The "Combat Association of German Soldiers" (Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten, KDS) was a militant and revisionist1 neo-Nazi group founded by Erwin Schönborn,2 Eberhard Taubert and others that was involved in the mercenary terrorist organization Aginter Press.3
The Kampfbund emerged in 1975 from the "Frankfurt Circle of German Soldiers" (Frankfurter Kreis Deutscher Soldaten), founded by Schönborn in 1967,4 in order to consolidate its structures. According to Stuart Christie, Aginter Press (1966-1974) had a considerable number of KDS members among its recruits, so had Otto Skorzeny's Paladin group.5 Camouflaged as a press agency with various international bureaus, the Lisbon-based Aginter Press had been set up with the help of the CIA and the Portuguese secret service PIDE.6
The KDS maintained contacts with the "Hoffmann military sports group" (Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann), with the "Citizens' and Peasants' Initiative" of the German holocaust denier Thies Christophersen7 and the "German Citizens' Initiative" (Deutsche Bürgerinitiative) of Manfred Roeder.8 Among the declared goals of the KDS were the "enforcement of German nationalism," the "punishment of all resistance fighters as traitors to the people" and the release of Rudolf Heß.9
History
According to Stuart Christie, the Kampfbund, "founded by Karl Heinz Keuken, Wolfram Langer, Erwin Schonbrun [Schönborn] and Dr. Eberhardt Taubert," had its headquarters in Talstrasse 6, D-6 Frankfurt am Main10 :
The organisation which has a membership of around 1500 of whom two-thirds are under the age of thirty, publishes the monthly Unser Kampf ("Our Struggle") which is wholly controlled by Nazis. Many members of the Paladin Group were recruited from the ranks of the KDS, as were many of the mercenaries who fought in Rhodesia (39 in June, 21 in July and 34 in September 1976). The Rhodesian mercenaries were recruited and trained by Taubert's colleague Major Nicholas Lamprecht.
Christie gives a chilling account of one of the founders, Eberhardt Taubert11 :
Dr. Eberhardt Taubert (died 4 November 1976) joined the Nazi party in 1931—two years before Hitler came to power. Promoted to Sturmfuhrer in [the] legal department during Goebbels' gauleitership of Berlin, he later followed Goebbels to the Ministry of Propaganda where he was assigned the department handling "the struggle against alien ideologies, religious meddling and bolshevism at home and abroad." Dr. Taubert later took charge of "active anti-Jewish propaganda" and was subsequently assigned the "anti-Komintern" bureau which specialised in anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1938 Taubert was appointed Judge with the "Court of Peoples' Justice." He was later made ministerial adviser to Goebbels and headed a 450-strong team of Nazi propaganda specialists in the occupied territories. After the war Taubert went to South Africa and Iran before returning to Germany in 1950, when he was recruited into the special services section of the Gehlen organisation (BND). He was also appointed chairman of the CIA backed "National Association for Peace and Freedom". Under cover of the All-German Ministry, Taubert was an adviser to Franz Josef Strauss, Minister of Defence, and to NATO on "problems of psychological warfare." For over twenty years Taubert was the main source of finance to the neo-Nazi and extreme right groups in Europe, acting as a conduit for money from businesses and foundations such as the Staats und Wirtschaftspolitischen Gesellschaft e.v. in Cologne and Pelugan AG of Frankenthal (in 1977 this company was run by former consul Dr. Fritz Ries, one of the many straw men through whom funds are channelled to Franz Josef Strauss). According to journalist Patrice Chairoff, Taubert was also one of the "respected correspondents" of the Greek KYP through his "World Service" "press agency."
Involvement in Aginter Press
According to Stuart Christie, the KDS formed a considerable part of the mercenary terrorist organization Aginter Press5 :
In the late sixties ... it is estimated that about 60 per cent of Aginter personnel were recruited from the ranks of the OAS, while the remainder were recruited from neo-Nazi organisations in Western Europe such as the Frankfurt based Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten run by another ex-Goebbels man and partner of "[Gerhard Hartmut] von Schubert" in Paladin, Dr. Eberhardt Taubert ...
Aginter, supported by various Western secret services, trained its members in covert action techniques,12 including bombings, silent assassinations, subversion techniques, clandestine communication, infiltration and counter-insurgency, and was involved in the execution of several false-flag terror attacks in Italy. Aginter has also carried out operations against domestic opposition for various right-wing authoritarian governments, including Salazar's Portugal, Francoist Spain and the Greek Regime of the Colonels after the 1967 putsch.
The link between Aginter Press and the KDS is a likely one, given the intimate professional relationship of KDS co-founder Eberhard Taubert with Germany's then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. Financial support for Aginter Press has come from the highest echelon of Germany's center-right Christian Social Union (CSU) at the time. Documents unearthed by the renowned German journalists Egmont Koch and Oliver Schröm during their investigation for a documentary on false-flag attacks in Italy for the public broadcaster ZDF, show close contacts of Aginter Press agents to Marcel Hepp, back then right-hand man of chairman of the CSU, Franz Josef Strauss. One Aginter agent was even in direct contact with Strauss. These documents contain a long list of cover names of ominous German sponsors under the headline “Industry."13 According to Koch and Schröm, Strauss supported his political friends in Spain and Italy repeatedly with cash. His close employee, Dieter Huber, was serving as money courier, but sometimes Strauss handed over the money personally. For his payments up to 100.000 Deutsche Mark, the chairman of the CSU even obtained donation receipts.13
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Holocaust Denial
In Germany itself, the KDS made headlines with its historical revisionist activities. In leaflets, the KDS offered a reward of DM 10,000 for "every properly documented 'gassing' in a 'gas chamber' of a German concentration camp."14
KDS leaflet offering a reward of 10,000 DM for each "perfectly proven gassing in a gas chamber of a German concentration camp."
