German security services to recruit HUNDREDS of new officers to combat right-wing radicals – interior minister

Germany's police and its domestic security service, the BfV, are to be beefed up with 600 new staff members tasked specifically with tackling right-wing extremism, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has announced.

Unveiling his plan in Berlin on Tuesday, the minister warned that more than 12,000 potentially violent right-wing radicals are on the loose in Germany, adding that half of all politically motivated acts of violence in Germany are committed by such people.

Seehofer also decried the "ugly blood trail" left behind by right-wing extremists over the last couple of decades, specifically mentioning a series of murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2001 and 2006.The minister also referred to the assassination of Walter Luebcke – a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, who actively supported her immigration policies – in June 2019 as well as a shooting attack in Halle in October, which left two people dead.

The police and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) – the domestic security service that deals with the most serious threats to the German state and constitutional order – will get 300 new staff members each to "better counter" the increasing danger posed by right-wing extremists, the minister said. Additional funding for the personnel increase was already approved by the Bundestag in November.

Both the police and the BfV will be tasked with closely monitoring the activities of suspected right-wing extremists in real life and on the internet. Online platforms will also be obliged to report any relevant posts to the police as part of what Federal Criminal Police Chief Holger Muench called a "completely new approach to combating digital crime" and a "climate of fear" created on the net by threats and right-wing propaganda.

The investigative capabilities of law enforcement officers are also being expanded, and the backers of right-wing extremism as well as their personal contacts will also appear on the police radar from now on.BfV chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said that his agency will particularly scrutinize the activities of the Identitarian Movement as well as the youth wing of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and its "wing" led by the controversial politician Bjoern Hoecke. Reports about the security service ramping up its surveillance of some AfD structures have been circulating in the German media since January.

Law enforcement agencies, along with the German Army, will not be exempt from scrutiny. German media earlier reported that the Interior Ministry plans to track down right-wing sympathizers within the ranks of the German security services, with the BfV expected to create a special department to investigate such cases.

The agency exposed such sympathizers within its own ranks last year when eight police officers were also suspected of being members of the so-called 'Reich Citizens Movement' – a loose association of several largely right-wing and anti-Semitic groups that reject the legitimacy of the modern German state.

The German Armed Forces have also suffered from several Nazi-linked scandals in recent years. According to the military's counter-intelligence service, at least 30 servicemen within the Bundeswehr "lack loyalty to the constitutional order" and about two-thirds of these people are suspected of being right-wing extremists.

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