EXIT-Deutschland is a small initiative that helps right-wingers who want to drop out of the scene by giving them new opportunities for an ‘afterlife’. The initiative relies on private donations and has to regularly prove its relevance.Challenge: Finding new occasions to spread its name and engage in discourse with neo-Nazis and the public.To get the EXIT message across, we developed 250 T-shirts bearing the rightist slogan: ‘Hardcore rebels. National and free.’ We used an assumed identity to supply them to the organisers of Europe’s biggest right-wing rock festival, who then distributed the shirts among festival-goers.But a surprise awaited the rightists back home. The Trojan idea: we had primed the shirts with a print that washed off. After the first wash, they said: ‘If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We can help you to get free of right-wing extremism. EXIT-Deutschland.’The ‘Trojan shirt’ coup was a great success. The message spread rapidly across the scene. And media from all over the world reported on EXIT and the ‘Trojan shirts’. And not only did the number of donations and Facebook fans greatly increase, but also, and most importantly, the number of rightists who requested consultancy tripled.

We produced 250 T-shirts for EXIT bearing a typical rightist slogan. But the T-shirts had been primed with a print that washed off. After just one wash, they said: ‘If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We can help you to get free of right-wing extremism. EXIT-Deutschland.’To avoid any risk for EXIT, we decided to leave the distribution to the organisers themselves. Therefore, we contacted the right-wing NPD party, which organises the festival, under the false identity of an unknown supporter and offered 250 of the ‘Trojan shirts’ as a donation.Because we knew that neo-Nazis are very cautious about unknown people, we chose to contact the organisers only ten days before the festival. Hence, we could reasonably argue why we were not able to meet before or hand over the donation personally.

The message spread rapidly across the scene, and media from all over the world reported extensively on EXIT and the ‘Trojan shirts’.

Channel Two of Germany’s television broadcasting claimed the ‘Trojan shirts’ to be the top social media hit in 2011.The media equivalence value of German TV, radio and print media was 50 times higher than the costs spent on the initiative.People from all over the world wanted to know more about EXIT-Deutschland. In the week of the initiative, there was an increase of 167,000% in single visitors on its home page.Compared to the same month one year before, EXIT-Deutschland received an increase of 434% donations in the month after the Trojan coup.But most importantly, with the Trojan coup we increased the EXIT consultancy rate among neo-Nazis threefold.