Far-right using lo sceptics to gain tr Ckdown action
The German Querdenker protest movement claims to be opposed to Covid measures, but its followers include thousands of extremists
JEWISH ORGANISATIONS throughout Germany are increasingly alarmed by a vicious anti-lockdown movement which is exploiting the Holocaust to further its agenda.
The ‘Querdenker’ (‘lateral thinkers’) is a campaign group which opposes Germany’s anti-corona measures. Its wide range of followers include thousands of rabid antisemites and violent far-right extremists.
Jews throughout the country have been outraged and horrified by how the Querdenker movement is publicly trivialising Nazi persecution of their ancestors.
Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Dr Felix Klein, the German government commissioner against antisemitism, said the Querdenker movement is becoming increasingly radical: “A year ago, the Querdenker movement suddenly appeared and we saw people from completely different backgrounds, extremists from the right and left, conspiracy theorists and everyday Germans, teaming up in a peculiar alliance against the government’s lockdown measures.”
“Now however, the sensible majority is becoming smaller and smaller while the strength of the radical right is surging. Worse still, antisemitism seems to have become another factor to bind all the protestors.”
“Former red lines have suddenly been crossed. It used to be frowned upon in Germany to attempt to trivialise or even normalize the Holocaust. Yet now we see young people appearing on stage claiming that because of anti-Covid measures they feel as persecuted as the Nazi-resistance fighter Sophie Scholl or Anne Frank.”
“We have also seen Querdenker protestors sewing the Star of David onto their sleeve with the word ‘unvaccinated’ on it, claiming that those opposing government anti-corona measures are being treated like Nazipersecuted Jews. This may currently be legal — just — but it is totally unacceptable.”
The Querdenker movement is a very broad church, making it difficult to define and therefore also difficult for German security forces to contain and control.
At the most disturbing end of its spectrum, it includes those who trivialise the Nazi persecution of Jews and who have even issued death threats to doctors, journalists, scientists and politicians across all 16 regions or ‘federal states’ of Germany.
This month police have had to stand guard outside the house of Stephan Weil, the minister president of the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia.
Former red lines have suddenly been crossed’
And last November, police also had to stand watch outside the home of Bodo Ramelow, minister president of the eastern state of Thurigina. He had been sent a funeral candle with a Querdenker flyer attached.
Another disturbing component of the broad, heterogenous Querdenker movement are the self-styled “Reichsbürger”, or Citizens of the Reich. These activists claim today’s Federal Republic of Germany was created by occupying foreign powers and is therefore illegitimate. Instead, they only officially accept the pre-WW2 political order – the German Reich.
The Querdenker movement also includes lawyers and professors eager to argue how lockdown rules supposedly violate freedoms enshrined in both the German constitution and European human rights legislation.
Others claim that the lockdown is part of a global conspiracy to bring about a New World Order by enslaving the human race.
In May 2020 Germany’s Spiegel TV interviewed a sub-group within a Querdenker protest in which claimed that Angela Merkel is a Satanist.
But the Querdenker movement is also home to swathes of innocent protestors who simply oppose the German government’s anti-corona measures.
For Dr Felix, the task is to now separate the innocent protestors from the far-right agitators: “The majority of the Querdenker may not be antisemitic, but these right-wing extremists are marching alongside the innocent protestors.”
“We need to reach out to them. We need to appeal to them to distance themselves from the fanatics. This effort might be a lot to ask of people,
I admit that, but it needs to happen.”
In Spring 2020 Michael Ballweg, managing director of a software company in Stuttgart, founded the ‘Querdenken 711’ group. Since then both small towns and big cities across the country have set up their own Querdenker group. Today around 70 local Querdenker chapters exist across the land, and many have their own website.
Last year Querdenker protests included not just small demonstrations in German towns and villages but also mass demonstrations in the cities of Bonn, Bremen, Dresden, Hanover, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
At an August 2020 Querdenker protest in Berlin, of the 38,000 protestors, around 3,000 were farright extremists.
On the Querdenker United website, CEO Ansgar Oschwald writes: “We distance ourselves in no uncertain terms from events that, with populist intentions and in lockstep with questionable political agitators, create a mood against society out of general discontent and frustration.”
Yet in Querdenker protests the continued trivialising of Jewish persecution under the Nazism raises questions how much the “questionable political agitators” are really being kept in check.
Sigmount Königsberg is the commissioner against antisemitism for the Jewish Community of Berlin, which supports local synagogues and Jewish schools and also acts as a support group for local Jews.
Of 38,000 protestors, 3000 were far-right extremists’
Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, he said he is deeply disturbed not just by the failure of protest organisers to manage their antisemitic, farright activists but with the general response of local authorities to the Querdenker movement.
“The number of Jewish people contacting me expressing concern has increased. Many are afraid and puzzled that the Querdenker are not being stopped.”
Germans have long been highly sceptical of vaccines and other statesanctioned injections, given the darker chapters of their history. This includes the Nazi doctors who used lethal injection to “euthanize” Jewish children, Jewish adults, and others it branded “life unworthy of life”.
And after WW2, the East German regime also injected its athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.
Commissioner Königsberg says the Querdenker have now taken this anti-vax stance to a sickening new level: “The face of the leading corona virologist, Christian Drossler, even appeared on placards comparing him with the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele”
“Many Jews are puzzled about the state’s general failure to act on all this.
“But I did gain some hope that the German Office for the Protection of Constitution will monitor the Querdenker movement.”
For others however, this is no cause for celebration. Co-ordinator Dr Mathias Berek is a cultural scientist
at the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin.
He says focusing on education would help overcome the “clear dangers” of the Querdenker movement: “I have no hope that the office for the protection of the constitution will really help here.
“In recent history, this institution had strong links to the underground neo-Nazi movement, the NSU. I put more hope in education. Right now, German school children are taken to concentration camps sites, and educators just let them be overwhelmed and hope it this will work.”
For Dr Berek, a far better method would be to encourage pupils to
engage in open dialogue about their own families and their histories, and explore how this relates to the Holocaust, life under Nazi oppression and life in a free society.
“The most disturbing thing is that Querdenker followers are always talking about freedom and democracy, and yet they march alongside antisemites, neo-Nazis and Reichsbürger.
“Ironically, these are the very people who would be the first to round up the Querdenker if they ever achieved the far-right dictatorship they yearn for.”
Focusing on education would help overcome the clear dangers’