Thursday's decision by the BfV intelligence agency to increase monitoring of "Der Fluegel" – The Wing – deals a blow to Germany's biggest opposition party, undermining its efforts to fend off accusations that it harbors racist views.

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The AfD has ridden a wave of anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to welcome almost 1 million asylum seekers, and the BfV decision follows fatal attacks on Jews, Muslims and a liberal politician in Germany.

"Today I inform you that The Wing has been upgraded to an extremist entity," BfV chief Thomas Haldenwang told a news conference, calling its leaders "right-wing extremists."

The Wing, which is headed by Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD's leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, had already criticized the decision to conduct a 14-month review of its activities. Another of its leaders, Andreas Kalbitz, dismissed the BfV's conclusions on Thursday as politically motivated.

"This is no surprise because the political decision was made long ago even though it is groundless and motivated purely by political considerations," Kalbitz said. "We will exhaust all judicial means available to fix this mistake."

Hoecke has condemned an attack at shisha bars in western Germany last month by a racist gunman who shot and killed nine people before killing his mother and himself. He also condemned attacks in October by an anti-Semitic gunmen in the city of Halle against a synagogue and a kebab restaurant that killed two.

Hoecke issued a statement with other AfD officials on Wednesday clarifying earlier comments about foreigners and the Holocaust that had caused controversy, apparently in anticipation of the BfV findings.

The deadly attacks shattered Germans' sense of security, renewed fears of far-right violence and prompted mainstream parties to accuse AfD politicians of contributing to an atmosphere of hatred that encourages violence.

An investigation against the AfD as a whole is still under way. Haldenwang said the BfV estimates 20% of the AfD's 35,000 members belong to The Wing.

The designation of The Wing as extremist enables the BfV to deploy additional espionage methods to monitor its activities.

Haldenwang said the agency estimates that some 20% of AfD's 35,000 members belong to The Wing.

Joachim Seeger, which heads the BfV division for far-right extremism, denounced what he said was a racial purity agenda among some of The Wing's leaders that excludes non-Europeans, especially Muslims.

The Jewish community welcomed the BfV's decision.

"State organs must at the same time investigate how big The Wing's influence is within the AfD," said Charlotte Knobloch, a member of the Jewish community in Munich. "The whole party should be monitored given that it enters elections as one and poses a threat to democracy."

The decision could renew a debate in the AfD about Hoecke's growing influence in the party.

"Hoecke must ensure that The Wing draws a clear line between itself and extremists," said AfD Berlin lawmakers Georg Pazderski.

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A 27-year-old German man previously unknown to police confessed to carrying out the attack in the eastern city of Halle in which two people were killed Wednesday.

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The suspected gunman, identified as Stephan Balliet, allegedly built the firearms he used with the help of online instructions, posted an anti-Semitic screed before the attack and later broadcast the shooting live on a popular gaming site.

In response to the attack and previous incidents, German officials have called for more officers to be devoted to tackling far-right extremism and a greater focus on online platforms they say are increasingly being used as a means of spreading far-right radicalism and linking up with like-minded people in a way already seen with Islamist extremism.

Thomas Haldenwang, who heads the BfV domestic intelligence agency, said the attack in Halle and similar shootings in Texas, New Zealand, and Norway showed the need for security services to get better tools to tackle online extremism. In particular, he called for authorities to be given permission to install monitoring software on suspect's devices so as to read their encrypted communication.

Holger Münch, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said online threats and acts of violence are creating a "climate of fear" in Germany that is deterring people from volunteering for public office.

"Right-wing crimes threaten our democracy," Münch said. "The situation is serious."

The country is still reeling from the killing of Walter Lübcke, a regional politician from Chancellor Angela Merkel's party, who was shot dead at his home in June. Lübcke had vocally supported Merkel's welcoming stance toward refugees in 2015 and the suspect in his killing is a far-right extremist with a string of convictions for violent anti-migrant crimes.

Münch said his agency has identified 43 far-right extremists who are considered to constitute a serious threat, an increase of about a third since the start of the year. Overall, authorities say there are some 12,700 far-right extremists in Germany "prepared to use violence."

He called for a bundle of measures including greater scrutiny of online hate postings, extending the period of time that security services can store data on possible extremists and for those who create and distribute lists of political enemies to be prosecuted.

He also proposed that an existing law requiring platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to swiftly remove illegal hate speech should be expanded to force them to report such content to police.

Münch suggested his office could become a central point of contact dealing with online hate crimes in the same way it already does for child pornography.

Further proposals include creating a special unit to investigate possible extremists in the police and other government departments and a crackdown on known far-right groups.

