Talking about the eggs on the window panes Thomas Mueller almost casually. There is no fear in his voice, not even anger, rather serenity. "I can understand the exasperation," he says. "It's the same with us politicians, isn't it?." And some, as Muller describes it, throw their exasperation against the windows of the town hall in Hildburghausen, in southern Thuringia.
But it did not stop at eggs. The opponents of the Corona measures threatened him, the district administrator Muller, also with Murder. "Muller, you stupid pig. Take a rope and hang yourself away!", wrote one person on Facebook. Another offered to help.
Incitement and violence: dangerous Corona deniers
Since the beginning of the Pandemic politics fights against increasing numbers of infections. But it has another opponent – so-called Corona deniers or Corona skeptics, who often use agitation and sometimes violence to oppose government measures.
And even now, after the heated debate on the "Easter Lockdown", arm the opponents of this policy massively. Research by our editors on Telegram, a messenger service that is very important for the scene, shows that some people are ranting against the "criminal chancellor": Some rail against the "criminal chancellor", others call for a "popular uprising". Still others become sharper in tone, incite against "Politjuden", smell "the Germans in a Corona concentration camp" by the new lockdown resolutions.
Karl Lauterbach attacked in the open street
SPD expert Karl Lauterbach, who keeps calling for tougher measures in the pandemic, says he has already been attacked in the street and had to call for help. Thuringia's prime minister Bodo Ramelow reports of a grave candle that perpetrators had placed in front of his home.
With Spahn and Lauterbach already in the autumn of the Personal security intensifies. On the front lines of the pandemic, however, it is often the mayors and district councils who fight. Like Thomas Muller. You have to enforce the lockdown on the ground. The opponents of politics often live next door.
Corona: Wave of hate on Facebook and Twitter
Last November it happened again. The second wave of the pandemic rolls on. Governments are tightening measures. But in Muller's region of Hildburghausen, a Corona hotspot with explosive infection rates, residents take to the streets, supporters of the protest travel specially. Many without masks, many do not keep their distance, according to police.
District Administrator Muller criticizes the demonstrators, accuses them of endangering themselves and other people by gathering in the streets. Shortly after the remarks, a wave of agitation begins, especially on Facebook and Twitter.
Three so-called hazard assessments have Federal Criminal Police Office previously written in the context of the Corona pandemic. Investigators locate the perpetrators primarily in the "right-wing spectrum". They come from a "mixed scene" of right-wing extremists, so-called Reich citizens, conspiracy mystics, anti-vaccinationists and esotericists.
Threatening calls on the landline
For Derya Turk-Nachbaur the calls at home are the worst. "I am kindly reporting. And then a male voice insults me: 'You traitor, we'll get you.' And hangs up."She forbids her children to answer the phone, but that doesn't always work," she says. Derya Turk-Nachbaur is an SPD politician in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg. She says she's good for three enemies at the moment. As a woman, as a child of Turkish immigrants, as a "Karl Lauterbach fan," as she herself says, and thus as an advocate of strict Corona measures.
Turk-Nachbaur wants to join the Bundestag, for it she makes election campaign, also sometimes provocatively. She calls for a hard lockdown in the pandemic, lots of tests, rapid vaccination. When the debate about the use of the vaccine of Astrazeneca boiled up, she wrote on her Twitter profile, "Smoking, swallowing the pill every day, eating ready-made lasagna, buying chicken wings for 1.99 euros a kilo, but turning up your nose at Astrazeneca because you don't know what you're feeding your body. Jo, is' clear."
Threats from right and left
Turk-Nachbaur says today that she was angry at the time. Vaccine, they say, is "such an important achievement" – and the SPD politician experience a debate in which people resist "tooth and nail" against. Hence her tweet. Shortly after, she has to deactivate her Twitter account because "hate mail is coming in by the hour," as she recounts. Users threaten her. "This H*** would be the first thing I would hang," writes one. "Left-wing crime pack," another. Not everything had come from the right. "There were also threats with a clear left-wing political background," Turk-Nachbaur said.
Derya Turk-Nachbaur has four Children. Two are already adults. They tell her, "Mom, go ahead, don't be intimidated!" Two children are still young, nine and six years old. "They don't get it. For her, I'm the mom who takes her to school and cooks for her in the evenings." Who is supposed to protect her children.