On 3 November 2026, police in Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and Bremen searched the homes of twelve men aged between 18 and 36. Dresden prosecutors and the Saxon criminal police (LKA) say the men formed a communist group in Zwickau in 2022, “Kollektiv Zwickau”, part of the national network Rote Jugend Deutschland. Its aim, according to the investigators, was to act against far-right structures across the country. They allege the members agreed over several years to pursue that aim through offences “such as bodily harm and property damage”. That is the language of §129 of the German criminal code: forming a criminal association. Five men were arrested. Four already had warrants against them, and a fifth is accused of attacking an officer during the search. Phones and storage devices were seized as evidence.
Those are the facts as reported by Tagesschau. Notice what the report does not contain: no named incident, no date, no victim, no place. Notice too what the Saxon domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz), quoted in the same report, offers as evidence of the group’s communism: Instagram posts, attending demonstrations and the use of communist symbols. All of these are lawful.
So the honest answer to our reader comes in two parts.
Allegation is not proof, and neither is denial
We do not know whether any of these men committed an assault. Nor does anyone outside the investigation. Socialists should not pretend otherwise, in either direction. Recent history in Saxony includes the Antifa-Ost case, where a court in Dresden convicted defendants of real and serious attacks. It also includes a long record of §129 and its sister paragraph §129a being used as what German lawyers have long called Ausforschungsparagraphen, investigation paragraphs. Their main use is not to win convictions. It is to justify searches, phone taps and the seizure of a whole milieu’s communications on the strength of a suspected “association”. The case ends in charges, or quietly does not, but the state keeps what it has learned and everyone who was watched gets the message.
Our starting point is therefore simple, and it is the one the labour movement has always claimed for itself: the presumption of innocence, a fair trial, and no punishment for opinions. Defending that is not the same as endorsing everything a group has done. It is defending the conditions under which any of us can organise at all.
We have been here before
The West German left knows this pattern well. In 1972 the SPD-led government of Willy Brandt adopted the Radikalenerlass, the decree that barred “enemies of the constitution” from public employment. The Verfassungsschutz screened millions of job applicants. Inprekorr, the German edition of the Fourth International’s press bulletin, reported in February 1976 that officials questioned neighbours and checked whether candidates had joined demonstrations against the Vietnam War or the Emergency Laws. Its argument was that the danger lay less in the few hundred people actually excluded than in the intimidation of the hundreds of thousands who were not.
The case that best shows how this worked is that of Ernest Mandel, told by the historian John Will for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Early in 1972 the Free University of Berlin selected Mandel, the Belgian Marxist economist, for a chair. On 22 February the Berlin science senator declared him unfit, on the grounds that his membership of the Fourth International made him an avowed enemy of the “free democratic basic order”. Six days later the federal interior minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, had him turned back at Frankfurt airport. When an SPD minister, Peter von Oertzen, pleaded with Genscher to lift the ban, Genscher replied that he knew perfectly well what Mandel had written, and that this was exactly what made him dangerous.
Mandel was accused of nothing but his ideas. The Red Mole said so at the time: the Senate, it reported, “admitted quite openly” that the only grounds were political. The solidarity campaign that followed was impressive. Thousands rallied at the Free University, students occupied the Otto Suhr Institute, and a committee formed that included Ernst Bloch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt and Peter Weiss. Protests came from Noam Chomsky, Joan Robinson and Christopher Hill. And it failed. The ban held until 1978, when a new interior minister softened the policy.
Two lessons from that story matter now.
The first is how Mandel himself fought it. As Will shows, he used the case less to win his own job than to address the whole left and the labour movement. In a message to the congress against political repression at the Free University in April 1972, he said the protest was not about solidarity with one individual or one political current. It was about defending the “elementary, common interests” of all wage-earners in West Germany and in Europe as a whole. He turned a personal ban into an argument about democracy, and used it to push against the fragmentation of the left.
The second is a warning. The pro-Moscow DKP refused to defend Mandel because he criticised the Eastern bloc. Sectarianism in the face of repression helps no one but the state. Kollektiv Zwickau is a Marxist-Leninist group. Many readers of this paper will disagree with its politics. That is no reason to stay silent.
Supporting the arrested
Get them lawyers and money. Legal defence in a §129 case is long and expensive. Rote Hilfe, the left’s solidarity organisation, and the Republican Lawyers’ Association (RAV) have decades of experience in these cases. Funds raised now matter more than statements issued later.
Insist on specifics. The demand to the prosecutors is simple: name the acts. Which assaults? When? Against whom? A charge built from general categories of offence, backed by Instagram posts and attendance at demonstrations, should be challenged in public at every stage.
Support those in custody. Write to them, visit where that is allowed, and organise court attendance so they are not alone in front of the judge. Support their families.
