from the official history of Alderney. 

At the service, the self-governed island’s President, William Tate, hit back at those who said the island of Alderney was not facing up to its past. “There are those who say that we don’t do enough. I take issue with that. I think we all live with the responsibility of ensuring that the lives of those people that were lost during that period do not go unremarked.”

Alderney is a three-mile-long slither of land that is home to some 2,000 people. Wildly beautiful, surrounded by the seething, white-crested Atlantic, the island is fringed with sandy crescent-shaped beaches. Alderney’s capital, St. Anne, a postcard-perfect, cobbled town, is covered in banners to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee when I visit. Though it’s just ten miles off the coast of France, this is unmistakably British soil.

Unlike the other islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, where British residents lived under German occupation, the people of Alderney collectively decided to evacuate their homes in June 1940, when the fall of France was imminent. They did not return until December 1945. On this virtually deserted island –– a mere handful of islanders remained –– the German occupiers acted with impunity, building labor camps and SS-run concentration camps.

The camps operated under the system of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” — extermination through hard labor — and hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners died here. They were worked to death, forced to build a vast network of fortifications as part Adolf Hiter’s “Atlantic Wall,” a system of defenses along the coast of continental Europe designed to deter allied invasion. The Channel Islands were a key part of this defense structure and Alderney was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.”

Eighty years later, and the island is still disfigured by concrete bunkers, firing ranges, batteries, and cement fortifications — relics of the darkest chapter of Alderney’s history. Threading through the rock deep below the island, a vast network of tunnels have been gouged out by forced laborers.

What precisely happened here, how many died here, and how they should be remembered are subjects of fierce contention. The British government has been accused of covering up Nazi atrocities on its own soil, of refusing to face up to or reconcile with the horrors of Alderney’s past and keeping it a secret for decades.

“How can Britain, in good conscience, build a £100 million memorial and education center, and become head of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2024, if we can’t come clean about one little fingertip of the Holocaust on British soil?” said Michael James, a local resident who was in attendance at the remembrance service. “It’s just wrong. It reeks.”

James believes the number of people who died in Alderney during the war is well into the thousands. “It’s staggering that we’re having to fight to get the truth. If you had died here wouldn’t you want your children to know you had died here? How many hundreds of relatives are out there that don’t know their family members died on this island?”

The islanders were told that there were four camps on Alderney. That slave laborers had worked here and built the island’s fortifications. That these laborers were Russian. That 337 of them had died. But recent studies have identified as many as nine camps and that alongside the Russian prisoners, there were also Europeans, North Africans and Jews.

In contrast to the official number of 337, the highest estimates for the number of deaths on Alderney run to 70,000. Many islanders believe the real number is somewhere in the thousands rather than the hundreds.

When the people of Alderney returned to their island after the war, they said the birds didn’t sing. The island was covered with barbed wire and concrete, and the silence suggested that something terrible had happened. The islanders were told little and asked few questions. Children knew that the gravesites were where “slave laborers were buried.” But, said Sally Bohan, who returned to Alderney after the war as an infant, she didn’t truly absorb what that meant until her late teens. “We didn’t realize the severity and — just the awfulness of it. And there was nothing here to say what had happened.” 

People relied on hearsay. Witness testimonies were routinely recounted of bodies being tipped off the breakwater, of people dying while building a vast anti-tank wall running along one of the island’s pristine beaches, their bodies simply folded into the cement. Islanders talked about finding bones on the beaches. About seeing ghosts: juddering forms dressed in the forced laborers’ distinctive striped uniform, up by Lager Sylt, the S.S. concentration camp near where the airport is now located. 

John Dalmau, a Spanish forced laborer who was taken to Alderney by the Nazis after fleeing Franco's regime, recounted being sent down as a diver in Alderney's Braye Bay to disentangle an anti-submarine net.

"Among the rocks and seaweed there were skeletons all over the place. Crabs and lobsters were having a feast on the bodies which remained intact," he wrote in the years after his release. "I watched the blown-up bodies moving with the tide."

Talk of a cover up by the British government has been rife on the island for many decades. A question has always hung in the air. Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil — the concentration camps and those who suffered in them — remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted?

Different islanders have different answers. Because Britain had other things to be getting on with — a country to rebuild. Because the atrocities weren’t significant enough to require Nuremberg-style trials. Because no one wanted to reflect on how much cooperation there was by Channel Islanders in German crimes. Because there was a collective sense of shame about letting the Channel Islands fall into enemy hands. Because no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

In 2016, when the then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Holocaust Memorial would be built in London’s iconic Victoria Tower Gardens on the banks of the Thames, right next to the Houses of Parliament, he described it “as a permanent statement of our values as a nation.”

At the outset of the Ukraine crisis, U.K. politicians praised the country’s “long, proud history of welcoming refugees.” A government cabinet minister, Tom Pursglove, cited the British 1930s “Kindertransport” policy as an example, when almost 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to Britain in the lead-up to World War II. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, a bronze statue of Jewish children arriving with their luggage silently watches over commuters.

The story of the Kindertransport is widely taught as part of the British school history curriculum. But few ask why only children — “kinder” — were given sanctuary, why their parents were left to be murdered by the Nazis.

“The thing is, if we reveal that the Holocaust happened on Alderney, and that quite a number of Jews died there, and that the government covered it up and prevented French Jews in particular getting justice, then where does it leave our program of teaching British values through the Holocaust?” said Marcus Roberts, founder of an Anglo-Jewish heritage organization called Jtrails, who has been studying the German occupation of Alderney for over a decade.

In a fiery meeting in Alderney last July, Lord Eric Pickles, Head of the UK Delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said the time had come for Britain to face up to its history during the Holocaust, “warts and all.” Following a presentation by the Alliance, laying out proposals for how Alderney could better safeguard the memory of the camps and grave sites dotted around the island, Lord Pickles told Alderney residents that they needed to face up to what had happened on their land.

“We can’t pretend everything was just rosy,” he said. “This is about telling the truth, the unvarnished truth, not for the titillation of others, but because you own it. It’s yours. You didn’t ask to be the custodians of the most important Holocaust site in the British Isles. It’s not what you asked. But you are the custodians and we want to support you.” The Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s eight recommendations included tasks like improving the mapping, signage and listing of the camp sites and grave areas.

The first person to stand up was Susan Allen, 77, a retired Alderney resident who had worked for the British Foreign Office for several decades. “I’m appalled by all this,” she said. “You are talking about taking over the whole island and turning it into a Holocaust — almost a Disneyland. And I’m sorry, I don’t go along with that.”

Another resident, a former Alderney politician named James Dent, said the memorialization should not be principally focused on Jewish memory. “In Alderney the prisoners were of all faith and no faith,” he said, echoing Allen’s concern that the island shouldn’t become “some macabre theme park for Holocaust tourists.”

Pickles seemed struck by the virulence of the opposition he faced at the town hall. “We’re merely suggesting there should be some small stones, just to be able to give an approximate idea of where things are,” he said a half hour into the impassioned meeting. When I spoke to him on a call last month, he said that he understood why people didn’t want their paradise tainted even by “merely improving the signage.”

“If you move to paradise, you want to see it in those terms. And I don’t think we should look down our noses at people who move to this lovely place that they’ve chosen to live in, and they don’t want to engage in its darker secrets,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little bit too tolerant by nature,” he added, after a pause.

During the town hall meeting, Dr. Gilly Carr, a Cambridge archeologist with a specialism in Holocaust heritage, suggested that the stones could simply have QR codes on them, rather than any text, so that people could find out more information about the gravesites and concentration camp remains only if they wanted to. “The beauty of an online site,” she told the Alderney residents, “is that it’s invisible.”

A spokesperson for the States of Alderney, Alistair Forrest, said the Alliance's suggestions were currently being worked through. “We pay our respect to those who suffered and died in the slave camps on our beautiful Island,” he said.

A debate over the number of people who died in Alderney has soured. “We seem to have become engaged in what I think is possibly a slightly bizarre competition,” Dent, the former politician, said during the meeting, describing how people were constantly trying to “top” each other by quoting ever-larger death tolls. “It doesn’t matter if it was 400, or 4,000, or 40,000 people who died here,” he said, adding that the victims should be memorialized “quietly, and with dignity.”

Knowing just how many died on their island, believe others on Alderney, is essential. The official number of 337 was arrived at back in the 1940s, when Britain commissioned an investigation into atrocities on the island in the aftermath of the war.

In May 1945, after Britain had taken back the island from the German occupiers, Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff was dispatched to Alderney to conduct an investigation on behalf of British intelligence. The young captain was just 24 at the time, but not inexperienced. He had been a star investigator at the London Cage, British intelligence’s secret interrogation facility during the war years. He was fluent in both German and French and — a bonus — had vacationed on Alderney as a child.

Pantcheff canvassed the experiences of some 3,000 witnesses. He produced a harrowing report, detailing what had happened at Alderney’s various concentration camps.“Crimes of a systematically callous and brutal nature were carried out — on British soil — in the past three years,” he wrote at the outset of the report, before detailing how forced laborers were tortured, starved, and worked to death.

"Workers were beaten for the most trivial offences against the harsh regulations, such as failure to execute a drill movement properly or endeavouring to acquire food from the garbage pail. On occasions workers were beaten for no reason at all."

Theodore Pantcheff, 1945

By counting the number of graves on the island, Pantcheff stated that he knew for certain that 337 people had died there, admitting that “it is impossible to say with any exactitude that the general figure of 337 could represent the full number of deaths on the island.” Pantcheff, his sons explained, was looking for bodies so that prosecutions could be made.

But no prosecutions were ever made –– an outcome that still haunts this island. Instead, the British government packaged up Pantcheff’s report, and sent it over to the Soviet Union, to, as Sturdy Colls put it, “wash their hands of it.” But as British-Soviet relations broke down in the postwar years, the chances of the two governments cooperating and sharing war crimes witnesses began to dwindle, and trials became an impossibility.

In 1947, the French War Crimes authorities requested a copy of the investigation. The British said it “was found that the majority of internees were Russians” and that the reports had been handed over to the Soviet Union. “I regret that the only information we can give you on this matter is the general statement that the Russians were treated with great cruelty,” the British letter to the French authorities read. The letter neglected to mention that held alongside Russian, Polish and Ukrainian prisoners, as well as German, Spanish, and North African inmates, were hundreds of French Jews.

Bunny Pantcheff’s report remained a secret for decades.

His son, Andrew Pantcheff, 67, said his father had dearly wanted to see those guilty of crimes against humanity on Alderney brought to justice. “Even if it’s only one,” Pantcheff pleaded to his higher-ups, according to his son. “Even if it’s only one, so that somebody who tries to do this again won’t be entirely sure that they can just walk away.” 

Perhaps the most important prosecution that never happened was that of Major Carl Hoffman, the brutal, relentless commandant in charge of coralling forced laborers into building the island’s massive fortifications.

After the war, the story ran that Hoffman had been hanged in Kyiv in 1945. But in reality, he walked free. He was held in British custody until 1948 before he was allowed to return to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life, dying peacefully in Hamburg in 1974. It was not until the 1980s that the British Foreign Office admitted this.

In the early 1980s, Solomon H. Steckoll, a South African journalist, attempted his own investigation. “A mass of obstacles had been placed in the path of the truth,” he wrote in his book, “The Alderney Death Camp,” published in 1982. “For over three decades now,” Steckoll wrote, “the silence has rested like a heavy blanket of impenetrable fog over what took place on Alderney.”

Pantcheff wrote his own account of what happened, titled “Alderney, Fortress Island,” published ahead of Steckoll’s book, setting out “to put flesh on the concrete skeleton and try to breathe life into it.”

The blurb reads: “There was no extermination camp, no Auschwitz, nor any ‘cover up.’” In the book, Pantcheff describes how he wants to dispel speculation: “If it does nothing else, at least it may help some of the more fantastic ghosts so far raised — for example the stories of gas-ovens in the concentration camp or bodies thrown in the cement mixer.”

But the book also criticizes those who “shirk the concept of blame or feel that it all happened a long time ago and is no business of theirs. If this book has a purpose, it is to make it as hard as possible to follow any of those easy options.”

According to his sons, Pantcheff hoped to lay bare the catastrophe that had happened on Alderney, and tell the stories of those who toiled and lost their lives there. “It might have been a very small tragedy compared to Auschwitz,” his younger son Richard Pantcheff, 63, said. “But it was a tragedy nonetheless. It was appalling. He didn't want it to be sensationalized. And he didn't want it to be minimized.”

“Alderney, Fortress Island” was the first time Pantcheff’s own account of what had happened on the island was put before the public. 

For many years, the official British government line ran that the U.K. copy of the original Pantcheff report had been destroyed to create “shelf space.” Many of Pantcheff’s papers were kept in the Alderney Museum files until the early 2000s, when MI6, the British intelligence agency, requested the files back, according to the museum director Trevor Davenport. “I personally bagged them up and sent them off,” Davenport said, adding that MI6 promised to send back copies. “When we sent them, I said to the council — ‘we’ll never see them again.’ And of course we haven’t.” Davenport said MI6 simply sent back a summary.

In the late 2000s, many of the materials from Pantcheff’s report became accessible at the British Archives. There are, however, files that are not included in the papers –– particularly the full statement by George Pope, one of the only islanders who remained in Alderney during the occupation. Pope said he had seen almost 1,800 Ukrainians die, and witnessed as many as 400 Jews thrown into mass graves. His account was regarded as unreliable by Pantcheff, who suspected Pope of collaborating with the Germans. “The Pope testimony could be the key document,” said Alderney resident Michael James. 

The sheer number and size of the fortifications built in Alderney between 1940 and 1945, some argue, make the official death tally dubious.

Soviet citizens who worked on Alderney were rarely prisoners of war. Marcus Roberts, the Anglo-Jewish heritage historian, described how they were mostly press-ganged or kidnapped civilians and were described by the Germans as “volunteers.”

“You have to ask yourself realistically, what size of labor force would you have needed to complete such constructions?” said Roberts. “I can say with a high degree of certitude that at least 15,000 died there,” he said, describing how it was important to factor in the prisoners’ living conditions, and their ultra-low-calorie diet of thin cabbage soup and bread. “I wouldn't be surprised if that number could be as high as 30,000.”

Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls said her investigations gave her an estimate of between 701 and 986 deaths, but that the true number is undoubtedly higher, due to the Nazis attempts to cover up their crimes.

Two military authors, Colonel Richard Kemp and John Weigold, wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper in 2017 that they believed a minimum of 40,000 slave workers died on Alderney — and “perhaps as many as 70,000.” They said Alderney had been turned into “a secret base to launch V1 missiles with chemical warheads on the South Coast.” 

These staggering numbers dwarf even the largest estimates made by other historians, causing considerable consternation in Alderney. Trevor Davenport, the director of the Alderney museum, is incensed by the number. “Rubbish! I mean rubbish. I don't even give it any credence at all,” he said.

Davenport does not believe the word “holocaust” pertains to Alderney, and prefers to discuss the island’s wartime past without the mention of forced laborers. He spoke to me on the condition that there would be absolutely no discussion of slave labor. Davenport said the islanders were fed up of listening to “utter tripe” produced by academics parachuting into the island.

The Alderney museum has a single cabinet devoted to the laborers, featuring a sandal worn by the workers along with archival photos. Among the IHRA recommendations described to residents by Lord Pickles, was the suggestion that more be added to the museum’s on-view collection about the island’s prisoners and that a new exhibition should be put together.

In early 2016, two drill rigs arrived on Alderney. One was stationed just off shore. The other was on the fields where forced laborers’ graves are known to be.

The Alderney government had been consulting with a multi-million pound scheme to build an underground electricity link between France, Alderney and Britain, known as the “FAB project.” The cable would span the island of Alderney — and potentially carve right through Longis common, where hundreds of forced labor victims are buried. 

Alderney Renewable Energy, the energy developer behind the project, told reporters that the drilling was part of a non-intrusive geophysical survey, intended to “detect any areas of unknown archeology” in the area. Residents said that the Alderney government did not engage with them about the plans, so that when the drills arrived, many didn’t know what they were doing there.

One resident contacted the police on the neighboring island of Guernsey to report that a site of mass murder was being plundered. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, alongside academics and local historians, all aired concerns that mass graves, including those of Holocaust victims, would be disturbed by the project. After being lobbied by one onlooker, the Russian Embassy got involved, issuing a statement saying that any remains of Soviet Citizens found during construction should be identified and given a proper burial. “The Embassy has also offered help with the identification of the said remains,” the statement read.

A group of 32 islanders took legal action, requesting that the British Ministry of Justice conduct a public inquiry. They alleged that the island's government had acted corruptly in its dealings with FAB, and that people within it had a significant conflict of interest in ushering forth the project while standing to financially gain from it. The Guernsey police dismissed the matter, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to prove the group’s allegations.

FAB Director James Dickson said FAB had “adhered to the strictest standards of professional conduct” and kept residents extensively informed about the project prior to the rigs arriving, through door-to-door flyers and public meetings. 

The States of Alderney chose not to respond to questions about FAB. 

Last week, FAB announced that the interconnector was no longer slated to run through Alderney, and would instead bypass the island. “This gives us more certainty, as we need to work with fewer permissions, approvals and licenses,” Dickson said in a statement. 

He told me FAB hoped to start construction in 2025.

The drilling was the match that lit the fire. “That’s what brought it all back up for me,” said Michael James, who grew up on the island and has spent the past four years intensively researching Alderney’s past. He described how the FAB project woke many islanders — including him — up to the pressing question of what had really during the war years and how many really lay buried on the island.

Among those to critique the project at its outset was Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, who submitted a report about the location of the graves and which areas needed to be avoided. “I voiced my deep, deep concerns that it was going through the site of a former cemetery,” she told me.

The forensic archaeologist’s distinctive, six-syllabled name trips lightly off the tongue of almost every islander I talk to within a matter of minutes. Her work is divisive.

In 2019, Sturdy Colls released a documentary called “Adolf Island.” The film followed her efforts to try to find out precisely how many people were buried in Alderney’s mass graves, using different state-of-the-art, non-invasive techniques, including ground-penetrating radar, laser technology and drones.

But before the film was made, a leaked pitch for the documentary appeared to show another motive: to dig up Holocaust graves. “Caroline negotiates with the States Council to excavate the site. The evidence is too strong to ignore. It will be an emotional axis for everyone involved in the story,” the pitch read. Marcus Roberts of JTrails wrote to her university that her film constituted the “exploitation of Jewish human remains for commercial gain and public entertainment.” The university chose not to uphold the complaint, according to Roberts.

Sturdy Colls said the pitch had been leaked when the TV production company’s website was hacked and should never have been in the public domain. She called Roberts’s allegations unfair and unfounded. “There was no suggestion that I was ever going to go and dig without any of the permissions being in place,” she said. “My understanding of Jewish law is very thorough.”

When it was released, Sturdy Colls’s documentary dwelt on local opposition to her research. “Shrouded in decades of silence amid attempts by local authorities to prevent examination and the search for missing victims of Nazi atrocities, the team must turn to state-of-the-art technology to get the answers they seek,” read the press release for the film, released on the Smithsonian Channel.

