COMMENT: 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. 

“Ger­man Intel­li­gence Set Up KKK Branch”; Ger­many Watch; 11/01/2012.

EXCERPT: 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. [Ital­ics added.]

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. [Ital­ics added.]

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. [Ital­ics added.]

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. . . .