ALARM bells are clanging louder and louder in Germany, from the East German state of Saxony to Berlin.

The anti-immigration Pegida movement began by holding rallies every monday in Dresden in 2014 but has since faded with the growth of the more respectable and successful, but equally racist, Alternative for Germany (AfD). With 25 per cent in the polls, the AfD is the second-strongest party in Saxony, with a strong chance of winning next year’s state elections and forming or at least sharing the next government. In fact, it is close to edging out the Social Democrats as second-strongest party in all Germany.
On August 16 these two closely related far-right rivals, Pegida and the AfD, joined together for an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Dresden, Saxony’s capital.

At a Pegida rally six weeks earlier, when a ship full of migrants rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean was desperately seeking a port, the crowd had chanted “Let it sink! Let it sink!”

For the August 16 rally a TV channel sent out a team to film any similar goings-on. An ugly-looking demonstrator with an odd cap in the colours of the German flag ran in front of their camera shouting that they were filming him without his consent, thus breaking the law.

The journalists told him to simply walk away if he didn’t want to be filmed. Instead, after shouting angrily into the camera, he called the police and insisted that they arraign the “law breakers.”
The police obliged and held the news team virtually captive for 45 minutes to “register their identities” and write up the mutual accusations. This effectively blocked their filming — clearly what the man had intended.

The story hit the national media with accusations that the police had worked hand in hand with Pegida to curb freedom of the press.
However the minister-president of Saxony, a right-wing Christian Democrat, defended the police — for “properly doing their duty.” Under pressure he promised to “further investigate” the case.

Then came the crowning revelation: the discovery that the angry protester was himself an employee of the state police authorities — “not on duty but on vacation.” Again, the police and Pegida seemed somehow in cahoots.

Two days later it was Berlin’s turn. Every year nazis, old and new, mark the death in 1987 of Hitler’s deputy fuhrer Rudolf Hess, who famously flew a solo flight to Scotland on May 10 1941 in an unsuccessful attempt to make peace with Britain six weeks prior to the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Hess committed suicide in 1987 while imprisoned for life in West Berlin’s Spandau district. Although the prison itself was torn down years ago to prevent its becoming a shrine, the nazis congregate locally anyway. In 2017, outnumbered by anti-fascists — 2,000 to 800 — they were prevented from marching.

This year they again called for a march, and Berlin’s city-state minister responsible for law and order, a Social Democrat, stated regretfully that he could do nothing to legally prevent them.
So anti-fascists organised a counter-protest, with church groups, political parties, unions and others organising a rally and a blockade of the nazi march. About 2,500 showed up. There were very few nazis — they could hold no rally and the battle seemed won. Church bells knelled in triumph and local political leaders were jubilant.

Then it leaked out that this was the wrong place. The nazis had evidently agreed with the police to forget Spandau and switch their march through a left-leaning area in East Berlin, where the youth are known for being action-ready “Autonomists” who confront fascism with bottles and bricks.

Police units, part of the 2,300 assembled that day, now marched alongside about 700 nazis from their new starting place United Nations Square (in GDR days Lenin Square) along the entire route, protecting them against small, hastily assembled groups of anti-nazis, including a few bottle or stone-throwers of the masked black bloc kind.

Some rules for the march had been handed down: no boots, no uniform, no mention of the name Rudolf Hess. Instead, their big banner at the front quoted him in big letters: “I regret nothing!”
In the meantime the main anti-fascist group in Spandau, off in the city’s western outskirts, was trying to get back into town to stand up properly to the nazis.

But the police first hindered them from reaching the train station and, when many finally did slip through, the police prevented them — and other passengers — from leaving the train stations nearest the nazi march and even stopped a train which would have taken them close to the final nazi rally.

The police could thus boast that, by and large, peace and order had been maintained. The nazis could boast that they had accomplished what they had planned.

As for the city government, a delicate coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and also Die Linke (the Left), they had nothing to boast of; indeed, there were no noticeable statements of any kind.
Peace and order were frighteningly absent the next weekend in Chemnitz, the third-biggest city in Saxony after Leipzig and Dresden. A Saturday evening city festival was ended with murder: a 35 year old man died of knife wounds after a fight.

Two young immigrants were arrested, a Syrian and an Iraqi. The mass news rag Bild quickly spread a story that he was killed while protecting a German woman harassed by the foreigners. The story, a total invention, spread like wildfire on Facebook and other social media; the fact that the victim was an anti-fascist whose father was Cuban and the background of the fatal fight was still unknown was of no importance — the victim was “a German killed by knife-wielding asylum-seekers.”

