Ever heard of this trio? The National Socialist Underground is their name and they became the nineties rightwing counterpart to the sixties leftwing Red Army Brigade. The NSU went on a decade-long killing spree in Germany that evaded detection by the best efforts of the German police. Fortunately, a film and documentary now available on Netflix unravels some of the mysteries, but the most perplexing one is why did the police get so much resistance from their own internal intelligence agencies? Since random terror is on the rise throughout much of the world, it might be helpful to investigate a crew that helped formulate the template.
Unfortunately, one of the most fascinating tangents in this case worthy of investigation is not discussed in either film, and that would be the elusive Andreas Strassmeir, a suspect in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma in 1988. Strassmeir disappeared and returned to his native Germany before the FBI could question him about that case. He was the son of the German Chancellor’s chief-of-staff at the time and a former officer in the Panzer Grenadiers before decamping to a kibbutz in Israel and then moving into a rabid rightwing Christian identify cult known as Elohim City in Arkansas. Strassmeir was made the cult’s chief-of-security upon arrival and soon met Timothy McVeigh, the sole patsy executed for the bombing, although there were others obviously involved (a pattern repeated in the complex NSU affair). The usual explanation for any glaring investigative anomalies is “protecting sources.”
A novel was the template deployed to indoctrinate a new wave of violence-loving fanatics in order to provoke an all-out race war. Odd that the insane idea of sparking a catastrophic race war was also at the heart of Charlie Manson’s soul. Eerily, the book predicted flying planes into buildings, as well as the destruction of federal buildings with fertilizer bombs hidden in vans. Originally set in the 1980s, The Turner Diaries was eventually re-dated for the far-off future. By capturing military bases, the racists eventually kill every non-white human being on the earth. Make no mistake, mass genocide is the stated goal, and within a decade, the book would be cited by terrorists in North America, England and Germany as a primary inspiration for their violent deed.
At the start of the 1990s, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Communist empire began collapsing. It was in the impoverished eastern sectors riddled with damaged souls that intel went trolling, because suddenly the old game of capitalist-versus-communist was obsolete, and a new boogyman needed to be installed quick or the dialectical strategy of tension might be lost. The scene began with heavy metal skinhead bands singing songs of praise for Nazi ideology and grew from there. The songs were illegal in Germany, and underground distribution provided an important source of funds.
If the BND was not actively fomenting the neo-Nazi revival, they were certainly watching the developments very closely. In fact, they sought to identify every person attending the concerts and buying the records, and opened files on hundreds of teenagers in order to profile ones that could be twisted into becoming informants. Just as the American Communist Party had been led by spooks from its inception, many of these Nazi organizations were headed by informants and agents paid through slush funds. The BND was providing the money to stage the events and were covering the publicity and promotion costs.
Tino Brandt was the BND’s most highly placed informant inside the Nazi youth movement. He was later found guilty of child abuse and now resides in jail. But when he was just 17, Brandt was already running a high-profile Nazi cult with funds provided by the BND. He held many fundraisers for the National Socialist Underground, money that went to purchase fake passports and weapons, including the Ceska 83 that was used in the random murders.
These are the victims of that Ceska 83. At the time, the police were stuck on a theory Turks were being killed as part of some criminal conspiracy. The police lied incessantly to the victims’ families and instead of looking for killers, investigated them. They became the primary targets and the usual dirty tricks were trotted out in failed attempts to force confessions from families already suffering from PTSD. Meanwhile, the BND assured local police that the trio known as the NSU had already fled to the United States, presumably to some Elohim City-type encampment. None of that was true, however. The trio was living in plain sight in Germany under fake IDs and continued randomly killing foreigners, robbing banks and receiving assistance from BND informants and agents for years to come.
As could be expected in a situation like this, the BND files on this case are permanently sealed. (To protect the sources, of course.) The film is titled: NSU: German History X, and the documentary is titled: The NSU Complex. There are details to be mined in both, but neither will satisfy the desire to get to the bottom of who was running this operation. When the local police finally figured out the bank robberies and murders were connected, and knew the perpetrators were using a white RV, it was simply a matter of locating an RV close to the scene of a robbery.
That RV was stuffed with automatic weapons and ammo and the two occupants seem to have been monitoring the police radio band because as soon as a call came in that a white RV had been spotted, they set the vehicle on fire and committed suicide. There are a lot of problems with this scenario. First, why no shoot-out? For such gung-ho paramilitary types, wouldn’t a shoot-out have been a more spectacular end for a racist martyr? Second, why destroy the van and its contents, unless, of course, you need to hide the trail back to the hidden hands that assisted your operations?
I suspect mind control might be in play on many terror events these days, especially the ones where the perpetrators kill themselves while destroying all their computers and cell phones.