CALW, Germany -- Cases of far-right extremists in the German military and police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nation's top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront an issue that has become too dangerous to ignore.
For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of "individual cases." The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles with no real investigation.
The problem has deepened with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which legitimized a far-right ideology that used the arrival of more than 1 million migrants in 2015 -- and more recently the coronavirus pandemic -- to engender a sense of impending crisis.
Most concerning to authorities is that the extremists appear to be concentrated in the military unit that is supposed to be the most elite and dedicated to the German state, the special forces, known by their German acronym, the KSK.
Last week, Germany's defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, took the drastic step of disbanding a fighting company in the KSK considered infested with extremists.
Germany's military counterintelligence agency is now investigating more than 600 soldiers regarding far-right extremism, out of 184,000 in the military. About 20 of them are in the KSK, a proportion five times higher than in other units.
But German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well. Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.
Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has identified far-right extremism and terrorism as the "biggest danger to German democracy today."
In interviews conducted over the course of the year, military and intelligence officials as well as avowed far-right members themselves described nationwide networks of current and former soldiers and police officers with ties to the far-right.
In many cases, soldiers have used the networks to prepare for when they predict Germany's democratic order will collapse. They call it Day X. Officials worry it is really a pretext for inciting terrorist acts, or worse, a violent attempt to overthrow the government.
"If the very people who are meant to protect our democracy are plotting against it, we have a big problem," said Stephan Kramer, president of the domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia. "How do you find them? What we are dealing with is an enemy within."
The KSK are Germany's answer to the U.S. Navy's SEALs. But these days their commander, Gen. Markus Kreitmayr, who has done tours in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, is a man divided between his loyalty to them and recognizing that he has a serious problem on his hands.
"I can't explain why there are allegedly so many cases of 'far-right extremism' in the military," he said. The KSK is "clearly more affected than others; that appears to be a fact."
Officials talk of a perceptible shift "in values" among new recruits. In conversations, the soldiers themselves said that if there was a tipping point in the unit, it came with the migrant crisis of 2015.
As hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers from Syria and Afghanistan were making their way to Germany, the mood on the base was anxious, they recalled.
"We are soldiers who are charged with defending this country, and then they just opened the borders -- no control," one officer recalled. "We were at the limit."
It was in this atmosphere that a 30-year-old KSK soldier, Andre Schmitt from Halle in eastern Germany, set up a Telegram chat network for soldiers, police officers and others united in their belief that the migrants would destroy the country.
Soon the chats morphed from a platform for sharing information to one dedicated to preparing for Day X. He portrayed a Europe under threat from gangs, Islamists and anti-fascists. He called them "enemy troops on our ground."
Schmitt denies ever planning to bring about Day X, but he is still convinced that it will come, maybe sooner rather than later with the pandemic.
"We know, thanks to our sources in the banks and in the intelligence services, that at the latest, by the end of September, the big economic crash will come," he said. "There will be insolvencies and mass unemployment. People will take to the street."