Build the widest possible defence. The campaign against the Berufsverbote won what it did because it reached beyond the far left: to trade unions, churches, liberal lawyers, civil-liberties groups such as the Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie, and to observers abroad. MPs can ask formal questions about how many §129 investigations Saxony has opened against the left, and how many ended in convictions. Journalists can be asked why intelligence-agency descriptions of lawful activity appear in reports of criminal raids.
Keep it going. The Mandel campaign was everywhere in the first half of 1972 and had lost its momentum within a year. Repression works on the state’s timetable, not ours. Plan for a case that will run for years.
Protecting ourselves
Say nothing to the police. The old rule of the German left, Anna und Arthur halten’s Maul (”Anna and Arthur keep their mouths shut”), still holds. No statements without a lawyer, including as a “witness”, which is often how statements are obtained from people who think they have nothing to hide.
Know what to do in a search. Ask to see the warrant. Call a lawyer at once; keep a number to hand. Do not obstruct the officers, but do not help them either. Note what they take. Afterwards, write down what happened and contact a solidarity group.
Think about what your phone says about you. §129 cases are built largely from seized devices. Full-device encryption, a strong passcode, disappearing messages and keeping fewer records about members are ordinary precautions for any organisation that the state watches. Above all, do your political arguing in person, not in group chats that a prosecutor may later read as evidence of an “agreement”. None of this is about hiding crimes. It is about not handing the state a map of your movement.
Organise in the open. The best protection is a base. A group rooted in workplaces, unions, tenants’ associations and campuses, accountable to the people it works with, is far harder to present as a conspiracy than a small circle that lives on social media. That was Mandel’s point in 1972 and it is ours now.
Reject the shortcut of small-group violence. The Marxist tradition RedMole.org comes from has always opposed individual violence and substitutionism: a small group acting in place of a movement that does not yet exist. That is not squeamishness about fighting the far right. Mass, organised, public anti-fascism works. Night-time actions by a handful of people isolate the left and give the state the pretext it is looking for. We say this whatever turns out to be true in Zwickau.
The bigger picture
The Zwickau raids did not come out of nowhere. In January the federal interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, promised a tougher course against “left extremism”. The far right is stronger in Saxony and Thuringia than anywhere in Germany. In that setting, a state that pursues anti-fascists with association laws while the AfD sits in parliament sends a clear message about whom it regards as the main enemy.
In 1976 Inprekorr warned that the tools a social-liberal government was building, such as the new §88a and the screening machinery, could later be used by a far harsher one. That warning has worn well. The powers we fail to contest today will be inherited by whoever governs next. Defending the people arrested in Zwickau, on the basis of a fair trial and no punishment for opinions, is part of defending everyone’s right to organise against the far right.
Further reading from the Red Mole archives
Clarissa Howard, “Ernest Mandel Barred from West Germany”, The Red Mole no. 38, 13 March 1972 (continued here). A report written in the first weeks of the campaign. It covers the 2,000-strong teach-in in Berlin, a spontaneous march on the house of one of the senators responsible, and the condemnation by the SPD’s Young Socialists. Frankfurt, Bremen and Konstanz universities all offered Mandel teaching posts. The report quotes extensively from Mandel’s eight-point open letter to the Senate. In it he argues that the Senate’s definition of “unconstitutional” would condemn Marx, Engels, Bebel, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and that a whole collective was being “declared guilty without being charged”. He also reminds the SPD that social-democratic organisations were banned as “marxist” under the Third Reich.
Sibylle Plogstedt, “Armed Resistance in West Germany: the Red Army Fraction”, The Red Mole no. 51, 8 September 1972. Plogstedt was one of the coordinators of the Mandel campaign. This is her review of the pamphlet Armed Resistance in West Germany, published by the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee. She argues that the German state used the RAF’s actions as a pretext to test its military-police apparatus, but she does not romanticise the RAF. In her view its armed actions were “not the product of the real development of the class struggle”, and its “armed revolutionaries of the first hour” stayed “in complete isolation till their ‘last hour’”. That is the case against substitutionism, made from inside the movement fifty years ago.
Sources in German
John Will, “Ernest Mandel in der Berufsverbotspraxis. Auf eine Nichtberufung folgt das Einreiseverbot”, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 12 January 2022: https://www.rosalux.de/news/id/45662/ernest-mandel-in-der-berufsverbotspraxis (reprinted in die internationale 2/2022).
“Bundesweite Razzia gegen mutmaßliche Linksextremisten”, tagesschau.de, 3 November 2026: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/razzia-linksextremismus-100.html
Anna Armand, “Hexenjagd in der BRD”, Inprekorr no. 51, 13 February 1976 (on the Radikalenerlass).
Werner Hülsberg, “Das Dilemma der SPD”, Inprekorr no. 68, 28 October 1976 (on §88a and the Berufsverbote).