Germany's 'Right-Wing Extremists' Reinvent Themselves as Grassroots Activists

It's always right-wing political groups who're branded as "extremists."

Far left-wing Stalinists are "liberals," to hear the idiots in the mainstream press.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Tapping Fears Over Migrants, Germany’s Far Right Expands Influence":

#WSJ Migrant Crisis Re-Energizes German Far Right: After failing at the ballot box, Germany’s right-wing extre... https://t.co/0SEBl6QHk5

— guynextdoor (@guynextdoorRVA) December 29, 2015

BERLIN—For years, Klaus Armstroff, head of an obscure German far-right party that calls for sweeping nationalizations, the death penalty and the return of lost pre-World War II territories, struggled to market his ideas. Now he can hardly keep up with demand for his “propaganda material.”

“People call us who have nothing to do with our party. But they order material to wake up their neighbors,” said Mr. Armstroff, who founded the party, called The Third Way, in 2013. Chancellor Angela Merkel, he said, “is playing into our hands.”

Public angst about the government’s decision to open the country’s doors to hundreds of thousands of migrants and the absence of a counterproposal from Germany’s mainstream parties have energized a far-right scene that, until recently, had appeared on the verge of political extinction....

Ballhausen, in the eastern German state of Thuringia, is one of many towns and villages where far-right activists have harnessed anxiety about the migrants to push their agenda, as Dorothea Schröder, a 59-year-old social worker, found out recently.

When Ms. Schröder and her local church decided to help refugees this autumn, she first turned to neighbors in Ballhausen for support. But it wasn’t forthcoming. After she and the local parish announced that they would host a migrant family in a house owned by the church, Ms. Schröder and her few supporters found stickers from The Third Way opposing refugees on mailboxes and doors. The village’s bus stops are currently daubed with a swastika and the runes of the Nazi Waffen-SS unit.

Known far-right activists turned up at a meeting on the issue that the church organized last month. The gathering soon descended into a shouting match, and police had to intervene to restore order.

“Some said the migrants should all drown in the Mediterranean, they should all be put into mines and be buried, or that they should fight in Syria and help to rebuild their country just as the Germans did after 1945,” Ms. Schröder said.

The NPD, the most well-known of Germany’s few, small extreme-right parties, had limited electoral success regionally in the past decade but has since become marginalized. Now, local politicians say, its former and current leaders are often among the organizers of the anti-migrant and anti-Muslim protests that have popped up across the country this year, particularly in the former communist east. And police said they suspected neo-Nazi activists of coordinating a rising wave of attacks against refugee shelters, which have quadrupled to more than 800 this year from 2014.