User:Hybay/Nordkreuz

Nordkreuz (German for north cross) was the name of a group of at least 54 extreme right-wing German preppers who, after the collapse of the state, were allegedly preparing for the mass killing of refugee aid workers considered to be political opponents. The group, consisting of members of the Bundeswehr, in particular the KSK and the Reservist Association, the LKA, SEK and civilians, formed in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in early 2016 and became known in August 2017. Together with Südkreuz, Westkreuz and similar groups, it was part of the extreme right-wing Hannibal network that was discovered in 2018. According to the founder Marko G. in August 2020, the network still exists.

Discovery
During the terror investigations against Bundeswehr soldiers from 2017 onwards, which were primarily directed against the extreme right-wing first lieutenant of the Bundeswehr Franco A. (28) and his contacts, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) also came across Horst S., a former air force officer and major in the reserve. During his interrogation by the State Security Service on 13 July 2017, he testified that a "Nordkreuz" group consisting mainly of former elite soldiers was preparing specifically for the breakdown of public order on a "Day X". Motivated by his "hate against leftists" at least one member of the group had collected names, addresses and photographs of target persons and refugees who "had to go". He had seen the folder with these data and an arms depot. At a meeting of four members of the group, the owner of the weapons hideout said that in the event of a crisis, people "who benefit from the refugee policy" should be "collected and taken to a place where they should be killed". He judged this to be mere mind games of "concerned citizens". Only two members of the group had represented this "more radical direction".

Horst S. is said to have voluntarily offered himself to the BKA as a whistleblower. As early as June 2017, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the MAD had questioned him, among other things about his book orders at the right-wing extremist Thule Seminar. Why he caught their attention is unknown. He denied any contact with Franco A. and claimed that he had bought books about the Waffen-SS out of sheer interest in his grandfather's biography. Using the contact details of his cell phone, investigators came across six Mecklenburg preppers who were exchanging information in their chat group Nordkreuz about an expected collapse of the state and wanted to use it to kill leftist opponents. The Attorney General ordered a simultaneous house search of these six persons. On 28 August 2017, the Federal Police confiscated hard disks and data carriers. Two of the six persons were arrested and accused of having prepared "serious acts of violence that endanger the state" (terrorist attacks). The others were initially questioned as witnesses. On 4 September 2017, the Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag learned for the first time about the Nordkreuz group and the contents of its communications.

Members
Founder and head of the group as well as administrator of its chat was the long-time LKA official Marko G. from Banzkow, who was a member of a special task force (SEK). He used to be a scout and paratrooper, and as a SEK member he is a precision marksman trained in hostage rescue. He already attracted attention in the German Armed Forces with an "interest in recent military history" of the Nazi era. In 1993 he was with a unit in a Brandenburg tank battalion from which a Uzi submachine gun disappeared. It was found in the apartment of Marko G. in 2019. During his training as a senior police officer, he brought books about the Wehrmacht and the SS to work and wore T-shirts with extreme right-wing slogans. In 2009, at least two police officers reported his behaviour orally and in writing to superiors, who did nothing. The note to the head of the LKA stated that G. was conspicuously interested in National Socialism and especially in the SS, "without showing the necessary distance".

At the end of 2015 Marko G. joined the already existing chat group Nord and a few weeks later created the other encrypted chat groups Nord Com, Nordkreuz and Vier gewinnt (german for Connect Four) on Telegram. He administered these chat groups under the pseudonym "Hombre", organized meetings, collected money for their depots and assigned them tasks. In November 2016, when his group was already known to investigators, he sent a video of a nutcracker moving his right arm up and saying "Sieg Heil" to a trainer at the private shooting range for special forces in Güstrow. In January 2017 the shooting trainer sent him rules for "keeping the German race clean" from 1938. On 20 April 2017, the "Führergeburtstag", Marko G. sent him a picture of Adolf Hitler with the inscription "Happy Birthday". One of the pictures sent by G. in the Nordkreuz-Chat showed soldiers aiming weapons at a person lying on the ground. The caption read "asylum application rejected". G. called the acting Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas "scum".

