THE German Defence Minister, Mr Volker Ruehe, started disciplinary procedures against senior army officers yesterday following revelations that a convicted neoNazi terrorist lectured officers at a military academy.
However, Mr Ruehe rejected opposition calls for his own resignation and insisted there was no evidence of extreme right-wing sympathies at senior levels of the Bundeswehr.
The news magazine Der Spiegel for organising bomb attacks on hostels for asylum-seekers and foreign workers in which two Vietnamese immigrants were killed, but was freed in 1990.
He remains under surveillance by the German intelligence services on account of his involvement in organisations with links to ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union. One of these groups, of which Mr Roeder is vice-president, helps ethnic Germans to move from eastern Russia to the region around Kaliningrad, formerly part of the German region of East Prussia.
Mr Roeder's talk to the military academy was about the resettlement of ethnic Germans near Kaliningrad, previously known as Koenigsberg. Mr Ruehe insisted yesterday that the officers who invited Mr Roeder knew nothing of his political background.
Prosecutors are expected to announce shortly whether they will charge a group of Bundeswehr soldiers who were videoed simulating rape and murder during training.
The video, recorded at a Bundeswehr training camp in the southern town of Hammelburg, shows one group of soldiers pretending to rape and execute another group dressed as civilians. All the recruits involved were preparing for deployment as part of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia.
Five soldiers were convicted earlier this year of rampaging through the northern town of Detmold, at tacking foreigners with baseball bats and shouting racist slogans. In 1994, members of an elite guards battalion were accused of routinely making Nazi remarks, including calls for Jews to be gassed.
The scandals are a major setback for the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, and his efforts to persuade Germans to abandon their reluctance to send troops abroad and to present the Bundes wehr as a normal, modern army.
Dr Kohl pushed through changes to the constitution to allow German troops to take part in missions outside the NATO area and participation in the peace-keeping force in Bosnia has been seen as an important test of the army's maturity.