Security officials are particularly concerned that the 'new Right' – groups that include factions within the Alternative for Germany party which entered the federal parliament two years ago – are providing the intellectual fodder for extremists.

Authorities are still investigating whether the suspect in the Halle shooting had ties to any known groups or individuals. At least five people watched the attack live as it happened, suggesting they may have known it was going to take place.

The suspect failed to force his way into the synagogue as scores of people inside were observing Judaism's holiest day, Yom Kippur. He then shot and killed a 40-year-old German woman in the street outside and a 20-year-old man at a nearby kebab shop before fleeing. He was later arrested in Zeitz, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Halle.

The suspect has admitted during questioning that he carried out the shooting and had anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist motives.

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The attack, in which two people were killed outside the synagogue and in a kebab shop, stoked renewed concern about rising far-right extremism and questions about the police response.

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The head of Germany's Jewish community, Josef Schuster, called the absence of police guards outside the synagogue on Yom Kippur "scandalous" as members of the congregation described waiting behind locked doors for the police to arrive, which took more than 10 minutes.

The assailant – a German citizen identified by prosecutors as Stephan B., firing what appeared to be homemade weapons – tried and failed to force his way into the synagogue as around 80 people were inside, then shot and killed a woman in the street outside and a man at a nearby kebab shop.

The attack, with the gunman ranting about Jews and denying the Holocaust in English, was livestreamed on Twitch, a popular gaming site.

The head of the city's Jewish community, Max Privorozki, was among those inside who watched the man trying to break in on monitors linked to a surveillance camera. "We saw everything, also how he shot and how he killed someone," he said.

"I thought this door wouldn't hold," Privorozki said outside the damaged door.

"That was a shock for us, that was Yom Kippur, all phones were switched off, we had to understand what was going on first – then switch on my phone and then call the police," he said. "It was really panic but I have to say after that, when the police came, we continued with the worship service, that lasted another three hours, the synagogue worship service."

The worshippers were brought out on buses several hours later. A video posted by a reporter for Channel 11 News showed people on a bus dancing, embracing and singing.

A worshipper who was at the synagogue, identified only as Christina, told Israel Radio that "it's not easy being openly Jewish in Germany," but "the main message is we can't give up. We won't give up on Jewish existence in Germany."

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier laid flowers outside the synagogue and met with community representatives, the first of several officials who were due to visit.

Ahead of the visit, Schuster was sharply critical Wednesday night of the lack of a police presence outside. "I am convinced that if there had been police protection there, in all probability the assailant would not have been able to attack a second site," he said.

Christoph Bernstiel, a local councilor who also represents Halle in the national parliament, told n-tv television that there will be a careful examination of how long the response took, "but at this point, it would be too early to draw premature conclusions."

Synagogues are often protected by police in Germany and have been for many years amid concerns over far-right and Islamic extremism. There has been rising concern lately about both anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency has said that the number of anti-Semitic acts of violence rose to 48 last year from 21 the previous year. It also said that the number of far-right extremists rose by 100 to 24,100 people last year, with more than half of them considered potentially violent.

In June, Walter Lübcke, a regional politician from Chancellor Angela Merkel's party, was fatally shot at his home. Lübcke was known for supporting the welcoming refugee policy that Merkel adopted during an influx of migrants in 2015. The suspect is a far-right extremist with a string of convictions for violent anti-migrant crimes.

Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria's state interior minister, accused members of the nationalist, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party of helping stir up anti-Semitism, an accusation the party rejected. Some figures in the party, which entered the national parliament in 2017, have made comments appearing to downplay the Nazi past.

The video streamed on Twitch, which apparently was filmed with a head-mounted camera, showed the perpetrator driving up to the synagogue in a car packed with ammunition and what appeared to be homemade explosives.

He tried two doors and placed a device at the bottom of a gate, then fired at a woman trying to walk past his parked car. The assailant then fired rounds into the synagogue's door, which didn't open. He drove a short distance to park opposite the kebab shop. He fired at what appeared to be an employee, while customers scrambled away.

What appeared to be a manifesto also appeared online, according to Rita Katz, the head of the SITE Intelligence Group.

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The news heightened fears of more anti-Semitic violence in a nation still scarred by the Holocaust and witnessing the rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party.

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"It's very scary," said Samuel Tsarfati, a 27-year-old stage director, as he left a Berlin synagogue with fellow French national Samuel Laufer.

The pair, who live and work in the German capital, had spent the holiest day in the Jewish calendar secluded in prayer and switched off their mobile phones for the fast day.

