Saturday, August 24, 2013 3:04:16 AM
German Officers’ Biases Seen as Enabling Neo-Nazis
Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi cell, is standing trial in Munich in the killing of 10 people.
Michael Dalder/Reuters
By MELISSA EDDY
Published: August 22, 2013
BERLIN — Germany’s police and security services suffered from deeply rooted prejudices and a lack of cultural diversity, which allowed a neo-Nazi cell to carry out violent attacks against immigrants for more than a decade without being detected, according to a parliamentary committee report issued Thursday.
The parliamentary investigation was ordered after the police in November 2011 stumbled on a link between a bungled bank robbery and the unsolved murders of nine small-business owners [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/world/europe/neo-nazis-suspected-in-wave-of-crimes-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ] — eight Turks and one Greek — between 2000 and 2007. The realization that a three-member cell of neo-Nazis operated in Germany for years with impunity caused public outrage and led to the resignation of top law enforcement officials.
The inquiry concluded that prejudice often led the police to draw quick and erroneous conclusions about certain murders, based on the ethnicity of the victims, and it demanded changes in the 36 law enforcement agencies, including training and recruiting more ethnic minorities.
“Turks murder Turks — that seems to have been the mentality,” said Sebastian Edathy, a lawmaker from the center-left Social Democratic Party who was chairman of the committee. “I don’t think it is a case of institutional racism, but we do have racists working within the security authorities.”
The 1,357-page report largely ascribed the authorities’ inability to solve the cases to biases harbored by individual officers. It also found that a culture more defined by rivalry than cooperation among the security forces also rendered it impossible to connect a bank robbery by the cell in one state to a murder in another.
Lawyers representing the victims’ families and representatives of the country’s police officers criticized the findings of the report, which is to be debated in Parliament on Sept. 2.
Rainer Wendt, the head of Germany’s police union, called the findings of the report “excessive and unfair,” and he placed blame on politicians who make decisions about training and financing the forces.
The committee made 47 points and recommended changes to the structure of the security forces, their ability to cooperate and how they carry out their investigations. No new legislation based on the recommendations by the committee, which included representatives from all five parties represented in Parliament, is expected to be drawn up until after a legislature is elected on Sept. 22.
Even after the failed bank robbery, it took the police days to make the connection to the murders. The authorities eventually linked the cell to the killing of a police officer and a 2004 nail bomb attack [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/world/nail-bomb-in-a-turkish-area-in-cologne-hurts-17.html ] on a shopping street in Cologne that was popular with Turks in which more than 20 people were injured.
Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of the cell after the two other members killed themselves, is standing trial in Munich [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/europe/trial-of-neo-nazi-beate-zschape-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ], charged with complicity in the killing of 10 people and carrying out the bombings. She faces life in prison if found guilty. Four other men face lesser charges on suspicion of supporting the three cell members.
Clemens Binninger, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union who served on the committee, singled out the Cologne bombing as a glaring example of the authorities’ refusal to consider racism or xenophobia as a motivation for the crime.
“A bomb attack in a street where only ethnic minorities live and work and only foreigners were targeted and were victims of this crime — nevertheless, authorities did not include a possibly far-right motive in their investigation, but focused only on organized crime,” Mr. Binninger said.
The 15.7 million members of ethnic minorities among the slightly more than 80 million people living in Germany are still vastly underrepresented in official positions and higher levels of government.
“If at least one member of a team involved in the investigative police had had Turkish grandparents, then it would not have taken more than six years to realize there might have been a right-wing motive behind the murders,” said Mr. Edathy, the committee chairman.
Lawyers representing the victims’ families at the trial in Munich issued a statement in which they insisted that institutional racism is prevalent and claimed the report did not go far enough.
The committee also called for improved cooperation among the myriad police, state and federal security forces, and for an increased vigilance to the threat posed by far-right extremism, which had been less of a concern after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which drew attention and resources to combating Islamic extremism.
Mishandling of the investigation has already claimed several high-ranking officials. In July 2012, Heinz Fromm stepped down as president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, days after it emerged that an official in his office had shredded documents containing potential evidence.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/world/europe/german-officers-biases-seen-as-enabling-neo-nazis.html
--
At Dachau, Merkel Warns of Extremism
Video [embedded]
Angela Merkel Visits Dachau: Ms. Merkel, in a first visit to the Dachau concentration camp by a sitting chancellor, spoke to Holocaust survivors and emphasized the importance of learning from Germany’s past.
