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Introduction: We’ve covered the neo-Nazi group The National Socialist Underground and its links to German intelligence for the better part of two years.
In addition to shredding files on the NSU, which was financed in considerable measure by Germany’s domestic intelligence service and elements of its military intelligence service, files on other German neo-Nazi groups have been destroyed before being properly vetted by German journalistic and legal authorities.
One of the most significant aspects of the case is the fact that powerful elements within the German government are going to extraordinary lengths to eclipse the institutional connections of the group. Turkish media were excluded from being seated at the trial of the group, many of whose victims were Turks. In addition, leading German media were left out of a “raffle” to award seating at the trial.
In addition, Germany Watch has suggested that the apparent German intelligence stewardship of the National Socialist Underground may have been a vehicle to eliminate peopel with information about the 9/11 attacks.
We now learn that the families of their victims and their attorneys have despaired, suspecting that the prosecutors have no interest in pursuing justice in the case, noting their dismissal of victims families counsel attempts at introducing evidence.
Program Highlights Include: German intelligence officers’ founding of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Germany; contacts between associates of a German policewoman murdered by NSU and elements of the German KKK (suggesting the possibility that she may have been murdered because of those links); the fact that the NSU was much larger than previously believed; contacts between a German intelligence official who resigned because of the file shredding and members of a German Nazi band called “Landser;” discussion of the Nazi and SS roots of the modern German police establishment; indications that the scale of German intel’s financing of the neo-Nazis is on a scale that indicates institutional support for the Nazi agenda; the claim by German military intelligence elements that helped finance NSU that they kept no files on the group; the shredding of NSU files the day before they were to be turned over to German prosecutors; the claim by German intel that the shredding of the files was the work of a “single individual.”
1a. We’ve covered the neo-Nazi group The National Socialist Underground and its links to German intelligence for months.
One of the most significant aspects of the case is the fact that powerful elements within the German government are going to extraordinary lengths to eclipse the institutional connections of the group.
Turkish media were excluded from being seated at the trial of the group, many of whose victims were Turks. In addition, leading German media were left out of a “raffle” to award seating at the trial.
Germany Watch has suggested that the apparent German intelligence stewardship of the National Socialist Underground may have been a vehicle to eliminate people with information about the 9/11 attacks.
We now learn that the families of their victims and their attorneys have despaired, suspecting that the prosecutors have no interest in pursuing justice in the case, noting their dismissal of victims families counsel attempts at introducing evidence.
“Suspected Nazi Killer Still Silent in NSU Trial”; Deutsche Welle; 1/4/2014.
. . . . Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promise that the murders would be thoroughly investigated once gave them comfort, hope, and courage. But after 11 months of trial most of the plaintiffs have lost faith in a fair trial or a just sentence.Zschäpe’s self-confident, occasionally even cheerful demeanor, has played a major role in that. She has remained unmoved throughout, even when her mother and cousin testified on her behalf.
She behaves very differently towards her three defense attorneys, who always stand protectively in front of her — to make things difficult for the curious photographers — when she enters court room A 101. Zschäpe often smiles as she confers with the trio of defenders, as the visitors can clearly see from their gallery three meters above her head.
. . . . But families are also often nonplussed by the conduct of the state prosecutors when they dismiss as irrelevant their lawyers’ requests to present evidence. Sebastian Scharmer, the attorney representing the interests of the family of Mehmet Kubasik, who was murdered in Dortmund in 2006, has openly accused the prosecutors of lacking interest in investigating the murders. . . .
1b. It comes as no surprise to learn that Germany’s domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) has been funding neo-Nazis. (Observers had concluded as much in the wake of the Thuringian neo-Nazi scandal.)
The cozy relationship between German intelligence and Nazi and fascist elements looms large in the reopening of the Munich Oktoberfest bombing of 1980.
“Government Development Aid for neo-Nazis;” German-Foreign-Policy.com; 11/16/2011.
New revelations on the neo-Nazi serial murders of nine men of non-German origin and a female police officer are incriminating a German domestic intelligence agency. According to media reports, a member of a recently discovered neo-Nazi terror group presumably had contact to the Thuringia Office for the Protection of the Constitution — even after he went underground. The affair could become an “intelligence agency problem,” predicts the domestic policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Hans-Peter Uhl. In the 1990s, under the pretext that they are very important informants, the Thuringia Office for the Protection of the Constitution had, in fact, paid amounts of DMs in the six-digits to influential right-wing extremist militants. The militants used this money to set up neo-Nazi structures in Thuringia, including the “Thüringer Heimatschutz” (Thuringia Homeland Protection), an organization of violent neo-Nazis. The members of the terror group, responsible for the murders, are not the only ones who have their origins in this organization. Leading functionaries of today’s extreme right are also coming from that organization, which has been officially disbanded, but is still at work in other structures. Today some of its militants, for example, are organizing neo-Nazi festivals with international participation aimed at networking the extreme right throughout Europe.
Covered by the Intelligence Agency
The aid furnished by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz — VS) to the neo-Nazi scene, to set up their structures in the federal state of Thuringia, is exemplary for the aid provided throughout the 1990s. As far as has become known, this aid crystallized around two prominent militants, Thomas Dienel and Tino Brandt. Both had been informants for Thuringia’s VS. According to a study on Thuringia’s extreme right, Dienel had been considered one of the most active neo-Nazis in Thuringia, until the mid-1990s. “Explicit threats to use violence against foreigners and people with diverging opinions” were part “of his repertoire.” However, his contribution was particularly vital in the field of setting things up and organizing. He established links to influential neo-Nazis in West Germany, organized many “demonstrations and actions,” with the founding of a party [1] on April 20, 1992, he created the “first structured gathering place for young neo-Nazis” and he radicalized members of the NPD. “Therefore, he has left a trail behind that can be followed to current structures” in the neo-Nazi scene, writes the author of the study, published in 2001.[2] The media reported that in the 1990s the VS paid Dienel 25,000 DM — officially for his service as an informant. Dienel acknowledged publicly that he had sometimes coordinated his actions with the VS, for which he also had received money. The VS had also helped him in court: “They covered me.”[3] . . . Read more »
2. The scale of the funding for the group was unprecedented for payments to “informers.”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has come under fire for paying almost a quarter of a million dollars to a neo-Nazi informer linked to a far-right terror group.
Opposition lawmakers and anti-Nazi campaigners criticized the payments made over 18 years after they were first reported Sunday by conservative weekly Bild am Sonntag.
Officials at the intelligence agency declined to comment on the report. But the head of a parliamentary committee tasked with investigating a string of murders allegedly carried out by the group says the information appears accurate.
Lawmaker Sebastian Edathy told The Associated Press on Monday that the newspaper’s report matched information submitted to his committee.
Edathy said the payments totaling €180,000 ($240,000) to a man identified by the newspaper as Thomas R. were “off the scale” for an informant.
3. German intelligence destroyed their files on the group the day before they were to be handed over to a prosecutor.
Germany’s equivalent of MI5 has found itself at the centre of a deepening intelligence service scandal after it was confirmed yesterday that its agents had destroyed files containing vital information about a neo-Nazi terrorist gang hours before the material was due to be handed to federal prosecutors.
The case concerns the National Socialist Underground, a neo-Nazi group responsible for Germany’s worst acts of far-right violence since the Second World War. Its members murdered a policewoman, shot dead nine immigrants, mounted two bomb attacks and robbed 14 banks to finance their operations.
Police discovered the bodies of the gang’s two ringleaders, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, in a burned-out caravan in eastern Germany last November. Investigators established that they had committed suicide after robbing a bank. A third member of the gang, Beate Zschäpe, was caught and arrested. She is still being questioned.
Details of the scandal were leaked to the German news agency DPA yesterday, prompting German Interior Ministry officials to admit that domestic intelligence service agents, who had been keeping the gang under surveillance for more than a decade, had destroyed files containing information about the group.
They revealed to a parliamentary inquiry that the agents had shredded the documents on November 11 – the day they were due to be handed to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor, who had taken over the investigation.
Jörg Ziercke, the President of Germany’s Federal Criminal Bureau, also admitted to the inquiry that his office “had failed” over the neo-Nazi investigation.
The revelations increased suspicions that neo-Nazi cell members were in the pay of German intelligence. In the past, the organisation has made no secret of the fact that it uses secret service “moles” to infiltrate the country’s far-right groups. However, keeping neo-Nazis on the secret service payroll would amount to active collaboration and imply that members of the intelligence service supported their criminal acts. The intelligence services have admitted to a parliamentary inquiry that both domestic intelligence and German military intelligence used so-called “moles” to infiltrate the neo-Nazi organisations frequented by NSU ringleaders Mundlos and Böhnhardt. . . .
4a. A minor correction (sort of): according to this article, the agency didn’t destroy the files one day before they were to be handed over...instead, they are claiming that the files were on November 12, 2011, one day after the informant-status of the neo-nazi pair became public OR they were destroyed in January, 2011. It was all due to innocent confusion by a “misguided individual” that heads the agency department for procuring intelligence sources:
The official investigation into the National Socialist Underground (NSU), the neo-Nazi cell which is believed to have killed at least 10 people over a period of years, has been marked by a series of embarrassing failures and slip-ups by the authorities. But new revelations about the case threaten to trigger a major scandal with possible political consequences.
...
Members of the parliamentary investigative committee reacted to the news with shock and outrage. “Such incidents make it difficult to convincingly refute the conspiracy theories,” said committee chairman Sebastian Edathy, a member of the center-left opposition Social Democrats. There has been persistent speculation that the domestic intelligence service may have used members of the NSU as informants.
Other members of the committee were equally scathing. Hartfrid Wolff of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party described the incident as “unbelievable,” while Clemens Binninger of the center-right Christian Democratic Union said it created scope “for all kinds of theories.” “Clearly the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has a lot to hide,” said Petra Pau of the far-left Left Party, which has been particularly critical of the authorities’ handling of the case.
Individual ‘Acted Alone’
On Thursday, officials at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the shredding of the documents was unprecedented. They insisted it was due to the misguided actions of an individual and not the result of an order to destroy the files.
Sources in the intelligence community said that a legal investigation had been opened against an employee of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The officer is apparently head of a so-called “procurement” department, which is responsible for running sources and obtaining information from them. The agency’s management is “appalled” and “absolutely furious” about the incident, sources said, adding that officials were trying to reconstruct the files as best they could. Apparently seven files were destroyed.
The agency has reconstructed the timeline of the documents’ destruction. The department head supposedly received orders on Nov. 10, 2011 to search his files for the names of the three NSU members — Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschäpe — and look for possible connections to the far-right scene. Among other files, the officer looked at documents relating to Operation Rennsteig.
The operation, whose name refers to a famous hiking trail in the state of Thuringia, was intended to recruit informers from a far-right group called the Thüringer Heimatschutz (“Thuringian Homeland Protection”) during the period from 1996 to 2003. Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe, who all used to live in the Thuringian city of Jena, were also active in the group for a time. Both the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Germany’s military intelligence agency, the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), were involved in the operation.
The department head allegedly did not find anything of interest in his files. One day later, on Nov. 11, he informed his superiors that he had not found the names of the three suspected terrorists or other evidence in his records. At the same time, he noted that seven so-called procurement files had been archived for too long. This type of file includes all the details about the recruitment of a source, including their codename and observations about their character. The agency is generally obliged to destroy such files after a maximum period of 10 years. The department head gave orders for the files to be destroyed immediately. A day later, on Nov. 12, another employee carried out the shredding as per instructions.
Embarrassing Revelations
The behavior of the department head appears odd, however. He told his superior officer in January 2012 that the seven files from Operation Rennsteig had already been destroyed in or around January 2011 because of the time limit on files. Only when Fromm, the agency head, asked follow-up questions did the officer admit that the files had actually been destroyed on Nov. 12, 2011 — in other words, just as the cell’s connection to the murder series was uncovered. At that time, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office had taken over the investigation and requested to see all the relevant documents.
According to sources in the intelligence community, Operation Rennsteig was a large-scale attempt to infiltrate the far-right scene around Thüringer Heimatschutz. Intelligent agents initially selected 35 “prospective candidates” as potential sources. Eight of those people were later recruited as informers, with six of them being run by the federal intelligence agency and the others by the state-level intelligence agency in Thuringia. In addition, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution drew up a list of 73 men of “military service age” for the Military Counterintelligence Service. It is unclear what the military intelligence agency wanted to do with the list. But it is perhaps significant that the names of Mundlos and Bönhardt appeared on that list.
....
4b. It also sounds like the remaining files that are to be turned over are expected to demonstrate that the gang members were, indeed, working as informants, raising questions of just how damning was the evidence on the destroyed files. Also note that the military intelligence unit, MAD, which was also working on “Operation Rennsteig”, is cooperating...they just happened to not keep any files at all on the matter:
“German Intelligence Grants Access to Files in Neo-Nazi Probe”; Deutsche Welle; 3/7/2012.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has offered the parliamentary committee access to 25 files relating to “Operation Rennsteig,” which was aimed at recruiting informants in right-wing circles in the eastern state of Thuringia between 1997 and 2003.
