Germany shocked by secret service link to rightwing terror cell

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ah yes.

GLADIO.

The following is from Searchlight, and there are photos there:

Germany: Nazi terror and state collusion



Published on Tuesday, 01 November 2011 02:48
Written by Gerry Gable

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GERMANY HAS BEEN SHOCKED BY THE REVELATION THAT a nazi terror cell that called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) carried out at least ten assassinations over 13 years without being stopped by the police or secret service. Two men and one woman killed eight Turkish people, a Greek and a police woman during 13 years in which they were on the run after a bomb-making factory was discovered in 1998 in a garage rented by the woman in Jena, eastern Germany.

As if that were not bad enough, the Hessen branch of the domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, admitted that one of its agents was present in April 2006 when two members of the NSU shot dead a 21-year-old Turkish man in an internet cafe. The agent had openly far-right views and was known in the village where he grew up as "Little Adolf". When police raided his flat after the murder they found extracts from Hitler's Mein Kampf. There are unconfirmed reports that the agent was present at three or more other nazi murder scenes.

The nazi cell was discovered when the two men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, were found dead on 4 November in a rented camper van following a bank robbery that went wrong. A post mortem revealed that the older man killed the other by shooting him in the forehead, then put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger, in an alleged suicide pact.

The woman, Beate Zschäpe, 36, handed herself in to the police in Jena after allegedly setting fire to the house she shared with the two men in Zwickau, Saxony, a town near the Czech border. She has been charged with founding a terrorist organisation and arson.

The camper van in which the two dead men were found.

The camper van in which the two dead men were found.
Investigators only linked them to the series of unsolved crimes after searching their home and vehicles and finding the guns used in the nine killings of shopkeepers and food vendors from 2000 to 2006 and the police woman in Heilbronn in 2007. At the time the police blamed many of the murders on a supposed Turkish gang war.

The police also found what looked like a hitlist of 88 possible targets including two prominent members of the Bundestag and representatives of Turkish and Islamic groups. The number 88 has significance among nazis as it corresponds in the alphabet to HH, standing for Heil Hitler. There was also a DVD in which the two dead men boasted of their crimes and threatened more killings.

As well as the murders, the nazis are suspected of at least 14 bank robberies and two nail bomb attacks. The police are looking at all unsolved crimes since 1998 that might have had xenophobic motives. There have been three other arrests and federal prosecutors are investigating whether the NSU has other members. Police believe at least 20 people helped the three core members of the NSU between 1998 and 2011.

A resolution passed by the Bundestag on 22 November called for "a thorough investigation into the links between the murders and the rightwing extremist milieu from which they emerged". A week previously the Christian Democratic Union, the largest party in the governing coalition, voted at its party conference for a ban on the German Democratic Party (NPD), Germany's largest nazi party, which contests elections.

The revelations so far are not so surprising for those who have monitored the often murderous antics of organisations such as Gladio, the Cold War network across Europe set up by Nato as a "stay-behind" force intended, on paper, only to operate in the event that the Soviet Union and its Communist allies struck against the West.

Gladio recruited former military personnel, often ex-special forces, sometimes with the cooperation of national security services and, in some places at least, financed by the CIA.

Beate Zschäpe, who handed herself in to police

Beate Zschäpe, who handed herself in to police.
Searchlight and others revealed that Gladio was not content to wait for any Soviet move but worked to its own agenda, building relationships with existing far-right organisations and creating its own, such as Column 88 in Britain. In Italy Gladio made efforts to advance the destabilisation of society with a series of bombings over many years to launch the "strategy of tension", working with the fascist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, led by Roberto Fiore, the friend and former mentor of the British National Party leader Nick Griffin. Italy had a strong Communist party at the time and Gladio tried to shift Italy to the right.

In Belgium shoppers in supermarkets were gunned down by men described at the time as being part of leftwing terrorist cells. They turned out to be serving or former police officers.

The British section ran training camps for young, potentially fanatical members of the extremist British Movement and discussed pre-emptive strikes against members of the TUC and a wide range of people covering all shades of the left including MPs.

Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos

Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos.
Most people thought that Gladio and its associates had melted away with the end of the Cold War but it seems it, or a successor organisation, has lived on at least in Germany. The NSU robbed banks to finance its activities and killed members of ethnic minority communities, with the suspected collusion of an intelligence service agent whose extreme political views were known but apparently ignored. These features fit the bill for a Gladio-style operation.

A question remains over why the NSU killed the police woman, Michele Kiesewetter. Had she discovered something or was she intended to look like another alleged victim of a a non-existent Turkish gang war? Or was she connected with the far right herself? It appears that her father tried to rent a bar in the eastern German state of Thüringen that was used by nazis for meetings. A chef employed at the bar had the same surname, Zschäpe, as the female NSU member.

Another question is why Zschäpe handed herself in. Was she worried that she might otherwise be found in a burning car with a bullet in her head, as happened in Italy after the nazi Bologna bombing in 1980, when far-right exiles were tempted to return home, only to be deemed unreliable and killed in cold blood by special police units. At the time Searchlight went to press, she had not told the police anything.

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Guns found at the NSU cell's burnt out house in Zwickau.
One of the excuses given for the authorities' apparent inability to stop the NSU is that it operated in the former communist East Germany. But the intelligence service agent linked with the cell was based in Hessen in western Germany. That may be where investigators may find answers to the many questions they should have about the NSU's operations. One line of investigation might be a man named Schinko, who is the running boy for the long-time German nazi and convicted criminal Manfred Roeder. Both of them are based in Hessen.

Roeder has for many years maintained a relationship with British nazis including the veteran Richard Edmonds, who recently rejoined the National Front without leaving the BNP, where he was for a while on Griffin's national advisory committee.

British nazis have often travelled to Europe and the USA to link up with likeminded people, as Searchlight has often reported. It is not impossible that some have had contact with the NSU.

Germany's Prime Minister Angela Merkel described the NSU's crimes as "something inconceivable" and a "disgrace and mortifying for Germany", promising to "do everything we can to get to the bottom of this". She could start by sacking some of her senior intelligence officers and brining some of them before the courts for this murderous collusion.

Readers can follow developments in Der Spiegel's English website, http://www.spiegel.de/international, which has some of the best coverage of this story. The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com) and Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com) are also useful sources.