Re the above:
I just noticed that one of the prosecution witnesses is Carsten Szczepanski. Szczepanski was a German neo-nazi who was turned by the state after his arrest for attempted murder. He worked as an informer from 1994 until 2000.
At least as early as 1998 Szczepanski provided intelligence on defendant Beate Zschäpe and her dead NSU comrades Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, as confirmed by intelligence documents put before the court. And yet... Within two years, they were setting off on a terroristic bloodbath which the state did not even acknowledge as politically-motivated murder until more than a decade later.
I think it is worth raking over some of this stuff.
In his (admittedly skewed) Combat 18 book,
White Riot, Nick Lowles (formerly of
Searchlight, latterly HOPE Not Hate) states that:
“The Sargents' key international supporter aside from Harold Covington was the German nazi Carsten Szczepanski. In the autumn of 2000, Szczepanski admitted to being a police informer, having been recruited by the internal security service [Verfassungsschutz] when on remand for the attempted murder of a Nigerian immigrant. During the C18 split [i.e. late 1996 onwards], Szczepanski, codenamed Piato, distributed pro-Sargent material amongst German nazis. He was later to form the National Revolutionary Cells [Nationalrevolutionären Zellen], a proto-terrorist group that openly advocated violence.” (p279, 2014 Milo Books edition.)
An
English language article on the WSWS website by Lena Sokoll (based on
Rolf Gössner's 2003 book about the use of informants and provocateurs by the Brandenburg intelligence service
Geheime Informanten: V-Leute des Verfassungsschutzes – Kriminelle im Dienst des Staates) fleshes things out a little more:
“...Szczepanski had already gained a reputation as a neo-Nazi at the beginning of the 1990s. He was part of the right-wing extremist skinhead milieu and had contact with the leadership of the National Front. He was also instrumental in establishing an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan in Germany.
“In 1992, police raided an apartment rented by Szczepanski and found four pipe bombs, explosive material and detonators. The police then undertook a preliminary inquiry on the suspicion that he was involved in founding a terrorist organisation. However, Szczepanski was never charged or sentenced for these crimes—indicating that he was at this point already being employed and receiving cover from the intelligence service.
“According to the Brandenburg intelligence service, it first began to work with Szczepanski in 1994, after he had begun a long prison sentence for attempting to murder a Nigerian, Steve Erenhi. Despite the gravity of his crime, Szczepanski was already a free man in 1997, and renewed his activities in the neo-fascist milieu as V-man ‘Piato.’”
More detail comes from a
2002 StateWatch article, which notes:
“Szczepanski had contact with Federal Crime Police Office (BKA) in the early 1990s and provided information on the German Ku-Klux-Klan during interrogations. He was released early from prison on the order of the VS [i.e. the regional agency, Verfassungsschutz] and employed by them for the next six years, earning around 70,000 DM (£23,500). It later became known that Szczepanski had a leading role with the [well-established neo-nazi party] NPD in Berlin-Brandenburg as well as with the Nationalrevolutionären Zellen (National Revolutionary Cells) and Blood & Honour, and that he spent those years building up far-right organisations in the region.”
It should also be noted that Szczepanski was at the time he was covertly working for the German secret state, he was publicly identified as a key figure in the neo-nazi networks (e.g., see this
1996 article from the ADL).
Meanwhile, I see that connections between NSU and Combat 18 have been made in some German quarters (eg
AntifaInfoblatt).
So a German state asset (Szczepanski) was used to align with British state assets (Charlie and/or Steve Sargent) in their feud with other British state assets (Will Browning and/or Darren Wells) at a time when the organisation subject to this dispute - itself widely suspected of having been a state-organised/supported honeytrap - was in the process of building international links, notably in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, and plotting and executing transnational terrorist plots, all whilst he engaged with (and informed upon) right-wing cadres who would subsequently go on to commit ten murders (and one attempted), more than a dozen bank robberies, and at least two bombings...
stupid evil crosses all frontiers
