Germany is a country with a long and complex relationship to authoritarianism. It is also of course the country that gave birth to the most evil political regime, Nazism, in the modern era.

The Allies agreed on the denazification of Germany as a goal after the end of World War II, but the general consensus is that it wasn’t a success. Some high-ranking Nazis were put on trial and sentenced to death, others were removed from public positions, but the majority of Nazis were reintegrated into postwar German society and even landed high-ranking positions.

Now, Germany is again displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. However, Germany’s love affair with authoritarian rule runs deeper than the current surge of the AfD. Its legal and judicial system has become notorious for its restrictions on freedom of speech and its penchant for framing dissent “not as a democratic expression but as a threat to public order.”

The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law.

The Ulm5 trial underway in Stuttgart, and now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.

In the early hours of September 8, 2025, five young pro-Palestinian activists broke into the German branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in Ulm, southern Germany. Once inside, they broke windows and destroyed furniture and technical equipment. They also sprayed slogans on the walls, such as “Free Palestine” and “Germany finances, Israel bombs.” No one was injured in the attack, and the activists not only remained on site but called the police themselves and waited to be arrested.

Since their arrest, the five activists—Daniel Tatlow-Devally (an Irish citizen), Leandra Rollo (a Spanish-Argentinian citizen), Crow Tricks and Zo Hailu (British citizens), and Vi Kovarbasic (a German citizen)—have been held in separate prisons and under highly degrading conditions. They are subjected to solitary confinement conditions lasting 23 hours a day, with just a couple of very short family visits per month. Irish politicians who visited Daniel Tatlow-Devally in prison were shocked by what they witnessed.

The Ulm5 activists are being treated like terrorists; in fact, they are being treated in a similar fashion as were the kidnappers, bank robbers, and murderers of the militant “Red Army Faction” group during their arrest in the 1970s. It is thus no coincidence that the trial of the Ulm5 activists is being held at Stuttgart-Stammheim, the very venue where the terrorist trials of the 1970s were held.

The defense team of Ulm5 has asked repeatedly why the trial is being held at high-security Stuttgart-Stammheim courthouse when the five defendants merely caused property damage without anyone being hurt, but no answer has been provided. Yet the answer is clear. It’s because German authorities treat Palestine solidarity as support for terrorism. In the eyes of current German laws, especially in connection with the long-standing political assertion that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état,” the genocidal party must, by necessity, be protected and those who protest against its crimes must, by extension, be treated as nothing more than criminals or plain terrorists.

Conveniently enough, the Ulm5 pro-Palestinian activists are being charged under Section 129 of the German Criminal Law, which is directed toward ordinary organized crime and criminalizes “whosoever forms an organization, the objectives or activities of which are directed toward the........

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