At the start of this year, residents woke up to find troubling graffiti sprayed across several locations in the Bad Herrenalb district of southwestern Germany. Alongside the names of well-known extremist networks like No Lives Matter (NLM) and 764, there was the moniker of a new group: Milikolosskrieg, a neo-Nazi organization that has emerged in the last year. The person behind the graffiti shared the press coverage it generated in a closed group on the messaging app Signal, to the applause of other members of Milikolosskrieg, which translates into English as “military war.”
While NLM and 764 have received significant media attention, Milikolosskrieg has gone largely unexamined. Bearing all the hallmarks of the decentralized, satanic, neo-Nazi organization Order of Nine Angles (O9A), Milikolosskrieg espouses a hard accelerationist ethos, and pushes its members through a three-stage pipeline—in which recruitment and radicalization lead to discussions of real-world terror activity. It started making waves when it shared links to its Telegram and Signal groups on social media, accompanied by images and videos of masked men with guns and inflammatory slogans like “Jews are garbage, kill them” and “join your local terrorist.”
“And here’s the kicker: The group’s members appear to be very young, between the ages of 12 and 18.”
Their propaganda aesthetic is deliberately crude and confrontational, full of satanic and O9A imagery, as well as heavily edited gore. In that respect, it takes cues from Atomwaffen Division, a bunch of O9A neo-Nazis who have been linked to many killings and designated as a terror group in the UK and Canada. Designed not only to shock, but to establish in-group identity and ideological alignment, Milikolosskrieg was banned from many social media platforms, including Telegram, but retains a presence on Signal, where users radicalize one another and guide newcomers toward increasingly extreme ideologies.
A core function of the group is to desensitize users through exposure to gore—beheading videos, narco executions, murder victim footage—and violent ideology, while normalizing discussions that encourage rape, child abuse, and mass murder. Materials shared in the Signal group—which VICE has infiltrated—include handbooks like Militant Accelerationist, which openly call for terror attacks while lauding far-right extremists like Brenton Tarrant as “saints”; links to download a rape-themed video game called No Mercy; images of animal sacrifices tied to O9A rituals; and memes glorifying murder and violent extremism. Members also celebrate the convicted child sex offender and murderer Peter Scully, and share tactics on how to avoid detection.
More than just a group of unhappy young people talking about unpleasant things online, the existence of Milikolosskrieg has already had real-world consequences. In one incident, a member from Paraguay expressed a desire to carry out a school shooting. Rather than discourage him, others in the chat urged him to attack a mosque or synagogue instead. One of his acolytes scolded him for not targeting Jews, to which he replied that a school would be easier and less risky than attacking a synagogue or mosque. When the Paraguayan confided that there were mosques and synagogues close to his home, fellow users further goaded him to target a religious site. Soon, the conversation had shifted onto practical advice about how to acquire firearms. At no point did any member express concern or opposition.
And here’s the kicker: The group’s members appear to be very young, between the ages of 12 and 18. Members of the Signal chat claim to hail from a wide array of countries, including the U.S., England, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Turkey. They use various different languages in the chat, though primarily it’s conducted in English, German, Greek, and Turkish.
The youth of the Milikolosskrieg group members is no coincidence. Just like NLM and 764, the collective’s deeply nihilistic ideology functions as both belief system and recruitment tool, aiming to appeal to disaffected teens who may feel isolated or misunderstood. By glorying in the malice of harm and abuse, they offer grotesquely simplistic answers to the complex questions young people must grapple with at the outset of their lives, potentially steering them along a dangerous path from which they are never able to veer.
Previously: A 12-Year-Old Boy’s Arson Arrest May Be Linked to a Global Terror Network
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