The two accused by the Attorney General are the lawyer Jan Hendrik H. from Rostock and the Chief Inspector Haik J. from Grabow. Jan Hendrik H. was a member of the FDP in the Rostock parliament and resigned in 2015, but kept his mandate. In 2017, he was deputy chairman of the "Independent Citizens for Rostock" (UFR – Unabhängige Bürger für Rostock), which provided Rostock's mayor until 2019. Haik J. worked at the Ludwigslust Police Inspectorate. Among other things he is accused of having used his service computer to research personal data of left-wing political opponents.

Further members are the German Army Major Horst S. from Krakow am See (until March 2017 Vice Chief of the Reserve Association of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) and the Master Craftsman Axel M. from Crivitz. The approximately 30 male members, sometimes including women and children, met at his place. Most members live in villages between Schwerin, Hagenow and Ludwigslust. At least two of them (Marko G. and Haik J.) are members of the party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Almost all of them are reservists of the German Armed Forces in the district association of the Laage airbase. Jan Hendrik H. stated that he had been a combat swimmer with the NVA.

After the raid, Marko G. stated that the group was made up of bankers, doctors, sportsmen, technicians, engineers, policemen and self-employed craftsmen. According to the BfV, most of the members came from the environment of the German Armed Forces and the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern police, including several former SEK members. They all have access to weapons, ammunition and are skilled shooters.

Frank T., the owner of the shooting range and shooting trainer of the company Baltic Shooters in Güstrow, was a member of Nordkreuz until 2017. Marko G. and the coach with whom he exchanged right-wing extremist chat messages were employed by Frank T. He is a multiple German champion with the short weapon and trains special forces from Germany and abroad, including special task forces, riot police, GSG 9 teams of the federal police, Einsatzkommando Cobra from Austria, SWAT teams from the USA and soldiers from Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK). Its annual three-day "Special Forces Workshop" is attended by professional marksmen of the security agencies and is sponsored by major defence companies. Until 2018, the State Office of Criminal Investigation, where Marko G. worked, was a co-organizer. Through this and through course participants from the police, Frank T.'s company gained a precise insight into police internal affairs. Other Nordkreuz members bought weapons and ammunition from him and took part in his training courses. Patron and frequent visitor of the annual meetings was Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's Minister of the Interior, Lorenz Caffier (CDU). His state interior ministry continued the cooperation with T.'s company for another two years until summer 2019.

Objectives
According to the Attorney General in August 2017, at least some members of the group were preparing for the collapse of the social and state order on a "Day X". They believed that the governments' refugee policies would impoverish private and public budgets, and that attacks and other crimes would increase. They saw the impending crisis as an opportunity to "arrest and kill with their weapons representatives of the political left spectrum". They exchanged views on this and made corresponding preparations.

Axel M. cited the Austrian Walter K. Eichelburg, an author of right-wing extremist conspiracy theories, as a source of ideas. Eichelburg claims that Muslims were preparing for an uprising in the near future ("Musel Revolt") and would then conquer the cities. Vigilance committees would have to start the "reconquest" from the countryside. Blood would "flow without end". Muslims had to be crucified or staked, as well as some "left-green poisoned" (linksgrünversiffte) politicians and bureaucrats, so that everyone could see who the enemies were and "what would happen to them if they did not surrender voluntarily".

Storage depots and bunkers
The preppers communicated via the encrypted messenger service Telegram. According to Axel M., they expect climate catastrophes, power cuts, a "wave of refugees" of Muslim migrants and a bank crash. Therefore, each member set up an "iron reserve" for "Day X" consisting of canned food, emergency generators, weapons and ammunition. Some would have built bunkers under their houses, others would have deposited only dried fruit and water. According to investigative documents, members of the group had set up depots with fuel, food and ammunition. Each member paid about 600 euros into a common treasury.

Weapons and ammunition
All Nordkreuz members legally possessed weapons as hunters or sport shooters, and together they went to shooting practice in Güstrow, to the police shooting range in Plate near Schwerin or to the Schwerin-Hagenow shooting range under the roof of the Reserve Association of the German Armed Forces. There they regularly met the former Major of the German Armed Forces Horst S., who had their mobile phone data.

The operator of the shooting range near Rostock sold weapons to the members. An instructor at the Bundeswehr airbase in Laage invited them to the security area after duty, where they were allowed to fly the Eurofighter in a flight simulator. The accused lawyer Jan Hendrik H. is said to have organised a shooting competition at birthday parties behind his house and to have named a challenge cup as a prize after Mehmet Turgut from Rostock, the fifth of nine murder victims in the NSU Ceska murder series.

