Wehrmacht Returns? ‘Right Wing Extremism’ Rising Sharply in Germany’s Armed Forces

The head of Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service, Christof Gramm, has reported that the country’s armed forces, known as the Bundeswehr, have seen a sharp rise in 'right wing extremism' - in line with a wider trend in the country. German military intelligence is currently probing hundreds of service members suspected of supporting extremism, with 360 new cases registered in 2019 alone. Gramm stated regarding the Special Forces Command (KSK): “The aim is to remove not only extremists but also people with a lack of constitutional loyalty from the Bundeswehr… We are currently dealing with around 20 suspected cases of right-wing extremism in the KSK alone while at the beginning of 2019, there were half as many.” He further revealed that cases of extremism were five times as common among special forces members. 

Germany’s armed forces have faced considerable issues across the spectrum, from endemic problems with defence production to extremely low availability rates for its weapons systems and prevalence serious abuses including sexual abuse by service members against one another. As Germany moves to drastically increase its defence spending, signs of serious steps to fix these endemic inefficiencies have yet to appear. The country is set to overtake Russia in defence expenditure by the end of the decade, as Moscow has moved to cut spending after a successful modernisation program while Germany is following a general trend among European and Western nations towards larger defence budgets. The German annual defence budget is expected to reach over $70 billion by 2030 - although this may not be reflected in actual combat performance given the history of inefficiencies in major defence programs.