She Called Police Over a Neo-Nazi Threat. But the Neo-Nazis Were Inside the Police

FRANKFURT — Traveling for work and far from home, Seda Basay-Yildiz received a chilling fax at her hotel: “You filthy Turkish sow,” it read. “We will slaughter your daughter.”

A German defense lawyer of Turkish descent who specializes in Islamist terrorism cases, Ms. Basay-Yildiz was used to threats from the far right. But this one, which arrived late one night in August 2018, was different.

Signed with the initials of a former neo-Nazi terrorist group, it contained her address, which was not publicly available because of the earlier threats. Whoever sent it had access to a database protected by the state.

“I knew I had to take this seriously — they had our address, they knew where my daughter lives,” Ms. Basay-Yildiz recalled in an interview. “And so for the first time I actually called the police.”

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It would bring her little sense of security: An investigation soon showed that the information had been retrieved from a police computer.

Image“I knew I had to take this seriously — they had our address, they knew where my daughter lives,” the lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz said.
“I knew I had to take this seriously — they had our address, they knew where my daughter lives,” the lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz said.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
Far-right extremism is resurgent in Germany, in ways that are new and very old, horrifying a country that prides itself on dealing honestly with its murderous past. This month, a two-year parliamentary inquiry concluded that far-right networks had extensively penetrated German security services, including its elite special forces.

But increasingly, the spotlight is turning on Germany’s police, a much more sprawling and decentralized force with less stringent oversight than the military — and with a more immediate impact on the everyday safety of citizens, experts warn.

After World War II, the greatest preoccupation among the United States, its allies and Germans themselves was that the country’s police force never again be militarized, or politicized and used as a cudgel by an authoritarian state like the Gestapo.

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Policing was fundamentally overhauled in West Germany after the war, and cadets across the country are now taught in unsparing detail about the shameful legacy of policing under the Nazis — and how it informs the mission and institution of policing today.

Still, Germany has been besieged by revelations of police officers in different corners of the country forming groups based on a shared far-right ideology.

“I always hoped that it was individual cases, but there are too many of them now,” said Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, where 203 police officers are under investigation in connection with reported far-right incidents.

For Mr. Reul, the alarm sounded in September, when 31 officers in his state were found to have shared violent neo-Nazi propaganda. “It was almost an entire unit of officers — and we found out by chance,” Mr. Reul said this past week in an interview. “That floored me. This is not trivial.”

“We have a problem with far-right extremism,” he said. “I don’t know how far it reaches inside the institutions. But if we don’t deal with it, it will grow.”

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Ms. Basay-Yildiz’s information was accessed from a computer at a police station in Frankfurt.
Ms. Basay-Yildiz’s information was accessed from a computer at a police station in Frankfurt.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
It has been growing by the month.

The 31 officers in Mr. Reul’s western state were suspended in September for sharing images of Hitler, memes of a refugee in a gas chamber and the shooting of a Black man. The unit’s superior was part of the chat, too.

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In October, a racist chat group with 25 officers was discovered in the Berlin police after one officer frustrated that superiors would not do anything about it blew the whistle. Separately, six cadets were kicked out of Berlin’s police academy after playing down the Holocaust and sharing images of swastikas in a chat group that had 26 other members.

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In November, a police station in the western city of Essen was raided after images of ammunition and benches arranged to form swastikas were discovered in a WhatsApp chat. This past week, a violent far-right chat with four police officers in the northern cities of Kiel and Neumünster was discovered. Ammunition and Nazi memorabilia were found in raids of the homes of two officers.

Much focus has been on the state of Hesse, home to Ms. Basay-Yildiz, who lives in Frankfurt, and a number of other high-profile targets of neo-Nazi threats.

Ms. Basay-Yildiz is intimately familiar with discrimination in Germany.

When she was just 10 years old, her parents, guest workers from Turkey, took the young Seda to help translate when they went to buy car insurance. The salesman declined to sell it to them. “We don’t want foreigners,” he told them.

“So I decided that I want to know what kind of rights I have in Germany,” Ms. Basay-Yildiz recalled. She went to the library, found an agency to file a complaint and got her parents the insurance they wanted.

It was then she knew what she wanted to do with her life.

She rose to prominence as a lawyer when she represented the family of a Turkish flower seller who was shot at his roadside stand. He was the first victim of the National Socialist Underground, known as the N.S.U., a neo-Nazi terrorist group that killed 10 people, nine of them immigrants, between 2000 and 2007.

 

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