In September 2017, the police found both legal and illegal weapons in the possession of Marko G., the founder of Nordkreuz. Thereupon, the Schwerin public prosecutor's office investigated him for violations of the War Weapons Control Act and the Weapons Act. It turned out that since at least April 2012, approximately 10,000 cartridges of ammunition had been stolen from the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Criminal Police Office and passed on to Marko G. and the Nordkreuz group. Three former SEK officers were suspected of the theft and passing on the ammunition. A seven-man LKA special commission and police departments of other states investigated their own colleagues for months and were sealed off in order to prevent any leakage from the authorities. On 12 June 2019, the Schwerin public prosecutor's office arrested the four SEK officials for violations of the War Weapons Control Act and the Arms Act, as well as for fraud. The investigators searched their apartments and offices in Güstrow, Waldeck, Banzkow and the LKA in Rampe near Schwerin.

During the second search in June 2019, investigators found other weapons in Marko G.'s home and that of his parents-in-law, including the Uzi, which had been stolen from Bundeswehr stocks, an illegal silencer, sporting guns, two Glock and Ruger pistols, stun grenades, gunpowder, telescopic batons and a Winchester rifle that had been put out to tender. In both raids they found a total of about 55,000 rounds of ammunition. The majority of the ammunition came from police stocks of seven states, the federal police, the Bundeswehr and customs. How it got to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is still unclear and was not pursued in the later criminal proceedings against Marko G.

Some of the cartridges found at Marko G. had been delivered to the company Baltic Shooters or to Frank T., others to the LKA, the police administration or the SEK Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which had been training on that shooting range for years. Marko G. may have stolen this ammunition on the shooting range or received it from someone there. He may also have had accomplices send him ammunition packages intended for the Federal and State Police or handed them over in Güstrow. Units of almost all addressees of the found ammunition were temporarily in Güstrow. Some ammunition manufacturers brought cartridges to the annual workshop themselves. According to witnesses, these were lying around openly, the consumption had not been documented and controlled. In contrast, the Ministry of the Interior, when asked, declared that the consumption had been recorded on site. The LKA had not carried out checks on persons or luggage. Whether and which authorities subjected Frank T. and his employees to a security check before they received permission for the trainings remained unanswered. An employee of the district, who had issued Marko G. weapons possession cards, was in turn a member of the reservist association, from which many Nordkreuz members came. He later testified that Marko G. had been registered with the district as a weapons expert. He confiscated his weapons and ammunition at the first search, but allowed him to give his legal weapons and cartridges to an arms dealer of his choice. G. chose Frank T.; what he received and did with it remained unclear. He is also said to have used stolen ammunition from G.'s possession, thus thwarting the clarification of its origin. According to experts, used and spent ammunition is not checked by the SEKs in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, unlike the patrol police. The large amount of ammunition diverted for Nordkreuz shows this deplorable state of affairs. However, during shooting training of special units, larger amounts of ammunition are often fired, making it almost impossible to record each individual cartridge.

In the criminal proceedings against Marko G., it became known that the Uzi submachine gun had been stolen from the German Armed Forces in 1993 when he was being trained there. According to media research, it had been stolen from a broken tank at the military training area Lehnin near Potsdam. 1400 of 55,300 cartridges found on him were subject to the War Weapons Control Act and could only be sold to police authorities and the military.

Marko G. was temporarily seconded to the Rostock water police. In November 2019, investigators found in his chat messages right-wing extremist statements of the water police officer Sven J. from Rostock. As a result, disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him and his apartment was searched. Illegal bullets, weapons and Nazi devotional objects were found there. Whether Sven J. was a member of Nordkreuz is not clear. The public prosecutor's office in Schwerin did not see any sufficient suspicion and left the proceedings to the public prosecutor's office in Rostock. The latter did not learn of Sven J.'s contacts with Marko G. until 2020 through press inquiries and explained that chat messages had not been relevant to the investigations so far. Sven J. has been deployed nine times on police missions abroad since 2010, even when Marko G. was already under investigation. In early 2018, Sven J. participated in the Frontex mission "Poseidon" against "illegal migration" and smugglers for four weeks on the island of Samos. According to information from the interior committee of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania his right-wing extremist attitude was noticed too late.

