Participation in attacks

I: “But you acted upon instructions to do so?”

A: “Yes, right. Personally I didn’t have a problem with this shop. But yes, I liked it.”

(Ri19, pseudo-extremist)

This interviewee was eventually expelled from the “illegal party” because his pattern of violence (solo acts)gradually became incompatible with the rules of the group.

Ad (2):

Organised acts of violence only included planned and deliberate mass rioting (hooliganism), strategically organised damage to property and organised attacks. For instance:

“The explosives made the whole thing more professional, we basically met every weekend.

Either I went down or he came up, [...] met constantly and exercised rather great care in everything we did. Eventually we noticed that we were kept under surveillance quite a lot of time, that we were being followed, so we needed more time in order to give them the slip and would go shopping later, for example, or tinker around.”(Li01, terrorist)

Alternatively, the motivation that Germany and one’s own lot should “be better off again” (Ri08, active extremist) led them to emulate the “terror attracting the media’s attention” (ibid.) of the NSDAP:

“I once lived in a street with asylum seekers’ homes, which I tried to set fire to at regular intervals. Because this is part of the game, and I found it OK. But I also desecrated a Jewish cemetery with them, I mean, I turned over tombstones, so I went on the rampage quite a bit, whenever possible, whatever would attract the media’s attention or so.”(Ri08, active extremist) We must state by way of conclusion that we observed distinctly homogeneous patterns and habits of violence across all groups. In other words: Those groups that excelled in making extreme strategic and organisational efforts did not include any members who committed acts of impulsive violence.

Likewise, groupings of perpetrators of impulsive acts never included individuals with a reflective and strategic mindset. Corroborating Sutherland’s theory of differential association (1968), the group members did not only borrow the techniques relevant for committing “their” type of offence (i.e.

violent offences in this case) but also adopted the motives, proclivities, rationalisations and attitudes of the individual groups, which explains the groups’ homogeneity. There was some sporadic contact between – exclusively right wing oriented – groups, e. g. one of the right wing oriented interviewees categorised as an offender committing acts of impulsive violence was given jobs by his brother, who moved in right wing circles.

We must state first of all that none of the three interviewees had formed concrete plans for an attack prior to procuring or producing explosives; rather, it was the possession of these explosives that caused them to contrive plans for future action. With the exception of one individual (Li01, terrorist), who envisaged producing explosives for terrorist purposes, they were mainly induced by curiosity and a kind of competitive drive to acquire explosives on a whim³⁰.

Case 1 – home-made explosives:

The interviewee’s group started toprofessionaliseright after the first press coverage of their“political actions”, referring primarily to a letter explaining their attitude and political goals:

“I was pretty scared somehow, I remember my parents being on holiday and I was driving around in the car, their car, buying newspapers, always three at a time at the newsstand, and then somehow there were fifteen newspapers in the car and they all wrote about it and I was a trembling a little: Now you’re the one they’re all after. If they find you out you get jailed, and somehow this was as if this was the end of the world, somehow probably.”(Li01, terrorist) The interviewee and his comrade-in-arms apparently tried to conform to the image projected by the media, i.e. the image of professionals posing a serious threat. Eventually it occurred to the interviewee who had been assigned by his group to look after“the technical issues”that“I [could] pry open New Year’s Eve bangers [...] and make a bomb out of them”(ibid.).

After his collaborator had hit on the idea to “obtain firearms and probably injure or kill somebody”

(ibid.) they debated “whether or not you may kill somebody” (ibid.). The interviewee himself evidently held “that one should not kill for a political cause”, his opinion remaining an unresolved conflict between him and his collaborator. The interviewee eventually did produce explosives, and they carried through a series of bomb attacks that were also covered by the media.

“The bomb attacks were always brought up in the newspapers. You got used to this media coverage and it was like getting a mark at school or university, just like that. I guess being in the newspapers was the success, the goal we were after. And we were always keen to see the media’s response. And afraid that someday there’d be a news blackout and we’d probably do something that wouldn’t elicit any response at all. So we kept staring at the media [...], we just considered it a political success to get media coverage.”(Li01, terrorist)

Case 2 – procuring a pipe bomb:

Contact with a chemist helped procure a pipe bomb that, however, was not required in the end:

“We acquired a pipe bomb but didn’t dare to explode it. And it was kept by one of our colleagues in his room, but he was afraid of his mother throwing it down when she cleaned the room as it would detonate on shock or percussion. [...] On the one hand it felt sexy to have something like this, but on the other we didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. When you’d say, and this is the point, where to throw it at, at a school? At this bloody local court where they hear some bloody junkies who trade a few car radios?”(Lu03, active extremist) They later on “disposed of” the acquired pipe bomb:

30We must note, however, that we cannot eliminate the possibility that some individual members of the respective groups may have tried much harder to procure explosives than perceived and reported by the interviewees.

