Enemy Within? : German Security Agents and the Far-Right

Abstract

Germany has seen an intensification of far-right terror acts over the last decade. In November 2011, the German Public learned about the underground operations of the NSU, a group of three neo-Nazi assailants with a largely unknown network of supporters that had been responsible for nine murders throughout the 2000s. It is important to note that it was bystanders and police, not security agencies, that uncovered the group, even though the public learned also learned that German Intelligence services had heavily infiltrated the NSU's network of supporters. Far-right violence would not end here. A wave of arson attacks against refugee homes, reminiscent of the sinister attacks on asylum seekers in the early 1990s, engulfed the country in 2015-16. In a wave of attacks inspired by Anders Breivik and the Christchurch shooting, as well as the NSU, far-right perpatrators killed nine people in an attack in Munich in 2016, attempted to break into a synagogue in 2019 and killed two bystanders, murdered CDU Walter Lübcke in 2019 and shot ten people in Hanau in February 2020...