Five special units from Switzerland also took part in the annual workshops at the Bockhorst shooting range in Güstrow from 2009 to 2019. The companies RUAG and B&T presented their weapons there and provided practice ammunition. In the trial against Marko G., it turned out that more than 4,000 cartridges of the ammunition found on him came from RUAG, which had sent 1750 directly to Frank T. Whether this man or third parties passed them on or whether Marko G. or others stole them for Nordkreuz is not clear. RUAG did not give any details of its customers and denied having any shortages of the ammunition given out after the shooting exercises. The five special units denied any knowledge of Frank T.'s contacts with Nordkreuz and stressed that their participation in its workshops was covered by the Swiss-German police agreement. In 2016, the Zurich police unit Skorpion had offered its own workshops in Güstrow; in 2017, Frank T. had attended them in Zurich. The Zurich City Police did not explain the purpose of these contacts. Frank T. refused to provide information on press inquiries. As a temporary Nordkreuz member, he had advised Marko G.: "The better the communication, the easier it is to organize and collect among each other on day X. But until then, it is important for each of us to keep a low profile. As a witness in the trial against Marko G. he denied any knowledge of the extreme right-wing motives and plans of the group.

Enemies lists
According to initial reports, Jan Hendrik H. kept a list of more than 5000 names and addresses of alleged opponents in his lawyer's office, including public officials, journalists and about one hundred politicians, mostly from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. He took the names from public sources and kept the list without indications of an intent to kill. Haik J. is said to have spied on report data of political opponents via his service computer. In the confiscated data of the Nordkreuz members, the investigators later found a total of about 25,000 names and addresses of persons listed as enemies. This was announced by the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection at the end of July 2018.

Enemy lists have long been commonplace in the extreme right-wing spectrum in Germany. The Nordkreuz list is the most comprehensive list of this kind to date. It contains 24,522 names and addresses of left-wing activists, punks, politicians and well-known artists from all over Germany. This data comes from a 2015 hacked customer database of the alternative Duisburg online mail order company Impact Mailorder with about 40,000 names of customers and business partners, which circulated a few months later in modified form as the so-called "antifa-list" on right-wing extremist sites.

On 14 July 2017, Heiner Merz, member of the AfD state parliament, distributed the hacked 25,000 or so names, addresses and e-mail addresses of alleged antifa persons as e-mail attachments. He called on AfD members to "store, distribute and use" the list, namely to search for persons from their local environment, to make them known locally and to denounce them to their employers: "There are few limits to the imagination" After the same data appeared at Nordkreuz, Merz claimed that he had received the list from an antifa drop-out and was "mistaken". The terror group Revolution Chemnitz also had access to the list circulating in the right-wing extremist scene.

In a second raid in April 2018, investigators found parts of the 2015 hacked customer file on electronic data carriers of Nordkreuz members. According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, these wanted to use the hacker list to specify details of possible targets. While some data carriers contained several tens of thousands of data records from the hacked customer file, according to BKA information, other information was individually compiled from publicly accessible newspaper articles, recordings or excerpts from websites. According to police records confirmed by investigators, interrogated Nordkreuz members such as Horst S. testified that they had used the lists to find "left-wing personalities" in order to "liquidate them in the event of conflict". In addition, Jan Hendrik H. was planning to issue to his comrades from "Day X" onwards curfew passes with stamps on headbows of the German Armed Forces, so that they would reach the "operational areas" for the planned killings more quickly.

The accused denied an intention to kill. According to investigators, however, they had prepared for "Day X" with "enormous intensity" by collecting the 25,000 names and addresses with the help of police service computers. Most of the people on the list were from the regional environment of the "Prepper", especially local politicians from SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens, Die Linke and CDU, who had shown themselves to be "refugee friends" and had done refugee work. Each member of the group had systematically searched villages and communities in their surroundings for possible targets, especially in Wismar, Ludwigslust, Schwerin as well as the region around Perleberg and Pritzwalk in the north of Brandenburg. In addition, the Nordkreuzpreppers collected personal data from all over Germany, also there mainly from left-wingers and those who had spoken positively about refugees and asylum seekers.

