The story sounded fishy from the get-go. The media buzz began with a white man who was said to have claimed asylum as a Syrian refugee in order to receive the generous welfare benefits available in 2015 and beyond. An attention bait, it seemed, because soon later the man was declared a far-right extremist who supposedly plotted an act of terror. “That‘s just a press scam targeted at conservatives, isn’t it? He probably does not even exist.” That’s what I thought. But Franco Albrecht is real. And he sat in custody for seven months. This is his story.
On the 20th January 2017 the young lieutenant of the Jäger Battalion 291 attended the Ball of Military Officers in Vienna (Ball der Offiziere). He found an old French police and military weapon, a pistol of the brand Unique 17, in the bushes outside. The press would later call it a „Wehrmacht pistol“ because it was also carried by German officers during the Nazi occupation of France. Waking up with a hangover the next day he had forgotten about the antique souvenir in his pocket and rushed to the airport. After discovering it again in his coat he tried to stash it in the cleaners‘ closet in the men’s room. One of the cleaners told the police about it and an alarm was attached. When Albrecht returned to collect the gun, he got arrested. This is when the avalanche of madness came crushing down.
His finger prints had already been known even though he had not committed any known previous crimes. But finger prints were used to register the undocumented immigrants in 2015/2016 and Franco Albrecht used to be David Benjamin back then, a Christian refugee from Syria mobbed for his Jewish name. A mock identity.
I explain the arrest and the asylum claim story in the following video.
What followed was a string of home raids and arrests culminating in the claim that Franco Albrecht and a handful of accomplices tried to topple the state with the found vintage gun and blame it on a non-existing Christian refugee to make it look like an Islamist assault. No sane person could say such a sentence with a straight face, but if you work in the mainstream media, you don’t have to be sane. Even the most random scribbles were blown into far-fetched crime plotting allegations. In the following video, I line out the details of the raids, confiscations and accusations.
Of course, our media were not really woke if they had not done their best to paint the man as a Neonazi. As already mentioned, the Wehrmacht pistol was a French model. An old, valuable copper-sketch print on the wall was described as “Landser poster” because “Landser” is an extinct word for a soldier, a word most Germans rather associate with a Neonazi band than with the military. Their most resourceful quarry, however, was his unpublished master thesis attempt that he made for the elite university École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. I detail the provided evidence in the following video.
Franco Albrecht is not an isolated case. He was just the most prominent victim of the crackdown. Following his arrest, reporters of the communist paper “taz” went on a research spree to smear any contact of his for their familiarity with one another. The journalists discovered the Telegram chat group “Südkreuz“ which was frequented by Albrecht. It belonged to the „Hannibal“ network. The administrator André S took his pseudonym from the show “The A Team.” The network formed a prepper milieu drawn from former policemen, soldiers and security workers. Leaked chat protocols led to more home searches and the tight German gun laws, which make the legal procurement of arms next to impossible, resulted in arrests and treason accusations as far-fetched as those against Franco Albrecht. This is explained in more detail in the following video.
The deeper reasons for the paranoia and neuroticism that led to all of this are manifold. The most imminent shift in our elite culture followed the failed coup d’etat in Turkey in 2016. Ursula von der Leyen, who is now President of the EU Commission and who was Germany’s Defence Minister at the time, used Albrecht’s arrest for a bonkers iconoclasm in all military bases across the country. It even extended beyond security circles and saw, for instance, the portrait of former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt removed from a public hall of the University of Hamburg that bears his name. He wore Wehrmacht attire on the picture. The population, however, let it happen because the military skepticism draws from many sources, not only from the dire experience from both World Wars. Among other things (e.g. the leftist pseudo-pacifism) there is an underlying envy of the last remaining superpower which is expressed in habitual anti-military self-righteousness. The dynamics that lead to the jealous anti-Americanism and that are currently most often described with the word “globalism” can be traced from the writings and talks of one of its loudest proponents Thomas P. M. Barnett, the author of “The Pentagon’s New Map.” He argues that the connectivity between people and places were the main if not sole source of prosperity and peace in and of itself and that rules, including the Western framework, our political system that conservatives believe allow freedom to operate, were just arbitrary and can just as well be removed down the road.
The iconoclasm and Bundeswehr witch-hunt Franco Albrecht and others fell victim to is permissible in a culture that has been accustomed to excessive anti-military skepticism for a long time. The German-language Wikipedia entry for the Bundeswehr reflects perfectly its weird presentation of the armed forces as a white-collar office with an attached sports ground. Girls preferred. The constitution expressively commands that no offensive war must be started. And it sounds so nice … until you wonder what modern government ever said it starts a war for fun. Is that the voice of peace or is it just the voice of immaturity? An institutional expression of that anti-military skepticism is a secret service specialised in the surveillance of the ideology of our soldiers, the Military Defence Service (German akronym: MAD, stands for Militärischer Abschirmdienst). In order to surveil reservists they have formed a joint task-force with the civilian thought crime spy agency Verfassungsschutz. Both agencies are an expression of the paranoia that is commonplace among all corrupt elites around the world, but a specialised secret service that looks into the thoughts of security forces are the cream on the cake. The legal foundation for the elite’s fear of the wider public is the Streitbare Demokratie (something like “defensive democracy” or “ready-to-fight democracy”). It is the idea that only Germany alone had ever experienced tyranny and persecution and that Germans must take different measures than Western nations. In the detail it allows to deprive the citizenry of all rights. The elites present themselves as innocent angels and reinterpret history so as to create the impression the now unwilling Nazis were driven by a braying, savage population into their crimes. This in turn is a common popular misreading of Max Weber’s “monopoly on power” or “monopoly on violence”(Gewaltmonopol) idea that describes statehood and is often mistaken for a normative command. In the eyes of our elites control ranks higher than creating trust. The question at this point is: Is the left able or even willing to deescalate? Reflecting on this cultural context, I have video-taped a corresponding talk here.
Goldstein 