The public display of Nazi symbols and slogans has long been banned in Germany, and yet with a few mouse clicks it is easy enough for someone there to buy a T-shirt glorifying Hitler for about 25 euros, or nearly $30, plus tax and shipping.
Online stores that trade in such merchandise have found creative ways of skirting the letter of Germany’s strict hate speech laws, for example by omitting vowels (“HTLR”) or by using “88” as a winking shorthand for “Heil Hitler” (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet).
A German advertising agency found the growth of those shops objectionable and came up with the idea for a campaign to put them out of business. If it succeeds, the “HTLR” T-shirt that is easiest to find will have a poop emoji separating those letters and the letter “I” to their left, giving it a snarky and emphatically anti-Nazi spin.
Recht Gegen Rechts, or Rights Against the Right, is taking aim at retailers that profit from the sale of pro-Nazi merchandise by moving to secure trademarks from the European Union’s intellectual property office for some Nazi symbols and coded phrases. The idea is that, by obtaining those rights, it can go after shops that sell items bearing right-wing slogans and phrases on the grounds of trademark infringement.
“Taking their money is the best way,” said Philip Schlaffer, a former neo-Nazi who profited from the sale of such merchandise for years. He now advises Rights Against the Right, which was started in 2021 by a German advertising agency, Jung von Matt, in partnership with a nonprofit in Hamburg called Laut Gegen Nazis, or Noise Against Nazis.
Unlike the United States, which takes a more absolutist approach to free speech, Germany, in an effort to confront its own past, restricts hate speech and the publication of symbols and slogans associated with hate groups.
Those groups have used coded shorthand to skirt the law, and their appearance on apparel is usually a cue to those who share a neo-Nazi ideology, Mr. Schlaffer said. Like-minded people know where to buy it, and the profits add up for the biggest sellers. The Rights Against the Right campaign has sought to cut into that revenue.
“All of these people are thinking about, ‘What if my shop is being taken? What if my if my name is taken?’” Mr. Schlaffer said. “This makes it, for a neo-Nazi, very difficult to plan into the future. They don’t have a safe space anymore.”
Maximilian Kreter, who studies right-wing extremism as a researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Dresden University of Technology, said there were about five big right-wing shops in Germany whose owners can live off their earnings. He added that the shops, which have been growing in size and influence since the early 2000s, were an important source of income for the neo-Nazi movement.
The Rights Against the Right campaign now has six trademarks and is registering several more. But as it has set its sights higher, it has faced a number of challenges. Two of its applications were rejected by the European intellectual property office because they involved coded references to Hitler and the swastika that the office deemed contrary to “accepted principles of morality.” And not all the successful trademarks have been rolled out smoothly.
Last year, Rights Against the Right secured a trademark for the name of one of the largest shops selling neo-Nazi merchandise, Druck18. Mr. Kreter has estimated that the store earns a five-figure annual profit for its owner, Tommy Frenck, who has been associated with a far-right political party that has called for the end of German “guilt” for World War II.
The site sells T-shirts with Nazi and xenophobic messages, bottle openers shaped like the helmets worn by the German Luftwaffe and even a cookbook titled “The 88 Best Meat Dishes From the Reich.”
Rights Against the Right had planned to replace Mr. Frenck’s website with a new version offering apparel featuring many of the same neo-Nazi code words, but with messaging telegraphing a distaste for the meaning behind them. Mr. Frenck, who could not be reached for comment, refused to take his site down and filed a legal challenge.
“For every attempt to trademark something, I will make available two new shops,” he said in August, when Rights Against the Right first sought to enforce the trademark, according to a newspaper in Thuringia, where Mr. Frenck lives.
A German court ruled last year that Rights Against the Right held a legitimate trademark to the name Druck18. In dismissing Mr. Frenck’s lawsuit, it also ordered him to cover the campaign’s legal expenses.
But the court did not direct him to take down his original online store. Rights Against the Right created its own store at a similar url (the landing page invites customers to “shop here to stop Nazis”) while pursuing a legal process to get Mr. Frenck’s Druck18 shop taken down.
Mr. Frenck, in an email, said he planned to sue for damages after prevailing in his legal dispute with Rights Against the Right, which he dismissed as “purely a PR campaign.”
Much of the apparel for sale at the Rights Against the Right store uses the neo-Nazi codes it has trademarked. “This shirt depressess Nazis,” a message on one white T-shirt reads, using a deliberate misspelling to emphasize one of the latest trademarks (“ess ess” is code for S.S., or Schutzstaffel, the elite guard of the Nazi Reich).
Other T-shirts feature some of the terms that the European Commission did not allow the campaign to trademark: “HTLR,” for example, and “HKN KRZ,” short for “hakenkreuz” (“swastika” in German). The latter often appears on neo-Nazi apparel in the style of the Run DMC logo; on the campaign’s shop, the letters appear in the same stacked order, but with lines crossing them out.
In less than a year, the shop has brought in more than €10,000, or about $11,550, for Noise Against Nazis, the nonprofit, according to Rights Against the Right.
Simon Knittel, an advertising executive who founded Rights Against the Right in 2021, said in an interview that he did not think that taking on Germany’s far right would be easy. But he said he relished a public fight with a prominent right-wing figure like Mr. Frenck.
“I saw this problem, and I just wanted to solve it,” he said, “and wanted to solve it with a clever idea.”
Mr. Kreter, the researcher, said that while Rights Against the Right had fashioned an unconventional way of cutting into the flow of money that sustains the right wing, it is unlikely to shut down the shops entirely.
“These campaigns are great, and they’re there to raise awareness,” Mr. Kreter said. “But, I mean, you cannot take down an ideology.”
He noted that Rights Against the Right had brought attention to the prevalence of the shops, an effort that he compared to other subversive actions taken by the German public in recent years to undermine far-right groups. He cited a 2017 neo-Nazi march in Wunsiedel, in eastern Germany, where locals taunted the demonstrators and turned the event into a fund-raising opportunity for an organization that helps people leave right-wing groups.
Mr. Knittel said his motivation was always simply to combat the right wing.
“In the end,” he said, “I had the feeling I wanted at least to say to my children or grandchildren, I tried to do something.”
