Alfred Josef Ferdinand Jodl was a German Generaloberst who served as the Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces High Command – throughout World War II.
The Nuremberg rallies were a series of celebratory events coordinated by the Nazi Party in Germany. The first Nazi Nuremberg rally took place in 1923. This rally was not particularly large and did not have much impact; however, as the party grew in size, the rallies became more elaborate and featured larger crowds. They played a seminal role in Nazi propaganda events, conveying a unified and strong Germany under Nazi control. The rallies became a national event once Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, when they became annual occurrences. Once the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established, the party's propagandists began filming them for a national and international audience. Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl produced some of her best known work including Triumph of the Will (1934) and The Victory of Faith (1933), both filmed at the Nazi party rally grounds near Nuremberg. The party's 1938 Nuremberg rally celebrated the Anschluss that occurred earlier that year. The 1939 scheduled rally was cancelled just before Germany's invasion of Poland and the Nazi regime never held another one due to the prioritization of Germany's efforts in the Second World War.
The Walther PP series pistols are blowback-operated semi-automatic pistols, developed by the German arms manufacturer Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is Germany's federal domestic intelligence agency. Together with the Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz (LfV) at the state level, the federal agency is tasked with intelligence-gathering on efforts against the liberal democratic basic order, the existence and security of the federation or one of its states, and the peaceful coexistence of peoples; with counter-intelligence; and with protective security and counter-sabotage. The BfV reports to the Federal Ministry of the Interior and tasks and powers are regulated in the Bundesverfassungsschutzgesetz. The President is Thomas Haldenwang; he was appointed in 2018.
The Solingen arson attack was one of the most severe instances of xenophobic violence in modern Germany. On the night of 28–29 May 1993, four young German men belonging to the far right skinhead scene, with neo-Nazi ties, set fire to the house of a large Turkish family in Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Three girls and two women died; fourteen other family members, including several children, were injured, some of them severely. The attack led to violent protests by Turkish diaspora members in several German cities and to large demonstrations of other Germans expressing solidarity with the Turkish victims. In October 1995, the perpetrators were convicted of arson and murder and given prison sentences between 10 and 15 years. The convictions were upheld on appeal.
The far-right in Germany slowly reorganised itself after the fall of Nazi Germany and the dissolution of the Nazi Party in 1945. Denazification was carried out in Germany from 1945 to 1949 by the Allied forces of World War II, with an attempt of eliminating Nazism from the country. However, various far-right parties emerged in the post-war period, with varying success. Most parties only lasted a few years before either dissolving or being banned, and explicitly far-right parties have never gained seats in the Bundestag post-WWII.
The National Socialist Underground murders were a series of racist murders by the German Neo-Nazi terrorist group National Socialist Underground. The NSU perpetrated the attacks between 2000 and 2007 throughout Germany, leaving ten people dead and one wounded. The primary targets were ethnic Turks, though the victims also included one ethnic Greek and one ethnic German policewoman.
The National Socialist Underground, or NSU, was a German neo-Nazi militant organization active between 2001 and 2010, and uncovered in November 2011. Regarded as a terror cell, the NSU is mostly associated with Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, who lived together under false identities. Between 100 and 150 further associates were identified who supported the core trio in their decade-long underground life and provided them with money, false identities and weapons. Unlike other terror groups, the NSU had not claimed responsibility for their actions. The group's existence was discovered only after the deaths of Böhnhardt and Mundlos, and the subsequent arrest of Zschäpe.
Germany has experienced significant terrorism in its history, particularly during the Weimar Republic and during the Cold War, carried out by far-left and far-right German groups as well as by foreign terrorist organisations.
The NSU trial or National Socialist Underground trial was a trial in Germany against several people in connection with the National Socialist Underground (NSU) – an extreme-right terrorist organization – and the NSU murders. It took place between 6 May 2013 and 11 July 2018 in Munich before the Munich Higher Regional Court. The trial was notable for being one of the largest, longest and most expensive in German history and made public claims of institutionalized racism within the German police force who for years ruled out Neo-Nazis as potential suspects in the killings and instead focused on suspects with Turkish backgrounds," going so far as to name their investigation "Bosporus."
