Flashback: Germany's top neo-Nazis are government agents

Something tells me it's probably more than just one in seven of the leadership that the government has admitted to...and almost certainly "top heavy", with the very top echelon being on the government payroll, making the entire movement controlled-op.

Germany's top neo-Nazis spy for ministry

16 Jul 2002
By Hannah Cleaver in Berlin
The Telegraph

One in seven of Germany's top neo-Nazis is a secret service agent, the government has admitted in an attempt to sustain faltering efforts to ban a far-Right political party.

Government lawyers have offered the information in the hope that it will save agents from being identified in court.

The government is trying to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) for its alleged unconstitutional, anti-democratic and racist views.

But the constitutional court, the only body with the power to ban a political party, unwittingly embarrassed the government when it called several senior party members to give evidence.

It turned out that many had been working for the intelligence services, some of them for decades. Five were identified and the court stopped its examination of the potential ban among fears that the evidence presented could have been influenced by the government's desire to ban the party.

Now the authorities have admitted that they have been paying 30 of the 210 top NPD functionaries for information. The figure, published in the German press this weekend, applies only to the ruling ranks of the party, leaving open how many of the average members might also be feeding information to the government.

Some has suggested that the party could not have survived without government money. The German states' interior ministries, which run their own intelligence services parallel with federal bodies, last week confirmed their opposition to identifying their recruits.

The Interior Ministry refused to discuss the disclosures, citing respect for the constitutional court as its reason. The court said the government must present its arguments on Oct 8.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1401559/Germanys-top-neo-Nazis-spy-for-ministry.html