Further personal files were found in a yellow file folder and an envelope that the investigators had confiscated from Jan Hendrik H. and Haik J. during their raids in 2017/18. They contained photographs and detailed information, also about contact persons. Behind 29 names, the Rostock lawyer had handwritten additions about name changes, birth names and dates, as well as new registration addresses. The 29 persons included members of the state parliament of the Left Party, several city council members of Rostock, and expert witnesses who had been invited by city council committees of which H. was a member. They are involved in a Rostock citizens' alliance against the right or organize the commemoration of the Rostock NSU murder victim Mehmet Turgut. According to their information, not all of them knew Jan Hendrik H. personally. His records also contained telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and newspaper articles on the refugee crisis of 2015, but ended in 2016. Starting on 28 June 2019, BKA investigators presented the 29 persons listed with two files with a total of 500 pages and asked them about the origin of the information contained in them. Several of the interviewees expressed their surprise that the LKA had not informed them about this in a timely manner, but that the BKA had informed them two years later. According to published research from July 2019, the lists contain persons from 7963 places in Germany and abroad.

Some of these witnesses had received an anonymous death threat in 2015 in the form of a letter and had therefore received temporary police protection. At the time, the State Security Service had prepared a floor plan of the apartment of one of the victims. The sketch was found among the accused Nordkreuzler. Investigators suspect that the criminal police officer Haik J. used his access to the police computer to research such details. Journalists suspect that he may have been involved in the 2015 investigation or that the State Security Service did not protect confidential data.

In Baden-Württemberg, in addition to 100 people from Stuttgart, a total of around 200 people from Böblingen, Esslingen am Neckar, Ludwigsburg, Göppingen and the Rems-Murr district are affected. Their addresses also come from the 2015 hacked customer file.

It is as yet unclear how many lists of what size and origin were found in total among the accused and witnesses. It is clear, however, that the data found is not only that list which became public as early as 2015 as the customer database. Rather, the Nordkreuz members are said to have carried out intensive research of their own into the personal data of their victims. Contradictory are also the statements of the federal government and state governments on the extent of the lists and references to the respective states.

Killing plans
At the beginning of 2017, members of Nordkreuz discussed near Schwerin where they could intern their political opponents on "Day X", talked about warehouses as well as execution, and asked the company commander of the reservists whether, in an "emergency" to transport people away, it would not be possible to organize trucks of the German Federal Armed Forces and thus overcome possible road checks.

Two former paratroopers as well as Haik J. and Marko G. exchanged right-wing extremist ideas in early 2017 in their own telegram chat group called "Vier gewinnt" (Four Wins) according to the German government. According to BKA information (July 2019), they called refugees "invaders", against whom one would have to use force of arms if necessary.

Nordkreuz wanted to order 200 body bags and burnt lime. Burnt lime can make corpses unrecognisable more quickly and accelerate their decomposition in mass graves. The intention to order was based on a three-page handwritten list with order addresses for these materials, contacts and housing relations. The BfV handed over the document to the Bundestag in June 2019. The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office requested extended surveillance measures against the group because of the find.

Networking
Nordkreuz was part of a network of comparable prepper and chat groups preparing for an armed coup on a "Day X". The administrator of the network under the alias "Hannibal" was Bundeswehr soldier André S., a former member of the Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK). After leaving the KSK, he was an "informer" for right-wing extremist tendencies in the Bundeswehr for the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD). On 13 September 2017, he learned from a MAD employee that the Federal Prosecutor General was investigating the Nordkreuz group. Afterwards André S. probably warned other preppers of further imminent searches and interrogations. As a result of the subsequent criminal proceedings against his MAD informant, he was interrogated. In the process, his role as network administrator and co-founder of the ##### Uniter association was revealed. His network included other chat groups, including "Nord" (north), "Nord.Com", "Ost" (east), "West" and "Süd" (south), organized along the geographical division of the military district administration, as well as groups in Austria and Switzerland. After Franco A. was arrested and charged as a suspected right-wing terrorist, "Hannibal" had all chats of these groups deleted.

It is unclear whether André S. was informed about the plans of Nordkreuz. According to the investigations carried out so far, the "Südkreuz" and "Westkreuz" departments allied with it, as well as a support group in and around Berlin, did not possess their own enemy lists.