Angela Merkel at Dachau on Tuesday. Her visit coincided with a violent protest in Berlin over a planned refugee center.
Kerstin Joensson/Associated Press
By MELISSA EDDY
Published: August 21, 2013
BERLIN — In her two terms as chancellor, Angela Merkel has repeatedly warned of the dangers of far-right extremism, pointing to the lessons of German history as an example for all of Europe, even as far-right political parties in Greece, Hungary and the Netherlands have attracted new supporters.
The far-right parties have capitalized on hard times, austerity and popular anger in those countries, but Germany’s prosperity has not kept it immune: far-right extremists mounted protests in Berlin this week against the resettling of 400 refugees from Afghanistan, Serbia and Syria in a former high school.
The planned refugee center has been a flash point for weeks, and not just among extremists. Residents in the center’s eastern Berlin neighborhood worry that concentrating so many refugees in one place would make it difficult for them to assimilate. The protests turned violent on Tuesday night, when the police arrested 25 people, among them a skinhead who gave a straight-armed Nazi salute, banned by German law.
As it happened, Ms. Merkel paid a visit the same day to the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where she spoke to a group of Holocaust survivors and emphasized the importance of learning from Germany’s past.
“How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live based on their race, religion, their political persuasion or their sexual orientation?” she said in a somber ceremony on the wide plaza where inmates once assembled daily for roll call. “Places such as this warn each one of us to help ensure that such things never happen again.”
About 43,000 people applied for asylum in Germany in the first half of 2013, almost double the number from a year earlier. Still, that inflow is far slower than the country experienced in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people from the former Yugoslavia sought shelter in Germany, straining the system and stoking tensions that led to deadly neo-Nazi attacks on asylum seekers.
That climate also gave rise to a neo-Nazi cell that killed nine minority businessmen and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. Beate Zschäpe [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/europe/trial-of-neo-nazi-beate-zschape-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ], the sole survivor of the cell, has been on trial in Munich since May.
On Thursday, a parliamentary committee is expected to release the findings of its inquiry into the authorities’ failure to uncover the cell until 2011. The country’s police and intelligence agencies have already intensified their efforts to crack down on far-right groups, but the report is expected to call for further measures.
Ms. Merkel is campaigning for a third term in office, and with less than five weeks until national elections, she remains the country’s most popular politician. But in the numbers game that is German party politics, her center-right Christian Democratic Union may struggle to find a partner to build a government. The latest poll, by the Allensbach Institute [ http://www.ifd-allensbach.de/service/english/summary.html ], showed the pro-business Free Democratic Party winning just enough seats to carry the current coalition government into another term; other polls indicate that many voters remain undecided.
Still, Ms. Merkel drew criticism when she squeezed the visit to the camp between a campaign rally and a speech in a beer tent. The opposition Greens called her visit “tasteless” and inappropriate, while the Badisches Tagblatt newspaper wrote that “the visit to the concentration camp seems calculated and thereby loses its impact.”
“Ms. Merkel is smart enough to say the right things in the right places,” said Abba Naor, 85, who spent three years at one of Dachau’s satellite work camps. Mr. Naor, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, traveled from Israel to take part in the ceremony with Ms. Merkel, the first sitting chancellor to visit the camp.
“It’s about time for a German chancellor,” he said. “Nobody visited here before.”
The Nazis established a prison camp in Dachau in 1933, and later developed it into a concentration camp that served as a model for others. Political prisoners and criminals were among the camp’s first inmates. About 10,000 Jewish prisoners, along with Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and others were among the more than 200,000 people held in Dachau during its 12 years of existence.
At least 41,500 people were either killed or died of starvation or disease before American soldiers liberated the camp in 1945.
Max Mannheimer, 93, a survivor of the camp and a member of the International Dachau Committee [ http://www.comiteinternationaldachau.com/en/ ], personally invited the chancellor to visit when he learned that she would be giving a campaign speech at the city’s annual beer festival.
“For us, the few remaining survivors, it would be a great honor,” Mr. Mannheimer wrote in the invitation. “Given the rise of far-right extremism in our society, your visit would be a strong political signal that this development, especially given Germany’s past, cannot be accepted.”
Mr. Mannheimer said he did not share the concerns over whether Ms. Merkel’s visit was appropriate. He pointed out that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited the city of Dachau twice during his 16 years in office without coming to the camp.
“I think it is positive,” Mr. Mannheimer said after accompanying the chancellor on a brief tour of the camp’s museum. “She came here first, and then she went to the beer tent.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/world/europe/at-dachau-merkel-warns-of-extremism.html
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Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi cell, is standing trial in Munich in the killing of 10 people.
