A Far-Right Terrorism Suspect With a Refugee Disguise: The Tale of Franco A.

OFFENBACH, Germany — On the peak of Europe’s migrant disaster, a bearded man in sweatpants walked right into a police station. His pockets had been empty aside from an outdated cellphone and some international cash.

In damaged English, he introduced himself as a Syrian refugee. He mentioned he had crossed half the continent by foot and misplaced his papers alongside the best way. The officers photographed and fingerprinted him. Over the following yr, he would get shelter and an asylum listening to, and would qualify for month-to-month advantages.

His identify, he provided, was David Benjamin.

In actuality, he was a lieutenant within the German Military. He had darkened his face and fingers together with his mom’s make-up and utilized shoe shine to his beard. As a substitute of strolling throughout Europe, he had walked 10 minutes from his childhood residence within the western metropolis of Offenbach.

The ruse, prosecutors say, was a part of a far-right plot to hold out one or a number of assassinations that could possibly be blamed on his refugee alter ego and set off sufficient civil unrest to carry down the Federal Republic of Germany.

The officer, Franco A., as his identify is rendered in court docket paperwork consistent with German privateness legal guidelines, denies this. He says he was making an attempt to show flaws within the asylum system. However his elaborate double life, which lasted 16 months, unraveled solely after the police caught him making an attempt to gather a loaded handgun he had hidden in an airport toilet in Vienna.

“That was actually a stunning second,” mentioned Aydan Ozoguz, a lawmaker who was commissioner for refugees and integration on the time. “The asylum system ought to determine cheaters, little doubt. However the greater story is: How may somebody like this be a soldier in Germany?”

The arrest of Franco A. in April 2017 shocked Germany. Since then his case has principally slipped off the radar however that’s more likely to change when he goes to trial early subsequent yr.

When he does, Germany will go on trial with him — not just for the executive failure that allowed a German officer who didn’t converse Arabic to go himself off as a refugee for therefore lengthy, but in addition for its longstanding complacency in combating far-right extremism.

Franco A.’s case spawned a sprawling investigation that led the German authorities right into a labyrinth of subterranean extremist networks in any respect ranges of the nation’s safety companies — a risk that, they acknowledged solely this yr, was far more extensive than that they had ever imagined.

One group, run by a former soldier and police sniper in northern Germany, hoarded weapons, kept enemy lists and ordered body bags. One other, run by a special-forces soldier code-named Hannibal, put the spotlight on the KSK, Germany’s most elite drive. This summer time, after explosives and SS memorabilia had been discovered on the property of a sergeant main, a complete KSK unit was disbanded.

I interviewed many members of those networks over the previous yr, Franco A. included. However the story of his double life and evolution — from what superiors noticed as a promising officer to what prosecutors describe as a would-be terrorist — is in some ways the story of immediately’s two Germanys.

One was born of its defeat in World Battle II and reared by a liberal consensus that for many years rejected nationalism and schooled its residents in contrition. That Germany is giving technique to a extra unsettled nation as its wartime historical past recedes and a long-dormant far proper rousts itself in opposition to a diversifying society. Germany’s postwar consensus teeters within the steadiness.

Once I first met Franco A. greater than a yr in the past at a restaurant in Berlin, he got here geared up with paperwork, a few of them notes, others extracts from the police file towards him. He appeared assured then. A Frankfurt court docket had thrown out his terrorism case for lack of proof.

However a number of months later, the Supreme Court docket restored the case after prosecutors appealed. Franco A. referred to as me on my cellphone. He was shaken. If convicted, he faces as much as 10 years in jail.

At the same time as his trial was pending, he agreed to a sequence of unique recorded interviews and invited me and two New York Instances audio producers to his childhood residence, the place he nonetheless lives, to debate his life, his views and features of his case. I went again a number of instances over the following yr, most just lately the week earlier than Christmas.

Typically he’d present us movies of himself in refugee disguise. As soon as, he led us down a creaky stairwell, via a safe-like steel door, into his “prepper” cellar, the place he had stashed ammunition and a duplicate of Hitler’s Mein Kampf earlier than they had been confiscated by the police.

Franco A. denies any terrorist conspiracy. He says he had posed as a refugee to blow the whistle on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s resolution to permit greater than one million refugees to enter Germany, which he thought-about a risk to nationwide safety and id. The system was so overwhelmed that anybody may are available, he mentioned.

