Protests during the Covid Pandemic
During the covid pandemic between 2020 and 2022, tens of thousands of people protested against the German government’s infection control measures every week. These protesters, calling themselves Querdenker, wove antisemitic resentment and conspiracy narratives about the origin of the virus into their movement.
The protests were largely organized using the messenger service Telegram. Beginning in the spring of 2020, numerous groups were created, through which a flood of false information and antisemitic, conspiracy-laden content was spread.
They denied the pandemic and its dangers, and developed an antisemitic conspiracy narrative, the Great Reset, which claims that Covid-19 is part of a secret plan by ‘powerful elites’ to take over political and economic control worldwide.
It was during this time that some people voiced the claim that the infection control measures were the same as the persecution of Jews under National Socialism and that Germany was a dictatorship.
Many people who had not previously been politically active took part in the protests against the infection control measures, and some became radicalized very quickly. There were attacks on medical facilities and test centers across Germany. People who were identified as ‘representatives’ of the pandemic, such as doctors, politicians, journalists, or even people wearing face masks, were publicly denounced, threatened, and attacked. In Idar-Oberstein (Rhineland-Palatinate), a right-wing pandemic denier murdered the 20-year-old student Alexander W. in September 2021 after he refused to sell him beer because he wasn’t wearing a face mask. In Königs Wusterhausen, Brandenburg, a man murdered his partner and three daughters in the belief that the pandemic was part of a Jewish world conspiracy.
Neo-Nazis and other extreme right-wing groups found willing listeners at the protests. In Hamburg, the AfD, the NPD, and organizers of the racist Merkel-muss-weg (MMW) protests also quickly jumped on the bandwagon. For several weeks in the winter of 2021/22, Hamburg became a hotspot for protests in northern Germany. The ‘Kunsthalle demonstrations’ often attracted more than ten thousand participants on their marches through Hamburg’s city center.
With the end of the pandemic, the well-networked scene turned to other topics: the spreading of Russian propaganda and disinformation since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. Actors in the movement also agitate against refugees and againsz queer and politically left-wing people.