Relationships to AfD
After the accusations against the criminal police officer Haik J. became known, the AfD Mecklenburg-Vorpommern appointed him to a party working group on internal security at the end of 2017. In January 2018, it elected him as deputy chairman of its expert committee 5 "Internal Security, Justice and Data Protection" He was a constituency employee for the then AfD state parliament member Holger Arppe. The accused lawyer Jan Hendrik H. also had good contact with him. Nordkreuz founder Marko G. is also an AfD member. After the media published chat transcripts of Arppe's execution requests against political opponents ("I want to see them hanged, dig a pit, put them all in and burnt lime on top"), the AfD expelled him from the party at the beginning of 2018.

According to initial media reports on the Hannibal network, the Office of the Attorney General had the homes of seven people in twelve locations searched on 23 April 2018, including those of Holger Arppe. He had previously been charged with Volksverhetzung on the basis of those chat transcripts. The investigators copied his computer and mobile phone data and questioned him for seven hours as a witness to the Nordkreuz chats.

There is no solid evidence that Arppe belonged to Nordkreuz. However, in May 2015 he had chatted with other AfD members about a member of parliament from the Green Party in Rostock: "Do we need his address? I have to feed his data into my computer tonight." The Green's name and handwritten private address were on the enemy list of Nordkreuz.

Observation
According to its own statements, the BfV had been observing Nordkreuz since autumn 2016 with all available intelligence resources. In response to a question by the member of parliament Martina Renner (Die Linke), the federal government replied on the one hand that the BfV had first become aware of Nordkreuz in June 2017 and then informed the BKA, among others. On the other hand, the same answer stated that the BKA had learned about the chat groups in July 2017 through a witness statement and had in turn informed the BfV.

As a result of the discovery of the group, the interior ministers of the federal states decided in December 2017 to include the nationwide knowledge of the police and the Verfassungsschutz about the prepper scene in their situation reports in order to check their composition and goals, proximity to weapons, possible radicalisation tendencies and references to extremism.

Between 2008 and 2017, Germany's Military Counter-intelligence Service (MAD) identified roughly 200 right-wing extremists within the Bundeswehr.

Disciplinary and criminal proceedings
The State Ministry of the Interior initially let Marko G. continue working as a police officer, since the Attorney General had not classified him as a suspect. He and Haik J. were not suspended from duty until January 2018. Marko G. was not remanded in custody until June 2019, after further stolen weapons and ammunition had been found on him. All illegal and legal weapons in his possession were seized. His gun ownership cards were withdrawn from him. A disciplinary action was brought against him and on 20 November 2019 a trial for illegal hoarding of weapons and ammunition was opened in Schwerin.

After the first raid on six Nordkreuz members, the LKA Mecklenburg-Vorpommern initiated proceedings against four of them, all policemen, for violations of the weapons law. The ammunition procurers of the SEK were suspended from duty and are to be expelled from the SEK. Two of the suspended SEK officers were arrested because of the danger of flight. Interior Minister Caffier had four other SEK officers transferred as a precautionary measure because they had close contact with Marko G. and the other SEK officers via chats. The shooting range operator in Güstrow was dismissed. Shooting training was reorganised to prevent ammunition theft. In the future, the Verfassungsschutz is to check all applicants for the state police, and in addition, the SEK service is to be limited to ten years.

Following a ruling by the Bonn District Court in March 2019, the Bundeswehr reservist association had to reinstate four Nordkreuz members who had been expelled in 2018, including the two accused by the Federal Prosecutor General and one of the SEK officers suspected of ammunition theft. The court saw no evidence of their anti-constitutional attitude. Membership in the chat group Nordkreuz and the prepper scene were not a violation of the free democratic basic order, the court said. While the reservist association stressed that the four Nordkreuzlers no longer participated in the usual shooting exercises and Bundeswehr training, the state command of the Bundeswehr did not rule this out.

