Making Hate Pay
In Fulda, a city in central Germany, neo-Nazis were marching through the streets—and inadvertently raising money for the refugees they despised. That’s not satire. It’s the operating mechanism of one of the more quietly satisfying protest concepts to come out of the German counter-right scene.
The idea, developed by activist groups operating under names like Rechts gegen Rechts (Right Against Right), Hass hilft (Hate Helps), and Hetzen für Flüchtlinge (roughly: Heckling for Refugees), is almost insultingly elegant. For every far-right demonstrator who shows up to a march, pledged sponsors donate a fixed amount to local refugee support organizations. The Nazis provide the headcount. The donors provide the money. In Fulda, the proceeds went to Welcome in Wohnzimmer, an initiative supporting people who’d fled to the region.
The organizers framed it bluntly: under the guise of free speech, racists spread their fascist ideology largely undisturbed—the very freedom of expression they’d gladly deny their opponents and civil society.
So rather than fighting the marches through legal channels—complicated, frequently counterproductive, and useful to the far right as martyrdom material—the campaign inverts the economics. Every step a neo-Nazi takes becomes a financial contribution to the people he hates most. The hatred is converted, automatically, into something useful to someone else.
Whether this changes anyone’s ideology is a separate question, and probably beside the point. The march is an expression of something already formed, not its cause. What Hetzen für Flüchtlinge refuses to do is treat the event as a confrontation to be won or lost on the far right’s terms. Instead it treats the march as raw energy—morally neutral, redirectable. There’s a judo quality to it that I find hard not to admire.
The image alone is worth something: neo-Nazis marching in formation through a German market town, each one incrementally funding the people they despise. It made a lot of people smile in August 2017. It also raised actual money, which is more than most protest aesthetics manage.