Inside Germany’s Taxpayer Funded Neo-Nazi Networks
The trouble with the country’s far-right informant apparatus.
MAY 7, 2024
One overcast day in Berlin in May 2016, a conversation about informants threw my career down an eight-year-long detour.
It happened at a bar in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, known as a haven for artists and immigrants. The bar had wooden beer-garden tables and graffiti on its outer white walls. It was there that I met Volker Eick, a political scientist who studies Germany’s use of informants. At the time, Eick was speaking with journalists on behalf of a group of lawyers who represented the victims of Germany’s most sensational terror spree of the 21st century: From 2000 to 2011, a white supremacist group called the National Socialist Underground murdered and bombed immigrants and robbed banks.
Germany’s intelligence agencies had numerous far-right informants with ties to the group, Eick told me, and nonetheless failed to stop the NSU. “It never came to the mind of secret service officers that there might be a terrorist plight,” Eick said. That the murders and bombings were the work of white Germans, not Muslims or immigrant mafiosos, “was, from their perspective, unthinkable.”
Law enforcement agencies around the world maintain that informants are essential for preventing violent extremism and thwarting terrorist attacks. In 2022, Germany’s federal intelligence agency had a budget of nearly half a billion euros and employed more than 4,000 agents. The number of informants it and its sister agencies in each of Germany’s 16 federal states employ, however, is unknown. Far-right terrorism spiked Globally between 2016 and 2020 according to the 2023 Global Terrorism Index. Yet while informants are often crucial to foiling terrorist plots, or at least, getting convictions, they are sometimes misused.
By the time I met Eick in Germany, I was captivated by how Germany’s enormous informant apparatus missed — and in some cases, assisted — the NSU. I asked him to introduce me to sources who’d had a front-row seat to Germany’s epic 21st-century intelligence failure. Eight years, dozens of conversations and interviews, and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents later, my research would prove Eick right.
Germany’s “secret service believed they had those informants under their full control and that they were playing a game with them, like playing chess,” Eick had told me at the bar in Kreuzberg that afternoon. Federal agents believed informants were figures with whom they could play, but they “didn’t take into account that it could be just the other way around.”
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No nation in the world knows the danger of informants better than Germany. During the Holocaust, Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, recruited, paid or coerced German and Polish citizens to inform on their Jewish neighbors and friends. The Gestapo would then raid the Jews’ shops and homes and loot their possessions, sometimes rewarding informants with a portion of the bounty.
But these noble new agencies were staffed with nefarious men.
After Germany lost the war, East Germany set about constructing a new secret police force with extraordinary powers: the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. Like the Gestapo, the Stasi often compensated or coerced people into becoming informants, tasking them with ratting out everyone from common criminals to those who distributed contraband Western music or espoused democratic ideas — even neighbors, family and friends. At its height the Stasi employed some 90,000 agents and 189,000 informants, making it one of the largest informant networks the world had ever seen.
When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi fell with it, and former East Germany adopted the West German way: Each federal state would have its own intelligence agency, in addition to the federal one. They would be named Offices for the Protection of the Constitution, tasked with defending Germany against election interference plots and violent political extremism by its own citizens, as well as from foreign terrorist groups and espionage. Laws were passed to ensure that each of the agencies would work independently, to prevent them from becoming an all‑powerful Gestapo‑like authority. Unlike America’s FBI, Germany’s intelligence agencies were forbidden from making arrests — that remained the purview of police, and German law mandated strict separations between officers and agents.
But these noble new agencies were staffed with nefarious men. In West Germany in the 1950s, as many as 1 in 3 intelligence officers were former Nazis. At least 80 were former Gestapo agents. From the start, these agencies operated “on the edge of legality,” as the German historians Constantin Goschler and Michael Wala describe in their book Keine neue Gestapo (No new Gestapo). And just like the Gestapo and Stasi, Germany’s modern-day intelligence agencies would place their faith in informants.
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One of the intelligence agents tasked with overseeing these informants was a young man named Gordian Meyer‑Plath. Meyer‑Plath had studied far‑right extremism in universities from Bonn to Brighton by the time he arrived in 1994 at the newly revamped Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Brandenburg. The state, which surrounds Berlin, was swimming with skinheads. During his first weeks on the job, right‑wing extremists beat up 10 French tourists in Potsdam, attacked a home for asylum seekers and set fire to the building of a gay and lesbian organization.