Sturdy Colls encountered vehement opposition from some islanders, even to her non-invasive techniques. “They want to encourage all ghouls, weirdos and anybody with twisted minds to come to Alderney,” wrote one angry resident to the local paper, “to see and worship the wonderful Nazi achievements, so that they can probe with modern gear, excavate slave labor camps, and fly their little spy planes. Well, not if I can help it.”

Sturdy Colls said she has never in her career experienced the hostility she faced in Alderney. “All because they want to forget the memory of people who were brutalized and murdered on this island,” she said in her documentary. At one point, she told me, residents threatened to shoot down her drone equipment.

Nigel Dupont, 63, a lifelong Alderney resident whose family have lived on the island for six generations, does not want to forget. He believes wartime events were “all hushed up” once Britain took back the Channel Islands. We drink tea in his light-filled kitchen, which looks out across Longis Bay. An anti-tank wall the Germans built, known as the “wall of certain death” — where witnesses said they saw bodies thrown into the cement — can be seen in the distance. 

“Lots of dark things happened here,” Dupont said, remembering how he grew up in a culture of collective silence. “Local families wouldn’t sit around the table and talk about what happened.” 

In the 2000s, that attitude began to change. “As people started to die, there became more pressure to talk,” he said, referring to the passing of the last generation with a living memory of the war.

Dupont said he paid scant attention to the significance of the architecture dotting the island as a young man. He used to throw epic parties in the German bunkers — “the acoustics were fantastic.” But as he got older and became a building contractor, he began to see the architecture of the island differently. “Over the years, the more I’ve read and the older I’ve gotten, I’ve begun to look around and do the math myself,” he said. He described how real Alderney natives — who have lived there a long time — were all keen to understand what really happened during the years they were forced to leave their island home.

 “My generation is ready to know the truth.”

In 1947, two years after he visited Alderney to conduct his investigation into German atrocities, a 26-year-old Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff wrote a memorandum to himself. It was a list of sentences, written in black fountain pen, each starting with the same four, underlined words: “I must not forget.”

“I must not forget the dead who were murdered,” he wrote. “Nor the face of a corpse that has been maimed and buried alive.”

“Humanity has been and is being outraged; only the few who are whole-heartedly persuaded of that, who know, will be prepared to do anything about it.”

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A self-described historian of German fascism, the septuagenarian might be best known for having spotted a dilapidated 19^th century Tudor-style castle while driving through the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the 1990s. Inspired by the castle’s name — Marxhagen — she decided to buy it. She moved in, decorated the place with Marxist paraphernalia and tried and failed for a quarter of a century to turn it into a Marxist think tank (one German TV report dubbed her the “Communist in the Castle” and noted that she spent more time battling building contractors than capitalism). In 2018, she sold it to a private investor.

Kaltenbacher claims to own no radio and no television and boasts that while she has seen no images of the current war in Ukraine, she has nonetheless come to the exact same conclusions as Vladimir Putin has — namely, that an attack on Ukraine was a necessary act of self-defense against the encroachments of the West.

Riding through the Tiergarten, she had to pedal slowly. Decked out in a torso-sized sandwich board quoting Hemingway praising the Red Army and clutching a bouquet of red carnations, she wobbled a little, as she came to a halt at the police barrier.

Informed that she would have to remove the placard as well as the orange-and-black St. George ribbon pinned to her chest before she would be let through, Kaltenbacher became animated. What about her right to free speech? What about the supposedly free West? “That’s not our construction site,” replied the amiable policeman — using a German idiom that means he’s just not the right guy to talk to about that.

In Germany, Kaltenbacher is part of a minority fringe. But with the second phase of Russia’s war on Ukraine, some of those people have found themselves front and center, splashed across the pages of German newspapers, and giving interviews on TV. These fringe groups’ activities — and German officialdom’s ham-handed responses — have garnered international ire, shed light on shifting domestic faultlines and raised questions about Russian disinformation activities in the country.

Most Germans do not share the pro-Russian views espoused by Kaltenbacher and the elderly crowd of far-left peaceniks and die-hard communists into which, having shed her bicycle, sandwich board, and ribbon, but still clutching her carnations, she soon disappeared. 

In fact, a poll taken by the ZDF Politbarometer, a long-running television program, showed that Germany’s recent announcement that it would provide Ukraine with heavy weapons had been met with a robust 56% approval.

But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been tepid in his support of Ukraine (the Ukrainian ambassador, in a superb use of idiom, dubbed him a “thin-skinned liver sausage” after Scholz rejected an invitation from Zelensky to come to Kyiv), and consequently has seen approval of his handling of the Ukraine crisis fall from 72% to 49%, with 43% of respondents saying he was doing a bad job.

Meanwhile, the more hawkish, outspokenly anti-Moscow Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock won 70% approval of her handling of the war.

There is, however, one way in which the crowd at the Soviet War Memorial was representative of a trend in Germany. Namely, that the extremist landscape is changing as traditional ideological divisions blur. “There’s a lot of mishmash going on at the moment,” said Jan Rathje, a senior researcher at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy.

The pandemic saw a diverse group of anti-establishment conspiracy ideologues (a group that goes by the name “Querdenker” in Germany) adapt the anti-vaccination movement; they also starting marching side-by-side with neo-Nazis, among others. When the war in Ukraine began, Rathje said, “the ‘Querdenker’ more or less embraced pro-Russian disinformation.”

These conspiracy narratives have spread. In one study conducted by Rathje’s group, in Germany “nearly one-fifth of respondents tend to agree with conspiracy ideological statements about the Russian war of aggression.”

“Extremism is changing — not disappearing,” agreed Martin Emmer, a political science professor at Berlin’s Free University, who noted that just because extremists no longer cleave  to traditionally left- or right-wing ideologies, that does not mean they are not still capable of disruption and even violence. “We know that influencers, particularly from Russia at the moment, take every chance to destabilize western society.”

He added, however, that Covid disinformation and Russian propaganda have not really taken hold here. “It worked better in countries like France and even the U.S.,” he said. “In the election last year, you saw more or less a decline in extremism, and growth in the centrist parties. German civil society is quite resilient compared to other countries. The support for democracy and political norms is quite high.”

Thus the tenor of the German crowd gathered in the Tiergarten, from which the cry of “Nazi” emanated now and then in the Ukrainian ambassador’s direction, was an outlier. Of the more than 3,500 demonstrations related to Russia’s war on Ukraine that took place throughout Germany from the end of February to late April, the vast majority were in support of Ukraine, according to Mediendienst Integration, which collated information from various German states’ Offices of Criminal Investigation.

Many of Germany’s three dozen or so pro-Russian demonstrations were “Autokorsos,” or car rallies. Ostensibly organized by private individuals, the first took place on April 3, the day photos of the Bucha massacre went around the world. Some 400 cars strong, it drove from one end of Berlin to the other, past the main train station, a central processing point for Ukrainian war refugees arriving in Berlin.

Despite the organizers having registered their demonstration with the police, the car rally took the city by surprise. It was, as the newspaper “Die Zeit” put it, a wake-up call of sorts: “the first sign that Russia’s attack on Ukraine would have an impact on how we live together here in Germany.”

Indeed, the made-for-TV images that emerged — seas of car-hood-sized Russian flags, Soviet flags, bellicose pro-Russian chants, honking — were troubling. For some, they were terrifying: a notice that made the rounds in Ukrainian refugee chats warned that the drivers would get out of their cars at night and look for people on the streets wearing Ukrainian symbols.

Car rally participants praised Putin, said they had no problem with him bombing apartment blocks and maternity wards, complained about discrimination against Russian-speakers here in Germany, and denied the images from Bucha were real. It raised the question of just what was going on, and how this could happen.

“For me, it looks like a provocation,” said Russian-born German author Wladimir Kaminer, in a television interview shortly afterwards. “A private person registers this demonstration, then just happens to really quickly have 900 friends, all of whom just happen to have two meter by two meter Russian flags on hand, and they drive — exactly on this day, when we see the horrible photos of civilians killed in Bucha go around the world — through the streets of Berlin?”

In the days that followed, politicians and the press condemned the Berlin car rally. Stefan Evers, Berlin’s general secretary for a center-right political party, called the images disgusting. “These fascist nutcases can keep driving straight to Moscow, and stay there,” he tweeted. Berlin politician Stephan Standfuss told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that intelligence services would need to look into the extent to which the car rallies “were being directed from Moscow.”

But the boisterous, flag-waving pro-Russian rallies continued to take place in German cities over the next weeks. These were fueled, in part, by made-up stories about violence against Russian speakers that, with the help of the Russian embassy, spread like wildfire among Russian-speaking communities.

Germany has 3.5 million Russian-speaking citizens; of these, about 2.4 million people are ethnic Germans, whose forefathers emigrated to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, these ethnic Germans were persecuted. Since the 1970s, Germany has offered this group the option to return as German citizens.

But Germany has been slow to recognize that it is, de facto, a land of immigrants, said Free University’s Martin Emmer, resulting in feelings of isolation and exclusion. Propaganda exploits these feelings. “What Putin does in his speeches is basically provide a framework for people to be friends with Russia — ‘Russia fights fascism.’ It’s amazing how flexible our brains can be.”

In addition, many Russian-speaking Germans continue to get their news and entertainment from Russian state television. Nostalgic shows and wartime dramas showing the Soviet Union freeing the world of Nazis shape people’s perceptions, says Free University researcher Anna Litvinenko. “It’s interesting how even people who escaped the Soviet Union and moved to Germany are also nostalgic,” she said. “It’s this instrumentalization of memory.”

As May 9, the date of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, approached, the Tagesspiegel newspaper wrote that 150 riders in a large pro-Putin Russian motorcycle group called the Night Wolves were expected to take part in a Red Army memorial march. Telegram channels were reportedly mobilizing pro-Putin Russians across Germany to get in their cars that morning and head to Berlin’s Treptower Park war memorial.

The city of Berlin decided to act. Just before the weekend, Berlin’s head of police announced a two-day ban not only of Russian flags and military trappings (including the orange-and-black St. George ribbon, a Russian military symbol), but the Ukrainian flag, as well.

The move was immediately denounced. “You cannot draw an equivalence between the flag of the victims, and the flag of the Russian aggressor,” said Stefan Evers, the politician, in a phone call on Monday, after images of the Berlin police confiscating a 80-foot-long Ukrainian flag in Tiergarten went around the world. “The political signal it sends is disastrous.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, weighed in: “Berlin made a mistake by prohibiting Ukrainian symbols,” he wrote, on Twitter. “Taking a Ukrainian flag away from peaceful protestors is an attack on everyone who now defends Europe and Germany from Russian aggression with this flag in hands.”

On May 9, Putin’s speech came and went. Towards midday, at the foot of Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall once stood, a group of mostly Russian speakers gathered with black and white photos of their grandparents for a spooky “Immortal Regiment”-style parade.

Later, at Treptower Park, a giant war memorial built by the Soviets in 1945, the Night Wolves hadn’t arrived; nor was there any news of a giant car rally from all over Germany headed this way. Inside the vast memorial, many of the German peaceniks and communists (including Kaltenbacher, the former castle owner) who had attended the Ukrainian ambassador’s wreath laying the day before were here again, along with Reichbuergers (a disparate group of monarchists and antisemitic far-rightists who do not believe in the existence of the modern Germany state), and representatives of the official German Communist Party.

At one end of the vast, shallow bowl-shaped landscape stands the memorial’s main centerpiece — an enormous statue of a Soviet soldier stepping on a giant swastika, on top of a pedestal on top of a hill. At the foot of this hill, the crowd included a Swiss mathematician who said the French and Germans were to blame; a completely bald, very muscular German who said he was here to support Russia fighting Nazis in Ukraine; and a German community theater actress whose social media includes a video of herself demonstrating the use of a Hitler salute to practice Covid-distancing.

Most Ukrainians had stayed away from Treptower Park — where, ultimately, only a handful of Night Wolves and no massive car rally materialized. But Daria and Bohdan, who did not want to give their last names, decided to come. In her mid-20s and studying in Berlin, Daria said she was there to pay tribute to her grandmother, and the suffering the Second World War, which wreaked havoc on her grandmother’s childhood, had brought on her family. “A lot of Ukrainian families have this story,” she said.”It’s important to remember.”

Her boyfriend put it differently. He stood in the hot sunshine, reflecting off the giant white walkway, next to one of the memorial’s many bas relief blocks featuring gilt quotations from Joseph Stalin. “I think that Russia cannot celebrate victory over Nazis,” said Bohdan, “because it is a country of Nazis today, and they are destroying our country, right now, like the army of Hitler.

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Otherwise, the 47-year-old knew plenty about his roots. He grew up steeped in his family’s stories, and fears, about Mississippi. He knew his ancestors were enslaved on a sprawling plantation about twenty miles outside of the picturesque town where William Faulkner grew up, and some of them were buried in a nearby cemetery lined with weathered headstones. He knew the slave owners of the plantation were Irish, and he knew, through a DNA test, that he had some Irish heritage, too. And he knew, from a story passed down from his grandmother, that a white man thrust a double-barrel gun in his great-grandfather’s mouth and stole his land. 

He just never knew about the lynching. Until he saw the photo.

The first time Tarrell caught a glimpse of the plantation, a chill came over his body. “You could feel it,” he recalled, winding down a lonely road in Mississippi. It was a stormy day in mid-December, and we were driving to the property where his ancestors were enslaved. The sky was dark and moody, and tall weeds shivered in the wind. The weight of it all hung in the air. “It’s heavy,” he told me, pulling up to a white house overlooking an open field.

Tarrell led me to a tangle of brush at the edge of the house’s lawn. He crouched down, scanning the earth for a budding rosemary plant. When he found it, he gave me a nod. “Here’s where we did it,” he said, pointing to the dirt. We were looking at the de-facto grave of William Steen, whose lynching was swallowed up by more than a century of silence.

Growing up, Tarrell knew nothing about Steen’s death, or that they were related. Nobody in his family did. Like many lynchings of that era, there are few public accounts of what happened. What we do know comes from two short newspaper articles published in the days after the killing: Steen, a former employee at a railroad shop, was hung by a mob on July 30, 1893, near Paris, Mississippi, about 30 minutes down the road from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “He boasted of being criminally intimate with an estimable white woman,” explained an article published the day after the killing. A second article described Steen as a “negro of ill-repute.”

It’s unclear if Steen was buried, or when the memory of his death began to fade. By the time Tarrell learned about it, nearly 130 years had passed. “I feel like I’m the voice for the dead,” he said.

Tarrell found out about two years ago while scrolling through his Facebook newsfeed. That’s when he came across a picture from America’s national lynching memorial of a rust-colored rectangular column inscribed with the names of seven lynching victims from Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Tarrell lived. He clicked on the photo and glanced at the names. When he saw William Steen, he paused. He knew he was related to a line of Steens from the same part of Mississippi. Could he have ties to this one?

Tarrell messaged the author of the Facebook post. She told him the lynching took place near the plantation where his family was enslaved, and the general area where they later lived. Tarrell reached out to a few family genealogy experts, and they began investigating the connection. Eventually, they concluded that Steen, the lynching victim, was the brother or cousin of Tarrell’s great-great-great grandfather.

Tarrell shared his findings with the members of the racial justice group documenting local lynchings, and they decided to arrange a long-overdue memorial for Steen in May 2021. Tarrell chose the property of the former plantation because of its proximity to his family’s ancestral cemetery. About 60 people showed up, including many of Tarrell’s relatives.

The realization bowled Tarrell over. He couldn’t believe that if he hadn’t checked Facebook, the whole story would have been wiped from his family’s memory. But he also didn’t think any of it would have been particularly surprising to people in Mississippi. The first time Tarrell drove to the former plantation, about a decade ago, a white friend told him to call her in two hours or she would alert the local chief of police. “They’re still active out there,” she warned. “The Klan.”  

When I traveled with Tarrell to the site of the former plantation and Steen memorial, about thirty minutes after we arrived, Tarrell led me to a tall cluster of weeds along the side of the road. He wanted to show me a historical marker identifying the nearby cemetery as a burial site for Black families after the Civil War. “Somebody shot bullets in it,” he said. But as Tarrell sifted through the brush, he realized the historical marker was nowhere to be found. He turned to me, incredulous.

“Somebody took it,” he said.

Steen was one of about 6,500 Black Americans lynched in a cluster of Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Mississippi was home to more lynchings than any other state in the country. Its legacy of violence stretches right up to the modern day — haunting family histories, memory, and behavior. When Tarrell’s grandmother learned he was quietly courting a white girl in high school, in the 1990s, she had an immediate, angry response: You could get lynched. “Those goddamn white folks gonna hang you,” she fumed. She wanted to protect him from the Mississippi she knew.

Lynchings weren’t hidden. They were often a deliberately public spectacle, drawing throngs of cheery white spectators who posed, smiling, in photos in front of the brutalized bodies, or brought home pieces of the victims as mementos. Like the Black man burned at the stake in 1899, dismembered, and sliced “into pieces, bones crushed into small bits and disposed of as souvenirs,” according to a newspaper account from the time. To deepen the terror, mobs would occasionally deposit victims’ mutilated bodies in Black neighborhoods and communities. In 1917, thousands sung Confederate hymns as they watched a Black man burned alive and decapitated in Tennessee. His severed head was then thrown onto Memphis’ Beale Street, the epicenter of the city’s Black business district. Such public, brutal displays of violence were intended to send an unambiguous message to Black Americans: Stay in your place, or else. 

The federal government tried, and failed, to step in. By the 1950s, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, but not one of them passed; they were often thwarted by Southern white Senators. The consequences of inaction were deep and long-lasting. “More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of Black advancement, independence, and citizenship in many small towns for half a century,” wrote Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in “On the Courthouse Lawn,” an examination of lynchings in the 1900s. Even today, research has found that the Southern counties with the highest rates of lynching also have the lowest rates of Black voter registration.

Lynchings were so traumatizing that some witnesses stayed silent about them their entire lives.

Tarrell belongs to a movement popping up from Arkansas to Alabama attempting to awaken the country’s memory of these dormant histories, by marking the landscape with echoes of its violent past. 

Despite thousands of documented lynchings, America’s first national lynching memorial did not open until 2018 – in Alabama, where an estimated 300 Black Americans were lynched from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and Confederate Memorial Day is still an official state holiday.

After more than a century of failed attempts, the U.S. Senate — for so long an obstacle to federal anti-lynching legislation — finally approved a bill designating lynching as a hate crime punishable up to 30 years in prison. On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed the historic bill into law. Still, as the country tiptoes toward a truth, it remains disabled by the long tail of its silence.

Silence distorts memory in various ways. It can happen when a nation, collectively, refuses to engage with the realities of its past, opening up space for revisionist histories and feel good counter-narratives that gloss over the horrors of the past. Sometimes national silence is summoned as an act of avoidance; other times, to serve a political or ideological agenda.

But silence also flows from the collective to the individual. A society can forget on a mass scale, not when the government imposes amnesia as a political project, but when people refuse to look within — to dig into the messy and complex family biographies that turn memory into a landmine, and forgetting into a psychological salve. Even the country held up as the global exemplar of historical reconciliation, Germany, is still haunted by the ghosts of family memory and perpetrator guilt. 

