Thirty German police officers suspended from duty for sharing far-right images

The Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, in February last year in Bochum.FRIEDEMANN VOGEL / EFE

A far-right infested police unit in western Germany.

Up to 29 police officers in North Rhine-Westphalia have been suspended from duty on charges of spreading messages containing neo-Nazi content for years, according to the authorities of the Land.

An image of Hitler, another of a refugee in an alleged gas chamber or yet another shot at black people are part of the scenes they exchanged in at least five chats.

The regional Interior Minister, Herbert Reul, has called it "a disgrace."

"The accusations hit the police squarely," declared the conservative politician, who has considered it to be "despicable neo-Nazi and anti-refugee propaganda."

In total, 126 images were shared by the groups, founded between 2012 and 2015. The operation has included raids and searches at 34 police offices and at several officers' homes in five cities.

The Duisburg Public Prosecutor's Office and the Bochum police are now investigating the accused for possible sedition and use of unconstitutional symbols.

Eleven of the agents participated actively by sending messages and the rest received and read them without reporting it to their superiors.

A total of 14 agents will be removed from their position and the rest, for now, have been suspended.

Most belong to the Mühlheim an der Ruhr police station near Essen in western Germany, and the head of the department is one of the suspended officers.

Investigators found the images in the course of an investigation related to another case, in which a 32-year-old agent had been accused of revealing official secrets to a journalist, and his phone was confiscated during the intervention.

That is why Reul expects that there will be more cases, since at the moment they have only had access to a mobile phone.

After the raids on Wednesday, the authorities hope to gather new information on other possible implicated in the far-right cell.

The regional Interior Minister has announced that he plans to create a special commissioner in charge of investigating the extreme right-wing radicalism in the North Rhine-Westphalia police, and on the other hand, the police union has shown its indignation because it has assured that "the fight against right-wing extremism is part of the DNA of the police ”.

Similar cases

The presence of neo-Nazis in the police and also in the army is in danger of ceasing to be news in Germany.

The case of the 29 policemen from North Rhine Westphalia follows others that have recently come to light.

In the federal states of Hesse, Baden-Württenberg and Bavaria there have been similar cases in recent months, of far-right agents connected through messaging services and social networks.

Far-right violence has turned the German authorities into the greatest threat to security in the country, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer declared earlier this summer.

The internal secret services number 32,080 people with far-right “potential”;

13,000 of them with a tendency to violence.