If something, he insisted that he was upholding the Structure, not undermining it. He by no means deliberate to do something violent — and he didn’t, he mentioned. “If I had wished it, why wouldn’t I’ve accomplished it?” he would inform me later.

Prosecutors wouldn’t converse on the file, however their accusations are outlined within the Supreme Court docket resolution. They level to the loaded gun Franco A. had hidden on the Vienna airport, to an assault rifle they are saying he stored illegally and to a visit to the parking storage of a presumed goal.

Then there are the quite a few voice memos and diaries Franco A. stored over a few years that they’ve used as a street map for his prosecution. I’ve learn these transcripts in police reviews and proof recordsdata.

In them, he praises Hitler, questions Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, indulges in international Jewish conspiracies, argues that immigration has destroyed Germany’s ethnic purity, hails President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a task mannequin and advocates destroying the state.

Franco A., now 31, says these are non-public ideas that can’t be prosecuted. Essentially the most excessive views in his recording are little doubt shared by neo-Nazis and are common in far-right circles. However his baseline grievances over immigration and nationwide id have change into more and more widespread within the Germany of immediately, in addition to in a lot of Europe and the US.

In his technology, which got here of age after 9/11, through the wars that sprang from it and in an period of worldwide financial disaster, the mistrust of presidency, far-right messaging and the embrace of conspiracy theories not solely entered pockets of the safety companies. In addition they entered the mainstream.

“Far-right extremist messages have shifted more and more into the center of society,” Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the home intelligence company, the Workplace for the Safety of the Structure, informed me in an interview.

They’ll even be heard within the halls of Parliament, the place the far-right Various for Germany, or AfD, leads the opposition.

Mr. Haldenwang’s company considers the AfD so harmful that it could place your entire get together beneath commentary as early as January — even because the AfD, like Franco A., claims to be the Structure’s true defender. Such is the tug of struggle over Germany’s democracy.

Over the time I’ve interviewed Franco A., senior protection officers have gone from humoring my queries about extremist networks to publicly sounding the alarm. It was March 2019 after I first requested a protection ministry official what number of far-right extremists had been recognized within the army.

“4,” he mentioned.

4?

Sure, 4. “We don’t see any networks,” he mentioned.

Till this yr, the German authorities had turned a blind eye to the issue. Franco A.’s superiors promoted him even after he detailed his views in a grasp’s thesis. He turned a member of extremist networks containing dozens of troopers and law enforcement officials. And he spoke publicly no less than as soon as at a far-right occasion that was on the radar of the safety companies.

However none of that tripped him up the best way a janitor on the Vienna airport would.

An Obscure Plot

It was the janitor who discovered the gun.

Black, compact and loaded with six bullets, it was hidden inside a upkeep shaft in a disabled restroom within the Vienna airport.

The Austrian officers had by no means seen a gun prefer it: a 7.65-caliber Distinctive 17 made by a now defunct French gun-maker a while from 1928 to 1944. It turned out to be a pistol of selection for German officers through the Nazi occupation of France.

To search out out who had hidden it, the police set an digital lure. Two weeks later, on Feb. three, 2017, they received their man.

Inside minutes of Franco A. making an attempt to pry open the door to the wall shaft utilizing the flat finish of a tube of hair gel, a dozen law enforcement officials swarmed exterior the restroom door, weapons on the prepared.

Two officers in civilian garments walked in and requested him what he was doing.

“I mentioned, ‘Sure, I hid a weapon right here,” Franco A. recalled. He mentioned he had come to retrieve it and take it to the police.

“And I believe somebody began laughing,” he mentioned.

The story he informed the Austrian police that evening as he was questioned was so implausible that he hesitated to retell it after we met. However in the long run he did.

It was ball season in Vienna. He had been there two weeks earlier for the annual Officer’s Ball, his story went. Barhopping together with his girlfriend and fellow troopers, he had discovered the gun whereas relieving himself in a bush. He put it into his coat pocket — solely to recollect it within the safety line on the airport. He hid it to keep away from lacking his flight after which determined to return at hand it in to the police.

“I really feel so ridiculous by telling this,” he informed us. “I do know nobody believes it.’’

Franco A. was launched that evening. However officers stored his telephone and a USB stick that they had present in his backpack. They took his fingerprints and despatched them to the German police for verification.

The match that got here again weeks later startled officers who thought they had been doing a routine examine on Franco’s id. He had two.

