From our You gotta be kidding series.
Recent German news reports about right wing demonstrations, arson attacks on refugee shelters, and hate speech have largely focused on the "anti-islamization" movement PEGIDA, and the recently founded political party AfD (Alternative for Germany).
Little notice was paid to the long standing extreme right party NPD (National Democratic Party). NPD members participate in PEGIDA demonstrations, but so do AfD members as well as citizens whose party affiliations are not always clear cut.
The last substantial event concerning the NPD occurred in September of 2015 when five NPD members of the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern visited a refugee shelter in their state. The conservative interior minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had denied an NPD request for a visit of a state refugee shelter, saying that the part's anti-asylum policies justified a ban.
The AfD is seen as much more of a potential rival in a series of 2016 state and local elections than the NPD.
Most important, though, is the ongoing attempt to have the NPD banned in a case pending before Germany's federal constitutional court. The current proceedings come roughly a decade after an attempt that was soundly defeated by the constitutional court in 2003 after it was discovered that a number of the NPD's inner circle - including as many as 30 of its top 200 leaders - were in fact undercover agents or informants of the German secret services.
30 out of its top 200 leaders, that's about 1 in 7, enough to raise a number of questions. Questions the blogster leaves to historians.
Because it gets better.
Several German states eventually decided to try again, and the constitutional court made it clear that it would consider a new petition only if the plaintiffs were able to prove that the security services had severed all ties to confidential informants within the party leadership. By May 2015, lawyers for the states certified that eleven CIs on the federal and state executive committees of the NPD had been "deactivated".
Until recently, details of the "deactivation" were not known.
They were made public in a recent article in Die Zeit, entitled "Government going away presents for NPD officials" [our translation]. Die Zeit obtained minutes and documents from the May 2015 submission that show relationships between CIs and their handlers that the word "cozy" does not adequately describe.
The documents show that at least nine out of the eleven total were given "severance pay". Although the amounts remain unknown because they were redacted, generic guidelines of domestic intelligence agencies indicate that the formula "monthly pay * number of years as CI" were used.
In many cases, the separation was marked by warm words of thanks and "best wishes for the future". Other phrases that could come right out of a letter of reference include gems that praise a CI as "always reliable, loyal and very engaged".
To lessen separation anxiety and to provide for potential emergencies, at least some of the former CIs were given emergency contact numbers.
It would be so nice to know whether the same courtesy and empathy is extended to CIs in left wing organizations.
[Update 1/22/2017] The latest attempt to have Germany's constitutional court ban the NPD failed, but not for the same reasons as the first one. This time, the court posits that the party is not an imminent threat, leaving a future ban open. In the aftermath, the major parties are now looking into changing the German system of government funding of parties with the intention to cut off small parties.
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