In Frankfurt am Main and Nuremberg, KDS members distributed leaflets to schools named after Anne Frank, in which Anne Frank's diary was described as a forgery and a "product of Jewish anti-German atrocity propaganda" that was supposed to support "the lie about the six million gassed Jews."2 15
After Operation Entebbe, in which Israeli special forces forcibly put an end to the hijacking of a French plane, the KDS declared the Ugandan security forces killed in the process "as victims of Zionist crimes" as its honorary members.16 In 1977, the KDS founded a "Citizens' Initiative for the Death Penalty and Against Vice and Pornography," which campaigned for the reintroduction of the death penalty in the Federal Republic of Germany.17
Joachim Fiebelkorn
In 1980, the German neo-Nazi Joachim Fiebelkorn, alleged KDS (and Paladin) member, together with "the butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, was involved in a coup in Bolivia that brought General Luis García Meza into power.18 In this so-called "cocaine coup," also the Italian neofascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale, Aginter Press) participated.
According to Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias in The Devil's Agent19 :
In her book, Levy [the wife of "The King of Cocaine," Roberto Suárez Gómez] described the protection and close working relationship her husband established with Joachim Fiebelkorn and the Bridegrooms of Death during the García Meza regime.
According to an Economist obituary, "Fiebelkorn, another right-wing extremist and a veteran of the Spanish foreign legion, created his [Suarez'] private army,"20 and served as head of Suárez bodyguards "to protect him from the rival group of drug traffickers collectively called the Colombians," according to McFarren and Iglesias.21
Fiebelkorn later testified to the West German police that Delle Chiaie had been the preferred middleman between Sicilian mafia and Latin American cocaine producers. More precisely, it was Roberto Suárez Gómez who had the Bolivian cocaine business firmly under control, and it was he who provided the money for the coup. A close relative of Suarez, then Interior Minister Arce Gómez, was number two in the cocaine trade after Suárez, for whom Fiebelkorn had created a private army, for a large part recruited from the terrorist group "Bridegrooms of death" (Los Novios de la Muerte).22
Bridegrooms of Death in 1980. Picture from Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias, The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie (Xlibris, 2013), 346.
- 1Fabian Virchow, Gegen Den Zivilismus: Internationale Beziehungen und Militär in Den Politischen Konzeptionen Der Extremen Rechten (Springer, 2006), 290.
- 2 a b Rolf Henkel, "Anfällige Jugend," Die Zeit, April 21, 1978, https://web.archive.org/web/20151215172239/http://www.zeit.de/1978/17/anfaellige-jugend/komplettansicht.
- 3Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie: Portrait of a black terrorist (Anarchy Magazine, 1984), 39-40, https://libcom.org/files/Stefano-Delle-Chiaie.pdf.
- 4Richard Stöss, Politics against democracy: right-wing extremism in West Germany (New York: Berg, 1991), 177-178, https://archive.org/details/politicsagainstd0000stos/page/176/
- 5 a b Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie, 39-40.
- 6According to an investigative report by the Italian Senate under the direction of senator Giovanni Pellegrino "Aginter Press was in reality, according to the last obtained documents acquired by the criminal investigation, an information centre directly linked to the CIA and the Portuguese secret service [PIDE], that specialized in provocative operations."Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Western Terrorism in Western Europe (Frank Cass, 2004), 115. Ganser references Senato della Repubblica, Commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi: Il terrorismo, le stragi ed il contesto storico politico, Redatta dal presidente della Commissione, Senatore Giovanni Pellegrino, Rome, 1995, pp. 204 & 241.
- 7 "Mit der 'Bauernschaft' nach Helgoland," taz, August 30, 1983, p. 3.
- 8Jürgen Strohmaier, Manfred Roeder: Ein Brandstifter (Gaisreiter Verlag, 1982), 38.
- 9Strohmaier, Manfred Roeder, 22ff.
- 10Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, 39.
- 11Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, 40.
- 12Documents on Aginter Press acquired by the Stragi Commission, published by the Associazione Antimafia Rita Atria, http://www.ritaatria.it/LeStorie/IncidentieStragi/PiazzaFontana.aspx.
- 13 a b "Kennzeichen D: BND-Schmiergeld," documentary by Egmont Koch and Oliver Schröm, ZDF, 16 February 2000.
- 14Wolfgang Benz, Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Organisationen, Institutionen, Bewegungen. Band 5 (de Gruyter 2012), 129ff.
- 15Michael Rindchen, Das Phänomen der Holocaust-Leugnung in den siebziger Jahren sowie in der ersten Hälfte der achtziger Jahre und die Reaktion von Justiz, Öffentlichkeit, und Gesetzgeber (Universität Kaiserslautern, Skript, 1999), 18ff.
- 16"Radikale: Erbe lebt," Der Spiegel, August 29, 1977, https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40749180.html.
- 17Yvonne Hötzel, Debatten um die Todesstrafe in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis 1990 (De Gruyter, 2011), 280.
- 18Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias, The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie (Xlibris, 2013), 354.
- 19McFarren and Iglesias, The Devil's Agent, 332.
- 20"Roberto Suarez Gomez, Bolivia’s King of Cocaine, died on July 20th, aged 68," The Economist, 3 August 2000, https://www.economist.com/news/obituary/28950-roberto-suarez-gomez-bolivias-king-cocaine-died-july-20th-aged-68.
- 21McFarren and Iglesias, The Devil's Agent, 355.
- 22McFarren and Iglesias, The Devil's Agent, 354.