A neo-Nazi wielding anti-Semitic epithets and wearing military-style camouflage fatigues and a metal helmet—all livestreamed to an alt-right audience on a popular white-nationalist Twitch channel—attempted to attack a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle on Wednesday with a semiautomatic rifle and a load of grenade-style bombs.
The man, later identified as 27-year-old neo-Nazi Stephan Balliert, was thwarted by a security wall around the synagogue, which was full of worshippers there to observe Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Unable to get inside, he lobbed at least one of the bombs over the wall, then turned and shot a random passerby before heading to a nearby kabob shop owned by a Turkish family, where he again killed one person while several others managed to get away.
The man then drove off. His livestream, carried live on Twitch.tv for about 30 minutes, was cut off by the video platform. On external videos carried by German news media, he could be seen wearing a GoPro camera on his helmet.
There were reports from police that one person was in custody after exchanging gunfire, and that Balliert hijacked a taxi but was apprehended shortly afterward when that taxi was rammed by a truck.
The livestream made it clear that the attack was a terrorist event by a white nationalist. Speaking in English, he repeatedly referred to himself as a “loser” in the video, apparently unhappy that he hadn’t anticipated the security measures and was unable to get at the worshipers inside.
Before he began the attack, he filmed himself inside his car making political pronouncements in English. “Feminism is the cause of declining birth rates in the West, which acts as a scapegoat for mass immigration, and the root of all these problems is the Jew,” he ranted.
The attack was clearly modeled on a similar terrorist attack last March on two mosques by a white nationalist in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were murdered. It too was similarly livestreamed with a GoPro camera. The worldwide spread of all of these acts underscores the global nature of the rising ride of white-nationalist terrorism.
The incident in Halle, a city of 240,000, is only the latest in what is now a running stream of white-nationalist mass killers inspiring each other sequentially. What’s particularly noteworthy is that this attacker spouted the same “Great Replacement” rhetoric as the Christchurch shooter, as well as the more recent mass killing in El Paso.
The German tabloid Bild, which first identified the shooter, reported that the man had been shot in a brief exchange of gunfire with police. He fled to a nearby taxi stand and hijacked a car, but it was rammed from behind by a truck, which enabled police to arrest him.
An eyewitness to the attack on the kabob shop told Bild that the shooter had difficulty with his gun throughout the incident, since it kept jamming. This enabled a number of customers in the shop to flee.