On 19 December 2019, the Schwerin Regional Court sentenced the Nordkreuz leader Marko G. to a suspended sentence of 21 months. The sentence remained far below the sentence demanded by the prosecutor. The presiding judge justified this on the grounds that Marko G. had legally possessed many weapons and 30,000 rounds of ammunition, had credibly repented of his crime and had shown himself willing to cooperate. The fact that he illegally obtained less official ammunition after the first house search than before was "already going in the right direction", he said. He had also not committed any further crimes with the weapons and ammunition. The cash book for the joint purchase of ammunition by the Nordkreuz group speaks against criminal energy: "Whoever plans criminal acts, does not write it down so easily. Although he had expressed himself in chats partly unconstitutional, his political attitude had to be separated from his motive for the crime. The judge classified this as "enthusiasm for weapons, which was felt right up to the end", The public prosecutor's office requested an appeal, above all because it did not buy Marko G.'s lack of right-wing extremist motivation for his collection of weapons and ammunition.

In April 2020, eleven disciplinary proceedings were underway against alleged right-wing extremist police officers in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. According to the Ministry of the Interior, eight of these were related to the case of Marko G.

According to the Federal Government, officers of the BKA, the Federal Police, including the GSG 9, several state police forces as well as foreign special forces regularly used the shooting range in Güstrow between 2010 and 2018. There was never a security check of the shooting range, because checking the operators of private shooting ranges, which were permitted under trade and weapons law, is not required by law. Furthermore, according to the Federal Government, there was no reason to do so in this case, as the LKA Mecklenburg-Vorpommern initially accompanied the workshops in terms of content and expertise, and these workshops were later held under the patronage of the State Minister of the Interior. The customs authority continues to use the Güstrow shooting range for regular shooting and deployment training, although the owner's proximity to Nordkreuz is known. Part of the ammunition stolen for Nordkreuz came from customs. The Schwerin public prosecutor's office is investigating the employee of a weapons authority: He is said to have put aside confiscated bullets for a monetary reward.

Information of the persons concerned
In September 2017, the BKA handed over 1477 data records on thousands of people to the LKA of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, according to the LKA. The 29 additional names were known in October 2017, but were initially classified as information only for police purposes and not as a list of endangered persons. In 2018, the BKA handed over to the LKA the results of its raids and a risk assessment. The state interior ministry was responsible for informing the listed persons, but Caffier always refused to do so. He neither wanted to talk about "death lists" nor to inform his colleagues in the state parliament about them, nor to instruct the LKA to inform listed persons because he saw no danger for them. Thereupon, the BKA informed those 29 persons of their possible endangerment by 12 July 2019. For the approximately 25,000 persons on the list discovered in 2018, the BKA assumed an "abstract danger situation" and did not inform them. Also the Federal Ministry of the Interior has so far refused to provide further details on possible "death lists" because of the ongoing investigations.

The Brandenburg State Office of Criminal Investigation stated that the Brandenburg citizens on the list had not been informed so far because the Internet shop operator had already informed them about the hacker attack and the tapping of their data. There were no concrete danger warnings for them. However, they now want to send them information letters.

After the order list for body bags and burnt lime became known, the danger situation for the people threatened by Nordkreuz was classified as far more serious. Various politicians called on the federal authorities to abandon their previous policy of not informing about the lists and to inform all of the approximately 25,000 people affected. Lars Klingbeil (SPD) emphasized that the state owes a complete explanation to the people on the Nordkreuz lists. Possible connections to the police, to reservists and to the AfD must be uncovered, right-wing terrorist networks must be "dried up". There must be an end to single offender theories. Konstantin von Notz (The Green's) demanded coordinated offers of help for victims from the federal government. Katja Kipping (Die Linke) demanded that all 25,000 persons on the Nordkreuz lists "be informed immediately".

On July 18, 2019, representatives of all opposition parties except the AfD demanded personal protection for citizens threatened by Nordkreuz in the Bavarian Parliament. Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann rejected this demand, emphasizing that the Federal Prosecutor General alone decides on the announcement of the lists. These could be used by right-wing terrorist groups for threats.

On 19 July 2019, the BKA ruled out a concrete and current threat to the listed persons, institutions and organisations and denied that the lists were "enemy lists or even death lists". The collection of information about "political opponents" and the disclosure of their names was common in politically motivated crime and increasingly affected public figures, officials, citizens' initiatives and media institutions. The aim is above all to "stir up fear and spread insecurity".