Michael Dalder/Reuters
By MELISSA EDDY
Published: August 22, 2013
BERLIN — Germany’s police and security services suffered from deeply rooted prejudices and a lack of cultural diversity, which allowed a neo-Nazi cell to carry out violent attacks against immigrants for more than a decade without being detected, according to a parliamentary committee report issued Thursday.
The parliamentary investigation was ordered after the police in November 2011 stumbled on a link between a bungled bank robbery and the unsolved murders of nine small-business owners [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/world/europe/neo-nazis-suspected-in-wave-of-crimes-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ] — eight Turks and one Greek — between 2000 and 2007. The realization that a three-member cell of neo-Nazis operated in Germany for years with impunity caused public outrage and led to the resignation of top law enforcement officials.
The inquiry concluded that prejudice often led the police to draw quick and erroneous conclusions about certain murders, based on the ethnicity of the victims, and it demanded changes in the 36 law enforcement agencies, including training and recruiting more ethnic minorities.
“Turks murder Turks — that seems to have been the mentality,” said Sebastian Edathy, a lawmaker from the center-left Social Democratic Party who was chairman of the committee. “I don’t think it is a case of institutional racism, but we do have racists working within the security authorities.”
The 1,357-page report largely ascribed the authorities’ inability to solve the cases to biases harbored by individual officers. It also found that a culture more defined by rivalry than cooperation among the security forces also rendered it impossible to connect a bank robbery by the cell in one state to a murder in another.
Lawyers representing the victims’ families and representatives of the country’s police officers criticized the findings of the report, which is to be debated in Parliament on Sept. 2.
Rainer Wendt, the head of Germany’s police union, called the findings of the report “excessive and unfair,” and he placed blame on politicians who make decisions about training and financing the forces.
The committee made 47 points and recommended changes to the structure of the security forces, their ability to cooperate and how they carry out their investigations. No new legislation based on the recommendations by the committee, which included representatives from all five parties represented in Parliament, is expected to be drawn up until after a legislature is elected on Sept. 22.
Even after the failed bank robbery, it took the police days to make the connection to the murders. The authorities eventually linked the cell to the killing of a police officer and a 2004 nail bomb attack [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/world/nail-bomb-in-a-turkish-area-in-cologne-hurts-17.html ] on a shopping street in Cologne that was popular with Turks in which more than 20 people were injured.
Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of the cell after the two other members killed themselves, is standing trial in Munich [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/europe/trial-of-neo-nazi-beate-zschape-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ], charged with complicity in the killing of 10 people and carrying out the bombings. She faces life in prison if found guilty. Four other men face lesser charges on suspicion of supporting the three cell members.
Clemens Binninger, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union who served on the committee, singled out the Cologne bombing as a glaring example of the authorities’ refusal to consider racism or xenophobia as a motivation for the crime.
“A bomb attack in a street where only ethnic minorities live and work and only foreigners were targeted and were victims of this crime — nevertheless, authorities did not include a possibly far-right motive in their investigation, but focused only on organized crime,” Mr. Binninger said.
The 15.7 million members of ethnic minorities among the slightly more than 80 million people living in Germany are still vastly underrepresented in official positions and higher levels of government.
“If at least one member of a team involved in the investigative police had had Turkish grandparents, then it would not have taken more than six years to realize there might have been a right-wing motive behind the murders,” said Mr. Edathy, the committee chairman.
Lawyers representing the victims’ families at the trial in Munich issued a statement in which they insisted that institutional racism is prevalent and claimed the report did not go far enough.
The committee also called for improved cooperation among the myriad police, state and federal security forces, and for an increased vigilance to the threat posed by far-right extremism, which had been less of a concern after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which drew attention and resources to combating Islamic extremism.
Mishandling of the investigation has already claimed several high-ranking officials. In July 2012, Heinz Fromm stepped down as president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, days after it emerged that an official in his office had shredded documents containing potential evidence.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/world/europe/german-officers-biases-seen-as-enabling-neo-nazis.html
--
At Dachau, Merkel Warns of Extremism
Video [embedded]
Angela Merkel Visits Dachau: Ms. Merkel, in a first visit to the Dachau concentration camp by a sitting chancellor, spoke to Holocaust survivors and emphasized the importance of learning from Germany’s past.
Angela Merkel at Dachau on Tuesday. Her visit coincided with a violent protest in Berlin over a planned refugee center.
