Neo-Nazi Tweens? Inside Germany’s Growing Far-Right Youth Movement
They train in the woods and strike at night against migrant and LGBTQ targets.Far-right youth groups are emerging across Germany. Die Zeit tracks a new generation of Neo-Nazis.
World Crunch/April 29, 2025
By Christian Fuchs, Martin Nejezchleba and Christina Schmidt
Berlin — It’s a Friday evening in September 2024, and Julian M and his six friends don’t waste any time. When they spot Raphael K coming out of a supermarket in the Berlin district of Marzahn, and see him wearing a rainbow ribbon on his arm, the group of youths start yelling “faggot,” and ask: “Why don’t you stand with Germany?”
Then one of them punches Raphael in the face, twice in the temple, and forces him to take off his T-shirt with the slogan “Anti-Fascist Action.” Later, the attackers flee the scene laughing, posting a photo of their “trophy” on Instagram.
That’s how Raphael K recounts the events to Die Zeit, which matches exactly with how investigators from the Berlin State Criminal Police reconstructed the attack.
The Berlin youth was targeted by a new neo-Nazi group called “Deutsche Jugend Voran” (DJV), a far-right gang of young people. Their mission: to intimidate political opponents and claim the streets of East Berlin.
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The DJV is led by Julian M., a 24-year-old sporting goods salesman. In early April, he appeared in a glass dock at the Berlin Regional Court. He wore a black shirt, New Balance sneakers, and had his hair slicked back. For this and three other attacks, he was sentenced to three years and three months in prison. The public prosecutor has appealed, so the ruling isn’t yet final.
When asked by the judge if he would distance himself from Nazi ideology and the DJV, he chews his gum and answers: “That’s my private circle of friends.” It’s only natural, he says, that he’ll keep meeting with them and attending far-right demonstrations.
Investigators say Julian M’s circle includes about 50 young men and women in Berlin. They organize in closed WhatsApp groups, attack non-right-wingers with brass knuckles and reinforced gloves, and carry gas pistols.
Neo-Nazi youth cliques like this have sprung up all across Germany in the past three years. The public started noticing the trend last summer. Three then-17-year-olds stand accused of beating Matthias Ecke, an Socialist Party candidate in the European elections in Dresden, so badly while he was putting up posters that he had to be hospitalized.
In Bautzen, Leipzig, and Zwickau, young people dressed in black, some with shaved heads, others in combat boots, tried to disrupt LGBTQ Pride parades.
“Hurrah, hurrah, the Nazis are here!”
Sometimes, up to 700 counter-protesters turned out at the rainbow events. By the end of March, nearly 900 far-right extremists planned to march through Berlin, some masked, some giving the Hitler salute. It was one of the largest neo-Nazi rallies in years, organized by people who until recently weren’t even on the radar of security agencies.
Protesters wore T-shirts with slogans like “I’m tan even without the sun” and “Youth without a migration background,” shouting: “Hurrah, hurrah, the Nazis are here!”
They meet for 50-kilometer marches, box in forest clearings, and take trips to myth-laden German landmarks like the Externsteine and the Kyffhäuser Monument. Their groups go by names like “Young and Strong,” “The Disruptive Squad,” “Defending Mecklenburg,” and “Fire from the North.” These cells are popping up everywhere: according to Die Zeit’s investigation, there are now around 120 of them.
Bomber jackets and combat boots are now seen as cool in some schoolyards.
Enrico, who works for an exit program for right-wing extremists in East Germany, uses a pseudonym. His clients are typically seasoned party officials or tattooed men entrenched in the far-right scene for years. But lately, something has shifted: the people reaching out to him for help are getting younger. Some are even worried parents of 12-year-olds.
And the numbers are rising: by 2024, inquiries nearly doubled from 40 a year to more than 70. Enrico says for some kids, these new groups are “the hot shit.” Bomber jackets and combat boots are now seen as cool in some schoolyards. Part of it, he says, is down to the way these groups present themselves.
When the most active members slap up illegal stickers, tag walls with graffiti, stand around a campfire, or pound a punching bag at the gym, they post slickly edited videos on Instagram and TikTok, often set to pounding electronic beats or rap. The aesthetic is martial, complete with smoke bombs and flaming torches. It draws in young people. Social workers say these young Nazis have become local influencers in certain regions. But what they post online is only half the story.
Alexander Ritzmann of the Counter Extremism Project has been tracking the trend for years. He warns that some of these groups could morph into shadow militias, ready to act on “Day X.” That’s the term they use for the day a right-wing dictator takes power. Their historical model? The Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing. Julian M.’s DJV crew in Berlin is modeled after it too. In October 2024, a DJV member messaged their leader saying he wanted to set up his own “SA-style subgroup.”