The operation involved the federal domestic intelligence agency, the regional agency in Thuringia and, according to the committee, the military intelligence service MAD.
The files are expected to reveal that the authorities were working with informants from the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU), an extremist group that is believed to have killed 10 people with non-German backgrounds over more than a decade before their cover was blown earlier this year.
Last week, it became apparent that some of the files relating to the operation were shredded by the federal intelligence agency last year. On Monday, the head of the agency, Heinz Fromm, resigned his post.
Another head rolls
On Tuesday, Fromm’s counterpart at Thuringia’s intelligence agency, Thomas Sippel, also stepped down in connection with the revelations. He will go into early retirement.
The chairman of the parliamentary committee, Sebastian Edathy, also urged the MAD to release their files, while the MAD insists it is cooperating. It also said on Tuesday that it does not have “Operation Rennsteig” files.
5. Another incidence of shredding of files on neo-Nazis has emerged, leading to the resignation of Claudia Schmid, the agency’s top Berlin official.
After the shredding of files on the National Socialist Union (which may well have been in cahoots with Germany’s domestic intelligence service), it emerges that files on Blood and Honor, another neo-Nazi organization, were shredded by an official of the Verfassungschutz.
Of possible significance is the fact that one of Schmid’s colleagues was friendly with “Landser” a German Nazi band.
“Fifth Head Rolls in NSU Investigation Affair”; The Local; 11/14/2012.
. . . . None of the files appeared to be related to the National Socialist Underground, which is suspected of killing 10 people between 2000 and 2007. Four other top Germany security officials have resigned this year due to blunders in the NSU investigation.
Claudia Schmid, head of the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution, requested a transfer to another job the day after she announced that her office had illegally destroyed files on the far-right “Blood & Honour” organisation rather than presenting them to the Berlin state archive. She described the action as a “regrettable mistake.”
The head of the authority’s department on extremism, responsible for the most recent case of illegal file shredding, has also stepped down from his post. Further employees are subjects of an internal investigation for their role in destroying the files.
It is still unclear whether the destroyed files were connected to the case of the National Socialist Underground terrorist organisation, which went undetected for over a decade. However, the files did contain information on “Landser,” a neo-Nazi band with whom an authority employee was once friendly.
6. In what has become routine, it has been revealed that a German intelligence officer set up a branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Germany. This is but the latest disclosure in a series of revelations about the profound relationship between German intelligence and neo-fascists of various kinds in Germany.
Far from being “infiltrators” into these groups, the operatives appear much more like “handlers.” German legislators have raised the very important question of the extent to which these neo-fascist groups have actually been spawned by the intelligence operatives in their ranks. We note that the German police officer murdered by the NSU was part of a milieu that included agents in the KKK of Germany.
“German Intelligence Set Up KKK Branch”; Germany Watch; 11/01/2012.
The German branch of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was set up and led by an undercover agent of the state of Baden-Württemberg’s secret service.
According to a report in the Tagesspiegel daily newspaper, an organisation called the “European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan–Realm of Germany” was established by a white supremacist government spy in October 2000. A short time later, the man was appointed by a KKK group in the US to the position of national leader, a “Grand Dragon”. The German branch existed until early 2003.
But that was not all. The agent was not only working for the secret service of a German state; it appears he was also operating with the official protection of one of his colleagues. An employee of the intelligence agency is suspected of having passed on to him “anonymous confidential information” in 2002. In particular, this person allegedly warned him that his phone was being tapped.
The Ku Klux Klan is one of a long line of suspicious organisations set up by German secret service agents with the help of state funds.
Investigations into the National Democratic Party (NDP) associations in the states of Thuringia and North Rhine-Westphalia had already revealed they could not have developed as they did without funding provided by the secret service. Several neo-Nazis openly boasted they had drawn funds from the intelligence service for a number of years.
As is now customary in such episodes, authorities asserted that the case was an “isolated” one. According to Die Welt, the daily newspaper, there is “no reason to doubt that agency employees fulfil their statutory duties correctly and irreproachably, and there is no reason to believe that they lack awareness of democratic procedures”.
The close links between the state and the Ku Klux Klan raises new questions about possible links between government agencies and terrorists of the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Plenty of overlap has been discovered between the KKK and the NSU.
Two of the three members of the NSU, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, were spotted near Jena at a cross burning attended by 20 neo-Nazis in the mid-1990s. Tschäpe even had photos of the scene and personally informed the public prosecutor about their attendance. That was before Tschäpe, Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos went into hiding and began their killing spree.
The identity of another undercover agent, operating in the KKK’s ranks under the code name “Corelli”, was discovered by police in 1998 on an address list Mundlos had hidden in a garage. But the main cause of suspicion is the fact that two members of the relatively small KKK group in Baden-Württemberg were close colleagues of the NSU’s last murder victim, policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter. Kiesewetter was shot in April 2007 and the series of NSU killings then abruptly ceased.
The murder of a German policewoman is not commensurate with the criminal operations of the NSU. All the other murders had immigrants as their victims and were obviously racially motivated. To date, there is no plausible explanation why Kiesewetter became a target of the NSU. The question arises as to whether the former KKK memberships of her squad leader and another police colleague played a role.
A parliamentary committee of inquiry into the NSU is now dealing with the case. But no clarification can be expected from that quarter because the investigation is systematically blocked by the authorities and the committee itself has little interest in bringing the facts to light.
Only occasionally, when it is all too obvious they are being led around by the nose, do the committee members allow some measure of the truth to surface. Responding to the new revelations about the KKK, Free Democratic Party deputy Hartfrid Wolff groaned: “Were there then any members [of the KKK] who were not in the police or secret service?” A legitimate question!
The authorities are continuing their attempt to prevent any further unravelling of the events. They have stopped referring to undeniable revelations as “mishaps”, “slips” and “isolated cases”; they append the official designation of “secret” to files that could lead to further clarification, or they destroy huge numbers of them. It is now known that far more records relating to the NSU affair have been destroyed than was initially announced. . . .
7. It should not surprise an objective observer that the NSU was far bigger than originally believed.
As preparations for the trial of a member of the group are readied, it is apparent that the German government is in damage control mode, denying Turkish media access to the courtroom in which the proceedings will take place.
Most of the victims of the group were of Turkish extraction. (Germany has a large Turkish population, as a result of the “gastarbeiter” (guest workers) brought into the country as laborers.
Suffice it to say that Turkish journalists and editors aren’t buying the official excuses proffered by German officials.
After the Bavarian authorities postponed the start of the trial to “reconsider” media access, the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey scored the German government for a “predetermined“verdict, labeling the trial a sham.
“German neo-Nazi Cell Bigger than Previously Thought” [Reuters]; Yahoo News; 3/24/2013.
A German neo-Nazi cell that waged a racist killing spree over a period of seven years without being detected by the authorities may have had a far bigger network of supporters than initially thought.
According to a report in the Bild newspaper on Sunday, security officials have compiled a list of 129 people who are suspected of helping the group, accused of murdering eight ethnic Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.
The existence of the cell, which called itself the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), only came to light by chance in late 2011 after two members committed suicide in the aftermath of a botched bank robbery and a female accomplice set fire to an apartment used by the gang.
Germans, burdened by their Nazi past, were horrified by the revelations and Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly apologized to the families of the murder victims.
But until now, officials have put the blame on a very small group, based in the eastern city of Zwickau.
“The new number is shockingly high,” Sebastian Edathy, chairman of a special parliamentary committee set up to probe the NSU, told Bild, confirming the list. “Now we have to clear up whether any of these people knew about the crimes or were informants.” . . . .
8. As preparations for the trial of a member of the group are readied, it is apparent that the German government is in damage control mode, denying Turkish media access to the courtroom in which the proceedings will take place.
Most of the victims of the group were of Turkish extraction. (Germany has a large Turkish population, as a result of the “gastarbeiter” (guest workers) brought into the country as laborers.
“Bavarian Courts Prevent Turkish Media Reporting Nazi Case”; Germany Watch; 3/28/2013.
In an apparent attempt to prevent Turkish media reporting on the full facts of the case, Munich’s Higher Regional Court released a list of media organizations that would be given reserved seats in the upcoming trial of an alleged neo-Nazi believed to have been involved in the murder of 10 people, mostly of Turkish origin. The list doesn’t include a single Turkish media outlet.
The court is claiming it provided accreditation on a first-come, first-served basis, but international outrage is growing. Turks in Germany and in Turkey are feeling left in the cold over a series of murders of which their community was the primary target.
The trial of Beate Zschäpe, a suspected member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) neo-Nazi terror cell (with links to German Intelligence), is expected to be the biggest in the country since the Red Army Faction trial of the mid-1970s. International attention is expected to be considerable, particularly given the xenophobic nature of the crimes and the involvement of Neo-Nazis.
This week, Turkish journalists and politicians have been demanding a guaranteed presence at the trial. Many are asking why such a small courtroom has been chosen and why an overflow room with live video isn’t being set up for journalists.
One of its primary responsibilities is to ensure that the process of truth-finding takes place with the greatest possible openness and transparency. It is incomprehensible to claim that a larger court room couldn’t have been found in Munich for the trial … indeed, it’s a shamefully inadequate excuse.
It is entirely incomprehensible that it wasn’t possible to secure even just one guaranteed seat for the Turkish media in the courtroom. . . .
. . . . Celal Özcan, the Berlin-based editor in chief of the European edition of Turkish daily Hürriyet, writes; “My newspaper, Hürriyet, called the court repeatedly before the accreditation period asking to be informed of dates so that we wouldn’t miss them. We registered on the first day of accreditation, and now we are told by the press office of the Munich Higher Regional Court that others were faster? How can that be? It is absolutely unacceptable that the Turkish media has been excluded from the courtroom. Many Turks aren’t just disappointed — they are shocked, both in Turkey and in Germany.” . . . .
9. Suffice it to say that Turkish journalists and editors aren’t buying the official excuses proffered by German officials.
After the Bavarian authorities postponed the start of the trial to “reconsider” media access, the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey scored the German government for a “predetermined“verdict, labeling the trial a sham.
“Turkish Deputy PM Speaks Out About German/Nazi Suspicions”; Germany Watch; 4/18/2013.
As we mentioned previously, the trial of a neo-Nazi in Germany was largely condemned before it started, as the Bavarian Courts had excluded Turkish media from being present at the trial — despite the fact that the trial concerns murders by the neo-Nazi group NSU of a number of Turkish people.
The neo-Nazi murder trial in Germany does not have any significance anymore for Turkey, since the result is pre-determined, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ has said.
“The ruling of the Munich State High Court will have no significance from now on for me,” Bozdağ told Anatolia news agency. “The court has not started the trial yet. But this is a court that ended the trial even before it started.”
Germany’s highest court postponed the start of the trial early this week after announcing an overhaul of disputed rules on media access.
Proceedings were to have begun on April 17 against a woman accused of being part of a Nazi cell blamed for 10 murders. But after Germany’s top court ordered the Munich judges last week to expand foreign media access to the trial, its starting date had to be put back, in a move victims groups called a “catastrophe.” . . .
. . . . Bozdağ stressed that there is an atmosphere that the trial is a show, for ‘completing routines.’
“The court chief has lost his neutrality. You cannot expect a justice from a trial whose head lost his neutrality. This trial is over for us, we are waiting the result as a mere formality.”
We are waiting for confirmation of the specifics Bozdağ refers to, however as we mentioned prviously, Germany uses this court when Nazis are on trial because members of this court are linked to the Nazi charity ‘Stille Hilfe’.
Expanding on other concerns linked to Germany, Bozdağ has called on German authorities to investigate claims that two recent fires may have been racially motivated. . . .
10. The venerable Der Spiegel informs us that a “raffle” awarding press seating to the upcoming trial of one of its members has managed to exclude many of the Federal Republic’s credible and best known publications.
Coming fresh on the heels of the (apparently deliberate and systematic) exclusion of Turkish media from the trial, this maneuver can only heighten suspicion that the powers that be in the Federal Republic do NOT want the truth to emerge.
This gambit is also noteworthy in that it strongly suggests that the German public opinion is worrisome to that country’s power brokers.
It appears that the truth about the Third Reich, its influence on the Federal Republic, and the links between the Underground Reich and that country’s security services remains eclipsed for most German citizens.
“Top Papers Left Out: Court Faces Fresh Trouble Over Press Seats”; Der Spiegel; 4/30/2013.
The Munich court where the NSU neo-Nazi terror trial is due to start on May 6 faces fresh controversy over media accreditation after several major German newspapers failed to obtain seats in a lottery of press passes. It was the second attempt to allocate seats after Turkish media had been left out in the first round.
The Munich court overseeing the biggest neo-Nazi trial in German history on Monday faced new complaints over its media accreditation process when leading German newspapers failed to obtain passes for the 50-seat press gallery.
The court postponed the start of the trial from its original date on April 17 to sort the problem out after the Federal Constitutional Court, responding to a complaint from a Turkish newspaper, ordered it to allocate seats to foreign journalists.
