October 7 & today · Germany · 2023–present
Nazi inheritance, resentment of Holocaust responsibility and Marxist–Islamist cooperation help explain Germany’s post-October 7 crisis.
Explore GermanyPublished by WTJPublication updated
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Nazi inheritance, resentment of Holocaust responsibility and Marxist–Islamist cooperation help explain Germany’s post-October 7 crisis.
The past does not keep people safe
After the Holocaust, Germany built a public culture of remembrance. Jewish communities rebuilt their lives within it. Remembering the destruction of Jewish life, however, did not guarantee the safety of the people living there now.
After October 7, the monitoring organization RIAS recorded a lasting rise in antisemitic incidents. By 2025, its annual total was more than three times the earlier baseline. The increase reached beyond arguments on a screen: people faced threats and assaults while the country continued to speak publicly about its responsibility to remember.
The Holocaust is turned against living Jews
German antisemitism had turned religious suspicion into racial exclusion and genocide. Postwar remembrance challenged it, but far-right racial conspiracy and Holocaust denial persisted. Another response evaded responsibility by reversing the accusation: Jews, through Israel, were portrayed as the new Nazis. Anti-imperialist hostility could borrow the language of anti-fascism while targeting Jews.
RIAS records a Jewish musician pressed to condemn genocide, then called a child murderer and Jewish Nazi and physically restrained. A political allegation had become a demand that one Jew answer for Israel. The child-murderer accusation revived blood-libel imagery; the Nazi label reversed the history of Jewish persecution. Here the conduct exposes the antisemitism: an individual’s Jewish identity, rather than a government decision, was made the basis for humiliation and coercion.
A shared enemy brings movements together
Berlin authorities describe Hamas supporters and secular PFLP supporters organizing under the VPNK umbrella, alongside cooperation with particular Marxist groups. Their shared hostility to Israel could outweigh incompatible religious and political beliefs. Other sections of the left rejected the agitation. This is a documented red–green connection, rather than an assumption about every protester.
Some religious fundamentalist attitudes in immigrant-origin communities predated October 7, as an older six-country study found. That background cannot measure today’s German population or explain every attack. Meanwhile, RIAS recorded increasing far-right incidents too. The surge arose in a setting where organized cooperation, circulating accusations and independent racial extremists could all intensify hostility towards the same Jewish neighbours.