"Fake refugee" German lieutenant story becomes a full fledged scandal for the German military

The initial reporting on the German officer who successfully registered as a Syrian refugee and then got caught in Austria trying to retrieve a hidden weapon was focused on how he did it. His extreme right wing attitude was mentioned briefly, and all of the big five papers the blogster reads meticulously pointed out that the German military intelligence agency (MAD) will conduct background investigations for new recruits prior to intake starting only in July 2017.

Not a single paper noted that the rank of the soldier as a First Lieutenant meant that he must have been in the military for at least four or five years by the time he was arrested in 2017. By that time, he would have undergone a detailed background check for a security clearance for access to classified information.

The blogster does not know whether the initial media reporting expressed partly successful damage control by the defense ministry or was just a sloppy.

For the next few days, reporting continued to focus on the failure of the asylum system. The blogster already described in January 2016 how easy it allegedly was to disappear as a fake refugee, even as a white German, as recounted in Thoughts on disappearing - by a German refugee center official.

Ironically, the lieutenant used that very strategy in December 2015.

As the extreme right-wing attitudes of the officer surfaced, German media went into the standard mode of discussion of extremist soldiers as a previously unknown bad apple. You know if from American police shootings. Sure, there are some bad apples, but the vast majority hero-blah-blah. Even conservative German media will acknowledge that the military can and does attract "problematic characters" but conservatives will hold the line at "bad apples".

The episode became a full crisis when it turned out that the officer had come to the attention of the chief of French military academy St. Cyr in 2014 with a master's thesis full of racist, xenophobic extremist content. He served with the combined French-German command, and some Germans attend the French academy.

This invalidated the "previously unknown bad apple" excuse and sent the ministry into crisis mode, prompting the country's first female defense minister to make a statement promising a full and transparent investigation and declaring her "overall" responsibility for the military.

This was a necessary move, as demonstrated by details on the army's handling of the 2014 master's thesis. "Master's" thesis is a sweet term here, it seems. According to Der Spiegel, the officer wrote of "white genocide", claimed that immigrants could never be part of the nation, that "immigration had already caused a complete exchange of the population in some cities", that massive immigration had laid the groundwork for the demise of Western society.

The files related to the incident give a disastrous impression of how the Germans dealt with it. The French school commandant noted that the thesis was rejected and that he would remove the student if he were French. The German officer in charge of the German contingent took a different approach.
He interviewed the student and noted that the student had been sloppy and stressed by the workload. According to the evaluating superior, the student did not hold extremist convictions. The offending thesis was withdrawn, and another one was written.

For people who don't see extremist militarism* or do not see it as a big problem, the case was then closed.

The blogster won't make big predictions, but given the defense minister's slick maneuvering and ability to survive, we may see a couple of officers take early retirement, followed by the time tested business as usual approach.
 
Below is a list of headline grabbing incidents from a reader comment in Die Zeit.

* German examples from a Zeit reader comment:

Hammelburg 1996 In den 90ern ließen Scheinerschießungen und Folterspiele im bayerischen Hammelburg die Öffentlichkeit aufschrecken. Die Soldaten bereiteten sich damals auf einen Einsatz in Bosnien vor. Fotos und Filme dokumentierten den Vorfall. Deutschland debattierte über die Frage, ob die Bundeswehr systematisch Anreize für Gewalt setzt.
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Coesfeld 2004 Die Folter-Exzesse aus der Kaserne Coesfeld werden publik. Schwarze Kapuzen, Stromstöße, Tritte, simulierte Folter in der Duschkabine. Einige Soldaten sollen daran zerbrochen sein. Die Ausbilder wurden im März 2008 zu Bewährungsstrafen verurteilt.
Zweibrücken 2006 Nach Medienberichten mussten sich in der Zweibrücker Niederauerbach-Kaserne neu ernannte Unteroffiziere nackt ausziehen und sich anschließend von Kameraden in perverser Weise traktieren lassen. Zu den Vorwürfen ermittelte die Staatsanwaltschaft.
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5/11
Afghanistan 2006 Die Bilder auf der Titelseite einer großen deutschen Boluevard-Zeitung schockierten die Öffentlichkeit: Deutsche Soldaten posierten in Afghanistan mit Totenschädeln, spießten sie einer Trophäe gleich auf die Spitze eines Kabelschneiders vorne vor dem Militärjeep auf oder hielten ihn gar obszön neben den entblößten Penis.
Rendsburg 2007 Video sorgt im Internet für Aufsehen. Es zeigt einen Ausbilder, der einen Rekruten beim Schießtraining mit rassistischen Sprüchen aufstachelt. Er solle sich vorstellen, auf Schwarze im New York erschießt.