How the Germany Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto Follows the Far-Right Playbook
The document was in English, not his native tongue, in an apparent goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
By Tess Owen
Oct 10 2019, 1:00pm
A so-called manifesto apparently linked to the German synagogue shooter started circulating on far-right social media Wednesday evening, hours after he’d killed two people in an attempted attack on Jewish worshippers observing Yom Kippur in Halle.
The 11-page document echoes those of the El Paso and other recent shooters. And like parts of the gunman's live-stream of the attack, the document was in English, not his native tongue, in an apparent goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
The man has been identified by German authorities as 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, who led a reclusive life and lived alone with his mother, according to Der Spiegel. He drove 45 minutes from his home to Halle and went up to the synagogue door as services were underway inside with about 75 people. But when he was unable to break down the door, he left and ultimately ended up killing a woman in the street, and later, a man working in a nearby kebab shop.
It’s not clear when he posted the manifesto, but it laid out three objectives: providing the “viability” of improvised weapons, inspiring others by spreading the footage of the attack, and killing as “many anti-whites as possible.”
The document puts the gunman within a growing recent tradition of violent far-right extremists around the world, who seek to inspire future attacks by adding to a library of manifestos or footage of past attacks.
The Norweigian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011 wrote a 1,518-page document that has since been cited as an inspiration by other far-right terrorists. That document also contained advice on how to prepare for an attack and select targets. The Australian white nationalist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March published an 87-page screed before his deadly attack titled “The Great Replacement,” which is the same name as a white nationalist conspiracy theory. The Californian who opened fire on a synagogue in Poway, killing one, also published a manifesto online — as did the man who.killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August.
The German synagogue shooter’s manifesto devotes nine pages to laying out his plan of attack, including images and details about the types of weapons he’d planned to use, such as a homemade submachine gun and other improvised firearms (as well as a sword and hand grenades). Similarly, the El Paso shooter in his manifesto had described the type of ammunition and gun he aspired to use in his attack targeting Latinos.
A section in the German shooter’s manifesto titled “Plan” is filled with violently anti-Semitic language, none of which would be out of place on far-right Telegram channels or forums like 4chan. Some of the slurs he uses are direct references to some of those online communities. He also adds that he’d considered attacking a mosque or an an “antifa cultural center” but ultimately chose to drive 45 minutes to a synagogue.
During a press conference Thursday, German Chief Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank referenced the shooter’s**live-stream of the attack, which later appeared on Twitch. In parts of the 30-minute video, the suspect spoke directly to the camera, in English. “Hi, my name is Anon,” he said, using a name that 4chan and 8chan users often call themselves. “I think the Holocaust never happened.” Frank asserted the gunman filmed the attack with the hope of having a global impact and inspiring future attacks. He didn’t say anything about the veracity of the manifesto, but SITE Intelligence, a global security research firm, believes that it’s authentic.
German authorities have labeled Wednesday’s attack as “terror” and are working to determine how the suspect obtained explosives, and whether anyone else knew about his plan. The suspect is currently in hospital and being treated for gunshot wounds to his neck.
The Germany Synagogue Shooter Is Making No Secret of His Far-Right Motivations to Police
Police were treating his murderous rampage as a far-right terrorist attack even before he confessed on Friday.
By Tim Hume
Oct 11 2019, 9:01am
A 27-year-old man has confessed to carrying out an attack near a synagogue in the German city of Halle, saying he was motivated by far-right, anti-Semitic beliefs, federal prosecutors said Friday.
The shooter made the extensive confession during questioning by a judge in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice on Thursday evening. He had made no secret of his motivations, and German authorities were already treating the shooting as a far-right terror attack.
Before launching the attack, which he livestreamed on Twitch, he declared on camera that he blamed Jews for “problems” such as feminism and mass immigration. He then unsuccessfully attempted to storm the synagogue, which was crowded with worshippers observing Yom Kippur.
After detonating an explosive at the gate of the Jewish cemetery, he shot dead a 40-year-old woman passing by, then attacked a nearby Turkish kebab restaurant, killing a 20-year-old man who was eating there. He then shot and injured a couple while on the run, before being arrested by police.