Szczepanski’s bomb-making materials should have landed him in prison. Instead, prosecutors looked the other way, never charging him at all.
Meyer‑Plath soon discovered that his agency was woefully unprepared to prevent such attacks. Neo‑Nazis had begun using online chatrooms to coordinate their activities, and Meyer‑Plath’s office didn’t even have internet. Then, a few months into his tenure, in the summer of 1994, Meyer‑Plath got his first big break: a handwritten letter from an infamous far‑right extremist. The man had written the letter from his prison cell. His name was Carsten Szczepanski — a neo‑Nazi who had burned a cross on live television and published the violently racist magazine Feuerkreuz (“Fiery Cross”).
Brandenburg’s intelligence agents had been monitoring Szczepanski since the year he founded his Ku Klux Klan‑themed magazine. They quickly learned that he wasn’t just inciting his readers to violence but preparing to commit it himself. On Dec. 8, 1991, Brandenburg police had searched Szczepanski’s apartment and discovered a piece of wire with a small bulb soldered to it, and a piece of detonation cord with a fuse — both of which could have been used as ignition devices for a bomb. Officers also found chemicals and instructions for how to construct explosives. When police notified Brandenburg’s intelligence agency, agents began to monitor Szczepanski, suspecting that he might be plotting a far‑right terrorist attack. Szczepanski’s bomb-making materials should have landed him in prison. Instead, prosecutors looked the other way, never charging him at all.
Then, on May 9, 1992, Szczepanski and 16 other neo‑Nazis attacked a Nigerian immigrant — a former schoolteacher named Steve Erenhi — outside a club and attempted to light him on fire. Szczepanski led the mob in chants of “Ku Klux Klan!” and “white power!” Unsuccessful at burning Erenhi to death, they threw his burned and broken body into a lake. Erenhi would almost certainly have drowned had passersby not managed to pull him out. This time, prosecutors reacted with unusual gravity, possibly due to the amount of attention the attack received in the press. They charged Szczepanski with attempted murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison. On July 8, 1994, he wrote a letter from his cell to Brandenburg’s intelligence agency saying he wanted to talk. He offered to become a Vertrauensmann — a “trusted man,” an informant — in the far‑right scene.
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From Meyer‑Plath’s point of view, it didn’t get much better than this. Szczepanski’s offer came at a time when Brandenburg desperately needed not just eyes on the neo‑Nazi movement but ears within it — spies they could trust, and whom the skinheads did, too. Within Brandenburg’s far‑right groups, Szczepanski was regarded “as a hero, a martyr,” Meyer‑Plath told me when I interviewed him back in June 2016. Szczepanski was a man “who, in their eyes, had not just talked, but acted,” like he had that night against Erenhi. Once he earned that reputation, “large sections of the right‑wing extremist scene saw it as their duty to support him, to communicate with him and to keep him informed.”
Some of Meyer‑Plath’s colleagues weren’t so convinced. They worried that recruiting Szczepanski crossed a moral line. Meyer‑Plath knew Szczepanski “was a decisive, dangerous right‑wing extremist.” We can’t work together with someone like that, his colleagues warned. But given the wave of anti‑immigrant violence proliferating across the state, Meyer‑Plath reasoned that working with him might be worth the risk. And so he and his superiors approached the Ministry of Justice to ask permission to use Szczepanski as an undercover informant, and a judge agreed.
For Szczepanski to be useful, he’d have to keep in close contact with his friends in the far‑right scene, “to make it seem credible that he still considered himself part of it.” One opportunity for continuity came in the form of Szczepanski’s magazines. Meyer‑Plath’s agency helped Szczepanski publish one he called Der weisse Wolf (“The White Wolf”) from behind bars, delivering a computer to his prison cell and helping him disseminate copies. Just like that, Brandenburg’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution became the financer and publisher of a white supremacist magazine. Meyer‑Plath’s agency also gifted him chocolate and meats. Once, Meyer‑Plath gave Szczepanski a T‑shirt from the militant neo‑Nazi organization Combat 18. “Adolf Hitler fighting force,” the T‑shirt read. Despite being in prison for attempted murder, Szczepanski was living like a king.
