Germany: Neo-Nazi NPD party's tentacles reach into the secret service

Radio Slovakia reports that discussion of banning the neo-Nazi NPD party is intensifying in Germany after it has come to light that members of the party’s rank and file occupy more than 130 different positions as collaborators with the German secret service. Not one of these supposed informers ever provided information to the authorities about the existence of a terrorist cell in Zwickau responsible for at least nine racially-motivated murders. The cell was recently broken up by the German Police.

A previous effort to ban the party did not succeed. One of the reasons it failed was precisely the existence of this extensive network of collaborators. German authorities believed the network would make it possible to monitor everything happening inside the party.

Germans are now asking themselves how it is possible that none of those informers ever noticed the existence of the terrorist group and never the warned the secret service of its operations. In Saxony, where the terrorists lived and planned their crimes, the Interior Ministry has admitted its error. Speaking to the ARD television station, Saxon Interior Ministry spokesperson Frank Wendy said: “All signs indicate that insufficient communications, including in other federal states, caused these crimes to be detected too late. That is why we need to introduce a communications system that will operate through the entire territory of the Federal Republic.”

Insufficient communications between the secret services is being mentioned more and more frequently as a reason that the activities of criminal groups are evading police detection. Bavarian PM Horst Seehofer has confirmed the latest findings that the terrorist cell in Zwickau was in contact with an NPD functionary.

The neo-Nazi party currently has representatives in two state parliaments in the east of the country, Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Saxony. In the states of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, the party almost passed the 5 % threshold in the most recent state parliamentary elections.