eurofascism.info

The term Eurofascism has been used in different meanings. Some have used it to refer to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, contrasting them to contemporary non-European regimes that could also be seen as fascist. Some Eurosceptics have used it pejoratively against the European Union, while some libertarians and  conservatives have used it to describe social democratic policies.

When Laila Dåvøy, the doubtlessly social conservative Christian Democratic Norwegian minister of family affairs, proposed that the 600 largest private corporations must appoint boards composed of 40 per cent women, the social conservative American writer Mary Gallagher described it as «Eurofascism, lite. Only they call it democracy».

In this context the term fits nicely together with words such as «feminazi», «environazi», «corporate fascism», «sexual fascism» and even «islamofascism».

Both Islamic fascists and environmentalist Nazis exist, but the words are used in a much wider sense, and consequently they are rather meaningless.

In this book, Eurofascism is used to refer to a specific ideological trend in post-WWII European fascism. However, the word has also been used to describe a number of groups involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. This dark network of hatred has ties not only to today’s suit-and-tie-clad Eurofascist politicians, but also to more well-known terrorist groups, such as the PLO.

Such is the case, for instance, with Karl-Heinz Hoffmann and his Wehrsportgruppe. In its early days, the group had served as guards at various meetings arranged by the NPD and by the Deutsche Volksunion. At that time the DVU was an association led by the same man who now leads it as a political party, Gerhard Frey. Frey also transferred money to Hoffmann, «in national solidarity», to cover his legal expenses.

But it was terror that was to bring the Hoffmann group into the limelight. The group was forbidden already in January 1980, and the police confiscated eighteen truck loads of various weapons and military equipment after razzias. In fall, the group hit the headlines again. 26. September 1980 a young man named Gundolf Köhler tried to place six pounds of explosives in a refuse can at the entrance to Munich’s famous Oktoberfest. The bomb went off prematurely, killing Köhler and twelve others.  215 people were wounded. And while the attack was described as the work of a lone nut, Köhler was linked to the Wehrsportgruppe led by Hoffmann.

The group was also involved in the December murder of Shlomo Levin, a Jewish publisher that had warned against the neo-Nazi scene of Germany. His female companion Frieda Poeschke was also killed.

The killer, Uwe Behrendt, fled to Lebanon, where he joined up with Hoffmann once again. With support from al-Fatah, the two of them founded Wehrsportgruppe Ausland based in Bir Hassan near Beirut.

According to the Italian neo-Nazi Elio Ciolini, Hoffmann was also  involved in the bombing in Bologna, though this information is dubious. The police caught up with Hoffmann in 1981, when he was arrested at airport in Frankfurt and charged with various offences, including kidnappings and counterfeiting. He was never charged or convicted for any crime related to the Bologna bombing.

In 1985, the journalist Ulrich Chaussy published a book, “Oktoberfest: Ein Attentat ” casting serious doubts on the official theory that Köhler was acting on his own. The book concluded that this leaves a number of questions unanswered, and Chaussy considered the case unsolved.

The story of the Wehrsportgruppe continues well into the 1990s. In 1998, German police raided the property of ex-WSG member Anton Pfahler. The raid uncovered weapons, including hand grenades and several machine pistols, and it was discovered that Pfahler ran a flourishing weapons business together with the 23-year old  Alexander Larrass. On Pfahler’s behalf Larrass travelled to the Czech republic, bought several Uzi and Kalashnikov machine pistols and imported them to Germany for sale to Pfahler’s customers. On trial in Munich, Pfahler tried and failed to present himself as a non-political militaria collector, and was eventually convicted to three years and eight months in prison.

Unsurprisingly, Pfahler has been involved with a number of German far right groups, including the NPD.

In Belgium, this brand of violent Eurofascism was represented by an organisation called Vlaamse Militanten Orde. The VMO was originally founded in 1949, and was then referred to as the Organisation of Flemish Militants rather than as the Order of Flemish Militants. From 1958 on the group was connected to the Flemish nationalist party Volksunie.

