On Brandt’s contact officers – and on the “Community of Conviction for the New Front“

This week saw above all the testimonies of three contact officers to “Thuringia Home Guard” (THS) and leader and secret service informer Tino Brandt. They had already been interviewed by the court before Brandt’s testimony, but had been called up to testify again – one reason being that some of them had been extremely unprepared for their testimony.

Not that their testimony yesterday and today showed them much better prepared: all three of them could or would not remember their talks with Brandt, not even after the presiding judge read out their memos summarizing them. So much for the way the service dealt with the information presented by its “top source”. At times it seemed like the secret service officials felt that their task was finished once they had typed up their notes of the meetings with Brandt.

Victims’s counsel requested that Kai Dalek be called to testify. In the 1990s, Dalek had built up the mailbox system “Thule net”. He was also a member of the “Gesinnungsgemeinschaft der Neuen Front“ (“Community of Conviction for the New Front“, GdnF) and as such was responsible for overseeing activities in Thuringia, which is why Brandt had told Dalek about the secret service’s interest in him. Dalek, who himself was already working for the Bavarian secret service at the time, told “his” service about the propensity to violence shown by the “Thuringia Home Guard” and about Brandt’s plans to build it up into a “military” organization akin to the historical SA. Brandt had tried to claim in his testimony that the THS had rejected violence.

But Dalek will also have to be asked about the relationship of the THS to the GdnF. The latter was formed by several militant Nazi cadres from Western Germany in the mid-1980s after several Nazi parties and organizations had been dissolved by the authorities. It was an informal, but strongly hierarchical organization of Nazi cadres aiming at organizing all leaders of the several Nazi parties and organizations all over Germany. By quickly reorganizing into new groups, they could guard against the results of administrative actions, which at the same time ensuring via the GdnF that all these groups worked towards the same goals. The GdnF openly propagated National Socialism as its goal and, as means to use that goal, both street terror after the SA model as well as targeted political murders. It was also the GdnF which opened itself up to skinhead culture and which, in the mid-1990s, worked to build up the “Blood & Honour” network both in Germany and internationally. Seeing that at least two of those most influential with regard to the THS, Brandt and Dalek, were either GdnF cadres or subservient to them, it seems quite possible that the NSU itself was also influenced and supported by that network. The GdnF at that time brought together a number of individuals who were both able, practically speaking, to organize and carry through murders and bombing attacks, and politically speaking, to lay down a concept of murders of migrants carried out without claiming responsibility.