A German left-wing politician decided to go public about receiving two death threats from neo-Nazis, revealing the threat of a growing neo-Nazi presence in the country. Uli Groetsch, secretary-general of the Social Democrats (SPD) in the southern state of Bavaria, said in a Facebook video that he had decided to speak out after receiving two in a short space of time. "Dear neo-Nazis, dear right-wing terrorists, today you sent me a second death threat in eight weeks, today it was actually more of a call to murder: Kill Uli Groetsch! A shot in the back of the neck, like Luebcke!," Groetsch said in the video.
Walter Lübcke, of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, was shot dead in the early hours of June 2 on the terrace of his home near Kassel, 160 kilometers northeast of Frankfurt. A neo-Nazi's arrest in the Kassel politician's murder case has fueled debates in Germany on whether the country has failed to take the rising threat from neo-Nazi terrorism seriously. The murder marks post-war Germany's first killing of a politician by a far-right perpetrator.
The manner of the killing, a close-range shot to the head, resembled a series of killings by the only neo-Nazi terrorist group, the National Socialist Underground (NSU). The central German city of Kassel was the location of a notorious NSU murder in 2006. The far-right terrorists killed eight Turkish immigrants, one Greek citizen and a German police officer between 2000 and 2007, but the murders have long remained unresolved. Facing growing far-right extremism, Germany has been shaken by more than 100 bomb and death threats sent by neo-Nazi groups to lawyers, politicians and institutions earlier this year. In addition, far-right groups have drawn up several "enemy lists" containing names and addresses of more than 25,000 people, a parliamentary inquiry revealed in July 2018.