The baseball bat years are back
It feels like the return of the baseball bat era, the post-reunification years when neo-Nazis carved out no-go zones, hunted down foreigners, the homeless, and activists, and set migrant housing on fire in places like Mölln, Solingen, and Rostock-Lichtenhagen.
But the security agencies have learned from the past. They’re no longer letting the violence spiral out of control like in the 1990s. Since 2022, Germany’s Counterterrorism Center has been regularly exchanging intel on these groups. State security and several branches of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have had their eyes on these far-right youths since last year. After multiple assaults on leftist politicians and attacks on gay men, police carried out multiple raids in Lower Saxony, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin, and Brandenburg. Some of the young perpetrators are already in custody or behind bars just months after their crimes.
So how did right-wing extremism creep back into youth culture? “You can’t make sense of it without looking at the social upheaval of the past ten years,” says a woman who works in de-radicalization and has met several of these young figures. She asked not to be named.
What stands out is that the youngest neo-Nazis first surfaced in areas where far-right parties Pegida and the AfD gained early traction. Back in 2020, she and her colleagues first encountered 12-year-old neo-Nazis in eastern Saxony. Some come from hard-right families—parents who have voted for the AfD since their children were born. These kids feel encouraged to take their parents’ protests a step further.
Others, however, are pushing back against liberal upbringings. “These are kids searching for identity,” the social worker says. Young men shaped by social isolation during COVID, trying to carve out their own space in small-town public life after lockdown.
Nazis old and new
We joined undercover chat groups called “Jung und Stark,” “Patriotic and Active Germany,” and “Trupp Deutscher Falken” to see what young neo-Nazis like Leon from Bavaria and Timo from Schwerin were saying.
Nazi cliques grow out of friend circles, formed at school, at football matches, sometimes on TikTok or Instagram.
Ideology rarely came up, and when it did, it was often in the form of rants against queer people, feminism, and supposed fears of trans individuals and anti-fascists. These ultra-young Nazi cliques grow out of friend circles, formed at school, at football matches, sometimes on TikTok or Instagram. Once someone shows interest, they’re invited to join private WhatsApp groups.
Even young teens took part in a large far-right protest through Ostkreuz and Friedrichshain, where some openly performed the Hitler salute. Credit: Steffens/DDP/ZUMA
These networks are spread across Germany. They act locally but share slogans, tactics, and symbols. They coordinate through chats and sometimes even meet up. When Julian M. beat up another youth on a Berlin train two months after stealing the Antifa shirt, neo-Nazis from Halle and Saxony joined in. And when the largest far-right protest against a Pride parade gathered in Bautzen last year, activists traveled in from cities all across Germany.
Another pattern stood out in the chats: long-established far-right parties like The Third Way and Homeland (Heimat, formerly called NPD), are now lurking among these youth groups, trying to recruit. On Telegram, if you find “Defend Württemberg,” you’ll be directed to a WhatsApp group. We asked a group administrator what kind of group that was.
The person spoke of a “sense of brotherhood and solidarity” and sent pictures of shirtless boys in combat training. We were then given a membership form for the Young Nationalists, the youth wing of Die Heimat. Die Zeit has identified thirteen such groups tied to the former NPD, which has spent years trying to stop its base from defecting to the AfD. These teens experimenting with right-wing extremist symbols are seen as the movement’s future.
One far-right veteran in southern Germany is keeping tabs on the new scene. Patrick Schröder, deputy leader of Die Heimat in Bavaria, used to run a far-right fashion label and now votes for AfD. He sits in a rock bar in the town of Weiden, and offers a warm greeting. He has short blond hair, a square jaw, and wears a black North Face rain jacket: just like the new generation of Nazis, who are 30 years younger than him.
The national resistance hadn’t been visible for years. but that’s changing.
Schröder watched the old comradeship scene fade. Now he wants to bring it back. His model is borrowed from the U.S., dreamt up by a convicted neo-Nazi: Active Clubs, martial arts cells dressed up as harmless youth groups. More than 20 of them are now active online, from the Western Ore Mountains to the Lower Rhine. No one knows exactly how many people are involved.
“The national resistance hadn’t been visible on the streets in recent years, but that’s changing,” Schröder says. “DJV and others are going full blast.” Still, he scoffs at the new wave, calling them “Division TikTok.”
He says the 1990s skinhead look they copy “looks like crap.” He slams them for boozing and rioting at protests. But he also praises the 1990s scene’s biggest success: setting up cells in almost every small town.
“We want to create our own youth culture over the long term,” says Schröder. And yes, he has already tried to connect with the newcomers. However, the younger Nazis have not yet responded to his request for cooperation.
In collaboration with Paulina Albert and Astrid Geisler.
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