Other members of Germany's 200,000-strong Jewish community expressed similar alarm over the attack. After trying to blast into the Halle synagogue, a lone suspect killed a woman outside and a man in a nearby kebab shop.

"It's not a coincidence it happened in east Germany. The far-right AfD is very strong there," Tsarfati said. Leaders of the AfD, which made big gains in elections in two eastern states last month, condemned Wednesday's attack in Halle.

Attacks on Jews rose by 20% last year and were mainly carried out by right-wing extremists. Even before the Halle shooting, a heavy police presence guarded the synagogue in the trendy suburb of Prenzlauer Berg where Tsarfati and Laufer attended prayers.

Jews and German politicians have been particularly worried by comments by Björn Höcke, the AfD leader of eastern Thuringia state, that the Holocaust memorial in Berlin is a "monument of shame" and that schools should highlight German suffering in World War II.

"What happened today shows that the AfD should not be underestimated," said Laufer. "AfD leaders like Höcke don't want to see that their words encourage some people to kill."

Höcke was among the AfD leaders to condemn the Halle attack.

The Halle gunman broadcast anti-Semitic comments before he opened fire. Several German media outlets said he acted alone although police have not confirmed this.

The far-right AfD entered the national parliament for the first time two years ago, riding a wave of anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to welcome almost one million migrants.

'Blinded by hatred'

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, suggested that the AfD's anti-immigrant rhetoric was contributing to an atmosphere of hate that encouraged political violence.

"This scary attack makes it clear how fast words can become acts of political extremism," she said in a statement. "I'd be interested to know what that AfD has to say about such excesses, for which it had prepared the ground with its uncultured hate and incitement."

At the gold-domed New Synagogue in Berlin's city center about 200 people, including Muslim leaders, held a vigil, some carrying Israeli flags and others holding candles. Merkel visited the synagogue in the evening and took part in prayers.

Renate Keller, a 76-year-old attending the vigil with her husband, said the attack in Halle showed that Germany was not doing enough to fight anti-Semitism.

"It scares me that after the Holocaust some people have learned nothing from our history, which still weighs on us today," she said. "People like the attacker have probably never met a Jew in their lives. They are just blinded by hatred."

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, warned of the incendiary potential far-right politics.

"It shows that right-wing extremism is not only some kind of political development, but that it is highly dangerous and exactly the kind of danger that we have always warned against."

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Alternative for Germany (AfD) proclaimed that it can't be frozen out of power forever after it nearly tripled its support in Saxony and almost doubled it in neighboring Brandenburg on Sunday compared with five years earlier.

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The far-right AfD took around a quarter of the vote between the two states, reflecting its establishment as a major political force – particularly in the ex-communist east – after the 2015 migrant influx.

But it fell short of beating the traditional parties that have governed those regions since German reunification in 1990, a possibility that seemed likely a few weeks ago and could have further destabilized Chancellor Angela Merkel's struggling coalition government in Berlin.

It remains uncertain whether her alliance will survive until the next national election, due in 2021. That is likely to become clear only in December, when the center-left Social Democrats – Merkel's junior partners in Berlin – finish choosing a new leadership from a 17-candidate field and mull the alliance's future.

The leader of Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, renewed her long-standing insistence that her party won't work with AfD. Asked if it can continue freezing out a force that wins a quarter of the vote, she replied: "Yes, we can." She argued that such a stance had attracted voters.

But she acknowledged that the outcome in Saxony, where her party won but now faces the prospect of patching together a three-way alliance with the environmentalist Greens, was a "difficult result." In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats face a similar task after their outgoing government lost its majority.

AfD has thrived on uncompromising opposition and savored the prospect of more. "Opposition is not necessary garbage," co-leader Jörg Meuthen said. "We will be a very strong opposition against very fragile governing alliances."

Meuthen compared AfD to Italy's League, which was once a regional party in Italy's north but surged to wider popularity with a strong anti-migrant stance in the country's recently collapsed government. "We are going in that direction, except that here change is coming not from the north of the country but from the east," he proclaimed.

Fellow party leader Alexander Gauland said there were majorities on the right in both states that voted Sunday and he was "very confident" that "not in the short term, but certainly in the medium-term" those could be turned into a government, at least in Saxony. "We have an election result that won't allow us to be left out in the cold permanently," he said.

Whether there's any chance of AfD's eastern strength spreading west is questionable at best. In May, the party won 11% of the nationwide vote in the European Parliament election, lower than the proportion it took at the national election in 2017 to enter Germany's federal parliament.

In recent months, the Greens – who have positioned themselves as more or less the opposite of AfD – have been surging in national polls. Traditionally weak in the east, the party made modest gains on Sunday, with some prospective voters apparently lining up behind Merkel's CDU in Saxony and the Social Democrats in Brandenburg to prevent AfD winning.

