State officials have called for a new leadership culture at the middle and lower levels of the police. Hesse’s Minister of the Interior Peter Beuth called for a new leadership culture at the police at the lower and middle levels.
Officers in Hesse will disband a Frankfurt police commando unit on Thursday after an investigation found that some of its members had glorified violence and made references to former Nazi organisations in online chats. On Wednesday, prosecutors fired 19 police officers who had been suspended for the chats. Like the United States, the German police and military have had to contend with far-right scandals in recent years.
Prosecutors said six officers were suspected of exchanging messages with Nazi images, which is prohibited under German law. Another officer with alleged links to far-right extremists worked at a Frankfurt police station and was a member of the WhatApp chat group investigating the main suspect. The police officer in question was dismissed from duty because of the racist content of his chat messages and because investigators were unable to determine whether the police station where he was being held was under threat.
More than 250 mobile phones, computers and hard drives were seized during the investigation. The investigation team of the Hessian criminal police, called AG 211, was set up and 60 investigators worked on the case. The policeman with alleged links to right-wing extremists, who worked for the Frankfurt police and was also a member of the chat group WhatApp, was monitored, his house searched and computers and mobile phones seized, but there was no evidence that he was an NSU 2.0.
BERLIN – A tactical police unit in the German city of Frankfurt is being disbanded amid investigations into members suspected of participating in chat groups that exchanged far-right messages, authorities said Thursday. Frankfurt prosecutors said Wednesday that an investigation into a 38-year-old police officer suspected of possessing and distributing child-bearing images has led to the discovery of alleged chat groups. The report is part of a wider inquiry into right-wing extremism in the civil service.
The Hessian State Police and the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office have begun investigations and searched several properties on Wednesday. Florian Flade, security correspondent of the Joint Investigation Unit, supervises WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung. So far there have been no revelations, but suspicions of far-right tendencies among members of the Frankfurt SEC have been dispelled, Beuth said on Thursday.
The police and military in Germany have been plagued in recent years by far-right scandals. Police officers have been fired or reprimanded in several states for participating in such chat groups, with swastikas, Hitler images and xenophobic postings on social media. Hessen, where the financial centre Frankfurt is located, has been a particular focal point of right-wing activities for German authorities.
