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Title: Confronting Escalating Repression in Germany Author: CrimethInc. Date: January 8, 2018 Language: en Topics: repression, Germany, g20, police Source: Retrieved on 16th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/08/confronting-escalating-repression-in-germany-in-the-aftermath-of-the-g20-a-call-for-resistance-from-the-rigaer-94
Following the popular rebellion in Hamburg during the 2017 G20 summit,
the German state has sought to crack down violently on dissent. In
August, the police shut down the most widely used German-language
platform for radical politics. In September, the neo-fascist party
Alternative fĂĽr Deutschland secured seats in the German parliament. On
December 5, police carried out 24 raids on leftist and autonomous
infrastructure across Germany, seizing laptops, cell phones, and other
means of communication. On December 18, the police published photos of
people they accuse of participating in the G20 protests. Four days
later, an anonymous threatening letter arrived at various autonomous
centers around Berlin. Together, these events indicate a rapid descent
towards tyranny. Yet German anarchists are resisting every step of the
way. The Rigaer 94, a social center in Berlin, is emblematic of their
courageous defiance. Here, we present some background on the Rigaer 94
and share translations of two statements on the conflict unfolding in
Germany.
The Rigaer 94 is an autonomous housing project and social center in the
Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain. The house has been at the center
of many conflicts with the police, especially over the past two years.
In 2016, the police declared the area immediately surrounding the Rigaer
Strasse to be a “danger zone.” This designates a zone in which the
police do not have to obey the law, where they may act according to the
supposed imperatives of “security.” Berlin police regularly carry out
illegal searches and set up control checkpoints in the neighborhood to
harass inhabitants of the Rigaer Strasse.
In summer 2016, a 500-officer SWAT team raided the Rigaer Strasse and
occupied the building’s social center, The Kadterschmiede. Police held
the social center for three weeks. In response to this siege, hundreds
and hundreds of luxury cars were burnt in night actions all over
Germany. A 5000-person demonstration mobilized people from all over
Europe to defend the autonomous center. The demonstration clashed with
the police, receiving support from the neighborhood and from autonomous
centers across Europe.
The fate of the Rigaer was to be decided in a court battle. Yet on the
night before the verdict was to be announced, a car belonging to the
state’s prosecutor caught fire. As a result, the prosecutor failed to
appear in court the next day. The prosecution thus forfeited the case
and the Rigaer Strasse won by default. Since then, the police have tried
numerous times to provoke the autonomous center into conflicts.
Police
This text appeared in German on December 17, 2017.
The police state has set its forces loose: on Monday, December 18, the
police published photographs of the faces of one hundred people who took
part in the resistance to the G20 summit in Hamburg. The state has
discarded the pretext of criminal prosecution entirely. Instead, it has
made a major provocation against our movement by launching a new
campaign of repression. This campaign is intended to strike fear into
the hearts of those who participated in the G20 summit in order to crush
all resistance. We will not be silent about this attack. The task of
dragging this society of police collaborators, murderers, and fascists
onto the funeral pyre remains before us.
It is clear to every reasonable person that the resistance in Hamburg
was necessary. The forces of repression and the right-wing media have
failed to reframe the narrative of the outpouring of defiance against
the G20 summit. In a country that proclaims itself to be among the most
democratic in the world, a country that presents itself as invincible, a
country equipped with a sophisticated apparatus of violence, and in the
face of enormous risks and serious consequences, tens of thousands of
people dared to rise up. A mix of protests and offensive actions turned
the summit of the ruling class into a disaster. A disaster for the city
of Hamburg and a disaster for the powerful 20 leaders themselves, whose
most important meeting now faces an uncertain future.
The summit was also a disaster for the police. In the Kaiser’s Germany,
in fascist Germany, and today in democratic Germany, the police have
never limited themselves to a merely executive function. They have
always served as the front line for this nation of murderers. We all
know how deeply anchored the ideology of the police is in our society. A
society that threw Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse into the canal; that hunted
Anne Frank behind her bookcase, to throw her into the extermination
camps alongside millions of other “subhumans”; a society that ends up
crowning the German-national military as the resistance[1]—this is a
fascist society. The security apparatus of Germany, which was
established during those slaughters and is now used to relentlessly hunt
rebels and anti-fascists in the name of the German people, is also
fascist. Just a few years after its “liberation,”[2] this society and
its executives were able to unite in the hunt against communists.
