QANON

In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded.

The mythology and language QAnon uses — from claims of ritual child murder to revenge fantasies against liberal elites — conjure ancient anti-Semitic tropes and putsch fantasies that have long animated Germany’s far-right fringe. Now those groups are seeking to harness the theory’s viral popularity to reach a wider audience.

QAnon is drawing an ideologically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, fringe thinkers and ordinary citizens who say the threat of the pandemic is overstated and government restrictions unwarranted.

“QAnon doesn’t openly fly the colors of fascism, it sells it as secret code,” said Stephan Kramer, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Thuringia. “This gives it an access point to broader German society, where everyone thinks of themselves as immune to Nazism because of history.” “It’s very dangerous,” Mr. Kramer added.

The QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in the United States in 2017, when a pseudonymous online poster claiming to hold the highest U.S. security clearance — Q — began dropping cryptic messages on the message board 4Chan. Global elites were kidnapping children and keeping them in underground prisons to extract a life-prolonging substance from their blood, Q hinted. A “storm” was coming, followed by a “great awakening.”

For historians and far-right extremism experts, QAnon is both a very new and a very old phenomenon. Made in modern America, it has powerful echoes of the European anti-Semitism of centuries past, which was at the root of the worst violence the continent has known.

The idea of a bloodsucking, rootless elite that abuses and even eats children is reminiscent of medieval propaganda about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies, said Miro Dittrich, a far-right extremism expert at the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

“It’s the 21-century version of blood libel,” Mr. Dittrich said. “The idea of a global conspiracy of elites is deeply anti-Semitic. ‘Globalists’ is code for Jews.”

Some QAnon followers are well-known extremists, like Marko Gross, a former police sniper and the leader of a far-right group that hoarded weapons and ammunition.

“Trump is fighting the deep state,” he told The New York Times in June. Merkel is part of the deep state, he said. “The deep state is global.”

QAnon Is Thriving in Germany. The Extreme Right Is Delighted.

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