Neumann Group

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The Neumann Group was a right-wing extremist terrorist organization in Germany that existed for a few months from the end of 1973.

history

The Neumann group was closely associated with the Nazi battle group Mainz , a neo-Nazi organization founded in 1969 by the couple Kurt and Ursula Müller and their son Harald Müller. All three were members of the NPD or the Young National Democrats . The Nazi battle group, in which other, mostly young people were organized in addition to the Müller family, together with the right-wing terrorist Manfred Roeder, attacked an Auschwitz exhibition in West Berlin .

The group, as whose ringleader Hans Joachim Neumann was considered, belonged u. a. Harald Müller, the Bundeswehr NCO Willi Wegner and the officer Ralph Ullmann. Neumann, a former police student and officer candidate from Hamburg, had a. a. At a conspiratorial meeting in Marburg an der Lahn as well as at events of the Federation of Heimattreuer Jugend and the Young National Democrats looking for neo-Nazis who wanted to participate in the formation of an underground organization in order to "protect the national body as a whole ... with the weapon if necessary" . Prior to this, Neumann had appeared in 1970 as a co-founder of a neo-Nazi organization called the NSDAP Munich . Neumann intended to “collect small groups of German National Socialists” and “eliminate the destroyers and haters of all order and all ethnic existence”. Neumann laid down his goals in a book manuscript entitled The Fourth Reich .

The group planned the kidnapping of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal . However, only various anti-Semitic graffiti, property damage, one gun theft and one arson were carried out.

In the spring of 1974, Neumann, Wegner and Ullmann knocked over around 100 tombstones for twenty minutes at the Jewish cemetery in Göttingen . Neumann later said during his interrogation in custody that he had devastated the cemetery out of "idealism". Also in Göttingen, the three neo-Nazis spilled the contents of a five-liter petrol can in the storage room of the left bookstore Polibula. Wegner suffered burns on his face when he lit the gasoline. In Mainz city ​​center, Neumann and Harald Müller sprayed anti-Semitic slogans on town hall doors and park benches. At the Jewish cemetery in Mainz Neumann and another member of the group smeared a total of 108 gravestones with swastikas .

Wegner broke into a customs barracks near Schöningen (on the border with the GDR) and stole eight MP 5 submachine guns , which he hid in a cave near Bad Sachsa in the Harz Mountains. Further weapons depots of the group existed with Harald Müller in Mainz, where three rifles, two gas pistols, 2,600 rounds of ammunition, eight daggers, batons and a chemical laboratory were later found, and with Wegner in Soltau , who had two rifles, two pistols, a shooting ballpoint pen and kept two radios. The weapons should be distributed "in the event of a communist uprising" to like-minded neo-Nazis.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution initially classified the group as a “harmless weirdo” and later wanted to recognize “parallels to Baader-Meinhof”. In April 1974, following information from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the group was finally removed by the criminal police. Half a dozen of its members were arrested. Neumann managed to leave for South Africa after a month in custody. Ullmann and Wegner were convicted of damage to property, serious theft and arson at the end of 1976. The court dropped the allegation of the formation of a criminal organization . Only Wegner had to serve a prison sentence, Ullmann's sentence was suspended. Harald Müller was not prosecuted.

literature

  • Antifa Commission of the Communist League (ed.): How criminal is the NPD? Analyzes - documents - names. Buntbuch, Hamburg 1980.
  • Klaus-Henning Rosen : Right-wing Terrorism. Groups - perpetrators - backgrounds. In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): Hitler's shadow fades. The normalization of right-wing extremism. Dietz, Bonn 1989, pp. 49-78.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c national body as a whole . In: Der Spiegel , August 15, 1974. Retrieved August 10, 2012.
  2. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau , November 11, 1976.