[Read: Germany’s Crackdown on Civil Liberties]
And he was paid royally. For each piece of intelligence Szczepanski offered, Meyer‑Plath’s agency would pay him as much as 300 deutsche marks — about $185 at the time. Over the next four years, Meyer‑Plath and his colleagues would meet Szczepanski on 37 occasions, paying him between 50,000 and 80,000 in taxpayer deutsche marks, about $31,000 to $50,000. Years later, when the details of their arrangement surfaced, some in Germany would wonder who was using whom.
On at least one occasion, Szczepanski’s intelligence did prove useful. He tipped Meyer‑Plath off that the anticommunist band Proissenheads was selling CDs that contained lyrics violating Germany’s law against inciting hatred. The irony that Brandenburg’s intelligence agency was going after seditious music while actively helping publish and disseminate Szczepanski’s seditious magazine seemed lost on the agency. In any case, the tip led to a nationwide investigation in which authorities seized thousands of the band’s CDs later that year. It also fueled Meyer‑Plath’s confidence that Szczepanski was on his side. But because informants’ activities are kept secret from the public, it’s impossible to discern Szczepanski’s true value. There’s no way to know whether Szczepanski was hiding the biggest clues of all while feeding Meyer‑Plath only crumbs about bad music.
Four years into Szczepanski’s sentence, Meyer‑Plath’s agency received permission for him to leave prison to take on undercover assignments. Every two weeks, a chauffeur would pick him up from prison and drive him to a tram or a bus, which he’d ride to meet far‑right friends and attend neo‑Nazi meetings and concerts. In the morning they’d give Szczepanski a cellphone, then collect it again at night so agents could scour any text messages that had come in. If his friends called, agents listened in. Meyer‑Plath thought of Szczepanski’s outings as “minor relaxations” in his sentence. But Szczepanski was barely serving his prison sentence at all, and instead working five days a week in a neo‑Nazi shop in Saxony’s Ore Mountains.
While Szczepanski liaised with neo‑Nazis in Saxony, a young man in Thuringia was on a remarkably similar trajectory. Tino Brandt helped create, unite and radicalize the white supremacist community in Thuringia. He taught them how to organize protests and gave them money with which to do so. Taxpayer money, in fact.
Brandt was born in 1975 in the small town of Saalfeld, an hour southwest of the city of Jena. By the time he was 16 the chubby teenager with a boyish face thought Germany’s culture was under attack. He believed mainstream news media censored right‑wing ideas. After all, a man could be charged with sedition for publicly questioning how many Jews died in the Holocaust. As far as Brandt was concerned, free speech for right‑leaning Germans didn’t exist. At 17 he joined Thuringia’s chapter of Germany’s neo-Nazi political party, the NPD. He later rose through the ranks and became its vice president.
Brandt began organizing rallies across Thuringia and as far away as Munich. On Aug. 17, 1992, Brandt arranged for 2,000 neo‑Nazis to march through Rudolstadt in honor of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was sentenced to life in prison at the Nuremberg trials. It was the fifth anniversary of Hess’ suicide, at age 93, with an extension cable he found in a prison reading room. The marchers preferred to believe in a conspiracy that Hess had been murdered. They chanted that Hess was a “martyr for Germany.” Seconds later, they shifted seamlessly to another chant: “Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus!” — “Germany for the Germans. Foreigners out!” To the white supremacists who marched that day, the connection between the two chants was clear: If Hess’ life’s work had been to rid Germany of Jews, theirs was to rid it of immigrants.
White supremacy has always taken aim at whichever out-group is most expedient. Fifty years after the Holocaust, Jews in Germany were few and far between, but immigrants were easier to spot. As politicians scapegoated them or used them for political capital, as newspapers printed front‑page stories about asylum seekers burdening Germany’s immigration system, foreigners were at the forefront of these white men’s minds.
On previous anniversaries of Hess’ death, just a few hundred admirers had gathered to pay homage, usually in the small town of Wunsiedel, Bavaria, where Hess was buried. This time authorities were shocked that thousands of neo‑Nazis had appeared without them catching wind of it in advance. And this wasn’t in some cemetery in the sticks — it was in the town of Rudolstadt.
But Brandt wasn’t entirely what he seemed. By the mid-1990s, the Thuringian Nazi mastermind had become a government spy.
