Unusual Shredding and Worrisome Polling



By Victor Grossman, Berlin



Bulletin No. 49

November 26, 2012

Source: http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=12983&Itemid=228



No, it wasn't shredded wheat. This shredding was not of  breakfast food and has been much harder to digest; it was  evidence on serial murder! The related biliousness is all  the more painful due to a worrisome new survey of rightist  hatred in Germany. But first some background.



For a year now the case of three mystery killers has roiled  the German scene. Their mug shots, shown over and over on  TV, have made them as recognizable as family members. The  two men are dead, eliminated by rather dubious "suicides".

 The third, Beate Zschäpe, still awaits trial for her role in  the killing, between 2000 and 2006, of ten men with  immigrant background, nine Turkish and one Greek, of  shooting down a policewoman, robbing banks, and igniting a  bomb in 2004 in a Turkish neighborhood in Cologne which  injured 22 people, four of them severely.



The ten murdered men, all shot in broad daylight at close  range with the same silenced CZ 83 pistol, included a  grocer, a locksmith, a tailor and an internet café operator.

 Since three were vendors of the popular Turkish specialty  food döner kebab the gutter press invented the nasty term  "döner murders" and pushed a false line that foreign mafia-  type mobs were to blame, probably fighting turf wars. The  actual killer group, its size still unknown, called itself  NSU for Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National  Socialist Underground), a reference to its Nazi beliefs  (Hitler's party was also misnamed "Nationalsozialist"). Its  aim, which found such support from part of the media, was to  increase anti-foreigner animosity - and move towards its  final take-over goals.



Even more earnest than the media-based racism was the  reaction of the authorities, especially the government's  secretive political watchdog agency called Verfassungsschutz  (VS - Constitutional Protector). This VS also rejected the  most obvious anti-foreigner motivation, neglected to follow  up leads supplied by Swiss police as to the origin of the  murder weapon and, even more suspiciously, first denied,  then distorted proof that one of its own secret agents was  present at the killing in the internet shop, accepting all  too quickly his alleged alibi and evidently hindering any  attempt to follow up this very damning lead. The VS has  continually held back details on the crimes from an all-  party investigatory committee of the Bundestag and finally  admitted that much of the evidence had been irrevocably  shredded.



This bloody, disturbing affair gained added importance in  connection with a survey by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, an  investigatory, educational foundation connected with the  Social Democratic Party. On November 14th it published  polling results showing that 25 % of all Germans had right-  wing or anti-foreigner prejudices. This included forms of  anti-Semitism which, it found, now affected one German in  eleven, with its increase in part reflecting events in  Palestine, especially Gaza. As many as 31.9 % now agreed  with the sentence: "The Jews use recollections of the  Holocaust today to gain advantages for themselves."



But even surpassing such views were various kinds of  prejudice against Islam or Muslims, affecting almost 60 % of  the population.



A generally right-wing extremist view of the world, which  combines such anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner  prejudice with a "tolerant" assessment of the Nazi years,  has grown from 8.2 % to 9.0 % in the last two years.



Most alarming has been the speedier growth in eastern  Germany, the former GDR. In fact, while right-wing extremist  thinking in the western states of Germany actually decreased  somewhat since 2006, from 9.1 % to 7.6 %, it doubled in the  East from 6.6 to 15.8 %. This trend was visible in nearly  all categories; in regard to anti-Semitism, notably, the  situation has now, in recent years, become worse in eastern  than in western Germany. And views either accepting or  approving Nazi ideology, formerly a problem largely  concentrated in West Germany, are also now stronger in the  East.



It has long been media routine, as part of a forcefully  engineered campaign to disparage every aspect of GDR life,  to postulate that East Germans, due to GDR schools, were  more prone to accepting fascist views and prejudices. This  poll indicates the opposite; the age group most infected is  that between 14 and 30; even the oldest in this sector were  only eight years old when the GDR disappeared. It had not,  and could not banish all such ideas from every head, not  even in forty years, but it did have a remarkable degree of  success. In recent times, however, the infection has been  steadily spreading eastward.



The Ebert Foundation found that fascistic, xenophobic views  are partly related to education, those having the least  schooling being most affected. And hatred of foreigners is  strongest in areas where there are almost no residents with  immigrant backgrounds, which means rural and small town  districts, especially in the East (just as anti-Semitism is  strongest where people have never ever met any Jewish  people).



But more important, if hardly surprising, it was found that,  aside from senior pensioners, those most affected by  fascistic ideology are the jobless. The study's authors  blame the "worrisome trend in the East" on "the cutting off  of certain regions from general social-economic development  (especially in rural areas) ...not only in the East but in  the West as well...Right-wing extremism is definitely not  only a problem of the East."



When all Germany was united within the Federal Republic in  1990, most East German industry was eliminated, resulting in  a jobless rate which has remained almost double the West  German rate ever since; it currently averages about ten  percent. Sporadic new growth was primarily in certain  limited urban centers like Dresden, Jena or Leipzig, while  the former systems of child care, youth clubs and free  participation in athletic and cultural activities were  critically reduced. Especially young women moved westwards  to find jobs, while many young men, frequently less mobile,  remained behind in hopeless towns and districts where the  Nazis, some local but many from West Germany, offered them a  feeling of group belonging and  a vent for frustration, most  clearly marked in concerts with bands and hard-drinking  audiences bawling out hateful texts against foreigners,  Jews, gays and all leftists. Anti-fascists courageously  opposed them in many areas, but not a few mayors, police  chiefs and district attorneys either tolerated them out of  fear or, all too often, defiantly encouraged them.