His ID had mentioned that he was a German officer primarily based with the Franco-German brigade in Illkirch, close to Strasbourg. However his fingerprints belonged to a migrant registered close to Munich.

Investigators had been alarmed. Had Franco A. stashed the gun to commit an assault later?

He was caught the evening of the annual fraternity ball, hosted by Austria’s far-right Freedom Occasion, which tended to draw militant counter-demonstrators. One idea was that Franco A. had deliberate to shoot somebody that evening whereas pretending to be a leftist.

As soon as the German authorities took over the investigation, they discovered two paperwork on his UBS stick: the “Mujahedeen Explosives Handbook” and “Complete Resistance,” a Chilly Battle-era information for city guerrilla warfare.

His cellphone led them to a sprawling community of far-right Telegram discussion groups populated by dozens of troopers, law enforcement officials and others getting ready for the collapse of the social order, what they referred to as Day X.

It additionally contained hours of audio memos through which Franco A. had recorded his ideas over a number of years.

On April 26, 2017, in the course of a army coaching train in a Bavarian forest, Franco A. was arrested once more. Ten federal law enforcement officials escorted him away. Ninety others had been conducting simultaneous raids in Germany, Austria and France.

In a sequence of raids, the police discovered over 1,000 rounds of ammunition. In addition they found scores of handwritten notes and a diary. Once they began studying, they started to find a person who had harbored radical ideas from the time he was a teen.

In our interviews with Franco A., he went again additional in time, recounting his childhood and a household historical past that grafts nearly completely onto Germany’s personal.

Echoes of Historical past

Franco A. was 12 or 13 when he purchased his first German flag, he mentioned. It was a small tabletop banner he picked up in a memento store throughout a household vacation in Bavaria.

The acquisition can be innocuous in some other nation. In postwar Germany, the place nationwide satisfaction had lengthy been a taboo due to the nation’s Nazi previous, it was a small act of rise up.

“Germany has all the time been essential to me,” Franco A. mentioned as he confirmed us images of his childhood bed room, the flag within the foreground.

He didn’t see many German flags rising up in his working-class neighborhood, which was residence to successive waves of visitor staff from southern Europe and Turkey who helped rebuild postwar Germany, and who reworked its society as properly.

Franco A.’s mom, a soft-spoken girl who lives upstairs from him, recalled having solely a handful of youngsters with a migrant background in her class as a pupil within the 1960s.

By the point Franco A. went to high school, she mentioned, kids with two German dad and mom had been within the minority.

Franco A.’s personal father was an Italian visitor employee who deserted the household when he was a toddler. He refers to him solely as his “producer.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s my father,” he mentioned.

In one in every of his audio memos, from January 2016, Franco A. would later describe the visitor employee program as a deliberate technique to dilute German ethnicity. He himself, he mentioned, was “a product of this perverse racial hatred.’’

He informed me that his grandfather was born in 1919, the yr of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which sealed Germany’s defeat in World Battle I.

The treaty gave rise to the “stab within the again” legend — that Germany had received the struggle however was betrayed by a conspiracy of leftists and Jews within the governing elite.

The propaganda helped gasoline anti-democratic cells within the army that hoarded arms, plotted coups and ultimately supported the rise of Nazism — a lot the identical issues prosecutors accuse Franco A. of immediately.

He mentioned his grandparents usually cared for him, serving him soup after college and telling him tales in regards to the struggle. His grandfather regaled him about his adventures within the Hitler youth. The copy of Mein Kampf that the police confiscated as soon as belonged to him.

He mentioned his grandmother was 20 when she and her sister fled the advance of the Pink Military in what’s now Poland. She informed the boy a narrative of how their wood cart had damaged down, forcing them to relaxation in a discipline exterior Dresden.

That evening, she mentioned, the sisters watched the town burn in a devastating bathe of bombs that killed as many as 25,000 civilians and has since change into a symbolic grievance of the far proper.

Years later, Franco A. would file himself enacting a fictional dialog through which he raises the “bomb terror in Dresden” and asks whether or not Jews had the appropriate to count on Germans to really feel responsible endlessly.

His lecturers inspired him to problem authority and suppose for himself. They got here of age through the 1968 pupil motion and sought to transmit the liberal values that sprang from it — a mistrust of nationalism and atonement for the struggle.

None of his lecturers that I spoke to detected any early hints of extremism however slightly recalled loving his contrarian and inquisitive nature.