The German security apparatus was refined to perfection when it was used
against guerrilla groups like the Red Army Faction, which carried out
the long-overdue execution of Hanns Schleyer,[3] a member of the Nazi
Party. The faces of rebels were posted on every corner on manhunt
posters; at every intersection, heavily-armed police maintained
checkpoints. The death penalty was re-introduced and the nature of
police work shifted. A new social discourse devised by a coalition of
media, politicians, and police paved the way for state assassinations,
psychological torture, and new special laws to be used against a large
part of the population. The police state, still in its infancy when it
murdered Benno Ohnesorg[4], had to reckon with the permanent threat of
insurrection.
Over the years, the German police have developed into a state within the
state. Following the end of the urban guerilla groups and the new social
movements of the 1980s and 90s, we are confronted with a society that
can no longer generate any relevant opposition to the system. Not even
when people are tortured and murdered in the bunkers of police stations,
like Oury Jalloh from Dessau, who was burned alive by the fascist pigs.
At the moment, the only factor inhibiting the completion of this
totalitarian police state is its hesitance to scandalize civil rights
activists too much. These civil rights activists, who like us are
continually deprived of resources and support from civil society, have
made their decision—whatever the state does cannot be wrong, whatever
the press says is true: resistance is futile.
The time of comfortable protests is long gone. Today, German society has
arrived at an extreme it hasn’t reached in over 80 years. Those who
resist face the following challenges:
of many years.
and surveil them completely without approval from a judge.
Already in the lead-up to the G20 summit, sanctions were made against
rebels. People who were designated by the police as “dangerous” received
notice that they were forbidden to travel to Hamburg. These people were
required to sign in every day at the police station while the summit was
taking place, and were threatened with fines and jail time if they
failed to obey. In a bid to intimidate rebels, police made their
surveillance of certain people extremely obvious, not to mention the
extensive secret surveillance that surely took place.
During the G20 summit, people undermined police control throughout the
entire city of Hamburg, leading to the “adjustment” of citizens’ rights
and massive amounts of violence by heavily armed troops of police.
The police activities before and during the summit were not
qualitatively new. For many years now, the security apparatus has
utilized every major event as an opportunity to mount new attacks on
social conventions. What was exceptional this time was the number of
attacks and how shamelessly they carried out these attacks against
protesters.
What began after the summit was a qualitative leap. Some people invented
conspiracy theories, claiming that the riots were carried out by the
state in order to draw radical infrastructure into a final repression
campaign in which it could be defeated once and for all. This kind of
thinking is idiotic. We know precisely that the political disaster we
created in Hamburg was desirable for us. In order to end this conspiracy
theory, we claim full responsibility for everything that happened in
Hamburg: from the first citizens’ protests to the very last stone that
flew at the police.
As a part of that radical infrastructure, shortly after the summit we
organized a demonstration in solidarity with all of those who were
targeted by repression. In the future, we will not shirk our
responsibility to take revolt further. Those who can only see state
conspiracy behind every act of struggle deprive resistance of all its
characteristics; they have no legitimacy to speak in the name of revolt.
It is clear that the state is fighting to ensure that its narrative of
the events is the definitive one. It must conquer the narrative as it
conquers everything else: our lives and our social structures, the
environment and technology. In this battle for capitalist and
nationalist ends, the state will always end up demanding fascism. With
the same tactics, they try time and time again to delegitimize
resistance by branding it criminal, antisocial, and apolitical. For this
purpose, the German state can rely on its police, its media, and the
German people, as well as its representatives.
It’s difficult to say who is the sleaziest of all participants in this
process is. The boss of Soko schwarzer block,[5] who would hunt
everything he could get his hands on with the same fervor; or the
nauseating Scholz,[6] who represents the rotten bourgeoisie of Hamburg
and their fancy cars; or the representatives of the press who serve to
carry out PR work for the police; or the craven police collaborators,
who deliver people up to brutal repression with the pictures they took
with their cell phones, who would rather march behind every Hitler
figure than take their lives in their own hands.
Some laughed at the latest wave of raids, which we saw coming far in
advance. Others laughed because they knew that Fabio,[7] a nice young
man from Italy, would be a problem for the state’s strategy of
repression. However, we should not underestimate the police strategy. An
essential part of this strategy is to use PR to achieve long-term
sovereignty of interpretation over the events in Hamburg.
All the same, who would have thought that so many months later, thanks
to their regular appointments with the press, the G20 would still be a
top theme on the daily news? And who would have thought that despite
having almost unlimited resources at their disposal, their professional
press work would fail without our doing anything?