It would be wrong to generalize and over-simplify. There are  many contradictions. The pro-Nazi National Democratic Party  of Germany (NPD) was able to win state legislature seats  only in Saxony and in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, both in  eastern Germany, but the electoral trend has luckily been  downward. In the former state, the NPD got 5.6 % of the vote  in 2009 (down from 9.2 % in 2004); in the latter, Germany's  poorest, it got 6.0 % in 2011 (down from 7.3 % in 2006).

 There are constant confrontations with vigorous anti-  fascists.



This brings us back to national politics. In this past year  the evidence mounted of mysterious connections between the  NSU killers and politicians, especially but not exclusively  in the East German state of Thuringia, where the three  killers come from. There were cover-ups, advance tip-offs of  police raids, and well-paid secret agents of the authorities  who helped build the neo-Nazi underground - but somehow  could not help in finding the killers.



After the monstrous bombing in Cologne in 2006 the local  police found evidence pointing directly to a right-wing  terrorist attack and reported it that way to the federal  Ministry of the Interior, Germany's top authority for police  affairs.  But the minister, the Social Democrat Otto Schily,  once a left-wing radical but by then a main supporter of  authoritarian positions, did not even interrupt his  vacation, while his Ministry insisted that the word  "terrorist" be removed from all correspondence regarding the  tragedy. It was to be treated only as a conflict "between  immigrants".  The officials involved have all displayed a  remarkably weak memory about the case, which somehow fits  well with the "accidental" paper shredding.



Berlin's city-state government has also become involved. One  of its own secret agents, employed from 2000 to 2011 though  he had himself been convicted of inciting racial hatred, had  evidently known the killer trio personally for years, may  even have provided them with material for bombs and had been  friendly with the woman, Zschäpe. It seems that he had  actually reported on his acquaintanceship with the wanted  criminals to his Berlin bosses, who somehow did not react.

 For months these facts, if that is what they are, were not  passed on to the investigating committee. Some may have been  lost forever to the shredding machine. Much is uncertain,  but the Christian Democrat responsible, Frank Henkel, deputy  mayor and responsible for law enforcement, has not been his  usual jolly self recently during unfriendly questioning  about his dubious conduct from Berlin's three opposition  parties, the Greens, the Pirates and the Left. His cabinet  seat in the city is still wobbly.



Will the jigsaw pieces of the Nazi underground murders and  bombing ever be fitted together, despite the retention of  secrets and the shredding of documents? In any case, the  existence of a right-wing danger can no longer be ignored,  while unpleasant recollections sometimes surface about the  early decades of the VS, which was created and for years  staffed largely by Nazi killers. Despite all the befuddling,  the big question remains: to what extent do the bungling,  buck passing and shredding represent not so much "normal"

 attempts to cover up poor administration and faulty judgment  but rather, on quite high levels, the toleration of  extremist pro-fascists because of their potential political  usefulness?



The present Interior Minister on the federal level, Hans-  Peter Friedrich, has now found a solution which might have  been expected from a man who himself comes from the right  edge of the spectrum. Aside from firing a few more  conspicuous sacrificial lambs (if one can refer to such  types as lambs) and setting up a new central register,  connecting all the agencies, he plans to establish a new  bureau devoted to sniffing out all presumed terrorists,"

 Islamic",  right-wing and also left-wing. And the Merkel  cabinet, which knows that active resistance to the Nazis has  come mostly from the left, wants to continue demands that  anti-fascist groups sign an "extremism clause" rejecting all  "unconstitutional" connections with the right or the left.

 As expected, compliance with such "loyalty oaths" is often  refused, which leads, as intended, to cutting off left-wing  anti-fascists from any official support, legal or financial.



How familiar is this old pattern! Pro-Nazis, who even without  a definite agenda like the NSU  have been attacking and  sometimes killing  people for years, mostly people of color,  but occasionally leftists, who have set the homes of  immigrants on fire and threateningly put both names and  addresses of leftist opponents on Internet, are equated with  activists on the left who try to block the path of fascist  marches and rallies, whereby occasional hotheads (or

 provocateurs) sometimes throw  a bottle or a stone at them.

 This old equation, so basic to the ideology of politicians  in many countries, is now being demonstrated most  dramatically in Greece, where the immense popularity of the  left-wing Syriza is being met by fostering - also, again, by  the police - of the Golden Dawn fascists.



The study by the Fritz Ebert Stiftung takes a stand against  this pattern:



"There is a direct connection between social gaps, social-  structural disintegration, and inhumane thinking. This makes  it especially important, on both the European and the  national level, to deal with social-economic questions, in  other words with questions of the distribution of wealth.

 Turning social conflicts into ethnic issues only plays into  the hands of the right-wing populists and increases the  spread of right-wing extremist attitudes. ..."



"Generating general suspicion against social projects by  insisting on an >extremism clause> while equating the  inhumane ideology of the right-wing extremism with any kind  of left-wing extremism whatsoever  is inacceptable and  counter-productive. The very genuine threat of the right-  wing extremists  must by no means be minimized by equating  it with a fictitious threat from left-wing extremism. "



It may be hoped that if  the Social Democratic Party attains  a share in Germany's next government in 2013, and especially  if the economic situation becomes more earnest, thus  strengthening the fascists, this cogent warning from its own  foundation will not itself  land in a shredder!



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