Right-wing extremists have infiltrated Germany’s armed forces. Why has so little been done about it?
By Peter Kuras
For a man at the centre of a neo-Nazi scandal, Philipp S was surprisingly bland. I was hoping for a peek inside the secretive world of right-wing extremism in the German armed forces when I attended his trial in Leipzig last year. Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t this polite 45-year-old man standing in well-pressed trousers and a beige sweater. Occasionally Philipp S (German privacy law prevents full identification of defendants) whispered to his fiancée. They seemed like a nice couple.
When German police raided Philipp S’s home in 2020 they found a cache of weapons, many of them stolen from the special-forces unit he was part of. The arsenal included a decommissioned ak-47, 2kg of plastic explosives, a smoke grenade and more than 5,000 rounds of live ammunition. The non-military material was equally disturbing: several back issues of Der Freiwillige, a magazine published after the second world war for former members of the ss; photo- and songbooks issued to the ss; and a collection of vintage postcards with slogans such as “We thank our Führer”.
The journalists at the trial included reporters from Taz, a left-wing newspaper which has doggedly investigated the armed forces’ neo-Nazi problem. Anyone in the courtroom hoping for a cathartic reckoning, however, was in for disappointment. The prosecution focused rigidly on the narrow question of whether Philipp S broke the law on owning weapons. Exactly how many guns did he have buried in his garden in Saxony? How did they get there? Even the judge seemed to grow bored with the endless lists of bullets organised by calibre and lot number, interrupting one such account to ask: “What can you actually do with all that stuff?”
“Often when we go into a home there’s a swastika hanging over the bed”
To the extent that the court discussed Philipp S’s Nazi memorabilia at all it was with an insouciance that was almost comical. The first witness was a detective for a police unit created in the 1990s to help stem a surge in right-wing violence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He insisted that having ss swag was not a big deal: “Often when we go into a home there’s a swastika hanging over the bed,” he said.
In recent years, right-wing extremism has become alarmingly prevalent in the German armed forces. A parliamentary report in 2020 concluded with chilling matter-of-factness that the security establishment had become entangled with “extreme-right organised structures”. The elite unit to which Philipp S belonged, the Kommando Spezialkräfte (ksk), is under particularly intense scrutiny. Commandos in this unit are five times more likely to have right-wing extremist convictions than the average soldier, according to Deutschlandfunk, a German public-radio service.
Leaders in Berlin are vocal about the need to expel these right-wing networks with an “iron broom”, as one put it. There have been investigations and inquiries: Philipp S’s company within the ksk was dissolved in 2020, and last year the German government introduced compulsory questions on political beliefs for new recruits to the elite force. The concern has become even more pressing since the government committed to spending an extra €100bn on the armed forces after Russia invaded Ukraine: it’s hard to justify borrowing huge sums of money to furnish a force that many Germans view as riddled with Nazis.
Politicians may be sincere in their desire to eliminate far-right ideologies from state institutions. As Philipp S’s trial suggests, however, in practice the state remains cautious about confronting them, at least when it comes to the armed forces. Prosecutors didn’t discuss what networks Philipp S might have been part of. They didn’t seem interested in his motivation for stockpiling the weapons – which might have affected the length of his sentence. They called no witnesses from his private life to throw light on his beliefs or who he associated with. One police officer noted that Philipp S had stored the phone numbers of two people tied to a suspected network of right-wing terrorists – but added that he may have had professional reasons for doing so. And that was more or less the end of the court’s interest in Philipp S’s potential connections to extremists.
The longer I spent at the trial, the more I realised that the dividing line I’d expected to see between Philipp S and the German establishment just wasn’t there. One of his former colleagues pronounced him an “excellent soldier” whose values resembled those of Germany’s main conservative party ten years ago. Soldier after soldier emphasised that Philipp S was “completely normal”.
In February 2017 a man was arrested trying to retrieve a pistol hidden in a public toilet in Vienna airport. This was the case that first alerted the German public to the prevalence of right-wing extremism in the modern armed forces: Franco A was a lieutenant in the ksk, the same elite unit that the Leipzig trial concerned.