As the party moved in towards the centre of the political spectrum, the VMO moved the other direction, effectively becoming a paramilitary organisation, giving its members military training at camps in the Ardennes. In 1963, all bands between the Volksunie and VMO were formally severed. The Belgian authorities heavily criticised, but tolerated the organisation until 1970, when a trial was instigated against the group. This happened after VMO-members had been involved in the violent attack on members of the Front Démocratique des Francophones, a rather reactionary Brussels-based Francophone party strongly opposed to the new linguistic legislation having been pushed through in the sixties. In the ensuing fight, one FDF-militant, Jacques Georgin, died of a heart attack.

The leader of VMO at the time, Bob Maes, decided to disband the group, trying to prevent further persecution of its’ members.

Numerous members of the group did, however, not support that decision and reconstituted the group the following year, now as Vlaamse Militanten Orde, an obvious reference to the Dinaso Militanten Orde, the paramilitary wing of the pre-WWII fascist party Verdinaso.

Amongst its members were several notable neo-fascists, such as Bert Eriksson. The new group soon functioned as an unofficial guard for the then marginal party Vlaams Blok.  It was also involved in a series of attacks on immigrants, Walloons and leftists, as well as in organising annual international neo-Nazi rallies at Diksmuide, where Keith Thompson and other representatives of the League of Saint George were amongst those in attendance. The order also gained considerable attention for digging up the corpses of former WWII collaborators – Cyriel Verschaeve, Staf de Clercq and Anton Mussert  and reburying them in Flanders.

One example of the political violence related to the VMO was an attack on the left-wing book store ‘De Rode Mol‘ (The red mole) in Mechelen (Malines) in February 1980. Inventory was smashed and two people were hurt. This is how the magazine of the VMO summarised the raid:

Flemish friends, as you know the Rode Mol in Mechelen was stormed in the month of February. One can discuss the method being used by the nationalist commando,  but there is one thing we can all agree about: red moles do not belong in our Flemish community. And it was nothing else this commando wanted than what our justice system should have done years ago; intervene against these red drugs- and porn-spreaders. These reds were not doing anything but helping our Flemish youth to go to hell!

Eight friends were regrettably enough arrested…

One of the eight was Luk Dieudonné. As this book was written, he worked at the secretariat of Vlaams Belang, one of the largest parties in Belgium and one of the most successful Eurofascist parties.

Although not involved in any serious terrorist attacks, the VMO used political violence as a method for years. Interestingly, the VMO also had direct ties to the German Hoffmann group, members of the VMO even attended a WSG-training camp near Nuremberg in August 1979.

However, politically motivated violence – and even terrorism – is not only a phenomenon of the past when seen in the context of Eurofascism. In recent years, there has been a number of examples of such violence taking place in the outskirts of the fascist revival. This violence has not won the same media interest as Islamic terrorism, as Brian Dominick pointed out in the New Standard in December 2006.

His examples are taken from the United States. In November, a white supremacist named Demitrius Van Crocker was sentenced to 30 years in prison for trying to buy sarin nerve gas from what turned out to be federal agents. He said he wanted to set off a nerve-gas bomb in Washington while Congress was in sessions.

As Dominick writes,

there were some local stories, and an AP report got picked up a few places. There was virtually no discussion of Crocker’s ideology, even though he apparently ranted extensively about his hatred of seemingly everything.

Today, a Muslim named Derrick “Talib Abu Salam Ibn” Shareef was charged with threatening to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall before Christmas, and already Google News reveals literally hundreds of stories constituting a frenzy of half-coverage, most of it extremely ill-informed, rushed to print or air just to make sure they’re jumping on the Muslim psychopath early.

A SPLCenter Intelligence Project report from 2005 concluded that «in the 10 years since the April 19, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, [...] the radical right has produced some 60 terrorist plots. These have included plans to bomb or burn government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives, and biological and chemical weapons».

