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  • Originally posted by Albany Rifles View Post
    When I visited it in....*gulp*....2005(?) they seamed to have a fairly robust military display.
    Most of their newer "military" acquisitions since then have gone to their Speyer subsidiary museum, which basically doesn't do tanks. They have a great submarine collection though, and do some special event stuff (might go there next month, they're gonna have a flight day for some of their aircraft including their reactivated C-160 Transall from the airport right next to the museum).

    And the Historical Museum of the Palatinate which is virtually next door is currently hosting an exhibition on French troops garrisoned in Palatinate between 1945 and 1999 for the rest of the year.

    They're planning to reshuffle their collection between Sinsheim and Speyer currently due to the 40-year anniversary of the Sinsheim museum. Next submarine (a German Navy 500-ton Type 206 that they bought in 2018) is planned to directly go to Sinsheim. They're still working on demilitarizing that, and the overland transport will probably be quite the sight again.
    Last edited by kato; 04 Aug 21,, 21:10.

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    • Originally posted by kato View Post
      Most of their newer "military" acquisitions since then have gone to their Speyer subsidiary museum, which basically doesn't do tanks. They have a great submarine collection though, and do some special event stuff (might go there next month, they're gonna have a flight day for some of their aircraft including their reactivated C-160 Transall from the airport right next to the museum).

      And the Historical Museum of the Palatinate which is virtually next door is currently hosting an exhibition on French troops garrisoned in Palatinate between 1945 and 1999 for the rest of the year.

      They're planning to reshuffle their collection between Sinsheim and Speyer currently due to the 40-year anniversary of the Sinsheim museum. Next submarine (a German Navy 500-ton Type 206 that they bought in 2018) is planned to directly go to Sinsheim. They're still working on demilitarizing that, and the overland transport will probably be quite the sight again.
      Didn't know about the Speyer Museum...been awhile since I was in Germany.

      From 1998 to 2003 I spent a lot of time on Germany...like 3 out of every 5 weeks...so on weekends I went and visited a bunch of stuff.

      I was in Kaiserslautern-Ramstein for a month in winter 2017 but on our time off we headed up into the Ardennes Battlefields.
      “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
      Mark Twain

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      • Originally posted by Albany Rifles View Post
        Didn't know about the Speyer Museum...been awhile since I was in Germany.
        They bought a former French military base in Speyer in 1990 when they could no longer expand in Sinsheim and basically opened a similar-sized operation to Sinsheim there. Focus there to a large extent postwar military aviation (almost complete collection of aircraft flown and retired by the Luftwaffe and NVA, along with selected allied combat aircraft that had been stationed in Germany) and some postwar naval history (with a Type 205 submarine and a civilian 44m SAR cruiser). In 2008 they opened a new space-focused exhibit centered around a Buran prototype that they had bought.

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        • Yean Sinsheim was right up against an autobahn and hemmed in on other sides. Makes perfect sense.
          “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
          Mark Twain

          Comment



          • The Army finally got some legal recourse against a right-wing extremist:
            • there's a retired colonel who is active among the Querdenker crowd since at least spring this year
            • among other things he got on their soapbox and spouted lines like "they should send the KSK to Berlin to clean up in parliament"
            • he is under observation by both domestic intelligence and (as a former soldier) by its military counterpart MAD
            • with limited recourse so far the Bundeswehr had issued a uniform ban for him and removed him from reserve exercises
            During the floods in Ahrweiler a Querdenker group seized a semi-destroyed school building and organized an "assistance center" there. Mostly along the lines of taking care for children while their parents cleaned up the destroyed homes and distributing some supplies and such. With a good helping of propaganda of course. The group also dressed up a car to look like a police car and started driving through the disaster area spouting conspiracy theories over loudspeakers. Police closed the whole place down after a few days and forcibly evicted them.

            Now, this colonel was among these guys. In uniform. In a leading position. He also published something online "ordering" other reservists and Querdenker to come to the area to join the group - cosigned by Bodo Schiffmann (a doctor from this area who fled to South Africa, then Tanzania due to "persecution" over his stance on lockdowns), Michael Ballweg (leader of the political Querdenken movement, i think we've had him somewhere in this thread), Frank Horn (a reservist running a Telegram chat group of 7000 Querdenker) and Karl Hilz (a retired Bavarian police officer with Reichsbürger stances). There were a few dozen people who ... tried to follow that order. They were kind of intercepted by roadblocks where conveniently besides police also military police was deployed. There was a apparently an attempt to "civilianize" the effort afterwards, in the sense of trying to hide involvement of these reservist Querdenker groups.

            For the other three guys: Horn probably wasn't a co-signer due to the 7,000-person support (there were people with more reach in the place), but because he basically calls for the government to be removed and is by political direction a Day-X-Prepper Reichsbürger. Hilz, the police officer, has a disciplinary trial ongoing against him for similar things. Schiffmann finances the whole thing by collecting "donations", about 700,000 Euro for this particular action (except Paypal just locked his account and that money this week...). All of them are under observation and have been for a while of course.


