There has been disagreement for years on exactly how many people have been murdered in Germany since the unification of right-wing extremists. In 2020, the federal government spoke of 109 murder victims for the period since 1990, 22 of them in North Rhine-Westphalia. In contrast, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation (AAS), based in Berlin, currently has at least 218 victims nationwide with right-wing extremist perpetrators. The foundation was named after the native Angolan Amadeu Antonio, who was beaten into a coma by right-wing extremists in Brandenburg in 1990 and later died. Amadeu Antonio was one of the first victims of right-wing violence in reunified Germany.
On the instructions of NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU), the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) has now begun to investigate cases from the state that have actually been closed to determine whether the acts might not have a right-wing extremist background. “Right-wing extremism is a huge danger,” said Reul in an interview with WELT in his office in Düsseldorf. “I’m in charge of the fight and I don’t want crimes to be miscategorized.”
At the LKA, the examination of the cases by employees of the state security department has just begun, but in recent years, outside expertise has already been brought in. For example, psychologists and political scientists are now strengthening the LKA investigators – one of these new employees heads the project group.
There are at least 25 cases with 30 fatalities, the report should be available in the spring. If there is not enough time to investigate all crimes, the working group could work longer. Reul does not want to say exactly what deeds are involved. For some crimes it has not yet been clarified whether they have a political background.
Some cases in which the perpetrator was a neo-Nazi, but no political background was seen at the time, have long been the subject of discussion: the murders of the three police officers Thomas Goretzky, Yvonne Hachtkemper and Matthias Larisch von Woitowitz are one of them. The officers were shot dead in 2000 by the then-known neo-Nazi Michael Berger in Waltrop, north of Dortmund. Berger killed himself after the fact. Even when a then-juvenile right-wing extremist stabbed punk Thomas Schulz in Dortmund in 2005, the police saw no political motive.
Reul says times have changed: “Awareness of the danger of right-wing extremism has increased in recent decades. We’ll see if that leads to cases being judged differently than they were then.” Working as Minister of the Interior has changed him: “Before I took office, I was convinced that Nazis were a small bunch of crackpots, who dream of Hitler coming back.” As interior minister, Reul then cracked down on right-wing extremists and criminal clans, even though the latter attracted more public attention.
Above all, he better equipped the police in Dortmund – the city had long been a focus of the Nazi scene in North Rhine-Westphalia. Reul supported the Dortmund police chief Gregor Lange and also visited the district of Dorstfeld, which was to become the “Nazi district”. “I’ve learned that right-wing extremism is a major threat and I’m acting accordingly.” The new working group of the LKA has nothing to do with the new black-green coalition, it was set up before the election.
Many neo-Nazis, especially from Dortmund, have left NRW in the past two years. Several cadres of the party “The Right” now live in Chemnitz, Saxony. For example Michael Brück, a former Dortmund councilor of the neo-Nazi party. After moving to Chemnitz, he complained in a podcast about the lack of public support. The city of Dortmund and large parts of the west are “ultimately lost”.
For Reul, this is a success of police work in recent years, but no reason to give the all-clear: “The neo-Nazis have migrated from the streets to the Internet. As a result, the danger has increased rather than decreased. Because it’s harder for us to keep an eye on the scene.” The police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution would follow them and are now also increasingly active online.
The interior minister looks somewhat enviously at the options available to security services in the United States and Israel, for example. “Data protection,” says Reul, “is slowing down police work. Not just when it comes to right-wing extremism.” In contrast to the desks of many other ministers, Reul’s has two large monitors. Although he is the oldest member of the cabinet at 69, the digital world is not alien to him, but very familiar.
The German authorities often have successful searches because foreign services make data available to them, says Reul. “That was the case, for example, with the planned attack on the synagogue in Hagen last year, which we were able to prevent thanks to the help of friendly services.”
It rankles Reul that he can only rarely take revenge on his partners. “But there are good reasons for our privacy culture. I don’t want to shake it. We have to work with what is legally available to us.”
