Germany has banned the neo-Nazi group Hammerskins Deutschland, describing it as an extremist organisation with ties to the US that sees itself as the elite of the rightwing skinhead scene.
The German organisation, believed to play a leading role in Europe’s rightwing extremist scene, was an offshoot of the Hammerskin Nation, an organisation founded in Texas in 1988, Germany’s interior ministry said on Tuesday.
The ban, which extends to the regional chapters of the group and a sub-organisation Crew 38, was a “hard blow against organised rightwing extremism”, the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, told reporters. It is the 20th rightwing extremist group to be made illegal in the country.
The minister said the ban was accompanied by a police crackdown in which 700 officers raided the homes of 28 members across Germany, seizing far-right “devotional objects” as well as cash. She did not specify whether any members of the organisation were detained.
“With this ban we are putting an end to the inhumane activities of an internationally active neo-Nazi association in Germany,” Faeser added. “This sends a clear signal against racism and antisemitism.”
There has been a rise in far-right extremism in Germany, and the domestic spy agency counted 38,800 potential far-right extremists in 2022, a year in which the number of politically motivated crimes hit a record high.
Thomas Haldenwang, who heads the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, told Associated Press more than 10,000 of these suspected extremists were members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rightwing populist political party.
“We see a very strong current of people within this party who are opposed to our constitution,” he said in an interview in June. “We see a lot of hatred and agitation against minorities of all kinds there.”
This weekend the AfD politician Jörg Prophet could become the party’s first city mayor in Germany, after the far-right party won its first district council and town mayorship in east Germany this year.
Speaking to reporters in Berlin, the interior minister appeared to hint at the spy agency’s warnings. “Rightwing extremism remains the greatest extremist threat to the basic democratic order in Germany,” Faeser said.
The ban on Hammerskins Deutschland came after more than a year of close cooperation between German federal and state government, she said, adding: “We also worked closely with our American partners.”
The ministry said the group’s modus operandi was music: it uses rightwing and antisemitic recordings to propagate a racial doctrine based on Nazi ideology and recruit members while organising hate-rock concerts and selling merchandise to raise revenue. The group has had a presence in Germany since the 1990s.
According to the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the parent group of Germany’s Hammerskins ranks among one of the “oldest hardcore racist skinhead groups in the United States”. A 2017 report by the ADL described Hammerskin Nation members as “almost exclusively young white males inclined to violence”.
Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the ADL’s Center on Extremism, noted that the Hammerskins continued to exist in the US. “But the racist skinhead scene here has declined greatly since the rise of the alt right,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “In Europe, the racist skinhead scene is stronger than it is here.”
