German Army Train Neo-Nazis

[Magus Mixmaster Remailer <mix@magusnet.com>]

Well, appears that while the German government is railing against neo-Nazis
on the Net, the German army is busy training the next generation of
jack-booted thugs:

"Pictures That Shame The German Army"
(London Independent, 7/7/97, p.9)

Bonn -- A German newspaper yesterday published pictures from an amateur
videotape of soldiers staging mock executions and rapes.

A youthful recruit in a Bundeswehr uniform is shown holding a pistol in
the mouth of another recruit in an image published on the front page of
<I>Bild am Sonntag</I>.

Another photograph shows a soldier pretending to rape another recruit
acting as a woman civilian, who is later shown being marched to
"execution" by troops. Other pictures show enactments of "civilians"
being tortured and hanging from trees, images which revived memories of
atrocities by Hitler's armies.

"There will be no toleration whatsoever of such perversion in the
Bundeswehr," the Defence Minister, Volker Ruhe, said in an interview
with ZDf television. "I will do everything to see that those involved
are disciplined and prosecuted. We will ... take action against all
those involved, even if they are no longer in the army."

The army said eight recruits on the film, made at Hammelburg training
grounds, near Wurzburg, in April 1996, were no longer in the army. The
Bundeswehr investigation also focussed on officers who failed to report
the incident which took place during a break in training for soldiers
preparing for a mission in former Yugoslavia.

Lieutenant-General Helmut Willmann, the army's officer, said acts by
"a handful of mentally disturbed individuals" could not besmirch the
force's good name. "I am horrified by what happened at the Hammelburg
training ground," he said in a statement release by the defence
ministry.

The Greens criticized Gen Willmann for trying to write off the incident
as an abberation, as officers knew of the tape for more than a year but
said nothing about it. Jurgin Trittin, chairman of the Greens, said the
incident was the latest of a series of unsettling incidents. There had
been 53 reported incidents of right-wing extremism in the army in 1995.

Wolfgang Schraut, commander of Jaeger Battalion 571, where the incident
took place, said the recruits could no longer be punished by the army
because they had left. "We will not be able to get our hands on them
any more," the officer said. "They were released from the army in an
entirely normal fashion after completing their military service."

He said that he did not know of the existence of the videotape until
Friday and had learned that it was shown "on occasion in small circles
amongst the comrades." Some 3,000 Germans are in the Nato-led
Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Bosnia. Around 4,000 Germans took part
in SFOR's predecessor, the peace Implementation Force but were
stationed in nearby Croatia.