From July 22, 2019, the state interior ministry informed about 1,200 citizens of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania by letter that they are on the Nordkreuz lists. Interior Minister Caffier made this announcement, but at the same time emphasised that he continued to exclude their endangerment. The information letters mention "collections of material" with "personal data about you", but without details about the investigation, the accused and the possible purpose of the lists. Instead, with reference to the BKA, they reject the terms "enemy" or "death list". In response to a parliamentary question, Caffier replied that a suspect had made inquiries in the country's residents' registration system in February and March 2017. Such collections on "politically differently thinking people" were "not unusual in the right-wing and left-wing extremist area" and were not usually accompanied by immediate danger. Mail recipients called this information policy a "bad joke" and a "complete disaster".

The LKAs treat right-wing extremist enemy lists very differently depending on the federal state. In Hesse and Thuringia, the police informed affected persons early on, in Bavaria the LKA sent them forms for criminal charges, in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony the LKAs left it up to the local police departments to decide on a message, in Rhineland-Palatinate the LKA still checked six months after the publication of a list whether the persons concerned should be informed, in Saxony-Anhalt they waited for persons concerned to ask the police themselves. In Brandenburg, they were not informed, but they still filed charges on their behalf. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Berlin, the LKAs found no evidence of a crime and did not inform anyone on their own. Although the BKA did not know the authors of the list either, it classified the named persons as not endangered and said that informing them would lead to "an uncertainty that is not justified from a police point of view". Politicians are demanding that the federal government set up a unit to coordinate the various criminal proceedings concerning the same enemies list.

In 2018, the Hamburg Ministry of the Interior and Sports had still denied that citizens of Hamburg were on the of Nordkreuz list, but in August 2019, upon request of the Leftist parliamentary group Hamburg, confirmed that 364 persons were listed in the Hamburg area, 236 of them with a Hamburg registration address. 24 persons are listed twice. The authority further ruled out providing information even to these affected persons because, according to the BKA, they were not currently endangered. Following criticism, the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office set up an information telephone to ask whether one was on the list.

In response to a lawsuit against the BKA, the Wiesbaden Administrative Court ruled on 19 August 2019 that the BKA did not have to publish the enemy lists and discontinued the proceedings in this regard.

Clearing up
After the raid in August 2017, the Minister of the Interior, Lorenz Caffier, set up a commission to investigate the prepper scene, but after two years the commission had still not submitted a report. In August 2018, following a request for freedom of information, Caffier's ministry refused to publish the commission's report on the prepper scene, of which until then there had allegedly only been drafts. A transparency initiative filed a lawsuit against this.

A three-member commission of experts was to "thoroughly investigate" the country's special forces/ operational units by the end of October 2019. However, more than a dozen parliamentary questions on Nordkreuz and the Hannibal network remained unanswered because of the ongoing investigations. They included the question of why the proceedings against the three Nordkreuz members and the two SEK officials were conducted separately and why the circumstantial evidence (chat groups, contacts with Franco A. and the extreme right-wing stance of some members) was not considered to indicate the formation of a terrorist group.

According to the federal government, the hard core of the group with Marko G. represents "a consolidated right-wing extremist attitude". The commission of inquiry appointed by Lorenz Caffier, headed by Heinz Fromm, presented its report of around 100 pages in November 2019, but only published an eight-page summary. According to the report, right-wing extremist police officers were able to take the lead in a SEK unit because their superiors did nothing about it. The Schleswig-Hostein State Office had had almost no knowledge of the group and its members. Thereupon Caffier subordinated the SEK to the Bereitschaftspolizei instead of the LKA and transferred a leading person and the head of the SEK, but transferred him to the department of right-wing extremism in the country's Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

In May 2020, in response to another parliamentary question, the German government replied that it had no knowledge of the origin of Marko G.'s illegal ammunition. The public prosecutor's office in Schwerin was responsible for this. The latter had concluded the proceedings against him without clarifying the origin of the ammunition and considered it too time-consuming to trace the ammunition routes in the ongoing proceedings against three former colleagues of Marko G. Other federal states had either omitted their own investigations into this matter or handed them over to the Schwerin prosecutors. Renner criticized: "The official disinterest in clearing up the Nordkreuz complex is scandalous. As long as this culture of looking away is not changed, the networks will remain a threat".