Neo-nazis as government agents

How western intelligence agencies played a crucial role in founding and funding the German neo-nazi movement

One of the most fascinating political narratives to gain currency of late has related to the tendency of governments to set up and finance “terrorist” or “extremist” strawmen with the intention of triumphantly “knocking down” and defeating their manufactured enemy, thereby justifying the alleged “necessity” of the Mother Government to “protect us”. This process can be motivated by the imperative of sewing fear, division, and even violence in society as a pretext to cracking down on our liberties, turning us against our fellow citizens, increasing state control, and diverting people from the more urgent task of checking the power of their own rapacious government.

Some alleged examples of this model in application include Nero’s Great Fire of Rome, Israel’s role in setting up Hamas, the Pentagon’s aborted “Operation Northwoods” scheme to stage “Cuban communist” attacks against Americans, and the Reichstag Fire, among other infamous events.

The tendency for humans to think in binary terms (either “left” or “right”, either “up” or “down”, either “good or “evil”, either “black” or “white”) is thus easily manipulated by the Hegelian synthesisers of the Total State. The very nature of argument is such that only two sides are normally allowed to participate, and it is often the case that arguments will tend to conclude in some form of “compromise” between the two sides. Therefore, if both the “thesis” and the “antithesis” can be controlled from the outset, it necessarily follows that the “synthesis” is essentially predetermined within the controlled paradigm.

It has been advanced by authors such as Antony Sutton that this forms part of a Hegelian template, call it “dialectical statism” if you like, that aims to facilitate conflict as a means to bring about a desired change. As Sutton wrote in America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (2002):

(T)he extremes of political left and political right are vital elements in a process of controlled change…In the dialectical process, a clash of opposites brings about a synthesis. This conflict of opposites is essential to bring about change. Today this process can be identified in the literature of the Trilateral Commission where “change” is promoted and “conflict management” is termed the means to bring about this change.

(p.34)

Noting the natural tendency for the State to seek incremental (or radical) increases in its power and ambit, there is every reason and motive for leaders to concoct menacing “threats” to the status quo, and thus to challenge and overturn existing notions in the public mind in such a way that the rationale for State control is refurbished and revitalised. This is the essence of Sutton’s argument; the same process is termed “Problem-Reaction-Solution” by Alex Jones and others, and forms the theoretical basis for our approach to the role played by Western intelligence agencies in fomenting the “threat” of neo-nazism.

The National Democratic Party of Germany

The National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), founded in 1964, is the most prominent post-war neo-nazi party in the Federal Republic of Germany. One of its founders and early leaders was the notorious Adolf Von Thadden, previously chairman of the crypto-nazi German Empire Party. Following defections and a general demise in its electoral fortunes, the Empire Party was disbanded, and Von Thadden quickly worked with other fascist activists such as Wolfgang Frenz to create the NPD. Before long the NPD had achieved some electoral success, gaining representatives in seven West German state parliaments.

More recently, the NPD won a remarkable 12 seats out of 124 in Saxony’s 2004 state election, having scored 9.2% of the vote. This extraordinary result was generally attributed to the economic and social malaise of Germany and the poor leadership of former federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The NPD’s campaign was based primarily around its opposition to cuts in welfare and its stock-standard opposition to foreigners.

Naturally, being an openly pro-nazi organisation in a country that had only recently been ruled by Hitler’s tyrannical national socialist party, the NPD has been publicly opposed by the post-war German political establishment; the government has made numerous attempts to outlaw the organisation from the outset, the most recent of which was initiated by Schroeder in late 2000. Following the federal parliament’s overwhelming vote to close down the NPD, the constitutional court was charged with the task of making a final decision in accordance with German law. As with previous efforts to crush the neo-nazis, Schroeder and his minions justified his proposed ban with reference to “grim statistics” showing an “upsurge of neo-Nazi violence”. Concurrent with these developments, Schroeder’s government organised and led a massive anti-nazi rally in Berlin on November 9, 2000, the 62nd anniversary of Kristallnacht. Approximately 200,000 people were estimated to have attended the state-sponsored demonstration.

As these developments were unfolding, the Associated Press reported that “a group of Jewish students in Germany” had been inundated with 17,000 email messages “threatening to repeat the Holocaust”; this served to heighten tensions and provided yet more evidence for the apparent need to ban the neo-nazis. Inconveniently (or perhaps conveniently), there was no prospect of hunting down and prosecuting the source of these threatening emails, as they “originated from a server in the United States”, thus it was “impossible for German police to investigate the incident as a violation of German anti-hate crime laws”.