What they didn’t know was that round that point he had entered a boundless world of on-line conspiracy theories that may affect him for years to come back. These views started to take form — within the privateness of his teenage diary.

Franco A. described the entries as experimenting with concepts, not proof of a hardened ideology or any intention. They included musings on the methods he may change the course of German historical past.

“One can be to change into a soldier and acquire an influential place within the army so I can change into the top of the German armed forces,” he wrote in January 2007. “Then a army coup would observe.”

Unheeded Warnings

In 2008, simply as Lehman Brothers imploded and the world descended into the most important monetary disaster because the Nice Despair, Franco A. joined the military. He was 19.

Very quickly, he was chosen as one in every of solely a handful of German officer cadets to attend the celebrated Saint-Cyr army academy in France, based in 1802 by Napoleon.

His 5 years overseas included semesters at Sciences Po in Paris and King’s School London in addition to at Sandhurst, one of many British Military’s premier officer coaching faculties, and a summer time session on the College of Cambridge.

In 2013, he wrote a grasp’s thesis, “Political Change and Technique of Subversion.”

Over 169 pages, Franco A. argued that the downfall of nice civilizations had all the time been immigration and the dilution of racial purity led to by subversive minorities. Europe and the West had been subsequent in line if they didn’t defend themselves, he mentioned.

Ethnically various societies had been unstable, he wrote, and nations that enable migration had been committing a type of “genocide.”

His remaining part posits that the Previous Testomony was the muse of all subversion, a blueprint for Jews to realize international dominance. It is likely to be, he mentioned, “the most important conspiracy within the historical past of humanity.”

The French commander of the army academy was aghast. He instantly flagged it to Franco A.’s German superiors.

“If this was a French participant on the course, we might take away him,” the commander informed them on the time, in accordance with German information media reviews.

The German army commissioned a historian, Jörg Echternkamp, to evaluate the thesis. After simply three days, he concluded that it was “a radical nationalist, racist enchantment.”

But it surely was additionally mixed with “an insecurity because of globalization’’ that made it socially extra acceptable, he mentioned — and due to this fact “harmful.”

However Franco A. was not faraway from service. Nor was he reported to Germany’s army counterintelligence company, whose remit is to observe extremism within the armed forces.

As a substitute, on Jan. 22, 2014, he was summoned to a department workplace of the German army in Fontainebleau, close to Paris.

An officer from the army’s inner disciplinary unit informed him that his thesis was “not appropriate” with Germany’s values, in accordance with the minutes.

Franco A. defended himself by saying that because the No. 2 pupil in his yr he had felt strain to create one thing “excellent” and had gotten carried away.

“I remoted myself fully on this newly created world of ideas and not checked out it from the skin,” Franco A. informed the interviewer.

After three hours of questioning, the senior officer concluded that Franco A. “had change into a sufferer of his personal mental talents.”

He was reprimanded and requested to submit a brand new thesis.

When Franco A. returned to Germany later in 2014, it was as if nothing had occurred. His superior in Dresden described him as a mannequin German soldier — “a citizen in uniform.”

In November 2015, he obtained one other glowing report, noting how he’d been positioned accountable for ammunition, a duty he fulfilled with “a lot pleasure and vitality.”

Prepping for Motion?

Prominently displayed on Franco A.’s bookshelf is “The Magic Eye,” a quantity containing colourful photos that, if stared at lengthy sufficient, give technique to totally completely different ones.

Franco A. is like that. All through our interviews, he forged himself as a peace-loving crucial thinker who had change into a sufferer of a political local weather through which dissent was punished. However information and interviews with investigators and different folks conversant in his case portrayed a really completely different particular person.

After he returned from France, Franco A. gravitated towards troopers who shared his views. Because it turned out, they weren’t arduous to seek out.

A fellow officer and good friend launched him to a national on-line chat community of dozens of troopers and law enforcement officials involved about immigration.

The officer who had arrange the community served in Germany’s elite particular forces, the KSK, primarily based in Calw, and glided by the identify of Hannibal.

Hannibal additionally ran a company referred to as Uniter, which provided paramilitary coaching. It has since been put beneath surveillance by the home intelligence service.

Franco A. attended no less than two Uniter conferences. Badges of the group had been discovered amongst his belongings. He was “often called clever” on the KSK base, police interviews counsel. “A number of troopers knew him,” one soldier mentioned in a witness assertion.

