German secret service and neo-nazis

This video says about itself:

22 August 2014

Thuringia’s special state parliamentary investigative committee on the ten murders committed by the NSU neonazi terrorist cell from 200[0] to 2007 is harshly critical of the role of the state’s agency for the protection of the constitution, and says the murders could have been prevented.

By Dietmar Henning in Germany:

Further evidence of ties between German neo-Nazi group and domestic intelligence agency

25 May 2016

The trial against the National Socialist Underground (NSU) at Munich’s district court is in the closing stages. For three years, the court and its chair, Judge Manfred Götzl, have looked at thousands of pieces of information. The main question has always remained: How could 10 murders, bomb attacks and a series of bank robberies take place under the noses of the police and intelligence agencies? Who held, and is holding, a protective hand over the right-wing terrorists?

Over recent weeks and months, further evidence has come to light demonstrating close connections between the domestic intelligence agency, police and NSU.

Research by Welt editor Stefan Aust and filmmaker Dirk Laabs recently revealed that Ralf Marschner, who worked for the intelligence agency (BfV) for a decade as agent Primus, most likely employed the three NSU terrorists, Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, after they went underground in 1998. Both men worked in his construction firm, Mundlos as a foreman under the name Max Florian Burkhardt, while Zschäpe helped out in one of his businesses.

Aust and Laabs then reported earlier this month that in 2001, Marschner was involved in an attack on a pub in Zwickau together with Susann Eminger, Zschäpe’s best friend. At this point, Zschäpe, Mundlos and Böhnhardt had already lived in the city for a year. Eminger visited Zschäpe in the apartment throughout the entire period of their illegality. Eminger’s boyfriend at the time, André, and her husband since 2005, is charged in the Munich trial with aiding the NSU.

On April 21, 2001, Marschner, Eminger and other skinheads burst into the bar and assaulted guests. According to witness statements from the owner, Marschner was the leader of the group. A political motive was later ruled out by the relevant investigators.

The state prosecutor in Zwickau laid charges of grievous bodily harm against Marschner and Eminger. However, these charges were not included in the Munich proceedings. These charges was kept under wraps by the federal prosecutor’s office as part of its so-called investigation into support structures. “Further investigations on the part of the federal criminal office (BKA) to clarify the extent of relations between Eminger and the agent Marschner remain unknown, even though they would have been required due to the trial over the bar brawl,” wrote Die Welt.

Proceedings against Marschner for the bar assaults were “temporarily suspended” two years later, while Eminger had to perform 20 hours’ community service. Agent Marschner has apparently enjoyed protection from the judiciary for decades. In Saxony alone, several dozen legal proceedings have been led against him since 1990 by the judiciary. The intelligence informant has never been sentenced to prison.

Even when Marschner was accused of killing a 17-year-old on the “Day of German unity” in 1990, he emerged innocent from the proceedings. The files on Marschner and the murder investigation were allegedly destroyed during the flooding in Chemnitz in 2010, authorities announced last week.

A petition by a representative of the joint plaintiffs in the NSU trial to order Marschner, who now lives in Switzerland, to appear as a witness was rejected by Judge Götzl, following consultation with the federal prosecutor. Even if the agent knew and employed Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe after they went underground, this was not of immediate relevance in determining the questions of the acts committed and guilt of the defendants, the court said by way of justification.

The inviting of another witness, who was present at a meeting in 1998 between the Brandenburg interior ministry and agents from Thuringia and Saxony, was also rejected by the court. This meeting decided not to provide information to the police about an agent who had supplied the underground trio with a weapon. While a representative of a joint plaintiff concluded from this that the Interior Ministry had “made possible the series of murders by the NSU,” the court declared that it did not draw the conclusion that “joint responsibility of the state existed in the acts of the defendants.”

But this is precisely what is becoming ever clearer. Marschner’s handler at the intelligence service, code-name “Richard Kaldrack,” was at the same time managing agent Thomas Richter, code-name “Corelli.” Richter was also active around the NSU terrorists and was possibly in contact with them. He worked for the intelligence agency for 18 years and received €300,000 for his services.

