BERLIN | Inventory before the big cleaning? The German government unveiled on Tuesday an unprecedented inventory of the presence of the far right in the security forces, a reason for “shame”, but not a “structural problem”.
Scandals have indeed multiplied in recent months, with the discovery of several groups of police officers exchanging racist remarks. In the army, an elite commando infiltrated by neo-Nazis was partly disbanded this summer.
“Each proven case is a disgrace for all the security forces,” said Minister of the Interior, Bavarian Conservative Horst Seehofer, at a press conference.
The intelligence services count, according to figures released Tuesday, some 377 cases of right-wing extremists in the security forces, including 319 in the police, a small minority among the 300,000 members of the police. These data cover the period from January 2017 to March 2020.
There is “no far-right network within the federal police,” for his part stressed its leader, Dieter Romann.
Pressures
These figures reinforced the minister, accused in Germany of not wanting to completely shed light on these abuses, in his conviction that extremist ideas are not a “structural problem” within the police.
If he presented this report of the intelligence services, Mr. Seehofer is still reluctant to carry out too thorough investigations, to avoid casting shame on all the “99% of police officers who respect” the Constitution.
Regions have however announced that they could conduct their own investigations to fill this void.
The pressure has indeed increased in recent months, including from the Social Democratic Party, a partner of the conservatives in Angela Merkel’s coalition, to shed light on the real size of these groups.
The head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a moral authority in Germany, himself called at the end of September to fight “more resolutely” the far-right networks in the country.
The porosity between the extreme right and part of the police is however proven. The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is thus the group in the Bundestag which has the most police officers in its ranks – 5 out of 89.
Death threats
Several recent cases, which government investigations failed to include in the count, have sparked outrage in Germany, where far-right terrorism is at the forefront of threats to the country’s security.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous region of Germany, around thirty police officers, suspended since, exchanged on Whatsapp messaging photos of Adolf Hitler and swastikas, as well as flags of the Third Reich and a montage showing a refugee in a gas chamber in a concentration camp.
A similar group was dismantled at the end of September in Berlin.
In July, investigators announced the arrest of a former police officer and his wife suspected of sending threatening emails to politicians and public figures across Germany.
Their messages were signed “NSU 2.0”, a reference to the German neo-Nazi small group whose members committed a dozen racist assassinations during the 2000s and benefited from the culpable passivity of the police.
The summer was also marked by the resignation of a regional head of the German police force because of supposed links between his services and the extreme right.
The case followed the discovery of the use of a police computer in the regional state of Hesse, where Frankfurt is located, to find private data on people who have been subjected to death threats and insults from the ultra-right by mail or e-mail.
The army is also concerned. The KSK, an elite commando, was thus partly dissolved before the summer. Twenty of its members were suspected of belonging to the neo-Nazi movement, a proportion five times higher than in the Bundeswehr as a whole, according to the German counter-intelligence service.