Politic?: Fascism's Stranglehold

"[The discovery is a] disgrace [for the police in the western region of North Rhine-Westfalia and impacted the force] to its core."
"We are talking about the nastiest and most disgusting neo-Nazi, racist and refugee-hostile hatred."
"I have to tell you that this process makes me speechless. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since I found out about it."
"We have to ask unpleasant questions of ourselves. Who knew about this? Why was this tolerated for years? By whom?"
Herbert Reul, interior minister, North Rhine-Westfalia

"The battle against right-wing extremism is in the DNA of the police."
"The fact that there are, nevertheless, officers who share radical, far-right and xenophobic content in chat groups is unbearable."
Michael Maatz, regional deputy chair, GdP union

Dozens of officers in Essen were asked to hand in their badges and weapons. BERND THISSEN/DPA/AFP via Getty Images

Germany is undergoing yet another neo-Nazi scandal, to augment those that have already been revealed polluting their national military and law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine police officers yesterday were suspended on charges of taking part in extremist chat groups sharing images such as swastikas and depictions of genocidal victims in gas chambers. Photographs of Hitler, Third Reich flags and another image showing a Black person being shot were part of the images shared on these chat groups.

There were 126 images in total, many of them grounds for lawful punishment, shared on five WhatsApp chat groups predominantly or exclusively dominated by police officers, 25 of whom were on the same police force in the city of Essen, asked to hand in their badges and weapons yesterday. Disciplinary measures are underway for the intention of termination against 14 of the officers, eleven of whom are suspected of having carried out criminal offences.

At 34 locations such as private homes and police stations, early morning raids were carried out. Extreme-right scandals have plagued police and military units in Germany. Prominent public figures have received death threats from neo-Nazis. Left-wing politicians and lawyers in recent years have been threatened, the incidents linked to police computers. The WhatsApp chat groups were revealed when an inquiry was launched into those threats, where it was revealed officers shared racist and anti-Semitic content.

A group of neo-Nazi "preppers", called Nordkreuz was discovered in 2017 who, according to authorities, were preparing themselves for "Day X", amassing lists of political opponents and storing weapons and body bags toward the goal that "Day X" evidently represented for them. Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer disbanded a combat unit of Germany's elite Special Forces Command in June in the light of suspected extreme-right ties in the ranks.

German authorities, according to security experts, have failed to tackle the problem of resurging fascism directly and have avoided answering the obvious; whether police can be trusted to investigate themselves. No officers have yet been charged with relation to the death threats. A police officer who founded Northkreuz who had served in the German military, had been given a 21-month suspended sentence on weapons charges last year.

Minister Horst Seehofer in the Bundestag. Hannibal Hanschke /REUTERS

Horst Seehofer, German interior minister, has resisted any assertion of structural racism within the security forces. He cancelled a scheduled study of racial profiling by police back in July with the explaintion by his ministry that there was no necessity to proceed with the investigation since racial profiling is illegal. He spoke, rather, of a study into police-directed violence.

Far-right networks in three of the country's sixteen federal states, cautioned a spokesman for the federal interior ministry, should not be taken as a"structural" racism issue among the nation's 300,000 police officers. Adding that it was too early to re-evaluate the decision that the racism study be shelved, Steve Alter was anxious in his statements to impress upon the news media that the interior ministry continues to trust the democratic, law-abiding judgement of Germany's security officers.

After an officer's cellphone had been confiscated over suspicion of media leaks, what was discovered was the presence of the offending chat groups, one of which started in 2012, another created in 2015, where most of the offensive material was found to have been posted and shared. Leading Mr. Reul to warn that there may well be further shocking revelations since cellphones belonging to other officers were seized on Wednesday for examination.