German authorities are facing a “complex threat situation.” Some observers caution against exaggerating the danger. A handful of remote, but high-profile incidents have put politically motivated crime increased on Germany’s security agenda. The renewed worries follow a German tourist getting stabbed to death in Paris allegedly by a man with a record of criminal behaviour, and mental illness and what prosecutors there have expressed is sympathy for the so-called Islamic State (IS).
The news has revived memories from 2016 when a man — also with an alleged IS affinity — pushed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market. The attack killed 13 people, and the assailant was later gunned down by police in Italy. A field of foreign and domestic actors currently confront Germany “with a difficult and fraught threat situation due to parallel crises.
The non-state threats that most matter to authorities, violent Islamists and white supremacists, are not fresh, but Hamas, which is identified as a terrorist group by the US and EU, and its major attack on Israel as a trigger for heightened security sensitivities.
Terrorism is a type of politically inspired crime, and an accurate assessment of the danger is hardly straightforward. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) counted 4,200 crimes linked with events in the Middle East since October 7, when Hamas killed around 1,200 people in Israel. The figure of 4,200 crimes is founded on daily reporting, which provides only a rough snapshot of the real-time situation in Germany, according to BKA information delivered.
A more thorough, and thus time-delayed, analysis pushes the figure down to about 2,000 politically motivated crimes in this period. Due to methodological discrepancies, a BKA spokesperson expressed the two figures are “not comparable.” “The case formations for politically motivated offences for 2023 are provisional and are subject to constant changes,” he added.
The BKA has explained an antisemitic motivation to fewer than half of the lower of the two figures, which can vary from verbal threats to property damage. What determines “antisemitism” is contested, however, and a BfV spokesperson said it is challenging to sort out peaceful protesters exercising their essential rights and violent extremists who may pose an actual threat to public safety.
Casting such a broad net could be a factor in the high rates of politically encouraged crime that authorities have registered in the last several weeks. At the same time, a net made to catch primarily spiritual extremists and antisemites “imported” from the Arab world may forget other possible perpetrators. In Paris, for example, researchers are looking into whether alleged antisemitic graffiti is linked to Russian intelligence or Moldovan organized crime.
As of mid-2022, the BKA declared slightly more than 1,000 people of interest in association with Islamist terrorism. It was keeping a look at a couple hundred such people in the far-right background, and a few dozen in the far-left. These are individuals who authorities suspect have the potential to reserve or support politically motivated crimes.
The current security fears, however, extend far beyond these threat categories, leading police unions and political parties to call for more security, a stronger show of force, and stricter laws that foremost affect immigrant and minority groups. Policing experts warn these steps are not necessarily grounded in hard data.
