German city declares "Nazi emergency"

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6. This The Nation article delves into Nazism and similar in Germany

The Neo-Nazi Murder Haunting Germany
The assassination of a local politician is waking up the country to the threat of the radical right.
https://www.thenation.com/article/neo-nazi-germany/

After discussing the above ...

Whatever we eventually learn as the investigation of Ernst proceeds, experts on right-wing extremism have long suspected that the Office of Constitutional Protection isn’t living up to its name. Most notoriously, the office and the country’s other security services failed to stop a series of murders of immigrants from 2000 to 2007 by a terrorist cell called the National Socialist Underground. “There’s been a tendency to underestimate the potential for right-wing terror for a long time,” said Kai Arzheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Mainz who studies right-wing parties.

There has also been a disturbing wave of violence against local officials. There was Henriette Reker, who was seriously wounded in a knife attack during her successful 2015 campaign for mayor of Cologne. There was a small-town mayor in eastern Germany, Markus Nierth, who resigned in 2015 after a neo-Nazi demonstration outside his house. “Papa, I’m afraid of the Nazis,” his young son told him. There was a Social Democratic leader in the town of Bocholt, Thomas Purwin, who stepped down in December 2016 after threats to his family. There was another small-town mayor, Andreas Hollstein, who was stabbed in November 2017 by a man shouting about refugees.

This list could continue: The Association of German Cities says 40 percent of city council members and 20 percent of mayors in Germany reported having received threats. In 2018 more than 1,200 crimes were recorded against local officials.

...

All of this news is bad, but it gets worse, because for the first time since 1945, there is now a strong right-wing party in German politics, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). It has the third-largest caucus in the federal Bundestag and is represented in all 16 state parliaments. And in recent state elections in eastern Germany, it made further inroads. The AfD thus achieved something that its postwar extremist precursors never did: It has brought the far right back into everyday political life.