Army hit by abuse scandal

German Defense Minister said cases of mistreatment did not amount to torture

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26. November 2004 By Aaron Kirchfeld

Twenty noncommissioned officers and one captain of the German army are being investigated for using violent training tactics that included electric shocks, physical abuse and psychological intimidation on around 80 recruits between June and September.
Spiegel newsmagazine reported Monday that in four instances on the training grounds in Coesfeld, a small town in northern Germany, the officers dressed themselves up as Arabs, ambushed the recruits during a night march, bound and hooded them and then transported them in trucks to a basement in the barracks.
There the recruits were forced to kneel against the wall, where they were roughed up and drenched with cold water. At least two of the victims received electric shocks in the throat, groin and stomach area from a loud-speaker cable, according to Spiegel.
On Wednesday, a 26-year-old noncommissioned officer admitted to administering electric shocks. “He regrets what he did,“ the client's lawyer said to mass-circulation Bild. On Thursday, one of the recruits told the newspaper “the worse thing was the humiliation and helplessness.“ All 20 noncommissioned officers and the captain have been suspended. They face charges of “mistreatment“ and “degrading treatment of subordinates.“ Both offenses carry a maximum of five years in jail.
Army officials said this type of combat preparation, presumably for intervention in Muslim regions, is not part of basic training. They also said they considered it an isolated incident. But Helmuth Prieß, the spokesman for a military watchdog group for soldiers, said he believes it is just the tip of the iceberg. “There's a system where soldiers just keep their heads down and usually keep their mouths shut,“ Prieß told dpa news agency on Tuesday.
The abuse first came to light when an army lawyer overheard a soldier telling fellow colleagues about the training methods over coffee. She looked into the case and a few weeks later passed the information on to army officials. They put together a comprehensive report and handed it over to the public prosecutor's office, which began its investigation on Oct. 27. The army claims it made the case public on Nov. 11, but that it only caught the public's attention when the Spiegel ran the story last Monday.
The public prosecutor's office in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, is focusing its investigations on five noncommissioned officers. The inquiry could take months. Senior Prosecutor Wolfgang Schweer called the training tactics “way over the limit“ and “intolerable.“ But he criticized the media's treatment of the events: “I consider the use of the term “torture“ for this to be an utter exaggeration.“
Investigators said there was reason to believe that the assailants had taken photographs and filmed the mistreatment and police confiscated computers and CD-ROMs. Spiegel also reported that recruits had been warned that they could be confronted with a “terrorist situation“ sometime during training. They were also told that if they could not bear the situation, they could say a codeword and, at the cost of their honor, be released from the exercise, Spiegel said.
Struck and a number of politicians expressed shock that abusive training tactics had not come to light earlier. “What disturbs me most is that those who were apparently subject to physical violence, namely the recruits, did not immediately speak out,“ Reinhold Robbe, chairman of the defense committee in the Bundestag parliament, said in a television interview with public station ZDF. Struck, who appeared before this committee on Wednesday to discuss the abuse, said those found guilty “would never put on a Bundeswehr uniform again.“
In its story on Monday, Spiegel newsmagazine said the recruits had “apparently been maltreated in similar ways“ as Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. And on Monday, the Süddeutsche newspaper titled its editorial “Abu Coesfeld,“ in reference to the town of 36,000 in North Rhine-Westphalia where the military base is located.
Struck said the officers used “intolerable training methods“ but that they did not involve “torture in the sense that prisoners were forced to divulge information.“
This is not the first time this year that the Defense Minister has been confronted with the issue of torture. In May, he reprimanded Michael Wolffsohn, a history professor at a military university in Munich, for saying in a television interview that torture was sometimes a legitimate tool in the war on terror. Wolffsohn was asked about his opinion because of the shocking events in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. Immediately afterward, Struck said, “German soldiers do not torture.“

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