Germany’s federal prosecutor Peter Frank said the assailant had 4 kilograms of explosives in his car, along with a number of homemade weapons, and intended to carry out a massacre in the synagogue. He said that the attacker was explicitly seeking to emulate previous attacks carried out by white nationalists — like the one who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March — and to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.
On Thursday, he was flown in shackles by helicopter to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, where special forces brought him before investigators. Despite having confessed to the crimes, under the German justice system, he will still face trial. He faces two charges of murder and seven of attempted murder.
Holger Stahlknecht, interior minister of the state of Saxony Anhalt, where the attack occurred, said the attacker was not known to intelligence authorities. Police say they are yet to establish whether he belonged to any far-right organization.
The attack is the latest in a high-profile string of far-right crimes in Germany, which have raised concerns about the growth and increasing militancy of the extreme-right. Germany’s interior ministry said there was a 20 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents last year.
In an interview with the Tagesspiegel newspaper Friday, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called for stronger security laws, saying: “We obviously have solidified right-wing extremist networks in Germany that do not shy away from terror and violence. Our country and its liberal constitution are attacked from within.”
The attack has also sparked a debate about the level of security provided to potential targets of extremist attacks. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which represents the country’s 200,000-strong Jewish community, criticized police for not guarding the Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur. But Oliver Malchow, head of Germany's police union, said it would be impossible to guard every potential target.
"We'd have to guard every synagogue, every church, every mosque, every holy place in Germany around the clock,” he said.
In an analysis for the University of Oslo, German far-right researcher Daniel Koehler said the attack represented a number of alarming new firsts in the recent history of anti-Semitic violence in Germany. In particular, the way the attacker used English in his livestream and alleged manifesto — which described his desire “increase the moral [sic] of other suppressed Whites by spreading the combat footage” — suggest he was attempting to appeal to the international white supremacist community.
“He was more interested in reaching a global audience than the German neo-Nazi milieu,” wrote Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.
While it’s not yet known if the attacker has links to right-wing extremist networks, the case appears to demonstrate the decreasing importance of organized far-right political parties, Koehler wrote. Instead, forms of “subcultural mobilization,” like racist online message boards, are playing an increasingly significant role in radicalization.
White Nationalists on Telegram Are Hailing the Germany Synagogue Shooter as a ‘Saint’
The gleeful reaction of white nationalists on Telegram provides yet another example of the international nature of the modern far right.
By Tess Owen
Oct 9 2019, 4:39pm
Far-right extremists on the encrypted messaging app Telegram hailed the gunman who killed two people near a synagogue in Halle, Germany, Thursday as a “saint,” a title reserved for white nationalists who’ve carried out previous attacks.
Telegram users pored over the pictures and video footage starting to trickle in for confirmation that the shooter was, indeed, a white male. “I’m betting on a saint here,” one English-language channel wrote to its 1,300 subscribers. Users celebrated the shooting as a sign of the coming “boogaloo” — a word borrowed from anti-government extremists to refer to an impending civil war.
The gleeful reaction of white nationalists on Telegram provides yet another example of the international nature of the modern far right, who increasingly rely on Telegram and other unregulated online social marketplaces to build alliances around the world and inspire lone-wolf attacks.
And Telegram, specifically, is growing: A recent VICE News analysis of 150 far-right channels found that two-thirds on the platform were created in the first eight months of 2019. The app has provided a safe harbor for extremists who found themselves exiled from mainstream social media and adrift when 8chan was taken offline in June.
The gunman in Germany targeted a synagogue where around 70 to 80 people had gathered to observe Yom Kippur. He recorded the attack using a camera mounted on his helmet, and the footage was later uploaded to the video game platform Twitch. The video, which Twitch removed, shows him trying to shoot down the door of the synagogue. The door held, so he drove instead to a kebab restaurant where he opened fire and killed two people.
Extremists rely on multimedia, like video clips of previous attacks, images from the battlefield in Ukraine, and PDFs of shooters' manifestos, to inspire future attacks — and Telegram allows users to upload unlimited amounts of those types of files.
