Germany still hasn’t solved the problem of Nazis in its army

---

There’s a Nazi army embedded in the German armed forces. Five hundred professional soldiers who swore allegiance to the Bundesrepublik but remain loyal only to the ideals of the Third Reich are working every day in German military bases or in NATO missions in Afghanistan and Africa. And they are actively recruiting new people — including 23 new soldiers since the start of the year.

“We just need to get a vaccine for yellow fever, then we can go to Mali to shoot n****rs in the head,” is one of the most significant declarations by one of the soldiers, which was caught on a hidden microphone planted by German military intelligence and presented to the Bundestag thanks to a parliamentary investigation promoted by the Linke.

This is the first political case since Defense Minister Ursula Von der Leyen (CDU) was confirmed in the role after Angela Merkel’s re-election. And it’s also a recurrence of evidence that the promise to oust Nazi soldiers has never really happened — and that Berlin cannot solve even after hearing recordings of 431 other facts officially admitted by the government.

Waiting for the moment when “whoever bears the swastika is expelled from the army,” as Linke MP Ulla Jelpke demands, it is worth shining a light on the last black can of worms opened up by the MAD (military intelligence) agents. Particularly noteworthy are the red flags with a hooked cross hanging in dorms. One could hear nazirock flowing freely from officials’ radios, and privates watch videos posted on the web, filled with “Heil Hitler” and SS chants, such as the one reported on local media.

It’s a Bundeswehr turned Wehrmacht which escaped the Grand Coalition’s government control. It slipped under the radar of the armed forces, unable even to slow the phenomenon down: just last year there were 289 new cases of ‘black swamp’ — as the Linke termed it in Parliament.

Minister Von der Leyen demands zero tolerance, and Jelpke asks the government to stop “closing one eye and instead start to act to drain the black swamp among the army. There has been too much indulgence on the part of lieutenants in barracks for those who own a gun, be it Nazis and Reichsbürger,” she said, referring to the right-wing extremists who do not recognize the Federal Republic.

The truth is that “German armed forces have a far right problem,” as the Linke points out. It’s a disease detailed in the stacks of tapped phone conversations, full of xenophobic jokes and illegal observations. The illness might even be incurable, as evidenced by the zero action taken after the “Report on anti-constitutional activities in the armed forces” denounced neo-Nazi activity in the army. (Il manifesto reported on this last November.) The report has been attached to Merkel’s response to the Green Party’s interrogation.

Just a few months earlier, a scandal broke out involving Lt. Franco Albrecht, who joined the French Military Academy in Saint Cyr in 2009, where he had graduated with a thesis on the strategy of political change and subversion, before he disguised himself as a Syrian refugee in a asylum center in Asia. There he developed a ‘false flag’ tactic, which involved terrorist attacks and promoting fake claims of responsibility to blame refugees for them.

According to Karlsruhe’s Public Prosecutor’s office, “he was plotting to attack national security in the name of far right ideology.” At the time of his stay, the neo-Nazi soldier even had a detailed checklist of institutional targets: from the Social Democratic Minister of Justice to the former president of the republic. That’s when Minister Von der Leyen convinced herself it was time to search barracks in the 16 German Lands, while also denouncing the “lack of action” of army bosses.

But since then, as the new revelations prove, nothing has changed.

---

Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-germania-scopre-i-nazisti-nellesercito/ on 2015-10-08