German Ministry report shows need for greater action on left wing extremism

The 2025 German Ministry of the Interior Report on the Protection of the Constitution is now available, and the numbers are interesting. The report represents a strong rebuttal to entrenched CVE practitioners in the United States who have continued to insist on minimizing or denying Left Wing Extremism (LWE) and criticizing Trump Administration efforts to address the threat.

As the Center for Security Policy has previously reported, the German Ministry of the Interior’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution has a mandate to surveil and report on ideological threats to the German constitution. Historically, they have held a significantly clearer view on the role and significance of Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) than have U.S. authorities.

In particular, the German Ministry of Interior identifies the threat using accurate ideological terminology and closely tracks statistics on left-wing extremism, whereas U.S. authorities have historically not used LWE as a term and have been ill-equipped to drill down into the ideological divisions within LWE. The U.S has traditionally relied heavily on non-governmental and academic databases for categorizing extremism statistics. Critics have expressed concern over biases in these data sources. The Trump Administration terminated the government’s relationship with the START database at the University of Maryland over what the Department of Homeland Security described as “biased and misleading data practices” related to the categorization of domestic terrorism, for example.

As a result, the German ministry report can help provide some insight into trends on Left Wing Extremism that may otherwise be difficult to come by.

The report is based on a sample of 85,837 politically motivated offenses:

In 2025 the number of criminal offences with a left-wing extremist background rose sharply by 38.9% to 8,133 (2024: 5,857), with the number of violent crimes even increasing by 60.9% to a total of 856 offences (2024: 532). About half of these leftwing extremist violent crimes were categorised as violent crimes against police/security authorities. After a drop in the previous year, this is a strong increase in the number of such violent crimes by 82.4% (425, 2024: 233). The number of criminal offences against right-wing extremists or supposed right-wing extremists rose to 6,027 in 2025 (2024: 3,859, up 56.2%), with the number of violent crimes almost doubling to a total of 528 offences (2024: 280, up 88.6%). The number of violent crimes related to the climate protest movement saw a further significant drop to only 21 offences (2024: 74, down 71.6%).

We can thus see significant increases in LWE crimes documented, as well as significant increases in the commission of violence by individuals with a LWE background. Additionally, the report notes that the total number of Left-Wing Extremists active in Germany increased by 4,200 over the previous year. Among those perceived as willing to use violence (11,600), the vast majority (8,700) are identified as autonomists.

Autonomism differs from traditional Marxism-Leninism by deemphasizing the importance of a “vanguard” communist party that attempts to centrally direct a revolutionary effort to seize control of the government and implement communism. Autonomists favor a decentralized effort that emphasizes driving the state out of territory and spaces that autonomists can occupy to live out their ideology in the real world. Autonomism is closely associated with concepts of “militant antifascism” espoused by Antifa.

The report notes:

Violence-oriented left-wing extremists consider criminal offences and violence to be a legitimate part of their “anti-fascist fight”. To them, this fight is the only effective means against anyone they themselves have identified as “fascist”. Their militant activities include doxing, threats, damage to or destruction of property, arson attacks on vehicles or meeting places, and even physical violence. They not only target actual right-wing extremists but also any person or institution considered to be “fascist” according to their world view. Even the most severe attacks on people are seen as a legitimate and necessary means.

The report notes with concern the role of the Kurdish PKK, which is heavily networked in the German scene, and warns about the return home of internationalist left-wing extremists who have gained combat experience in Syria. In the U.S., Antifa member Daniel Baker, who was known to have served with PKK-linked YPG in Syria, was convicted of issuing threats against police and Trump supporters in 2021. The report also highlights collaboration across national borders, including with active LWE scenes in France, Italy and Greece.

It also examines the role played by targeting critical infrastructure, and the tactical use of arson by Left Wing Extremists, including the activities of Vulkangruppe, an anarchist group which has repeatedly targeted the German electrical infrastructure citing both environmentalist and anti-fascist motivations. Regarding the prospect for future attacks against infrastructure and against corporate targets, the report concludes, “almost every larger company is under the abstract threat of becoming a target of leftwing extremist criminal offences.”

In contrast, U.S. studies by major think tanks have excluded both corporate targets and especially the use of arson when categorizing left-wing extremism, despite the fact that felony arson is a terrorism predicate crime under U.S. federal law.

While the German Ministry of the Interior’s surveillance and understanding of LWE is in some cases superior to that of the U.S, where the German approach has perhaps fallen short is in the disinclination to name and ban specific left wing extremist organizations and parties, and specifically Antifa. In contrast the German government’s liberal use of this power against perceived RWE actors has been criticized by U.S. government officials as bordering on censorship.

Former President of the Federal Office of the Protection of the Constitution Hans Maaßen noted that “The claim, repeatedly made by the political left and from the Antifa environment, that this is not possible because there is no associative structure, is a mere protective assertion [Schutzbehauptung] intended to prevent a ban.”

The U.S. State Department designated the Germany-based Antifa Ost (Hammerbande) group as a terrorist organization in November of last year.

While in theory it should be possible to examine LWE without occasion to draw explicit comparisons to Right Wing Extremism (RWE), in practice the media and most CVE practitioners insist on doing so.

Here, the German report is slightly less helpful, in part due to the categorization of certain German offenses. The report notes that in total numbers Right Wing Extremism motivated crimes make up a substantial majority of the total, “In 2025 the number of criminal offences with a right-wing extremist background remained at a high level; 36,951 such offences were recorded (2024:37,835, down 2.3%), including 1,395 violent crimes (2024: 1,281, up 8.9%).”

Of these, however, the lion’s share of offenses (62.6% or 23,122) were labeled as “propaganda offenses” under German law, while 4% were violent offenses. While the specific statutes aren’t cited, it’s likely that these propaganda offenses would include First Amendment-protected speech in a U.S. context. The report does distinguish between “propaganda offenses” and “incitement to hatred and violence” (which might be viewed analogously to U.S. hate crime or civil rights law).

In contrast, we are not given a specific citation for how many of the LWE cases would fall under the rubric of “propaganda offenses”, at least in the available English-language summary. While we cannot be certain from this that none of the total 8,133 LWE offenses were propaganda offenses, it seems reasonable to conclude that the number of propaganda offenses, if any, were considered insignificant enough to be unworthy of mention. The report does note that the vast majority of LWE offenses were aimed at either perceived right wing extremists or police, and that violent offenses make up roughly 10.5% of the total offenses, more than double the percentage of RWE violent offenses.

After excluding propaganda offenses from the RWE category, we have 13,929 RWE offenses and 8,133 LWE offenses. This is unsurprising considering that the German Ministry of Interior records more than 16,000 extremists of RWE background than LWE background.

While a direct comparison is difficult, one can see that when an adjustment is made to exclude offenses which may not be offenses at all under U.S. law, the notion –popularly argued by some U.S. CVE practitioners– that RWE dwarfs LWE to the point that significant law enforcement attention of LWE is unjustified becomes impossible to sustain.

In conclusion, while only operating from an available English-language summary, we can see that the 2025 German Ministry of Interior report provides useful resources for understanding the threat of LWE and clearly dispels media claims that U.S. allies are not highly concerned about the rise in left-wing extremist activity.