In an attempt to be completely fair, it decided to raffle the press passes. The venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and another national broadsheet, Die Welt, failed to get press accreditation in the lottery conducted on Monday. Die Tageszeitung, another well-known German newspaper, also failed to get a seat.
All three said on Monday they were considering legal action against the allocation. Publications that obtained seats in the raffle included lesser known newspapers such as local paper Hallo Munich and women’s magazine Brigitte. . . .
11. One of the most significant aspects of the case is the fact that powerful elements within the German government are going to extraordinary lengths to eclipse the institutional connections of the group.
Turkish media were excluded from being seated at the trial of the group, many of whose victims were Turks. In addition, leading German media were left out of a “raffle” to award seating at the trial.
For more than a decade, we’ve examined the 9/11 attacks, the Nazi and fascist connections to that attack, in particular.
In our visits with Daniel Hopsicker, we have noted that Mohamed Atta was fraternizing with Germans and Austrians in South Florida, having been brought into the United States (from Germany) by the Carl Duisberg Society.
Now, Germany Watch has published an intriguing hypothesis concerning the murders committed by the group and the 9/11 attacks.
Against the background of German intelligence connections to the 9/11 attacks, the story below notes that murders 2, 3 and 4 occurred in the immediate run-up to 9/11, the fourth less than two weeks before.
The National Socialist Underground then disappeared from public view for two years.
The presence of a German intelligence officer at the scene of one of the murders (who possessed Third Reich documents as well as other Nazi paraphernalia) also is worth noting, as is the useful “amnesia” (mind control?) of one of the German police officers shot by the group.
Of course there are other possibilities for the duplicity on the part of the authorities, however the working hypothesis presented by the Germany Watch folks is more than a little intriguing.
“The Neo-Nazi Show Trial And The Timing Of The Murders”; Germany Watch; 5/5/2013.
The German show trial for the National Socialist Underground begins this week, after several false starts due to the Bavarian Court not wanting interested press at the hearings (see here).
There is a strange coincidence to the dates and places;
Murders number 2, 3, 4, and 5;
Murder of Abdurrahim Özüdoğru
On 13 June 2001, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru was killed by two shots in the head with the same silenced CZ 83 already used in the murder of Enver Şimşek. Özüdoğru, who worked as a machinist for a big company in Nuremberg (which company?) had been helping out in a tailor’s shop; the murder was discovered by a passer-by who looked through the shop window and saw the body sitting in the back of the shop, covered in blood.Murder of Süleyman Taşköprü
On 27 June 2001 between 10:45 and 11:15 a.m, Süleyman Taşköprü, aged 31, died in his greengrocer’s shop in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld after being shot in the head three times. This was two weeks after the second murder, and the same guns as in the first case were used, a CZ 83 and a 6.35 mm gun.Murder of Habil Kılıç
On 29 August 2001 Habil Kılıç became the fourth victim. Kılıç, aged 38, who was married and had a daughter, was shot at point-blank range in his greengrocer’s shop in Munich-Ramersdorf. This was the first of two murders in Munich.The Theory
Are these linked to the 9/11 Hamburg cell? They all worked shop fronts, which are perfect for low level intelligence messengers, they may have been supplying something along the lines of fake ID/paperwork or weapons, or perhaps they were just messengers/couriers for German intelligence/ the Hamburg Cell Jihadis. The Hamburg Cell also frequented an extremist mosque in Munich.
Once the 9/11 operation was underway, German intelligence cleaned house. The “NSU” vanished for 2 years just a little over a week before 9/11, with no more linked murders in that 2 year period. Repeat — the last murder was just over a week before 9/11, whilst one murder was Hamburg and one was Munich. If the NSU murders were normal far right extremists sending a message to asylum seekers, where’s the message? There was none.
So, then two and a half years later in Rostock-Toitenwinkel, 25 February 2004, between 10:10 and 10:20, Mehmet Turgut was shot three times in the head and neck with a silenced CZ 83 and died instantaneously. Turgut, who had been living illegally in Hamburg, was in Rostock on a visit and had been asked by an acquaintance to open up a doner kebab shop that day. He was clearly targeted and enticed to be there that day and time. That is NOT a random far right killing.
Because of Turgut’s link to Hamburg, Rostock police made the connection to the third victim, Süleyman Taşköprü, thus establishing the term doner murders.
On 6 April 2006, just two days after the murder of Mehmet Kubaşık, Halit Yozgat became the last victim of the murder series. Yozgat, who ran an internet café in Kassel, Hesse, was also shot in the head with a silenced gun. On the occasion of this murder an agent of the Hessian Office for the BfV Protection of the Constitution was present. The agent claimed first to have left the premises shortly before the murder, but later changed his statement when presented with evidence of witnesses who had seen him present when the murder happened. His involvement with the case gave rise to suspicions that a German agency might be linked to the murders.
When this BfV officer was investigated, various Nazi paraphernalia was present in his apartment, including some documents from the Third Reich, though it is not publicly known what these docs referred to. Is he really a Nazi, or is that being used to make out he is an extremist infiltrator of German intelligence — that he was linked to the murder through his Nazi affiliates, rather than being present at the murder BECAUSE he was working for German intelligence?? . . .
12. A recent book by a former official of the BKA, the German federal police (equivalent of the FBI) focuses on the Nazi and SS origins of that agency. (33 of 48 top BKA officials at the agency’s inception had backgrounds as SS leaders.)
Supplemented by an internal colloquium, the inquiry notes the postwar Nazi networking within the BKA and the effect this appears to have had on postwar German law enforcement, particularly with regard to policy toward right-wing extremists, anti-immigrant xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
Worth remembering in this regard is the concept of bureaucratic inertia. Government bureaucracies manifest that inertia, and the contemporary German collusion with Nazi elements must be viewed against the background of the Nazi/SS genesis of the BKA.
We should not fail to note that the SS/Nazi officials heading the BKA would undoubtedly have answered to former Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller, security director for the Bormann Capital Network and the Underground Reich.
German Police Begins Banishing Long Shadow of Nazi Past; Deutsche Welle; 2012.
A Federal Crime Office investigation into how former SS officers remained at its helm well into the 1960s is well underway, providing new insights into how Nazis were reintegrated into mainstream society.
The ties between some BKA founders and Nazis are no longer disputed. . . .
. . . A total of three colloquia focusing on the role of ex-Nazi police officers who founded the BKA in 1951 and made up the core of its leadership into the 1970s, was launched by the BKA in the summer. The agency has opened its archives to an inter-disciplinary team of renowned researchers.
The founding core of the BKA included some 48 members of the Nazi security forces known as the Reichskriminalpolizei, or Kripo. They became part of a new Criminal Police Force in the postwar British Occupied Zone, which later evolved into the BKA. According to Ziercke, of the 48, 33 had been SS leaders. . . .
. . . .At the end of the 1950s, nearly all of the BKA leadership positions were still filled with ex-Nazis or SS leaders. According to Ziercke, the police organization was rife with cliques and internal connections leading back to the Nazi era that helped with re-commissioning.
The BKA’s investigation aims to examine the question of whether the Nazis’ notions on crime fighting were carried on after the war. . . .
. . . . But then came the publication of a book by a former BKA employee Dieter Schenk. Titled “The Brown Roots of the BKA,” the book argues that the organization had been founded by active Nazis.
Whether the BKA founders were Nazis or merely careerists is something discussed in the Schenk book as well as the current colloquia. More important, according to Schenk, is his belief that the political leanings of the BKA founders can still be felt in its policy, “in the half-heartedness with which it has fought against the radical right, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant” elements in the country. . . .
http://www.jpost.com/landedpages/printarticle.aspx?id=380148
October 29, 2014 Wednesday 5 Heshvan 5775 23:04 IST print gohome
The Jerusalem Post — Israel News
German ‘Nazi’ classroom under investigation
By JPOST.COM STAFF
10/29/2014
According to media reports, the ninth-graders have taken to popular messaging app WhatsApp to promote Nazi slogans.
A school district in Germany has caused quite the media stir this week after images of students saluting with Hitler-like mustaches surfaced in an influential publication.
German newspaper Bild broke the story on Tuesday, revealing that members of a high school class were communicating using the notorious Nazi salute and other 1930s-Germany rhetoric.
According to local media reports, the ninth-graders have taken to popular messaging app WhatsApp to promote Nazi slogans, anti-Semitic jokes and other offensive content. Twenty-nine students are part of the group.
The school kids reportedly greet one another with the ‘Hiel Hitler’ sign, a symbol that has come to define the Third Reich’s reign over 70 years ago.
The case has grabbed the attention of the cops, who have launched an investigation into the school. A police spokesperson said they were mulling legal action against the teens.
As for the school district’s knowledge of the controversial activity — a spokesperson from the Education Ministry stated that if the report turned out to be true, they would show no tolerance.
http://www.thelocal.de/20141113/neo-nazi-to-face-child-sex-abuse-charges-tino-brandt-nsu-thuringia
Neo-Nazi to face child sex abuse charges
Far-right extremist and former informant for the security services Tino Brandt will face charges of serious sexual abuse of children.
State prosecutors in Gera, Thuringia, said that Brandt, 39, would answer 157 charges for acts that took place between 2011 and 2014.
“This means that he himself had sexual contact with children and young people,” a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said.
Brandt is accused of having supplied minors to adults for sex in exchange for money in 45 cases.
As leader of the “Thuringia Homeland Defence” group, Brandt had contact with the National Socialist Underground members Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe before they began their serial murders.
News of the charges against Brandt came just one day after his handler from the Office for Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) had given evidence at Zschäpe’s trial.
Prosecutors said that there was no connection to his political opinions in the present charges.
They added that Brandt, who has been in custody since June during the investigation, had co-operated with the investigation and admitted to some of the allegations.
Oh great. The CDU is at risk of getting out-Nazi-ed by the AfD in the realm of cuddling up to growing anti-Muslim far right movements. And the temptations for the CDU to catch up with the AfD in this area are clearly only going to grow:
“We are the natural allies of this movement,” said AfD deputy leader (and former CDU official) Alexander Gauland. Well, you can’t argue with that!
Here’s something to keep in mind involving any future terror attacks perpetrated by Syrian refugees who are only identified by their fingerprints after the fact and can’t actually be found or even verified as having ever existed: it’s probably a good time to suspect neo-Nazis:
“If the plan had succeeded, his fingerprints would have registered on the refugee records system and led investigators to his false identity as a Syrian asylum seeker, turning fresh scrutiny on migrants in Germany.”
That was the plan: frame a Christian Syrian refugee for the killing a variety of left-wing politicians:
That was the plan...the incredibly brazen plan that didn’t raise an alarms despite the fact that the guy wrote a masters thesis about “political change and subversion strategy” that contained far-right ideas and the guy didn’t even speak Arabic:
And that incredibly brazen plan apparently almost worked and involved an entire cell of far-right extremist:
So what’s next for Germany’s investigators now that there’s signs of a wider network of far-right extremists who are actively planning false-flag terror plots? Well, the plan appears to be to search all barracks and hope that the neo-Nazis don’t hide their neo-Nazi-ness after Nazi memorabilia was just found at a second military barracks, this time in southwest Germany:
“Volker Wieker, inspector general of the Bundeswehr, the association representing German soldiers’ interests, ordered the inquiry after pictures of soldiers from the Wehrmacht, the army which served Adolf Hitler, and several Nazi-era helmets were found at a barracks in Donaueschingen in southwest Germany.”
Well, at least Germany’s military is conducting some sort of review. But isn’t there a more proactive approach the Germany military could take? After all, the exposed terror plot was only discovered after police traced a loaded gun “Franco A” stashed at Vienna International Airport back to the fake Syrian refugee persona. And if any military on the planet needs to worry about neo-Nazis infiltrating their ranks and acquiring valuable skills, it’s the German military.
And yes, there is a more proactive approach that could be taken. But isn’t taken for some reason and hasn’t been taken for a long time
“It’s not that there are a lack of clues, rather that they are often discovered when it’s too late, or by coincidence. The failure of MAD in connection with the NSU murders suspect raises the prospect that extremist tendencies were noticed, but that other soldiers and supervisors either didn’t react, or reacted too mildly.”
Yep, the NSU murder suspect, André E., basically trained as an open neo-Nazi. And nobody cared:
And sure, that was 17 years ago, but it’s not like there haven’t been plenty of incidents since, including the newly exposed terror plot. And while it’s suggested that dropping the conscription policy has led to a concentration of far-right extremists populating the military’s ranks, note that there was indeed conscription 17 years ago (it was ended in 2011) and André E. was still allowed to train as an open neo-Nazi, so it’s not like this is purely an issue with dropping the conscription policy. At the same, if dropping conscription did indeed make the problem worse, well, we probably shouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more “André E.“s hiding in plain sight.
