ExtremismGermany Restructures Police, Intelligence to Fight Far-Right Violent Extremists
German government statistics show that in 2018 there were more than 24,000 active right-wing extremists in Germany, with about 12,500 of them considered capable of carrying out violent acts. The total number of these extremists is expected to increase in 2019 by as much as a third, to 32,200, according to government documents obtained by the newspaperTagesspiegel. On Tuesday, The German government unveiled broad new measures to restructure domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies in 2020 in order to make the German intelligence and law enforcement services more capable to fight the rising threat of right-wing extremism.
The German government unveiled broad new measures to restructure domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies in 2020 in order to make the German intelligence and law enforcement services more capable to fight the rising threat of right-wing extremism.
The new measures include 600 new intelligence positions for spotting and weeding out potentially violent right-wing extremists and their networks; more targeted and more intrusive cyber investigations; and increased coordination and cooperation among state and federal intelligence services.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer announced the new measures on Tuesday.
The of law enforcement and domestic intelligence comes in the wake of two right-wing terrorist attacks in the past six months: The killing of Walter Lübcke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel Christian Democrats Party, who was the president of the district council for the central German city of Kassel. Lübcke, a supporter of Merkel’s generous immigration policies, was shot in his home in June.
On Yom Kippur, a white supremacist gunman shot and killed two bystanders on a sidewalk outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle. His plan was to enter the synagogue and massacre those inside, but the security doors prevented him from gaining access to the synagogue.
“I’ll never forget a young citizen in Halle calling through the silence that ‘you all can’t protect us,’” Seehofer recalled on Tuesday. “As a consequence of Halle, we want to confirm to the public: Many steps are being taken.”
Seehofer described those deaths as part of a slew of “terrible isolated incidents” and said they were casting shadows over Germany’s declining crime rates over the past two years.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that federal statistics show that half of all politically motivated violent crimes in Germany last year were attributed to right-wing extremism.
Seehofer also referred to the Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), a small neo-Nazi group which carried out a series of anti-immigrant murders, attacks, bombings, and bank robberies for twelve years — starting in 1999 before finally being uncovered in 2011. Unlike other terrorist groups, the NSU never took responsibility for its actions, and it took the German police years to connect members of the groups to their crimes. Following the exposure of the group, the German intelligence services were roundly criticized for their failure adequately to monitor right-wing extremists and investigate the crimes they committed.
“The fight against right-wing extremism should have been given this priority earlier,” said Seehofer. “That is also true.”