            Well, yeah, anyway. There goes his pension now. Said colonel is now charged with unlawful assumption of public authority. And violating the uniform ban of course.

            On August 1st the same people organized a rally in Berlin, the action in Ahrweiler was partially structured around drumming up support for that. During that rally 967 people were arrested, 75 police officers injured (which isn't that high, that's normal for rallies of that scale) and a 49-year-old died from a heart attack when police arrested him.


            Just for general context: The colonel in question used to work for KSK in 1996-1998 delivering war criminals from Bosnia to The Hague, and in 1999 was commander of Panzergrenadierbataillon 112 during its initial forced entry into Kosovo.

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            • A group of nine men is currently being investigated for forming an armed militia. The charges by now include a racist motive for the group, intending to attack immigrants.

              The group was led by a reserve colonel, a former paratrooper who publicly exhibited a faible for militaria. Three others were also reservists, three were civilian employees of the Bundeswehr, supposedly including contractors working in base security.

              The colonel was separately from these investigations found by MAD to be in close contact with a staffer at the Ministry of Defense (mayor-rank-equivalent, with high-classification access in particular on KSK and MAD operations) who is now suspended with him and his whole department investigated. Due to the overall security relevance of this connection and the overall group they're also now a bit tight-lipped towards the press.

              Police searched 8 separate estates belonging to members of the group three weeks ago, as well as a hidden weapons depot found a week later, During these searches weapons, weapons parts and ammunition were found "of which a substantial part has to be evaluated first" (i.e. they confiscated a bunch of collector pieces, presumably WW2, which have to be evaluated as to whether they're e.g. re-activated or otherwise illegal).

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              • Police arrested about 50 adherents of the right-wing extremist party "III. Weg" (Third Way) last night on the Polish border.

                The group was following a "call" by the party to "deter immigrants" with patrols along the border. Police confiscated machetes, a bayonet, pepper spray and batons. The "call" was known ahead of course, there were German and Polish borderguards as well as state police forces waiting for them.

                Given the rather open national-socialist allegiance of the group and the current immigrant thing being about Belarus it's probably not all that coincidental that this took place in the area where the 1st Belarussian Front crossed the Neiße river into Germany on their way to Berlin on April 16th 1945.

                In the federal election about a month ago the party managed to get a grand total of 0.017%.

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                • Deutsche Welle article on that last one: https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-...der/a-59610055

                  And our good old US propaganda version which mentions it but fails completely to tie its article subject to it: https://www.rferl.org/a/germany-pola.../31527854.html

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                  • The presidents of the domestic intelligence service (BVS) and military intelligence service (MAD) have had to give their joint annual public report to the parliamantary intelligence oversight committee today. This annual report is the only public session of the intelligence oversight committee, their other work is classified.

                    MAD is currently handling 1397 suspect cases for extremism - for scale, in the calendar year 2019 they had 363 cases and in 2020 477 cases.
                    BVS reports that they're "not rarely" finding members of armed security forces - military and police - in "pertinent networks" they're observing, and consider the situation "worrying" as these people would also have access to classified information and after all are armed. Both agencies are also tasked with counterespionage.

                    While both agencies see their current "primary task" and the primary "dangerous group" to be right-wing extremism, they consider the increased caseload more an effect of increased public attention to the topic though.


                    The federal intelligence service (BND) president also had to report, but his agency isn't working in that field. He was mostly being defensive over the Afghanistan collapse in his report.

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                    • Originally posted by kato View Post
                      The New York Times has published a very extensive article on Franco A., the German officer who posed as a refugee:

                      https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/w...m-refugee.html

                      Well worth a read. It's mostly based around interviews with him.
                      Franco A. for the duration of his trial has been walking around free.

                      On January 22nd Franco A. was caught in a random check with a fake vaccination certificate. Par for the course police searched his house, and found 23 (illegal) insignia with swastika as well as 7 various (legal) weapons including machetes, 21 (!) cell phones and 50 unused prepaid cards for them.

                      As a result Franco A. is now sitting in jail, and one of his mandatory defense attorneys has asked the court to be relieved from his duty..

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                      • Originally posted by kato View Post
                        Franco A. for the duration of his trial has been walking around free.

                        On January 22nd Franco A. was caught in a random check with a fake vaccination certificate. Par for the course police searched his house, and found 23 (illegal) insignia with swastika as well as 7 various (legal) weapons including machetes, 21 (!) cell phones and 50 unused prepaid cards for them.

                        As a result Franco A. is now sitting in jail, and one of his mandatory defense attorneys has asked the court to be relieved from his duty..
                        He has been in the Effed Around Phase and has entered the Find Out Phase.
                        “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                        Mark Twain

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                        • In a concerted action this morning 800 police officers raided some 61 estates belonging to 50 individuals.

                          https://abcnews.go.com/International...roups-83904901

                          The raid was against members of:
                          • the German chapter of US neonazi terror group Atomwaffendivision
                          • a group accused of attempting to reestablish outlawed German neonazi militia Combat 18, the combat arm of the German chapter of Blood & Honour.
                          • Thuringian neonazi martial arts group Knockout 51 which was trying to establish itself as a local turf authority
                          • internet chat group Sonderkommando 1418 which was trying to recruit people for a "race war"
                          The concerted raid was due to cross-connections between these groups, investigations are led at federal level (and are apparently the largest police operation led by the federal attorney so far).
                          Four people were arrested who for the most part were those connecting the above groups. There are also some connections to German neonazi political party NPD. Supposedly some premises of people arrested earlier were also raided during this action, possibly in connection with a series of rightwing-motivated arson attacks around Berlin.

                          The accused also include an actively serving Bundeswehr NCO who was under observation by military intelligence service MAD.
                          Last edited by kato; 06 Apr 22,, 12:12.

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                          • Originally posted by kato View Post
                            In a concerted action this morning 800 police officers raided some 61 estates belonging to 50 individuals.

                            https://abcnews.go.com/International...roups-83904901

                            The raid was against members of:
                            • the German chapter of US neonazi terror group Atomwaffendivision
                            • a group accused of attempting to reestablish outlawed German neonazi militia Combat 18, the combat arm of the German chapter of Blood & Honour.
                            • Thuringian neonazi martial arts group Knockout 51 which was trying to establish itself as a local turf authority
                            • internet chat group Sonderkommando 1418 which was trying to recruit people for a "race war"
                            The concerted raid was due to cross-connections between these groups, investigations are led at federal level (and are apparently the largest police operation led by the federal attorney so far).
                            Four people were arrested who for the most part were those connecting the above groups. There are also some connections to German neonazi political party NPD. Supposedly some premises of people arrested earlier were also raided during this action, possibly in connection with a series of rightwing-motivated arson attacks around Berlin.

                            The accused also include an actively serving Bundeswehr NCO who was under observation by military intelligence service MAD.
                            It's terrible those groups exist but good job on the German authorities on cracking down on them.

                            Thanks, Kato
                            “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                            Mark Twain

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                            • Franco A. was found guilty and sentenced to 5 years 6 months last week, for "preparation of a violent offence endangering the state", violations of weapons laws, violations of explosives laws, theft and two cases of fraud. The 3 months jail time ahead of trial wil be deducted from that.

                              The prosecutor had called for 6 years 3 months in the trial, the defense for an acquittal on the main charge and fines or probation for the lesser stuff.

                              The court largely followed the prosecutor but reduced it since A. had admitted to some of the minor crimes, has started to pay back some of the money embezzled and has waived property rights to confiscated weapons. They also took into account that Franco A. will lose his job as a soldier and "was on several occasions the addressee of actions that vilified him in gross disregard of the presumption of innocence". There were also some elements that the prosecution could not prove to the court, such as that Franco A. had planned to commit terrorism - to pin it as an islamic/foreign attack - as "David Benjamin", the Syrian refugee identity he created.

                              The resulting sentence is broadly in line with that for other rightwing terrorists.

                              The Bundeswehr is running a separate military court trial against him. This is basically just about formally stripping him of his rank, withholding pay and kicking him out.

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                              • Right now 3000 police officers are conducting a large-scale operation against a nationwide terrorist network in Germany. In total 130 premises are being searched, in two cases with GSG9 special forces use. 25 people have been arrested, two of them in Austria and Italy.

                                The organization variably calling itself "Patriotic Union" or "The Council" consists of currently 51 accused and includes a former AfD federal parliament representative (an active professional judge), a prince (whose castle in East Germany was stormed at dawn today) and multiple former Bundeswehr officers and former police officers.

                                The Bundeswehr officers involved also included
                                - an active NCO working in the staff of KSK special forces (in logistics) who had already been observation due to being an outspoken Covid vaccination opponent
                                - a former Bundeswehr battalion commander who was fired in the 90s for misappropriating former East-German Army weapons and selling them on the black market.
                                - a retired colonel who during the floods in the Ahr valley last year attempted to install a group of retired soldiers - in uniform - in the flood area (they were evicted by police back then). Edit: mentioned him before in this thread.

                                The group was planning to forcefully remove parliament and in an armed coup install itself as a new government. Members of the group have allegedly procured weapons and held paramilitary training exercises. They had prepped a "shadow cabinet" that included the prince at its head and the former AfD rep as planned minister of justice.

                                The "Patriotic Union" was found due to cross-connections to the "United Patriots", a separate group of 12 arrested half a year ago who was planning to blow up infrastructure targets and abduct government officials.
                                Last edited by kato; 07 Dec 22,, 09:14.

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