So we’ll see what, if anything, is discovered by Germany’s full-scale barracks search. At least now that this plot has been exposed it should at least give pause to any groups planning similar false-flag terror attacks in the works. In the mean time, lazy neo-Nazi networks in the German military that don’t bother to hide the Nazi memorabilia in their barracks in time had better watch out! Maybe. Or, as the whole NSU scandal has taught us about these, maybe they have nothing to worry about, which is party of why this whole situation is so worrying.
This is getting interesting: The head of Germany’s intelligence, Hans-Georg Maaße (Maassen), is about to be fired following allegations of ties to the AfD. Maaße faced scrutiny over possible far right sympathies after he asserted that there was “no evidence” of a “manhunt” against foreigners after dismissed days of neo-Nazi riots in the city of Chemnitz. He also questions the authenticity of video footage showing the anti-immigrant riots, suggesting they could be faked. He was also charged with sharing confidential government reports with the AfD and advising the party on how to avoid surveillance:
“Maaßen has come under fire in recent weeks for allegedly sharing confidential government reports with the AfD and advising the anti-immigration party on how to avoid being put under surveillance by his agency. He also faced heavy blowback for questioning the authenticity of video footage from the anti-immigrant riots in Chemnitz, and claiming there was “no evidence” of a “manhunt” against foreigners.”
Yep, the head of Germany’s intelligence appears to have ties to neo-Nazis. That’s not wildly alarming or anything.
And as the following article notes, this wasn’t the first time Maassen’s ties to the far right have been questioned. A former leader of the AfD’s youth wing wrote a book this year — “Inside AFD: The report of a drop-out” — that claimed that Maassen had advised ex-AfD leader Frauke Petry on how the party could avoid being put under surveillance by his office:
“The violence in the eastern city has shaken Germany deeply. But Maassen said his BfV domestic intelligence agency had “no reliable information about such hunts taking place”, and that a video circulating showing that happening could have been faked.”
There was “no reliable information about such hunts taking place”...except for the videos of people being hunted down, which could have been faked. Yep, it sure sounds like Germany has a Nazi-sympathizer problem...in the top office of the BfV. But we already knew that. Or at least should have suspected it following the publication of book that made exactly these claims:
And that book is part of what makes Massen’s recent comments so amazing: he was already under scrutiny for alleged far right ties before he made these recent comments about the Chemnitz riots.
It’s also interesting to note that Maassen apparently clashed with government officials over the decision of the BfV to blame Russia for the Bundestag hacks of 2015:
Recall that it was the BfV’s initial public attribution of the Bundestag hack to the Russian government in January of 2016 that represented the first instance of “Fancy Bear” being declared a Russian government hacking entity, as opposed to just being a sophisticated entity presumed to be operating out of Russia. This was followed by another BfV report in May of 2016 officially blaming the Russian military intelligence for the hacks. Also recall that it was that 2015 Bundestag hack where the X‑Agent malware was used with a hard-coded 176.31.112.10 command and control server IP address that traced back to a server that was vulnerable to the Heartbleed attack. This was same IP address was hard-coded into the X‑Agent malware found in the DNC’s servers, which always seemed like a remarkably suspicious ‘clue’ because the DNC server hacks were supposed to have taken place until March/April of 2016, after the BfV blamed the Russian government for the Bundestag hacks. So it’s worth noting that Maasen was the head of the BfV during this period when the agency made the formal attribution of Fancy Bear to the Russian military intelligence which was important for establishing the initial accusation of Russian government hackers targeting the DNC later in 2016.
So how many times has Maassen met with the AfD? According to the following article, Maassen himself admits to 5 personal meetings with AfD members, which he tries to frame as not being very many given that he’s had 237 personal conversations with politicians since he took over the post in 2012. But as the article notes, the AfD didn’t actually enter Germany’s parliament until September of 2017, so 5 personal meetings with AfD since then is about one every couple of months or so on average. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot of neo-Nazi meetings. And while some of the information he passed along to AfD members during these meetings allegedly included numbers of the number of Islamist extremists in the country, it also sounds like Maassen shared with the AfD numbers of the BfV’s budget, which is reportedly secret and can only be discussed among very few Bundestag members in the parliament’s confidential committee:
“The relationship between Germany’s domestic spy chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) came under renewed scrutiny on Thursday, when it was revealed that the head of the domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), had passed on information from his yearly report to the far-right populist party ahead of its publication.”
The AfD got information from Maasen from the BfV’s annual report ahead of its publication. That sure was considerate of him. And this was confirmed by AfD Bundestag member Stephan Brandner:
Maassen tried to defend himself by out out that he’s supposed to speak to members of all political parties and keep them informed. He also tried to characterize his 5 personal meetings with AfD members out of a total of 237 meetings he’s had since 2012 as indicating no particular special interest in the AfD. But as the article points out, the AfD has only been in parliament since 2017 (September of 2017, to be precise):
But perhaps that most scandalous part of Maassen passing along information to the AfD is the the allegations that he passed top secret BfV budget information, which is something very few Bundestag members in the parliament’s confidential committee:
Also keep in mind that this budget information presumably wasn’t just like the BfV’s total budget. It was probably like the budget for different areas of the BfV. So did he pass along budget information on things like the budget for monitoring far right groups like the AfD or Pegida? That’s unclear, but based on everything we’ve seen it would almost be surprising at this point if he didn’t.
Here’s an update on the scandal in Germany over the apparent secret support of the far right by Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the BfV which is part of the Interior Ministry: So Maassen was indeed fired from the job. But it’s a firing that comes in the form of a promotion to a better-paid position of state secretary in the Interior Ministry. It turns out the head of the Interior Ministry, Horst Seehofer, balked at completely letting Maassen go, so promoting him out of the BfV was seen as the only viable compromise position.
Seehofer also happens to be the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the right-wing sister party to Merkel’s CDU. And as the following article notes, the CSU is as risk of losing its long-standing majority in Bavaria largely due to the rise of the AfD in the upcoming state elections on October 14. And Maassen is, of course, now a hero of the AfD and far right in general.
So it’s looking like the ruling German coalition is giving Maassen extra lenient treatment as a means of placating the CSU’s concerns over pissing off right-wing voters. But the ruling coalition isn’t just the CDU and CSU. The center-left SPD is also part of this coalition and the decision to promote Maassen is not surprisingly angering SPD voters and potentially driving them toward other parties like the Greens.
Despite these intra-coalition tensions there’s still no desire on the part of either the CDU or SPD leadership to break the coalition and call snap elections because polls currently show that both parties would lose voters to the AfD and Greens. And that ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation is why the row over what to do about Maassen is putting the ruling coalition into what is being described as a permanent crisis mode:
“Their solution — promoting spymaster Hans-Georg Maassen to a better paid position at the Interior Ministry — has only inflamed tensions among the rank-and-file of the ruling parties, whose leaders are united by fear more than collective purpose.”
Better pay at the same agency. It’s quite a ‘firing’, thanks to the intervention of Interior Ministry chief Horst Seehofer of the CSU:
This, in turns, has raised pressure within the SPD to either reconsider their current coalition — triggering elections — or else somehow deliver on policies that will stop the bleeding of voters:
But based on current polls that show both the CDU and SPD would lose voters to the AfD and Greens in any future elections, the SPD can’t simply pull out of the coalition at this point without expecting losses. So they’re basically stuck:
And at the same time the SPD views the demoralizing nature of the promotion of Maassen as a threat to its electoral chances, the Seehofer and the CSU can point to the state elections next month and the rising appeal of the AfD, and the risk that their appeal would only grow if Maassen was forced out entirely, as a political justification for the decision to basically give Maassen a promotion:
And that electoral urgency to placate the far right, at the cost of alienating the left, highlights the growing polarization of Germany’s political landscape.
So just how big are the electoral risks facing the CSU in the upcoming state elections? As the following article describes, there’s no risk that the AfD will overtake the CSU in Bavaria. Support for the CSU stood at 35 percent in recent polls, compared to the 47.7 percent it won in 2013 during the last regional election. And the AfD is currently polling at 11 percent, giving it enough support to enter the Bavarian state parliament for the first time. So there’s been a double-digit drop in support for the CSU and almost all of that drop appears to be explained by a rise in support for the AfD:
“The Christian Social Union (CSU), which has enjoyed six decades of dominance in the state, is predicted to suffer heavy losses in the vote on 14 October.”
So some degree of heavy losses for the CSU in the state elections in a few weeks is already a given. It’s just a question of how heavy those losses will be and how much of that translates into support for the AfD. And thus far, it’s looking like the CSU’s losses are the AfD’s gains:
And note how the CSU’s electoral success, or lack thereof, appears to be a kind of test on whether or not Germany’s conservatives can successfully articulate a policy regarding refugees and immigrants that is simultaneously pro- and anti-refugee, essentially making the argument that Germany needs to temporarily accept refugees while for humanitarian purposes while generally voicing opposition to the refugee policy and general and demanding that it not be repeated:
Will such an approach work for Bavaria’s voters? We’ll see, but if not and if the AfD surprises to the upside, we should probably expect parties like the CDU and CSU to start sound a lot more like the AfD going forward. Might there be another promotion for Hans-Georg Maassen too?
It’s also worth recalling that a member of the CSU is poised to become the new president of the European Commission in 2019 at the end of Jean-Claude Juncker’s term. Manfred Weber, the CSU politician who is also the head of the right-wing faction of the EU parliament, is seen as the likely person Germany is going to try get in that position and, according to EU custom, it’s seen as Germany’s ‘turn’ to put someone in a top-level EU position so if Germany wants to give Weber that position it will likely happen. And if the CSU ends up veering much further to the right that’s inevitably going to impact Weber’s decisions at the EU-wide level. It’s a reminder that the way the EU works, Germany’s problems are Europe’s problems, and right now Germany has a problem with a far right sympathizer at the head of the domestic intelligence office and it responded by giving the guy a promotion due to political concerns would only make the far right even stronger.
@Pterrafractyl–
It will be interesting to see how Germany’s formal diplomatic recognition of the Knights of Malta plays out in this political landscape, bearing in mind that Bavaria–home turf of the CSU–is heavily Catholic.
https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/news/detail/7730/
Background on the Knights of Malta here: https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-610-the-knights-of-malta-revisited/
Best,
Dave
Here’s a story to keep in mind in the context of the rise of the far right across Europe and the potential takeover of law enforcement agencies and the numerous scandals involve German authorities covering up for extremist groups: German authorities have been investigating a 30-odd member far right ‘prepper’ group called Nordkruez (Northern Cross) on suspicions that the group was preparing a terrorist attack. What they found was that the group not only had close links to the police and military but had also managed to access police computers and collect almost 25,000 names and addresses of local politicians who were supportive of the refugees during the refugee crisis in 2015. One of the members of Kordkruez was still employed in the special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations. Nordkruez then combined a “death list” of targets that included members from SPD, the Greens, Die Linke, and even the CDU. The group also ordered 200 body bags and quicklime, which can be used to speed up the decay of a corpse and cover up its smell, and stockpiled weapons and ammunition. As we’re going to see, the group was not just preparing a domestic terror campaign but was also preparing for a Nazi coup known as “Day‑X” in neo-Nazi circles.
So this group of German ‘preppers’ wasn’t just planning for the collapsed of society. They were also planning on inducing that collapse through a political assassination that would result in a neo-Nazi coup:
“The 30-odd members of the group reportedly had close links to the police and military, and at least one member was still employed in the special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.”
A domestic terror group with close links to the police and military. And using those links they amassed a list of 25,000 targets from police databases. And just in case it wasn’t clear what they planned to do to the people on this list, they also ordered 200 body bags and quicklime. It’s a civic nightmare scenario:
Keep in mind that if they were planning on using quicklime to dispose of bodies and speed up the decay of a corpse, that implies they weren’t necessarily just planning on open assassination and instead were planning on abducting targets and leaving their whereabouts unknown. So if any Germany politicians suddenly go missing we now have a better idea of what may have happened.
And yet note how Germany’s domestic intelligence agencies, the BfV, made no mention of Nordkreuz in its annual report that was released last week:
So Germany’s domestic intelligence agency appears to be turning a blind eye to a domestic terror group with close ties to the police and military. Surprise!
And just to make it clear that Nordkreuz has a neo-Nazi overthrow of the government on its mind, here’s an article that points out that group wasn’t just planning on assassinating political enemies. They were also preparing for “Day X”. And as the article notes, Nordkreuz isn’t the only far right group found to have infiltrated German institutions while making “Day X” preparations. In 2017, German military intelligence cracked down on a group calling itself “Hannibal’s Shadow Army” that as operating within the German armed forces and had the same vision of a coming ‘Day X’ through nationalist military coup. So there are at least two German neo-Nazi groups with members from the police and military that have been planning on bringing about a far right military coup in recent years. And these are just the groups we know about:
“Germany now has to deal with the fact right wing extremism is morphing into something more powerful than the old fringe neo-Nazi and skinhead movement. Feeding off the broader populist discourse in Europe, the ease with which groups like Nordkreuz could recruit from and use the resources of the police—and whether they were given passive help in doing so—also poses tough questions about Germany’s ability to fight domestic extremism when its own security services are compromised.”