When it comes to facing the past, Germany is often praised as the poster child of success. The country even has a specific term for the painful process of reconciliation that unfolded in the decades after the Holocaust: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

The word, which has no equivalent in English, means “working off of the past.” It is occasionally used interchangeably with the English phrase “memory culture” to describe Germany’s wide-ranging and layered approach to Holocaust memory, which includes literature, education, art, popular culture, and physical memorials. I first learned the term in an email with a German historian while preparing to travel to Berlin. I began to use it almost obsessively when I arrived, and not just because there was absolutely no way I could pronounce Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. The idea of a collective, nationally sanctioned culture of remembrance intrigued me, maybe because it felt so impossible to imagine in America, a country perpetually at war with itself over how to remember the past (see: Critical Race Theory).

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung did not unfold easily or quickly, however. Most Germans were not particularly eager to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust after the war. Although the Allies imposed a denazification program in West Germany, its government was still chock full of former members of the Reich a decade after the war; in 1957, nearly 80% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry were former Nazis.

Meanwhile, narratives of victimhood were pervasive across Germany. There was a widespread feeling among Germans that they suffered tremendously during the war, and were its real victims. In the late 1960s, a wave of youth activism began to challenge some of these attitudes, as a younger generation moved to confront the country — and their parents — over its Nazi past.

A decade later, the release of the 1978 American  television miniseries “Holocaust” had an enormous cultural impact across Germany. Nearly 20 million West Germans tuned in to watch the show about a fictional Jewish family. It brought many viewers into the lives and stories of victims for the first time, and is widely seen as catalyzing the country’s reckoning.

In the 1990s, another crucial shift occurred when Germany reunified and memory culture became absorbed by the state: “In order to become accepted globally, a lot of money was put into mastering one’s past, putting up commemoration sites and museums,” Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, a German historian and the director of Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism, told me. Public memorials and museums later popped up across the country, including the famous Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Since then, Germany’s atonement has been invoked as a global success story: an example of a country that bravely dealt with its past and became a model for other countries’ long overdue historical reckonings.

In America, scholars and journalists have increasingly begun to talk about Germany’s process in conversations about race and reconciliation, poring over Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung for clues about how the U.S. can meaningfully confront its history of slavery and racial violence. Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student.

The Atlanta-raised, Berlin-based scholar Susan Neiman wrote an influential book about what the U.S. can learn from Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, inspiring an outpouring of articles in magazines and newspapers dissecting Germany’s reckoning in an American context. One of the most recognizable figures in America’s lynching memorial movement, the pioneering American civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, has often contrasted the two countries’ versions of remembrance, comparing America’s South “littered with the iconography of the Confederacy” to Berlin, awash in Holocaust memorials. Stevenson, the founder of America’s first national lynching memorial, said his initiative drew inspiration from Germany’s landscape of Holocaust memory and homages to the victims of Hitler’s killing machine.

“When you go to Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed next to the homes of families that were abducted during the Holocaust,” Stevenson remarked. “There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany.”

On a rainy morning in October, Gisela Martin placed a rose on top of a freshly polished gold stone. She stood outside of her mother’s last residence, an apartment building in a busy Berlin neighborhood, before she was murdered by the Nazis in the late 1930s. Martin was joined by her nephew, son, and a handful of locals, to lay a memorial stone in the sidewalk in front of the building. The brass block, roughly the size of a CD case, is inscribed with Martin’s mother’s name, birthday, and the dates she was deported and murdered by the Nazis. Rain and wind pelted the group, and Martin — petite, in a dark peacoat — stood quietly next to her nephew as volunteers placed the stone in the ground. It was jarring for Martin to see the truth of her mother’s murder, a long-guarded family secret, on the pavement for anyone who walked past it to see.

There are more than 75,000 of these memorial stones, called Stolpersteine, across Europe, making the project the largest decentralized Holocaust memorial in the world. 

“What really works are these little stones,” Michael Naumann, Germany’s Culture of Secretary from 1998 to 2000 as the government finalized Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, told me: “Because these are individual names. The only way you can actually teach the Holocaust is to grab you by your heart.”

In Berlin alone, the streets are studded with roughly 8,500 gold squares, which are impossible to miss once they’ve been pointed out. They glisten off some of the busiest avenues in the city and quiet side streets, in front of apartments, restaurants, cafes, and commercial buildings. For people who choose to read what they say, the individual stories within each stone force the kind of intimate, and personal, confrontation with Germany’s past that can get lost in the larger and more abstract memorials.

Gisela Martin’s mother was the casualty of a little-known Nazi extermination program called Aktion T4, which claimed the lives of about 300,000 people with disabilities between 1939 and 1945. The “euthanasia campaign,” as the Nazis called it, sought out to eradicate German society of people with mental and physical impairments. The victims were among the first targets of the Nazi regime, described as the Holocaust’s “trial run.” The medical establishment was involved in every step of the murder campaign, beginning with identifying victims and ending with overseeing and carrying out the killings. By 1941, the T4 program had exterminated some 70,000 people in death centers across Germany by lethal injection and gassing.

Gisela Martin’s mother, Hedwig Daum, was forced from her home and taken to a psychiatric hospital in December 1937, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Daum’s relatives are skeptical of the diagnosis, but say she was under a considerable amount of stress at the time and may have had a nervous breakdown). The following year, officials involved with the program forcibly sterilized her — another feature of the T4 program — and brought her to a psychiatric hospital. She was released, and then shortly thereafter brought back to a psychiatric unit, where she remained imprisoned until she was murdered on May 29, 1939.

Martin, who is 88-years-old, was four when Daum died, and her recollections of her mother are fuzzy. Memories come in abrupt flashes: sitting on her mom’s lap while food simmered on the oven, filling the apartment with rich scents, or waving to her through the window of the psychiatric ward. But a memory of her last glimpse of her mother when the authorities came to take her away is intact. “She fought and screamed like crazy, and my sister held me in her arms,” she told me. “It was terrible.” Daum’s only wish, according to medical records later obtained by her grandson, Reiner Lenz, “was to return to her children.” 

The circumstances around Daum’s death were kept for decades by only Gisela Martin, her siblings, and her father. Even among themselves, the topic remained a source of silence. “It was simply not discussed,” Martin said. The stigma and shame surrounding mental illness were so deeply rooted that Martin even kept the truth of her mother’s death from her husband. “I was afraid that if he heard about the psychiatric clinic, he would think that I'm also not right in the head if I lost my temper,” she explained. “It was kept secret.”

Martin watched solemnly as a volunteer cemented the plaque into the pavement and rinsed it off with water, leaving a gilded block nestled inside the street’s drab row of gray cobblestones. Then she crouched down, gingerly set a rose on top of the stone, and wiped away a tear. For Martin and her family, the unveiling of the marker served as a corrective against the country’s legacy of postwar amnesia about the Nazis’ crimes against the disabled. After so many decades of silence, Martin told me she was “finally ready to talk about what happened.”

The next in line to place a rose over the stone was Martin’s nephew, Reiner Lenz, who spent years researching Daum’s biography and tracking down her medical files to find the official record of her death.

“After the war, nobody talked about people like my grandmother,” he recalled. “They said, ‘forget it.’ But we shouldn’t forget. The death of my grandmother has left a gap for her children and grandchildren that has never been closed.” He believes the stone represents a quiet rejection of the country’s rising tide of right-wing nationalism. “It is intended to commemorate all the sick and denounced sick who need special protection by society,” he said. “It should be a reminder to all of us never to allow such an injustice again.”

Visiting concentration camps is not mandatory in Germany, but it is encouraged and in some schools required. One morning, I joined a class of about 20 high school students on a tour of Sachsenhausen, a Nazi death camp outside Berlin. Nobody in the class had visited a concentration camp before. They gathered quietly around their guide, a German history buff in her early thirties. She carried a black tote bag with “it’s a beautiful life without Nazis” emblazoned across the front in bubbly pink letters.

In recent years, Germany’s sites of remembrance have become a flashpoint among figures associated with the country’s far-right movement, who bemoan the country’s memory culture as a source of national shame and guilt. In 2017, a politician with the country’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, assailed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame in the capital.” The party grabbed headlines the following year when a group of its constituents interrupted a tour at Sachsenhausen, questioning the existence of gas chambers, and an AfD politician called on a local mayor to ban Stolpersteine, those gold memorial stones, calling the country’s remembrance culture “a dictatorship of memory.” In their narration, the act of remembering is akin to an assault on the German identity, and nowhere are the country’s memory efforts more visible than in its memorial sites.

I decided to join the high schoolers as they toured Sachsenhausen because I wanted to understand what Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung meant to a generation that was further removed from its history than their parents or grandparents. The students passed under the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and walked into the camp, somber as the guide led them around its grounds, through the reconstructed barracks where prisoners slept and the gas chamber and execution site where tens of thousands were murdered from 1936 to 1945.

About halfway through the tour, the guide paused and withdrew two photos from her tote. She asked the class to describe them. The first was a black and white picture taken from the camp’s watchtower in 1941, looming over a neat row of prisoners with the edge of a machine gun in the frame. She explained that it was a propaganda picture of the camp used by the Nazis to convey a message of order, intimidation, and control. The second was a fuzzier snapshot of an inmate kneeling in front of a group of SS officers, including one who was laughing. This photo, she said, made the officers look cruel and arrogant, and the prisoner sympathetic. She then asked the students if they thought the picture was a propaganda photo. The class agreed that the picture portrayed the soldiers in a negative light, and therefore was not used in Hitler’s propaganda machine.

The guide told me the goal of the exercise was to show students how to distinguish between propaganda and reality — and to challenge the myth that everyday Germans didn’t know what was really going on at the time. “It’s important to show that ideas of the concentration camp were distributed very widely.”

At the end of the tour, one of the students approached me and struck up a conversation. I asked her about what she took from the guide’s photo lesson. “It was amazing to see the actual faces of the people and to see who they were because they look like normal people,” she said. “But you imagine them as monsters.” How did she talk about this history with her parents? “We don’t talk about it at all, actually,” she replied. As we chatted, a handful of her classmates migrated over, and within a minute, I was surrounded by 10.

The students told me that visiting the camp was different than reading about it. But then the conversation drifted into what it meant to learn about the Holocaust as Germans, and how they believe the rest of the world views them. “When you go to other countries, they go, ‘Oh, the German guys, they are the people who started the wars and everything. They have stereotypes,” one girl said. “We are a new generation.” Another student chimed in: “We cannot be blamed for this.” In the exchange, I saw edges of the emotions exploited by the far-right in its weaponization of memory politics.

As the two were talking, one of their peers made a face. Germans are still voting for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he pointed out. Doesn’t that factor into the conversation about blame? He pointed to Sachsenhausen’s gate, visibly agitated. “Doesn’t everybody have at least a basic understanding of history?” He asked. “There’s still people who openly say they are Nazis.”

I asked the tour guide how memory is integrated into Germany’s educational system. “It is very victim-focused, which is important,” she answered. “But I think now it would be a good idea to focus more on perpetrators. Everybody agrees that the Nazis were evil. But, we have to see them as people, so we can understand that normal people are capable of doing these things.”

“It’s a wall of silence and denial, and also a wall of threat,” Dominik, a playwright, told me over Zoom from his home in western Germany, describing the process of trying to untangle his family’s past. He hoisted a black photo album in front of his screen, opening it up to a page of World War Two-era photos. 

The pictures, he told me, were from his grandfather’s time in the Nazi’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht, and the album was one of just a few family remnants from that period of time (the other: a certificate affirming his grandmother’s Aryan lineage). The first time Dominik leafed through the pages a few years ago, he focused entirely on his grandfather’s face. He had a powerful urge to see if he looked unhappy. The second time he looked at the album, he noticed something startling. In the background of the photos, he saw burning villages and what appeared to be Russian prisoners of war. Somehow he completely missed the horror in the pictures when he saw them the first time around.

To Dominik, who asked to be identified by his first name because he has been targeted by neo-Nazi threats, the omission revealed a longing to see his grandfather as he wanted, not necessarily as he was. “I was looking to find proof that my grandfather was innocent,” he told me. Towns on fire and prisoners muddied that conceptualization, so “I completely kept them out of my mind.” He doesn’t believe he’s alone in that urge. “I think many people have a desire to deal with the past, but they also have a desire to say: not my parents, not my grandparents. They were fine. They helped the Jews. They were resistance fighters or victims of the Nazis.” 

Dominik belongs to a cohort of Germans who are interrogating the country’s reputation as a champion of remembrance and pointing to the gaps within it as symptoms of deeper amnesia. He’s 39, with a dark sense of humor, and wary of the country’s memory worship. I mentioned some Americans’ invocation of  Germany’s process as a possible model for the U.S. He chuckled. “This is like the new export product of Germany,” he told me, wryly. “After the cars, we also make this ‘great’ memory culture.” 

In early November, Dominik, along with the other two members of his theater collective, screened a movie, which they will adapt into a play later this year, about how the descendants of perpetrators engage with their family histories. I attended the screening in Berlin along with a few dozen Germans who quietly sipped beverages and watched the film, which occasionally felt like a fever dream. The movie dealt with the emotional toll of silence within families and was based on interviews between the collective’s members and their parents. For each of them, confronting family narratives of the war and Nazism meant coming up against a “wall,” as Dominik told me, of shame, anger, and denial, from their parents. 

The trio sought out to make the film after recognizing, as a group, that the country’s celebrated Holocaust reckoning had stopped at their own doorsteps. Dominik’s grandfather was in the army and joined the Nazi party when he was 19; the grandfathers of the other two collective members were SS officials. Growing up, their family discussions of the war focused on German — not Jewish — suffering: “about how grandfather was freezing in the Soviet Union, and he was such a victim,” Dominik explained. “These narratives are there all the time growing up. There’s no conversation about the Shoah. There’s a lot of conversation about how cruel the war was.” 

Over time, Dominik grew to reject the narrative he absorbed as a child about wartime suffering, opting instead to research the parts of the story his family and so many others left out. These interrogations, and subsequent discussions with family, formed the basis of Dominik’s contribution to the collective’s film.

At first, the members’ parents were supportive of the movie, which they were told was about family memory and the war. But as the conversations grew deeper and closer to their families’ behavior in Nazi Germany, Dominik said there was a moment for each person where things took a noticeable turn. Their parents “got angry and their faces changed and they started insulting us.” For Dominik, that happened after he asked his father if he knew the history of the shop where his grandfather worked, which had been run by a Jewish family until the Nazis expropriated it. “He was like, ‘OK, now I want to know, what is this project actually about? Do you want to play police and say your family is all Nazis?’” Dominik recalled. “Then, he lost himself in the worst antisemitism I’ve ever heard in my family.”

Dominik said he was shocked and disgusted by his father’s antisemitic screed. But it also revealed to him an internal conflict. Even though he was furious, something unexpected came up: “I had the feeling that I must protect him,” he explained.

“From what?” I asked.

“From the shame I feel. He exposed himself. And it is him, not me, that I want to protect.”

I traveled to Germany to try to better understand the lessons of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and to unpack the narrative that I had consumed in America about Germany as a champion of memory. But during my reporting, I kept coming up against a particular strain of silence that I couldn’t move past, and I wondered if I had been thinking about the reckoning in the wrong way. Maybe the story was actually about the conversations the country couldn’t have.

Shortly after I arrived in Germany and began talking to people about the past, it became clear that there was a notable gulf between collective and individual memory: the way the country processed memory on a national level and how individuals confronted their own family histories. It didn’t take long for me to pick up on this distinction. I noticed that many appeared comfortable talking about the Holocaust in an abstract way, synthesized more or less under the umbrella of: “the Nazis were evil,”  but withdrew altogether when I tried to nudge them into more personal territory. A common set of answers to my questions about what took place within peoples’ families and communities was: “We didn’t talk about it;” or, “I don’t know.” A level of detachment I found perplexing, given what I had read and studied about Germany’s textured and successful reckoning. 

The lack of interrogation into peoples’ family histories I encountered seemed to stand in stark contrast to national culture of memorialization I saw throughout the country: the shrines and museums; the class field trips to concentration camps; the declarations of public officials on important dates, such as the anniversary of Kristallnacht. So, after attending the screening, I ran my observations past Dominik. Was I being too harsh, or was there a genuine gap between the individual and nation’s ability to process the country’s history?

“This is not just your impression,” he replied. “There is this official culture of remembering and some people are quite cool in talking about it, but there’s not a connection to your own person or to your identity or what actually happened.” 

He added: “The vast majority of Germans grew up with horrible mass murderers as their closest relatives. Or let’s say, to be kind, they grew up with people who were completely callous and indifferent towards mass murder and mass murderers. And then you have these people as your parents or grandparents. The thought that your grandfather, the man you love, who kissed you, who hugged you is such a monster, is actually too painful for many Germans.” 

In 2019, researchers with Germany’s Bielefeld University surveyed more than 1,000 people across the country about their understanding of their families’ roles during the war. Specifically, the researchers asked the subjects to choose if their ancestors were perpetrators, victims, or “helpers” who assisted victims during the war. Nearly 70% of Germans surveyed said their family members were not perpetrators. More than half said they were victims.

I’ve often wondered about the psychological source of a person’s aversion to digging into the dark areas of their family history. Is it rooted in a fear of learning the truth? Or, is it about how to hold on to two contrasting stories of someone you love?

Maybe no one is better positioned to mull over these questions than Peter Pogany-Wnendt, a Hungarian-born Jewish psychotherapist living in Germany. The 68-year-old son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Pogany-Wnend works both with the descendants of perpetrators and survivors in his therapeutic practice.

Over cappuccinos in a quiet Berlin cafe, Pogany-Wnendt told me he sees the country’s emphasis on public memorials as a national form of displacement from individual guilt. “Because we are making a memorial public, we don’t need to look in our families. That’s not right. Because a public memorial is only as good as it is anchored in the personal story.”

Pogany-Wnendt believes that when feelings of shame and guilt remain repressed and unaddressed, they pass along to the next generation, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. But he also believes that the emotions transmitted from parent to child come with an “impossible task” for the descendants of both survivors and perpetrators. For the descendants of survivors, the impossible inherited task is to mourn the suffering of their parents and grandparents; for the descendants of perpetrators, to atone for their descendants' guilt and repent.

"Their parents were not able or willing to do this emotional work," he explained. "As it is neither possible for the children of the victims to mourn the suffering and the losses of their ancestors, nor is it possible for the children of the perpetrator to atone for the guilt of their fathers and mothers, both sides have to give the original feelings back to their ancestors. This is an individual inner-soul process that liberates the descendants from their emotional heritage, pain or guilt, and from the impossible tasks." 

In Pogany-Wnendt’s case, that meant realizing he could not mourn for his father, whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust, and whose deep grief left a lasting imprint on him while he was growing up. Pogany-Wnendt realized he couldn't grieve his dad's losses for him. He had to give that pain back.