AfD has tapped into disillusionment in the east among people who feel left behind after nearly three decades of German unity. Promises of equal living standards didn't always become reality, salaries in the east still lag behind those in the west and many young people have left to seek opportunities elsewhere.

AfD received its strongest support Sunday from men in rural areas, with its overall support around 10 percentage points higher among men than among women. It has risen as the Left Party, which is partly rooted in East Germany's communist party, appears to have lost its once-strong appeal to protest voters in the region.

"In the east, it has reached a size that it is laborious to govern around it, and the other parties are still struggling with that," Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University, told Deutschlandfunk radio. But he said it wasn't realistic to expect other parties to stop freezing it out of government "in the foreseeable future," for the next two or three parliamentary terms.

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Voters in Saxony, a region of around 4.1 million people bordering Poland and the Czech Republic, and neighboring Brandenburg, which has 2.5 million inhabitants and surrounds Berlin, are electing new state legislatures.

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The formerly communist east has become a stronghold for the six-year-old Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is hoping for a possible first-place finish in at least one state. Saxony has been governed since German reunification in 1990 by Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and Brandenburg by the center-left Social Democrats, its junior partners in the national government.

Both are expected to lose ground, while the opposition Greens, which have traditionally struggled in the east, but have surged in national polls over recent months, are also looking to improve their score significantly.

That could be awkward for the national government's future. The Social Democrats, mired in a long-running national poll slump, are currently in a long-drawn-out process of choosing new leadership.

A very weak performance Sunday and in a third eastern state election, Thuringia, on Oct. 27, could strengthen the hand of members who want to walk out of the fractious national coalition.

More immediately, forming new state governments in Saxony and Brandenburg could be tricky, since mainstream parties have vowed not to form coalitions with AfD. Polls put the party's support in Saxony at more than double its 9.7% score in 2014, and its support in Brandenburg well above the 12.2% that it won then.

"AfD must not be given responsibility for this state," Saxony's center-right governor, Michael Kretschmer, told ZDF television on Friday.

"This is a party that is sliding further and further into right-wing extremism."

Saxony is currently governed by a coalition of Merkel's CDU and the Social Democrats. In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats lead a coalition with the Left Party, which is further to their Left.

Polls suggest that both coalitions will lose their majority, forcing them to bring in a third partner such as the Greens or consider alternatives such as a minority government, which is a rarity in Germany.

Saxony has long been a hotbed of far-right groups. It is not only a stronghold of AfD but also the state where the anti-migration group PEGIDA – Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West – rose to prominence with weekly protests in Dresden that brought tens of thousands of supporters into the streets at the height of the 2015 migration crisis.

Following the killing of a German man by a Syrian asylum-seeker a year ago, the Saxon city of Chemnitz saw days of anti-foreigner riots by thousands of neo-Nazis and members of AfD.

AfD has tapped into disillusionment, particularly in rural areas, among people who feel left behind after nearly three decades of German unity. Promises of equal living standards did not always become reality, salaries in the east still lag behind those in the west and many young people have left to seek opportunities elsewhere.

In both states voting Sunday, the party has put up posters urging voters to "complete" the 1989 rebellion against communist rule and proclaiming that "the east is rising up."

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Alternative for Germany (AfD) posted segments of a video clip showing youths attacking security guards with plastic chairs on the Twitter account of its parliamentary faction.

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In the AfD video, the party's deputy floor leader, Beatrix von Storch, says: "Stuttgart, 50 hooligans. Police operation against rioting youths, attacks on lifeguards."

Von Storch was referring to a brawl at a public swimming pool at the weekend in Stuttgart where police arrested three youths who had attacked staff.

But the footage used in the AfD video were from a brawl last month in the Israeli city of Holon, which was widely reported by Israeli media as well as by the British daily The Mirror.

Some German news web sites and social media users accused the AfD of racism, and some said the AfD was "dumb" to use a video in which the security guards were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the word security in Hebrew.

The AfD later removed the video from Twitter.

In a new video posted on Twitter, which did not include footage of a brawl, von Storch says: "Our country has changed. Drastically. And that's because of a number of migrants that is too high."

The AfD and its supporters say members of the public do not feel safe at swimming pools and water parks because migrants often harass women, get into fights and engage in pickpocketing.

The AfD entered parliament for the first time in the 2017 election, helped by voter angry at Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to welcome almost one million refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

German parties say the AfD's verbal attacks, mainly against Muslim migrants, legitimizes a language of hate that encourages far-right sympathizers to resort to violence.

