Far-right and other politically motivated crime in Germany has doubled over the past decade to hit an all-time high last year, the government said Tuesday.
Such crimes — from hate speech and property offenses to assault — rose by 2% to 85,837 reported cases last year, with about half motivated by right-wing ideology.
“By far the most offenses were committed by right-wing and far-right perpetrators,” said Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, but he stressed that left-wing offenses rose most sharply.
“Key drivers of societal polarization are social media, through which hatred, incitement and propaganda are spread,” said Federal Criminal Police Office chief Holger Muench. “This accelerates radicalization and, in the worst case, leads to serious crimes in the offline world.”
Violent crime rose by 1.2% to 4,156 cases, the highest number in a decade, police said.
“Violent offenses are rising significantly in both the left-wing and right-wing extremist spheres,” Dobrindt told a Berlin news conference.
So-called hate crimes, committed due to group-related prejudices, were up 1.8% to 22,159 reported offenses.
Of these, more than 80% were motivated by xenophobia. This was followed by antisemitic crimes, which increased by 5% to 6,548 cases.
Security authorities also recorded a 5.7% increase in religiously motivated crimes, reaching 1,983 cases.
Muench also pointed to “nihilistic crimes,” committed in online networks, as “a phenomenon we’ve seen increasingly over the last two or three years.”
He said mostly young, male perpetrators use digital networks “to try to persuade vulnerable individuals to self-harm, to take photos of themselves that are later used for blackmail, and ultimately to push people to their deaths.”
A German juvenile court in Hamburg this year started the so-called “White Tiger” trial, in which a man is accused of multiple sadistic online crimes, including coercing a 13-year-old transgender youth to take their own life.
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