ABSTRACT
Giving an empirical picture of German right-wing terrorism’s characteristics is important in order to understand how this form of political violence manifests itself. This chapter utilizes a reviewed and updated version of the DTG actors dataset’s codes regarding group size, weapons type (tactics), lifetime, target groups and forms of communication. Thereby, it becomes possible for the first time to see how German right-wing terrorism has changed or kept certain core elements over the decades. Foiled and failed attacks have been included in the dataset, as well as plots by identified right-wing extremists. In contrast to the study from Perliger (2012), which included every act of right-wing violence, only actors and incidents classified as ‘terrorist’ according to the outlined definition from Chapter 3 were used for the following analysis. Incidents of terrorist violence with unknown but suspected right-wing perpetrators (e.g., a large amount of the quantitative data from intelligence and police reports) were excluded. Although of course the American and German right-wing extremist movements vastly differ in numerous elements, both provide uniquely detailed empirical accounts of their characteristics, which is why an initial comparison of these two violent Far-Right scenes offers some insights about possible parallels. It is important to note here that the DTG dataset is actor centric and qualitative in nature, while the study used to compare right-wing violence from Perliger (2012) is incident centric and quantitative in nature. Therefore, the comparison does only offer an indication of potential similarities and differences.