Debate about the risk of far-right violence intensified this summer after the murder of a pro-immigration conservative politician Walter Lübcke. A far-right sympathizer has been charged with his killing.

The AfD denies it harbors racist views and says its members have been victims of attacks by far-left groups.

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Hezbollah's military wing was outlawed by Germany in 2013.

The resolution, stating that Hezbollah represents a "danger to [Germany's] constitutional order," was presented to a Bundestag vote by the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) but was rejected by the Christian Social Union, the Social Democratic Party, the Left, the Greens, Free Democrats, and Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union.

The Shiite organization has been designated as a terrorist group by several western countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Israel, as well as by Arab League member Bahrain. Some countries, such as Australia, France and Germany, only classify Hezbollah's military wing as a terrorist organization.

Those who opposed the bill argued that it would be "more appropriate" to deal with the classification of Hezbollah through the European Union's institutions.

"If we really want to outlaw the group, then a decision in that regard should be taken at the European level," said CDU's MP Roderich Kiesewetter.

The AfD slammed the vote's results.

"Hezbollah must be banned in Germany," said AfD deputy Beatrix von Storch, who helped draft the bill. She called the group a "terrorist organization" whose goal is the "destruction of Israel."

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Issacharoff told German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur Sunday it was very difficult for him to imagine any interaction with those who felt nostalgia for Germany's past.

Party leader Alexander Gauland has referred to the time of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship and the Holocaust as a "speck of bird poop" in Germany's history, while Björn Höcke, a powerful party leader in the east, suggested it was time for the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past.

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The two parties gathered in different parts of the camp, now an open-air museum, and did not encounter each other. It was the first time the far Right has held a protest at Auschwitz at the annual event, which is also International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day.

At the official ceremony on Sunday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and other government officials were joined in prayer by some of the last remaining survivors of the death camp.

In another location at the site, far-right protesters wrapped in Polish flags, some stamped with the words "Polish Holocaust," laid flowers and sang the Polish national anthem.

"The Jewish nation and Israel is doing everything to change the history of the Polish nation," said Piotr Rybak of the Polish Independence Movement, who led Sunday's protest. "Polish patriots cannot allow this."

Asked by an opposition politician on Twitter how long it would take the government to react to such situations, Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński wrote: "React to what? To the fact that someone is not in their right mind and blames all the evil in this world and his frustrations on a particular nation?"

"If you are trying to blame this government for anti-Semitism in the heads of seriously crazy (I believe) fools, it is indecent and unwise," he added.

The protest comes at a time of surging anti-Semitism in parts of Europe and as critics accuse the Polish Independence Movement of trying to build a nationalist sense of grievance among Poles by seeking to minimize Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

During decades of communist rule, Poles were taught to believe that, with a few exceptions, the nation had conducted itself honorably during a war that killed a fifth of the population.

Many still refuse to accept research showing thousands participated in the Holocaust – in addition to the thousands that had risked their lives to help the Jews – and feel the West has failed to recognize Poland's own wartime suffering.

More than 3 million of Poland's 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Jews from across Europe were sent to be killed at death camps built and operated by the Germans on Polish soil, including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis also killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians.

Diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel were strained last year after the Polish Independence Movement government sought to impose jail terms for suggesting the nation was complicit in the Holocaust.

On Friday, Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald Memorials Foundation, barred the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) from attending a commemoration for the 56,000 people who perished there in the Holocaust.

"The Buchenwald Memorials believes that representatives of the AfD must not take part in the ceremony on its premises while they haven't credibly distanced themselves from their party's anti-democratic, anti-human rights and revisionist positions," Knigge wrote in a letter.

The AfD, which rejects charges of racism, expressed regret at the decision to ban it from taking part in the wreath-laying ceremony.

"Mr. Knigge is such a prisoner of his friend-enemy dichotomy that he is unable to build bridges on an important memorial day like today," said Stefan Moeller, an AfD lawmaker in the Thuringia state parliament.

Knigge specifically took issue with Björn Höcke, the AfD's leader in Thuringia, the region where Buchenwald is located, who told supporters two years ago that Berlin's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a "memorial of shame" and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

Germany's domestic spy agency said this month it would investigate the AfD to see whether its policies breached constitutional safeguards against extremism.

The agency said it would pay closer attention to the AfD's youth wing and elements close to Höcke. The AfD leadership has condemned the investigation and said it would take legal action.

Last week, AfD lawmakers in the Bavarian parliament staged a walkout during a speech by a Jewish community leader and a Holocaust survivor after she accused the party of playing down Nazi crimes.

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