The Nazi's that never really went away

How the SS had a back-up plan that is still in place today

Day X, violent attacks on left-wing politicians and activists, murders of immigrants, firebombings of asylumseeker’s homes and outright violence against anyone who dares to disagree with them, Germany is still a hotbed of right-wing extremism. And this election year has proven that it is not only a small group of disenfranchised boneheads who are the driving force behind the resurgence of the extreme right. In Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg the Alternative fur Deutschland surprised noone by taking a large part of the parliamentary seats, showing that the extreme right is firmly embedded in German society still.

But it's not only neonazi’s and the AfD that are still very much a part of German society. The so-called Reichsburgers, or sovereigns and separatists, the Siedler (or Seedling) movement and large parts of the anti-vax movement are run by former neonazi leaders who are trying to get their eugenistic, racist, anti-semitic and misogynyst ideas across to a wider public most of the times hardly even trying to hide their brown ideology.

Why is Germany still so susceptible to these thoughts and ideologies? What happened after 1945? Was there not a massive de-nazification? Did Germany not become the light in the democratic West?

In 1945, when the Third Reich was crumbling down and the Allied Powers were occupying Germany, there was one group that did not go down without a proper fight: the SS. Hitler’s elite stormtrooper corps that was in charge of annihilating the Jews, the Roma and Sinti, the homosexuals, the handicapped, the Left, etc had made their back-up plans in case the Allied Powers would win the ground battle. The SS were a government within the government and their leader Himmler was almost more powerfull than Hitler himself. Himmler’s minions ran the concentration camps and the extermination groups, or Einsatz-gruppen, and were the coordinators of mass-extinction. They were ruthless, precise and very good at being administrative crooks. They used stolen art and other valuables to fill their coffers. They used the money to live luxurious lives, but mostly they invested in the future and kept their money well hidden from the rest of the Third Reich.

After the Third Reich fell the Allies tried to arrest the leaders of the SS but were overwhelmed by all the other tasks at hand, like rebuilding a society and not losing Europe to either the Communists or the Capitalists. Both the Western Allies and the Soviets and their satellites arrested dozens of SS men and tried them for war crimes. Some of them were shot or hanged, but a lot of them spent time behind bars and were in need of lawyers and other forms of help.

The SS men that managed to escape capture, and there were many of them, were also in need of help to flee the country or to assume a new identity in order to stay close to their families. There was an obvious need for an organization that could help out all SS men who were now on the run or awaiting trial.

And help was on the way. The SS had set up various rat-lines, with the help of the Red Cross and the Vatican, to get them out of Germany into Italy or Spain and then onto new horizons in South-America, mostly Argentia, where blank Red Cross provided passports were handed out to them by President Peron who could use their smarts to bolster his army and intelligence services to fight the Communists. Egypt and Syria did the same in later years as they needed men who hated Jews with a passion and could use their experience in killing Jews in their fight against Israel. And the United States decided that SS scientists could help the US in their arms race against the USSR and with Operation Paperclip shuttled hundreds of Nazis to the US.

But still there was a need for more help from the inside. And that is where the “Princess of the SS” came in. Gudrun Burwitz, or Gudrun Himmler as she was actually called, favorite daughter of Heinrich and staunch national socialist was ready to help. She, together with other SS and Nazi second and third tier bigwigs, set up the organization called “Stille Hilfe fur Kriegsgefangene und Internierte” (Silent Help for Prisoners of War and those that are Interned). The SS coffers that had been filled to the brim with blood money were ready to do their jobs. Lawyers with national socialist leanings were hired to make sure that imprisoned SS men were getting all the help and support they needed to stay out of jail or at least have all the luxuries available to them in prison.

But soon, as the years passed and the arrest rate went down, the Stille Hilfe found other uses for their money and connections. Dozens of SS men and other Nazi Party leaders and members had never been challenged by authorities and even managed to stay in their positions as councilmembers, prosecutors and businessmen. The West had decided that the fight against the USSR was more important and wanted to forget about the SS and the Nazi’s as soon as possible.

So now there was an organization and there was money. What to do? Well, Gudrun and her friends decided that it was time to set up a new Nazi movement and they started to organize across Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries. The right people were found to lead a new movement. Young angry men who were ready to take up the mantle of the Third Reich were given training and money to set up more groups and to start an underground war against the State and the natural enemies of national-socialism, the Left and the Jews.

After the fall of the Third Reich there had been several attempts at reviving the National Socialist Party but with the grounding of the German Constitution, which explicetely denied entry to national socialist groups into parliament, it seemed that “going underground” was the only way to actually build up a strong movement.

Gudrun and her friends started handing out money and advise to several groups and individuals, mostly those that openly supported the ideas of Holocaust-denial or revisionism, but with the help of some former leaders of the Hitler Youth and the BDM (the female version of the Hitler Youth) the former SS decided to invest in a new generation of stormtroopers to be.

