By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG
BERLIN — Last month’s truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin has exposed a deep divide within the ruling coalition in Germany over how to protect the public from terror, stoking fears that authorities are ill-prepared to head off another massacre in Europe’s largest country.
At issue is whether the federal government should take control of police and domestic intelligence, functions that have been the purview of regional authorities for decades.
Critics view Germany’s decentralized security architecture — prescribed by the Allies after World War II to prevent a relapse into Nazism — as a relic of the postwar order.
But a proposal this week by Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, to centralize authority for security in Berlin was met with howls of protest, including from his fellow conservatives. Regional leaders vowed to fight any attempt to rob them of control of security in their jurisdictions.
The powerful premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, made it clear he wouldn’t even consider de Maizière’s reform proposals, the core of which would entail disbanding Germany’s 16 regional domestic intelligence offices and creating a Berlin-based central authority.
“I can only say that Bavaria’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution will never be dissolved,” Seehofer told reporters, using the intelligence service’s official name.
German authorities primarily rely on U.S. intelligence to warn them of pending threats.
Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel, whose party governs in a grand coalition with Merkel’s conservatives, was less dismissive but said upending Germany’s federalist structures was unrealistic and would take years. “We have to lay out what we want to do now instead of pursuing a massive bureaucratic restructuring,” he said.
The debate highlights just how fraught the issue has become as the country heads toward a general election in the fall.
In France after the 2015 terror attacks and in the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, politicians quickly reached a consensus on streamlining and tightening security in the name of public safety. Germany, however, is more divided, in part because of its particular history and traditions.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
Many here have pointed to the U.S. reaction to terror, which many critics say encroached civil liberties, as an example of what not to do.
Nonetheless, with the specter of more attacks like the one in Berlin, the public is becoming more inclined to demand tighter security, even if, as polls suggest, it means more surveillance and other measures that were long unthinkable in the privacy-obsessed country.
De Maizière, whose reform ideas are supported by Merkel, warned in a lengthy article published this week that Germany’s current system is ill-suited to the age of terror. He said Germany couldn’t simply “expect others to take care of this for us” and lamented that the country lacks many of the investigative tools and structures that are standard in other parts of the world.
“Given the possibility for crisis and catastrophe in Germany … we must accept that our country has to be better prepared for difficult times than it has been,” he wrote in a full-page essay in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “It is time to strengthen Germany’s ability to respond to crises.”
German authorities primarily rely on U.S. intelligence to warn them of pending threats and German intelligence officials are in constant contact with their U.S. counterparts — an exchange the government credits with helping prevent a number of attacks over the years.
In terms of the Berlin Christmas market attack, the fault lay not with the warnings but rather with inaction and an unwieldy security apparatus.
Anis Amri, the Tunisian asylum seeker police say carried out the assault, was a known threat. Authorities were aware for almost a year that Amri was in contact with members of the so-called Islamic State, that he had researched how to build a pipe bomb online and had volunteered as a suicide bomber.
Though Amri’s case was discussed several times by a special anti-terrorism unit in Berlin, authorities concluded they had no legal justification to detain him.
Amri was placed under surveillance when police suspected he was trying to purchase weapons to mount an assault. But the investigation was suspended after authorities failed to find any evidence.
Though he was slated for deportation, bureaucratic hurdles delayed his expulsion and, without the authorities’ knowledge, he was able to travel from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where he was registered, to Berlin.
During Amri’s more than year-long stay in Germany, numerous regional and federal agencies monitored and investigated him.
Though Amri’s case was discussed several times by a special anti-terrorism unit in Berlin, authorities concluded they had no legal justification to detain him, Ralf Jäger, interior minister for North-Rhine Westphalia, told a committee of the state’s parliament Thursday.
The family of Anis Amri hold his portrait in Oueslatia, Tunisia | Mohamed Messara/AFP via Getty Images
“We need to discuss how we can improve public safety within the parameters of the law,” he said, adding that in Amri’s case authorities tested the legal system’s limits.
Whether a lack of coordination between Germany’s disparate security agencies was what allowed him to slip through the net is unclear. But if that turns out to be the case, it wouldn’t be the first time that terrorists have taken advantage of Germany’s decentralized bureaucracy.
The so-called National Socialist Underground, a neo-Nazi terror cell responsible for a string of immigrant murders across Germany, went undetected for more than a decade as regional authorities failed to share information that could have led to the group’s arrest.
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