“My father, he was always very sad,” Pogany-Wnendt explained. “And I felt as a child that I had to make him happy. I always felt responsible for his sadness and thought I had to mourn for my father. I tried to identify with his sadness and to put it on my own shoulders. But then I realized that I can’t mourn for my father or work through his pain. I have to leave it with him.”

Pogany-Wnendt’s recognition that he could not mourn his father’s losses for him, or resolve his grief, helped him feel more compassion towards him. He sees how the descendants of perpetrators, too, can undergo a similar process. 

“It’s not the guilt they’re inheriting, but the guilt feelings,” he said. “Because you can’t inherit guilt.”

“But there is a responsibility to remember what they did.”

Like the cobblestoned streets of Berlin, there are pockets of the American South coming alive with long-suppressed memories. But the reckoning is far from settled. In some places, two versions of history inhabit the same space. In others, the urge to remember is overwhelmed by the desire to forget.

In November 2015, Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney, issued a memory challenge to Memphis, Tennessee.

At the time, Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, was a few years away from opening America’s first lynching museum in Alabama, and was at the forefront of the country’s lynching memorialization movement. Stevenson gave a speech to a crowd in Memphis, imploring them to honor the county’s thirty-plus lynching victims.

Recalled Margaret Vandiver, a retired criminology professor who became involved in the effort: “A couple people who were in attendance looked at each other and said: Yup.” A multiracial, intergenerational coalition calling itself the Lynching Sites Memorial Project of Memphis, or LSP, came together shortly after, and set out to begin marking the landscape. The group has installed three memorials and hopes to have another in the ground soon.

The Memphis memorial group is one of a dozen like-minded organizations that have sprung up across the U.S. in the last few years, especially in the South. There are now lynching memorialization coalitions in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, South Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Colorado, and Florida.

Vandiver, who published a book about lynchings in Tennessee, told me she has been surprised by the sustained interest in the group’s work. 

But where there’s support, there’s also opposition. One morning in December, Vandiver picked me up at the local library to show me a few of the city’s lynching markers. She brought me to a green sign installed in 2018 memorializing Lee Walker, who was lynched in 1893 after he was accused of attempting to rape a white woman. A mob of 3,000 people broke into the jail where Walker had been held, hung him on a nearby pole, and then burned and mutilated his body.

As we pulled up to the stop, Vandiver warned me to keep an eye out for an “angry-looking” man. “If he approaches us, just go back to the car and I’ll handle him,” she instructed. The man, she explained, used to own a nearby business, and was enraged after the memorial went up, claiming it loomed over the parking lot. We didn’t see him, but it wasn’t the only story I heard of the business community or local leadership pushing back against markers that unearthed the brutality of lynchings for passersby — including shoppers — to see.

Others would simply prefer to avoid the ugliness of America’s racial violence as a matter of emotional self-preservation. Fred Morton, an 82-year-old volunteer with the Memphis group, told me the predominant sentiment towards this kind of history among white people in his blue-collar, middle-class community is: “Let’s just not talk about it. This is unpleasant, this is unseemly, this is disconcerting.” 

Vandiver brought me to a grassy field in an industrial, gentrifying neighborhood in Memphis. The plot of land marks the spot where a white mob killed three Black businessmen in 1892. The murders profoundly affected Ida B. Wells, a crusading investigative journalist who was a close family friend of one of the victims. The killing led Wells to begin collecting data that would ultimately debunk the widespread myth that lynchings were a form of punishment for Black men sexually assaulting white women. Wells found that the lynchings were instead “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” 

Despite the significance of the lynching in the city’s history, there are no markers or signs noting what happened. The lot where the men were killed, in fact, now sits on the grounds of a hip new brewery.

Later that afternoon, I met up with Wayne Dowdy, a Memphis historian. Morton and Vandiver joined me, as well as two other local volunteers with the Memphis lynching memorial group, Randell Gamble and Laura Kebede. I intended to talk to Dowdy about Memphis’ history of lynching, but our conversation quickly veered into the personal. Gamble and Kebede are Black; Vandiver, Dowdy, and Morton are white. 

Vandiver, who grew up in Florida, recalled singing the de-facto national anthem of the Confederacy, Dixie, in school. Dowdy explained how he grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s, steeped in the narratives of the Lost Cause, one of the most enduring revisionist mythologies in American history. The story Dowdy absorbed about the Civil War, in school and his community, was “the Confederate soldiers were noble, brave heroes who were fighting to maintain a way of life which had nothing to do with slavery. It was regurgitated at home, in the neighborhoods. It was like the air and water. No one who was white questioned it.”

Vandiver added that her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, and regaled his grandson — her father — with vivid tales of it while he was growing up. “So there's that one generation between someone who fought for Confederacy and me sitting right here,” she said. “That's how close this all is.”  

“See, for me, I don’t hear these stories from whites,” Gamble interjected. “I hear about the violence from slavery, Jim Crow, with African Americans. But from whites, I don’t hear these stories you’re telling about their families.”

There’s not a lot of talking happening in Arlington, Tennessee. 

That’s one of the first things Cynthia Myers tells me when she greets me in the middle of the small town square, about thirty minutes outside of Memphis. It’s a quaint and small plaza, with a Christmas tree and an old-fashioned red brick store hosting a steady stream of weekend shoppers. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from the courtyard, however, is any mention of the man who was shot to death and castrated right there, in broad daylight in 1939.

“It’s a taboo conversation,” Myers, 59 years old, told me wearily. “People don’t want to talk about it.”

Myers grew up with the story because the lynching victim, Jesse Lee Bond, was a cousin. And she was close to his brother, Charlie Morris, who spent years trying to bring the lynching to light. He died a few years ago, after successfully lobbying the state legislature to pass a cold case bill reopening investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era. 

But Arlington remains silent on Bond’s lynching. There’s no sign in the town square marking the site of the killing or stone marking Bond’s grave. According to Memphis lynching memorial members I spoke with, some of the descendants of the alleged perpetrator still live in town but have not spoken up publicly about what happened. “Some of them are in this place of denial, the past is the past,” one Arlington resident told me.

Jesse Lee Bond was a sharecropper who bought his seasonal planting supplies from Arlington’s general store, S.Y. Wilson & Company. The owners tracked the debt of farmers who bought their supplies on credit in a private notebook, and, according to some accounts, Bond was suspicious of how much they claimed he owed them. One day in April 1939, Bond asked for a receipt after buying something on credit, a request that was seen as out of the ordinary for a Black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South, and reportedly infuriated the white store owner when he found out. He ordered Bond to come back to the store, and his aunt accompanied him. When he arrived, the store owner and his employee started shooting, according to the Memphis lynching memorial group. 

“They shot at him and shot him. He ran out to the outhouse. They riddled the outhouse,” Morris said Bond’s aunt later told him. “And when he staggered out of the outhouse, they threw him down and they castrated him and dragged him to the river.” County records reported the cause of his death as an “accidental drowning.” The store’s owner, Charles R. Wilson, and his employee were charged with first-degree murder but later acquitted by an all-white jury. 

Charlie Morris was at school when he found out his brother had been murdered. “It affected me very much,” he recalled in an oral history recorded before he died. “My mother had three sons. And when she passed away, I was six. And the last thing that she said, on her deathbed, was ‘keep my boys together.’ And this was broken when they killed Jesse.” 

On the 79th anniversary of Bond’s lynching, the Memphis lynching group hosted a memorial ceremony and vigil in the Arlington town square. But since then, efforts to install a memorial in the square or a marker on Bond’s grave have been unsuccessful. “Arlington is this little town with this nice cute square, and that’s the icon for the town,” Gordon Myers, a local Reverend, told me, over lunch in town. “There’s a lot of energy towards preserving this facade within the administration of the town and the politics and real estate development.” Placing a lynching memorial in the center of it all would complicate the image the town markets to itself and others.

But Myers wants to see just that. From her perspective, the town’s ongoing silence feels like an acceptance of the lynching itself. “It’s like they’re still supporting what happened. To not want to engage with it, deal with it, or even discuss it, she told me. “Even if you don’t apologize, just open up about it. That would make a difference. It would give some closure about what happened.” 

On one of my last days in the South, I stopped by the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, with Tarrell and some members of the local lynching memorial initiative, the Lafayette County Community Remembrance Project.

The group was about half white, half Black, and mostly over the age of 50, although there were a few younger people there. They wanted to show me the memorial dedicated to the county’s seven lynching victims that was installed on September 17, 2021 in front of the county courthouse after a years-long, messy approval battle with the County Board of Supervisors.

The group included people with deep ties to the town and its violent history. 67-year-old Oxford native Effie Burt told me her grandfather, a sharecropper, left town after he was threatened with a lynching for refusing to work. “That could have been him on that sign,” she said, motioning to the marker. His sons fled to Missouri in the middle of the night to escape the specter of violence. “That destroyed my family,” Burt added. “I grew up without my uncles.”

As we were talking, I couldn’t help but fixate on the visuals of my surroundings. We stood next to the lynching memorial, at one edge of the town square, near the county courthouse. A stone’s throw away, an enormous Confederate statue loomed over the front of the square. Calls to remove it have been unsuccessful, so the statue now uneasily skirts the lynching memorial. It’s almost too perfect of a metaphor for America’s relationship with its past: the tensions of the current moment in the country’s historial reckoning carved in miniature, between these two memorials, on this town square. 

As I reflected on the contrasting iconography, I thought of something Dominik, the German playwright, told me when I explained the fractured state of American memory politics. “To some extent, it’s not that bad,” he replied. “At least you have a fight. A fight about history and ideas and the future of the country.” 

A clash is also a sign of life. Not a calcified, collectivized consensus on the past, but a living organism, being worked out right in front of you — on the Oxford square, or downtown Memphis, or in the minds of white Americans as the country spars over how to narrate the truest version of its history to the next generation. 

“When you move the conversation from the larger historical systemic to the personal, I think that’s what people are afraid of,” Dr. William Horne, Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University, who has written on his family’s role in slavery, told me. “Sometimes I wonder — is the best we can do to have a systemic conversation about systemic wrongs?”

In Mississippi, Tarrell recently learned about a family in the area where Steen was lynched with the same last name as the white woman he allegedly had a relationship with. He told me hasn’t been able to get in touch yet, but he’d like to meet up. He’s not interested in blame. He just wants to get closer to understanding what happened on July 30, 1893, and why.

“I’m not trying to disgrace anyone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened. If I had the opportunity to talk to one of them, they might say something that could help me learn more about my ancestors. I’m just trying to find the truth. And have some closure for the family. That’s the only thing I want to do.”

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The 1852 novel, written by Harriett Beecher-Stowe, for which the station is named occupies a fraught place in the annals of American literature, recognized both for galvanizing public opinion against the brutality of slavery and for reinforcing reductive racial stereotypes with the servile depiction of its main character. 

Pölking, whose parents are German and Cameroonian, spoke of his discomfort passing the station. “It woke up a lot of bad emotions,” he told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, arguing that it is way past time for it and a nearby street to be renamed.

So far, Pölking’s petition has not succeeded. The station’s name greets visitors on a large sign outside, emblazoned in white letters against a bright blue background. 

A few minutes down the road lie Onkel Toms Hütte stable and horseback riding school, a restaurant called Uncle Tom’s Burger and the Onkel Toms Hütte kindergarten. In fact, the entire area pays homage to a book once described by the Black American writer James Baldwin as a “catalogue of violence.” 

The existence of this neighborhood in modern-day, multicultural Berlin can be traced back to a surprisingly durable national fascination with America’s antebellum South, which first took hold in the mid-19th century. 

Soon after publication, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” became a global sensation and the only book in the 19th century to outsell the Bible. It made Beecher-Stowe Germany’s most beloved American author and had a profound effect on popular culture, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed beer gardens and campgrounds springing up across the country. Berlin’s Onkel Toms Hutte subway station opened in 1929, near an Uncle Tom’s pub and a sprawling housing development of the same name. 

These literary-themed homages tapped into a fantasy with the American South that sanitized the brutality of chattel slavery and characterized plantation life as bucolic, simple and comfortable for thousands of “loyal and happy” slaves. 

Heike Paul, is an American Studies professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg who has written extensively about Germany’s obsession with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She describes this inaccurate interpretation of a brutal and shameful period of American history as the “pastoralization of slavery” and a “total disconnect” from Beecher-Stowe’s text, which was written to expose the horrors of the practice.

Similar ideas are also central to the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist account of America’s past that surfaced after the defeat of Confederate forces in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Romanticizing plantation life and depicting slaves as the faithful servants of benevolent owners, the mythology of the Lost Cause also insists that the war was fought over state’s rights, not whether or not white people had the right to own and place other human beings in chains. 

While Beecher-Stowe was a staunch abolitionist, the unquestioning subservience of her central character reinforced stereotypes and a variety of racist ideas. According to Sanders Isaac Bernstein, a Berlin-based PhD student at the University of Southern California, whose work has included analysis of German nostalgia for the Confederate South, this archetype “was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization.”

Bernstein holds up as an example the introduction of a 1911 German translation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which states that “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

While living in the South, I encountered ideas rooted in the Lost Cause repeatedly. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Civil War casually referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or the myriad revisionist narratives I came across while covering North Carolina’s debate to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. Most people who opposed the idea argued that taking down or altering the monuments amounted to historical erasure, advancing the falsehood that the war was fought in response to northern “tyranny.” In reality, however, the defense of these symbols, included, at its core, a glorification of the Confederate cause and antebellum life.

Coming across these ideas in the contemporary South may be unpleasant, but it is not surprising. I did not expect to find traces of them in Berlin, though. Wanting to understand how this contentious American myth gained such a following in Germany, I asked Bernstein to meet me at Onkel Toms Hütte. He arrived, dressed in black. We both took photographs of the station’s sign and then moved to a nearby bench. 

Outside of the neighborhood of Onkel Toms Hütte, most of Germany’s homages to Beecher-Stowe’s book are no longer visible. The nearby tavern shut down in 1978 and the campgrounds disappeared decades ago. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not the only example of Southern storytelling that resonated in Germany. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” became an immediate bestseller under the Third Reich and its 1939 movie adaptation, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is said to have been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Revisionist interpretations of the Confederacy persisted under the Nazi regime, which had developed its own Lost Cause narrative to cope with the national humiliation that resulted from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. According to an account by the ex-Nazi leader Hermann Rauschnin, Hitler believed that the “American people themselves were conquered” when the South lost the Civil War. Since then, he argued, the United States had slid into a state of political and racial “decay.” 

You can still see clear signs of this strange love affair lingering in the Germany of today: Civil War reenactments in which the majority of participants want to take the losing side; Confederate flags flying at anti-lockdown protests, at country music festivals, or hung in the back of Berlin drinking establishments. In many instances, the Stars and Bars can be seen as a convenient alternative to the Nazi swastika, the display of which has been banned under German law since 1945. 

The cultural resonance of the Confederate war manifests itself in subtler ways, too. Bernstein, who is American, said: “Sometimes I’m surprised by the way in which one can still encounter people being like, ‘You know, the real America is in the South.' I think it comes back to a particular idea of the city being somehow part of the world capitalist system, but the country is where a nation’s cultural life truly exists. I can’t help but think that part of that is the remaining power of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’”

Of course, Germany is not the only country in which Confederate iconography can be seen. In recent years, the Stars and Bars has become a common touchstone for the far right from Ireland to Brazil. However, it is especially jarring in a nation that has, for decades, made rigorous efforts to confront the violence and prejudice of its past. 

Germany’s long and painful process of reckoning with the Holocaust, known within the country as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, is often hailed as a global model of historical reconciliation. According to Bernstein, it includes a deep suspicion of wistful longing for an imagined past, an emotion fostered and exploited by the Nazis to advance their ideas of antisemitism and volkisch nationalism. 

However such messaging remains powerful to this day. In a recent campaign, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland called for a return to a “normal” Germany. While, at least on the surface, about the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, one video juxtaposes grainily nostalgic cinefilm of a white family with contemporary footage of burning barricades, anti-fascist protesters and lockdown signs. At one point a garden gnome makes an appearance in a neat suburban garden, presumably owned by a clean-cut white, middle-class family — a bizarre symbol of the party’s cozy, quaint and culturally homogenous vision for the nation.

That these ideas still have a following in Germany may explain why Pölking’s campaign to rename Onkel Toms Hütte has, as yet, not been acted upon. After all, preserving the name allows people to cling to a German identity rooted in an illusory version of the past, far away from the complexities and tensions that exist in today’s world.

For Bernstein, that raises a worrying question: “Shouldn’t Germany, of all places, be aware of the trap of nostalgia?”

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington, DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

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Born in Suizhou, Hubei in 1976, he trained in a police academy before working as an officer in a prison and then as a manager in factories in Guangdong. There, he began advocating on behalf of workers and ran several blogs reporting on human rights violations in China, all of which were deleted by the authorities. He now runs a blog called “Free in China” from Germany. Later, he helped organize protests in Beijing on behalf of people whose homes were razed in massive state development projects. 

Liu’s work attracted the attention of the artist Ai Weiwei, who made a 2010 documentary featuring Liu called Hua Hao Yue Yuan (Blissful Harmony) about how the Chinese authorities treat activists. After the documentary’s release, he was among those calling for a “Jasmine Revolution”, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings calling for democracy. He was arrested and tortured in Chinese detention. Upon his release he fled to Europe in 2013.  

I met him in Berlin, where we discussed his work as an overseas activist and his ongoing fight against intensifying censorship from Beijing. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: What is it like to be a Chinese dissident living in exile in 2021? 

Liu Dejun: It’s very difficult for me. When Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and democracy activist, died in 2017 after nine years in prison, I was very upset. I called for non-violent revolution in China, to overturn the Communist Party. I wrote letters to the United Nations and to the European Union and other international organizations. And, I’m not 100% sure, but I think the Communist Party was very angry with it and wanted me to stop. 

You currently live in Nuremberg, do you feel surveilled?

I used to live in an apartment in Nuremberg, but it was broken into by someone. They left something on the sofa that didn’t belong to me: a ladies’ jacket. I asked all my friends about it but none of them said it was theirs. I think it might have been someone from the Communist party, because it was right before an event where I was to make a speech. I’ve had my bicycle tires slashed and the wheel unscrewed, so that if I cycled too fast and a car came, or I braked too hard, the wheel would come off. I think it’s just to threaten me. Sometimes, my laptops and phones tell me my WhatsApp had a suspicious login. But I think Germany is safe. They can’t kidnap me or torture me. Maybe they could kill me, but everybody will die eventually. I’m not afraid of that. 

You spend quite a lot of your time organizing resistance within China. Does technology like virtual private networks help you navigate censorship?

Technology helps us because now people in China can find out the truth about what's happening in their country on the internet — not only about Tibet and the Uyghurs, but also Hong Kong and human rights violations in mainland China. But the firewall and the internet censorship is getting harder and harder to break through, so it’s getting more difficult. We used to be able to make VPNs that would last six months, but now a private VPN is blocked after just one or two days. I’m looking for support and experts from different corners of the world to create services that are difficult for the Chinese government to discover. 

The authorities often crack down on certain populations for using VPNs. For example, for Uyghurs having a VPN on your phone is enough to get you arrested. Do you worry that might become the norm?

