NEO-NAZIS ON THE RISE Far-right infiltrates police in Germany
Death threats linked to police computers and the discovery of far-right chat groups in police departments across Germany have fed concerns about far-right infiltration
Travelling for work and far from home, Seda Basay-Yildiz received a chilling fax at her hotel: “You filthy Turkish sow,” it read. “We will slaughter your daughter.” A German defence lawyer of Turkish descent who specialises in Islamist terrorism cases, Ms Basay-Yildiz was accustomed to threats from the far right. But this one, which arrived late one night in August 2018, was different.
Signed with the initials of a former neo-Nazi terrorist group, it contained her address, which was not publicly available because of the earlier threats. Whoever sent it had access to a database protected by the state.
“I knew I had to take this seriously — they had our address, they knew where my daughter lived,” Ms Basay-Yildiz recalled. “And so, for the first time, I actually called the police.”
It would bring her little sense of security: an investigation soon showed that the information had been retrieved from a police computer.
Far-right extremism is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are both new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on having dealt honestly with its murderous past. This month, a two-year parliamentary inquiry concluded that far-right networks had extensively penetrated German security services, including its elite special forces.
But increasingly, the spotlight is turning on Germany’s police, a much more sprawling and decentralised force with less stringent oversight than the military — and with a more immediate effect on the everyday safety of citizens.
After World War II, the greatest preoccupation among the United States, its allies and Germans themselves was that the country’s police force never again be militarised, or politicised and used as a cudgel by an authoritarian state.
Policing was fundamentally overhauled in West Germany after the war and cadets across the country are now taught in unsparing detail about the shameful legacy of policing under the Nazis — and how it informs the mission and institution of policing today.
Still, Germany has been besieged by revelations of police officers in different corners of the country forming groups based on a shared farright ideology.
“I always hoped that it was individual cases but there are too many of them now,” said Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, where 203 police officers are under investigation in connection with reported far-right incidents.
For Mr Reul, alarm bells rang in September, when 31 officers in his state were found to have shared violent neo-Nazi propaganda. “It was almost an entire unit of officers — and we found out by chance,” Mr Reul said. “That floored me.
This is not trivial.”
“We have a problem with far-right extremism. I don’t know how far it reaches inside the institutions. But if we don’t deal with it, it will grow.” It has been growing by the month.
The 31 officers in Mr Reul’s western state were suspended in September for sharing images of Hitler, memes of a refugee in a gas chamber and the shooting of a black man. The unit’s superior was part of the chat, too.
In October, a racist chat group with 25 officers was discovered in the Berlin police after one
I always hoped that it was individual cases, but there are too many of them now.
HERBERT REUL
INTERIOR MINISTER OF NORTH-RHINE WESTPHALIA
officer, frustrated that superiors would not do anything about it, blew the whistle. Separately, six cadets were kicked out of Berlin’s police academy after playing down the Holocaust and sharing images of swastikas in a chat group that had 26 other members.
In November, a police station in the western city of Essen was raided after images of ammunition and benches arranged to form swastikas were discovered in a WhatsApp chat. Last week, a violent far-right chat with four police officers in the northern cities of Kiel and Neumünster was discovered. Ammunition and Nazi memorabilia were found in raids of the homes of two officers.
Much focus has been on the state of Hesse, home to Ms Basay-Yildiz, who lives in Frankfurt, and a number of other high-profile targets of neo-Nazi threats.
Ms Basay-Yildiz is intimately familiar with discrimination in Germany.
When she was 10 years old, her parents, guest workers from Turkey, took the young Seda to help translate when they went to buy car insurance. The salesman declined to sell it to them. “We don’t want foreigners,” he told them.
“So I decided that I want to know what kind of rights I have in Germany,” Ms Basay-Yildiz recalled. She went to the library, found an agency to file a complaint and got her parents the insurance they wanted.
It was then she knew what she wanted to do with her life.
Ms Basay-Yildiz rose to prominence as a lawyer when she represented the family of a Turkish flower seller who was shot at his roadside stand. He was the first victim of the National Socialist Underground, known as the NSU, a neo-Nazi terrorist group that killed 10 people, nine of them immigrants, between 2000 and 2007.
Police forces across Germany blamed immigrants, failing to recognise that the perpetrators were wanted neo-Nazis, while paid informers of the intelligence service helped hide the group’s leaders. Files on the informers were shredded by the intelligence service within days of the story’s exploding into the public realm in 2011.
After a five-year trial that ended in July 2018, Ms Basay-Yildiz won her clients modest compensation but not what they had most hoped for: answers.
“How big was that network and what did state institutions know?” said Ms Basay-Yildiz. “After 438 days in court, we still don’t know.”
Three weeks after the trial finished, she received her first threat by fax. They have not stopped since. Ms Basay-Yildiz represents precisely the kind of change in Germany that the
far right despises.
But she is not the only one. Police computers in Hesse have been used to call up data on a Turkish-German comedian, Idil Baydar, as well as a left-wing politician, Janine Wissler, who both received threats. The police president of the state failed to report it for months. He had to resign in July.
Most of the threats, including those to Ms Basay-Yildiz, have come in the form of emails signed “NSU 2.0.”
In all, the state government has been looking into 77 cases of far-right extremism in its police force since 2015. This summer it named a special investigator whose team is focused solely on the email threats.
When investigators discovered that Ms Basay-Yildiz’s information had been called up on a computer in Frankfurt’s 1st precinct 90 minutes before she received the threat, the police officer who had been logged on at the time was suspended. The whole police station was searched and computers and cellphones were analysed, leading to the suspension of five more officers. Later in the year, the number grew to 38.
Ms Basay-Yildiz is not reassured.
“If you have 38 people, you have a structural problem,” she said. “And if you don’t realise this, nothing will change.”
More frightening than the threats, Ms BasayYildiz said, was her growing sense that police were shielding far-right extremists in their ranks. She was never even shown photos of the officers in question, who remain suspended on reduced pay, she said.
The threats kept coming, sometimes every few months, sometimes weekly. She moved her family to another part of town. Her new address was even more protected than the old one. Ordinary police computers could no longer call it up. For 18 months, she felt safe.
But early this year that changed: whoever was threatening her had identified her new address and made sure she knew it. This time police came back and said her address had not been accessed internally.
On Nov 11, Ms Basay-Yildiz received her latest threat. It opened with “Heil Hitler!” and closed with “Say hi to your daughter from me.”
When she reported it to police, their assessment was that she and her daughter were in no concrete danger.
“But I can’t rely on that anymore,” she said. “It’s a great factor of insecurity: who can I trust? And who can I call if I can’t trust the police?”