Soon after the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in early 2005, Schroeder used the occasion of a planned neo-nazi rally in Dresden to renew his pledge to ban the NPD. Most interestingly, this was followed shortly after by yet another mysterious wave of neo-nazi email spam, this time affecting computer users all over the world. The pernicious spam came in the form of a self-replicating virus, however, as noted by Der Spiegel, it was “not clear exactly who is behind the virus”, and the origins remain a mystery.

State-sponsored neo-nazis

As the constitutional court was deliberating on the fate of the NPD, the Guardian newspaper published a chilling article in August 2002 showing that the party’s co-founder and one-time leader, Adolf Von Thadden, was an agent of British intelligence, popularly known as MI6. The Guardian wrote that Von Thadden “was working for British intelligence throughout the four years he led the NPD, from 1967 to 1971”. However, it was believed that there was an earlier connection between Von Thadden and MI6:

(A) former senior officer in German intelligence told the Guardian this week that he had been informed of a much longer-standing link between Von Thadden and British intelligence. His recollection raises the question of whether the German far-right-winger was under the sway of M16 when he and others founded the NPD in 1964.

Dr Hans Josef Horchem, who was the head of the Hamburg office of the Verfassungsschutz - the West German security service - from 1969 to 1981, said he received regular visits from British intelligence liaison officers.

“We held general discussions on security. At one of these - I think it was towards the end of the 70s- they said, ‘Adolf von Thadden was in contact with us’, and that that was in the 1950s”. Mr Horchem did not know whether the links between the German and British intelligence had continued into the 60s and 70s.

Von Thadden was by no means the only party founder, or top official, working for the intelligence agencies. As the allegations about Von Thadden were becoming public in 2002, it was revealed in the constitutional court case that German intelligence had dozens of agents ensconced at the highest levels of the NPD. Despite the government’s charge that the NPD was pursuing “anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic goals that are in violation of the constitution”, it became known that at least 30 of the top 210 officials in the NPD were on the government payroll, “some of them for decades”, as the Telegraph reported. The Telegraph noted, “some has suggested that the party could not have survived without government money”. It is not known how many lay party members were working for the government.

Wolfgang Frenz, a leading official and founding member of the NPD, was found to have received “up to £260 a month (from) the intelligence services between 1962 and 1995”. This is particularly interesting because it suggests that Frenz was already working for the government by the time he was helping set up the NPD in 1964. According to the Scotsman, Frenz “had a relationship with the intelligence services he described as “particularly intensive” in the 1970s and 1980s”.

Incredibly, Udo Holtmann, the editor and publisher of the NPD’s official newspaper, “was paid by the government for 24 years”, despite his official role in producing neo-nazi literature.

These embarrassing developments completely derailed the government’s attempts to ban the NPD in the constitutional court, as it was no longer clear whether the chief proponents of “anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic goals that are in violation of the constitution” were freelance nazis or government agents:

The case against the NPD, brought in the country’s constitutional court, began to unravel…when 10 out of 14 party members who supplied incriminating evidence were exposed as being in the pay of regional state intelligence services...The constitutional court argues that the government’s use of paid informers leaves it open to charges that it was relying on agents provocateurs in its efforts to ban the party.

Agents provocateurs

The most shocking aspect of these revelations is the fact that the government agents were not only paid informants, but were themselves responsible for many of the potentially illegal activities of the NPD:

In one particularly galling blunder, a witness was said to have compiled a mass of evidence which disclosed that NPD officials had delivered overtly anti-Semitic speeches at party meetings. The court’s investigation, however, established that the witness, Wolfgang Frenz, a regional NPD deputy leader, was not only a government mole but that he made the anti-Semitic remarks himself.

The cold truth is that Herr Frenz and his confederates “accounted for some of the most extremist statements cited as evidence”. In seeking to stir up anti-semitic sentiment among his fellow party members, the admitted German intelligence agent said at a meeting, “if there had been no Auschwitz, it should have been created for the Jews living today.” Not to be outdone by his government colleague, Udo Holtman, the aforementioned NPD newspaper editor, “publicly called for the death penalty for German politicians who support liberal immigration laws”.

If it wasn’t bad enough to have government agents make wild anti-semitic speeches or be appointed as editor of the neo-nazi newspaper, it has also been alleged that another agent, called “Mirko H.”, was responsible for producing “thousands of copies of a CD by the band White Aryan Rebels called “Notes of Hate,” containing Nazi lyrics that are banned in Germany”. While working for the “Office of the Protection of the Constitution since the mid-1990s”, Mirko H. was also producing CDs featuring violent racist death threats in the lyrics:

The song “This Bullet is for You” includes a death threat against the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Michel Friedman, and other German politicians. The album, chilling in its unabashed xenophobia, also includes calls for the killing of Mo Asumang, a popular German erotic television star of Ghanian ancestry.

