Lis­ten now: One Seg­ment

Against the back­ground of increased Nazi activ­i­ty in the “new” and reunit­ed Ger­many, the emer­gence of vir­u­lent Nazism in the Bun­deswehr takes on a par­tic­u­lar­ly sin­is­ter note (the Bun­deswehr is the Ger­man army.) This pro­gram exam­ines the rela­tion­ship between con­vict­ed Nazi ter­ror bomber Man­fred Roed­er and the Bun­deswehr. The per­pe­tra­tor of the bomb­ing mur­der of two immi­grants, Roed­er was select­ed to lec­ture at an elite Ger­man offi­cers acad­e­my in 1995. In addi­tion, the Bun­deswehr donat­ed a num­ber of sur­plus mil­i­tary vehi­cles to Roed­er’s organization÷a prac­tice that was not atyp­i­cal of the Bun­deswehr’s behav­ior towards oth­er Nazi orga­ni­za­tions. The Bun­deswehr was the bene­fac­tor of an orga­ni­za­tion of Waf­fen SS vet­er­ans, which also received sur­plus army vehi­cles. Sup­port for Roed­er’s activ­i­ties on behalf of the state reached to the high­est lev­els of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, which has attempt­ed to cov­er up the affair by dis­cred­it­ing crit­ics of the army’s behav­ior. Oth­er Nazi ele­ments had been req­ui­si­tioned to lec­ture at the offi­cers acad­e­my as well.) In the past, Roed­er has served as a liai­son with Nazi and fas­cist groups in oth­er coun­tries, includ­ing the Unit­ed States. The seg­ment also con­tains dis­cus­sion of the role of Third Reich vet­er­ans in the post World War II Ger­man mil­i­tary.