The police investigation uncovered an extraordinary story: Franco A had registered himself as a Syrian refugee under a pseudonym, and was planning to carry out violent attacks on several politicians. Prosecutors said these were “false flag” operations aimed at stirring up resentment of the refugee population. (A court later rejected this explanation but did find Franco A guilty of plotting an act of terrorism, sentencing him to five and a half years in prison.)
Two members of the network had been compiling hit lists of politicians. They also bought body bags and quicklime
Franco A was part of an informal network of police, judges, prosecutors and military officers connected to each other on social media. They swapped racist banter (one member ran a shooting tournament named after a Turkish immigrant murdered by neo-Nazis), weapons recommendations and preparations for the collapse of the existing social order, which they referred to as “Day X”. The network’s members were especially exercised by the influx of refugees from the Middle East – particularly Syria – in 2015. They discussed the need to distribute a cache of weapons to use in what they saw as the coming chaos.
The network divided itself into four distinct chat groups on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, each identified by a point of the compass. At least one of the chats was administered by a ksk soldier who went by the codename “Hannibal” (he was later identified as André S), which became the shorthand term for the entire network. In August 2017 police raided several homes connected to the north chapter. It turned out that at least two of its members had been compiling lists of left-wing and centre-left politicians that were extensively annotated with personal information drawn from police databases. They had also bought body bags and quicklime.
They were initially charged with terrorism but the case was later abandoned. The only member of the north group to go to court so far was prosecuted for weapons-law violations – just like Philipp S – and got no jail time. When the verdict was delivered, supporters in the courtroom broke into applause.
Several other charges of illegally owning weapons have since been brought against soldiers, police officers and politicians in the Hannibal network, but each has been treated as an individual case. Under German law, prosecutors have a lot of discretion in defining what constitutes a criminal conspiracy – none has so far attempted to link the illegal-arms caches in the Hannibal network in this way.
It isn’t easy for prosecutors to gather the necessary evidence for a conspiracy charge when some people within the security apparatus seem to be actively hindering investigations. In September 2017 federal agents exploring possible connections between Hannibal’s network and Franco A’s planned terror attack raided the ksk offices where Hannibal worked. They found that his laptop and other devices had already been removed. Many suspected that he had been tipped off by an insider. A military-intelligence agent was accused of alerting him to the raid, but was acquitted at trial. (A spokesman for Germany’s military-intelligence agency told 1843 magazine that the court’s verdict “ended” the matter. He added that there had been no suspected cases of right-wing extremism in the agency in recent years.)
Philipp S’s case was tainted too: an agent from Germany’s military-intelligence services leaked information about it to a friend in the ksk, according to Der Spiegel. The agent was suspended from duty, though officials insisted the investigation had not been compromised.
“I asked myself what would I do if I found an SS songbook in my grandfather’s things?”
German authorities have long been accused of protecting right-wing extremist organisations. Most notorious was a case concerning a terrorist cell, the National Socialist Underground (nsu). In the 2000s members of the cell went on a murder spree, killing ten people and attempting to kill many more. The victims – mostly of Turkish origin – were shot at close range using the same pistol. Investigators concluded that the crimes must have been committed by Turkish gangsters. They clung to this theory for years, even though the victims had no connection to any gang and there were no traces of gang activity at the crime scenes. America’s FBI advised police to look at right-wing extremists instead, but nothing happened.
The real perpetrators might never have come to light but for the death of two of the terror cell’s leaders, who killed themselves in an apparent murder-suicide pact in 2011. After their bodies were found in a burnt-out motorhome in eastern Germany, police discovered that they had been part of a secretive neo-Nazi group; they also found forensic links to the Turkish murders.
It then emerged that Germany’s internal security service, the Verfassungsschutz, had been monitoring the nsu. The service had kept quiet about what it knew of the neo-Nazis’ activities, and when the existence of the terror cell was exposed its employees destroyed several files containing details of the surveillance operation. The head of the internal security service eventually resigned, along with several senior officials.
Mindful of this history, some fear that tolerance of far-right extremism is entrenched within the German security establishment. “These elite units are just lightning rods,” Florian Pfaff, a campaigner for military accountability, told me. The real problem, he said, is a far more general disregard for the law: “That extends to the highest levels of the army, and into the highest reaches of German politics.”
