Concern has been raised Germany over the infiltration of the country’s security forces by the far right, according to a report in the Financial Times.
A number of prominent Germans – mostly women, people with immigrant backgrounds, or politicians on the broad German Left – have received threatening letters containing details not ordinarily available to the public. There is also evidence that at least some of the targets of the letters had been searched for in official police databases and some of the detail in the letters would have required access to official records or surveillance.
The letters claim to be from an organization calling itself the National Socialist Underground 2.0, a clear reference to the original National Socialist Underground, a neo-Nazi terrorist group uncovered in 2011. Some of the letters have been signed by ‘Der Fuhrer’, the title used by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
The first letter from NSU 2.0 was sent in 2018 to a lawyer of Turkish descent, Seda Baysal-Yildiz, who had helped prosecute the original NSU group. There was evidence that her name had been searched for in a police database in the state of Hesse. A criminologist and police analyst, Thomas Feltes, believes that up to one-in-five Germans have far-right sympathies, and that the far right has become increasingly emboldened since 2015, when the first of nearly one million Middle Eastern asylum seekers began to arrive. However, Martina Renner, a left-wing politician who received one of the NSU 2.0’s letters, does not believe that there is a large far-right network in the country’s security forces, though acknowledges that even a ‘lone wolf’ neo-Nazi could do serious damage.