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Photo: Malte Ossowski / picture alliance / Sven Simon
The chat group on WhatsApp was called "Itiotentreff", that should be funny.
Here Frankfurt police officers sent each other messages and photos.
There was something banal, but also something terrifying.
One picture showed Hitler in front of a smoking chimney with the words: "The bigger the Jew, the warmer the place."
It's been two years since the group was exposed.
The horror was great, Hesse's Interior Minister Peter Beuth (CDU) came under pressure.
But his counterparts in the federal and state governments ducked, their reflex: an isolated case, Frankfurt is not everywhere.
It was a devastating signal of inaction that they sent to their officials.
A police service group in Mülheim an der Ruhr was recently noticed.
There, too, there was the same disgusting mélange of Nazi, racist, inhuman messages in a WhatsApp group called "Alpha Team".
North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) spoke of a "shame for the police".
And what are his federal and state colleagues doing?
They keep silent.
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