Germany’s far-right terror problem now runs through its teenagers
Recent Hamburg verdict against child members of neo-Nazi cell that firebombed refugee shelters has crystallised a threat authorities openly warn about: radicalisation of children
HAMBURG (MNTV) — Germany is confronting an uncomfortable truth about the far-right violence threatening its Muslim and migrant communities: increasingly, it is being carried out by children.
That reality was underscored this month when a Hamburg court jailed eight members of a far-right terrorist group — some as young as 14 when they joined — for a campaign of arson and bomb attacks on asylum seeker shelters.Â
The case of “Last Defense Wave” (Letzte Verteidigungswelle) has become the starkest illustration yet of a pattern that German security officials, and their counterparts across Europe, now warn is accelerating.
On August 5, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg convicted seven members and one supporter of the group.
The defendants were found guilty of belonging to or supporting a terrorist organisation, alongside charges including attempted murder, arson and aggravated assault.Â
They received sentences ranging from one and a half to five years, and — because all were aged between 14 and 21 at the time of the offences — were tried under Germany’s juvenile criminal law.
Campaign against refugees
The group, prosecutors said, was founded no later than May 2024 and saw itself as the “last resort” for the defence of an ethnically defined German nation.Â
Its purpose was explicitly violent: to attack migrants and political opponents in order to topple Germany’s democratic order.
The attacks it planned and carried out were aimed overwhelmingly at asylum seekers. In January 2024, two members tried to set fire to a shelter for asylum seekers in Schmölln, in the eastern state of Thuringia, using pyrotechnics.Â
In October that year, the group set ablaze a cultural centre in Altdöbern, in Brandenburg. A further planned arson attack in Senftenberg was foiled after a tip-off. Members also daubed “foreigners out” on buildings and engaged in so-called “pedo-hunting,” pursuing people they claimed were paedophiles.
The presiding judge, Ulrike Taeubner, oversaw a trial conducted partly behind closed doors because several of the accused were minors — one just 15 years old, three aged 16.
Children as extremists
What has unsettled Germany most is the age of those involved. When the group was formed, all of its members were underage.Â
The country’s justice minister, Stefanie Hubig, described their earlier arrests as a warning sign, noting that far-right extremist violence can now involve individuals of any age — including children.
The case emerged from a nationwide crackdown. Five teenagers were arrested in May 2025 in raids across Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and Hesse, with more than 220 officers searching 13 properties; three others were already in custody. In June, two further teenagers were detained in Thuringia on suspicion of membership.
A rising threat
The verdict lands amid a documented surge in far-right violence in Germany, where politically motivated crime has climbed sharply and where the country’s own security services now monitor dozens of individuals as right-wing extremists.Â
The concern over youth radicalisation is not confined to Germany: neighbouring Belgium’s counter-terrorism body warned only this month of online networks manipulating vulnerable children and teenagers toward violence, part of a wider European alarm over how quickly the young are being drawn into extremist movements.
For Germany’s Muslims and its migrant and refugee communities, the “Last Defense Wave” case is a stark confirmation of a threat they have long described: that anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, amplified online and increasingly present in mainstream politics, is radicalising a new and younger generation toward violence.Â
The country’s own domestic peace researchers warned this year that entire communities are being placed under blanket suspicion, and that mainstream parties risk normalising the language of the far right.
The eight who stood trial in Hamburg were, in the end, children who set out to burn down the homes of people seeking refuge.Â
That, for many in Germany, is the most frightening part of the story.
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