Dozens of national socialist youth camps were organized throughout the decades leading up to the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. Several potential future leaders of a new Nazi movement were given the tools and money to start up their own groups. Most were failures as in-fighting tore these groups apart, but there were some winners to be found in the ranks of the new brown shirts.

Most of the new Nazi groups turned to street violence and thuggery and adapted the skinhead subculture looks in an attempt to recruit more disenfranchised youths in the 70s, 80s and 90s. These Boneheads, as the Jamaican lifestyle inspired Skindheads were profoundly anti-Nazi, shaved their heads, wore bomberjackets and military style boots with white laces in them. They drank beer by the liter, had rough parties and went out on the streets to beat up and sometimes kill political opponents and people of color. Several racist murders in the 80s and 90s resulted in public outrage and soon Boneheads were seen as dumb racist thugs and not as the well organized Nazi sponsored groups that they were. The authorities had decided not to invest much time in researching these groups as they were tunnel-visioned to focus on the extreme left due to the violence of the Rote Armee Fraction and the large anti-authoritarian movements in Berlin and Hamburg who were not afraid to challenge the police in large street battles.

Parallel to the groups of Boneheads there were several attempts to by-pass strict German laws to get a nationalist party started up. The NPD (National Party of Germany) was the most succesfull of these and still exists today under the name Der Heimat (The Homecountry). The NPD gave space to those nazi-sympathizers who weren’t ready to go out on the streets and fight it out there with their enemies. They wanted to get into parliament and disrupt democracy from the inside. But due to the German government keeping a close eye on their Nazi tendencies the NPD never rose to the heights that they had envisioned.

But the lack of government interest in Bonehead culture gave way to a large growth of local and regional groups of Nazis. And soon these groups became national and international. Organizations like Blood and Honour, Combat 18 and the Nationalist Socialist Movement inspired racist thugs across Europe and the US to form their own chapters including having their own musical underground and merchandise channels. And even though groups like the Aryan Nation and the British version of Blood and Honour gained notorioty in the English speaking media, the German groups stayed out of the limelight and continued to grow.

Several national attempts at forming a Nazi organization, like the Wiking-Jugend and the Freie Arbeiters Partei, had failed in the 90s because they did step into the national political arena and were then banned by the German State, but it did not stop members from setting up new groups to continue their work.

The so-called Freie Kameradschaften (Free Comrades groups) were locally organized Nazi groups that had no official political aspirations. They were seen as social groups in line with biker groups or even bowling teams. But they were violent and well organized. If they weren’t out hunting political opponents or immigrants they organized concerts, meetings in beer-halls and, most importantly, marches on days and in places that were deemed special to the Nazi movement. Thousands of Nazis would flock to small towns on birthdays of important Nazi leaders and would march around town shouting slogans that were barely legal. They would also visit cemeteries where Nazis were buried and organized so-called Trauermarches (Grief marches) where they would hold vigils at the graves of deceased SS men. Before and after these marches meetings would be held in conference centers and hotels where networking took place and where original SS officers were given a podium to regale the crowd with war stories. These events also gave space to Holocaust deniers and other pseudo scientists who wanted to sell their books and videos to a hungry crowd.

And at night, after large amounts of beer had been consumed, the Nazis would go out on the streets and attack leftist bars or worker union’s offices and they would beat immigrants and people of color into the hospital, if they didn’t kill them outright.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of far-right inspired assaults and arsons were recorded by police during the 90s, 2000s and further, but no steps were taken to dismantle the groups behind the attacks as they did not seem to form a real danger to established German society.

When, in the 90s, images blew up on TV’s across the world of hundreds of far-right members attacking asylumseeker housing in cities like Rostock in former East-Germany it was the German government who downplayed the organized nature of the attacks. The blame was put on disenfranchised youths that had grown up under a Communist regime. These youths just needed a way to let out their anger and frustration, but there were supposedly no signs of organized attacks.

The new Nazi movement couldn’t believe their luck and decided to double down on their actions. They recruited new members on a daily basis and wealthy backers, like the lawyer and real-estate mogul Jurgen Rieger from Hamburg, helped set up centers across Germany where new members could be taught the ways of organizing and violence. Large estates were bought in North, East and South-West Germany where, far away from prying eyes, youth camps were organized and where new strategies were implemented.

One of those strategies was to establish a well rounded Nazi movement in Dortmund. Locally organized Nazi groups were reeled into one group that shared a strategy, which basically meant terrorizing Dortmund’s leftist groups in an attempt to establish a Nazi neighborhood, which exists untill this day.

With successes across Germany in Dortmund, Dresden, Rostock and other smaller cities and villages, some which are completely under Nazi control, it was time to establish power in the larger Federal States like Saxony, Thuringen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. These states were known to house angry citizens who had no faith in the German government. People believed they had been left behind after the Berlin wall had fallen and economic prosperity was never shared with the East. And in a move that angered more people the German government decided to house large numbers of immigrants in cities and villages in these impoverished states. The large influx of strangers, mostly of Muslim faith, did not go over well with traditionalist, Christian, conservative locals and the far-right groups saw the perfect opportunity to gain control over the region.

