n articles bearing headlines such as “Into World War,” “This is no longer terrorism, it is war” and “We cannot be subjugated, we have to fight,” Berthold Kohler in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Stefan Aust and Mathias Döpfner in Die Welt am Sonntag called for war and dictatorship with an aggressiveness previously seen only from extreme right-wing circles.

Kohler, Aust and Döpfner are not fringe figures. They belong to the so-called “Alpha journalists” who have the deepest connections in government and security circles, and who used the Ukraine crisis to promulgate war propaganda against Russia and the return of German militarism.