The revelation of the murders committed by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terror group in 2011 heightened public awareness of right-wing violence and extreme right-wing networks. At the same time, however, the public sphere was rife with racist debates about certain groups of the population – whether they “belonged” in Germany and their usefulness to the country. Thilo Sarrazin, a former SPD politician and head of the Bundesbank, invoked an alleged "downfall of the West" in his book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is abolishing itself) with racist, ethnic arguments. The book ended up on the Spiegel bestseller list.

Extreme right-wing ideas were widely disseminated via the internet and social media. The Identitarian Movement used these platforms to propagate the racist and predominantly anti-Semitic conspiracy narrative of the Great Replacement. Right-wing parties celebrated election successes in several European countries. With the Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013, an extreme right-wing party established itself in Germany, becoming the third strongest party in the Bundestag in 2017.

Global political conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria, spurred more people to flee to Europe in the 2010s than in previous years. Parts of the German population welcomed and supported the refugees in the "summer of migration" in 2015, but the number of racist attacks, fires set to refugee centers, and right-wing marches rose sharply at the same time. In Hamburg, a well-known neo-Nazi detonated an explosive device in the immigrant-dominated district of Veddel in December 2017.

Several “Merkel must go” rallies in Hamburg in February 2018 attracted up to 300 people from the middle- and far-right, including organized neo-Nazis, NPD and AfD officials, sympathizers of the Identitarian Movement, fraternity members, Reichsbürger and hooligans. They protested against Chancellor Angela Merkel as the embodiment of the German government's migration policy as well as against refugees and immigrants. Twelve such rallies were held – the last one in November 2018.