White nationalists on Telegram quickly cloned the shooter’s Twitch video before it was ultimately removed by the company and it on the platform. They also created GIFs of the most violent moments from the video and shared a clip showing the suspect speaking directly to the camera.
“Hi, my name is Anon,” he says in the clip, using a name that 4chan and 8chan users often call themselves. “I think the Holocaust never happened.” He also goes on to spout anti-Semitic and white nationalist conspiracy theories, for example blaming feminism for “declining birth rates in the West.” The video have also been widely shared on other far-right forums online.
While some far-right commentators on places like 4chan mocked the gunman for his “low score” — which extremists use to talk about the number of people killed in an individual attack — others defended him. One far-right Telegram channel even used the attack as a teachable moment to remind subscribers about how they should select targets and test security ahead of time.
The far-right Telegram chatter surrounding the synagogue attack — such as wondering if the gunman was one of their own — was reminiscent of the way that ISIS channels parse details of apparent jihadi attacks to decide whether they should claim responsibility. ISIS has long relied on the encrypted app to orchestrate attacks and recruit new members from around the world. The burgeoning far-right and white nationalist Telegram community appear to be taking a page from the ISIS playbook.
The white nationalist who opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, live-streamed his attack on Facebook and shared a link to his manifesto on 8chan. The manifesto was full of references to far-right memes and ideas that transcended borders, acting as the glue to an increasingly global far right: The document was named “The Great Replacement,” which is a popular far-right conspiracy theory and the inspiration for the “You will not replace us” chant that was heard during the violent Charlottesville rally in August 2017.
Last month, the Soufan Center, a global security research organization, published a report looking at the transnational connections between far-right extremists — and found that Ukraine had become a “hub” for white supremacists. According to the report, at least 17,000 people from 50 countries have traveled to Ukraine since 2014 to fight there, often alongside a neo-Nazi-aligned regiment, and many of those fighters have since returned home with new paramilitary skills.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwk9a/how-the-germany-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-follows-the-far-right-playbook
The document was in English, not his native tongue, in an apparent goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
By Tess Owen
Oct 10 2019, 1:00pm
A so-called manifesto apparently linked to the German synagogue shooter started circulating on far-right social media Wednesday evening, hours after he’d killed two people in an attempted attack on Jewish worshippers observing Yom Kippur in Halle.
The 11-page document echoes those of the El Paso and other recent shooters. And like parts of the gunman's live-stream of the attack, the document was in English, not his native tongue, in an apparent goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
The man has been identified by German authorities as 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, who led a reclusive life and lived alone with his mother, according to Der Spiegel. He drove 45 minutes from his home to Halle and went up to the synagogue door as services were underway inside with about 75 people. But when he was unable to break down the door, he left and ultimately ended up killing a woman in the street, and later, a man working in a nearby kebab shop.
It’s not clear when he posted the manifesto, but it laid out three objectives: providing the “viability” of improvised weapons, inspiring others by spreading the footage of the attack, and killing as “many anti-whites as possible.”
The document puts the gunman within a growing recent tradition of violent far-right extremists around the world, who seek to inspire future attacks by adding to a library of manifestos or footage of past attacks.
The Norweigian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011 wrote a 1,518-page document that has since been cited as an inspiration by other far-right terrorists. That document also contained advice on how to prepare for an attack and select targets. The Australian white nationalist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March published an 87-page screed before his deadly attack titled “The Great Replacement,” which is the same name as a white nationalist conspiracy theory. The Californian who opened fire on a synagogue in Poway, killing one, also published a manifesto online — as did the man who.killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August.
The German synagogue shooter’s manifesto devotes nine pages to laying out his plan of attack, including images and details about the types of weapons he’d planned to use, such as a homemade submachine gun and other improvised firearms (as well as a sword and hand grenades). Similarly, the El Paso shooter in his manifesto had described the type of ammunition and gun he aspired to use in his attack targeting Latinos.
