A Bavarian town found an answer to an annual problem: what do you do when extremists keep marching through your streets? You make them fundraise against themselves.
Every year, neo-Nazis gathered in Wunsiedel to march past the grave of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy. The grave was destroyed in 2011, but the marches continued anyway—tradition, or ideology, or both. Locals grew tired of it.
In 2014, a group called Right Against Right came up with something unexpected. They organized a sponsorship scheme: for every metre the 250 marchers walked, €10 would go directly to EXIT Deutschland, a program that helps people leave extremist movements. The town spread the word quietly through their website, then waited.
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Start Your News DetoxThe marchers didn't find out until they'd already started. By then, turning back would have meant admitting defeat. So they walked. And walked. Each step funnelled money into the very organization designed to undo what they stood for. When it was over, the neo-Nazis had raised more than $12,000 for anti-hate programs.
What made this work wasn't anger or confrontation—it was a kind of judo move. The town didn't try to stop the march. They didn't ban it or fight it directly. Instead, they redirected the energy. The marchers had two choices: proceed and fund their opposition, or back down and admit the whole thing was pointless. They chose to march.
"If you can't stop them, you can at least make them run for something worthwhile," Right Against Right wrote. "This turns the funeral march into a fundraising march, and the demonstration into a charity event."
The idea caught on. In 2017, the Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco used the same approach when neo-Nazis planned a march in their city. They launched an "Adopt a Nazi (Not Really)" fundraiser on GoFundMe. That campaign raised over $150,000.
There's something quietly powerful about this approach. It doesn't shame the marchers into silence—it makes their own actions work against them. And it channels real money into real work: helping people exit extremism, which is harder and slower than any protest, but arguably more durable.