Most of the chat members had been “preppers” anticipating what they believed can be the collapse of Germany’s social order.

Franco A. himself started stockpiling a “prepper” cellar with meals rations and different provides. He additionally started acquiring weapons and ammunition illegally, prosecutors say.

Russia had just lately invaded Ukraine. A febrile interval of Islamist terrorism had simply begun in Europe.

In August, Ms. Merkel welcomed lots of of 1000’s of principally Muslim asylum seekers from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The specter of struggle or civil unrest inside Germany felt actual, Franco A. recalled.

At this level, prosecutors say, he started considering violence. The battle of the state towards terrorism was a “battle towards us,” he mentioned, in accordance with the indictment towards him.

However the “reward of reality” must be “well-packaged.” To steer folks to it, a “set off occasion” was obligatory.

That was when he began his seek for numerous attainable triggers, or targets, prosecutors say.

He denies this. However on the finish of his Christmas break in 2015 — 10 days earlier than he would take up his first task within the Franco-German brigade close to Strasbourg — he donned his refugee disguise.

The Phony Refugee

As he sat ready on the police station for his first interview as David Benjamin, his refugee alter ego, Franco A. studied a world map on the other wall. He was making an attempt to determine whether or not Damascus or Aleppo would make a extra credible birthplace.

Over time, he would invent a sprawling household historical past. Fluent in French after his army coaching in France, he informed his interviewers that he was a Syrian Christian of French descent.

He mentioned he had attended a French highschool after which labored as a fruit farmer in Tel al-Hassel, a small village exterior Aleppo.

“I attempted to be ready the most effective I may,” Franco A. recalled. “However in the long run, it was not obligatory in any respect.”

He mentioned his story was by no means questioned by the German authorities, overwhelmed on the time. Two days after exhibiting up on the police station, he registered as an asylum seeker and was then bused to a sequence of non permanent group shelters.

Finally he was assigned to a small residence in Baustarring, a Bavarian hamlet 250 miles west of his military base.

Franco A. filmed a number of movies of his shelters on his cellphone digicam. He was clearly unconvinced of how needy the asylum seekers had been. Most of the Syrians, particularly, had fled previously middle-class lives in cities destroyed by combating. They seemed “extra like vacationers” than refugees, he mentioned.

“I made a decision to take a foul phone, as a result of I didn’t wish to stand out with phone,” he mentioned. “In the long run, I had the worst.”

The system was overly beneficiant and conspicuously forgiving, he mentioned. At the same time as he turned down job provides, he continued to obtain his month-to-month stipend. He confirmed up on the shelter maybe as soon as a month, and missed two dates in a row.

In Franco A.’s view, Ms. Merkel’s authorities had helped create its personal humanitarian disaster by becoming a member of wars within the Center East. It was like a case examine from his disgraced grasp’s thesis materializing earlier than his eyes.

“Thousands and thousands of individuals got here from a destabilized area that in my eyes may have been stored steady,” he mentioned.

The Moroccan interpreter in his asylum listening to later testified that she had doubts he spoke Arabic. However due to his Jewish-sounding identify she didn’t dare converse up. As a Muslim, she nervous about sounding anti-Semitic.

Franco A. was in the end granted “subsidiary safety,” a standing that permits asylum seekers with no id papers to remain and work in Germany.

Parallel to his refugee life, his fame in far-right circles grew. Franco A. mentioned he attended debating occasions in bars. After one such occasion, he was invited to talk.

On Dec. 15, 2016, he mentioned, he spoke on the “Prussian Night,” an occasion organized at Lodge Regent in Munich by a writer run by a Holocaust denier. His subject that evening: “German conservatives — diaspora in their very own nation.”

All through that yr, his voice memos sounded more and more pressing. Those that dared to voice dissent had all the time been murdered, he mentioned in a single from January 2016, three weeks after registering as a refugee. “Let’s not hesitate, to not homicide however to kill,” he mentioned.

“I do know you’ll homicide me,” he added. “I’ll homicide you first.”

A Potential Goal

Franco A. had been dwelling his double life for nearly seven months when, in the summertime of 2016, he traveled to Berlin, prosecutors say.

On a aspect road close to the Jewish quarter, he went to take 4 images of automotive license plates in a personal underground parking storage, they are saying. Investigators later retrieved the photographs from his cellphone.