A section in the German shooter’s manifesto titled “Plan” is filled with violently anti-Semitic language, none of which would be out of place on far-right Telegram channels or forums like 4chan. Some of the slurs he uses are direct references to some of those online communities. He also adds that he’d considered attacking a mosque or an an “antifa cultural center” but ultimately chose to drive 45 minutes to a synagogue.
During a press conference Thursday, German Chief Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank referenced the shooter’s**live-stream of the attack, which later appeared on Twitch. In parts of the 30-minute video, the suspect spoke directly to the camera, in English. “Hi, my name is Anon,” he said, using a name that 4chan and 8chan users often call themselves. “I think the Holocaust never happened.” Frank asserted the gunman filmed the attack with the hope of having a global impact and inspiring future attacks. He didn’t say anything about the veracity of the manifesto, but SITE Intelligence, a global security research firm, believes that it’s authentic.
German authorities have labeled Wednesday’s attack as “terror” and are working to determine how the suspect obtained explosives, and whether anyone else knew about his plan. The suspect is currently in hospital and being treated for gunshot wounds to his neck.
The Germany Synagogue Shooter Is Making No Secret of His Far-Right Motivations to Police
Police were treating his murderous rampage as a far-right terrorist attack even before he confessed on Friday.
By Tim Hume
Oct 11 2019, 9:01am
A 27-year-old man has confessed to carrying out an attack near a synagogue in the German city of Halle, saying he was motivated by far-right, anti-Semitic beliefs, federal prosecutors said Friday.
The shooter made the extensive confession during questioning by a judge in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice on Thursday evening. He had made no secret of his motivations, and German authorities were already treating the shooting as a far-right terror attack.
Before launching the attack, which he livestreamed on Twitch, he declared on camera that he blamed Jews for “problems” such as feminism and mass immigration. He then unsuccessfully attempted to storm the synagogue, which was crowded with worshippers observing Yom Kippur.
After detonating an explosive at the gate of the Jewish cemetery, he shot dead a 40-year-old woman passing by, then attacked a nearby Turkish kebab restaurant, killing a 20-year-old man who was eating there. He then shot and injured a couple while on the run, before being arrested by police.
Germany’s federal prosecutor Peter Frank said the assailant had 4 kilograms of explosives in his car, along with a number of homemade weapons, and intended to carry out a massacre in the synagogue. He said that the attacker was explicitly seeking to emulate previous attacks carried out by white nationalists — like the one who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March — and to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.
On Thursday, he was flown in shackles by helicopter to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, where special forces brought him before investigators. Despite having confessed to the crimes, under the German justice system, he will still face trial. He faces two charges of murder and seven of attempted murder.
Holger Stahlknecht, interior minister of the state of Saxony Anhalt, where the attack occurred, said the attacker was not known to intelligence authorities. Police say they are yet to establish whether he belonged to any far-right organization.
The attack is the latest in a high-profile string of far-right crimes in Germany, which have raised concerns about the growth and increasing militancy of the extreme-right. Germany’s interior ministry said there was a 20 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents last year.
In an interview with the Tagesspiegel newspaper Friday, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called for stronger security laws, saying: “We obviously have solidified right-wing extremist networks in Germany that do not shy away from terror and violence. Our country and its liberal constitution are attacked from within.”
The attack has also sparked a debate about the level of security provided to potential targets of extremist attacks. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which represents the country’s 200,000-strong Jewish community, criticized police for not guarding the Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur. But Oliver Malchow, head of Germany's police union, said it would be impossible to guard every potential target.
"We'd have to guard every synagogue, every church, every mosque, every holy place in Germany around the clock,” he said.
In an analysis for the University of Oslo, German far-right researcher Daniel Koehler said the attack represented a number of alarming new firsts in the recent history of anti-Semitic violence in Germany. In particular, the way the attacker used English in his livestream and alleged manifesto — which described his desire “increase the moral [sic] of other suppressed Whites by spreading the combat footage” — suggest he was attempting to appeal to the international white supremacist community.
“He was more interested in reaching a global audience than the German neo-Nazi milieu,” wrote Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.
