Germany Hurt in Efforts to Ban Neo-Nazis

Court Suspends Case Against Party After Learning Leader Was Government Spy

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service

BERLIN, Jan. 23 -- The German government's effort to persuade a court to ban a neo-Nazi party was seriously compromised this week by disclosures that a senior party member whose racist statements were a key part of the case had been a paid government informant.

Officials at the Federal Constitutional Court had accepted the case, with hearings scheduled to begin Feb. 5, partly on the basis of statements by the informant, Wolfgang Frenz. But the government never told the court that he was formerly on the payroll of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Now the court has suspended the Feb. 5 hearing, and legislators and court officials said the court could throw out the government's petition to ban the National Democratic Party, a petition submitted only after a vote of both houses of Parliament and cabinet approval last year. "The judges are very angry," said one court official, who asked not to be identified.

As a tool against a Nazi revival, German law allows the court-ordered banning of parties that are deemed extremist. After a surge in racist violence in 2000, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (right, with Jewish leaders) decided to go after the NPD, as the party is known in Germany, this way. Only two parties, both far-rightist, have been banned in the history of the federal republic.

"It's inexcusable that the NPD could survive this important effort to ban it," Michel Friedman, vice president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told German radio.

In an editorial today, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said the government looked "idiotic" and its conduct was "grotesque."

The government said its plant within the party made statements cited in government legal briefs after the German intelligence agency had severed its relationship with him. But Frenz still needed government permission to testify because of a confidentiality agreement he had signed with the agency.

An Interior Ministry official mentioned the agreement in passing during a phone conversation with a judge last week, but then failed to follow the judge's request that the matter be immediately reported to the court in writing.

Angered, the judges then suspended the Feb. 5 hearing and gave no indication that they would hold it at a later date.

In a statement, the court, the country's highest, said the issue "raises procedural and material questions of law that cannot be cleared up before the court date."

"There were serious failures," acknowledged Interior Minister Otto Schily at a news conference today, adding that ministry officials believed that because Frenz had not been on the government's payroll since 1995 they didn't have to reveal that he had been an informant.

Schily said that Frenz had been dropped after his public statements became increasingly shrill. But government officials then used those racist statements to persuade the court last October to take the case seeking the NPD's ban.

Frenz, 66, a co-founder and former executive member of the 6,500-strong NPD, told the German press today that he was paid about $400 every two weeks for reports on the party. He said he paid taxes on the money and then gave the balance to the NPD, which, if true, means the country's domestic intelligence agency was indirectly subsidizing one of its principal enemies.