Five years is a long time.

You can forget something there.

But such amnesia as in the 32-year-old Bundeswehr soldier who appeared as a witness before the Higher Regional Court on Tuesday (that he testified would be an exaggerated claim) is unusual.

The State Security Senate had summoned Alexander J. because he hoped to gain knowledge from him in the trial against the suspected terrorist Bundeswehr officer Franco A.

The project must be viewed as a failure.

And yet the interrogation provided certain information about the contacts that the defendant had and about the habitus he maintained.

Matthias Trautsch

Coordination of the Rhine-Main report.

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And something else was formally noticeable during the largely sterile interrogation of Alexander J. and an officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office as a further witness: The proceedings against A., which have been running since May 2021, are slowly running out of breath. As the presiding judge Christoph Koller said at the end of the session, a witness is to be heard on January 20, thus closing the evidence. In February, the representatives of the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and Defense could then make their pleadings.

The charges against A., who lives in Offenbach, are in preparation for a serious criminal offense that is dangerous to the state.

He is accused of planning attacks on politicians out of a völkisch-nationalistic outlook.

The first lieutenant had acquired a false identity as a Syrian asylum seeker in order - according to the prosecution - to raise suspicions against refugees after an assassination attempt.

In February 2017, he was arrested at Vienna Airport for fetching a gun hidden in a toilet.

What he intended to do with the gun is unclear.

"Conservative, but not right-wing"

As Alexander J. testified before the Higher Regional Court, he met A. 2016 in Illkirch near Strasbourg, where both were stationed. He and A. met a few times privately, went out to eat, and “exchanged views”. It was a relationship with the officer in command that alternated between comradeship and friendship. He had a weakness for culinary art, together they "tried out all the restaurants in Strasbourg". If he had to characterize A. he would describe him as “conservative, but not right-wing” and also as “cosmopolitan, with good taste for food”.

J. would certainly have been more informative if he had been asked about the menus of the Strasbourg restaurants, but the presiding judge was more interested in what was meant by "conservative" in the opinion of the witness. Whether this includes the relativization of the Holocaust or assumptions about a secret world government of the reptilians. Or whether the common feast was also about refugee policy or the Green politician Claudia Roth. J. cannot remember that at all. He can't rule it out either. “I don't want to deny that” is his favorite phrase.

The memory gaps are similarly large in relation to a favor that A. is said to have asked him in April 2017.

J. was supposed to pick up a car in Munich in case A. was no longer able to do so.

J. does not want to have known what the latter meant.

And also not what the collection campaign should be good for.

Where exactly the car was parked and how to get the key - he can't remember that either.

Not even when the court points out to him again and again that he had already put all of this on the record in previous interrogations to the Federal Criminal Police Office and the military counterintelligence service.

The answer is at best: "I cannot rule that out."