Graffiti in Bad Herrenalb
Destroying the world as a goal
By Fides Schopp Date:25.06.2025
It sounds unbelievable, almost like a serial plot. Graffiti pointing to a terrorist network has appeared in a spa town in the northern Black Forest. The frightening thing: The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution knows nothing about it.
At the beginning of the year, graffiti was sprayed on several garages, a private car, a youth work bus and the monastery wall in the monastery district of Bad Herrenalb. Letters, abbreviations, signs, numbers, swastikas. “This desecration of our monastery district must finally come to an end,” said priest Robert Mađarić Beer in the “Schwarzwälder Boten” newspaper recently. The spraying of the youth bus, which was financed by donations from citizens and associations, was particularly annoying.
At first glance, the graffiti appears to be “vandalism” according to local newspapers. At second glance, however, the scrawled signs and numbers reveal a creepy, more than worrying background. The words and symbols indicate that the spray-painted person is part of online networks called No Lives Matter (NLM) and Milikolosskrieg. NLM emerged from the online communities Com and 764.
Its members are sadists, systematically befriending minors online and forcing them to create explicit sexual material of themselves or others, to hurt or even kill themselves or others. 764, writes the Guardian, for example, is currently one of the "most disturbing trends".
Online video with the graffiti has emerged
Images of the graffiti from Bad Herrenalb have now emerged in a video in a closed chat group. The video is a collage of various short clips: soldiers, jihadists, swastika spray-painting, brutal violence. Shortly before a graffiti from Bad Herrenalb is shown, a beheading can be seen. The video was posted by a user called Milikoloss. He asks the group how the clip is being received. The answers come immediately: "Love it" and "Your best yet".
To better understand the NLM community, it helps to look at what this network has developed from. Thilo Manemann works at the Berlin Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (Cemas) on right-wing terrorism, especially groups that are classified as militant accelerationism. Their aim is “to bring about the collapse of the democratic social order through all forms of violence, but above all through terrorist attacks”, he explains.
The right-wing terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, originally founded in the USA and then spilled over online to Germany and elsewhere, for example, represents these goals. Its members see themselves as an avant-garde that creates the initial conditions for a “social order based on the National Socialist model” after the collapse, says Manemann. He cites the right-wing terrorist attack on a synagogue and a snack bar in Halle in 2019, in which the perpetrator killed two people, as an example of this phenomenon in Germany.
The members are only interested in destruction
What often happens with online groups can be observed in militant accelerationism: Sub-groups form, splits occur and in the end, widely ramified transnational networks emerge. This network also includes groups that belong to the Nihilistic Violence Extremism, or NVE, spectrum. Here too, according to Manemann, the idea is that the "democratic social order is irreparably broken". The whole thing is based on an anti-Semitic and racist world view, but there is one difference to militant accelerationism: there is no longer a vision of the future. It is no longer about destroying society in order to build something new, "but the idea is actually just to destroy this society".
According to Thilo Manemann, researchers have identified three strands within the NVE online community: The first has a focus on sextortion: minors in particular are coerced and blackmailed into sexual content, for example by posting nude pictures of them online. The second strand involves people who "commit cybercrime", such as credit card fraud. The third strand brings together a community that "advocates offline violence". The latter includes the group No Lives Matter, which is referred to in the sprayings in Bad Herrenalb.
“Basically, these groups thrive on recognition,” explains Manemann. “This means that the more violent, the more repulsive the act of violence or the content that is created, the more recognition the members receive in the groups.” Some of the group members are also embedded in gaming communities. This is reflected in a playful logic within the groups. Manemann: “In order to be part of this group and to further consolidate this affiliation, the content must also become more extreme.” This is why he and his colleagues at Cemas have noticed “that radicalization in these groups is increasing much faster”. In addition, the pursuit of recognition encourages victims to become perpetrators, which leads to a greater spread.
Human hatred in Bad Herrenalb
"NLM x MSK" can be seen on the garage in Bad Herrenalb. MSK stands for Milikolosskrieg. The context is a multi-page manifesto written in English by Milikolosskrieg. It describes how mankind has been destroying nature since the industrial revolution, and that it is a catastrophe, but only a temporary one. Misanthropy, i.e. hatred of humanity, is praised as an awakening and freedom movement: "If you really want to change something, you have to destroy yourself." The manifesto is anti-Semitic, nationalistic and subscribes to the ideology of the Order of Nine Angles, an esoteric, Satanist neo-Nazi group originating in the UK. It is not only a model for these nihilistic online communities such as NLM, but also for militant neo-Nazi groups such as Combat 18 and Atomwaffendivision.
When asked by Kontext, the Pforzheim police wrote that they have been conducting “six criminal proceedings since February 2025 on the initial suspicion of damage to property and/or the use of signs of unconstitutional organizations against currently unknown perpetrators” and added: “We currently have no concrete knowledge that the ‘No Lives Matter Network’ has made a criminal appearance within the jurisdiction of the Pforzheim police headquarters.” And the Office for the Protection of the Constitution replies: “The LfV has no knowledge of the group you mentioned for Baden-Württemberg”.
So much cluelessness is worrying. Thilo Manmann says that it is important to “intervene at an early stage”, as the network thrives on its members constantly recruiting new perpetrators. What's more, these online groups operate like a loose network. This means that if a group falls away, whether due to investigation pressure or arrests, the other group members are very quickly able to form a new group, says Manemann. The challenge lies in “keeping an eye on the complex network structure”. To make matters worse, the network is now transnational. It is therefore all the more surprising that the authorities in Baden-Württemberg have no knowledge of it, as the investigating authorities in other European countries (examples here and here) and in the USA (here) are heavily involved.
It is very difficult to keep track of how many people are active in these groups because they mainly operate in conspiratorial online spaces, such as Telegram. It is not easy for outsiders to get into these closed groups because you have to go through an application process. Manemann assumes that everything that is known from media reports on court cases or investigations only represents a “small section of the full extent”. He is certain that the problem is “much bigger”.
