The German army claims to find at least 20 “far-right extremists” within its own ranks every year, and since 2008 has found around 200 soldiers with ‘extremist views’.
The report comes after a member of the German Green Party made an inquiry of the Military Intelligence Service (MAD) in the German parliament. The MAD claimed that since 2008 they had discovered around 200 far-right extremists – to which interior political spokesman of the Green Party Bundestag faction, Irene Mihalic, expressed serious concern, newspaper Zeit reports.
Mihalic slammed the president of the MAD saying that he had formerly testified at a parliamentary meeting at the beginning of October that the service had only discovered around eight “Nazis” per year.
“This is very dangerous precisely when looking at the military training that right-wing extremists in the Bundeswehr can use for their efforts,” Mihalic said.
MAD president Christopf Gramm said that over the last few years, the agency had seen no real rise in the number of far-right extremists within the armed forces. “We have so far not been able to establish that the number of recognised right-wing extremists had jumped upwards,” he said.
The report is not the first time neo-Nazi sympathies among the German armed forces has been raised. Earlier this year in May, several pieces of memorabilia from the Nazi period were found in German army barracks prompting the government to do large-scale inspections of other barracks as well.
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Earlier in the year, authorities also uncovered a bizarre plot involving a far-right army officer who had posed as a Syrian asylum seeker and along with several others had plotted a terrorist attack.
Prosecutors in the case said they were not sure whether the officer was plotting a terrorist attack in order to blame it on Syrian migrants or whether the terrorist attack involved attacking the migrants themselves.
“This knowledge, as well as anecdotal evidence indicating the soldier had a xenophobic background, lead to the suspicion that the defendant had planned to carry out a violent criminal act, an attack, with the weapon hidden in Vienna airport,” prosecutors involved with the case said.
Despite the little evidence of growing right-wing extremism, in many parts of Germany governments have focused their energies on combatting the far-right.
The left-wing Berlin coalition released a paper last year indicating that the main threat to the city was the activity of far-right extremists only weeks before failed asylum seeker and radical Islamist Anis Amri killed 12 and injured more than 50 at a Berlin Christmas market.
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