Images shared in WhatsApp group included photo of Adolf Hitler and the swastika flag. Twenty-nine police officers in the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia have been temporarily suspended after their unit was found to have shared extreme rightwing content on a WhatsApp group. Images shared by the officers, most of whom are members of a unit in the town of Mülheim an der Ruhr, reportedly depicted Adolf Hitler, the swastika flag, a collage of a refugee inside a gas chamber and the shooting of a young black person. (…) On Wednesday morning, authorities searched 34 apartments and offices with links to the officers under investigation, in the towns of Duisburg, Essen, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Oberhausen, Moers and Selm. The officers under investigation include six women. Eleven officers who are believed to have actively sent the images are under investigation for incitement of the people and the use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations. The remaining 18 officers are understood to have merely received the messages without reporting it to higher authorities. The chat group’s existence and content had emerged by chance, after authorities in Mülheim had confiscated the mobile phone of a police officer who was being investigated for sharing classified information with a journalist. Reul said on Wednesday he expected further disclosures as the confiscated phones were examined. The scandal comes just two months after the federal interior minister, Horst Seehofer, halted a planned study into allegations of racial profiling by German police forces.
via guardian: German police officers suspended for sharing neo-Nazi content