Among other things, he made available electronic storage space for a neo-Nazi magazine, which published a greeting to the NSU as early as 2002. He was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan in Baden-Württemberg, which also included two colleagues of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, who was murdered by the NSU in 2007. A CD containing data with the title “NSDAP/NSU,” which he handed over to the intelligence service in 2005, only emerged years later. In 2014, shortly before he could be questioned about this, the 39-year-old died suddenly of a diabetes illness that apparently nobody was aware of.

Now, a telephone from Richter, “Corelli,” has also appeared. Corelli allegedly used it in 2012 and handed it over to the BfV in autumn 2012. There it was concealed in an armoured cupboard. It was then discovered in a fifth search in the summer of 2015, the intelligence agency now declares. Intelligence agency experts, who were until April this year working on it, have found a series of pictures and names from the radical right-wing scene. It has now been passed to the BKA for further evaluation of the available data.

Journalist Thomas Moser, who has been working on the NSU story for years, told Teleopolis last Tuesday about “overlaps” between the intelligence agency and the NSU.

He cited from protocol notes from a situational briefing in the police directorate (PD) in Gotha from November 5 and 6, 2011, found by the parliamentary NSU committee. As part of its area of responsibility, the bodies of Mundlos and Böhnhardt had been found in a burnt-out caravan the previous day.

In the protocol, among other things, the following statements are cited: “Efforts to locate the trio were abandoned in 2002. It was known that the state domestic intelligence agency (LfV) was concealing the target persons.” “The PD head intended to do everything to locate Ms. Zschäpe before she was withdrawn by the LfV.” And: “At least one member of the trio was allegedly working for the intelligence service until 2003. … The trio or part of it was closely tied to the intelligence agency, or the state intelligence agency had something to do with them, something like that.”

The police in Thuringia therefore assumed that the NSU trio was being protected by the intelligence agency. The situation briefing was led by Michael Menzel, who had led the police directorate in Gotha since 2009 and since 2015 has worked as criminal director in the Thuringia Interior Ministry. Menzel was also on location when the bodies were discovered and could have tampered with evidence. He was invited as a witness by the Munich trial, as well as by a number of parliamentary investigations, but always responded in vague terms.

Menzel, who began his police career in the GDR, is tied by several threads to the NSU. Among his colleagues in Saalfeld, where he headed the criminal police from 1998 to 2001, was Mike Wenzel, who as an intelligence officer dealt with the Thuringia Home Protection (THS), a right-wing organisation out of which the NSU emerged. Wenzel’s niece, Kiesewetter, was believed to be the NSU’s last victim in 2007. Her service weapon was later found in Mundlos and Böhnhardt’s burnt-out caravan. Even though nothing was publicly known about the NSU at that time, Wenzel immediately drew a connection between the so-called “döner murders” and the death of his niece.

It has long been known that over 20 agents of the intelligence service were operating around the NSU. A handler for agents in Hesse, Andreas Temme, was even present when Halit Yozgat was murdered in Kassel in April 2006. Any boundaries between the intelligence services and the NSU terror gang are virtually undetectable.

Whether the intelligence service is jointly responsible for the NSU murders, or whether one of the NSU members collaborated with intelligence, remains unclear, largely thanks to the joint efforts of the interior ministry, intelligence agencies, police authorities, federal prosecutor and the Munich District Court.

This video from Germany says about itself:

2/10/1980 MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR THOSE WHO DIED IN THE NEO-NAZI OKTOBERFEST BOMB

All 6 neo-Nazis, arrested in connection with the bomb attack at the Munich Beer Festival, have been released after questioning.

By Dietmar Henning in Germany:

1980 Oktoberfest bombing: German government and secret service still withholding information

25 May 2016

On September 26 1980, 12 innocent bystanders and the perpetrator, Gundolf Köhler, were killed in the most serious right-wing attack in post-war German history. Over 200 were injured, some seriously.

At the time, the investigators and secret service drew a veil over the background to the attacks and those responsible. Although evidence and witnesses pointed to the involvement of state bodies and neo-Nazi terrorist groups, the authorities soon settled on a narrative that Köhler was the sole perpetrator. The state attorney halted any investigations two years after the attack.

