Germany's Idiot Soccer Hooligans Are Teaming Up With Germany's Idiot Neo-Nazis

What happened on Sunday in Cologne surprised a lot of people, not least the police, 44 of whom were injured when a demonstration consisting of soccer hooligans and neo-Nazis turned violent. The police were prepared for violence—when demonstrating, hooligans and neo-Nazis tend to lean more toward riot than, say, hunger strike—but they weren't really prepared for the number of demonstrators: nearly 5,000 showed up to drink and protest outside the Cologne Cathedral.

The demonstrators in question call themselves Hooligans against Salafists. (Salafism is an Islamic sect that believes in a literal and traditionalist interpretation of Islam's sacred texts.) The stance of the demonstrators is broadly anti-Muslim, and they've been around, mostly in the darker corners of Facebook, since early this year.

"At first when I read about it I considered it a joke," Richard Gebhardt, a German political scientist who focuses on right-wing extremism in soccer, told me by phone. "I never thought I'd have to take this kind of movement seriously."

Part of the problem for Gebhardt and other observers of fan culture and extremism in German sports was that prior to Sunday, neo-Nazis and hooligans had never really teamed up before. German hooligans have always had a right-wing streak, and some of Germany's most prominent neo-Nazis, like "SS" Siggi Borchardt, are also soccer fans. But the hooligan scene, since its heyday in the 1980s, has been professedly anti-political.

"They always had this idea that football and politics were separate. 'Don't talk to us about politics. We don't want to know about the NPD or anything like that.'" explained Gebhardt. "This was always considered a kind of Lebenslüge [a sustained delusion] that football is football and politik is politik."

On Sunday, not only were hooligans openly milling with neo-Nazis at a political event, but rival groups that normally meet before matches in fields outside of town to fight were united under a single umbrella. Schalke and Dortmund supporters weren't breaking bottles and trying to stab each other, they were drinking together, and then throwing those bottles at the police.

So why the sudden alliance? There are a number of factors. For years, hooligans have wanted a larger influence in German soccer's fan scene. Prominent in stadiums around Europe in the 80s and early 90s, they've been on the wane as the game has modernized and become more valuable as a global enterprise. Today, teams and leagues strive to create safe places for viewing matches, and they've largely succeeded in making the top tiers of German soccer into family entertainment.

Today, the hardcore fan scene is dominated by ultras. Like hooligans, ultras tend to be anti-police, but that's about the extent of their shared ideology. In general, ultra groups are left-leaning, often explicitly anti-racist and anti-fascist. Bayern Munich's Schickeria are a prime example. The Schickeria recently won an anti-discrimination award for bringing attention to the story of Kurt Landauer, a former club president and Jew who fled Nazi persecution only to return to Bayern and rebuild after the war.

A more specific provocation for Sunday's protest was the "Sharia Police." In September, a group of Muslim men walked the streets of Wuppertal wearing orange traffic vests with the words "Sharia Police" printed on the back. They encouraged people not to drink or gamble, or otherwise break Sharia law. Their presence freaked out Germans nationwide and stoked fears that Germany's large Turkish population was being radicalized.

It's funny how extremism tends to react to extremism, building in a kind of feedback loop. The disparate German hooligan scene is now united with neo-Nazis "against two enemies: their old enemy, the police, and their new enemies, the salafists," said Gebhardt.

When we talked, Gebhardt repeatedly reminded me that the demonstrators in Cologne were a tiny (if dangerous) minority in German soccer. The Bundesliga is a safe place to watch matches, after all. Ticket prices are shockingly low and the league's average attendance is among the best in the world.

The hooligans and the neo-Nazis are using the game as a way to drum up attention. "This is propaganda" said Gebhardt. "They're against more than just Salafists. The main [neo-Nazi] activists who are using the hooligans against Salafists to bring their own agenda into the public discourse are just racists."