Kerstin Joensson/Associated Press
By MELISSA EDDY
Published: August 21, 2013
BERLIN — In her two terms as chancellor, Angela Merkel has repeatedly warned of the dangers of far-right extremism, pointing to the lessons of German history as an example for all of Europe, even as far-right political parties in Greece, Hungary and the Netherlands have attracted new supporters.
The far-right parties have capitalized on hard times, austerity and popular anger in those countries, but Germany’s prosperity has not kept it immune: far-right extremists mounted protests in Berlin this week against the resettling of 400 refugees from Afghanistan, Serbia and Syria in a former high school.
The planned refugee center has been a flash point for weeks, and not just among extremists. Residents in the center’s eastern Berlin neighborhood worry that concentrating so many refugees in one place would make it difficult for them to assimilate. The protests turned violent on Tuesday night, when the police arrested 25 people, among them a skinhead who gave a straight-armed Nazi salute, banned by German law.
As it happened, Ms. Merkel paid a visit the same day to the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where she spoke to a group of Holocaust survivors and emphasized the importance of learning from Germany’s past.
“How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live based on their race, religion, their political persuasion or their sexual orientation?” she said in a somber ceremony on the wide plaza where inmates once assembled daily for roll call. “Places such as this warn each one of us to help ensure that such things never happen again.”
About 43,000 people applied for asylum in Germany in the first half of 2013, almost double the number from a year earlier. Still, that inflow is far slower than the country experienced in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people from the former Yugoslavia sought shelter in Germany, straining the system and stoking tensions that led to deadly neo-Nazi attacks on asylum seekers.
That climate also gave rise to a neo-Nazi cell that killed nine minority businessmen and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. Beate Zschäpe [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/europe/trial-of-neo-nazi-beate-zschape-in-germany.html?pagewanted=all ], the sole survivor of the cell, has been on trial in Munich since May.
On Thursday, a parliamentary committee is expected to release the findings of its inquiry into the authorities’ failure to uncover the cell until 2011. The country’s police and intelligence agencies have already intensified their efforts to crack down on far-right groups, but the report is expected to call for further measures.
Ms. Merkel is campaigning for a third term in office, and with less than five weeks until national elections, she remains the country’s most popular politician. But in the numbers game that is German party politics, her center-right Christian Democratic Union may struggle to find a partner to build a government. The latest poll, by the Allensbach Institute [ http://www.ifd-allensbach.de/service/english/summary.html ], showed the pro-business Free Democratic Party winning just enough seats to carry the current coalition government into another term; other polls indicate that many voters remain undecided.
Still, Ms. Merkel drew criticism when she squeezed the visit to the camp between a campaign rally and a speech in a beer tent. The opposition Greens called her visit “tasteless” and inappropriate, while the Badisches Tagblatt newspaper wrote that “the visit to the concentration camp seems calculated and thereby loses its impact.”
“Ms. Merkel is smart enough to say the right things in the right places,” said Abba Naor, 85, who spent three years at one of Dachau’s satellite work camps. Mr. Naor, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, traveled from Israel to take part in the ceremony with Ms. Merkel, the first sitting chancellor to visit the camp.
“It’s about time for a German chancellor,” he said. “Nobody visited here before.”
The Nazis established a prison camp in Dachau in 1933, and later developed it into a concentration camp that served as a model for others. Political prisoners and criminals were among the camp’s first inmates. About 10,000 Jewish prisoners, along with Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and others were among the more than 200,000 people held in Dachau during its 12 years of existence.
At least 41,500 people were either killed or died of starvation or disease before American soldiers liberated the camp in 1945.
Max Mannheimer, 93, a survivor of the camp and a member of the International Dachau Committee [ http://www.comiteinternationaldachau.com/en/ ], personally invited the chancellor to visit when he learned that she would be giving a campaign speech at the city’s annual beer festival.
“For us, the few remaining survivors, it would be a great honor,” Mr. Mannheimer wrote in the invitation. “Given the rise of far-right extremism in our society, your visit would be a strong political signal that this development, especially given Germany’s past, cannot be accepted.”
Mr. Mannheimer said he did not share the concerns over whether Ms. Merkel’s visit was appropriate. He pointed out that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited the city of Dachau twice during his 16 years in office without coming to the camp.
“I think it is positive,” Mr. Mannheimer said after accompanying the chancellor on a brief tour of the camp’s museum. “She came here first, and then she went to the beer tent.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/world/europe/at-dachau-merkel-warns-of-extremism.html
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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