It was only thanks to the initiative of journalist Ulrich Chaussy and the victims’ attorney Werner Dietrich that the attorney general was forced to take up the case again at the end of 2014. In February 2015, they demanded the Secret Service and Foreign Intelligence Agency (BND) look through their files covering the Oktoberfest bombing and the right-wing scene at the time and make the relevant files available.

The state attorney in Karslruhe sent the two agencies a long list, which included the following search terms, among others: Karl-Heinz Hoffmann (the paramilitary group the culprit Gundolf Köhler trained in) and Heinz Lembke (the neo-Nazi who was suspected of providing the explosives for the attack).

But the prosecutors are still waiting. The BND has since provided a few files; however, they are redacted. The Secret Service, which possesses far more files regarding the Oktoberfest attack, the culprit’s background and the neo-Nazi organisations of the time, is keeping these under lock and key.

This was revealed in an answer to a parliamentary question lodged by Left Party deputy Martina Renner. The Karlsruhe state attorney has been waiting for 15 months. The Secret Service has justified the long wait by saying that it involved “a very extensive trawl through the evidence.” However, the Secret Service and the government were close to completion of their review, it was said.

Given the previous practice and methods of the Secret Service, it is to be suspected that the time is being used in order to “clean” the files, or even to destroy them. For example, following the uncovering of the far-right terrorist group Nation Socialist Underground (NSU), numerous files were shredded.

There are numerous clues pointing to the links between the Secret Service, Köhler and the “Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann” paramilitary group. In his updated book, Oktoberfest—the attack: How the cover up of right-wing terror began, Ulrich Chaussy describes how the authorities were not willing to carry out investigations into the right-wing scene after the assassination and even sabotaged such efforts. The penetration of the right-wing terrorist groups of that time, especially the “Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann,” by the secret service agencies is still being kept secret. In his book, Chaussy draws several parallels to the murders carried out by the NSU.

For example, the authorities dismissed confessions by two members of Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. The statement “that was us,” by Walter Ulrich Behle, an undercover agent for the North Rhine-Westphalia state secret service, was described as “alcohol-induced bragging.” And the statement of Stefan Wagner, who said while on the run from the police, “I was part of the action against the Oktoberfest,” was supposed to have been false. The state attorney claims Wagner had had an ironclad alibi for the day of the attack, while in his book, Chaussy cites a high-ranking Federal Criminal Agency officer saying, “Stefan Wagner’s alibi was never checked out on tactical grounds.”

Heinz Lembke, a right-wing radical who had accumulated huge caches of secret weapons and explosives, and was suspected of having supplied the explosives for the attack, was never examined in more detail as part of the investigation into the Oktoberfest bombing. He was arrested only a year after the attack, when one of his weapons caches was discovered accidentally. In early November 1981, a day before he was to testify before the public prosecutor, he was found hanged in his cell. His file contains the restrictive notice: “only partially admissible in court,” which suggests the activities of an undercover operative.

Given the close relations between the secret services and the neo-Nazi scene in Germany, the federal government and intelligence agencies have withheld background information about the Oktoberfest bombing for decades. The government has repeatedly refused to answer questions in parliament from the Greens and the Left Party. Real names are generally kept secret.

On April 7, 2015, the parliamentary justice secretary, Christian Lange, said on behalf of Justice Minister Heiko Maas (both from the Social Democratic Party), in response to an inquiry by the Greens, that the government had again come to the conclusion that “questions about the operation of undercover sources and agents—the function of people—even if it concerns long-past operations, cannot be answered to protect the operation of the intelligence services.”

Parliament’s right to information finds its limits “in the best interests of the nation or a federal state, which could be compromised by the disclosure of confidential information.” In this way, the Justice Ministry places the interests of the state and its intelligence agencies higher than the rights of parliament and the public interest.

Both the Green and Left Party parliamentary groups lodged a constitutional challenge to the Supreme Court, submitted in May 2015, to force the government to answer their questions. A decision is still pending.