In 2003, the FBI discovered that William Krar and Judith Bruey had assembled a frightening arsenal in three rented storage units. The arsenal included more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote control briefcase bombs, and almost 2 pounds of sodium cyanide, enough to make a bomb that could kill everyone in a large building. Krar was sentenced to 11 years in prison for possession of a chemical weapon. Krar had ties to New Hampshire white supremacist groups.

Daniel Levitas, author of «The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right» commented dryly to the Christian Science Monitor: – I have no doubt whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have heard from John Ashcroft himself.

In 2003, police uncovered a neo-Nazi plot for a massive bomb attack on the construction site of Munich’s new synagogue.

Federal prosecutors stated that the neo-Nazis arrested also had additional targets in mind. 30 pounds of bomb-making material, including explosive TNT, was found. The plan was most likely for the attack to take place during a cornerstone-laying ceremony attended by Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber and high-ranking members of the Jewish community. The arrested belonged to an obscure organisation called Kameradschaft Süd – Aktionsgemeinschaft Süddeutschland. According to press reports, several of its members have been arrested for fights and attacks in and around Munich, and at least two of them also had a past with the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the NPD.

In the spring of 1999 three bombs exploded in London, targeting the capital’s black, Asian and gay communities. In each attack a number of people were injured. In the last Andrea Dykes, who was four months pregnant with her first child, died along with her friends and hosts for the evening, Nick Moore and John Light. Her husband, Julian, was seriously injured. The four friends had met up at the crowded Admiral Duncan pub in the centre of London’s gay village to celebrate Andrea’s pregnancy. That same evening the bomber, David Copeland, was arrested.

Within a few weeks of his arrest, Copeland’s far right connections became obvious. He had become fascinated with Nazism when he was thirteen and saw himself as the «first domino» in a race war. In his  confession he stated that he wanted «murder, mayhem, chaos, damage, to get on the news. It’s a top story, really. My main intent was to spread fear, resentment and hatred throughout this country».

He was a loner who had gone crazy, but that was just one part of the story. The «normal teenager, happy, quite attentive, quite [enjoying] his work» described by his brother Jon in a BBC documentary decided to move to London and «came back totally opposite really, very reclusive, into himself». But, as the documentary states, if Copeland did not find happiness in London, he did find something else. He joined the British National Party in 1997, and pictures showing him standing next to John Tyndall made for very bad PR for the Eurofascist party when they surfaced after Copeland’s arrest.

Copeland stayed with the BNP for a year, and then went on to join the much smaller and openly Nazi National Socialist Movement,  becoming its regional leader for Hampshire just weeks before the start of his bombing campaign. His weeks of terror was quite possibly inspired by the Nazi-Occultist-Islamist ideologist David «Abdul-Aziz ibn» Myatt, who as a leader of the National Socialist Movement had called for «the creation of racial terror with bombs»*.

At around the same time as the nail bomb campaign, James Shaw was arrested late one night after attacking a bus driver. When police arrived they discovered that Shaw was carrying not only a knife, but also two homemade bombs. When searching his home, they found three more bombs, along with pages and pages of racist writings.

Shaw, who had planned to blow up railway lines, was a former high-ranking member in the National Front.

Yet another example is Stuart Kerr, who was imprisoned for 12 years for petrol-bombing an Asian owned shop in Chichester. The police, who were told by Kerr that he is «a racist and a supporter of the British National Party», found piles of BNP and Combat 18 literature.

In fact, the ugly stain of terrorism goes right to the top in the BNP. In 1985, Tony Lecomber, a central member until early 2006, was  injured by a nailbomb he was carrying to the offices the Workers Revolutionary Party. Police found ten grenades, seven petrol bombs and two detonators at his home. He was convicted on five counts for offences under the Explosive Substances Act and jailed for three years. The episode gave him the nickname «Lecomber the Bomber».