VPNs are not very safe anymore and, because Chinese internet censorship technology is improving all the time, it makes them harder and harder to use. People who develop them are always at risk. The government spent many years tracking down the creator of Shadowsocks, a free encryption project that was used to breach the firewall. He was discovered by the security services and arrested, and now he doesn’t maintain it anymore.

Is there any way around this kind of surveillance?

I gave up creating VPNs, because the security services would take down anything I created very quickly. Now I’m looking for support to find other ways to help people cross the firewall. If we use a peer-to-peer network with people using different servers from around the world, it’s much harder for the Chinese government to discover.

It sounds like you are racing against the government to help people access an uncensored internet. 

I just want people to access information. I’m planning a mobile phone app that just directs people immediately to a website containing real news and articles about democracy, human rights, and nonviolent social movements. 

Is it difficult to talk to your family?

Signal is blocked and Telegram is blocked in China. I think my sister was threatened by the security services, so she doesn’t use a VPN. I have to use a separate mobile phone, only with WeChat, to talk to them. I keep it turned off, and just turn it on to talk to my family. 

The artist Ai Weiwei made a documentary about you. How did that happen?

In China, I used to write about human rights, and women’s rights, and was always protesting against the Chinese government. After I helped organize some anti-government protests in 2010 the police kidnapped me, beat me and blindfolded me before taking me out to the mountains outside Beijing. They left me there and told me “if you come back to Beijing, we will kill you.” I told a friend, who wrote on Twitter that I had been kidnapped. Ai Weiwei saw it and came to pick me up in the early morning with a camera and some other friends. He made this film about how China cracks down on activists. 

Are you still trying to organize protests within China?

I publish blogs on my website about how to organize and people in China spread this themselves. But it’s difficult for people because of censorship - they don’t have any information about Xinjiang, for example. With the pandemic, there is now a new level of surveillance. Some people are not aware that they’re being controlled. 

The post For a dissident living in Germany, China’s digital policing is winning appeared first on Coda Story.

But Höcke — head of a radical faction within the AfD known simply as “the Wing” and a man who once described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument to shame” — did not stop there. Not only should the faithful cast their ballots for the party, he said, they should make sure to do it in person and not by mail, which, he alleged, is vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. “Anyone who has an interest in fair elections and secret elections should go to their polling place,” he explained. 

Germany heads to the polls on Sunday, September 26, in an unusually open and unpredictable general election that could determine the country’s direction for decades to follow. For the first time in 16 years, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has helmed the country since 2005, is not standing again. 

The three candidates — Armin Laschet, from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, Olaf Scholz from the center-left Social Democrats and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens — are locked in a volatile race for the nation’s highest office. In the final days of the campaign, Scholz’s SPD is in the lead with 25%, followed closely by Laschet’s CDU. The Greens, however, have recently fallen behind.

Parties that advocate for postal voting, Höcke continued — including the Greens and the SPD — were essentially condoning voter fraud. He then brought up the example of an unproven story making the rounds this year about a young Green supporter allegedly casting their grandmother’s vote for the party without her knowledge. 

If wide-scale election manipulation could occur in the United States, he said, drawing on the dizzying number of false claims made by Donald Trump during his 2020 presidential campaign, “then I know that it’s possible in the most important country in Europe.” 

“Stay alert, my friends,” he added. “This is about our democracy.”

As up to 60 million Germans prepare to vote, Höcke is just one of many reactionary figures alleging that the election has already been fixed. Less than a year after Donald Trump flooded the U.S. presidential elections with conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud in the United States — leading to five deaths during the January 6 assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. — German far-right parties have picked up the narrative and run with it.

The allegations of voter fraud in Germany have come from a cast of extreme groups and individuals, including AfD leaders and politicians, radical right-wing organizations like Ein Prozent, and conspiracist movements including QAnon and the anti-lockdown Querdenken group. 

While the AfD remains a small force in German politics — it is currently polling at around 11% nationally, slightly below the 12.6% it achieved in 2017 — the party’s supporters, primarily communicating through Telegram, claim that postal ballots will be used to steal the election. Others subscribe to a false belief, which also circulated in the U.S., that the election will be hijacked by rigged voting machines. 

While calling foul after an election loss is not a new tactic, disinformation experts say Trump’s unrelenting declarations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election have inspired like-minded movements in Germany to resort to similar tactics. 

“Donald Trump isn’t the reason we have voter fraud narratives, we already had those before,” said Karolin Schwarz, a Berlin-based author and journalist who tracks far-right disinformation online. “But he contributed to the existing narratives and maybe even created some more that hadn’t been around before.” 

In November 2020, AfD leaders released a tepid statement acknowledging Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s U.S election victory: “We accept the democratic decision of the American citizens and are confident that possible irregularities in the vote counts will be resolved quickly through the rule of law,” it read.

Yet some party members disagreed. “No congratulations for the globalist electoral fraudster Joe Biden,” Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD member of parliament, wrote on Twitter, claiming that there had been “massive irregularities.” Deputy party leader Beatrix von Storch also contradicted the statement and posted about “massive evidence of election fraud.” 

German officials have prepared for the possibility that, due to the ongoing pandemic, up to half of the country’s voters will cast mail-in ballots in the general election — up from almost 29% in 2017. For a number of conspiracy theorists and right-wing figures, such statistics lend credence to their notions of rampant manipulation and deception.

The first preview of what might happen after Sunday’s elections came in June, during regional polls in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won more than 20% of the vote. When the party’s support failed to match its polling numbers and the Christian Democrats performed significantly better than expected — the AfD ended up trailing the CDU by 16 points — far-right politicians and commentators immediately began to cite election fraud, many posting a now-debunked report that some poll workers were invalidating AfD votes. 

While the Saxony-Anhalt allegations were spread primarily by individuals on the fringes of the AfD, the party has now embraced these ideas. In late August, AfD social media accounts began to feature campaign ads that echoed Höcke’s speech: “A mailbox isn’t a polling place,” they read. 

Nora Mathelemuse, a Berlin-based analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, believes that the AfD’s focus on election fraud is part of an effort to seize the spotlight at a time when voters are looking to mainstream politicians to steer Germany out of the coronavirus pandemic.

The party’s followers are clearly on board. I spoke to a handful at Höcke’s rally. None were willing to vote by mail and all believed the election results would be compromised.

“I can’t really imagine voting by mail because I think postal voting is prone to fraud — you can manipulate a lot with postal votes,” said Peter Kunadt, a 58-year-old man from Burgstädt. He brought up both the U.S. election and the Saxony-Anhalt election, saying that he couldn’t see how late-breaking shifts in votes in both cases were possible without some kind of tampering along the way. 

Thomas, 53, who declined to give his last name, agreed that mail-in ballots could not be trusted. “It’s going to be manipulated, I’m 100% sure,” he said. “With postal voting, it’s easy to cheat.”

In the long term, the danger of such beliefs are clear: “The underlying core of this narrative is that it’s trying to destabilize the democratic process within Germany,” said Mathelemuse. “Because if the election doesn't properly work, then what is our democracy?”

If nothing else, widespread rumors of voter fraud will almost certainly make the lives of poll workers and election officials significantly more difficult. In his speech, Höcke urged AfD supporters to visit polling centers to serve as informal observers. He asked them to write down the number of votes for each party and compare their figures with the official results. The AfD has a page on its website dedicated to such reports. Its headline reads: “Trust is good — control is better.” 

The post As Germany prepares for a historic election, far-right leaders are embracing Trump’s Big Lie appeared first on Coda Story.

On a YouTube livestream by the group “Honk for Hope,” which had previously organized buses to anti-lockdown protests in cities across Germany, Eder called for a “unit” of like-minded individuals to ride down to the flooded area and work at a Querdenken stall to hand out food, flashlights and other “everyday necessities” to individuals affected by the disaster. He said that the local council was “letting people down terribly,” because it had rejected his offer to coordinate all rescue operations.

Shortly before, Eder, who lives in the southern state of Bavaria, had appeared at an anti-lockdown protest in Berlin, calling for a military coup. In his YouTube stream, he wore his old uniform. “If I arrive somewhere in jeans, I have to explain who I am,” he said. A doctor named Bodo Schiffmann, who regularly tells his 140,000 Telegram followers that most people who get vaccines will die and compares healthcare professionals to the mass-murderers of Nazi Germany, appeared in the same broadcast, promising “to get non-bureaucratic help directly to flood victims.” 

The floods, which occurred after two months’ worth of rain poured down on western Germany in just two days, killed 141 people in Ahrweiler alone. German prosecutors have launched an investigation against the conservative head of the district, Jürgen Pföhler, on grounds of “negligent homicide.” They allege that he failed to adequately warn and evacuate residents who lived near the River Ahr, which broke its banks, destroying bridges, roads and homes and injuring hundreds of people.

In response to the disaster, large numbers of people have donated to crowdfunded campaigns to provide relief. In just a few days, Schiffmann received €700,000 in donations to his PayPal account, which he had promised would “100%” go directly to flood victims. However, the money remained in Schiffmann’s personal account, which PayPal froze in early August for undisclosed reasons. Around 2000 firefighters, police officers, soldiers and official rescue workers were deployed to the Ahr Valley. Meanwhile, according to the Ahrweiler emergency services, more than 5,000 volunteers from all over the country registered to hand out cooked meals and supplies, including flashlights, batteries and blankets to the people of Ahrweiler. 

Along with aid from concerned citizens, authorities have also seen a surge of disinformation in flood zones. At a July press conference, the national government spokesperson Ulrike Demmer warned that false information was being spread with the aim of “aggravating and exploiting the tense situation and the completely understandable uncertainty of the people affected, harming trust in state measures and institutions.” 

In the North Rhine Westphalia, which neighbors Ahrweiler, intelligence officers observed that “members of the Querdenken movement” were “arriving in the flooded regions from across the country.” 

While members of radical right-wing political parties, including like the National Democratic Party and Der Dritte Weg (Third Way), traveled to Ahrweiler and took selfies amid the wreckage, a number of Querdenkers arrived to offer therapy for traumatized children, driving what they referred to as “peace vehicles.” On July 20, local police tweeted that right-wing extremists were posing as “carers” and one such vehicle — painted to look like a police car — was using a megaphone to spread “fake news” that official rescue workers were soon to leave the scene. The mayor of the town of Sinzig told the national broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that another had driven through his town, announcing that a “second wave” of floods was imminent. 

Querdenken activity has exacerbated the chaos and fear experienced by a population already reeling from the effects of the floods. In the first two weeks after the deluge, “there was no electricity or internet for people to check the rumors they were hearing,” said one 22-year-old student, who asked to be referred to simply as Clara, raising privacy concerns. 

Across the Ahr valley, word-of-mouth speculation about potential dam failures drove people to flee their homes, many leaving all their belongings behind. “My brother was volunteering in Sinzig, when a peace car drove by, announcing, ’The dam has burst, run!’” Clara added. ‘There was no dam nearby, but some people began to run in panic, while others broke down crying.” 

At its height, the Querdenken movement held anti-lockdown protests that attracted tens of thousands of attendees in cities across the country. In recent months, however, it has shrunk to a core group of increasingly radical individuals and pivoted from criticism of Covid-19 restrictions to extreme anti-state and anti-globalist rhetoric. In April, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — Germany’s federal domestic intelligence organization — announced that it would start surveilling Querdenken members and that it had set up a new category of extremism especially for them, defined as “actions that delegitimize the state.”

According to Pia Lamberty, co-director of the Berlin-based think tank the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, this new category is problematic, because it ignores the antisemitic and far-right background of many Querdenken protesters and frames criticism of the government and its actions as the main problem. She worries that the designation could be used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to investigate protest groups that exist far from the fringes of the radical right wing, such as environmental activists and police abolitionists. 

“The new category can be used differently, depending on who has political power,” Lamberty said. “It could eventually be used to go after legitimate criticism.”  

Like Eder, many of the Querdenkers expressing extreme anti-government views appear to share backgrounds in the military or police force. After the floods in Ahrweiler, Eder and dozens of former officers occupied an empty primary school in the city Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler to offer medical aid, hand out meals and supplies near a sign that read “We are here. Where is your government?” 

According to Sascha Klose — a rescue worker for the volunteer-run Federal Agency of Technical Relief, who lives in the village of Fritzdorf — people seeking help were met with a barrage of wild theories, among them that the disaster was planned and caused by chemicals that the German government had released over the district by airplane. 

A significant number of the people who joined Eder in Ahrweiler belong to a 5,000 member Telegram group called Veteranen-Pool, set up in April to encourage army veterans and former police officers to fulfil their “soldiers’ duty” and stand between Querdenken protesters and serving law enforcement officers. The group includes a former soldier named Frank Horn, who told the German news program Kontraste that he aims to prepare its members for the day when the state collapses, so they can arrest politicians for imposing lockdown measures and bring them to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Eder’s group — one of whom was filmed by the public broadcaster ZDF showing neo-Nazi tattoos — were removed from the primary school on July 30, following orders from the city council, but reports continue to surface of Querdenkers volunteering in the region. 

For the past few weeks, authorities in Ahrweiler have repeatedly had to reassure locals that official organizations, such as the fire brigade and the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, have no intention of ending their relief efforts. 

A recent report by the North Rhine Westphalia’s intelligence service found that while the aims of the Querdenken movement are more blurry than those of right-wing extremists, its prevailing “discourses clearly aim to overthrow the state.” 

As the locals in Ahrweiler begin to rebuild their lives, not everyone is keen to listen to the conspiracy theories promoted by Querdenkers.. Sascha Klose even recalled seeing one of Eder’s team being punched in the face by a local resident. 

“He had one of the sides of his house ripped out and found a severed head floating in his living room,” she said. “After hearing a story like that, the veterans had responded by telling him that the rain had been artificially created.”

The post Far-right groups hit Germany’s flooded regions with conspiracy theories and disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

She was especially keen on the advice columns, even though the questions — “Does he love me?”, “How do I get him to notice me?” — were pretty much the same in every magazine she read. She liked the idea that people could confess their secrets, and that others would listen and respond. 

In East Berlin, Klier had, like many other teenagers, grown up reading Neues Leben (New Living), the only mainstream monthly teen magazine published in the German Democratic Republic. While Western publications were banned from the country, Neues Leben was published by the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official youth organization of the Communist Party, which set out to instill the values of the state in young people. 

The magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1992, was modeled on West Germany’s trashy teen title, Bravo. However, it was also under strict instructions to make state youth projects look appealing to teens. So while it featured articles about sex, relationship advice columns and profiles of pop stars, it also included glowing reports of young workers who gave up their weekends to participate in FDJ initiatives, such as volunteer home-building and recycling projects.

In January this year, I visited Ingeborg Dittmann, the former editor of Neues Leben, in her house in the outskirts of Berlin. Dittmann worked at the magazine from 1973 to 1992, and now publishes a monthly newspaper about arts and politics for her neighborhood. We sat in her living room, while she smoked cigarettes and went through old copies of the magazine.

“This was our most popular column”, she said, flicking to the back of an issue and pointing to a headline, “schreibst Du mir, schreib ich Dir” (Write to me, I’ll write to you). This personal ads page was where East Germans under the age of 26 advertised for pen pals. Young people from other communist countries, including the USSR, Hungary, Romania and Cuba could send in their details, too. 

“It was for young people who couldn't get out,” Dittmann explained, referring to the heavily guarded border that prevented citizens from leaving the country. “Between the ages of 15 and 18, I had up to 15 pen pals.” 

Old editions of Neues Leben feature posters of The Beatles, fashion advice and reports about FDJ art competitions and festivals. Many of its stories were written by Dittmann’s old friend Eckhard Mieder, during his time as features editor between 1980 and 1984. 

“The point of Neues Leben was to make politics entertaining for the youth.” Mieder told me. “We had a mission to educate our readers according to socialist principles. But I don’t think it worked. I spent half a year at Neues Leben replying to letters from readers, which were all about problems with parents and sexuality.”

The young people shown in the magazine “were supposed to function as role models,” Mieder said. For example, in 1983, then 20-year-old Falk Schade and his girlfriend Kerstin were featured in a photo story that showed them attending the annual communist youth festival in the eastern town of Memleben. They married shortly after.

In the story, Falk and Kerstin are wearing blue communist youth uniforms. 

Kerstin pins a badge of a white dove onto Falk’s stiff blue shirt. Her own badge reads “Gegen Nato Waffen, Frieden Schaffen” (“Create peace against NATO weapons”). 

At the time, the global nuclear disarmament movement was in full swing and demonstrators tried to join the FDJ festival. The editorial in Neues Leben makes no mention of their presence. Instead, another picture shows Falk and Kerstin visiting a shooting gallery. In a photo caption, Falk says: “I don’t understand that some of our people believe that if you tell everyone to leave weapons alone, there won’t be any more war.” 

When I called Falk Schade, who recently separated from Kerstin, he said that a Neues Leben reporter had followed them around the festival, and later showed them a version of their dialogue to approve. He added that Neues Leben’s staff used the story to show the FDJ in the best possible light.

“They interpreted a lot into what we were saying,” said Falk. 

State censorship

Back in the 1980s, Dittmann wanted to write about music. In her apartment today, she still has a collection of ceramic vases that the magazine gave out as awards to readers’ favorite East German pop stars. Some of the musicians, such as the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, later fled to the West while on tour and were banned from the magazine’s pages. 

As editor, Dittmann was allowed to publish two articles about Western musicians, actors and authors in each issue. Their work was often not available in the east, so she relied on friends in West Germany to send cassettes and books to the office. She was always worried her work would incur the wrath of authorities. 

“I wrote with a stomach ache, because I never knew, did I get it right?” she said. 

One day, after a friend from Hamburg sent her a book about rock music, she was called to the publisher’s security department and questioned by the secret police.

Although it enjoyed a long existence, Neues Leben’s print run was always limited. The magazine had a circulation of 500,000, but issues were widely shared and monthly readership was estimated to be two million. At monthly editorial conferences, editors pitched ideas, but there was never any doubt about who was really in charge. 

The FDJ Zentralrat (or central council), which was responsible for executing the Communist party’s youth policies, was located on one of the main streets in East Berlin, close to Neues Leben’s offices. When Dittmann became deputy editor-in-chief, she says, officials told her that “mechanical engineering” would be an important topic to cover for young people. 

“We were all socialists, completely in accord with the politics,” said Mieder. 

But the conversations between editors about what could and couldn’t be said often turned farcical. Once, Mieder profiled a young pig farmer from the northeastern city of Neubrandenburg and began with the sentence: “She organizes our Sunday pork cutlets.” His editor at the time promptly told him to change his intro, owing to there being a shortage of pork in East Germany. 

The fall of the wall

In 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FDJ central council announced a national campaign — “Max Braucht Schrott” (Max needs scrap metal) — in which young workers would volunteer their spare time to participate in collections for a steel plant in the state of Thuringia. 

A 23-year-old man named Carsten Seeger, who organized recreational activities for young workers, was interviewed by Neues Leben, after his district in the northern state of Mecklenburg came third in the country for the amount of metal gathered. 

