At least 10 fake Jewish organizations with ties to Germany’s far-right Reichsbürger movement were discovered to have been operating as legally sanctioned non-profit charitable organizations, according to a Saturday report from the German state-owned DW News.
In an article from May of this year, DW described the Reichsbürger movement as an extremist movement that denies the existence of modern Germany, instead insisting that the German Empire, founded in 1871, along with Germany’s pre-World War II borders, are still extant.
The term “Reichsbürger” translates to “citizen of the Reich.”
Reichsbürgers openly state their opposition to the German state and, according to DW, are, on average, over 50 years of age and hold populist, right-wing, antisemitic, and Nazi ideologies.
DW reported the broadcaster ARD first broke the story in an interview with Reichsbürger-connected conman Iwan Götz.
A fake “chief rabbi”
Götz, 75, claims the title of “chief rabbi” and is responsible for multiple of the fraudulent Jewish organizations. The Reichsbürger also claims to have converted to Judaism while in Russia decades ago.
Das Erste, the primary television channel of ARD, reported earlier this month that Götz, who claims to represent “true Judaism,” has been convicted of sedition on several occasions.
According to the German broadcaster, the Reichsbürger says that, without him, there would only be Zionists in Germany.
He also engages in Holocaust revisionism, saying that while “Germans did a small part of it, Hitler was financed by Jews.”
A number of the fake Jewish organizations have since disbanded, but those that remain may prove difficult for legitimate Jewish groups to oppose.
A spokesperson for Germany’s interior ministry told DW that Germany today “does not regulate whether and under what conditions an association may or may not describe itself as belonging to a religious or ideological confession.”
Hence, organizations posing as Jewish, even if for pernicious reasons can be difficult to dismantle, and it remains unclear what legal avenues there may be for doing so.
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