There’s no shortage of tough questions for Germany raised by the news of these groups’ plans. Dealing with far right terrorism is nothing new for Germany, but when these groups recruit from members of the police and military and utilize police resources, the question of whether or not Germany’s own security services have already been infiltrated turns into the question of just how extensively they’ve been infiltrated. They’ve clearly already been infiltrated. And these different groups appear to have the same underlying goal, “Day X”, which also raises the question of whether or not they’re working together or if these were independent “Day X” efforts:
It’s all a grim reminder that, while Germany’s far right may be making gains in the political realm with parties like the AfD, winning elections isn’t the only avenue for gaining power that the far right has in mind. They’ve have a long time to ‘prep’ for ‘Day X’ and apparently a lot of inside help.
This next article talks about how the German police targeted 12 locations across six states on Valentines Day, targeting a far-right terror group who was planning to cause ‘civil war’ with attacks on politicians and Muslims. They were successful in arresting twelve out of 13 suspects, including an police administrator who was an infiltration and was working for those extremists. They planned to create ‘a civil-war-like situation via as yet undefined attacks on politicians, asylum seekers and people of Muslim faith,’ police said. The group’s ultimate aim was ‘to shake the state and social order in Germany and in the end to overturn it,’. Recently, the German federal police said they had identified 48 people on the extreme right as ‘dangerous’ individuals who could carry out an attack.
Although not discussed in the article, there are similar groups with the same nefarious goals in the United States, such as militant – neo-Nazi groups such aa “Atom Waffen” and the “Base”, and TBD. More recently there was a letter signed by 40 members of CongressThe Department of Homeland Security recently said in a new strategy report unveiled last month that, “White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism.”
Congressman’s Max Rose’s (NY 11th District) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:https://maxrose.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2019.10.16_rose_fto_letter_to_state.pdf It names Azov Battalion, Nordic Resistance Movement, and National Action as three examples of foreign groups that have been connected to recent terrorist attacks around the world as well as recruiting and influencing American citizens. Here his the press release for that: https://maxrose.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2370
The Soufan Center released a new report titled “White Supremacy Extremism: The Transnational Rise of The Violent White Supremacist Movement These networks share approaches to recruitment, financing, and propaganda, with Ukraine emerging as a hub in the broader network of transnational white supremacy extremism, attracting foreign recruits from all over the world. white supremacy extremists have found it easier and easier to recruit, fundraise, and spread violent propaganda. Moreover, white supremacist extremists are imitating Salafi-Jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and many are taking advantage of international conflicts – such as the conflict in Ukraine — to expand the global white supremacy movement
https://thesoufancenter.org/research/white-supremacy-extremism-the-transnational-rise-of-the-violent-white-supremacist-movement/
Police raid far-right group planning attacks on ‘politicians, asylum seekers and Muslims’ to bring about ‘a civil war-like situation’ in Germany
• Police carried out raids on 13 locations across six states in Germany on Friday
• Heavily-armed officers targeted far-right terror group aiming to cause ‘civil war’
• Group planned attacks on politicians, asylum seekers and Muslims, officers said
• 12 out of 13 suspects, including a police worker, were arrested during the raids
By AFP
PUBLISHED: 06:52 EST, 14 February 2020 | UPDATED: 08:32 EST, 14 February 2020
Police in Germany have carried out raids against a far-right terror group that planned to create a ‘civil war’ with attacks on politicians, asylum seekers and Muslims.
Officers, including heavily armed specialist units, hit 13 locations across six states on Friday targeting the group’s five founding members and eight supporters.
Twelve of the thirteen suspects, including a police administration worker, were arrested during the raids. Police said the men are aged between 20 and 50.
Prosecutors said the police worker was immediately suspended and barred from entering police precincts while the investigation is ongoing.
Investigators say the group, which they did not name, was founded in September 2019 by the five main suspects after they met online.
They planned to create ‘a civil-war-like situation via as yet undefined attacks on politicians, asylum seekers and people of Muslim faith,’ police said.
The group’s ultimate aim was ‘to shake the state and social order in Germany and in the end to overturn it,’ investigators say.
Alongside the five prime suspects, the eight supporters ‘are believed to have agreed to provide financial support, procure weapons or take part in future attacks,’ prosecutors said.
The men had established an online chat-room where they discussed their plans and swapped images of weapons they claimed to have manufactured at home.
Police say they launched their raids in order to confirm whether the weapons were real, or images that had been faked.
Police did not immediately say whether any weapons were recovered.
The raids took place in the states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.
The home of a non-suspect was also searched in Bavaria.
German authorities have turned increased attention to the country’s underground extreme right scene since the murder of conservative local politician Walter Luebcke last June and an October attack on a synagogue in eastern city Halle.
Suspects arrested in both cases have ties to the extreme right.
Interior minister Horst Seehofer announced in December 600 new posts across the federal police and domestic security services to track far-right extremist threats, citing a growing danger.
At the time, federal police said they had identified 48 people on the extreme right as ‘dangerous’ individuals who could carry out an attack.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8004015/Police-raid-far-right-group-planning-cause-civil-war-Germany.html
Is Germany’s military and law enforcement heavily infiltrated by an international neo-Nazi network plotting for the day German democracy dies? If the recent disbanding of an elite Germany commando unit is any indication then, yes, Germany’s military and law enforcement agencies are thoroughly infiltrated by a neo-Nazi network plotting for “Day X”, the far right dream day when Germany democracy collapses. Because as we’ll see, the story of the disbanding of KSK, Germany’s equivalent of the Navy Seals, by Germany’s defense ministry announced a couple weeks ago following an investigation into charges that elite combat unit’s leadership was openly tolerating and promoting far right extremism is is really the story of Germany officials belated discovering a much larger far right network that appears to have been growing in strength for years across all branches of the military and law enforcement, including the military counter-intelligence agencies tasked with routing out these networks.
The investigation that resulted in the disbanding of the KSK was started following reports of a party held at a farm where a large number of KSK soldiers attended and engaged in open Nazi-like activity. It turned out the party was a going away party for one of the leaders of the KSK unit. This leader was reportedly quite enthusiastic in his Nazi chanting. As we’ll also see, part of the reason the disbanding of the elite KSK unit is so disturbing is that the investigation didn’t just discover that a large fraction of the unit was involving with this far right network. It also discovered that large amounts of weapons and ammunition and explosives are missing from the unit. Like the kinds of explosives used to explode building facades on special missions abroad. So the Germany government discovered a network of not just highly trained extremists but perhaps the most highly trained extremists possible and they’ve stolen taken large amounts of explosives:
“The raid highlighted “a new quality” of far-right extremism among those trained and armed to protect Germany’s democracy, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer said. Since then, military leaders and politicians have rolled out a flurry of initiatives, which critics said were long overdue.”
A “new quality” of far right extremism. That’s how the report on the investigation of the KSK unit described what it found. Although, in a sense, elite military trained Nazis is kind of an “old quality” of far right extremism. There were a lot of military-trained Nazis during WWII, after all. And this “new quality” of far right extremism already has high-grade military explosives and the skills to use it. And now how the KSK reportedly operated partially outside the Germany military chain of command. So the leadership of this unit was promoting far right extremism and operating outside of the military chain of command:
And now here’s a more detailed look at what the investigation into the KSK discovered and the initial 2017 neo-Nazi party at a farm that involved a large number of KSK soldiers celebrated the retirement of one of the KSK leaders who was reportedly the most enthusiastic Nazi. The article also describes the network of safehouses and weapons caches already created by the network, along with in-person meetings where they train and prepare for “Day X” when the network plans to executive its grand plan:
“The sergeant major’s nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, the police found two kilograms of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition, much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military..”
They didn’t discover a neo-Nazi military network. They discovered a neo-Nazi military network that had been stealing and hiding military weapons and ammunition for years. And while the German government has discovered the existence of these stores of stolen weapons and explosives, they haven’t actually discovered where these stores are all located. The weapons are still sitting there, waiting for “Day X”. And that’s why Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, identified far right extremism and terrorism as the “biggest danger to German democracy today”:
And note how one of the founding officers of the KSK went on to become an open Nazi and wrote a book that placed the KSK in the tradition of the SS. So KSK has been promoted as a unit for Nazi sympathizers for years from one of its founding members:
But it’s not just the leadership of the KSK that’s been infiltrated. The entire German armed forces appear to be infiltrated, including the military counter-intelligence unit that’s in charge with investigating dangers and was instead apparently tipping off KSK about upcoming raids:
Also note channels how were set up by members of KSK on the encrypted message platform, Telegram, for coordinating with fellow Nazis in other branches of service and civilian agencies. It makes it sound like KSK is playing a leading role in this broader network. One of the members of the group estimated that around half of his KSK unit was a member of the chat. Keep in mind we’re talking about a unit of 1,400 soldiers. So 700 or so of them were members of that Telegram chatroom and yet we’re told only 20 members of KSK are being investigated for far right extremism. It’s a reminder that the defense ministry is essentially dissolving and reforming the KSK unit because extremism was so wildly widespread there were too many people to individually investigate. But it also raises the question of whether or not the remformed KSK is going to meaningfully purged of extremists:
Finally, note the existing warming from one of the leaders of the Telegram chat rooms: Thanks to the pandemic “Day X” is coming sooner rather than later, and he bases this on source in in the banks and in the intelligence services. Now, it’s entirely he’s hyping the extent of this network. But based on what we’ve seen so far it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t assume that this network really does have sources in the banks and intelligence services:
So we’re going to see what happens with Germany’s seemingly sudden discovery of a vast and well-armed neo-Nazi terrorist network operating across its military and government bureaucracies. Will there be extensive followup investigating and further revelations? Or will this all just kind of fall down the memory hole again? We’ll presumably get an idea when the KSK is eventually reformed...or during “Day X” when all the undismantled neo-Nazi networks pop up and start mass terrorizing everyone.
Given all of the understandable concern that the US is on the verge of having President Trump unleash some sort of far right insurrection to stay in power — concerns that have only grown following the thwarting of a militia plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan and start a civil war — here’s a pair of article that remind us that Germany is continuing to experience its own growing threat of a far right insurrection with extensive help from high up in the government.
First, here’s an article about from late September about the dismissal of Christof Gramm, the head of Germany’s military intelligence services (MAD), following the revelation this summer that large stores of weapons and explosives were missing from military stores due to years of pilfering by an extensive neo-Nazi network that infiltrated of Germany’s military, including its elite special forces. And the infiltration of those elite units included the top leadership of these units and the military intelligence units tasked k with watching out for extremist infiltration was itself infiltrated. So Gramm’s dismissal was kind of a given at that point and it finally happened. The real question is what comes next and whether or not there’s going to be an meaningful attempt to purge Germany’s military after we learned that the extremist infiltration is at a far greater level than officials ever imagined (at least publicly imagined) and at this point we’re just getting generic pledges to improve the situation with acknowledgements that not enough has been done:
“Thursday’s announcement came three months after Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer disbanded one of four fighting companies in Germany’s elite special forces, the KSK, because it was considered to be riddled with extremists.”
Three months after an elite commando unit gets entirely disbanded following the discovery that it was basically an elite neo-Nazi commando unit we finally have the head of the agency tasked with preventing exactly this situation stepping down. So what reforms are underway? Well, there’s a call from the defense ministry for “additional efforts and dynamism” that should be reflected by a change in personnel, which sounds like a n acknowledgement that more neo-Nazis and sympathizers in the military need to be identified and fired. But it also said the aim is for MAD to work more closely with Germany domestic intelligence agency — the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) — which is the kind of reform that suggests that MAD is so thoroughly infiltrated and corrupt that its job needs to be outsourced. Also recall that it was employees of the BvF who were tipping National Socialist Underground! So having the MAD work more closely with the BfV shouldn’t exactly be a source of comfort:
Next, here’s an article from last week that provides some important historical context for the rise of the far right in Germany and the recent discovery of the weapons and explosive stockpiles: It’s been clear from the very beginning of Germany’s reunification that the formerly communist East Germany represented an incredible recruiting opportunity for the neo-Nazis of West Germany and presenting all sorts of opportunities for secret neo-Nazi training camps and weapons stockpiles, but the possibility of a far right party like AfD returning to the parliament or the existence of domestic terrorist networks was long-ignored by Germany’s leadership. And here we are:
“For years, German officials trusted that a far-right party could never again be elected into Parliament and dismissed the idea of far-right terrorist networks. But some now worry that the far-right structures established in the years after reunification laid the groundwork for a resurgence that has burst into view over the past 15 months.”