The constructing housed the places of work of the Amadeu Antonio Basis, a company based and run by Anetta Kahane, a outstanding Jewish activist. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has been the goal of far-right hatred for many years.

Judging from notes they confiscated, prosecutors consider that Ms. Kahane, now 66, was one in every of a number of outstanding targets Franco A. had recognized for his or her pro-refugee positions.

Others included Overseas Minister Heiko Maas, who was justice minister on the time, and Claudia Roth, a Inexperienced lawmaker who was then Parliament’s vice chairman.

Ms. Kahane’s identify seems no less than twice within the notes, as soon as on the finish of a bullet-pointed listing of seemingly mundane gadgets reminiscent of “fridge” and a reminder to name the financial institution the place his refugee alter ego had an account. Franco A. confirmed them to me. He mentioned it was an atypical to-do listing.

On one web page, he famous Ms. Kahane’s background, age and work deal with. He additionally drew an in depth map of the situation of her parking storage. On the identical piece of paper, he wrote: “We’re at a degree the place we can not but act like we wish to.”

Earlier than the journey to Berlin and within the days after, prosecutors say, Franco purchased a mounting rail for a telescopic sight and components for a handgun, and was seen at a capturing vary making an attempt out the equipment with an assault rifle.

He additionally traveled to Paris, the place he met the top of a pro-Putin Russian suppose tank with hyperlinks to France’s far proper and is believed to have purchased the French handgun that was later present in Vienna.

In all, prosecutors say there’s “possible trigger” that Franco A. was getting ready a killing.

Franco A. disputes nearly each a part of the accusations. None of what the prosecutors say quantities to an intention to hurt Ms. Kahane, he mentioned.

“There are footage on my telephone, however then this doesn’t show I used to be there,” he mentioned throughout a tense six-hour interview one evening.

“I can’t speak about this in any respect,” he mentioned, citing his upcoming trial. However then he did anyway, in “hypothetical phrases.”

If he had gone, it could have been to have a dialog, Franco A. mentioned. He would have rung the bell however discovered that Ms. Kahane was not there. Then he may need gone to the parking storage, considering, “OK, possibly you could find out one thing out in regards to the automotive.”

“After which you possibly can possibly discover, via no matter fortunate circumstance, discover this particular person,” he mentioned.

Even when he had deliberate to kill Ms. Kahane — which he asserted was “undoubtedly” not true — and even when he had visited the storage, “at worst it could be the preparation of an assassination” and never terrorism, he argued.

How does this endanger the state? he requested. “This particular person’s not even a politician.”

I visited Ms. Kahane to ask what she thought. The day we met, one other neo-Nazi risk had simply landed in her e mail field. She will get them on a regular basis.

“We are going to lower a swastika into your face with a really sharp ax,” the message learn. “Then we are going to lower your backbone and depart you to die in a aspect road.”

However scarier nearly than the threats, she mentioned, was the naïveté of the German authorities.

She recalled the day the police got here to inform her that they had caught a neo-Nazi soldier who deliberate to kill her. They had been referring to Franco A. and two of his associates.

She had laughed and mentioned, “So you bought all of them, all three of them?”

“They all the time suppose it’s only one or two or three Nazis,” she mentioned.

Whose Structure?

There’s a provision within the German Structure, Article 20.four, that permits for resistance. Conceived with Hitler’s 1933 enabling act in thoughts, through which he abolished democracy after being elected, it empowers residents to take motion when democracy is in danger.

It’s common amongst far-right extremists who denounce Ms. Merkel’s administration as anti-constitutional. That Structure has satisfaction of place in Franco A’s library. He quotes from it usually.

The week earlier than Christmas, I went to see him yet one more time.

He was upset that I had transcripts of his voice memos. I challenged him on a few of the issues he had mentioned — for instance, that Hitler was “above the whole lot.”

How may he clarify that?

He had meant it in an ironic means, he mentioned, and performed that part of the recording for me. The tone is informal and banter-like, two voices chuckle.

However it’s not apparent that it’s all a joke.

I requested him about one other recording, from January 2016.

Anybody who contributes to destroying the state was doing one thing good, Franco A. had mentioned. Legal guidelines had been null and void.

How may he say that and say he defends the Structure, too?

There was a protracted silence. Franco A. checked out his personal transcript. He leafed via his lawyer’s notes. However he didn’t have a solution.

Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Kaitlin Roberts and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.