On Sunday evening a memorial march to the site of his death, with flowers and candles, swiftly turned into a wild chase by 800 fascist types against anyone who looked “foreign,” against those calling for calm, against any and all journalists — considered enemies — and against the pitifully small contingent of police trying to separate opposing groups.

By Monday evening the fascists, with supporters from all over Germany, had rallied a mob of about 7,000 thugs who basically seized and controlled the city centre. The police, although certainly forewarned, had strangely assigned a puny contingent of 600 police with two water cannon, which proved almost totally ineffective.

The mob’s attacks of the previous evening continued against journalists and the courageous crowd of 1,000 to 1,500 who held banners saying: “No to Racism and Violence” or “Chemnitz — Free of Nazis” who were barely protected by the police. There were thankfully few injuries, which was less a result of police separation than the steadfastness of the anti-fascists.

Chemnitz has a varied history. An industrial city specialising in heavy machine tools, it leaned strongly to the left before Hitler took over. It was hit heavily by wartime bombing. In 1953, in the days of the East German Democratic Republic, it was renamed Karl Marx City, with the approval of one sector of the population and the silent disapproval of another. After German unification in 1990 it was renamed Chemnitz with a vote of 76 per cent.

Part of its heritage included a massive bronze bust of Karl Marx, erected in 1971 — 23 feet high and with its granite pedestal 43 feet. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chemnitzers decided to keep this monument, which they fondly nicknamed “nischel” — a slang word like “noggin.” It became a main attraction of the city, with locals even producing chocolate souvenir replicas.

Offers from West Germany and the US to buy it were rejected. Behind it, in large stone letters, are the Communist Manifesto words: “Workers of the world unite” in German, English, French and Russian.

Ironically, on August 27 the anti-immigrant mob surrounded the Marx bust. They did not damage it physically, but films show thugs shouting from the pedestal, with one man raising his arm in the legally forbidden Hitler salute.

The slogans, written or shouted, were in similar vein. The biggest banner said in local dialect: “We wanna be German — and free.”
Many shouted the “We are the people” slogan used by the anti-GDR crowds in 1989, but now directed against foreigners, Merkel, Die Linke, the press — anyone but fascists.

How could this happen? Although unification was 28 years ago, wages in Saxony are almost a quarter lower than in Germany nationally, although hours are on average longer.

Unemployment is 5.1 per cent across Germany — but 7.3 per cent in Chemnitz, with a high proportion of “precarious” jobs. Many here are angry and easily misled, and there are a variety of racist and fascistic groups.

The fascistic AfD, although always disparaged by the other parties, has been given surprisingly generous treatment by most of the media. And although the hard-core fascists attack the AfD as being pro-immigrant, it has actually played up every criminal deed by an immigrant or other “non-German,” often for weeks and months, while hardly mentioning or quickly dismissing countless attacks on people of colour, those who wear Muslim head coverings or display other “non-German” characteristics.

Merkel’s CDU party, despite tutting at mob actions, almost always condemns both “left and right extremists.” Recent years have seen many violent attacks on immigrants in Saxony, but these have been hardly punished.

A number of suspicious connections have been revealed along with indications of collusion between conservative government institutions and fascist gangs — most alarmingly within the Bureau to Defend the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), which is essentially the German FBI: in 2011 evidence emerged of the German authorities' failure to stop a group of neonazi terrorists, the National Socialist Underground, who killed 10 people, robbed 14 banks and planted two nail bombs during 13 years on the run, despite Verfassungsschutz agents infiltrating the group and even being present during the murder of a Turkish migrant by the NSU.

What will happen in states like Saxony if the AfD shares or even heads a state government? Deja vu 1932?

The fascists marched again last Saturday in Chemnitz, but this time a big anti-fascist counter-rally took place. Other major protests are planned for Berlin and Hamburg this month and next.

Part of the widespread response to push back against the growth of the populist hard right was launched yesterday: Aufstehen (“Stand Up)” hopes to create not a new party but a movement, uniting Social Democrats, Greens, Die Linke and others in a combined effort to win successes for the working class: affordable homes and controlled rents, better wages and pensions, taxes on the super-wealthy, stronger unions and peace-centred foreign policy. Inspired by La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Melenchon and Momentum, it aims to speak to those lost to the far right in recent years.

This and the other efforts represent hope for fighting back. Its success could be crucial in all of Europe — indeed in all the world.