According to the Sunday Herald, Lecomber caused an upstir in the party 11 years later, allegedly having contacted a former BNP member and suggested «direct action», in the form of «[killing] members of the establishement who were aiding and abetting the coloured invasion of this country»

The Sunday Herald notes that «Lecomber admitted that a conversation took place with Owens but said that he did not mean the allegations to be taken literally».

According to Searchlight Magazine, this is the background for why Lecomber was pushed out of the party. What really happened is still a riddle.

A similar idea to what Lecomber supposedly suggested grew forth in a small Flemish neo-Nazi group identified as Bloed, Bodem, Eer en Trouw. In early September 2006 the Belgian police detained 17 suspects, mostly soldiers, during raids at barracks and homes near the town of Mechelen and around Antwerp. Police had also seized illegal weapons, including a homemade bomb, land mine detonators and large quantities of ammunition. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that those arrested were mainly «soldiers and people with an extreme-right ideology who clearly express themselves through racism, xenophobia, Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism». It added that the suspects were planning «terrorist actions» aimed at «destabilising» Belgium.

Whether there is something to that, or whether it was just «pub talk» remains to be shown. However, there is little doubt that the fringes of Eurofascism represents a very real breeding area for terrorism.

This was demonstrated clearly when Hans van Themsche, an eighteen year-old schoolboy, bought himself a hunting rifle and went into the streets of Antwerp, specifically looking for people of immigrant background to shoot. He killed a Malinese au pair, Oulematou Niangadou, and the two-year toddler she was looking after, Luna Drowart. He also shot the Turkish woman Songül Koç, who recovered.

Hans van Themsche, too, was a lone individual acting on his own, carrying with him a knife with the words «Blut und Ehre» engraved, the motto of the Hitlerjugend. The fact that he is the nephew of a Vlaams Belang-parliamentarian and that police found a copy of Hitler’s «Mein Kampf» inherited from his grandfather who fought on the Eastern Front still made journalists smell blood.

The one that came closest to the truth was perhaps Hilde Sabbe in Het Laatste Nieuws who wrote that the shooter might indeed have been a gun freak or a pure psychopath, but that he also was a product of a society that had become colder, more hateful, a society with less solidarity and less tolerance. «I hold one party responsible for that», she wrote, «the party, not its voters, but the party leadership and its strategists. A party that has shamelessly exploited the anxiety for the unknown that exists in any human. The party that has made the fearful white man in all of us even more frightened»

Sometimes some people take the Eurofascists bloody serious. And there is a thought for the next time you hear the story about the dangerous Muslims who are to take over Europe – turning it into Eurabia: Where does an idea stop?

As the former neo-Nazi Ingo Hasselbach points out in his highly interesting book «Führer-Ex»: «my experience as a neo-Nazi taught me that a militant ideology and conspiracy thinking can destroy even the most basic human sympathy»

Perhaps that is were Hilde Sabbe misses a point, because the idea of immigrants as a problem and little but a problem, does not stop somewhere slightly to the left of Vlaams Belang, nor is it something the more parodical neo-Nazis can claim as their own.

The Eurofascists have succeeded in selling that idea into the very mainstream of European politics.

Footnotes:

*  Myatt is a rather colourful representative of the British extreme right. He grew up in Tanzania, and has reportedly studied Taoism and spent time in both a Buddhist and a Christian monastery, as well as having been involved in «quasi-Satanic» secret societies. He has authored a number of books, including both «A practical guide to Aryan revolution», «Divine Revelation of Adolf Hitler», «Black Book of Satan» and various science fiction. He has also translated works by Sophocles, Sappho, Aeschylus and Homer, and has written several collections of poems. In 1998, he converted to Islam – or rather to radical jihadist Islamism, and became an outspoken supporter of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

**  Translated from Dutch by the author of this book. Published in Het Laatste Nieuws, 12. May 2006. Not found online.