The World Socialist Web Site provided a little more information as to the identity of “Mirko H” and his accomplices:

(Toni) Stadler ran a neo-fascist shop with specialist music and literature. He took part in the production and distribution of the CD “Notes of Hatred,” which featured lyrics by the “White Aryan Rebels” calling for the abuse of children and the rape and murder of foreigners, Jews and anti-Nazis.

Shortly after Stadler received the commission for the production of the liner notes and cover for the CD, the Brandenburg intelligence service recruited him as an undercover agent. Stadler’s acquaintance, Mirko Hesse, who established contact with a foreign-based CD publishing company, was in the meantime working for the national intelligence agency.

As WSWS concludes, “thus two of the producers of the incriminating CDs are in the employ of the state.”

The well-known German politician, Gerhard Baum, commented on this wave of scandals, “the disastrous impression has been created that the state, through its undercover agents, is co-running the (National Democratic Party) and fabricating evidence needed to ban the party”. His analysis is perfectly consistent with the dialectical model of state-sponsored neo-nazism.

Descent into Bizarro World

The nefarious pursuits of the German government, and its crazed neo-nazi agents, are by no means confined to the Federal Republic of Germany. Last year, the Telegraph reported on the bizarre activities of a group of neo-nazi agitators in the Czech Republic. According to the report:

Neo-Nazis wearing SS uniforms spent almost two years living out their fantasies in the Czech Republic, entertaining crowds with mock executions of ‘‘Jewish Bolshevik agents’‘, “Communist partisans” and “traitors”, it was revealed by German state prosecutors last week.

The macabre activities of the group, which claimed to be a historical re-enactment club, surfaced after the arrest in November of its founder, Peter Schulz, a known neo-Nazi – and, embarrassingly, former German intelligence agent – who is separately facing charges for the hoarding of weapons and explosives.

The activities of this odd fascist cult, founded by a “former” intelligence agent, are so weird that even I can’t get my head around them. According to the Telegraph, the group “is believed to have crossed into the Czech Republic at least six times to stage “executions” in the border towns of Svojanov, Vranov, Slatinka, Pardubice, Dukla and Hradek”. According to video evidence captured by police, some of the rituals of this sinister group included acting out executions of “army deserters” by firing squad in front of hundreds of startled onlookers, the public “killing (of) “Jewish Bolshevik agents” during staged executions”, and the reenactment of the Battle of Stalingrad.

None of these activities were illegal in the Czech Republic - they are proscribed in Germany - but a police raid on the group’s premises uncovered “MG42 German machine guns, pistols, a revolver and 2.5 kilogrammes of “black powder” and ammunition”. What on earth is the purpose of this organisation, and why was it founded by a former government agent?

Violent nazi thugs: also working for the state?

Astonishingly, there is some evidence that neo-nazi government agents have gone so far as to commit attempted murder. As the World Socialist Web Site notes:

In 1993, five people died in an arson attack on a house in Solingen, in which Turkish families were residing. Three of the culprits had trained in a karate school run by Bernd Schmitt, a secret service informant.

In 1995, a skinhead named Carsten Szcepanski tried to drown a Nigerian man in a lake near Berlin. Some time later it became known that at the time of the attack he was an undercover agent for the secret service.

How far are these people prepared to go? Attempted murder? Manslaughter? Murder? Mass Murder? What is there that these neo-nazi government agents are not prepared to do in order to serve their state masters?

The awful truth

The evidence is clear: the British and German intelligence agencies played a crucial role in setting up, funding, and recruiting for the German neo-nazi movement. They have provided the neo-nazis with founders, leaders, publishers and editors. Their agents have incited racism and even murder. The German government has simultaneously sponsored anti-nazi and pro-nazi organisations. This was clearly done in order to create fear and insecurity, and thereby to centralise and consolidate the power of governments at the expense of their hapless subjects. There is no other possible explanation for this behaviour.

Next time either Tony Blair or his German counterparts (or, for that matter, any of the court intellectuals who have the gall to point to the phony “neo-nazi” movement as “proof” of the need to abolish our liberties) choose to lecture anybody about the “evils of racism” or any such related subject, it would certainly be opportune to issue a reminder as to the true source of “racism” and its neo-nazi derivative.

Posted by Steve Edwards on Friday, April 28, 2006 at 12:20 PM in Far Right
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