Informer Tino Brandt: the secret service was not interested in Nazi crimes.

The first two witnesses today were a police officer and a judge from Zwickau who had interviewed the old lady who only by chance was rescued from the burning house in the Frühlingsstraße.

The Zschäpe defense made every effort to try to present the interview conducted by the judge in a bad light – despite the fact that that interview only showed the old lady to be incompetent to testify. They also tried to get the police officer to confirm that Zschäpe had rung the old lady’s doorbell before fleeing the scene. Legally speaking, however, this would only confirm Zschäpe knowledge that the old lady was at home and that Zschäpe thus acted in the knowledge that her neighbor could die in the fire. In any event, ringing the doorbell would not be enough to establish “abandonment of an attempt” and free Zschäpe from criminal responsibility.
The testimony of the next witness, Tino Brandt, will continue tomorrow, as planned. We will report on the entirety of his testimony then. Two interesting statements by Brandt, long-time informer for the domestic secret service in Thuringia, are worth reporting already since they show how that service works when it deals with Nazis.

Asked about his “truthfulness as a source”, Brandt stated that he never made any reports dealing with crimes by members of the Nazi scene. The secret service had simply not been interested in clearing up “bar fights” and had not asked about criminal acts.
Brandt also reported that in the early 1990s, he had reported to a “leading comrade” in the militant neo-Nazi scene, Kai Dalek who is now known to have been an informer for the Bavarian domestic secret service. Brandt had, inter alia, told Dalek about the interest of the Thuringia service in recruiting him as an informer. Dalek was a member of the German-wide network „Gesinnungsgemeinschaft der neuen Front“ (GdnF, „Community of Conviction for the New Front“), led by Christian Worch from Hamburg, and within that community was responsible for „leading” the scene in Thuringia.

Over more than a decade the secret service in Germany has claimed that there existed no organization of the militant Nazi scene coordinating the activity of that scene in the background. Antifascist groups had pointed out time and again the importance of the GdnF. Brandt’s testimony today again showed that they were right to do so – even groups like “Blood & Honour” were influenced and steered by this network.