CounterVortex

Neo-Nazis have taken over the entire village of Jamel in Germany‘s northeastern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. “The police, the authorities, no one dares to intervene,” Uwe Wandel, mayor of the district that includes the village, told Der Spiegel. Jamel is home to Sven Kruger, a leader of the ultra-right National Democratic Party, an openly Hitler-nostalgist outfit that has had seats in the state parliament since 2006. Kruger and his allies have bought up nearly the whole village and driven others out, the magazine reports. Horst Lohmeyer, one of the few residents to oppose the extremists, said, “They see Jamel as a ‘nationally liberated zone'”—meaning a place foreigners and anti-fascists must fear to tread. (UPI, Jan. 3)

Old Nazis are also in the news in the Federal Republic with revelations that the West German BND intelligence service knew the postwar whereabouts of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, eight years before the Israelis found him in Argentina. A report in the German daily Bild refers to documents which a German court has ordered the BND to make public.

After the war, Eichmann was believed to have fled to either Egypt or Syria. But by 1952, the BND knew he was in hiding in South America. Bild reports an index card in archival materials released by the BND states the following: “Standartenführer Eichmann is not in Egypt, but is living under the false name of Clemens in Argentina. E.’s address is known to the chief editor of the German-language newspaper Der Weg in Argentina.”

At the time, the BND took no action against Eichmann. Bild reports the service did not deliver information about him to US agents until 1958. It was later confirmed that Eichmann had been hiding out in Buenos Aires since 1950 under the name of Ricardo Klement. He had also secretly transported his family there from Austria. (Czech Press Agency, Jan. 11)

The BND (with CIA oversight) was built on the foundation of Hitler’s intelligence apparatus for the Eastern Front, led by Reinhard Gehlen. In 1965, an internal BND investigation tracked down around 200 former Nazis in the agency’s employ. Some 70 were deemed unsuitable for continued service and dismissed. (Deutsche Welle, Jan. 20)

See our last posts on Central Europe, the worldwide radical right resurgence and the legacy of World War II

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