While it’s not yet known if the attacker has links to right-wing extremist networks, the case appears to demonstrate the decreasing importance of organized far-right political parties, Koehler wrote. Instead, forms of “subcultural mobilization,” like racist online message boards, are playing an increasingly significant role in radicalization.
White Nationalists on Telegram Are Hailing the Germany Synagogue Shooter as a ‘Saint’
The gleeful reaction of white nationalists on Telegram provides yet another example of the international nature of the modern far right.
By Tess Owen
Oct 9 2019, 4:39pm
Far-right extremists on the encrypted messaging app Telegram hailed the gunman who killed two people near a synagogue in Halle, Germany, Thursday as a “saint,” a title reserved for white nationalists who’ve carried out previous attacks.
Telegram users pored over the pictures and video footage starting to trickle in for confirmation that the shooter was, indeed, a white male. “I’m betting on a saint here,” one English-language channel wrote to its 1,300 subscribers. Users celebrated the shooting as a sign of the coming “boogaloo” — a word borrowed from anti-government extremists to refer to an impending civil war.
The gleeful reaction of white nationalists on Telegram provides yet another example of the international nature of the modern far right, who increasingly rely on Telegram and other unregulated online social marketplaces to build alliances around the world and inspire lone-wolf attacks.
And Telegram, specifically, is growing: A recent VICE News analysis of 150 far-right channels found that two-thirds on the platform were created in the first eight months of 2019. The app has provided a safe harbor for extremists who found themselves exiled from mainstream social media and adrift when 8chan was taken offline in June.
The gunman in Germany targeted a synagogue where around 70 to 80 people had gathered to observe Yom Kippur. He recorded the attack using a camera mounted on his helmet, and the footage was later uploaded to the video game platform Twitch. The video, which Twitch removed, shows him trying to shoot down the door of the synagogue. The door held, so he drove instead to a kebab restaurant where he opened fire and killed two people.
Extremists rely on multimedia, like video clips of previous attacks, images from the battlefield in Ukraine, and PDFs of shooters' manifestos, to inspire future attacks — and Telegram allows users to upload unlimited amounts of those types of files.
White nationalists on Telegram quickly cloned the shooter’s Twitch video before it was ultimately removed by the company and it on the platform. They also created GIFs of the most violent moments from the video and shared a clip showing the suspect speaking directly to the camera.
“Hi, my name is Anon,” he says in the clip, using a name that 4chan and 8chan users often call themselves. “I think the Holocaust never happened.” He also goes on to spout anti-Semitic and white nationalist conspiracy theories, for example blaming feminism for “declining birth rates in the West.” The video have also been widely shared on other far-right forums online.
While some far-right commentators on places like 4chan mocked the gunman for his “low score” — which extremists use to talk about the number of people killed in an individual attack — others defended him. One far-right Telegram channel even used the attack as a teachable moment to remind subscribers about how they should select targets and test security ahead of time.
The far-right Telegram chatter surrounding the synagogue attack — such as wondering if the gunman was one of their own — was reminiscent of the way that ISIS channels parse details of apparent jihadi attacks to decide whether they should claim responsibility. ISIS has long relied on the encrypted app to orchestrate attacks and recruit new members from around the world. The burgeoning far-right and white nationalist Telegram community appear to be taking a page from the ISIS playbook.
The white nationalist who opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, live-streamed his attack on Facebook and shared a link to his manifesto on 8chan. The manifesto was full of references to far-right memes and ideas that transcended borders, acting as the glue to an increasingly global far right: The document was named “The Great Replacement,” which is a popular far-right conspiracy theory and the inspiration for the “You will not replace us” chant that was heard during the violent Charlottesville rally in August 2017.
Last month, the Soufan Center, a global security research organization, published a report looking at the transnational connections between far-right extremists — and found that Ukraine had become a “hub” for white supremacists. According to the report, at least 17,000 people from 50 countries have traveled to Ukraine since 2014 to fight there, often alongside a neo-Nazi-aligned regiment, and many of those fighters have since returned home with new paramilitary skills.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwk9a/how-the-germany-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-follows-the-far-right-playbook