Who could ever imagine the rise of a German far right movement or the creation of Nazi domestic terror networks? Not Germany’s leadership, apparently. It’s an unbelievable level of naivete that gets paired with the repeated revelations of high-level protection of these neo-Nazi networks. Networks that have seen an explosive growth over since reunification that’s included using locations like abandoned Soviet military bases to run workshops on forging identity papers, bomb making, guerrilla warfare and “silent killing.” It’s a reminder that the network of weapons and explosive caches that was recently discovered to be scattered around the country have probably been proliferating for close to the last three decades:
And then there’s the previous cases of high-level protection of these domestic terror networks like the National Socialist Underground that raises the obvious question of just how clueless Germany’s intelligence services really were about this threat:
It’s a chapter of Germany’s history that underscores the fact that if we are to believe that Germany’s government hasn’t been aware of the growing far right threat in its military we have to assume it hasn’t been aware of this threat for at least the last thirty years. Which, of course, is an absurd assumption, especially following the discovery of the National Socialist Underground. Which is a reminder that the many disturbing questions raised by the recent discovery of neo-Nazis in Germany’s military about the extent of far right infiltration in Germany’s military leadership should really be extended to the rest of Germany’s government and political establishment for the last generation.
Following the dismissal two weeks ago of Germany’s head of military intelligence, Christof Gramm, over the discovery of extensive far right infiltration of the German military that appears to have been covered up for years and resulted in the disbanding of out of Germany’s elite special forces units, one of the obvious questions raised by the entire affair is whether or not there’s going to be any sort of meaningful investigation of the full extent of this far right infiltration now that the public has learned that its been going on for years without any official action.
Last week, we got an answer to that question. Sort of. The answer came in the form of a report filed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The report focused on far right infiltration of Germany’s police forces and military. Recall part of the plan for dealing with the far right’s infiltration of the military — infiltration that included infiltrating the agencies tasked with watching out for such infiltration — was to have the military work more closely with the BfV on these matters. Also recall that BfV officers were found to have assisted and worked with the National Socialist Underground (NSU) neo-Nazi terror group. So unless there’s already quietly been some sort of major purge of far right infiltrators in the BfV as a consequence of those past revelations, it’s hard to imagine the agency isn’t still suffering for that same infiltration.
So what was the gist of the BvF report? Exactly what we should have cynically expected: There’s nothing to worry about. Sure, there are a few Nazis in the police force and military, but Interior Minister Horst Seehofer assured the Germany public and that he refuses to put “the other 99 percent” of the members of these institutions under suspicion.
Seehofer on Tuesday rejected accusations that there was a “structural racism” problem in the police when he presented the report. As the article notes, Seehofer halted a study announced by the justice and interior ministries to investigate the use of racial profiling by German police back in July, citing the fact that such profiling is legally forbidden. Even the head of the Association of German Criminal Police Officers said the study would help establish trust in the police. But Seehofer blocked it. He blocked an investigation into legally forbidden racial profiling practices by the police that even the head of the Association of German Criminal Police Officers and justified blocking it by pointing out that such profiling by police would be illegal. That actually happened. That’s all part of the context of the BfV’s new report.
So the investigation prompted by the discovery of these neo-Nazi networks didn’t find any additional neo-Nazi networks and now we’re told by Seehofer that there basically aren’t any others and its insulting to the 99% of non-far right members of the police and military to even suspect there might be others. It’s a move that is consistent with what Rafael Behr, a criminologist and sociologist at the Hamburg Police Academy, describes as a “structural blocking of an investigation into racism.”
The article also notes the refusal to even ponder the possibility that there’s a structural problem with Germany’s military and police forces isn’t limited to Seehofer. When Saskia Esken, a leader of the SPD, suggested in June that there might be “latent racism” in the police force, not only did Seehofer described the prospect as “incomprehensible,” but Esken faced fierce backlash even from members of her own party.
Was there any value in the report? Well, Joachim Kersten, senior research professor in the Criminology Department of the German Police University, described the report as a step in the right direction but that it was essentially a roundup of known cases. There is a much larger “dark scene” within the police than the report illuminates, according to Kersten. As Kersten put, “They have to face the music, and unfortunately the music is a Nazi melody,” and that’s obviously not happening. So if there’s any value to the report it’s that it’s such a blatant cover-up that it warrants not just an investigation into far right infiltration of Germany’s institutions but an investigation into these prior investigations:
“But in presenting the report Tuesday, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that while the cases already under investigation need closer examination, he would not put the other “99 percent” of employees of the country’s security agencies under suspicion. He has resisted calls for an independent study to examine police racism — calls that have grown alongside the proliferating scandals and the global Black Lives Matter movement.”
It’s just a few bad apples and anyone suggesting anything more than that is unjustly subjecting the other 99 percent of Germany’s police and military to inappropriate suspicions. That’s was the fundamental message from Germany’s Interior Minister, a week after the head of Germany’s military intelligence agency was fired for allowing an elite special forces unit to operate as a Nazi cell within the military for years. And it was a message shared by far more people in Germany’s government than just Seehofer:
As Joachim Kersten, senior research professor in the Criminology Department of the German Police University, described it, while we should indeed not forget that there are 250,000 officers the vast majority of which aren’t extremists and are doing their jobs, there’s is also a much larger “dark scene” within the police than the report illuminates. In other words, the report really was a cover-up. A cover-up of that much larger “dark scene”:
And that’s all why when Seehofer tries to deflect attention away from this issue by recommending instead a more general study of racism in society and that all public offices, and not just police agencies, should be under scrutiny, he is correct. There is obviously a much larger problem with far right infiltration in Germany’s institutions, as this public cover-up of a report ironically makes clear.
Here’s a pair of updates about Germany’s recent ‘discovery’ that Germany’s military and police forces are infested with extremist, including a number of officers:
First, here’s a article from last week about a new investigation into 26 soldiers suspected of organizing a far right chat group. Notably, many of the soldiers belong to a logistics unit near Hanover and the entire group of 26 soldiers are officers: 16 non-commissioned officers and 10 other officers. So it sounds like this investigation into 26 soldiers suspected of setting up a far right chat group is really an investigation into just the officers in a single logistics unit. And that’s the kind of investigation that suggests a much larger investigation is necessary:
“The alleged group was made up of 16 non-commissioned officers and 10 other officers. So far, three of the soldiers have been temporarily suspended, according to German news agency dpa.”
An investigation exclusively into officers who organized the far right chat group. With that many officers involved it raises the obvious question of how many people were actually using this chat group. And then there’s the question of what percent of the officers in this logistics unit were part of this group.
Next, here’s an article from a few days after the above article about a new investigation into eight civilian employees of the Germany military who are also suspected of being members of the Riechsbuerger movement, a movement that insists Nazi Germany still exists and is the legitimate German government:
“Members of the Reichsbuerger (Citizens of the Reich) do not recognise modern-day Germany as a legitimate state, and insist the former, far larger “Deutsche Reich” still exists despite Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War Two.”
Nazi Germany lives on, at least in the minds of the Reichsbuerger movement. The big question is how many minds in the Germany military share this sentiment. There’s at least one logistics unit in Hanover that would probably largely agree.
Here’s a story about QAnon that could end up having particularly dark implications in Germany given the growing scandal surrounding the discover of extensive far right networks operating in Germany’s military and law enforcement institutions:
The seeds of doubt are germinating. Finally. That’s what we’re hearing from reports on the response of the QAnon community to the inauguration of Joe Biden. Up until now, the QAnon community could also tell themselves that everything was going “according to the plan”, no matter what happened, as long Trump remained in office. Whether or not Trump won the election, “The Storm” was on the way, tight up until Inauguration Right. And then something happened: Joe Biden became president. The Storm ended up being just a bunch of hot air. Even the hard core adherents who stood with Trump and “Q” up to the very end are starting to wonder if they should still “Trust the Plan”.
What sort of impact these seeds of doubt end up having on the US political scene is something that’s going to be keenly watched going forward. But as the following article reminds us, QAnon isn’t just a US-based phenomena. It’s gone global, with Germany now holding the most QAnon followers outside of the English-speaking world. And while seeds of doubt may be taking root, a lush tropical forest of denial and fantasy continues to flourish in the land of QAnon even with Trump out of office. The article, published on Jan 19, one day before Biden’s inauguration, was depicting a German QAnon community that was continuing to grow by the day. A Germany QAnon community that, not surprising, included a number of people who were involved with the August 2020 far right storming of the Reichstag:
“Prior to 2020, the QAnon movement was largely considered a niche phenomenon in Germany. But within a year, Germany has become home to the largest QAnon community outside of the English-speaking world.”
The largest QAnon community outside of the English-speaking world. That’s quite a concentration of adherents for a a conspiracy theory focused on US politics. It would surprising if it wasn’t for the enormous overlap between QAnon and the broader world of far right conspiracy theories built on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion template. But given that QAnon is basically a wacky modern update of the Protocols, we probably shouldn’t be too shocked that country like Germany, that’s been experiencing its own far right surge for years now, would have a large QAnon community. And after the prominent role Q followers played in the storming of the US Capitol on Jan 6, we can’t be surprised to learn that the August 2020 far right storming of the German Reichstag included Germany’s Q community too:
So that was a Germany media overview of the state of the German QAnon community one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration. Perhaps some of those followers did finally lose their ‘Q’ faith following the lack of any triumphal Inauguration Day mass arrests. But this is a movement built on the remarkable ability to keep the narrative going no matter what happens. There should be no expectation that this is going away. Sure, it will change and adapt, but it’s not disappearing. Germany’s QAnon community is making that clear.
And Germany is far from the only country that’s been experiencing a surge in far right politics. The rise of the far right has been the story of Europe over the last decade, which suggests there’s probably quite a few more Q followers in the non-English-speaking parts of Europe than are currently recognized. Which raises the question: since the Q phenomena was focused on US politics but built branches around the world and has demonstrated an ability to adapt and alter the narrative as needed, are we poised to see an explosion of local ‘Q’ narratives? A German ‘Q’ and maybe a Brazilian ‘Q’ and perhaps Hong Kong ‘Q’? Trump leaving office and failing to fulfill ‘The Storm’ prophecy certainly created a vacuum of sorts for the Q community, but there’s nothing stopping enterprising ‘Qs’ from filling that vacuum with new narratives. New narratives that will almost invariably be even more unhinged than the current narrative, because that’s how it survives. By getting even more divorced from reality. Big lies are like that. And that points to perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the QAnon phenomena: No matter how bad it gets, it always seems to survive...by getting worse.
Is a Belgian ‘Rambo’ capturing the hearts and minds of Belgium’s conservatives? That appears to be the case as the story of Corporal Jurgen Conings continues to unfold. Weeks after Conings — a far right Belgian soldier who recently went on the run with an arsenal of weapons and a politically-inspired assassination list — went on the run, the support for Conings on the Belgian right only continues to grow, with the story taking on a kind of meta-symbolism of the Belgian culture wars. Conings himself clearly fueled these sentiments with letters explaining his actions stating he no longer wanted to live in a society ruled by “politicians and virologists” and wanted to join the “resistance”. Is there a broader “resistance” Conings is working with? Well, Conings claims he’s been working alone. And yet he still managed to take a small arsenal from his military barracks despite being on a watchlist for far right extremist views. It’s the kind of scenario that suggests Conings might have help. And the longer Conings goes without getting captured, the more his popularity on the right continues to grow and the more help he’s probably getting:
“In the letters, he said he no longer wanted to live in a society ruled by “politicians and virologists” and wanted to join the “resistance”.”
Is this event going to be the start of some sort of Rambo-style violent “resistance” for Belgium? If so, we have to ask if he’s already getting help from other members of the “resistance” in the Belgian military. Because somehow the guy managed to sneak out an arsenal that included four anti-tank rocket launchers despite being disciplined last year for extremism:
And just to be clear, when Conings was disciplined for extremism last year, he was identified as a potential terrorist. So a guy on the terrorist watchlist was not only allowed to remain in the military but somehow managed to sneak out rocket launchers:
“Van Quickenborne said Conings was on a list of potential terrorists compiled by OCAM, an organisation responsible for assess the threat of terrorism in Belgium, because of far-right tendencies.”
He was on a terrorist watchlist and still allowed access to the arsenal of his barracks. It raises the question: since Conings was allowed to remain in the military despite being on a terrorist watchlist, are there any other members of the Belgian military on that watchlist still in the Belgian military? It seems highly likely. Where any of those other soldiers harboring extremist sentiments also stationed at Conings barracks? Perhaps with responsibilities securing the arsenals? These are the disturbing questions Belgium has to ask, along with the much more disturbing question of how much support is Conings getting from of Belgium’s overall populace as part of a broader culture war:
“Almost three weeks on, Conings is still on the run, but Belgians now view him as something more significant than just a crazy lone gunman. The true shock-factor of the case is that tens of thousands of people have rallied to support him and that far-right Flemish nationalists from the Dutch-speaking north are styling him as a symbol of their deeper political grievances.”
Jurgen Conings is apparently speaking for a seeming majority of Belgium’s Flemish nationalists. Not just Belgian extremist. Mainstream conservatives. As the article notes, if elections were held today, the Flemish conservative nationalist N‑VA and far-right Vlaams Belang would together have a majority of seats in the Flemish parliament. And that’s the political coalition increasingly embracing this “Belgian Rambo” is an inspirational figure symbolizing a broader culture war and right-wing grievance complex and the Flemish desires for secession:
And given the widespread support for Conings across Belgian society, it only follows that support for Conings in the military is going to be pretty substantial too. Which, again, is why we have to ask: is Conings getting help from within the Belgian military? And many more potential Rambos are there still waiting to snap?