After the rally, antifa activists outed Brandt as the organizer and published his address. Brandt filed a defamation lawsuit against them and won. He used some of the money he received in damages to establish a group that grew into a statewide network of neo‑Nazis, Thuringia Homeland Protection, or THS. Brandt began holding Wednesday night meetings at a small bar just 200 meters from his home in Saalfeld. There, Thuringia’s fascists would play cards, throw darts, shoot pool and debate politics. The hangouts grew from 10 or 12 to as many as 80. On Fridays, Brandt organized legal trainings in which he would coach THS members how to evade the police. These seminars were part of Brandt’s plans to prepare for what many white supremacists referred to as “Day X”: the day when white people would reclaim global order, as they did in the American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries.
For his day job, Brandt worked at a publishing house called Nation Europa, disseminating far‑right books. Each month or two, he would organize a “worldview” training, where Nation Europa authors would lecture about right‑wing political theory. As many as 70 people would attend. As the alcohol flowed, Brandt would walk from table to table to speak with his comrades and plan the “actions” they’d undertake on the weekends. Sometimes they would organize right‑wing concerts or demonstrations. Other times they’d show up at leftist demonstrations or music festivals to break bones. Later he would phone his henchmen and remind them to “clean up” their cars: to empty out all the baseball bats, knives, daggers, airsoft guns, neo‑Nazi propaganda and other incriminating materials in case they got stopped by police.
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But Brandt wasn’t entirely what he seemed. By the mid-1990s, the Thuringian Nazi mastermind had become a government spy.
Two years after antifa activists exposed Brandt as one of the organizers of the Hess rally, two strangers approached him and asked if he would be willing to fill out a questionnaire about the demonstration. Although the men were dressed in typical neo‑Nazi garb, Brandt could tell they weren’t part of the scene. Still, he obliged, writing that the rally was to allow the “free‑minded youth” of Thuringia to express their unpopular views. A few weeks later, Brandt was walking down the street when the two men reappeared.
“Tino, we’d like you to have a talk with us,” one of them said. By this time Brandt suspected they were working for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and when he asked, they confirmed it. They wanted Brandt to become an undercover informant — to infiltrate the far‑right scene he had spent the last two years building. They handed Brandt 200 deutsche marks, about $135 at the time, to help him think it over. He didn’t think it over for long.
Why did Brandt say yes? One incentive was surely the money. Another was probably power: He might have wanted to use his position to inform on his rivals and protect himself from prosecution for his acts. It’s also possible that Brandt fashioned himself a double agent from the start, planning to take the taxpayer money and use it to fund the very far‑right activities the agents were tasked with monitoring — for this is what he would go on to do.
[Read: Explosions in the Forest of Unterlüß]
The first time Brandt met his handlers, they assured him he wouldn’t have to rat out his far‑right friends. Rather, they just wanted to know who was attending his rallies. An intelligence agent named Norbert Wiessner began meeting with Brandt for half an hour each Thursday at the Greek in Coburg, a restaurant not far from the publishing house where Brandt worked. Sometimes, Wiessner would ask Brandt to turn his cellphone volume up so that he could eavesdrop on Brandt’s calls with comrades, much like Meyer‑Plath did with Szczepanski. Brandt would talk, eat, sign some receipts using his code name, Otto (or sometimes Oskar) — and Wiessner would hand Brandt the cash.
Brandt’s pay was contingent upon the value his handlers assigned to the information he provided — usually between 250 and 300 deutsche marks each week, nearly $200 at the time. This pay scheme gave Brandt an obvious incentive to lie: The more he told the agents, the more money he made. Brandt was a “junkie for whom money was a very good means of exerting pressure,” one of his handlers would say. And yet agents never seemed to exert that pressure or get anything useful in return.
But to his minders, Brandt’s subversions of justice were a small price to pay for having such a well‑placed informant.
By taking their money but withholding information about criminal activities, Brandt imagined that he was the one in control. And maybe he was. Over the next seven years he amassed a small fortune, and he used his informant money to buy cars, which were always in need of costly repairs. His handlers would front the bills. Brandt also bought heaps of far‑right books. But most of the money went straight into building an environment in which some of Thuringia’s white supremacists could radicalize into violent extremists — the very thing the intelligence agency was supposed to stop. Putting on concerts wasn’t cheap. Cars, gas, hotel rooms, telephone bills, flyers, and stickers to hand out at events — Brandt would present his handlers with fistfuls of receipts, which agents would reimburse. One of Wiessner’s colleagues described Brandt as a “technology freak without end,” always eager to acquire the latest cellphones, PCs and cameras. His minders provided him with these, courtesy of the German taxpayer. One particular technology caught agents’ eyes: an early internet mailbox system that Thuringia’s white supremacists used to communicate anonymously and undetected.
