On a cold and windy Monday at the end of April in the eastern German city of Chemnitz, 15 members of the far-right group “Pro-Chemnitz” organized a rally in defiance against coronavirus lockdown measures. Allowed to stand in pre-drawn spaces, six feet apart on all sides, and cordoned off by police, they stood around a 40-ton, 42-foot-tall bust of Karl Marx and likened the social distancing measures to totalitarianism. 

The gathering coincided with Hitler’s birthday — a significance lost on no one in a city where, two years ago, more than 6,000 neo-Nazis flooded the streets for a week of rioting. Just outside the police cordon, some 300 people gathered in support. The demonstration had all the main characteristics of the contemporary European far-right, focusing on anti-immigrant sentiment and distrust of the state. One placard bore racist caricatures and the slogan, “Freedom of movement for asylum seekers and harvest workers, prison and fines for me and my relatives?” 

But also visible was something more common at pro-Trump rallies in the United States than at European protests. One man’s mask bore a red letter “Q” — a symbol of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Beneath it, he chanted “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), a slogan that has become the rallying cry for racist nationalists in Germany. 

Germany’s response to the coronavirus crisis has, so far, been the most successful in Europe. The country has reported by far the lowest mortality rate per capita within the EU and has been able to widely and safely reopen. But the Covid-19 crisis has also led to a spike in interest within the country. Even as the country has begun to return to normalcy, the effects of the disinformation are persistent.