It was the founding of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party that gave way to hardcore Nazis to whitewash themselves. They grew out their hair and put on suits and ran for office. They had learned from the past how to not get banned by the German authorities and stayed away from national socialist terms but made sure that everyone knew where they stood. Their outwardly public friendly face, which was still ripe with open racist beliefs, gave way to Nazi sympathy behind closed doors at party meetings and conferences. Dozens of members had to be dismissed because of their open Nazi sympathies or violent rapsheets that disqualified them for public office. But the AfD had put down its roots and were thriving off of the frustration with the national government across the eastern states. And with every local election they gained more and more seats and even won entire majorities in small counties so they could build up their base for future state elections.

Meanwhile, those hardcore Nazis that had not alligned themselves to the AfD or the NPD/Heimat were still out there organizing concerts, marches and even martial arts tournaments. They connected to Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian and other new Nazi groups and sent their members to countries where it was allowed to train with firearms like AK-47s. The idea of a Day X started to rise up and gain ground. Day X would be the day where the Nazis would overthrow the national government and would reinstate the Third Reich. Nazis decided to enlist in the police and army to get training and access to weapons and ammunition and throughout the last decade several groups have been unearthed and prosecuted by the German State for trying to overthrow the government and democracy, some of which were highly trained special forces groups who had well-laid out plans to gain power and execute “enemies of the people” en masse.

Others who had gone through the Nazi training camps funded by the Stille Hilfe in the 80s and 90s saw different opportunities and decided to take up the mantle of other groups that felt they were being oppressed by the German government. During the days of Covid the so-called anti-vaxers came out of nowhere it seemed, but in reality it was a concerted effort of far-right groups that unified the movement. Men like Thomas Wulff stepped up to the plate and changed their Nazi slogans into anti-government ones thus hiding their real brown colors from the scores of people who felt angry at the covid-measures that were installed and seemed to take away their personal freedom of movement in combination with mandatory vaccinations. The anti-vax movement blamed a international shadow government for taking away national rights and that was coal on the fire for the Nazis who wanted to spread the ideas of a international shadow government lead by a Jewish Cabal, an idea that originated in the 19th century and had insistenly stuck around in fringe conspiracy groups. Nazis had learned to exchange words like “Jews” for “Globalists” in order to stay away from prosecution in Germany and other countries when talking about the Holocaust. In their words the Third Reich had been destroyed by the Globalists, who then had spread the lie that Hitler had wanted to exterminate the Jews. Concentration camps had never existed according to these revisionists and in order to sell their books they had to use words like “globalists” and “cabal”, only slightly straying away from using the word “Jew”.

Now, with the anti-vax movement primed to hate the “globalist elite” the Nazi movement found a way to recruit thousands and thousands of people in their attempt to overthrow the national government. In a bizare play on words the anti-vax movement started to compare covid-measures to the days of the Third Reich and even talked about the possibility that concentration camps would be set up for those who refused to be vaccinated. They pictured government leaders as Nazis and called the police “stormtroopers”. The Nazi movement could not help but laugh behind closed doors as even so-called leftist hippies and esoterical groups of people now closed ranks with hardcore racists and national socialists. The Nazis recalled the days of the early Nazis who had dabbled in esoteric beliefs and who had romantized living of the land and producing food that was free from poisons, returning to the days of the early Germanic tribes who had lived in harmony with the land. Yoga practicioners now mingled freely with fervent Nazis as they broke through police lines and stormed the capital in Berlin.

An other group that recieved help from Nazis in growing bigger were the so-called Reichsburger (Sovereign Citizens or Separatists). These nationalists, with deep racist beliefs, espouse to establish the old German Empire that existed before World War One. Their symbol being the black, white and red flag of the old Empire, which throughout the years has been used by the new Nazi movement at their marches as a replacement for the forbidden Swastika flag of the Nazi Party. These Reichsburgers do not acknowledge the German State as it is in their eyes a concoction of the anti-German Allied Powers and not a real State. They refuse to pay taxes and hope one day to topple the “fake” German government and replace it with an heir to Kaiser Wilhelm and reinstate the German Empire to its old borders.

Several of these Reichsburger groups have been raided, arrested and prosecuted by the German government because they were far into their plans of trying to overthrow the government with a violent insurrection. Not surprisingly, amongst those arrested were people with backgrounds in Nazi groups. Just different clothes and haircuts but the same old brown ideas and beliefs.

Himmler’s little “Princess” and her close SS friends could not be more proud of the current Nazi movement they have created. The AfD is quickly becoming one the biggest parties in Germany, the anti-vax and Reichsburger movements are growing in strength and numbers and street violent thugs are regaining their footing in cities like Chemnitz, Leipzig, Dortmund, Dresden and other places. The Left is shattered, the conservative government is quickly adopting anti-immigrant policies in a bid to take away votes for the AfD and the resentment against so-called “woke politics” on social media is thriving.

Even though the Third Reich fell in 1945 it seems that the Nazis never really seemed to have gone away.