widthThe hat they set up in Ahrweiler is the best emergency aid, Nikolai N. said, pointing the camera at himself. The mud stuck to his skin, clothes and rubber boots. He and his followers shoveling mud in the flood zone is a “people’s on-demand measure” and has nothing to do with the instrumentalization of “horizontal thinkers” and right-wing conspiracy theorists. But what Nikolai N. hides from the people of Ahrweiler is that he is a right-wing extremist and anti-Semitist video blogger. In December 2019, an activist named “Volkslehrer” was fined for inciting a rebellion-he had previously denied the massacre at the Dachau concentration camp memorial in February. After visiting the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial, he also questioned the number of victims of the Holocaust in a video and described Anne Frank’s diary as a “child’s fantasy product”. He slandered the victims of the Hanau racist attack as criminals, which is why the city of Hanau reported right-wing extremists in February this year.
At the request of FAZ, the police headquarters in Koblenz did not want to comment on this issue. But the authorities are not aware of such activities in crisis areas: according to a tweet from the Koblenz police, right-wing extremists are currently on the road as “ground paramedics”. Once the law is violated and the situation is used for political purposes, it will intervene. In the Telegram group of Nikolai N, who has nearly 35,000 followers, he has never been politically involved: in addition to videos about the cleanup, he recently praised a photo of a man from the scene of right-wing extremism. The print on his T-shirt is obviously related to the imprisonment of the deniers of the Holocaust. Women in the identity movement environment also appeared in the disaster area as modern rubble women and posed on social media in front of the remains after the flood. Like right-wing extremist marches, disaster tourists are arranged in the front row to reduce the impression of belligerence. However, in a comment on such a post on Instagram, a man wrote: “Germany is above all else.”
A man wrote: “Germany is above all else.”
In this flood disaster, the group of “horizontal thinkers” and neo-Nazis has clearly discovered a new topic for itself, which is combined with right-wing extremist ideology and misinformation. Some of them even traveled on their own buses. In the past, coronavirus deniers were driven to demonstrations. The organizers of these bus trips participated in the neo-Nazi party “The III. Weg”, which is abided by the various agencies that protect the constitution at the federal and state levels. Thomas Haldenwang, chairman of the Federal Constitutional Protection Office, recently stated that the COVID-19 protests have decreased. However, some of the protagonists have not disappeared, especially within the scope of “imperial citizens and self-governing”. These refusals to be made in a democratic manner are intended to “permanently shake the trust in state institutions and their representatives.”
Right-wing extremists claimed on social media that the flood disaster was “a deliberate failure of the country.” Merkel drowned the people. According to her remote diagnosis, the “media” was hiding this. Anti-Semitists and Attila Hildeman, who fled to Turkey under the arrest warrant, said that the flood was caused by man: “This is war.” The right-wing assistance operations are inseparable from agitation. “We provide help where the country fails,” said the NPD-related initiative “Youth Seize”. This is also to eliminate one pain and another: Merkel pays for refugees, not for flood victims. The frustration and sadness of the Ahrweiler people standing in the ruins of their own existence are being exploited and politically accused.