Today, Seeger is a social worker in the lakeside city of Neubrandenburg. He told me that the campaign was like a kind of weekend camp, with drinks, music and bonfires in the evening. It was also closely followed by the authorities, who wanted to meet collection targets.

“We wanted to prove ourselves, to show that we were capable of shaping the future. We didn’t want to embarrass ourselves by failing,” he said.

By November 1989, the volunteers in Seeger’s town had gathered all the metal they could and, as a reward, were sent on a group holiday to Saxony. Owing to the government’s heavy censorship, they had not heard about growing protests across the country, which were about to topple the East German regime. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the former GDR’s economy was plunged into bankruptcy. In the years following German reunification in 1990, over 14,000 East German companies were privatized and as many as four million East German workers lost their jobs.

In 1990, a publishing company in Hamburg bought Neues Leben, hiked up the price and urged Dittmann and her team to run stories about sex and crime. In Dittmann’s view, this was Neues Leben’s lowest point. By 1992, the magazine had lost a large section of its readership. 

Dittmann has mostly fond memories of editing the magazine under the watchful eyes of the FDJ. “We didn’t just have to print the party’s speeches, we could go into schools and talk to young people. Working at Neues Leben was the best job in the business,” she said.

Still, she acknowledges, “it got boring, interviewing one youth brigade after the other.”

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Last month, Germany released a coronavirus tracing app that has eased the concerns of digital rights activists and the privacy-sensitive German public. 

Released on June 16, the “Corona-Warn-App” uses Bluetooth to detect and contact people who may have been exposed to someone who has contracted the coronavirus. Germany initially pursued a centralized approach — in which anonymized personal data is stored on a central server accessible by the government — then ceded to privacy concerns and pivoted to a decentralized version, in which data is stored on users’ phones.

Beyond decentralization, the app is open source, with 100% of its code published online and a platform for people to comment, ask questions, and make suggestions. Germany’s Chaos Computer Club — Europe’s largest association of hackers, which often campaigns against surveillance technology — has signaled approval, praising the commitment to transparency shown by the German app’s developers. 

Public health authorities say that digital contact tracing can slow the spread of the virus. A study by the University of Oxford found that tracing apps start working when 15 percent of a population uses them. Figures released this week show that nearly 19 percent of the German population has downloaded the app, a strong start in a country where almost half of the population said they would not download a tracking app, according to a survey by the public broadcast group ARD. 

But the 15.8 million downloads are not necessarily indicative of proper use. 

“Exceeding 15 percent of the population seems promising,” said Melyssa Eigen, a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “But the app is completely voluntary. It's voluntary to download and voluntary to share that you've been infected.”

Eigen says it is likely that some users download the app only to receive warnings about other people. 

“If you become infected, there's nothing forcing you to share that information,” she said. That’s one of the downsides to a decentralized app. In a centralized approach, the government could intervene based on a person’s contact list. 

“There is a trade-off between privacy and efficiency.” 

For those who cannot avoid crowded situations — people who live or work in densely populated areas — the app may be less effective in preventing the spread of the virus, as it merely acts as a warning. But, overall, the positive reception to its launch could lead to more testing and lower case numbers. 

“It's pretty impressive that in a country where people are really into their digital rights and fear government surveillance that it's even been downloaded as much as it has,” Eigen said.

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However, first impressions on social media can be deceiving. Kleine, 28, is an important influencer on Germany’s far-right scene and a member of the anti-immigrant Identitarian movement. Along with his colleague Phillip Thaler, he produces a YouTube channel titled Laut Gedacht (“Thinking out loud”).

Clearly aimed at a millennial and younger audience, Laut Gedacht’s weekly-posted videos regularly attract up to 200,000 views. In one, Thaler and Kleine openly mock the speech of the environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who lives with Asperger’s syndrome. In another, more recent posting, the two men criticize German media outlets for their “insincere” coverage of Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister Viktor Orban.

At first glance, Laut Gedacht might appear to be like any one of the dozens of far-right YouTube channels now operating in Germany. A closer look at its sponsor list, however, reveals links to a well-resourced and carefully organized information operation. 

Klein and Thaler receive financial support from a group named Ein Prozent (One Percent), the aim of which is to spread nationalist narratives among young Germans.

The group was founded in 2015 by Götz Kubitschek — a former reserve officer in the German army, who reportedly served in Bosnia, but was later dismissed from the military for his involvement in “right-wing extremist” politics. According to its website, Ein Prozent was formed in 2015 as a reaction to the German government's decision to take in large numbers of refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

The organization is primarily funded by small donations from a large network of like-minded individuals. According to the group’s website, almost 50,000 people gave an average sum of $22 to Ein Prozent in 2018, allowing it to spend $425,000 on “patriotic projects” that year.   

Since its founding, the group has backed more than 80 right-wing cultural initiatives across Germany. They range from youth magazines to music projects and social media channels, such as Laut Gedacht. Ein Prozent propagates support by deploying slick online marketing techniques to build and nurture networks of young influencers already well established in German-language far-right social media circles.

Although Ein Prozent is not officially affiliated with any political party, it has strong links to Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Kubitschek, for instance, is a regular speaker at AfD events, while AfD politician Hans Thomas Tillschneider is on the group’s board of directors.

Founded in 2013, AfD has quickly risen to political prominence. In Germany’s last parliamentary elections, held in 2017, it won 12.6% of the vote and 94 parliamentary seats. The party’s growing popularity can be largely attributed to its hardline positions on immigration and Islam. AfD co-chairman Alexander Gauland has openly and frequently spoken of fighting an "invasion of foreigners."

Culture war

Stefan Laurer, is the editor of Belltower News, a Berlin-based publication that specializes in coverage of extremist organizations. According to him, Ein Prozent is “basically implementing a policy based on the ideology of the New Right.” 

Laurer refers to the metapolitical strategies of the Nouvelle Droite movement. Established in late-1960s France and borrowing heavily from radical left-wing theory, its proponents believe that, in order for the far-right to be successful, reactionary ideology must be gradually and comprehensively filtered into society, via non-political channels such as music, literature and art.

“The assumption is that in order to get more people in Germany to vote for the far-right AfD party, the whole culture needs to change first. People need to feel like it is a completely normal thing to do,” he explained. “The idea is that a real, long-lasting change in politics needs to be preceded by a cultural change.” 

Back when these ideas were first established, attempts to radically alter the cultural landscape of any nation would have been faced with almost insurmountable obstacles, given that the monopoly on cultural output was held by the legacy media. But, in the age of social media, the ability of previously marginal voices to create content and reach large audiences has greatly expanded. 

While the global far right has proved adept at exploiting the potential of 21st-century technology to deliver its political message, Ein Prozent is notable as an organization dedicated to achieving this wider cultural shift. 

To help spread its ideas to German youth, Ein Prozent actively backs right-wing German musicians. According to Belltower News, in 2016 the group promoted a track called “Europa” produced by a 27-year-old rapper known as Komplott (German for “conspiracy”).

According to Patrick Stegemann, who has recently published a book about Germany’s far-right online networks,  the group considers “Europa” to be the “unofficial anthem” of young, indigenous Germans.

Another notable example of Ein Prozent’s incursion into the German music business is the 28-year-old rapper Chris Ares, whose nationalist-themed album “2014-2018” briefly topped both the German iTunes and Amazon Music charts. 

It includes tracks such as “Narrativ,” which features the  lyrics, “They call you Nazi, if you are not left-wing and don’t sound cosmopolitan and intelligent. If you don’t want women to be raped — Nazi! If you want to grow happily in this country — Nazi!” 

The album was produced by the label Arcadi Musik, an offshoot of the far-right lifestyle magazine Arcadi, which receives financial support from Ein Prozent. The group also contributes funding to the alternative media site Redpilled.de, which aggregates short films on topics such as violent crimes committed in Germany by immigrants, a number of which are made by Ein Prozent’s own in-house media operation.

International links

Ein Prozent also produces several podcasts featuring well-known German far-right personalities. The strategy of collaboration is not limited to Germany alone. Kubtischek also organizes annual summer “academies” at his home, in a small village in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, to which he invites influential figures from the international far right.

Visitors have included Jack Donovan — an alt-right anti-feminist writer and men’s rights activist from the U.S., with more than 30,000 followers on Instagram — and the Austrian Martin Sellner, a key figure in the Identitarian movement.

Sellner has been permanently banned from the U.K. and denied a travel permit to the U.S. In 2019, he was investigated by Austrian police after it emerged that he had received a donation of $1,500 from Brenton Tarrant, the Australian-born gunman who murdered 51 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Together with Kubitschek, Sellner founded the German branch of the Identitarian movement. 

Kubitschek also runs a publishing house named Verlag Antaios, which prints books by notable far-right figures, including Sellner, Donovan and Alain de Benoist, the French political philosopher widely considered the founder of the Nouvelle Droite.

In 2019, Ein Prozent was banned from Facebook and Instagram for its links to the Identitarian movement. Now, the group’s main platforms are its own website and YouTube channel, which at the time of writing had just over 11,000 subscribers. It also communicates with an audience of 7,000 via Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform popular with far-right and other extremist groups.  

While these numbers are relatively small, experts believe that the group’s real influence lies in the projects and organizations it supports — many of which have a far wider reach and affect public discourse in a deeper way than a single, fringe political organization could hope to. For example, a chart-topping rap album is likely to connect not only with those already dedicated to the far-right cause, but also potential new converts. It also helps to normalize and entrench reactionary themes within popular culture. And that is precisely what Ein Prozent is all about. 

“They work as a PR company. That’s how they understand politics,” Stegemann told me. “It’s much more powerful to finance somebody else to tell your truth than to do it yourself.”

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The gathering coincided with Hitler’s birthday — a significance lost on no one in a city where, two years ago, more than 6,000 neo-Nazis flooded the streets for a week of rioting. Just outside the police cordon, some 300 people gathered in support. The demonstration had all the main characteristics of the contemporary European far-right, focusing on anti-immigrant sentiment and distrust of the state. One placard bore racist caricatures and the slogan, “Freedom of movement for asylum seekers and harvest workers, prison and fines for me and my relatives?” 

But also visible was something more common at pro-Trump rallies in the United States than at European protests. One man’s mask bore a red letter “Q” — a symbol of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Beneath it, he chanted “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), a slogan that has become the rallying cry for racist nationalists in Germany. 

Germany’s response to the coronavirus crisis has, so far, been the most successful in Europe. The country has reported by far the lowest mortality rate per capita within the EU and has been able to widely and safely reopen. But the Covid-19 crisis has also led to a spike in interest within the country. Even as the country has begun to return to normalcy, the effects of the disinformation are persistent.

Since mid-March, experts have noted an explosion of membership in German online groups related to the theory. Analysis of Qlobal-Change, a German QAnon YouTube channel, shows that its follower count has grown exponentially in this period. Similarly, its Telegram channel had around 20,000 members in February and now has more than 110,000 followers. The same group hosts channels in Italian and Spanish, but each has only a fraction of the membership of its German-language iteration.

Researchers first began to notice QAnon hashtags circulating on German social media in 2018, but back then the movement was extremely fringe. It partially surfaced in the mainstream when a far-right extremist murdered 10 people and wounded five others in a racially motivated attack on a shisha bar in the western city of Hanau. The case was widely reported in the national media, including a rambling 24-page manifesto published on the killer’s own website that cited theories popular in QAnon circles. 

Since its birth in 2017, with a cryptic post on the online message-board 4Chan, QAnon has grown into a sprawling movement. Focusing on U.S. politics, its themes center on an alleged “deep state” plot against President Donald Trump and his administration. It also teems with wild allegations involving the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein and, now, Anthony Fauci — a leading physician on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who has cast doubt on many of Trump’s medical claims. Even German-language QAnon channels largely concentrate on translations of U.S.-based material. 

The popularity of QAnon may be connected to the country’s unique relationship with the United States. The U.S., allied with the U.K. and France, occupied West Berlin until 1991 and Germany continues to house more U.S. troops than any other country in the world — a common sticking point for German conspiracists. The U.S.-German relationship has long been considered the beating heart of an ideology known as Atlanticism. That is – as both critics and proponents have argued — until Donald Trump came to destroy the alliance.

Trump’s attacks on NATO, the European Union, his dismissal of the Paris climate accord, and his preferential treatment of historic enemies such as Russia over allies like Germany, have made him a hero to Germany’s anti-Atlanticist conspiracists. And although Trump’s generally abrasive demeanor has meant he has clashed with many world leaders, his attitude towards German Chancellor Angela Merkel often appears to be one of open enmity. His attacks on science leaders and parroting of unverified cures for the coronavirus, such as chloroquine, has also boosted his profile in Germany. 

Opposition to Atlanticism has long been a key element of conspiratorial far-right ideology in Germany. Consider the example of the Reichsbürgerbewegung. This sovereigntist and irredentist movement, rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state, based on the belief that Germany has continued to be covertly occupied by the U.S. since reunification. 

Now, according to Jan Rathje of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation — a Berlin-based extremism research network — Reichsbürgerbewegung groups have begun to borrow heavily from QAnon. They also praise Trump as a welcome ally and have even shifted their position on the U.S. military presence on German soil.

“Before Trump's presidency, the USA was perceived by right-wing extremists and sovereigntists as a secret occupying power over the German people. This represented a traditional narrative of these milieus since the end of the Third Reich,” Rathje later wrote via email. “Apparently this has changed since the corona crisis. What was previously demonized is now idolized as support for the overthrow of the Merkel regime: U.S. troops on German soil.”

This is important for one follower of the QAnon-Germany Facebook group, who goes by the name Ryanne Divina online. In an interview conducted via private messages on Facebook, they said that they have been following QAnon since 2017, which they found via YouTube. They see themselves as someone who is “putting the pieces of the puzzle together” and believe the Reichsburgerbewegung theory that Germany is not a sovereign state, and has not been for a long time. 

“America, or rather the Allies, have occupied Germany and thus control what happens here or what is allowed,” they wrote. “Germany has long ceased to be a constitutional state, but a company with its business people just as it is in America.”

QAnon’s popularity in Germany has not been limited to right-wing extremists. Theories that brew in QAnon chats and forums have been migrating well beyond extremist circles, particularly those about Bill Gates and Covid-19. Portrayals of Gates as a puppeteer of the coronavirus crisis for example have appeared across multiple misinformation websites in recent months. According to one study by The New York Times and Zignal Labs, a San Francisco-based company that analyzes online conversations and tracks influencers, posts linking Gates and QAnon appeared more than 1.2 million times on social media between February and April.

This explosion of conspiracy theories has corresponded with a steady stream of anti-lockdown demonstrations, which have continued even now that such measures have largely ended. Since mid-March, left and right-wing protesters have appeared every week outside the Volksbühne in Berlin, one of Germany’s most prestigious theaters. Demonstrators can often be seen carrying placards about Gates, and QAnon symbols are common. 

Experts on the European far-right maintain that more empirical research is needed to determine exactly why QAnon is having such a moment in Germany, but all agree that the conditions created by the pandemic have acted as a catalyst.

According to Jakob Guhl, senior researcher at the extremism-monitoring organization ISD Global, QAnon is an “umbrella” theory, under which many different conspiracies can gather. He believes that its surge in popularity “is happening because of something that only very few of us understand.”

“Most of us aren't public health experts or virus specialists,” Guhl explained by telephone, adding that some may believe that QAnon is “reempowering people again and making sense of a very tragic situation.”

According to Guhl, QAnon’s growth has not been slowed by the comparative effectiveness of the German government’s Covid-19 response. “It is of course quite difficult to predict the future of the QAnon movement,” he later wrote in an email. Nevertheless, the success of the government’s response could produce a scenario “in which this benefits conspiracy theorists more broadly: if the death rate is low, is that not proof that the measures were disproportionate to the risk, and must therefore have been implemented because of the interests of secret and malign forces?”

“Certain stones can only be set in motion,” Ryanne wrote, “before the avalanche breaks with all that is connected to it.”

Photo by Grischa Stanjek / democ.

The post How Covid-19 spread QAnon in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

Just days earlier, the German government had proposed mass data collection to trace the spread of the new coronavirus. The Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in the central German city of Halle advocated the voluntary collection of mobile phone data, in order to gain a better overview of the epidemic, even suggesting that data protection legislation be “reevaluated and, if necessary, adjusted in the short term.” Involuntary mass collection of location data has also been floated at the government level, before being withdrawn.

In an exceptionally privacy-conscious society such as Germany, these ideas have sparked a debate about how much state intrusion citizens are willing to accept, in order to bring an end to the national lockdown.

Compared to other European countries Germans “are much more sensitive towards privacy,” said Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, of the Berlin-based Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. “This is really a German thing, the importance of data protection.”

As the newspaper Handelsblatt explains, “angst about potential surveillance is rooted in Germany’s past.” The combined legacy of the Nazi Gestapo and the East German Stasi are thought to be part of the reason Germany has been a pioneer in data protection — with legislation dating back to the 1970’s. This attitude to personal data has been tested, however, by recent discussions about the extent of measures that the government can take to control the Covid-19 pandemic.

Initial plans

In Asian countries like China and South Korea, data collection has been key to controlling the outbreak from the beginning, often to invasive ends, like South Korea publicizing infected patients’ travel histories. Initially, it seemed that Germany might follow a similar path. 

In mid-March, a proposed bill was leaked to the press, which would have given the government powers to “apply technical means to trace” people who had been in physical contact with infected individuals. A major political and civil-society backlash followed — the bill was interpreted as a mandate to seize individual users’ cell phone location data from telecom providers.

Two days later, on March 23, Health Minister Jens Spahn, seemingly chastened by the reaction, distanced himself from the plan. Still, he appeared to leave the door open for such policies in the future, if support for such measures grows “in the political and societal arena.” 

Though plans to track individuals were put aside, other forms of data collection have still taken place. On March 18 the German cell network giant Telekom announced it would voluntarily give anonymized location data to public health authorities. Another company, Telefonica, soon followed suit. The data was intended to measure whether the population as a whole was obeying social distancing regulations, not what any given person was up to. Even this softer form of surveillance caused some stark reactions.

“Here, in Germany! With your phone!” said one journalist at a Bavarian public broadcaster, in a YouTube video posted on March 21. “Welcome to the surveillance state.” 

The possibility of the state suddenly introducing invasive programs of public surveillance has shocked some commentators. “Why are we doing something that we’d previously thought was morally reprehensible — namely, introducing soft cyber-dictatorship measures?” asked Markus Gabriel, a well-known German philosopher public intellectual who teaches at the University of Bonn, in an interview with Deutschlandfunk, a major public broadcaster.

The App

The latest German initiative to limit the spread of Covid-19 is a yet-to-be-released cell phone tool that uses Bluetooth to gather data about who a user has been in physical proximity to. If the user is confirmed as having contracted the virus, individuals who have been in contact with them will get a notification. 

The technology is being developed by a large consortium of European organizations, including a leading German public health authority, called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Testing (PEPP-PT), which is working on a common technological framework for a virus tracking technology. The group is developing a combination of tools and standards that developers can use to build their own apps, all of which will be interoperable. In its literature, the consortium has assured the public that the data will be anonymized and not stored in central databases, instead offering a kind of grassroots, peer-to-peer surveillance. 