For these reasons, and on the occasion of the manhunt for participants
in the Hamburg riots against the G20, we want to emphasize anew the
importance of our struggle against the state—against fascist
organizations like the police, the secret services, and the right-wing
structures—and also against the collaborators and informants within the
population and the press. Fabio and everyone else who remains defiant in
front of the judge are role models demonstrating a dignified approach to
dealing with repression. The same goes for everyone who sends messages
of solidarity to those targeted by repression, despite the intimidation
of the state.
On the occasion of the police manhunt and the state’s call for a new
wave of denunciations against 100 people, we have decided to release
photographs of 54 police officers who took part in the eviction of the
Rigaer Strasse last year. We would be glad to receive any tips,
including where these police officers live and where we can meet them in
private. Aside from taking part in the eviction, they should also be
held responsible for all the violence they unscrupulously perpetrated
during the three-week-long siege of our neighborhood in Freidrichshain.
It is important that we stop hesitating and put our strength into
mobilizing solidarity and structures that are capable of action. The
demonstrations[8] after the raids were a beginning. After the next
raids, we must become even more numerous. It is important that when all
else fails, we take the streets to show our solidarity with all the
comrades who are hunted by the henchmen of the ruling class.
So—out into the streets! Determined and angry, despite the repression,
we will fight against the ruling order!
Letter Received from the Police State
This text appeared in German on December 30, 2017.
On December 22, an anonymous letter was delivered to various locations
that the authorities have designated as “left-extremist meeting points.”
The nine-page letter, double-sided with three photos on each side,
contains threats against 42 people whose full names are listed. For 18
of those people, their photos were taken from the Berlin police
department’s records or from people’s ID cards and are accompanied by
partly relevant, mostly slanderous commentaries. This information can be
directly traced to the data records from the state security departments.
In addition, 24 people were named without their photos.
The letter, reproduced below for the sake of documentation, is signed by
a fake organization called “The Center for Political Correctness.” The
letter claims to be a reaction to the behavior of the radical autonomous
house project Rigaer 94: “Your presence annoys an entire neighborhood.”
The letter proves that the people who sent it were directly affected by
the publication of the Rigaer 94’s call for a manhunt against the
police. In the call, photographs of 54 police officers who took part in
the summer 2016 eviction of Rigaer 94 were publicly released.
The letter threatens to publish more information about the individuals
it targets. It is highly likely that the information and data records
listed in this letter were passed on to Nazis. Many Nazi organizations
are named in the letter, including “Autonomous Nationalists” and the
“Identitarian Movement.” For the time being, we do not know to what
extent this personal data has already been sent to Nazis. The letter
makes nebulous threats—for example, against people’s cars or families,
or that lawyers or investigation committees will become involved. The
letter also threatens to send the data records to the police. This
particular threat is an alibi that proves the letter’s authorship. An
initial evaluation by a number of those targeted by the letter has
confirmed that the information can only have been made available to the
“scene-aware” state security officers (LKA 5) that work within the
Berlin police department. The data records are pulled from approximately
the last ten years. We are certain that the letter was created and sent
by the Berlin police, since no one else would have access to these
photos or the biometric information and investigation files.
The fake moniker reveals more about the authors. “Center for political
correctness” is a play on “Center for Political Beauty.” The Center for
Political Beauty is a leftist organization that uses publicity campaigns
to fight against racism and fascism. Their last action was directed at
the Alternative For Germany (AfD, the far-right German party) politician
Björn Höcke. Höcke made a name for himself with his pro-fascist remarks
about the Holocaust memorial in downtown Berlin: “We Germans, our people
[Volk], are the only people in the world that has planted a monument to
shame in the heart of our capital.” In addition, he complained about the
“stupid” coping policy (Bewältigungspolitik)[9] and demanded that the
“memorial policy shift 180 degrees.” In order to stigmatize him and the
AfD, the Center for Political Beauty secretly rented the empty lot
adjacent to Höcke’s home and set up concrete slabs or “stelae” that
looked exactly like those of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. They also
publicly threatened to publish the results of their 10-month-long
observation of Höcke from near his house. From this much, we can
conclude that the letter that was sent to us was sympathetically
received by the ranks of the Berlin police with their fascist activities
and sympathies—to say the very least.
The threat to forward the data to extra-parliamentary Nazi organizations
such as the Autonomous Nationalists shows that the authors of this
letter are actively involved in far-right organizing. Furthermore,
sending such a letter demonstrates that the authors have a great deal of
confidence in and support from the police department. This is shown not
only by the downright fascist ideology that the letter expresses, but
also by the means itself. Slander and the sending of anonymous threats
are known in all parts the world where political tension is high and
regimes entrust their stability to security organizations. These
techniques were developed in the 1960s in the US, where the FBI used
similar methods to target the Black Panther Party. Named COINTELPRO,
this program was exported to all dictatorships. The East German secret
service, utilizing their strategy of “decomposition,” employed similar
measures.
