By Patricia H. Kushlis
In Monday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kulish reported on a more than decade long outbreak of suspected violent neo-Nazism that has stalked Germany from Rostock on the Baltic to Munich and Nuremburg in Bavaria since at least 1998. According to Kulish, the lengthy crime wave is likely connected to a loosely organized group calling itself the National Socialist Underground.
The story came to light on November 4 following an explosion and fire that gutted an apartment in Zwickau in eastern Germany where several members of the group had been living – two of whom are now dead in an apparent double suicide. A third turned herself into police. A fourth was arrested separately.
Members of the Underground have apparently murdered at least ten people, committed a minimum of 14 bank robberies and set off a bombing in Cologne in 2004. Several other bombings – including one in Saarbrucken in 1999 and another in Berlin in 2002 may also turn out to be the work of this same group. The scope and types of their actions are reminiscent of the left-wing urban guerrilla Baader-Meinhof Gang otherwise known as the Red Army Faction that operated in the 1967s and 1970s - except that their political leanings and targets are not.
The times are also very different.
Whereas Baader-Meinhof targeted the German elite and US military personnel at the height of the Cold War, today’s National Socialist Underground has seemingly concentrated on murdering Turkish street vendors and small shopkeepers although one bombing – in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin – could be another piece of their handiwork.
The members of the left wing Baader-Meinhof Group turned out to be children of the middle class. How large is the National Socialist Underground and how does it operate? Who are these people and what motivated them to engage in militant acts? What is its relationship to German political parties, movements and even the security services?
Right wing extremists in Germany have been under surveillance and largely kept under the carpet ever since the end of World War II. After the Berlin Wall’s fall and the incorporation of East Germany into the Federal Republic, German right wing militant extremism erupted with a vengeance in the East where it continues to receive its greatest support. When the Communist lid came off in 1989, the neo-Nazis popped up like toadstools after a rain.
Glaring economic discrepancies and far higher unemployment in the East compared with the prosperous West likely helped trigger the initial extremist reaction especially among minimally educated young men disillusioned with life under Communism but unfit to compete in the West.
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court
Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has the ability to declare radical groups illegal – and it does so. This keeps them out of the government but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist – some in shadowy forms – lurking beneath the surface. The National Democratic Party – the extreme right’s closest legal representative – competes in elections. It currently has seats in two of Germany’s state parliaments – Saxony and Mecklenburg - but none at the federal level. Its members number 7,000 down from a couple of years ago.
An effort in 2003 on the part of both houses of the German parliament to declare the party illegal failed when it was learned that a number of the NPD's inner circle were undercover agents or informants of the German secret services. But what does that mean? And why did it take an explosion, a gutted apartment, joint suicides and a hunted woman turning herself in to the police for the group to be exposed to the public?
A dream of former times than never existed
Its continued virulent anti-Semitism is demonstrated in support for Iran – presumably based on Hitler’s obsession with a greater Germany’s “Aryan” roots - and the Palestinian cause because the Palestinians’ struggle is against Israel. Yet, its anti-immigrant behavior has, in fact, exposed less pure racial fault lines – whatever those may be in the days of DNA - and jumbled ideology.
The focus on murdering hapless Turkish dӧner-kabab street vendors as was likely done by the National Socialist Underground, for instance, is just plain perverse. What kind of message does that send?
Turks have been immigrating to Germany for decades and Berlin, the end of the rail line, has been a major destination. During the long years of a divided city, the Federal Republic was eager to resettle as many people loyal to the FRG there as possible to keep its civilian presence alive in this former and future capital deep in East German territory. Jobs in Berlin came with incentives. Even so most Germans preferred to live in the West. Poorer Turkish laborers came seeking a livelihood. Many stayed making Berlin their home.
The 1980 Oktoberfest Bombing
In a lengthy October 25, 2011 Der Spiegel investigative report, Tobias Heymann and Peter Wensierski question whether the German authorities have pursued the activities of extreme right wing groups as vigorously as they could and should. The reporters point to a 1980 Oktoberfest bombing in Munich which resulted in the worst terrorist attack in postwar German history that left 13 people killed and over 200 wounded.
The person who also managed to kill himself in the attack when he tried to plant the bomb, was a 21 year old man named Gundolf Kӧhler. The Bavarian state government’s Office of Criminal Investigation, under the CSU – the conservative Christian Social Union run by ultra-conservative Franz Josef Strauss - determined that there was no conspiracy and that this confused young man had acted alone. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office agreed. The case was covered up and the evidence sealed until last month.
46,000 pages of documents later
According to the Der Spiegel reporters after reviewing copious documents - some 46,000 pages - about the case, Kӧhler had indeed had connections with the National Democratic Party. They began when he was fourteen. But what about before that? Could he possibly have been a member of some kind of an organization for younger youth that taught similar political leanings that helped begin his path towards neo-Nazism?
Evidence included his National Democratic Party membership card, his attendance at the party’s state convention and participation at campaign events. He had also formed a close relationship with a former Nazi who had become a father figure and a strong influence on his world view. As a member of the Viking Youth, Kӧhler supported the Holocaust and was anti-Communist. The several hundred members of the Viking Youth organization, modeled on the Hitler Youth, were physically trained to combat the left. Kӧhler had also been involved in a paramilitary organization (Military Sports Group) run by a known neo-Nazi.
Then there was his continued involvement with the neo-Nazi right when he studied in Tübingen, an extremist wing that had also had connections with Germany’s major Christian conservative parties – the CDU and Bavaria’s CSU.
Perhaps in their anti-Communist zeal at the time, German government and party officials – especially those in Bavaria and on the Christian right – overlooked the pernicious activities of Germany’ militant neo-Nazi right. Maybe they didn't see the connection. Or perhaps, as Der Spiegel and others have suggested, the relationships between the extreme right and the CSU in particular may well have been more closely intertwined than the leadership wanted to admit.
Highly suspect verdict
Clearly, the German investigators knew more than enough about Kӧhler and his involvement with neo-Nazi groups to make the verdict by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office that there was “no evidence whatsoever” that “third parties could have influenced Kӧhler” highly suspect.
Whatever the reasons for the cover up in 1981 at the time the case against Kӧhler was closed, the explosion, deaths and arrests in Zwickau earlier this month demonstrate that the climate for right wing native born extremist violence has not disappeared from the German political scene.
The NSU may have had a base in the East but its operations – murders, bombings and bank robberies occurred throughout the country.
Revelations of "Structures we never imagined" - Angela Merkl
Angela Merkl’s commented to reporters on Sunday that the crimes in the Zwickau case revealed “structures we never imagined.” But what are they? How deep are their roots?
Will Germany, therefore, begin to confront truthfully these secretive elements in its own society especially in an era of anti-immigrant bashing that extends throughout a troubled Europe? The NDP is small; Germany’s militant neo-Nazi right is even smaller.
German government policies since the end of World War II have rigorously opposed such dangerous ideology and consequent actions. The secret “structures” and the people supporting them need to be publicly revealed and dealt with through the criminal justice system. Then, and only then, can today’s strong Germany rid itself of its troubled past.