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Bundeswehr soldiers (archive image): 843 right-wing extremist suspected cases in 2020
Photo: Deutzmann / imago images
Young team soldiers in the army are apparently particularly susceptible to right-wing extremist ideas.
This emerges from the new report of the "Coordination Office for Suspected Extremism Cases" of the Ministry of Defense.
For the first time, the figures are broken down by age, place of residence, rank and military service.
According to this, the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD) investigated 843 right-wing extremist cases among soldiers last year, a significant increase from the 592 cases a year earlier.
The public outrage over right-wing extremist incidents, such as those among the elite fighters of the Special Forces Command (KSK), has meant that significantly more cases are now reported from within the troops than before.
The Bundeswehr is now reacting "extremely sensitively to extremist behavior in its own ranks," says the report.
The MAD is primarily concerned with the area of “new rights”, a “heterogeneous trend that is essentially characterized by the relativization of right-wing extremism and the reference to similarities with the right-wing democratic fringes”.
However, it is more difficult to identify extremists in this field than with neo-Nazis or "old rights".
Since the AfD regional associations in Brandenburg and Thuringia and the »Junge Alternative«, the AfD's youth organization, were declared suspicious cases by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the military intelligence service has been trying to clarify the role that Bundeswehr members play in these organizations.
Right-wing extremist attitudes are particularly widespread among younger regular soldiers under the age of 34 and are above average among the team ranks there.
Since 75 percent of the team soldiers are doing their service in the army, this part of the armed forces is also affected more than average.
It represents 25 percent of the soldiers in the Bundeswehr, but comes to 50 percent of the right-wing extremist suspected cases.
The air force, navy and especially the new cyber sector are much less affected.
For the first time, the report also shows the regional distribution of suspected cases.
The result is interesting.
With the locations in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg, two large western federal states are affected above average and with Thuringia only one in the east.
If you look at the home countries of the soldiers concerned, besides Baden-Württemberg, however, it is the eastern German federal states from which an above-average number of members of the armed forces come who are suspected of extremism.
"A disproportionate accumulation of suspected cases can be determined especially in Saxony," the report says.
The Bundeswehr is now paying more attention to ethos when it comes to hiring soldiers.
In the past year, 71 applicants were sorted out during the application process due to doubts about their loyalty to the constitution.
Because once you become a soldier, you can only be removed from service with great difficulty.
The procedures to remove recognized extremists and people who are not in compliance with the constitution from the Bundeswehr are "very cumbersome and lengthy," criticize the authors of the report, which also went to the Defense Committee.
"A disproportionate accumulation of suspected cases can be found in Saxony in particular."
Report from the Ministry of Defense's "Coordination Office for Suspected Extremism Cases"
There the opposition sees itself confirmed.
"The data show very clearly that right-wing extremism continues to be by far the greatest threat in the Bundeswehr," says defense politician Agnieszka Brugger from the Greens.
The particular accumulation of cases among young soldiers in the army illustrates the need for action to take a closer look.
"The findings that have finally been presented must be followed immediately by action," demanded Brugger.
Military intelligence is to be reformed
Martina Rosenberg plays a central role in the fight against right-wing extremism in the Bundeswehr.
The lawyer has been at the helm of the MAD for almost exactly a hundred days.
In the past few years, the Bundeswehr secret service was more likely to attract attention through breakdowns and scandals than through successful investigations.
Last year it came out that a senior MAD officer had passed on internal details about a case against a KSK instructor to old comrades from his time with the elite association.
The former defense disciplinary attorney Rosenberg has now used her start for a kind of cash fall, she talked to many employees and visited the branch offices of the Cologne authority.
She presented her assessment last Wednesday to the secret parliamentary control body for the intelligence services.
According to participants, if one really wanted to establish the MAD "as a spearhead" in the fight against right-wing extremism, the service would have to be consistently reformed and strengthened.
Rosenberg presented his first ideas behind closed doors.
According to information from participants, she demanded that the MAD needs more and better trained staff, which is why she wants to cooperate more closely with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service in the future.
In principle, the MAD should also become more civil, as it has long been suspected that the soldiers deployed there reacted negligently in cases of right-wing extremism and spared their comrades.
Above all, however, Rosenberg wants to improve the "eyes and ears of the MAD".
In the committee she reported that the eight outposts of the Cologne authority that had previously existed were not sufficient to find out enough about right-wing extremist currents in the area and also to be accessible to soldiers who want to provide information.
In the MAD itself, she wants to set up her own sub-department just for the fight against right-wing extremism.
The list of reform proposals illustrates how backward the MAD has been so far.
Rosenberg wants to ensure that the military intelligence service has full access to the "intelligence information system", the central database of the authorities, where it can view information on people and add their own details.
With the better integration, she hopes, connections of right-wing extremists beyond the Bundeswehr will be recognized.
In the political arena, Rosenberg's concept was largely received positively.
However, it remains to be seen whether the MAD will get enough money for its conversions.
The left warned that the secret service had to clean up internally first.
"All efforts to optimize things are going to zero if the MAD does not have the basic political and ideological stance against right-wing extremist ideas," says left defense politician Alexander Neu.
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