A number of academics have warned governments around the world not to commission coronavirus contact-tracing apps that collect and store personal data. Earlier this week, an open letter signed by professors from 26 countries urged governments to ensure the safeguarding of privacy. In the letter, the academics warned that the centralized approach could "catastrophically hamper trust in and acceptance of such an application by society at large." 

It’s not entirely clear what form the technology will take in Germany. There has been talk of  integrating the common European framework within existing apps, like the government’s NINA emergency notification app. Users can then decide whether to turn on the tracking feature. The technology might ship as early as this week.

Some commentators have greeted this idea as a significant improvement on earlier, more invasive proposals.

“If the app adheres to these standards, it could be a reasonable and useful tool,” said Felix Maschewski, who lectures on the philosophy of technology at Free University of Berlin and co-authored “The Society of Wearables”.

But concerns remain, he said, as “to what extent it could really be effective.” 

Others had similar worries. “On closer inspection, this ‘hope’ for salvation...disappears,” reads an article published in the German publication Netzpolitik. The authors go on to cite the “unwieldy” performance of Bluetooth tech, as well as “doubts about the anonymity of data.” Similar criticisms have greeted a recent announcement that Apple and Google have teamed up to develop their own contact-tracing app.

Public attitudes

Polls show an uneven response to plans for the app among the German public. In response to a survey by an international team of academics, over 70 percent said they would be willing to install it. 

But another survey by the public-service broadcast group ARD has 47 percent of Germans saying they would download a contact tracker, while 45 percent said they would not. Almost half of the negative respondents cited privacy concerns. 

In spite of the widespread public outcry in March, concerns remain that data-collection initiatives might escalate beyond the voluntary. Earlier this month, Hansjörg Durz, a digital issues-focused legislator from the governing coalition, suggested that, if people refuse to volunteer sufficient data, “limiting the right to privacy shouldn’t be taboo.” 

Dr. Elke Steven, managing director of the Berlin-based digital rights organization Digitale Gesellschaft, is worried that people might progressively acquiesce to ever more stringent and problematic data-gathering initiatives as the crisis wears on.

“The longer this lasts, the more people will be prepared to agree to these surveillance measures, in order to maintain their other freedoms,” she said.

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Ministers in Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet recently approved a bill to toughen existing online speech laws and force social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to report criminal posts to the police. Under the planned new law, social media platforms will not only have to delete certain kinds of hate speech, but also flag the content to the Office of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA). 

Companies will be required to report posts which include information about preparations for terrorist attacks and the “formation of criminal and terrorist groups.” The new law extends to multiple forms of hate speech, including racial incitement and the distribution of child pornography. The networks would also have to deliver “the last IP address and port number most recently assigned to the user profile” — which could be passed over to prosecutors.

The new measures, which require the approval of Germany's Parliament, were first proposed in the aftermath of a terror attack in the east German city of Halle in October, when a gunman targeted a synagogue, killing two people on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Germany’s most recent law against hate speech and disinformation, the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), was passed in 2017. The legislation, which covers social media networks and media sites with more than two million members, allows users to report content, such as incitement to violence or threats that could be considered illegal, and obliges tech companies to delete posts within 24 hours under penalty of hefty fines.

German officials say the rules have improved how digital platforms respond to illegal hate speech.

While the new law covers YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, messaging services like Telegram, Discord and other video and gaming platforms like BitChute and Steam are not included.

The proposal comes as Germany continues to reckon with the first murder of a politician by the far-right since reunification in 1990 — Walter Lübcke, the former president of the local government of the city of Kassel was shot dead last June. A far-right extremist, Stephan Ernst, 45, has confessed to murdering Lübcke.

Critics of the new law say it could give tech companies the responsibility of deciding what deserves prosecutors’ attention in the first place.

“Tech companies will need to establish whether a certain content is punishable. This exacerbates the issue of private companies having a say on legal matters that should be a prerogative of the judicial system,” said Simone Rafael, editor in chief at Belltower News, a Berlin-based digital publication covering extremism and its internet grammar.

Switching platforms

One of the central assumptions of the law is that online hate can have dangerous consequences in real life if not curbed by robust legislation. But critics say the methods used by far-right groups to communicate on the web might get in the way of the law’s effectiveness.

One recent report by the Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, a Berlin-based think tank that studies right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism, shows that right-wing web figures have sought to bypass existing regulation and platforms’ own community standards for hate speech. 

The report shows how far-right influencers have toned down their video content on platforms like YouTube, while using divisive or hateful language on other video platforms like BitChute. 

“One of the big problems is when you don't consider what people do on other platforms, so it can clearly be that a person is a Nazi and argues for violent ethno-genocide, but if he has a YouTube channel and doesn't do it there, then it's not a problem,” said Miro Dittrich, a project leader at the Amadeu Antonio foundation.

The foundation’s report singled out 11 far-right YouTube channels with followings ranging from 43,000 to about 200,000. Eight of them are managed by independent right-wing influencers, two by the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, and one by the alt-right German news outlet Compact TV. All of the organizations also operate channels on BitChute. 

BitChute did not return answers to questions submitted by Coda Story for this article. Research from the Amadeu-Antonio Foundation indicates the video hosting service had 26,000 users in 2017.

One of the biggest YouTube channels is run by German far-right influencer Tim Kellner — a former policeman who was once investigated for the promotion of prostitution, attempted extortion and assault — and has more than 200,000 subscribers. But while his content is regularly deleted under YouTube’s hate speech guidelines, the same doesn’t happen on BitChute, where he has 2,300 subscribers. 

Kellner encourages his subscribers to leave YouTube in favor of BitChute and other platforms.

A German neo-Nazi called Dennis-Ingo Schulz, known online as “The True Association,” was banned from YouTube in 2016, but his videos are available on BitChute, where he has 1,379 followers and hosts, among other things, revisionist discussions on the Holocaust with pseudo-historians.

While the new law aims to target exactly this type of content, digital experts are skeptical about its effectiveness as it applies to only the most popular social media platforms.

According to Matthias Kettemann, a lawyer and senior researcher in digital communication regulation at the Leibniz Institute for media research in Hamburg, “de-platforming” hate groups or individuals from leading digital platforms is sometimes counter-productive. “No doubt that extremist content is still much present on platforms, but de-platforming those sites isn’t the solution because [content] will migrate to more obscure ones,” he said, in a phone interview.

Dittrich’s most recent research indicates the crackdown on hate speech from media companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has led to an exodus of extremist accounts to other platforms.

“Telegram for example is becoming more and more like a social network than a messaging platform,” said Dittrich.

Last month, German police arrested twelve men suspected of planning attacks against mosques, migrant reception centers and politicians after a nationwide investigation into an extreme-right group. The arrests followed raids in 13 locations in six German states. According to the national news agency Dpa, the founders of the cell first met on a Telegram channel.

Telegram, which has two million users in Germany, has proven to be a fertile ground for right-wing extremism. In September 2018, far-right demonstrators who gathered in Chemnitz used Telegram channels to network and organize marches and meetings. 

Telegram did not respond to questions submitted by Coda Story for this article.

Dittrich’s monitoring project currently counts more than 300 German-speaking far-wing Telegram channels, many of them containing calls for a violent takeover of the state to safeguard whites, as well as conspiracy theories about Jews and disinformation about race and Islam. Some channels are used to exchange racist memes and pictures of Nazi memorabilia.

One of the most vocal promoters of a switch from YouTube to Telegram is Martin Sellner, the de-facto leader of the far-right European Identitarians. The group was banned from Facebook in 2018 for violating the platform’s policies. Sellner, a 31-year-old Austrian citizen with past links to neo-Nazi movements, leveraged his popularity on YouTube last summer to call for his followers to move to Telegram and “free themselves from Silicon Valley overlords.” 

The new law has attracted criticism from press freedom organizations like Article19 who have raised concerns that it could undermine free speech. “We believe that addressing hate speech and underlying root problems and prejudices that hate speech is symptomatic of, requires more than knee-jerk responses,” wrote Barbora Bukovska, senior director of law and policy, in an email.

The threat from far-right extremism resurfaced last month when a deadly shooting rampage at two shisha bars in the west German city of Hanau left nine people dead. While the suspect Tobias R, 43, doesn’t appear to have had a presence on Telegram, his name was celebrated on the platform after the attack.

The post Germany to force social media companies to report hate speech to police appeared first on Coda Story.

Russian influence on a pivotal national election. The far-right gaining ground, moderates on the back foot. Immigration and identity front and center in the political debate. Sound familiar?

In the past, German elections have always been a byword for moderation, where certain political norms — such as its lead role in Europe and close bond with the United States — were taken for granted. But this campaign has been different.

As Angela Merkel battles for a fourth term as German chancellor, she has been facing an onslaught of fake news and populist, often hate-filled, rhetoric - much of it disseminated through shadowy online channels that seem to lead back to Russia. The stakes are higher than ever, with Europe’s cohesion in doubt and many Germans wondering if they can still rely on a United States under President Donald Trump. Some now look to Merkel as the new “leader of the free world.”

In Coda Story’s second collaboration with Reveal, a program of The Center for Investigative Reporting, we look at how to identify this digital disinformation and where it comes from. Coda’s Ilan Greenberg meets with expert Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council at its conference in Warsaw to discuss Russia’s election meddling, as President Trump delivers his first major foreign policy speech a couple blocks away. And he visits Boris Reitschuster, a German journalist who had to leave his posting in Russia because of death threats.

In Berlin, Reischuster leads an effort to resist the Kremlin’s influence on the more than four million German citizens with Russian origins. Meanwhile, German cyber-experts and the media are concerned about a hack on the German Parliament. Many believe Russian agents are holding the stolen files and will spring a Fall surprise to undermine Merkel just as the nation goes to the polls.

But first, reporter Luisa Beck finds Beatrix von Storch, the leading candidate of Alternative für Deutschland (the AfD), a far-right political party that is on the cusp of entering the German parliament - something right-wing parties have tried and failed at many time since the end of World War II. The show also examines the story of Anas Modamani, one of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who took refuge in Germany. But he became the center of a political maelstrom when he took a selfie with Merkel as she visited his shelter. Thanks to disinformation and fake news Modamami was falsely accused of being a terrorist.

“The Rise of the German Right” will be broadcast on public radio stations across the United States. The full episode is available on The Center for Investigative Reporting’s website or as a download from iTunes.

Reveal is a weekly radio program produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. For more, check out their website.

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Intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen went further, detailing fears of a Kremlin-led “targeted disinformation campaign” using a combination of cyber-attacks and false news stories. In the ensuing panic, German politicians started scrabbling for a solution. But an attempt to force social networks to police false news on their platforms has become mired in controversy.

The bone of contention is a proposed “law against ‘fake news’” which would force social networks to remove false reports from their platforms. The suggestion was met by immediate outrage from tech groups and journalists, who said it would usher in online censorship on an unprecedented scale.

Hastily backtracking, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas in March unveiled proposals for a “network enforcement law,” which would force networks to quickly review and delete “hate crime and other illegal content,” which are already banned under German law.

The repackaged plan still takes aim at what the German government calls “illegal ‘fake news’.”

“After the experiences of the U.S. election campaign, the fight against illegal false reports (‘fake news’) in social networks is now a high priority in Germany,” reads the legislation currently awaiting EU approval.

“Illegal false reports,” the draft stipulates, are those that break existing German laws on “hate speech, libel, defamation, or disturbing the peace by simulating a crime.” The proposals aim to force social networks to police this content.

In past years, there has been an increase of “fake news,” including “xenophobic fakes” across German social media, according to Hoaxmap, a project that compiles fake news about imaginary crimes committed by migrants.

“We can’t constantly monitor all the sources repeatedly spreading rumors about refugees,” said Hoaxmap fact-checker Lutz Helm. “There are just too many.”

Helm first noticed fake stories about migrants appearing online in late 2015 after the entry of a million asylum-seekers into the country. Today, he says, social media accounts play a larger role in spreading fake information than unscrupulous news portals. The pressure is on. If adopted, Maas’ proposals would force social networks to quickly delete any flagged illegal content or face fines of up to $56 million.

It is not clear how many of the hundreds of fakes identified by Hoaxmap would fall under the “illegal false reports” category in the proposed law. However, lawyers and politicians say networks have long failed to deal adequately with user complaints about such content.

“[Networks] are still ignoring our laws,” German politician Renate Kuenast told Spiegel Online last December after finding herself at the center of one of several high profile fake news cases in recent months.

Despite massive pressure from her team, Kuenast claimed it took Facebook three days to remove a photo of her with a fake quotation suggesting she had defended an asylum-seeker suspected of raping and killing a German student in Freiburg.

Then, in March this year, Facebook won a case against Anas Modamani, a Syrian asylum seeker whose selfie with Angela Merkel was shared thousands of times over months by users falsely suggesting he was an Islamic State terrorist.

Although the network removed all specific posts identified by Modamani and his lawyer, a German court ruled that moderators didn’t have to prevent the libellous material reappearing on the site.

This is what forced German politicians to take action. “Still too little illegal content is being deleted. And it isn’t being deleted fast enough,” said Justice Minister Maas in a statement presenting his draft law in late March. “We have to ramp up the pressure on the social networks.”

And the pressure is on. If adopted, Maas’ proposals would force social networks to quickly delete any flagged illegal content or face fines of up to $56 million (50 million euros). Moderators would have 24 hours to delete “obviously illegal content” and seven days to delete anything needing longer consideration.

But critics of the law say that when it comes to “fake news” it’s unreasonable to expect networks to determine the truth — and therefore the legality — of suspect content. “This law would force private companies instead of courts to decide which content is illegal in Germany.”

“In many cases, it just isn’t possible to identify within such a short timeframe what’s “obviously illegal,” said Dominik Hoech, a Berlin-based lawyer specialising in copyright and media law. “Sometimes we spend months in court arguing over questions of ‘true or false.’”

Complicating matters further, social networks are reluctant to acknowledge that some false reports or “fake news” could under any circumstances constitute illegal content to be removed or blocked from their sites. Facebook, for one, appears unconvinced.

In April, the network announced a series of collaborations with fact-checking teams designed to halt the spread of “fake news.” A new feature would allow users to flag a story as suspect and send it to the fact-checkers. But if the story is found to be false, the content wouldn’t be removed. Instead, users sharing it would be warned it is disputed and shown an article presenting the facts.

When asked about Germany’s plans to force networks to delete illegal content, Facebook was keen to distance its anti-fakes campaign from its recently-expanded Community Operations Team — moderators who review and remove flagged content from the site. Neither team, it stressed, should or could decide whether a post was legal.

“We’re working hard to remove illegal content from our platform and are determined to solve this problem,” said a Facebook spokesman in pre-prepared written statement. “As experts have already established, however, this law would force private companies instead of courts to decide which content is illegal in Germany.”

Meanwhile, fact-checkers contracted by Facebook in Germany to check posts flagged as suspect say their role is only to establish whether disputed content is true, not whether it is legal. That’s despite legislators’ claims that when it comes to potentially libellous “illegal fake news,” truth and legality go hand in hand.

“The [new] rules have no influence on the work we do,” said Jacques Pezet of Correctiv, a German non-profit investigative newsroom now working with Facebook to look into potentially false news stories. Pezet said his team aims to decide the veracity of the disputed content within a week, but that that wasn’t always possible.

“Fact checking needs time. We don’t want to spread unchecked information ourselves,” he said. “That’s why I think the 24 hour or seven-day timeframe shouldn’t have any influence on us.” And anyway, said Pezet: “We don’t delete anything. We have nothing to do with deleting obviously illegal posts. That’s the job of the moderators.”

Given this confusion over the legality of “false news,” sceptics say it’s unlikely the proposals will be approved in their current form.

“In many places the [draft] law appears fairly crude,” said Hoech. “But the critics also deserve some criticism. It’s no small matter if someone, for example, is wrongly branded a criminal online and it is shared thousands of times. Facebook and others have done next to nothing for too long — the problem has been ignored.”

The post In Germany, a battle against fake news stumbles into legal controversy appeared first on Coda Story.

That weekend alone, nearly 2,000 were rescued. Half a dozen others arrived in white plastic bags. In Messina, an imam and a priest led prayers for two of them as their relatives mourned their loss, shivering under blankets.

Others, burned from the mixture of fuel and salt water, were taken directly to the hospital, where those who made the trip before them brought them a phone to call their families and reminded them that they should be grateful to be alive. Since January, 602 people have died or gone missing trying to cross the central Mediterranean route, following the deadliest year yet with 4,600 deaths in 2016.

The reasons behind what pushes this group of mostly Sub-Saharan Africans to risk death and endure beatings, rapes and exploitation on their way to Europe are as complex as the individuals themselves. Yet their fate often comes down to a binary decision: they are either refugees where they happen to land, fleeing war or persecution, or they continue their journey and are economic migrants looking for jobs.

And even as the line between both conditions becomes blurrier, it also keeps moving.

Outside immigration centers, migrants and asylum seekers insist they want to keep heading north. “Germany is my country,” one man from Senegal said. “In Germany they like African people,” he insisted.

What they don’t know or talk about is how European countries are erecting fences to stop people from going north and governments are making deals with countries in Africa, including quasi-states such as Libya, to send people back. Now with rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and upcoming elections, politicians and citizens increasingly say countries like Germany can’t take everyone who comes in, especially the Africans.

So far this year, nearly 25,000 people have arrived in Sicily, a trend that if continues could break last year’s record of 181,000. And just as thousands arrive almost weekly, tens of thousands linger in Italy as they navigate an overwhelmed asylum system, appeal their rejected claims or are stranded here — unwilling or unable to go back.

***

Momodou Sheriff, a 17-year-old from Gambia, said he never planned to come to Sicily but the situation in Libya was so unbearable that getting on a flimsy boat was better than staying. He arrived in Catania a year ago.

Initially, Sheriff was running away from home after his mother wanted to force him to enroll in a Quranic school. “If I stayed and don’t do what she says, she will continue to hurt me. She had been fighting me,” he said. “In Europe, you have no right to beat your child with a stick or other things.”

Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest countries, with less than two million people, but it’s among the top nationalities arriving in Italy, especially for unaccompanied minors. About 60 percent of the population of The Gambia live in poverty and it’s getting worse. The temporary displacement of thousands in January, when the then-president who had been in power for 22 years initially refused to leave, showed how fragile democracy can be.

“The distinction between a refugee and other irregular migrants coming from the Gambia is hard to maintain in a country where a lack of democracy is accompanied by failures of economic and political governance,” Alexandra Embiricos, head of outreach at Migration Hub Network in Berlin, wrote last year.

And the path to Europe is seldom straight. Sheriff said he first fled to relatives in a nearby village but they sent him back, insisting he must listen to his mother. The then-15-year-old instead left for neighboring Senegal, where he ended up on the streets and met a man who offered help.

He wasn’t sure if he could trust him, but went along anyway. “It’s scary but how will I do? There’s no other choice,” he said from a shelter for unaccompanied migrant children in the center of Catania. “It’s better than sleeping outside. So I go with him.” Women know to take contraceptives before the journey because of the likelihood they will be raped. The German ambassador in Niger described conditions in Libya as being “worse than in concentration camps.”

