I sat last night and watched the German show 'Panarama' on ARD (public TV, Channel One).
It's a documentary news show, and they had a fifteen minute piece on Prepers.
What is a Preper? It took me about a minute to grin and realize that it's the German version of the US crowd who have preparation in mind for the next crisis. These are the folks who have a basement stocked up with food....have weapons....and keep preparing for the some massive event which may or may not ever occur.
In this case, the guy in question was a cop....who got involved in a Preper-group, and two members got into real serious trouble (state investigation). So the federal cops came around to this cop's house and spent roughly an entire day looking for something to connect to the two guys in trouble. In some ways, I got the feeling that the federal cops have a weak case and are hoping something pops up to hype up the situation to the judge.
The cop whose house was being searched? He couldn't understand why he was being picked up....he'd done nothing illegal. The journalists laid out the issue....in that this 'club' that the cop belonged to....had numerous members, and the government's investigation had led from the two guys in the investigation episode....to the dozens in the Preper-club.
What interested me was the cross-over from the American-style preparation for worldwide chaos....to a German version. Germans typically do follow American trends but this is a bit unusual.
There's probably 250,000 Germans who watched the Panarama piece and out of that....I'll bet at least 3,000 are today asking questions about Prepers and likely to engage in the 'hobby' by the end of this year.
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