The 28-year-old first lieutenant, who had falsely registered as a Syrian refugee, was arrested in Bavaria last Wednesday on suspicion of planning a gun attack which he meant to blame on his alter-ego – a fictitious Damascus fruit seller.
The scandal widened after news magazine Der Spiegel reported that although the suspect expressed far-right views in a 2014 academic paper, no action was taken against him.
The military intelligence service is currently investigating around 280 cases of suspected far-right sympathisers in the German armed forces, the report said.
A suspected accomplice, a 24-year-old student, was also detained after being found in possession of explosives.
Von der Leyen told ZDF television on Sunday night that the arrested officer had written a paper for his Master’s at a military academy that was filled with “primitive racial ideas” that drew initial scrutiny from superiors but were then “whitewashed” in an “ill-advised esprit de corps”.
“People look the other way and it starts to ferment until there’s a scandal,” she said. “The Bundeswehr (army) has an attitude problem and it evidently has weak leadership at different levels.”
Yesterday von der Leyen sent a follow-up letter to all members of the armed forces, saying that she had asked the army’s inspector general to examine any extremist or racist tendencies and determine why such problems had not been properly and fully tackled.
She asked the soldiers for their support and understanding for her efforts to dig into this and other recent cases of crimes and racism involving soldiers.
The chairman of the Bundeswehrverband, a lobby group that represents members of the armed forces, criticised von der Leyen’s “weak leadership” remarks.
“Her comments leave us bewildered and outraged,” André Wuestner told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper. “If the minister is truly serious about that, then she’s massively damaging the Bundeswehr.
“To say all 250,000 in the Bundeswehr have an attitude problem affects us all.”
The arrested soldier had previously been detained in late January by Austrian authorities on suspicion of having stashed a gun in a bathroom at Vienna’s Schwechat airport.
Investigators later discovered that he had used a fake identity to register himself as a Syrian refugee, even though he spoke no Arabic.
The soldier, who has an Italian father and German mother, had pretended to be a Damascus fruit seller named “David Benjamin” – ostensibly a Catholic with Jewish roots who had fled the Islamic State (IS) militant group.
He had registered himself at a German refugee shelter and even launched a request for political asylum, said the prosecution statement.
Incredibly, the request was accepted, despite the soldier’s lack of Arabic language knowledge.
He was allotted a place in the refugee home and from January 2016 onward received €400 ($435) a month in state assistance under this false identity.
The Bild daily has now reported that police found a “death list” compiled by the suspect, including left-wing anti-fascist activists.
The bizarre case touches on two sensitive issues in Germany: the right-wing extremism that occasionally plagues the country, and the turmoil surrounding the influx of more than a million migrants, many from the war in Syria, since 2015.
“It’s not in order that the superiors didn’t grasp what was going on and didn’t understand their responsibility,” said von der Leyen. “Evidently, the early-warning mechanisms the forces have in place didn’t work, and that has to be investigated.”
She and Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, in charge of immigration and refugee issues, have vowed to clear up the embarrassing case, which has led one Social Democrat member to label them a “security risk” for Germany.