Two recent articles from The New York Times continue the newspaper’s documentation of a sinister and dangerous infiltration of German security forces by far-right extremist networks. As I wrote when I flagged the first of these reports earlier this year, the rise of Nazi-adjacent adherents inside the German armed forces is a nauseating development, almost the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But as I’ll get into a little later, what’s going on in Germany is of urgent importance to Americans, and more of us need to be paying attention to these disturbing events.
While earlier reporting from the Times concentrated on far-right elements in the German military, particularly in its elite KSK commando units, a piece from last week explores the growing evidence of a widespread extremist presence in the nation’s police forces. A multiplicity of chat groups populated by policemen share racist, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim content, such as “images of Hitler, memes of a refugee in a gas chamber and the shooting of a Black man.” As with the networks uncovered in the ranks of the German army, some adherents appear to be moving beyond rhetoric to plans for action: a few weeks ago, raids on a “violent far-right chat” group resulted in recovery of ammunition from the homes of two officers. More concretely, police computer records have been used to pull up data on prominent Germans of foreign ancestry, who subsequently experienced threats to their lives. These targets include “a defense lawyer of Turkish descent who specializes in Islamist terrorism cases” and a Turkish-German comedian.
Particularly alarming is that the German police were reformed after World War II specifically to prevent their militarization and politicization, as had occurred under Nazism. The Times notes that “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.” That such radicalization is occurring despite such conscious efforts to head it off for literally decades is deeply unsettling. The article goes on to note that some Germans “fear that the infiltration of police ranks poses special dangers for Germany, not least a creeping subversion of state institutions that are supposed to serve and protect the public.”
This crisis among Germany’s police is not occurring in a vacuum, but parallels the rise of right-wing politicians and politics in the country. Indeed, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, or AfD, has “aggressively courted” the police and military; the Times observes that “penetrating state institutions, especially those with guns has been part of the party’s strategy from the start.” More than this, some elements of the AfD appear to be encouraging German security forces to engage in outright treason against the German state: the head of the AfD in the German state of Thuringia “has repeatedly appealed to police officers and intelligence agents to resist the orders of the government, which he calls ‘the real enemies of democracy and freedom.’” (Indeed, in a shocking appraisal of the AfD’s subversiveness, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency “considers the AfD so dangerous that it may place the entire party under observation”).
A second Times article published yesterday centers on a German army officer who, in addition to participating in far-right groups, created a false immigrant identity for himself as part of a scheme to, as German prosecutors allege, “carry out one or several assassinations that could be blamed on his refugee alter ego and set off enough civil unrest to bring down the Federal Republic of Germany.” The officer, identified in court documents as “Franco A.,” was arrested in 2017, but a trial will finally happen early next year; the Times reporter, Katrin Bennhold, spent many hours interviewing Franco A. for the article, and presents his story as emblematic of “the tale of today’s two Germanys”:
One was born of its defeat in World War II and reared by a liberal consensus that for decades rejected nationalism and schooled its citizens in contrition. That Germany is giving way to a more unsettled nation as its wartime history recedes and a long-dormant far right rousts itself in opposition to a diversifying society. Germany’s postwar consensus teeters in the balance.
The account of Franco A.’s life and the crimes of which he’s been accused read like a combination spy novel-psychological thriller (it occurs to me that had John Le Carré not passed away this year, his next novel might well have been about the right-wing presence in Germany’s armed forces). Franco A. has his own idiosyncratic story, but it offers important potential clues to the mindset of other Germans who have turned their backs of German democracy in the name of preserving or saving what they see as a pure German-ness under assault by immigrants and others (one telling detail is that Franco himself is hardly a pure German, having an Italian father who abandoned him as a toddler; in an act of linguistic rebellion, Franco A calls him his “producer” rather than his father). It also offers examples of a German problem that has accompanied and abetted right-wing expansion in the military: a general refusal by higher-ups and politicians to acknowledge it’s actually happening. For instance, after Franco A. wrote a master’s thesis that described immigration as “genocide” and the Old Testament as “a blueprint for Jews to gain global dominance,” he suffered no consequences, while his extremist views were not communicated to military counterintelligence, “whose remit is to monitor extremism in the armed forces.”