Finally, we can’t ignore the new post-Jan 6 context for this story: the remarkable parallels with what happened to the US conservative movement and the Republican Party, where a misinformation-fueled narrative of ‘the world is out to get conservatives’ has such a strong grip on the psyches of American conservatives that there are basically no sources of information outside of this far right universe this demographic is willing to trust. The sense of alienation against the rest of society is seemingly impenetrable and only grows the longer audiences remain captives of these misinformation ecosystems:
And that’s all part of what the big question in the case of Jurgen Conings isn’t whether or not the guy is going to get caught before he manages to scratch some names off his hit list. The big question now is how many more ‘Rambos’ will Belgium be dealing with in coming years now that conservative Belgians have already fallen in love with the idea of going to war with the rest of their society.
There’s another story about extremism in the military out of Germany, although the story is coming to us from Lithuania. Around 30 German soldiers stationed in Lithuania as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence mission (basically an anti-Russia sabre-rattling mission) were recalled to Germany following an investigation that revealed anti-Semitic far right songs were sung during an April incident at a hotel, including a Hitler Birthday song.
Recall how this is just the latest in a growing list of recent stories about investigations revealing extensive patterns of organized extremism in Germany’s military and police forces. So this isn’t just a story about extremism in the German military. It’s the latest chapter in the much larger and growing story about extremism in the German military:
“The NATO Enhanced Forward Presence mission has been deployed on a rotational basis in the three Baltic countries and Poland in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Germany was given command of a battalion of 1,000 soldiers in Lithuania.”
It’s bad enough when Germany finds extremists in its military ranks. But it’s a scandal with historic echoes when the extremism is discovered in the battalion of 1,000 soldiers stationed on Lithuanian soil. And it started off with just four soldiers being recalled:
And while the discovery of four extremists in a Germany unit operating in Lithuania is bad enough, that number quickly grew from four to around 30 soldiers being recalled after investigations found they had sung a birthday song for Hitler and even committed acts of sexual violence. So the one thing we can conclude at this point is that we can’t really make any conclusions about the extent of the extremism in this military unit. The number keeps growing and the more they investigate the more incidents of extremism they find. For example, shortly after it was announced that four soldiers would be recalled to Germany, we got the update that their entire 30-member platoon was disbanded:
“The 30-member platoon will be disbanded upon its return to Germany and any soldiers found guilty of crimes or misconduct will be severely punished, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defense minister, said. The members of the platoon were among roughly 600 German soldiers serving in Lithuania, one of the three Baltic countries where, along with Poland, NATO has put troops in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea and incursions into Ukraine.”
The whole platoon had to go. That sounds like a much bigger problem than just a few bad apples. And probably a much bigger problem than just this platoon.
And note how the Hitler birthday song incident reportedly happened in violation of as sergeant’s order, but the sergeant failed to report the violation. So this platoon was celebrating Hitler’s birthday with the full awareness of a sergeant, who covered it up, making this just the latest incident of Germany military officers being complicit in this extremism:
It’s also worth noting how utterly NOT hidden it sounds like behavior was at a hotel. Sure, they were singing at a hotel and not at their barracks. But dozens of drunken singing soldiers doesn’t sound like an event intended to be hidden from the broader public. It’s the kind of story that raises further question about just how hidden, or not hidden, this extremist behavior in of soldiers stationed outside of Germany, especially in countries like Lithuania with a local populace that might harbor a great deal of its own extremist sympathies. What kind of social environments are being created around these Eastern European NATO contingents that led these soldiers to believe holding a Hitler birthday party at a local hotel would go unnoticed?
Finally, note how we’re only hearing about this platoon being recalled. That’s it. No one else appears to have been implicated in the investigation. So either all the extremists were in that one platoon or ....
One of these days it’s going to be the Day X. It’s just a matter of time. That’s the disturbing conclusion that’s hard to avoid following the latest report on the thwarting of another German far right “Day X” coup plot. A shockingly large coup plot that involved the arrest of 25 individuals, including an active duty soldier, a former officer in the elite special forces, a police officer and at least two army reservists. A large number of locations were also raided, including 150 homes and a military barracks. Attacks on the power grid were apparently part of plot.
The network of individuals involved with the plot appear to be centered around the Reichsbürger (Reichsbuerger) movement, which believes the most-WWII German government is illegitimate. It’s a theme heard echoed by politicians in the AfD. Recall the September 2017 report describing how AfD co-founder, Alice Weidel, was parroting Reichsbürger rhetoric with her description of the government as “pigs” who are “nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war, whose task it is to keep down the German people”. It also turns out that one of the figures involved with this plot was AfD member Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who was a lawmaker until last year. She was designated to become the group’s justice minister in the post-coup regime. It was just back in October when Malsack-Winkemann was allowed to retain her position as a judge in Berlin despite the protests of several regional judicial authorities over her far right views.
The designated leader of the post-coup Germany would be Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, the 71-year-old descendant of a former German royal family. He’s also described as the ringleader of the group. Interestingly, liberation was promised by the imminent intervention of the “Alliance,” a technically superior secret coalition of governments, intelligence services and militaries of various states, including Russia and the United States. So we have a coup plot with a German aristocrat that apparently involved help from an international “alliance”. This is a good time to recall the August 2021 story about the declared formation of an international coalition of conservative movements that dwklbe coordinated by Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil. As we saw, AfD Parliamentarian Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister, was part of that announced Conservative International. She also happened to royalty, with the title Her Highness Duchess Beatrix Amelie Ehrengard Eilika von Oldenburg. She is a distant relative of both Prince Charles and Bertrand de Orléans e Bragança, the head of the Brazilian royal family, who she met with the prior month. It would be very interesting to learn if Von Storch had any involvement with this.
And as investigators point out, this is far from the only Day X plot that’s been revealed in recent years, raising the question of how intertwined all these plots ultimately are. Recall the June 2019 reports on German investigations into the 30-odd member far right ‘prepper’ group called Nordkruez (Northern Cross) on suspicions that the group was preparing a “Day X”-style terrorist attack. The group not only had close links to the police and military but had also managed to access police computers and collect almost 25,000 names and addresses of local politicians who were supportive of the refugees during the refugee crisis in 2015. One of the members of Kordkruez was still employed in the special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.
But it’s the repeated exposure of high level far right groups inside the German military that makes some sort of Day X scenario just feel inevitable for Germany. Because it doesn’t appear that anything is actually being done to meaningfully address these festering networks. Recall the July 2020 dissolution of an entire elite German military unit — the KSK, which is Germany’s equivalent of the US Navy Seals — after investigations revealed the unit’s leadership was openly tolerating and promoting far right extremism and discussions of preparing for “Day X”. The leader of the unit was reportedly enthusiastic in his Nazi chanting. Also, large amounts of weapons, ammunition, and explosives — the kind of explosives used to blow up building facades on special missions abroad — were found to missing from the unit. And that there was the December 2020 report on the discovery of eight Reichsbuerger members in the Germany military. What progress has Germany actually made in meaningfully busting up these networks? One the one hand it’s nice to see that active military members of this plot were caught. But on the other hand, it’s the latest example of how these far right networks manage to persist despite all the investigations:
“This was the latest of a series of plots discovered in recent years of extremist networks preparing for a day the democratic order collapses, a day they call Day X, the subject of a New York Times podcast series last year.”
It just keeps happening. Another Day X plot was revealed by German authorities. At this point the question isn’t whether or not there are groups actively plotting Day X coups in Germany. The salient questions at this point is how many of these groups are there, how closely are they working together, and how extensive is their support inside the German military and national security state? Along with the question of the selected date for the eventual Day X. It’s that sense of inevitability that is perhaps the biggest part of this story. Because this isn’t a new story. We’ve been hearing about these plots for years. They keep getting busted, but the plotting clearly continues. And this time, the bust in includes a German Prince, Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, who is described as both the ringleader and the figure designated to take over as the new head of state following the coup.
But there’s also talk of some sort assistance that would be given to the coup plotters by “the imminent intervention of the “Alliance,” a technically superior secret coalition of governments, intelligence services and militaries of various states, including Russia and the United States.” On one level, that sounds a lot like the kind of ‘secret powerful forces will swoop in and save the day’ narrative we’ve come to expect from QAnon-affiliated movements. But at the same time, given the remarkable persistence of this plotting and the growing international far right networking over the last decade, questions about what kind of international support there was/is for these Day X plots should loom large in this investigation. After all, we shouldn’t necessarily assume Day X will take place exclusively in Germany. Why not have simultaneous far right coups around the world? So when we hear about seeming fantastical predictions that the governments of Russian and the US will playing an assisting Day X role, keep in mind that the plotters might be assuming these ‘allied governments’ already had their own Day X:
The plot even includes a former AfD lawmaker who remains a judge in Berlin despite alarms raised by several regional judicial authorities about her far right views:
And while the presences of German monarchs and far right judges is certainly disturbing, it’s the active members of the German military busted in this plot that represents the most glaring threat to the German state. Especially since these discoveries keep happening. it’s these repeated discoveries of far right cells high up in the German military that gives the Day X scenario a “just a matter of time” feel to it:
Finally, we get to the now eerily familiar-sounding scenario the coup plotters had in mind: power outages. This is, of course, coming less than a week after the still unsolved attack on the Moore County, North Carolina, electrical grid. And months after Germany authorities foiled an earlier electrical grid attack plot by this same Reichsbürger network:
Just as we keep seeing Day X plots revealed, we just keep learning about new far right plots to attack the power grid, and not just in Germany. Which is reminder that “Day X” might be the preferred name German far right networks having given to their coup plots, but the “Day X” isn’t just a German plot. It’s just the name given to the German iteration of the far right coup plots being actively plotted basically everywhere.
So was this a real coup plot? Or just national security theater? Those are some of the questions raised by the nationwide raids by German authorities on the “Reichsbürger” plot last week. As we’re going to see, many appear quick to dismiss the plot as almost comically hopeless and not really serious. And yet, as we’re also going to see, the execution of these raids appears to have followed a very disturbing pattern. That kind of pattern that suggests the coup plotters have a lot more high level support inside the German government than is currently recognized.
For example, as the following article describes, many Germans are raising the fact that the BfV — the country’s domestic intelligence agency tasked with watching out for extremist movements — has long been quick to dismiss the movement as posing little threat even after a member killed a police office in 2016. Of course, as we’ve seen, the BfV has its own disturbing history when it comes to coddling extremists. There were the members of the BfV were found to have been tipping off members of the NSU! Then there was the story from back in 2018 about the head of the BfV, Hans-Georg Maassen, holding multiple meetings with members of the AfD where he passed along to them information from his yearly report to the far-right populist party ahead of its publication. Maassen was subsequently fired from his position after the story came out, although his firing came in the form of a promotion to a better-paid position of state secretary in the Interior Ministry. Those concerns about the BfV going easy on far right extremists were further inflamed following the 2019 assassination of a pro-refugee German politician in 2019. As we saw, part of the concerns over the BfV that year were driven by the fact that the agency didn’t even bother to mention the “Day‑X” plot that was then recently uncovered involving the “Nordkreuz” far right network.
But as we also saw, the BfV isn’t the only German intelligence agency accused of collaborating with extremists. In September of 2020, Christof Gramm, who led the German military counterintelligence agency tasked with monitoring extremism inside Germany’s military since 2015, was fired in the wake of the stories about the extensive extremist infiltration inside the elite KSK German miltiary unit and the large volumes of weapons and explosives that were found to be missing. And as we saw, part of the response to the scandal involved asking the German military intelligence to work more closely with the BfV. Yep. And after all that, the BfV issued its annual report on the state of the extremist threat inside Germany. A report that basically told the public there’s nothing to worry about.
It’s that recent history of extremist coddling by both the BfV and the MAD that is part of the context of the current questions about how these raids were carried out. Questions like why was it that the Germany media apparently got tipped off about the upcoming raids two weeks in advance. Tips that appear to have been passed along to some of the targets of the raid. In particular,
Maximilian Eder, a former commander of one of the Bundeswehr’s armoured infantry battalions between 1998 and 2000 and a founding member of the KSK. Eder reportedly told a neighbor in his home town of Bavaria that “It could be that the police will come around next week.” Eder was ultimately arrested in the Italian city of Perugia. How many other members of the plot knew about those upcoming raids?
As we’re also going to see, the head of the German Federal police announced last week that more raids are coming. So not only did the media get tips weeks in advance about these raids — tips that at least in one case appear to have been passed along to a coup plotter — but now everyone got notification about yet-to-come raids. It’s details like this that has many people asking how serious this plot was in reality? And while many seem very ready to dismiss it all as national security theater, those raid tipoffs are ominously consistent with another scenario: a national security limited hangout intended to ensure the full scope of the plot — including all of the powerful and influential people involved — doesn’t actually get revealed:
“Such pompous fantasies, paired with hectoring legalese, used to make it easy to dismiss the Reichsbürger scene. Even after a policeman was shot dead by one of the fringe movement’s adherents during a raid in the Franconia region in 2016, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, declined to take steps towards systematic surveillance. Even though the conspiracy theory had several hundred followers, not all of them could be classified as rightwing extremists, the BfV said at the time.”
