“The attack on the doner shop is just the beginning. We will be back”. These threatening words were written in a letter by strangers bearing the Nazi swastika, after a Molotov cocktail was thrown that led to a fire at Hanover’s Ayasofya mosque in late July.

“Continue your work in peace, and the day will not be long when we will do to you what we did to the Jews,” read another threatening letter to the Ditib Islamic community in the town of Bramsche, near Osnabrück, Lower Saxony. Similar threatening letters with far-right, racist and intolerant content have been received by many mosques, Muslim communities and Christian minorities in Germany in recent years.

Some of them even bear the signature “NSU.2”. A clear reference to the neo-Nazi terrorist organization NSU (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund) which acted criminally in the period 2000-2007 and had previously carried out a series of murders of Turkish immigrants and a Greek, Theodoros Voulgaridis in Munich.

Criminal targeting of citizens of another religion

The German authorities have not yet identified who or who are behind the writing and sending of the controversial letters that have been increasing lately. However, they are said to have been drawn up by a specific person, a woman in fact. However, the police proceed with caution in the investigations, because it is possible that the real culprits are bluffing and want to target a specific person, disorienting the authorities. The investigations are currently being conducted on cases of hate speech and incitement to hatred, threats and insults as well as the use of Nazi symbols, which are constitutionally prohibited.

According to data from the Ministry of the Interior of Lower Saxony, there have been at least 30 cases of similar threats bearing the NSU 2.0 signature accompanied by Nazi symbols throughout Germany in recent years.

“Threats to people living in Germany will not be tolerated, especially when they concern their faith,” a spokeswoman for the German Interior Ministry, Nancy Feser, said this morning, speaking to German radio station DLF.

However, the fact is that the Muslim world living in Germany is worried, the heads of mosques and Islamic communities have been on the alert for a long time, while the Evangelical Church, specifically in Hanover, strongly condemned the recent attack on the city’s mosque.