Right-wing incidents in the city have been on the rise since November 2021. Now the Nazis have struck again.
Offenbach – Hitler with a surfboard and two swastikas. Including anti-Jewish slogans. The sticker is emblazoned in black and white on a municipal garbage can in Waldstrasse, near Martin Luther Park. And there should be more of them in the city area. At least that’s what an anonymous reader of Bürgel’s suggestion suggests. The sticker marks the latest in a series of far-right excesses that have rocked the city in recent weeks and months.
It started with a real wave of swastikas in November last year. At that time, the Nazis smeared the so-called swastika on numerous walls around the main station and also sprayed the asphalt of the surrounding streets with the NS symbol and the runes of the SS.
A week after the next accident: this time a small red car was sprayed with a large blue swastika. At that moment, the police even arrested two suspects. In the following months, graffiti with a right-wing background was repeated, mostly combined with content that denied the coronavirus.
A few weeks ago, strangers smeared street lamps, warning lights and vehicles with swastikas in a DHL Packstation at almost every door. At the end there are 135 swastikas, the words “I have a gun NSU 3.0” and the call to kill aliens. According to the police, the suspect named as the defendant does not come from the Rhine-Main area. And now Hitler’s sticker about 20 x 20 centimeters in size, which, while not in quantity, surpasses pretty much everything that has been seen before in terms of right-wing extremist content.
Henryk Fridmann of the board of the Jewish community states: “Such an accumulation of such serious incidents was previously unthinkable in Offenbach.” There have always been individual graffiti, but they can often be classified as the unsightly work of stupid guys. “But this quality that we have experienced here over the past few months is something new and scary.” It is frightening for the Jews of Offenbach to see that something that seemed impossible in this city in recent decades is suddenly taking place on such a massive scale.
The police headquarters in southeastern Hesse, on the other hand, do not want to confirm Fridmann’s impression and are contemptuous. Spokesman Christopher Leidner says: “For the city of Offenbach, right-wing politically motivated crimes were recorded in the double-digit low-end in 2021.”
Even if it has not been able to provide definitive data on the current year. In essence, “almost the same number of cases occurred as in the January to October 2021 confrontation period. Leidner also says:” Our State Security Commissioner has no evidence of a right-wing scene in Offenbach. “
Sven Malsy, leader of the parliamentary group of the Left Party, is surprised by the alleged ignorance of the police. “There is absolutely no doubt that there is a whole range of the right organized in Offenbach,” he clarifies. Many of these are also well known and would make no secret of their attitude. “Here in Offenbach, we have a growing problem with rights that advance more and more and which apparently are not harassed even by the police.”
From Malsy’s point of view, the reason the police don’t see the obvious isn’t so much that law enforcement is blind in the right eye. “In some places, the police love statistics too much.” In the police station, for example, it is often assumed that the statistics reflect the absolute reality. Malsy clarifies his assessment with an example: if in 2021 three individual swastikas were smeared on three lanterns with an Edding pen and 135 swastikas on a single packing station this year, the police would explain, according to their logic, that the number of right Believes that criminal offenses are on the decline. But this is exactly the situation we have in Offenbach right now ”.