Prior to the internet, if a white supremacist wanted to know what others were up to, he might call the national neo‑Nazi hotline. The same way that pre-smartphone Americans dialed the National Weather Service for the forecast, German far‑right extremists could dial in and listen to a message about upcoming demonstrations. Then, in the mid‑1990s, some neo‑Nazis in Thuringia began using a more secretive system, Thule‑Netz, which contained an encryption technology that kept its users anonymous and their messages secure.
Now that Brandt was a mole, he granted his handlers access. And yet they failed to gain any useful intelligence. It’s possible that Thule‑Netz’s users weren’t plotting anything illegal, or even that Brandt warned them not to. But it’s also possible the encryption prevented agents or even Brandt himself from ascertaining their identities. Despite their absolute faith in Brandt, none of his handlers seemed to be able to pinpoint what exactly he was contributing toward their constitutionally mandated mission of protecting Germany from extremist threats. If anything, he was undermining it: He even used taxpayer money to free neo‑Nazis from punishment for their crimes, paying off their court‑imposed and municipal fines. But to his minders, Brandt’s subversions of justice were a small price to pay for having such a well‑placed informant.
Time and again, prosecutors declined to charge Brandt for his acts or acts that authorities believed were orchestrated with his help. It seemed that he was untouchable, that his minders would do anything, even subvert justice, to protect their mole. His status as an informant seemed to grant him impunity.
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Brandt worked as an informant until 2001, when a Thuringian intelligence officer leaked his identity to the press. When the far‑right men and women he had helped radicalize learned he was a snitch, they abandoned him. The neo‑Nazi network that Brandt had so carefully created disowned him — or so he claimed — and he lost his job at the far‑right publishing house.
But it wasn’t Brandt’s unconstitutional activities, or the violence he allegedly directed his network of neo-Nazis to commit, that did him in. At least 66 times between 2011 and 2014, Brandt trafficked children to adults for the purposes of sex, and sexually abused young boys himself. In 2014, Brandt pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a lenient five and a half years in prison. Some think Brandt might never have felt emboldened to act upon his pedophilic impulses if Thuringia’s intelligence agency hadn’t offered him that impunity. If there was one lesson Thuringia’s intelligence agency had taught Brandt, it was that he could get away with anything.
As for Szczepanski, a judge eventually ruled that he was eligible for early release from prison, even though he had served less than half of his sentence. Later, the German news magazine Der Spiegel discovered that Szczepanski hadn’t even paid the 50,000 deutsche marks in damages he owed to Erenhi, the Nigerian man he’d nearly killed. Instead, Brandenburg’s intelligence agency had fronted the bill, using taxpayer money to cover Szczepanski’s tab for attempted murder. The would‑be murderer turned well‑paid informant was free. It wasn’t until two years after Szczepanski got out of prison — when intelligence agents discovered that he was planning to bomb a group of antifascists — that they finally decommissioned their mole.
Later, Meyer‑Plath admitted that the way he had recruited and worked with Szczepanski in the 1990s would never fly today. In the 2010s, Germany’s intelligence agencies passed new “best practices” directives governing how agents should go about choosing and recruiting informants. But Meyer‑Plath fiercely defended his and his agency’s actions at the time. Germany needed informants like Szczepanski in the rank and file of far‑right groups to protect the public from far-right attacks, he told me.
Even in the best-case scenario, when offered the right incentives, informants can reveal only as much as they know. And even with the best informants in the world, “the perfect terrorist — the perfect political extremist and hate crime committer — we won’t catch him,” Meyer-Plath told me. “We will only catch the ones that make mistakes.
Today, Western intelligence agencies remain addicted to informants. No matter that they are inherently untrustworthy and, as Brandt’s case illustrates, can even undermine their very cause. In the wake of its failure to prevent the NSU, Thuringia announced that its intelligence agency would no longer use informants except in terrorism cases. But the Bundestag passed no such federal legislation, and today in Germany these agencies still have discretion over when to share their intelligence with police, or whether to tell police when their informants commit crimes.
This article is excerpted from Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants