Allan Hall: Germans must open their eyes to neo-Nazi threat

Earlier this year, a drunk was seized in a Berlin pub after his mobile phone ringtone was identified as the Horst Wessel Song, the anthem of Nazism. And last week in Neu-Ulm, a 22-year-old man was fined the equivalent of £2,400 for shouting “Sieg Heil!” at a political rally.

These are all evidence of the seriousness with which the German authorities take the post-Second World War constitutional ban on public displays of all things Nazi – so how is it that a right-wing death squad of at least four people, underwritten by as many as 20 others, was allowed to remain off the radar of 32 intelligence agencies and regional police forces for 13 years?

In that time, it murdered nine immigrant businessmen and a policewoman, sent letter bombs, detonated a bomb at a railway station and taunted society with offensive videos.

The exposure of the so-called Zwickau cell has shone an uncomfortable light on the German psyche and its attitudes to neo-Nazi extremism.

Had the terrorists been left-wing, the country would have been seized with a panic that Baader-Meinhof mayhem was upon them once more – and al-Qaeda at the gates.

Neo-Nazism, it seems, barely warrants a raised eyebrow over the breakfast table headlines – an apathy matched in the forces of law and order. Despite a squad of more than 30 detectives and three informants in the immediate circle of the killers, plus no evidence that the immigrant victims were targeted by rivals or gangsters, the authorities continued to deny that right-wing hate lay behind the assassinations.

In effect, Germany chose not to look into that dark corner of neo-Nazism where the answers lay. It remains the mad woman in the Teutonic attic: locked away, but palpably there – and not something you want to disturb.

“Blind to extremism” was how the news magazine Der Spiegel summed up the German reaction to the cancer that has never been fully cut out of society since 1945.

Not noticed? Or did not want to notice?

While Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks of a deep sense of disgrace and shame for Germany, the sense on the streets is of business as usual.

Germans are consumed with themselves – with job worries, immigration fears, with paying for Greece and of educational standards slipping in schools because of the number of Turkish children in class who struggle with the language.

If the victims had been middle-class German businessmen, the frisson of terror would have been acute much earlier. As it was, there was a sense of “it’s only them”.

Swathes of eastern Germany, the epicentre of the far-right scene, have no-go areas for ethnic minorities. At one place, Jamal, neo-Nazis celebrate the lost Reich with torchlit parades around blazing bonfires and sing the old songs of hatred.

For too long the carworker on the Rhine and the banker in Frankfurt has ignored these extremes; in this, it seems, the public were in tandem with authorities, who failed to join the dots up when it came to the Zwickau cell.

Thomas Oppermann, a top Social Democratic MP and chairman of the parliamentary intelligence committee, said there had been “a systematic underestimation of right-wing extremism in Germany”.

But was official failure merely tracking the sentiments of the public? To this day, while there has been some sympathy expressed for the victims of the Zwickau gang, Germany is not a country racked by doubt, pity or even heightened concern about the radical right. The euro, yes; the Fourth Reich, no.

Germany is revamping its intelligence efforts and promising to do more to root out an ideology that should have died with Hitler.

But Bernd Wagner, a criminologist and expert on the far right, who founded the “Exit” group to help neo-Nazis leave the scene, says it is in the minds of the people that real change will have to come.

“Every Nazi group certainly has the potential to form a violent cell which could operate in the underground,” he said. “No snappy response from intelligence agencies can help, when they say everything is under control, and that our eyes and ears have everything covered. History is now telling us this is not the case.”

• Allan Hall writes from Berlin for The Scotsman