"Child murderers!" a group of right-wing protesters shout at Armin, an artist from the small German town of Kandel. Armin had left a sign for the thousands of demonstrators who descended on his town on Saturday: "Piss off."
"They are exploiting a local tragedy for their own ends," one of his neighbors says. "We just want to live peacefully together."
The tragedy she's referring to is the death of 15-year-old Mia V., who was stabbed to death in front of a local drugstore by her ex-boyfriend, an Afghan refugee, on December 27. After her death, it emerged that she and her parents had gone to the police multiple times to report the youth's aggressive behavior.
Since then, the case has taken on a life of its own — striking a nerve around the country as Germans become increasingly polarized in their attitudes toward migration.
Competing demonstrations
The case is how this wealthy town of only 8,000 inhabitants found itself at the center of four competing demonstrations on Saturday. Thousands of protesters representing dozens of groups — from the far-left antifa (anti-fascists) and the youth wing of the Greens to the neo-Nazi NPD and the far-right Reichsbürger movement — filled the tight medieval streets.
"We are protecting ourselves and our children from migrants," says a member of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who came all the way from Heidelberg. "The politicians have failed us. I don't feel safe letting my 16-year-old daughter go out on her own at night."
"You turned our children into sheep then invited in the wolves," charged these demonstrators
She is one of the many women — far more than one usually sees an at AfD convention or a far-right rally — who've come to protest.
Around her is a dense crowd carrying German flags and banners reading "You turned our children into sheep then invited in the wolves." After a speech from the AfD state lawmaker Christina Baum, the audience begins to chant "Resist! Resist!"
It was the AfD, together with a "women's rights" group called Kandel ist überall, (Kandel is everywhere) that called the original demonstration, calling on supporters from all over Germany to join in the march — and come they did, from Bavaria, from Dresden, from Berlin.
Read also: Dueling protests after teen allegedly murdered by refugee
'We don't want to have anything to do with it'
"They're all strangers," a member of the town's Wir sind Kandel (We are Kandel) group tells me. "We don't want to have anything to do with it. What a scandal, making that girl's parents see her death used in this way."
An "anti-fascist action" flag carried by left-wing demonstrators
But the town of Kandel has been hijacked by both sides, which are kept apart by a heavy police presence. Playing folk music and carrying rainbow banners, a group of counterdemonstrators has arrived to "show those racists some resistance. Germany has to be more careful than most about creeping fascism."
Antifa demonstrators, faces covered, bring up the rear, chanting "Nazis out! Together against racism!"
Read also: Violence against refugees in Germany drops dramatically
Kandel has become a microcosm of Germany's internal divisions. But, although the demonstrations were ostensibly called in her name, Mia V. is hardly mentioned, and her parents have likely already moved away. That the townspeople want to be left in peace, that they've been threatened, that the mayor has received death threats: these don't seem to even register to the protesters, who have found a convenient place to set up their soapboxes.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II." Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland, again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam