Because they were involved in a class chat with National Socialist, anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying content as police students, 18 police officers in Saxony-Anhalt are said to lose their jobs.
Criminal investigations were also initiated against four of the accused because of the use of signs belonging to unconstitutional organizations, incitement to hatred and the distribution of violent and animal pornography. Saxony-Anhalt’s Interior Minister Tamara Zieschang (CDU) said on Tuesday afternoon: “This class chat is a disgrace to the state police.”
Recognizable touched she described details; Accordingly, the chats existed between 2017 and 2020 and were actually used to exchange information about homework, exam preparation, but also anti-Semitic and violent content. Eleven men and women made active contributions. The chat was not blown up because police students turned to superiors or reported it, but in the course of other investigations against a police candidate.
“Tough and consistent action must be taken against those affected”
The Interior Minister reported that at least 50 of the more than 5,000 individual messages were racist or glorified violence. As an example, Zieschang cited a picture of Hitler under which it said: “Three Jews go to a bar. It was fun, it’s a gas chamber.” The image of a dismembered woman’s corpse was titled with the word “Lego”. “I ask for your understanding that I am not describing the disgusting pornographic content here,” Zieschang continued at the specially convened press conference.
Some of the accused had obtained very good degrees from the police college, and according to the Ministry of the Interior they were about to become civil servants. Now ran against all dismissal procedures, so Zieschang. “This behavior and in particular the content of the chat, which cannot be reconciled with the duty of loyalty to the constitution, will not be tolerated by me, by the entire state police. They contradict our professional ethics and our mission statement.”
However, one is only at the beginning of the processing, in which the police rabbi should also be involved, as well as the contact person for Jewish life in Saxony-Anhalt and experts for intercultural competence.
State police and interior authorities take the incident very seriously, “tough and consistent action must be taken against those affected,” said the domestic policy spokesman for the CDU parliamentary group, Chris Schulenburg. His SPD counterpart, Rüdiger Erben, called for intensive work with police candidates from the very first day of training: “It’s not just about imparting specialist knowledge, but also values.”
The police college in Aschersleben was already in the headlines in 2018, when it was about suspected drug trafficking. Several would-be police officers have been fired.