30 German Army Officers Attended ’95 Speech by Right-Wing Terrorist

For the sixth time in a year, the German army has been embroiled in a scandal involving right-wing extremists in uniform, with the wrongdoers this time not lowly, forgettable privates in an isolated barracks but officials at a prestigious academy where senior officers bound for army headquarters are trained.

Der Spiegel magazine, in its current issue, reports that the army’s Hamburg-based Leadership Academy in 1995 invited Manfred Roeder, a convicted right-wing terrorist, to address its officers on the subject of repopulating part of Russia with ethnic Germans. The Defense Ministry has confirmed that about 30 officers turned up for Roeder’s talk.

In the outcry that followed these revelations, it emerged that the army had also given Roeder, 68, some old vehicles, shovels and other tools. What he did with the materiel has not been disclosed. Because he has ties to paramilitary and German-supremacist groups, some fear he may have passed it on to one of them.

The Roeder incident, more than any scandal in the military to date, has raised questions about whether the modern German army has done all it should to separate itself from the aggressive, uber alles mind-set.

Although most Germans agree that the Bundeswehr, today’s army, is no threat to democracy, social critics often note that it was reconstituted from the remains of the Wehrmacht--Hitler’s army. They ask whether, in its postwar haste to rebuild and fight the Cold War, the country sufficiently studied its errors and atoned for its crimes.

“This is a very deep-rooted problem,” said Werner Haendler, an elderly concentration camp survivor who still makes Berlin his home. “The army has maintained a silence, perpetuated a myth, that the Wehrmacht always fought clean and never committed any crimes.”

Since Germany has been trying harder in recent years to project an image of the Bundeswehr as a group of conscientious, nonaggressive men and women active mainly in international peacekeeping, there could not have been a more bizarre, damaging choice for an officers’ guest speaker than Roeder.

He received his boyhood education at a Nazi prep school, fought with the Wehrmacht at 16, wrote in 1973 the preface for a German book, “The Auschwitz Lie,” and organized illegal annual demonstrations commemorating the birthday of Hitler confidant Rudolf Hess. In the early 1980s, he was active with a group that committed bombings and arsons, including two attacks on Jewish schools and one on an exhibition about the Auschwitz death camp.

Two Vietnamese asylum-seekers were killed in another of these fire bombings. A court found Roeder guilty of leading a terrorist organization and of attempted instigation to murder and sentenced him to 13 years in Germany’s highest-security prison. He served eight years, and, police said, went straight back to his extremism upon release. German intelligence officials have kept him under surveillance.

It has not yet been explained why, despite this record, someone at the academy invited Roeder to lecture. “If somebody doesn’t know who Manfred Roeder is, then he shouldn’t be in his post. Maybe he should be selling vegetables,” said Michael Wolffsohn, a contemporary history professor at the German military academy in Munich. He has criticized the Defense Ministry for trying to hush up previous scandals.

Defense Minister Volker Ruehe “has definitely underestimated the penetration and resolution of right wingers at the military academies,” Wolffsohn added.

Nor has it been explained why the academy would want to hear about Roeder’s work seeking to resettle ethnic Germans in the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

The Kaliningrad region, 97% ethnic German in the imperial era, became part of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.

Amid opposition calls for Ruehe’s resignation, the defense minister has condemned the selection of Roeder as a lecturer and promised to discipline officers responsible for inviting him. Two senior academy officials have been suspended, including the institution’s former head, who has since gone on to train members of the Albanian army.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl has said he fully supports Ruehe and will not ask for his resignation.

In recent months, the German army has been shaken by scandals involving conscripts decorating their barracks with Hitler photos and other Nazi paraphernalia, videotaping mock rapes and executions, beating up foreigners and setting fire to a hostel for Italian construction workers. Ruehe has portrayed these as “isolated incidents” and called for stepped-up screening of conscripts for anti-democratic tendencies.