Thuringia's Antisemitic Incidents Hit a New Record. The Far Right Is the Fastest-Growing Slice of It.

In September 2025, a man on a tram in Erfurt spotted a young man wearing a Star of David necklace. He hit him. Then he followed him to Europaplatz and hit him again. The chain broke and was lost. That single incident sits inside a much bigger number: 418. That's how many antisemitic incidents RIAS Thuringia documented for 2025 — the highest count since the monitoring office opened in 2021, and the fourth consecutive year the record has been broken.

The headline driver is still the aftermath of October 7, 2023: 244 of the 418 incidents were classified as Israel-related antisemitism, itself a new high over 2024's 197. That's the number most outlets will lead with, and it's real. But bury the lede here and you miss the part that should worry an antifascist readership most: incidents attributed to a far-right background rose 10.3 percent to 103 — the single fastest-growing category in the entire report. Post-Shoah antisemitism, the specific strain built around minimizing or reversing blame for the Holocaust, was 71 percent far-right-attributed where a political background could be identified at all. These aren't isolated cranks scrawling on walls. RIAS Thuringia's own framing is that this is a "growing challenge for democratic culture," showing up in schools, football, universities, and — repeatedly — at memorial sites, where attacks on Holocaust remembrance function as a deliberate contest over how Germany is allowed to talk about its own history.

This lands in a state where the AfD is not a fringe protest party but the strongest force in the Landtag, propped into government-adjacent influence by a CDU that keeps promising a firewall and keeps finding reasons the firewall doesn't apply this particular week. When Thuringia's government antisemitism commissioner calls for tougher criminal law in response to these numbers, that's the easy, low-cost answer — it doesn't touch what actually normalized this: a mainstream political culture in the state that has spent a decade treating the AfD's presence in local council chambers, talk shows, and coalition arithmetic as an unfortunate but manageable fact of life, rather than the incubator it is.

None of this excuses the antisemitism that also showed up inside protest movements the report documents — including, notably, hostility toward a RIAS information stand at the anti-AfD protests around the party's federal congress in Erfurt this July. Antisemitism is not the exclusive property of any one political camp, and a left that lets it slide in its own ranks under cover of "criticism of Israel" is failing the same people it claims to defend. But the trend line that should set off alarms in this report is the one moving fastest: right-wing extremism finding new footing, in a state where the party best positioned to benefit from that normalization now polls first.

Sources

RIAS Thueringen press release, Jahresbericht 2025

Thueringer24 / dpa coverage of the 2025 report

Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, 2023 report (297 incidents, up from 243 in 2022)

IDZ Jena, Thueringer Zustaende -- annual monitoring on far-right normalization in Thuringia