“So we eventually drove to a gravel pit, at freezing temperatures, and detonated it [the pipe bomb; author’s note]. It produced a crater in the frozen ground. So, it was quite a beast. But then we also realised that we had been fairly big-mouthed.”(Lu03, active extremist)

Case 3 – procuring WW2 explosives:

The procurement of explosives from an adjacent country reads like an adventure story:

“... so we partied a bit and one thing led to another, and then he said, and it wasn’t too far away from the border: ‘On the other side there’s a place with umpteen old mines etc. still lying around’. ‘Course I wanted to see that. And [...] the others wanted to see it, too, of course, and so we went there.”(Ri23, terrorist)

“Out of sheer madness”(ibid.) they took with them a bazooka:

“So it contained these 1.5 kilograms [...] of TNT. [...] Again sitting together in the evening, partying and [...] drinking a lot and then: ‘So what we’re gonna do with it?’ And then we had [...] these debates like, well, ‘let’s blow up something’, and this was all still a joke more or less.

Well OK, some of those who said that may not have meant it as a joke at all but really meant it, and the others only thought they were joking at that time. And we didn’t really think about it, [...] gym bag, we took it with us on the train, without thinking about it, [...] come to think of it now, what could have happened theoretically – never gave it the slightest thought, just went off with it.”(ibid.)

As described above, the possession of explosives triggered further strategic deliberations on what to do with them also in the following case:

“... we talked about it but we hadn’t formed any concrete plans, like saying, now OK, let’s do something, or we plan to do something, but it was more like ‘wow, we could do something with it’. I mean, there was no doubt we were going to do something with it, that was obvious, even I myself wanted to do something, blow up a tree in the woods or something like that, like let’s see how powerful the blast is etc., because we never had handled anything like this before.”(Ri23, terrorist)

Although all three interviewees claimed that they had been opposed to planning an attack or killing somebody, only one of them had actually abandoned these plans (case 2). This was due mainly to the comparably candid exchange of views between group members and the opportunity to freely discuss one’s apprehensions and concerns. “Voicing one’s fear of course is a bit like, you know, you’re not fearful” (ibid.). This is how the case 3 interviewee described how his group handled fear. “After all, you’re also a role model [...] for the others [referring to persons not belonging to the inner circle;

author’s note] [...] now if you gain the reputation of being a chicken or something disreputable, too bad really”(ibid.). Like in the other two cases, the group members had been knowing one another for quite a long time, had been “very close” (ibid.), taken “up loans on behalf of the other” (ibid.) and

“devoted themselves to one another”(ibid.); yet the interviewee complained that“the most important thing, i.e. talking between one another and revealing one’s fears and concerns, is something you don’t do” (ibid.). While budding doubts were mentioned within the group, they were not addressed in public:

“They[doubts; author’s note]did arise. And they did exchange their doubts, too – that is, this is what became known afterwards – between one another, however always only between the two of them, but each one would discuss his doubts with somebody else again so that at the end of the

day they did all discuss it with each other only nobody ever really knew it. That was an almost strange feeling afterwards, why we didn’t sit down right away, declaring our doubts.” (Ri23, terrorist)

Opting out was no alternative for the case 1 interviewee, either, due to his excessively strong emotional ties with the collaborator whom he considered a “surrogate brother”³¹ (Li01, terrorist).

Moreover, he felt too much enticed by the power ascribed to him by the media.

It was interesting that the case 1 and case 3 interviewees reported having tried to undermine the further proceedings; this is probably a biographical reconstruction designed to neutralise their feelings of guilt:

“Each time we left the scene after depositing the bomb I hoped that no-one would be injured, that the news would report “no injured”. And I strove to achieve this aim, that there wouldn’t be any injured persons [...], trying to keep the level low. And, relatively speaking, I succeeded in preventing injuries.”(Li01, terrorist)

We can state, by way of summary, that none of the three cases we studied had formed concrete plans to carry out a bomb attack prior to procuring or producing explosives. On the contrary, only the actual possession of explosives sparked off discussions on what to do next with them. The cases we studied did not show a fundamental restructuring of the groups (e. g. members opting out) but revealed that group members instead tended to sabotage their group, e. g. by deliberately taking care of the explosives and depositing them somewhere hard to reach, or by intentionally organising attacks so that nobody would be killed. Even though group dynamics make it considerably more difficult to leave the group at such a delicate moment, we do not assume that this is on principle impossible. Our analysis however tends to indicate that group consensus, while not endorsed by each individual member, is indeed reached and maintained by the group as a whole. We also noticed that clear role constraints and an overall atmosphere not conducive to promoting a change of attitude typically prevailed in those groups that did not abandon their idea of carrying through bomb attacks (cf. Marmet 1999, 34 et seq.).

These groups were extremely cohesive, with a very high degree of groupthink – “A way of thinking that attaches more priority to maintaining cohesion and group solidarity than to a clear-headed assessment of facts” (Aronson et al. 2004, 336 et seq.). Dealing fairly and squarely with one another, not subjecting other group members to self-censorship and encouraging them to voice their individual fears and doubts turned out to be an all-important prerequisite for quitting this process in due time.

Out study clearly showed that strategic and logistics activities quickly became the prime driving force behind all further developments once an attack had been contemplated: Eventually, the only thing that mattered was the – possibly perfect – realisation of the plan, whereas rules of conduct based on ideology or, if applicable, potential disapproval of the plan receded into the background. In the course of events, the process developed its own momentum which was almost impossible to stop, not least thanks to the atmosphere prevailing within the groups.

31His biological brother had died when the interviewee was about 15 years old.

4.2.3 Life “hereafter” – motives for renouncing the ideology and terminating the