Cooperation between organized Nazi groups and the police is nothing new.
During the siege and eviction of the Rigaer 94 in the summer of 2016,
the personal information of people recognized by the police at the
demonstrations was leaked to a Nazi blog in the “Halle-Leaks.” In
addition, fliers illustrated with SS symbols were distributed in the
area expressing support for the police. We also recall the right-wing
activist Marcel Göbel,[10] whose false testimony about the Rigaer 94 and
the Kadterschmiede [11] was enough for the secret service to classify
these places as “Autonomous strongholds.”
Lastly, the threatening letter confirms the claim made by the Rigaer 94
in their call for a manhunt against the police: fascist ideology lives
inside the police departments, especially the secret services and state
security. This is cause enough for us to renew our struggles.
We are not shocked that the police are carrying out this kind of
repression. We are talking about the same police that murdered Oury
Jalloh. The same police that made headlines throughout Germany because
of its contacts with neo-Nazi groups and its escapades with individual
Nazis.[12] The same police force that let one of their officers be
killed in order to prevent the full investigation of NSU activities.[13]
To everyone involved in our movements: we must prepare for further acts
of disinformation, slander, false reporting, psychological and physical
attacks, and “inexplicable” fires like the one that occurred in October
2015 at the entrance of the Liebig 34.[14] The ones responsible for
these acts are members of the Berlin Police department. The police
figured out a long time ago that anarchy cannot be fought with legal
means; they have decided on a strategy of direct escalation in the
conflict with the Rigaer 94.
One final detail: the letter was sent from the post office in
Tempelhof-Schoenenberg, the same district as the police precinct. We
could never imagine that the police would make such an amateur mistake,
even though they tried to conceal traces that would reveal who sent the
letter. As can be seen in the photos posted with this statement, we were
able to make the fingerprints on the letters visible. To do so, we made
a solution composed of ninhydrin, ethanol, and acetic acid. We used a
spray bottle to mist the letter and hung it up on a shelf to dry at 80
degrees Celsius. After about 10 minutes, the results were developed, as
seen in the photos.
–Some of those targeted by the letter.
[1] The German military is so unpopular that it has to portray joining
the military as an act of “resistance,” as nobody wants to join. The
military released a new youtube series which is an example of this.
[2] The end of World War II and subsequent occupation of Germany by
Western powers and the Soviet Union is usually referred to as Germany’s
“liberation,” implying that Germany was successfully cleansed of
fascism.
[3] Hanns Martin Schleyer served in the SS during World War II. After
the war, he became an important industrial leader in West Germany. The
fact that prominent Nazi figures could still hold power after WWII
confirms that de-Nazification never took place in Germany. This helps to
explain why the RAF kidnapped and murdered Schleyer in 1977.
[4] The university student Benno Ohnesorg was murdered by German police
during a demonstration in 1967. His death was an important moment in the
German student movement; the June 2 movement was named after the date of
his death.
[5] Soko Black Block is the official name the German police gave to
their campaign of repression against G20 participants.
[6] Scholz is the Mayor of Hamburg, famous for suggesting that the
police give people poison to make them vomit in order to prove that they
took drugs.
[7] An 18-year-old Italian arrested at the G20 and held in prison for 4
months.
[8] On December 5, police raided several homes belonging to people
accused of participating in a black bloc that the police brutally
attacked during the G20 summit. Demonstrations took place all over
Germany in response to the raids.
[9] This concept is specific to Germany and means “the politics of
coming to terms with the past.”
[10] Marcel Göbel was a right-wing activist who infiltrated leftist
movements. During the summer of 2016, when the Rigaer Strasse was being
evicted by the police, luxury cars caught fire every night for months on
end to protest the eviction. The police only caught one person
committing arson—and that person happened to be right-wing activist
Marcel Göbel. Göbel tried to light a poor person’s car on fire to make
it appear that leftist activists were indiscriminately burning cars. In
fact, left activists only burn luxury cars. After Göbel was arrested, it
was revealed that he had worked extensively with the police.
[11] A social center and event space associated with the housing project
Rigaer 94.
[12] In October 2017, police officers in Rostock came under fire for
their involvement in a Nazi plot to murder left-wing activists.
[13] The National Socialist Underground [NSU] carried out a series of
murders between 2000 and 2006, mostly against people of Turkish
background.
[14] Another leftist housing project in Berlin.