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**How Germany’s Extreme Right Seized on the Martial Arts Scene**
To increase their ranks, neo-Nazi groups in Germany and across Europe are using the sport as a training and recruiting tool.
By Catie Edmondson
Reporting from Berlin
Sept. 17, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
A professional mixed martial arts fighter based in Berlin, Niko Samsonidse, has added a ritual to his tournament prep in recent years: vetting the event to ensure it is not organized by far-right extremists.
Urging other fighters and trainers to do the same, Mr. Samsonidse has become outspoken in his efforts to call out attempts to exploit the growing martial arts scene to advance extremist ideologies.
Mixed martial arts, or MMA, “is getting way more popular in Germany, and mostly they’ve got nothing to do with extremism,” said Mr. Samsonidse, a social worker who wrote his thesis on fighting extremism in combat sports.
“But most of the people, they are not aware what’s happening beside of them,” he added.
Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and across Europe have worked to co-opt martial arts as a training and recruiting tool — hosting high-profile combat sports festivals and offering local opportunities to practice the sport — to try to broaden the groups’ appeal, experts say.
It is part of a larger strategy to make the face of extremism more mainstream. Festivals or tournament organizers market their events in a way that makes them hard to distinguish from normal combat sports tournaments. They then use the events as a gateway to soften up potential recruits to their ideology.
The festivals — which are often declared political events, making them harder to ban and ensuring that any profit will be tax-exempt — typically feature a right-wing extremist speaker or seminar, according to Hans-Jakob Schindler, the Berlin-based senior director of the Counter Extremism Project. And while mixed martial arts tournaments in Europe typically feature fighters from different racial groups, these events allow only white fighters to take part.
“They’re trying to broaden the capture area,” Mr. Schindler said. “You get people to buy the T-shirt, you can get them to come to one of the festivals. And you slowly begin speaking them to them about how the political system is bad. And so you draw them in a bit more subtly than you did in the past.”
In the promotional videos for the largest extreme-right combat tournament, called “Kampf der Nibelungen,” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” there are no far-right symbols or slogans on display. Focused instead on the boxing ring, the ring girls and the heavily tattooed fighters, the only indication that the event is out of the mainstream is that the participants’ faces have all been blurred.
But the message underpinning the events, said Alexander Ritzmann, a senior adviser at the Counter-Extremism Project, is clear: “that whites are under threat on all kinds of levels.”
Some of the participants have openly cast their efforts to learn martial arts as preparation to fight back against those they see as threatening white European identity, the Frankfurt Roundup newspaper reported, quoting a martial arts fighter who took part in the Battle of the Nibelungs, Germany’s most notorious far-right combat sports tournament.
“In this day and age, it’s so obvious that our people have their backs against the wall, and we all have concerns about our survival,” the unidentified fighter said on a far-right podcast in 2015, adding that the day would come when “we have to put ourselves in a ring with all these multicultural people.”
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You can find the full article text below if the article is paywalled for you.
**How Germany’s Extreme Right Seized on the Martial Arts Scene**
To increase their ranks, neo-Nazi groups in Germany and across Europe are using the sport as a training and recruiting tool.
By Catie Edmondson
Reporting from Berlin
Sept. 17, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
A professional mixed martial arts fighter based in Berlin, Niko Samsonidse, has added a ritual to his tournament prep in recent years: vetting the event to ensure it is not organized by far-right extremists.
Urging other fighters and trainers to do the same, Mr. Samsonidse has become outspoken in his efforts to call out attempts to exploit the growing martial arts scene to advance extremist ideologies.
Mixed martial arts, or MMA, “is getting way more popular in Germany, and mostly they’ve got nothing to do with extremism,” said Mr. Samsonidse, a social worker who wrote his thesis on fighting extremism in combat sports.
“But most of the people, they are not aware what’s happening beside of them,” he added.
Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and across Europe have worked to co-opt martial arts as a training and recruiting tool — hosting high-profile combat sports festivals and offering local opportunities to practice the sport — to try to broaden the groups’ appeal, experts say.
It is part of a larger strategy to make the face of extremism more mainstream. Festivals or tournament organizers market their events in a way that makes them hard to distinguish from normal combat sports tournaments. They then use the events as a gateway to soften up potential recruits to their ideology.
The festivals — which are often declared political events, making them harder to ban and ensuring that any profit will be tax-exempt — typically feature a right-wing extremist speaker or seminar, according to Hans-Jakob Schindler, the Berlin-based senior director of the Counter Extremism Project. And while mixed martial arts tournaments in Europe typically feature fighters from different racial groups, these events allow only white fighters to take part.
“They’re trying to broaden the capture area,” Mr. Schindler said. “You get people to buy the T-shirt, you can get them to come to one of the festivals. And you slowly begin speaking them to them about how the political system is bad. And so you draw them in a bit more subtly than you did in the past.”
In the promotional videos for the largest extreme-right combat tournament, called “Kampf der Nibelungen,” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” there are no far-right symbols or slogans on display. Focused instead on the boxing ring, the ring girls and the heavily tattooed fighters, the only indication that the event is out of the mainstream is that the participants’ faces have all been blurred.
But the message underpinning the events, said Alexander Ritzmann, a senior adviser at the Counter-Extremism Project, is clear: “that whites are under threat on all kinds of levels.”
Some of the participants have openly cast their efforts to learn martial arts as preparation to fight back against those they see as threatening white European identity, the Frankfurt Roundup newspaper reported, quoting a martial arts fighter who took part in the Battle of the Nibelungs, Germany’s most notorious far-right combat sports tournament.
“In this day and age, it’s so obvious that our people have their backs against the wall, and we all have concerns about our survival,” the unidentified fighter said on a far-right podcast in 2015, adding that the day would come when “we have to put ourselves in a ring with all these multicultural people.”