Is the BfV’s longstanding casual attitude toward the risk posed by the Reichsburgers movement a reflection on that movement or a reflection on the BfV’s sympathies? That’s one of the questions raised many are wrestling with. Questions that have been asked for years in some cases. As we’ve seen, members of the BfV were found to have been tipping off members of the NSU! Then there was the story from back in 2018 about the head of the BfV, Hans-Georg Maassen, holding multiple meetings with members of the AfD where he passed along to them information from his yearly report to the far-right populist party ahead of its publication. Maassen was subsequently fired from his position after the story came out, although his firing came in the form of a promotion to a better-paid position of state secretary in the Interior Ministry. Those concerns about the BfV going easy on far right extremists were further inflamed following the 2019 assassination of a pro-refugee German politician in 2019. As we saw, part of the concerns over the BfV that year were driven by the fact that the agency didn’t even bother to mention the “Day‑X” plot that was then recently uncovered involving the “Nordkreuz” far right network.
But as we also saw, the BfV isn’t the only German intelligence agency accused of collaborating with extremists. In September of 2020, Christof Gramm, who led the German military counterintelligence agency tasked with monitoring extremism inside Germany’s military since 2015, was fired in the wake of the stories about the extensive extremist infiltration inside the elite KSK German military unit and the large volumes of weapons and explosives that were found to be missing. And as we saw, part of the response to the scandal involved asking the German military intelligence to work more closely with the BfV. Yep. And after all that, the BfV issued its annual report on the state of the extremist threat inside Germany. A report that basically told the public there’s nothing to worry about. So when we read about the dismay over the BfV’s lack of action following the 2016 killing of a policeman by a member of this “Reichburger” movement, keep in mind that there is a far more extensive track record of the institutional coddling of this movement. The presence of members of the KSK elite military unit — like 64-year-old Maximilian Eder who was arrested in Italy — is entirely consistent with this history and exactly what we should have expected:
So when we see we seemingly bizarre references to “allied” movements in the US, UK, and Russia that are going to swoop in and assist the planned Day X coup, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a network that’s been allowed to largely fester unimpeded for years now. Which is the kind of scenario that could involve all sorts of international networking. It’s a still-unexplored aspect to this story: who are the international collaborators?
But perhaps the biggest immediate question surrounding this story is the ominous question of why German authorities tipped of the media about the planned raids as early as two weeks in advance! Even Eder, the former KSK commander, reportedly knew about the upcoming raids a week in advance. That sure looks like another instance of Germany’s domestic security agencies finding a new excuse to go easy on this network:
And as the following article notes, those weren’t the only early warnings on upcoming raids. The head of the German Federal police literally just told the media that more raids are coming:
“The head of Germany’s federal criminal police, Holger Münch, on Thursday revised the number of suspects upwards to 52, of whom 23 were currently in custody, adding that further raids and arrests were expected in the coming days.”
More raids were announced. Publicly in advance. Who knows why these additional raids were publicly declared, but the Reichburger network behind this plot got another warning to get ready.
Also note the relative scales here: while 52 people may sound like a lot, this is reportedly a movement with tens of thousands of members, many in high levels across German society and military. As the article describes, there were at last two other current or former members of the KSK in addition to Eder who were arrested in the raids: Rüdiger von Pescatore, a paratrooper commander, and an unnamed current sergeant tasked with logistics at the KSK. We can be pretty confident that these aren’t the only members of the military who are involved with this plot. But now any of those additional members know that more raids are coming thanks to the announcement of additional raids yet to come:
We keep hearing attempts to dismiss this plot as a laughable joke that never had a chance of success. An overhyped story intended to convince the public that the German state is on top of a coup threat that doesn’t really exist. National security theater. And yet the recent history of Germany’s extremist plots keeps yielding one example after another of the German national security state seemingly turning a blind eye. Often a blind eye towards extremist members of that national security state. First they were ignored and discounted for years and now, after it’s too large to ignore, the crackdowns are getting preceded with tipoffs, including public tipoffs. So yeah, it does look like we’re seeing some sort of national security theater. Limited-hangout national security theater. In this case, a limited-hangout in the form of a massive raid on a nationwide heavily armed network that enjoys high level protection. And when that’s the limited-hangout, you should probably expect a lot more theater of this nature. At least until it’s finally Day X for real, at which it will still be theater. Fascism is heavily reliant on theatrical narratives, especially during a coup, after all. It will just be a far more lethal form of national security theater at that point.
It was all just an innocent mistake. As usual. Another ‘accidental Nazi talk’ incident. That’s the spin we’re getting from the Trump campaign over a video post to Trump’s personal Truth Social account. A video depicting hypothetical celebratory newspaper headlines after Trump is back in the White House, like “BORDER IS CLOSED — 15 MILLION ILLEGAL ALIENS DEPORTED” and “ECONOMY BOOMS.” But those headlines aren’t the part that has the Trump campaign spinning. It’s a certain phrase that shows up twice in the video that is generating all this spin: “Industrial strength significantly increased ... driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” While the phrase “unified Reich” appears to be a reference to the 1871 formation of Germany’s Second Reich, it’s also obviously hard to user a phrase like “unified Reich” with American audiences and not have it sound like a reference to Nazi Germany.
Interestingly, the inflammatory phrase in the video appears to be lifted directly from text found on the Wikipedia page for WWI. And it’s not the only phrase from that Wikipedia article that shows up in the video. The nonsensical sentence “First World War (often abbreviated as WW1 or WWI) Causes of World War I,” also shows up, which is the same sentence that shows up in one of the article footnotes. It’s that second nonsense phrase that raises a sadly topical question: was this video generated by AI? Because random nonsense like that sure seems like something an AI, and only an AI, would do. So was this an AI-generated Trump video that included WWI references because someone prompted an AI to make a video like that? Or did the AI decide to inject a Reich reference in a video about Trump’s future glory it on its own? Who knows.
The Trump campaign is trying to brush it all off as a video created by a random account online and posted by a staffer who didn’t see the “unified Reich” text. It’s an explanation that directly contradicts claims Trump made at Mar-a-Lago just last month about how the only other person who has access to Trump’s Truth Social account is former deputy White House Chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Still, it’s not hard to imagine plenty of staffers have access to Trump’s account.
The question of who posted the video isn’t nearly as interesting as the question of why it was posted in the first place and who was the intended audience. It’s not hard to imagine riling up his base with references to a future Reich is just part of Trump’s campaign strategy given the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat of violence if he doesn’t win in November. But as we’re going to see, there was another event that just happened to coincide with the Tuesday’s posting of this video that is weirdly resonant with the whole “unified Reich” theme: The start of the trial of the leaders of the Reichsbürger (Reichsbuerger) movement.
Yep, it turns out the leaders of a plot to overthrow the German government and reinstall the “Deutsche Reich” of Nazi Germany just happened to get underway on the same day this video appeared on Trump’s account. Oh, and let’s not forget how the Reichsburger movement has a major QAnon element that heaps praise on Trump.
So was it really just a coincidence that the trial for the leaders of a QAnon-themed plot to reimpose Nazi Germany started on the same day this “unified Reich” video appeared on Trump’s account? That’s the coincidence we’re being asked to accept. And who knows, given the rate at which Trump engages in Nazi-themed dog whistling to his base, coincidences are bound to happen at some point. But, if so, it’s one hell of a coincidence:
“The background is made up of hypothetical newspaper front pages with headlines including “BORDER IS CLOSED — 15 MILLION ILLEGAL ALIENS DEPORTED” and “ECONOMY BOOMS.” Twice in the clip, slightly blurred text appears beneath the headlines that reads: “Industrial strength significantly increased ... driven by the creation of a unified Reich.””
It’s quite the messaging ‘mistake’: hypothetical future headlines that seems to include a blurred reference to a “unified Reich”, seemingly taken from the Wikipedia page for WWI. It might technically be a reference to the 1871 unification of German and the formation of the Second Reich, but as the article notes, the term “Reich” is pretty much synonymous with the Third Reich of Nazi Germany for American audiences. This was either a real mistake or a barely covert Nazi reference:
And note some of the other text that also shows up in the video like “First World War (often abbreviated as WW1 or WWI) Causes of World War I.” That’s the kind of weird nonsense sentence that we would expect from AI. So we have to ask: was this video created by an AI? If so, did the person using the AI ask it to include references to a Reich or was that something the AI just did on its own? Either scenario seems plausible if you think about it:
And then there’s the question of who actually posted this video on Trump’s Truth Social account. Because it’s not like this simply showed up on the Truth Social platform. It was Trump’s personal account. We are told it was posted by an anonymous staffer, but as the following article notes, Trump stated back in February that the only people with access to his account are himself and Dan Scavino, Trump’s former White House deputy Chief of Staff. Now, it’s obviously very possible that Trump was just bending the truth as usual when he made that statement. But if we take Trump at his word, the only two people who could have posted this video are Trump or Scavino:
“X user Patriot Takes shared a video of Trump speaking at Mar-a-lago, Florida, in April in which Trump spoke about how Dan Scavino, a political adviser who served in the Trump administration as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications from 2020 to 2021 and Director of Social Media from 2017 to 2021, is “the only one that has my number” seemingly referring to his Truth Social account, adding he is the only who can “say something horrible.””
It was either Trump or Scavino. Or Trump lied about who has access to his account. All plausible scenarios, whether or not the person who posted the video was even aware of the “unified Reich” text. But if we assume the person who posted it was aware of the text, there’s the question of of motive. Was this just another attempt to troll the public while sending a signal to Trump’s fascist base to get ready? We can only speculate, but it’s worth noting the remarkable ‘coincidence’ regarding the timing of this video: on the same day this video was posted to Trump’s Truth Social account, the German courts began the trial for the leaders of the Reichsburger plot. A plot to overthrow the German government, reinstall the “Deutsche Reich” of Nazi Germany, and negotiate a new peace treaty for Germany with the Allies of WWII. And a plot with a major QAnon contingent that loves Donald Trump:
“Prosecutors said the suspects planned to storm the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, take lawmakers hostage and impose a new state order, killing people as needed. The alleged plot included standing up 286 paramilitary units and taking over Heckler & Koch, the main supplier of small arms to the German military.”
A plot to impose a new state order. That sure sounds like plans for a new Reich. But when we see the monarchist nature of this plot, it almost sounds more like a plot to return to the “Unified Reich” of 1871. But don’t forget what we’ve learned about this movement: a belief that the “Deutsche Reich” of the Nazi era is still the legitimate government of Germany. Hence, the apparent plans by Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss to somehow negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies. In other words, this was a plot to reimpose the government of Nazi Germany. But this wasn’t just a neo-Nazi movement. There was a whole ‘QAnon’ angle too and a deep affection for Trump and this movement. And trial for the key leaders in this plot just happened to start on the same day this “Unified Reich” video shows up on Trump’s Truth Social account:
Also when we see the members of the German military involved, including an ex-colonel who helped set up Germany’s elite Special Forces Command in the 1990s and a former paratrooper, keep in mind that the Reichsburger plot was just one of the deeply alarming stories in recent years involving fascist cells in Germany’s elite military units and plots for a “Day X” which sounds awfully similar to the Reichsburger plot. Which is the kind of situation that suggests the busting of the Reichburger plot hasn’t necessarily ended this looming fascist threat for Germany:
Keep in mind that, while the media may have glossed over how Trump’s video seemed to be a shout out to the Reichburger movement, we can bet the Reichsburgerers themselves noticed. And, sure, many of them are in prison or awaiting trial. But this is a movement with tens of thousands of followers. They aren’t all in prison.
Also keep in mind that there’s undoubtedly a number of still-free Reichsburger sympathizers who presumably would be more than happy to participate in any sort of January 6 ‘rerun’ should Trump lose and the campaign shifts into ‘by any means necessary’ mode.
In the usual email torrent of contribution solicitations today, the Biden labeled requests have sited the above reference “Unified Reich,” and have inferred the potential for Nazi’ism to become an American way of life. The Biden labeled email requested a donation to “Take this country backward.”
It seems to me DE has outlined how the Biden administration has embraced fascism in another name, eg U.S. support of Ukraine, and seeks to normalize these ideas. The email text says supporting Biden’s campaign will help keep a dictator out of the White House.
On election day, the U.S. voters may be offered a choice of a convicted felon who wants to be a dictator, or a nice elderly man who denies fascist terminology but supports the ideology.
The rebroadcast of discussion with Peter Lavenda from 2015 episodes (beginning with FTR# 838) provides much clarity to current events.
My comment above should be edited.
Last line, first paragrah should read: “The Biden labeled email requested donation to prevent an effort to “Take this country backward.”
Thank you.