Michèle Kiesewetter, a German police officer, was killed by neo-Nazi terrorists. On the 25 April 2007, Kiesewetter and her partner were on patrol in their police car. At approximately 2:00 p.m., they stopped in a corner of a large parking lot in Heilbronn to have a lunch break. Shortly after, both officers were ambushed and shot in the head by two gunmen, approaching from behind the vehicle. Kiesewetter, sitting in the driver's seat, was fatally injured. Her partner, sitting in the passenger's seat, was badly injured, but survived the attack. When the police and the ambulance arrived on the scene, both officers were lying on the ground, next to their car, and their handguns and handcuffs were stolen. The gunmen have also been implicated with the murders of nine other people, most with Turkish roots, between 2000 and 2006, the so-called NSU murders.
On 11 April 2017, the tour bus of the German football team Borussia Dortmund was attacked with roadside bombs in Dortmund, Germany. Three bombs exploded as the bus ferried the team to the Westfalenstadion for the first leg of their quarter-final against Monaco in the UEFA Champions League. One of the team's players, Marc Bartra, and a policeman were wounded, but the strengthened windows of the bus prevented casualties.
The Atomwaffen Division, also known as the National Socialist Resistance Front, is an international far-right extremist and neo-Nazi terrorist network. Formed in 2013 and based in the Southern United States, it has since expanded across the United States and it has also expanded into the United Kingdom, Argentina, Canada, Germany, the Baltic states, and other European countries. The group is described as a part of the alt-right by some journalists, but it rejects the label and it is considered extreme even within that movement. Atomwaffen has been described as "one of the most violent neo-Nazi movements in the 21st century". It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and it is also designated as a terrorist group by multiple governments, including the United Kingdom and Canada.
Klaus Gosmann (born 1 September 1940), nicknamed The Midday Murderer, is a German serial killer who killed 7 people. He received his nickname because he committed his robberies and murders mostly at noon. He was released in 2015 after 50 years in prison, being up until that point Bavaria's longest-serving prisoner.
Walter Lübcke was a German local politician in Hesse and a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). On 2 June 2019, he was assassinated at his home by a neo-Nazi extremist. Stephan Ernst was arrested on 15 June 2019 and confessed to the crime on 25 June 2019. The Federal Prosecutor's Office classified the murder as a political assassination.
The Halle synagogue shooting occurred on 9 October 2019 in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and continued in nearby Landsberg. After unsuccessfully trying to enter the synagogue in Halle during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the attacker, 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, fatally shot two people nearby and later injured two others. Federal investigators called the attack far-right and antisemitic terrorism.
The murder of Walter Lübcke occurred on 2 June 2019 in Wolfhagen-Istha, Germany, near the city of Kassel. Walter Lübcke, the head of the public administration of the Kassel region, was killed in front of his home by a shot to the head at close range. On 15 June 2019, right-wing extremist Stephan Ernst was arrested as the prime suspect. On 25 June 2019, he made a confession, which was recanted on 2 July 2019. Ernst was convicted of murder on 28 January 2021.
The Hanau shootings occurred on 19 February 2020, when nine people were killed and five others wounded in a terrorist shooting spree by a far-right extremist targeting three bars and a kiosk in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany. After the attacks, the gunman, identified as Tobias Rathjen, returned to his apartment, where he killed his mother and then committed suicide. The massacre was called an act of terrorism by the German Minister of Internal Affairs.
Gruppe S, named after founder Werner S., was an alleged far-right terrorist group in Germany that emerged on the internet in September 2019 and was dismantled in February 2020 with the arrest of several militants. They are said to have armed themselves in a few months, conducted target practice and planned simultaneous assassinations of Muslims in mosques, prominent politicians and people close to anti-fascist movements.
