At the beginning of the 1980s, a surge of right-wing extremist violence targeting migrants occured in the Federal Republic of Germany. On August 22, 1980, the “German Action Group,” carried out an arson attack on a building housing asylum-seekers in Hamburg-Billbrook. The group was led by Manfred Roeder, who had loyally served the Nazi regime decades before.
Following the failure of the neo-Nazi German National Party (NPD) to gain entry into the Bundestag in the elections of the late 1960s, several right-wing terrorist organizations formed within the FRG. Many of them had an anti-communist orientation, seeking to undermine communist activity in West Germany and hinder political relations with the GDR. These groups included the “European Liberation Front” and the “German National Liberation Movement” as well as the “People’s Socialist Movement of Germany/Party of Labor” (VSBD/PdA), which became a gathering point for violent neo-Nazis from the mid-1970s onward.
The FRG experienced a surge of right-wing terrorist violence in the 1980s. On August 22, 1980, for example, the “German Action Group,” under the leadership of Manfred Roeder, who had loyally served the Nazi regime decades before, carried out an arson attack on a building housing asylum-seekers in Hamburg-Billbrook. The group consisted of two men 50 years of age and a 24-year-old woman, and the attack fatally injured two Vietnamese – 22-year-old Ngoc Nguyen and 18-year-old Anh Lan Do. Following the attack the city of Hamburg continued to use the shelter, which had sustained only minimal fire damage. The two victims are officially counted as the first victims of right-wing extremist violence in Germany since 1945. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume that there was in fact a larger, unknown number of such victims, as in many prior cases, the true motives for murder were not investigated or revealed due to institutional racism.
The extreme right perpetrated another terrorist attack on September 26, 1980 at Munich’s Oktoberfest. On the event grounds Gundolf Köhler detonated a grenade filled with TNT, packed inside a container filled with nails and screws, and was himself killed in the explosion. 13 others were killed, and over 200 were injured, many severely. Köhler was a member of the extreme right-wing group “Combat Sport Club Hoffman.” Following the attack, it remained unclear whether he planned and carried it out alone or with others.
The activity of extreme right-wing groups in West Germany in the 1980s is a clear reminder that such tendencies did not first emerge in the 1990s with the formation of the right-wind terrorist organization “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) (see also: Revelation of NSU murders, 2011).
