This article was originally published in German by Exif here.
At midday, 3 March 2025, a man drove his car at high speed into a crowd of people in the centre of Mannheim. Two people died and a further eleven were injured. After the attack, the driver fled and shot himself in the mouth with a blank firing weapon. He is receiving medical treatment in hospital and is in police custody. The driver is suspected of two counts of murder and multiple attempted murders and was questioned for the first time today. He did not make any statements to the magistrate.
The driver of the car, Alexander Scheuermann (born 5 February 1985) from Ludwigshafen (Rhineland-Palatinate), was born in Baden-Württemberg, is single, a trained landscape gardener and is said to be mentally ill. He has repeatedly received medical treatment. At a press conference yesterday evening, the police released information about the perpetrator. According to the Mannheim senior public prosecutor, Romeo Schüssler, he has previous convictions dating back a long time: an assault for which he served a short prison sentence over ten years ago, as well as a case of drunk driving. His last conviction was in connection with “hate speech” on the internet in 2018, when he was fined for a Facebook comment. The investigations are focussing on a mental illness. It is being assumed that the offence wasn‘t politically motivated. Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) announced there was currently no indication “of an extremist or religious background”.
It is surprising that the political dimension of the offence is not the focus of the investigation. According to information available to Exif-Recherche, the perpetrator Alexander Scheuermann was part of the so-called “Ring Bund” – a group from the Reichsbürger spectrum, led by neo-Nazis. The same people who also belonged to an arms trading ring, namely Bernd Zimmermann from Gröbenzell (Bavaria) and Alexander Reichl from Neubiberg (Bavaria).
Internal messages suggest that the [arms] sales were intended to build up the AfD-affiliated organisation “Patriotische Alternative”. In this context, a handwritten note was found on Zimmermann during a search on 29 January 2020, listing various weapon names such as Kalashnikov, AK 47 and hand grenades. The smartphone analyses show that Reichl and Zimmermann planned various political projects together and suggest that Zimmermann was involved in the arms trade. Alexander Reichl was sentenced to 4 years and 3 months in prison at the Munich Regional Court on 31 May 2022.
Alexander Scheuermann, the perpetrator from Mannheim, again appears in a list of people compiled by Bernd Zimmermann. In this list, which was created in 2018, various people are assigned numbers and information is recorded in categories. Alexander Scheuermann has the personal number 000415 and the following entries:
Nickname: Alex
Date of birth: 05.02.1985
Assignment: RB Ringbund
Wishes: Security, possibility to retreat, contacts
Comments: pers. Known
Under the personal number, Zimmermann noted Scheuermann’s email address [REDACTED] and also recorded his “skills”. Scheuermann’s skills include: trained landscape gardener, boxer, licence to shoot cattle for slaughter, English. The assignment “RB Ringbund” indicates that Alexander Scheuermann was a member of this group.
“Ring Bund”
During the investigations into the arms trafficking ring, Alexander Reichl and Bernd Zimmermann held numerous documents relating to the founding of the so-called “Ring Bund” (also: “Ringbund” or “RingBund”). According to this, the “Ring Bund” is an unregistered association based in Switzerland and is a member of the “Ring Order”. A record of the results of the founding of the association is dated 15 December 2016. Nine people from Bavaria and Thuringia were involved in the founding.
The two neo-Nazis were busy, widely networked and tried to set up various organisations. Zimmermann was largely responsible for the establishment of a security business, shooting training and the structure of the organisation.
A meeting of the “Ring Bund” is said to have taken place from 2 to 4 February 2018 under the name “Day of the Alliance and Crisis Preparedness” in a well-known neo-Nazi property in Guthmannshausen. The organisational structure of the “Ring Bund” is said to have been discussed there, as well as IT training. According to a list of participants available to Exif-Recherche, Alexander Scheuermann did not take part in the meeting. The first evidence of Scheuermann’s connection to the “Ring Bund” only emerged a few months later. More precisely, on 24 September 2018, when Zimmermann, using the pseudonym “der Baron”, gave instructions to a “Sabine” on how to read and write messages in the drafts folder of the “RingBund” account. The e-mail address “[REDACTED]” is assigned by Zimmermann to Alexander Scheuermann in his list.
Another meeting took place on 17 November 2018 near Ulm. There, Zimmermann is said to have given a lecture to three participants on “The theory of the revolutionary situation”, “Enemy stereotype”, and “What violent resistance would mean”. According to the paper, the “Ring Bund” is tightly organised, has a constitution and has set itself guidelines. Conspiratorial behaviour, such as the use of “desired names” instead of a clear name, is mandatory, as is the creation of a Proton Mail email address. Point two of their guidelines makes their anti-Semitic world view clear: “We have recognised that these events did not occur by chance and accident, but are the goal of a globalisation policy and were deliberately and intentionally caused. The cause is not the individual government in power, but a system that is controlled by the globally dominant high finance, on whose dependence the governments of most countries in the world are dependent.” It is a widespread myth in the extreme right that Jewish people in high finance control governments worldwide (keyword: “Zionist Occupied Government”, ZOG for short).
The “Ring Bund” endeavoured to dissolve the existing order. This was summarised in bullet points: Dreams of the replacement of power, the system question, opposition of world finance with infinite possibilities. The right to self-defence was also emphasised.
The network around Reichl and Zimmermann is far-reaching. However, it is difficult to categorise how substantial and in-depth their contacts are. The list in question also includes Thorsten Heise, Tobias Schulz (known as “Baldur Landogart”) and Björn Höcke, who, like Alexander Scheuermann, are listed as “personally known”. Reichl lived with Tobias Schulz for a while and met the nationally influential neo-Nazi cadre Thorsten Heise several times. When Heise was in Switzerland on 20 May 2018, he spontaneously invited Reichl to a barbecue. Reichl had previously attended a meeting in Fretterode, Thuringia, where Heise lived. Björn Höcke met Reichl again in April 2016 at the so-called “Kyffhäuser meeting”, which he attended with other members of the “Patriotische Alternative”. The group around Reichl posed together with Höcke with one of the group’s banners. No other relevant personal meetings with Höcke are known. Bernd Zimmermann’s list, therefore, does not say very much about the nature of the relationship. It is not known how deeply involved Alexander Scheuermann was in the group or how long he was a member. However, Scheuermann demonstrably has access to the group‘s communication structure, i.e. the e-mail address of the “Ring Bund”.
It is a fatal mistake to rule out a political motivation for the offence in Mannheim at this point in time. The perpetrator appears to have been ideologically stable until at least 2018. This is at least suggested by his membership of the extreme right-wing “Ring Bund” and must be investigated accordingly – regardless of whether he also had a mental illness and whether corresponding statements on social networks appear contradictory. For example, in December 2020, when he shared a video on Facebook in which an artist painted over neo-Nazi symbols and commented on it with the words “Awesome”. And just a little later, in May 2021, he posted a photo of himself with a cushion in the background labelled “Odin instead of Jesus”. A phrase that is popular and widespread in the extreme right-wing scene.
Supplement 05 March 2025:
Alexander Scheuermann participated in a march of “Wir für Deutschland” on 3 October 2018 in Berlin. Around 2,000 right-wingers gathered in a march co-organised by Berlin NPD. The current “Die Heimat” cadre Sebastian Schmidtke also gave a speech.
