Some serving police and military personnel in Germany are plotting for ‘Day X’ – a far-right conspiracy that seeks to overthrow democracy and launch a race war
“If I hadn’t woken up, we would have all been burnt to death. I still ask myself why, when the police admitted they knew neo-Nazi’s were planning an arson attack on me, why did they fail to warn me?”
For three years, Ferat Koçak, a Die Linke politician now in the Berlin State Parliament, had been under surveillance by neo-Nazis – who, in turn, were under surveillance by the police.
In 2018, Koçak – whose parents are Kurdish and who lives in the multicultural Neukölln area of Berlin – that surveillance spilled out into real life violence. The home he shared with his parents was targeted by arsonists. His car was set on fire in the driveway, with the flames spreading to their house.
That same evening, a neighbouring bookshop run by Heinz Ostermann, who had hosted anti-right-wing reading groups, was also firebombed.
Three days later, his mother suffered a heart attack.
“The police knew about the planned attack but either could not or would not prevent it,” Koçak said. To this day, he still regularly receives death threats from far-right actors.
To all intents and purposes, Germany has laboured hard to make amends for its Nazi past. In the wake of the Second World War, it re-emerged on the world stage as a functioning and modern liberal democracy; an anchor within the European project.
But what if two key pillars of this nation – the police and the army – were not entirely what they seemed? And what if a percentage of the service personnel within these organisations were working in an interlinked form as a ‘state within a state’, hiding in the shadows of the establishment and preparing themselves for a ‘Day X’?
‘Germany Still has a Nazi Problem’
It’s an overcast and windswept day in Neukölln, and Ferat Koçak is taking part in a memorial service at Zichenplatz for the nine people murdered in Hanau, Hesse, by the far-right gunman Tobias Rathjen in 2020. Koçak is here as an official parliamentary observer.
Neukölln itself is a typical Berlin mix of multiple cultures, with shisha bars next door to coffee shops, buzzing outdoor markets and Bierkellers standing side by side.
But, despite this eclectic scene and its Kurdish population, this area in south-west Berlin has a dark side: an active neo-Nazi scene dating back many years.
“Germany has an ongoing issue in admitting that it still has a Nazi problem within its society and state institutions,” Koçak said. Indeed, no one in Neukölln has ever been convicted by the courts of an act of far-right extremism and terrorist activity.
Troublingly, this neo-Nazi scene has crossovers with state officials. A Berlin police superintendent was accused of supplying classified police computer files to members of the far-right via a chat group. When this was discovered, the officer was simply relocated to another force.
This was not the only time the police have been found to be colluding with the far-right. Germany’s Council for Migration – a non-profit organisation established in 1997 – noted in its 2020 report that, between January 2017 and March 2020, there were 1,441 suspected cases of right-wing extremism across all security and intelligence services.
