GERMANY: Secret service colluded with far-right
01 January 2002
Since last summer, the German government has officially committed itself to the fight against neo-fascism. However, with its attempt to ban the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) it has became clear that its arguments are based on evidence from active neo-nazis, who have worked as informants for the internal secret service, (VS, Verfassungsschutz, Office for the Protection of the Constitution). The government withheld this information from the Federal Constitutional Court and refused to clarify the role of the informants in its bill of indictment, so the court has interrupted proceedings to decide if the trial will continue.
Under article 21(2) of the German constitution, the Federal Constitutional Court has the right to decide on the legality of a political party. The Federal Government lodged an application for an NPD ban with the court in early 2001 and the court decided on 4 October that the evidence constituted grounds for a trial. By January this year however, the court had learnt that witnesses had connections to Germany's secret service, triggering "the biggest secret service scandal in the history of the FRG". The interior ministry has refused to comment in detail on this matter to the Constitutional Court and argued that the witnesses' role was of no importance as the comments used in the bill of indictment were made either before or after their dealings with the services. The court gave the government until 11 February to produce a statement on the matter. The plaintiffs then handed over a 40 page document to justify their evidence to the trial, which is to be considered by the court in the coming months.
It is unclear why interior minister Otto Schily was ignorant of the implications of the evidence prepared by the VS. Some argue it was a deliberate attempt by a far-right faction within the service to jeopardise the prosecution of the NPD, a suspicion that does not seem entirely unfounded when considering the connections between Germany's far-right and the VS. The VS effectively financed a large part of the NPD's organisational structure and propaganda through wages paid to informants that were ploughed back into the party. The reliance on evidence given by such informants becomes even more bizarre when comments by experts on the far-right indicate that the NPD's statements and manifesto are, in themselves, enough to prove their unconstitutionality and threat to the "free democratic order of the FRG". Green and Socialist party members have demanded a clarification of events.
The government's clarification to the court on 11 February, according to Green MP Hans-Christian-Ströbele, was unclear as to the extent and nature of the involvement of the VS in NPD structures. He demanded a change in the bill of indictment to exclude information from informants and to proceed only on official NPD material and statements. PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) MP Ulla Jelpke said that the:
...scandal surrounding the informants again shows that the secret service departments will not be controlled by anybody nor reveal their hand. They are a state within a state, an alien element in a democratic society.
Wolfgang Frenz, one of the main witnesses at the trial, is a co-founder of the NPD and author of several racist and anti-Semitic writings. He was an informant for the VS for 36 years and received a monthly salary of 600-800 DM, which he paid into party funds, a total of at least 260,000 DM (£85,000) of taxpayer's money that was effectively donated by the state. Comments by Frenz and also Horst Mahler (a former left radical lawyer, turned neo-nazi) are listed in the government's bill of indictment, but due to the confidential nature of the information given by the secret services, it is not officially known how many NPD informants were listed to give evidence at the trial. Remarks by politicians indicate that at least four informants were supposed to give e