Every time I read about the rise of the right-wing in Germany, and in particular in its security services, I’m hit by a powerful sense of transgression, of breaking taboos. The inevitable background is Nazism and the holocaust, dictatorship and the demonization of the Jews. At a gut level, the idea that German policemen or soldiers would look at the Nazis and find inspiration goes beyond appalling, into a basic affront against the supposition that we live in a world capable of moral and political progress. It is very difficult, viscerally, not to view these developments, and these men, through a prism of good and evil.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this perspective, but it doesn’t necessarily help us understand why this is happening, and just as importantly, how it can best be countered and reversed. A growing, violent conspiracy to overthrow the German government isn’t just a threat to Germany — it’s a threat to the United States. Germany is arguably our most important ally, a lynchpin of our NATO alliance and a leader of democracy in Europe (particularly now that the United Kingdom has shirked its international responsibilities and ideals in the name of a self-defeating hyper-nationalism). Beyond this, the persistence of German democracy represents the best of America’s positive role in the world, a constitutional government cultivated and protected by prior generations of Americans, and part of a worldwide fabric of liberal democracy that helps keep our own democracy safe. It’s a sign of the depth of our own internal conflicts, myopia to the larger world, and alienation from our own history, that the rise of the far-right in Germany’s armed forces and police isn’t a much bigger story in the U.S.
Given the bottomless depravity of Germany’s Nazi past, and how strongly the country has worked to educate its citizenry about it, it seems that the very taboo nature of Nazism, or Nazi-adjacent ideas like German racial purity and the subversive threat of outsiders, carries a perverse inherent appeal to certain people, the lure of the forbidden. But what of the substance of the concerns that the right-wing soldiers and police officers express, that they fear Germany is being overrun by immigrants and must act to protect the country, even if that means destroying its democracy through treason and violence, acting like the very terrorists they claim many of the immigrants are?
One clue that immigration alone may not be the whole story is a fact that becomes glaring after reading so many of these articles: the extremist networks in the military and police aren’t just right-wing, they’re utterly male networks, to the point that I have yet to see mention of a single woman who participated in the chat groups or armed plots. This sense of repressed and soured male energy seems to have intersected with Germany’s restrictions on military involvement since World War II; there is a distinct sense of men play-acting fantasies in a world closed to women, where they can construct narratives of dominance and violent redemption safe from basic reality checks.
It is to the point that I begin to wonder if immigration, while certainly a real spur to their radicalism, isn’t also acting as a cover for more profound causes rooted in what some would describe as “toxic masculinity.” After all, does it really make any sort of logical sense that a million Middle Eastern immigrants allowed into the country in response to the Syrian refugee crisis would really overwhelm and destroy a nation of 80 million? And a related question haunts not just German but other western right-wing movements: if the “pure” national cultures they are trying to protect are so great, how can it be that they’re so easily threatened by a few brown-skinned people? Isn’t it likelier, given the greatness of German culture, that this minority would assimilate to the über-appealing German culture and values? Why are violence and dominance seen as the only viable resolutions to this supposed crisis?
These recent Times articles got me thinking in particular of this Amanda Marcotte essay about the role of sexism and patriarchy in authoritarian movements, and of this more recent piece by David Futrelle. Among other things, Marcotte argues that male fears of rising female power are a larger component of growing authoritarianism around the world than is generally thought. Meanwhile, Futrelle actually draws a direct link between white men’s fears of losing their privileged societal position to women, on the one hand, and conspiracy theories that immigration by brown-skinned men in particular will challenge their sexual primacy while resulting in mixed-race babies who will effectively replace the white population (the so-called “white genocide”). It is hard to look at Germany and not think some less articulated force along such lines is at play. After all, this is not the Germany of the 1920’s and early 1930’s. The economy is not in shambles. The country is not paying war reparations. There is not massive political instability. Yet, these men with guns feel massively insecure, as if their place in society were not at all assured, despite the fact that they occupy positions of great responsibility, power, and authority. To be blunt about it: these are the German men entrusted to carry guns and defend the nation, yet in a grotesque process of both mission creep and mission shrink, they may now confuse perceived threats to themselves with threats to the homeland.
This is why, despite the nightmarish aspects of this right-wing Teutonic menace, I wonder if a great part of defeating it will be to expose it to sunlight, to the interrogation of basic morality and facts. This is not to say it should be take lightly — right-wing extremists have already killed numerous of immigrants in recent years, and there is no reason to think that plots disrupted by German authorities wouldn’t have otherwise arrived at their violent conclusions. Hundreds or thousands of well-armed men dreaming and plotting of a “Day X” when their will to violence overturns the democratic order must be taken seriously. But just as the German government has made an enormous mistake in not taking these plots seriously in the past, they are both absurd and ominous enough that their uncovering and publicizing now might spark a backlash among the large majority of Germans repelled by their deadly schemes.