Warning From Former Extremist: Neo-Nazi Terrorist Threat Remains Real
As Germany prepares to commemorate the 10 victims of the killing spree committed by the NSU neo-Nazi group, a former extremist has warned that more potential terrorists are lurking in the far-right scene, which he claims is well-organized and ready to resort to bombing attacks in its goal of creating a “Fourth Reich”.
Gabriel Landgraf, 34, a former neo-Nazi from Berlin, says the German far-right scene has long contained potential terrorists with the same militant goals as the so-called Zwickau cell, the trio discovered by chance last November after murdering 10 people since 2000.
“These networks and structures have existed since the 1980s and 1990s. There are theories and strategies going around in the scene for how to go into terrorism,” Landgraf, a former senior member of militant far-right groups, told foreign journalists in Berlin.
“People I knew were talking about using pipe bombs and other methods,” said Landgraf, a well-spoken, slender man who quit the scene in 2006 and who doesn’t want to be photographed. “They were saying that if the Day X, when society and the state collapse and the Fourth Reich can be built on the rubble, doesn’t arrive quickly enough, we will have to find other ways and means to make it happen, and that terrorism is an option.”
“They’re not stupid,” he added.
Landgraf, who is bald and has large piercings in his ears, said he didn’t know about the Zwickau cell, which called itself the National Socialist Underground and shot dead nine mostly Turkish shopkeepers and one policewoman as well as injuring 22 people with a remote-detonated nail bomb in a Turkish district of Cologne in 2004.
But he said he wasn’t surprised by its existence or its capabilities.
“These networks and these methods and ideas have been around for a long time. I didn’t find it surprising. What did surprise me was how the security authorities failed to find them and failed to prevent the killings,” he said.
The discovery of the Zwickau cell was a major embarrassment for German security authorities. It exposed them to criticism that they have been blind to the threat of far-right violence and excessively preoccupied with Islamist militants.
‘They’re Cracking Up With Laughter’
There have been calls for a fundamental reform of the domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. A parliamentary committee of inquiry has been set up to investigate what went wrong, and the Interior Ministry has said it will set up a register of known neo-Nazis, similar to its register of radical Islamists.
According to Landgraf, though, hardcore neo-Nazis aren’t especially worried about the debate. “We know that many people who need to be fought are cracking up with laughter at the moment,” he said.