Raids in twelve federal states
Faeser bans neo-Nazi group “Artgemeinschaft”
September 27, 2023, 7:14 a.m
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Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is banning a right-wing extremist organization that calls itself “The Art Community”. As the ministry reports, police forces searched 26 apartments of 39 club members and the club’s rooms in twelve federal states this morning.
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has banned another right-wing extremist organization. In the morning, police forces searched 26 apartments of 39 members as well as rooms of the association “The Art Community – Germanic Faith Community for Essential Living” in twelve federal states, as the Interior Ministry in Berlin announced. The ban against the association, which is attributed to the ethnic settler milieu, had been prepared for more than a year. The findings of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution were decisive here.
Faeser described in a message “The species community” as a “sect-like, deeply racist and anti-Semitic association”. The minister also justified her decision with the child’s best interests. She said: “This right-wing extremist group has tried to raise new enemies of the constitution through disgusting indoctrination of children and young people.”
According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the ban also includes all sub-organizations of the movement, which, according to the security authorities, has around 150 members. These included so-called “associations”, “guilds”, “circles of friends” and an association called “Familienwerk”. According to the information, searches were carried out in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia.
“Blood and Soil” ideology pursued
Last week, Faeser banned the elite neo-Nazi group “Hammerskins Deutschland”. According to them, 700 people were deployed during searches. The minister said that the “species community” was no less dangerous than the “Hammerskins,” especially because of the “manipulative, indoctrinating upbringing of their children” and the distribution of corresponding writings.
To justify the ban, her ministry stated that the settler movement was spreading a worldview that violated human dignity under the guise of a pseudo-religious Germanic belief in gods. The central goal is the preservation and promotion of one’s own “species”, which can be equated with the National Socialist concept of “race”. The right-wing extremist worldview was lived out and solidified particularly through the passing on of the ideology to children and young people. “Relevant literature, some of it from the Nazi era and only minimally modified,” was used.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution lists settlement efforts by right-wing extremists separately in its current annual report. The report states that the aim of these movements is mostly to “preserve the Germans”. “Being German” is defined primarily with reference to the ethnic concept of the people in the sense of the ethnic “blood and soil” ideology.