ExtremismGermany: Elite Army Unit Has Until October to Purge Far-Right Soldiers – or Be Disbanded

Germany’s Special Forces Command (KSK) will not be immediately disbanded over ties of several officers and soldiers to far-right, neo-Nazi groups. Instead, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced on Wednesday, the unit will be given three months to prove it can change from within.

Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that following revelations of far-right activity in the KSK’s ranks, the German government set up an investigative task force to look into the matter and recommend corrective measures. On Wednesday, Kramp-Karrenbauer, in a joint press conference with the Bundeswehr Chief of Defense Eberhard Zorn, announced the results of the investigation, and said that the better course of action, for now, would be to allow the unit time to put its own house in order.

“The analysis concludes that the KSK cannot continue in its current form. That it must be changed from the inside out and that it must be better reintegrated into the Bundeswehr.”

“We will give the KSK time to press the reset button,” said the defense minister.

Kramp-Karrenbauer had already announced structural reforms of the KSK unit, which include the dissolution of one of its four combat companies in which many soldiers were found to espouse far-right, white supremacist ideology. She warned that if the KSK fail to make sufficient progress by the end of October, the entire Special Forces Command would be dissolved, to be replaced by an entirely new outfit.

“If we let things go on then the danger is indeed great that we will have a real structural problem for the future,” she said.

Der Spiegel reports that the KSK was created in 1996, and was equipped and trained to deal with anti-terrorism operations, hostage rescue missions, and operations in hostile urban environments. Most of the German soldiers who served in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and, on a smaller scale, in several African countries are members of the KSK, but details are sketchy because German law requires that the unit’s operation are kept secret.

Bundeswehr expert Thomas Wiegold told DW that the defense minister was “trying to get rid of those toxic parts in this unit without disbanding the unit as a whole, without destroying the capability they need.”

The investigation found that white supremacist extremism in the ranks of the KSK was first noticed in 2017, when KSK members at a commander’s farewell party performed Nazi salutes and played rock music which is popular in neo-Nazi and skin head gatherings.

A report by Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) in January revealed that 500 soldiers in the German military were being investigated for right-wing extremism (see “Germany: More than 500 Soldiers Investigated for Ties to Extremist Right-Wing Violent Groups,” HSNW, 27 January 2020; and “Germany: 14 Soldiers, Defense Ministry Employees, Designated as Extremists,” HSNW, 4 March 2020). MAD noted that twenty of the suspected right-wing extremism cases currently being processed were within the KSK. Soldiers and officers in other branches of the Bundeswehr have been investigated, and dismissed from the service, for neo-Nazi sympathies, but the size of KSK relative to the size of the Bundeswehr as a whole means that the number of officers and soldiers with white supremacist leanings in KSK dwarfs the number of far-right officers and soldiers serving in other units.

The German authorities note that there is more here than political ideology. In May, police seized karge quantities of explosives and weapons at the home of a KSK soldier, and found detailed plans for attacks on politicians supporting immigration and on Muslim immigrants and asylum seekers. Kramp-Karrenbauer had previously described the disappearance of 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 62 kilograms of high explosives from a KSK base as “disturbing” and “alarming.”