In 1945, when foreign armies had reduced Hitler’s Reich to rubble, many observers thought that Nazism had died with its leader. But millions of Germans had supported and carried out his commands, to a greater or lesser degree. To prop up the fragile order, the Allies needed to appoint some of these people to public office. They relied on documents that asserted – without much inquiry – that the bearer had never collaborated with the Nazis. Many Germans nicknamed these documents “Persil certificates”, after the laundry detergent. Today’s armed forces have no institutional links with Hitler’s, but there were undoubtedly overlaps in personnel in the formative, post-war years.
The main task of the new security establishment in West Germany, as far as its American backers were concerned, was confronting the Soviets. Successive governments in West Germany agreed. The headline-grabbing antics of radical terrorist groups like the Baader Meinhof gang, who sought to overthrow capitalism through killing and hijacking, lent credence to the idea that the main threat to political stability came from the left. (This was only partially true then, and has been demonstrably false since the 1980s, when most left-wing groups abandoned the tactic of organised violence.) The preoccupation with the threat from Moscow meant that German officials continued to overlook people’s backgrounds if they might be useful in the fight against communism
He was arrested trying to retrieve a pistol hidden in a public toilet in Vienna airport
In the 1950s nato spies sought to organise their own shadow army across western Europe so that a force was battle-ready if the Soviets invaded. In Germany they drew on a ready-made pool of anti-Soviet fanatics. Officially, America’s Counterintelligence Corps hunted ex-Nazis and brought them to justice. Secretly, they also recruited selected fascists for the German chapter of this shadow army. Prominent recruits included Reinhard Gehlen, who had been a senior commander on the Nazis’ eastern front. He subsequently became the first head of West Germany’s domestic intelligence service.
Gehlen helped to recruit a cadre of ardent former Nazis to the shadow army, most notably Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo chief known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his role in killing and deporting Jews and resistance fighters in France during the second world war. Though nato promised to abandon the controversial militia after its existence was revealed in 1952, this didn’t officially happen until at least the 1990s. (Most details regarding the organisation remain classified.)
Rather than fading away with time, right-wing extremist sentiment seems to have flourished in some parts of society. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, a sociologist who studies racism in Germany, compares the different types of far-right sympathisers to the layers of an onion. The inner core of violent activists is supported by a second layer of people who fund their activities. The third layer consists of political organisations explicitly bent on taking the system down. A fourth layer, which Heitmeyer calls “the milieu of authoritarian national radicalism”, consists of political parties that feed on nationalist sentiments, such as the populist Alternative für Deutschland (afd), which got 10% of the vote in last year’s election. The onion’s outer layer consists of those who openly or privately express racist views. The problem is that it’s hard to tell which category right-wing members of the police or armed forces might fall into.
The lawyer for Philipp S seemed to enjoy having the eyes of the press on him during the trial. He peacocked into the courtroom each morning, his shoes shining brightly. “These discussions about right-wing extremism don’t belong here,” he said, addressing the judge with the confidence of someone with a good story to tell. The defendant was a heroic soldier with a long record of service to his country, he said. Yes, he had made a bad mistake in taking the munitions and burying them in his garden – but he had suffered enough for this crime. (Philipp S was imprisoned for several months before the trial; because of his commando training he was monitored by three to four well-trained guards to stop him trying to escape.)
Philipp S was a sympathetic defendant. He broke down in tears while reading a confession on the first day of his trial. As the case progressed, he remained respectful and dignified. That he’d kept an ss songbook, his lawyer argued, was evidence merely that Germany had a past. “I asked myself, what would I do”, his lawyer said during closing remarks, “if I found an ss songbook in my grandfather’s things?” The courtroom went silent at this. Perhaps some were too shocked to object. Or maybe they were thinking about their own grandfathers, about what they might have found in their attics and basements.
The judge eventually concluded that Philipp S held right-wing extremist positions, but that there was no evidence of him planning to use his impressive armoury to commit a terrorist act. The army tended to attract right-wingers, he added: “You don’t find a lot of Greens or leftists in the military, not to mention anarchists.” He didn’t seem to think much could be done to change that. He sentenced Philipp S to two years’ probation, ordered that the former soldier be given back his id and his passport, and sent him on his way.■
Peter Kuras is a journalist in Berlin
images: getty, alamy