When the man said he was going to Libya to work, Sheriff decided to tag along. Libya had long attracted migrants looking for jobs, but the Arab Spring that ended with the killing of dictator Muammar Gadaffi left a de facto failed state. For those landing in Italy from sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent pass through Libya.

It didn’t take long before Sheriff and the man he had accompanied were chased by armed men. They became lost in the desert in Nigeria. Eventually, they arrived in Tripoli, he said, where houses are riddled with bullet holes and men dressed in military uniforms indiscriminately open fire. “For us, the foreigners who are not Libyans, you cannot walk out by yourself because if you do, you lose your life.”

Human rights organizations describe Libya as a living hell for migrants: a minefield of kidnappings, with gangs and smugglers demanding money from migrants’ families. Women know to take contraceptives before the journey because of the likelihood they will be raped. The German ambassador in Niger described conditions as being “worse than in concentration camps” in a document to the German foreign ministry. “There are executions of countless migrants, torture, rapes, bribery and banishment to the desert on a daily basis,” the German newspaper Die Welt reported.

Even with precautions, Sheriff was kidnapped. “You arrive at so-called soldier checkpoints and they have their guns, they stop you and everybody comes down and check you if you have guns or not and they take you with them, just like that,” he said.

They divide people between those who have family that can pay a ransom and those who don’t. Sheriff, who was among the latter, was sent to work in a farm. There, he survived off bread and tea, without showers, sleeping on the floor and taking beatings. The thought of not making it out of Libya often crossed his mind, he said, but “I also believe that you only die when your time arrive.”

Three months in he found a way out while the guard was distracted and fled, along the same route thousands of others use to reach the coast of Italy. He climbed on board a rubber dinghy with more than 150 people, so cramped that he started losing the feeling in one of his legs.

At sea you can be injured, you can die, you can be rescued, Sheriff explained. “At any moment anything can happen, you understand?”

***

Increasingly those arriving in Sicily are unaccompanied minors. Nearly one in five of the arrivals by sea in January were young sub-Saharan teens. Those who work with refugees worry that they are being pushed into criminality and prostitution as the Italian system struggles to adapt and the teens are caught between bureaucracy and the mafia.

Many face sexual exploitation on their way or in Europe. Some fall through the cracks, escape the state-sponsored centers and end up prostituting themselves to earn money to continue north.

The International Organization for Migration estimates about 80 percent of the Nigerian women who disembark in Sicily end up being prostituted in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. And more keep coming: last year it was 11,000 of them —twice as many as in 2015.

Di Maria Liliana, who leads the shelter for Italian and unaccompanied boys where Sheriff lives, said human trafficking makes it difficult for her organization, Futura ´89, to open shelters for girls.

“Two years ago we had opened a center for girls, we only had 10 from Eritrea and the 10 of them continued to escape,” she said. Earlier this year, they opened another one with 25 Nigerian girls, but only seven remain. They will soon close the shelter and reopen it for boys, she said.

There’s always someone threatening them or their families back home, so they leave. “We find them in the usual places,” she said, which means the streets of San Berillo.

The historic neighborhood of San Berillo in the heart of the old town of Catania was partly destroyed in the 1950s in a failed urban development plan, and by the 1990s was considered one of the largest red-light districts in Europe.

Today it is a melting pot of refugees, settled migrants, and Italians, said Valeria Giuffrida, a volunteer and cultural mediator. In between the abandoned homes, long-time residents and newcomers eat for a couple of euros at informal Senegalese restaurants run out of home kitchens, play soccer on the dimly lit streets or take free Italian classes inside crumbling buildings.

Groups of young men hang out on the corners and it’s not uncommon for fights to break out, but they’re rarely serious, Giuffrida said. Still, as she walked around the neighborhood she made sure the drug dealers knew she wasn’t looking for trouble, just showing off the area.

“Here is where minors squat,” she said and pointed to boarded up houses with chained doors often covered in colorful murals. “There is no legal work for refugees and if there’s no work, life is no good.”

***

Before the borders started to close and the European Union pushed for asylum seekers to stay in the country where they first arrived, most would use Italy as a springboard. But now more are requesting asylum here, with about 176,000 people housed in reception centers across the country as of the end of last year.

About 34 miles from Catania is Cara di Mineo, which since 2011 has been housing thousands of asylum seekers as their cases are processed. Europe’s largest migrant center was originally for U.S. Navy families from a nearby base, and the earth tone paint scheme, terracotta roofs and street layout make it look like an American suburb. Except there’s an Italian village overlooking the housing area and the complex is enclosed by a chain link fence with barbed wire and access is restricted by armed guards. Outside, about half a dozen cars line the narrow road, offering rides for five euros.

Some migrants complain about the crime inside, the poor conditions and food; although others say it’s not too bad. The government pays 35 euros per day for each migrant to the center and they are also supposed to get 2.50 euros in pocket money. Instead they get cigarettes they can then sell, which advocates point to as an example of the corruption going on.

“People arrive in Sicily without an idea of what they will have to do here. They think it’s over because they are alive, but they don’t know about our immigration system.”

If they find a bike, they can work in the nearby orange groves for 25 euros a day, but if they need to be picked up, their pay can drop to 10 euros. Cheap labor is not new, said Alfonso di Stefano, with the Antiracist Network in Catania, but Cara di Mineo provides a constant stream of workers.

The group calls for the closure of Cara di Mineo and makes weekly visits. “We try to monitor the system, unfortunately from the outside,” said di Stefano, since they aren’t allowed in.

“People arrive in Sicily without an idea of what they will have to do here. They think it’s over because they are alive, but they don’t know about our immigration system,” said Antonio Sciuto, who works with di Stefano.

“They normally spend eight or nine months in Cara and this is just the start to life in Italy or to be relocated in another EU country. After the final denial, it’s common you are a ghost. You stay or go back but without money, it’s very difficult.”

The system to process migrants has become dysfunctional, said Cristina Molfetta, a researcher with the Italian organization Fondazione Migrantes. “Especially during the last two, three years, the only way to legalize their status is to make an asylum request.” she said. And bigger numbers of asylum seekers overwhelm the system.

Although cases are supposed to be considered individually, in practice the country they come from is a big factor in asylum applications, said Fausto Melluso, who works for migrant support organization Arci in Palermo. Those coming from Nigeria, Senegal and Gambia almost don’t stand a chance, he said.

The impact of sheer numbers of migrants can be seen in Sicily’s streets. During a spate of cold days earlier this year, the Red Cross and other organizations set up emergency shelters to offer people a warm drink and a place to sleep. A man from Chad who stopped by one night said he had been in Germany and France before, but because he was fingerprinted in Italy, he was sent back.

He wanders during the day, he said, and looks for a place to go to sleep at night, “but I’m ready to give up.”

***

John Oriaifo, a 21-year-old from Nigeria, lived in Cara di Mineo but lost his housing after his asylum application and appeal were rejected. “Here, it’s all about documents,” he said, “you cannot go anywhere without documents.”

He would be living on the streets but he was lucky to meet volunteers from the Catholic community of Sant’Egidio, which offers housing to a handful of those who need it and partners with migrants to serve the vulnerable populations of Italy.

When the bodies of six migrants killed in a 2013 shipwreck washed ashore in Catania, members of Sant’Egidio realized the immensity of what was happening, said volunteer Sebastian Intelisano. “That day we understood we have to answer to this tragedy with our heart, with our body and with our mind.” So they welcome those who arrive and say a prayer for those who don’t make it.

The migrants became the bridge to the Muslim community, he said, and shares the story of a Nigerian migrant giving his gloves to an elderly homeless man on one of the coldest nights of the year. “This is a real experience of integration. If Italians give a piece of their heart to migrants, migrants give this piece of heart to the whole society, and we can create a big network.” On Sundays the church pews are filled with Italians and Africans, organ music mixes with an African drum beat. Italians and the newcomers cook and eat together after Mass.

Oriaifo said he didn’t plan to come to Italy either. He was living in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja when a bomb blast in 2014 killed his mother and sister while they sold produce in the local market. According to news reports, at least 21 people were killed and 52 injured in the attack. The Islamist Boko Haram had been bombing targets in the region. He only escaped because his mother asked him to go home to cook.

He decided to join a friend who had an uncle in Libya. All was going well, but, just like Sheriff, the minor from The Gambia, he was kidnapped and forced to do manual labor until he could escape. He arrived in Catania more than a year ago and focused on learning Italian. After two appeals, his case was finally approved in late March and he can now start a job search.

Stories like this make it difficult to separate refugees from those who came for economic reasons, Intelisano said, which is at the core of current political discussions. “I don’t know why he leaves his country, but one migrant that arrived in Libya is like one that lives in a place with a war,” he said. “And by building this difference we will build a wall.”

While more migrants are reaching Italy, the number would be manageable if all EU countries collaborated, experts say. In 2015, there were two asylum seekers for every 100,000 European residents, according to Molfetta of Fondazione Migrantes. “It’s not the number that put Europe in crisis, but that there is no political accord in how to share the burden,” she said.

“Here in Italy we see people arriving on a daily basis, nonstop, but we have to keep in mind that this is like the tip of the iceberg,” said Marco Rotunno, spokesperson with UNHCR in Catania. “We are not seeing huge numbers like the neighboring countries where a big conflict is happening or a disaster is happening.”

***

For those already here, failure is not an option.

Sheriff, the 17-year-old Gambian, remains in the shelter, home to unaccompanied minors from Africa as well as with Italian boys, for now. As a minor he is protected by the state and can’t be deported. If by the time he turns 18 he still doesn’t have refugee status, he can enroll in a school or find a job and stay legally in the country. But Sicily has among the highest unemployment rates in Italy, especially among the youth.

It’s been a year since he arrived in Catania. He goes to school to learn Italian, which given the mix of nationalities in his shelter, he already speaks well. In the house with brightly colored rooms, 15 boys, including 10 Italians and five from different African countries, take turns playing soccer on the Xbox, split house shores and watch movies — the integration is almost seamless, Liliana, the president of the shelter, said.

Life in Italy can be challenging, especially when you don’t speak the language. “It’s hard to make friends,” he said. But he is competitive and social. One day in the local park, as the boys from the shelter played soccer with a tattered ball, two young Italian boys just sat and watched. Sheriff and the others asked them if they wanted to join and soon the group of Africans and Italians were trying to score between goal posts marked by rocks.

Sheriff said he wants to be a mechanic or engineer. His father and uncle used to be mechanics. “I always followed my father when he was alive,” he said, as he shifted his gaze down. His father died in a car accident when Sheriff was seven or eight. “I was very close to my dad when he was living. I loved him, he liked me. He would take me to school and say to me I needed to study.”

He still misses his country, his family. Even though he doesn’t speak to his mother, he talks to his two younger siblings and an uncle. In his room, he has a framed photo of himself in Gambia smiling, holding a big snake wrapped around his neck. “I miss Gambia’s smiling coast,” he said.

While he has friends who have left Italy for other European countries after their applications were denied or remained illegally in Italy, for the most part, he said, they appeal their cases and find a way to stay. So far he has a two-year permit to remain in Italy.

“I am hoping to see change in my life so that I can live my life here,” Sheriff said, “if not, I gotta find a solution.”

This story was produced with support from Robert Bosch Stiftung

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Last December, Navid, a 30-year-old from Iran, arrived at a refugee shelter in rural Germany, just south of Berlin. Navid says that he is a political refugee and came to Europe by boat from Turkey to Greece, like the hundreds of thousands of others in the fall of 2015. When the Germans who managed the shelter asked the busload of asylum seekers if anyone spoke English or German and could serve as a translator, Navid volunteered. He spoke English well, and he knew that he would be able to help the Farsi and Dari speakers among the new arrivals. Navid also was eager to demonstrate that he was a hard worker. He had arrived in Germany during the great surge of asylum seekers when thousands were crossing into Germany every day, and he wanted to distinguish himself.

Navid, who asked that his real name not be used, has translated at other asylum seekers’ doctors’ appointments and at parent-teacher meetings at schools. Sometimes his translation duties interrupted his German classes. His hours are inconsistent and his assignments last minute, he said.

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For this work, Navid was paid a salary of one euro an hour. At the end of each month, he received a check ranging from thirty to fifty euros, which he cashed at a bank in the nearest town. Like other asylum seekers, Navid received a monthly stipend of three hundred and twenty euros, free lodging, and other welfare benefits.

This wasn’t what he expected when he came to Germany from his home in Tehran, where he had been in the military. Nor was the shelter, a camp in the middle of a forest, how he had imagined his home in Europe would look. He had imagined fancy apartment buildings in cosmopolitan cities. Not a lightly trafficked road through the forest.

“I am doing this job to make some new connections, find new people. I don’t have any other options,” Navid told me one afternoon, over beers at a park by the Spree River in central Berlin. Navid was still waiting to hear whether he would be granted asylum as a political refugee or denied residency and potentially deported. Without asylum, people like Navid have a more difficult time finding employment because they must prove that a German citizen isn’t available for the job they are applying for. Asylum had been taking an average of six months to be processed, but in areas that have been overwhelmed by asylum seekers, like Berlin, the wait can take even longer before they land the coveted interview that may lead to a residency visa. Nadja Jung, a spokesperson at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, said that there are no records for how many asylum seekers have found regular employment.

“Of course, I think it’s not enough and not right,” Navid said of his translator’s salary. “Of course, I think they are using us. They are using our skills and abilities. It’s not just translation. I see people painting the walls and they do other things, and these are just one euro jobs.”

Navid’s salary is part of a German government policy dating back to 2003, in which the long-term unemployed are offered extremely low-wage jobs, along with significant welfare benefits, with the idea that these jobs will eventually help people find employment in the normal job market. In 2016, as part of a new refugee integration law, the German government announced that it will create a hundred thousand more low-wage jobs for asylum seekers, but these will pay only 80 cents an hour. The plan went into effect last August.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been under mounting pressure over the federal government’s handling of the refugee crisis, including how Germany’s newcomers — nearly 200,000 were awarded asylum from January to August of last year — are going to find work. In a recent interview, Sigmar Gabriel, the vice-chancellor, said that the government had “underestimated the challenge” of integrating refugees. An investigation by the Hamburg-based NDR television station found that 100,000 asylum seekers in Germany have been working illegally.

The new low-wage jobs are intended to preserve employment opportunities for citizens because they are one step removed from regular employment. According to Jung, the spokesperson for the labor ministry, examples of such jobs would be “helping with the preparatory work for creating an herb garden in a school, helping to renew a fence in a kindergarten, helping to keep public parks clean, helping with the demolition of a building.”

Companies that hire asylum seekers will receive two hundred euros a month for each individual hired from the federal government, but this is meant to be compensation for any expenses companies may incur hiring asylum seekers, not payment. It’s not clear how asylum-seekers will be selected for these jobs, since in all likelihood there will not be enough opportunities to go around. However, if refugees are offered a job and they refuse to work, their monthly cash stipend, which starts at one hundred and forty-three euros (Navid receives more because his shelter does not provide daily meals) will be cut. Furthermore, Jung said that language classes, university studies, apprenticeships and other “measures of integration” are meant to take precedence over the low-wage jobs, unlike what Navid experienced. She said that it’s not clear yet how many asylum seekers have been hired under the new integration act, or how many were hired in temporary jobs at their shelters, like Navid, before the new law was applied.

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“The political decision to create 100,000 jobs was a certain symbol, a populous symbol,” said Bernd Mesovic, deputy managing director of the immigration advocacy organization, Pro Asyl.

Navid told his shelter that he was no longer going to translate. He told the shelter’s manager “You don’t help me. So why should I help you, because it’s not a job.”

The low-wage job program may not offer significant financial support to refugees, but “the integration of refugees in the labor market is one of the main pillars of successful social integration,” wrote the spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in an email interview when asked the purpose of the low-wage job program that doesn’t have a financial impact on refugees in Germany. Jung acknowledged that the program was also intended to make Germans more tolerant of asylum seekers. The low-wage jobs “create meaningful occupations serving the public good in and around reception centers, without being employed. This improves the acceptance of refugees on a local level.”

After a few months of working as a translator, Navid asked the shelter’s management if he could be moved from his current dorm room, which he shares with a rotating cast of seven other men, to a private space. Navid’s argument was that he had essentially volunteered dozens of hours at the shelter, and now it was time for the administration to help him. He was finally moved to a private room in September, but for the months until then, he felt it as a slight.

Then, in July, Navid told his shelter that he was no longer going to translate. He said that he told the shelter’s manager “You don’t help me. So why should I help you, because it’s not a job.”

Abdul-Fattah, an Afghan man who lives at Navid’s shelter, told me that the management deleted Navid’s name from the list of translators, “But anyway, he was still working for us,” Abdul-Fattah said. Navid often translates for Abdul-Fattah’s pregnant wife during her doctor’s visits.

“The Afghan people came to me and said ‘Please we need you,’ and I had to translate because they were my friends,” Navid said.

I asked Minna if she felt that she was being taken advantage of by being paid such a small salary. “I don’t care,” she said with a shrug.

An hour’s drive from Navid’s shelter in the woods, Minna, a twenty-three-year-old from Syria, lives in a shelter in the Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain, home to many of the capital’s nightclubs.

Minna serves food at her shelter cafeteria for a salary of less than one euro. Even before she was paid for serving food, she worked as a volunteer. “It’s better than doing nothing,” she said, sitting on a bench outside her shelter one sunny afternoon. Karam, a 21-year-old friend of Minna’s also from Syria, said that he would like to have such a job, but none was offered to him.

Minna said the shelter makes sure that the shifts don’t conflict with her German classes. She had been studying education in Syria when the war forced her to flee. She wants to be a kindergarten teacher and hopes to get her German teaching certification once her residency has been finalized. I asked Minna if she felt that she was being taken advantage of by being paid such a small salary. “I don’t care,” she said with a shrug.

“For some of them, it’s more a problem to be paid so much below the minimum wage. They will say ‘If I do a job of that kind maybe I’d prefer to do it without payment,’” Mesovic said. “But on the other hand, there are refugees who paid a lot of money in their home countries to make it to Germany, so of course they would need every cent.”

One afternoon after meeting at his shelter, Navid and I followed the dirt path that led out the camp’s front gates to a nearby lake. Along the way, we passed some Afghan kids playing in the dirt. They greeted Navid with a salaam.

We settled down at a picnic table. Across from us, two Syrian adolescents blasted Arabic pop music from a cellphone. Germans were sunning themselves on beach towels.

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Along the lakeshore were large homes with manicured lawns. Navid said that his friends, other asylum seekers in Germany, believe that they will never be able to obtain such luxuries. These friends tell Navid, “You came as a refugee. You are like a slave. They will never let you get so high.”

That mentality hasn’t won over Navid yet. He holds on to the idea that if he makes enough of an effort, he will be able to succeed in Germany. Navid wants to get a master’s degree in business to compliment his first master’s degree in engineering. “I want to find a good job,” he said. “I hope, too, that the things I don’t have now, I will have.”

This story was produced with support from Robert Bosch Stiftung.

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