Et would not have been wrong if Otto Schily had been in the studio of “Anne Will” when the question was discussed there on Sunday evening about how dangerous the group of Reichswutbürger who were arrested on Wednesday actually was. In an interview, the former Federal Minister of the Interior spoke of a “rather bizarre gang of crackpots” who, in his opinion, posed no real threat to state and society. What the public has learned since then about some of the characters has served to confirm Schily’s assessment – at the top is the figure of a nobleman in corduroy trousers, whose name sounds slightly like an operetta, at least to bourgeois ears.
But as it was, all the politicians among Will’s guests agreed that it was a “danger that should be taken very seriously” (Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, SPD, and NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul, CDU, and Janine Wissler, Die Linke ) acted. Reul said that there were people who knew how to put such plans into action. And Faeser referred to the number of emergency services (3000) and the executed arrest warrants (25).
Now, of course, the minister knows exactly that the numbers only show what effort the Federal Public Prosecutor General and his colleagues in the federal states considered appropriate. It will probably never be clear whether they did it for purely objective reasons or whether they saw the opportunity to finally demonstrate the state’s ability to defend itself in a particularly impressive way. In any case, the number of insiders among those who, from the point of view of the investigators, should not have been inside was alarmingly high.
A big PR campaign?
Among them was Florian Flade, a member of the research team at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR, who had completed background reports the moment the raids began. This circumstance has led to critical questions: Were individual media deliberately used by politicians in order to stage their own actions as effectively as possible? Were emergency officers endangered by the piercings because violent suspects could have gotten wind of it?
With “Anne Will”, Flade reacted professionally to such accusations. He confirmed they knew what was coming two weeks before access. However, his team did not receive the information from Ms. Faeser during an invitation to coffee, but through long-term contacts with the security authorities. This information was handled responsibly, which is also shown by the fact that all the suspects were found on Wednesday. Faeser also pointed out this fact. Like Reul, however, she seemed very defensive when Will asked how the leaked information happened and what the consequences would be. The suspicion that “the raid looks like a PR campaign”, formulated by the left-wing member of the Bundestag Martina Renner, is not dispelled.
Flade took credit for not exaggerating his scoop by making the conspiracy bigger than it was. Further investigations would have to show how concrete the danger was. His view of the composition of the military arm of the would-be subversives is also differentiated: active soldiers and police officers are hardly represented, rather retired security forces have dominated. However, there is a pattern among these, namely membership in special forces. Flade demanded that more attention be paid to attitude and historical education when recruiting them, but at the same time one could hear a great deal of skepticism in his words in view of the question of how this could succeed in view of the lack of applicants.
