IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

Where is the outrage? Why isn’t the world talking about the scary Nazi networks within the German military, special forces and police?

Well, it’s not a surprise, as the New York Times wrote in September. Germany’s Nazi past is still present. And unfortunately, that became all to clear in the last few months.

There is a high-level Nazi network in German special forces who want to take over control and hardly anyone is talking about it. The so called ‘Hannibal’s Shadow-army’ is a network of extreme right who are preparing to go to war, take control of the German state and kill their political enemies — migrants and people from the left.

This doesn’t seem to be new in Germany where Neonazis have killed hundreds of people in the last decade.

But this time, we are not talking about the typical small scale, Neonazi attacks — we are talking about elite soldiers, some of the most skilled and trained people in warfare, with access to weapons.

If this isn’t scary enough just yet, these groups seem to have close links to state-authorities as described in the piece by German newspaper Taz.

Again, this might not be a surprise to the informed reader as the NSU scandals have shown, as the scandals around the secret service for internal affairs, the Verfassungsschutz, e.g. around their extreme right president Maaßen have shown (German Comedian Böhermann, made a list of the 17 most serious scandals of Maaßen , Side note: Böhermann himself has also been accused of antisemitism recently) , how the case of Franco, a soldier from the extreme right who planned a terrorist attack, has been dealt with or how the cases like the one of Oury Jalloh, a black person who burned to death in a police cell, is being dealt with.

German police is famous for its deadly violence and has been called out for it by Amnesty International and for its institutional racism and racist sterotyping by the UN for years. And new police laws are currently being introduced in most German states that give German police even more power.

All these examples and these are just a few of the more famous ones, point to serious structural and institutional racism within the German state.

So why is this not causing the national and international outrage it deserves?

As some articles by Deutschlandfunk and Heise.de are pointing out, the media silence about Hannibal’s Schattenarmee is a scandal in itself.

At least the case of the Nazi cell within the Frankfurt police received some international news coverage (e.g. in English: NYPost, Guardian, DW). Some new cases within the German police are being picked up by media.

And some politicans within the left and green parties are requesting investigations into the Hannibal case. But as the investigations into previous cases have shown, there will only be change with significant pressure from below.

So, go on the streets, make use of your right to protest and take action, as long as we still can.

We don’t want to end up in a 1930’s Germany situation again. The slogan of ‘never again’, carries a responsibility.