Warning from Former Extremist: Neo-Nazi Terrorist Threat Remains Real
As Germany prepares to commemorate the 10 victims of the killing spree committed by the NSU neo-Nazi group, a former extremist has warned that more potential terrorists are lurking in the far-right scene, which he claims is well-organized and ready to resort to bombing attacks in its goal of creating a "Fourth Reich".
Gabriel Landgraf, 34, a former neo-Nazi from Berlin, says the German far-right scene has long contained potential terrorists with the same militant goals as the so-called Zwickau cell, the trio discovered by chance last November after murdering 10 people since 2000.
"These networks and structures have existed since the 1980s and 1990s. There are theories and strategies going around in the scene for how to go into terrorism," Landgraf, a former senior member of militant far-right groups, told foreign journalists in Berlin.
"People I knew were talking about using pipe bombs and other methods," said Landgraf, a well-spoken, slender man who quit the scene in 2006 and who doesn't want to be photographed. "They were saying that if the Day X, when society and the state collapse and the Fourth Reich can be built on the rubble, doesn't arrive quickly enough, we will have to find other ways and means to make it happen, and that terrorism is an option."
"They're not stupid," he added.
Landgraf, who is bald and has large piercings in his ears, said he didn't know about the Zwickau cell, which called itself the National Socialist Underground and shot dead nine mostly Turkish shopkeepers and one policewoman as well as injuring 22 people with a remote-detonated nail bomb in a Turkish district of Cologne in 2004.
But he said he wasn't surprised by its existence or its capabilities.
"These networks and these methods and ideas have been around for a long time. I didn't find it surprising. What did surprise me was how the security authorities failed to find them and failed to prevent the killings," he said.
The discovery of the Zwickau cell was a major embarrassment for German security authorities. It exposed them to criticism that they have been blind to the threat of far-right violence and excessively preoccupied with Islamist militants.
'They're Cracking Up With Laughter'
There have been calls for a fundamental reform of the domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. A parliamentary committee of inquiry has been set up to investigate what went wrong, and the Interior Ministry has said it will set up a register of known neo-Nazis, similar to its register of radical Islamists.
According to Landgraf, though, hardcore neo-Nazis aren't especially worried about the debate. "We know that many people who need to be fought are cracking up with laughter at the moment," he said.
Germany will hold a ceremony and observe a minute's silence on Thursday in memory of the victims of the NSU -- eight men of Turkish origin and one Greek man, all murdered in cold blood in a six-year killing spree in various German cities, simply because they were immigrants. A policewoman was also killed and her partner seriously injured after he was shot in the head. Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold the keynote speech in place of Christian Wulff, who resigned as president last Friday in a scandal over favors from private entrepreneurs.
The murders, initially called the "doner killings" in just one indication of how insensitively the investigation was handled, baffled the police, who long suspected that the victims might be involved in gambling or protection rackets. The possibility of a far-right motive was never investigated until a DVD claiming responsibilty was discovered by chance in an apartment used by right-wing extremists.
Call for Broader Debate on Racism
Thursday's ceremony is being overshadowed by warnings that three months after the shock discovery of the existence of the NSU, the momentum for a broad public fight against the far right is starting to slacken.
"I would have preferred a deeper debate about the failings of the authorities," said Bernd Wagner, a leading analyst of the far-right and founder of EXIT-Deutschland, an organization set up in 2000 to help neo-Nazis quit the scene.
"The political pressure is easing off again," he said. "We're not addressing the basic issue of how to use our domestic intelligence services in the future."
The investigation so far has blamed poor coordination between police and the regionally fragmented intelligence authorities for the failure to apprehend the three members of the NSU, who had been on the run from the police since 1998 but had managed to live surprisingly normal lives with the help of accomplices.
Two of the members, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, committed suicide in November following a botched bank robbery. The third suspected member, Beate Zschäpe, is in custody. Police searching the apartment they had used in the eastern city of Zwickau found DVDs in which they credibly claimed responsibility for the killings.
Wagner said he hoped Merkel would talk about the problem of racism in German society in her speech on Thursday. "I expect her to address the racial myth in Germany, and to explain that we're not an ethnically homogeneous society, that we're a community of different ethnic groups."
Estimates of the number of people killed by far-right violence since unification in 1990 vary widely. The government says there have been around 50 deaths, while the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, an anti-racism group, puts the figure at over 180. There was an upsurge in racist violence in eastern Germany after unification in 1990 when immigrants became scapegoats for the economic upheaval caused by the rapid collapse of the communist economy.
Wagner said the nature of far-right violence was changing. "At first it was spontaneous, uncontrolled, racist youth violence, but in the last 10 to 15 years it has become more focused, better organized and more strategic."
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