2023-06-22 08:13:10
How do you become a neo-Nazi? This vertiginous question was at the heart of the first days of the trial of four young ultra-right men accused of having fomented plans for attacks, which opened on Monday, June 19, before the Assize Court for minors in Paris. The defendants, aged 17, 20, 22 and 23 at the time of the events, had met on a neo-Nazi discussion group called “Waffenkraft Project” before meeting one day in a forest to practice shooting. It was in 2018, the year of their arrest.
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As with every terrorist trial – this one should last two weeks – the first days were devoted to the personality of the accused. As in every terrorist trial, we tried to guess, in such or such biographical detail, such trauma, such mishap, the triggering element of their radicalization.
The four accused, all only sons, have a few common traits: obvious psychological weaknesses, an often chaotic childhood, a solitary personality, offset by an addiction to screens, which led them to meet on this online forum to share their obsessions. . But before fantasizing about plans for mass killings, each had experienced a very different path to neo-Nazi ideology.
Henri and the “chaos of the world”
Henri (first name has been changed) was 17 at the time of the incident. It was he who was behind the creation of the “Waffenkraft Project” forum. His childhood is a Dickensian romance. The son of a bipolar mother and an abusive father, he was born with two clubfeet and suffered early on from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
At the end of CE2, he was placed in an educational and pedagogical therapeutic institute for children with psychological disorders. A decision that will prove catastrophic: “It was a shock. I found myself with young people who could not read, who sometimes did not speak French. There was no discussion. It was screaming and screaming. Only physical domination allowed access to his ends. It wasn’t human relations as you would expect, but I adapted well, perhaps too well…”
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Henri lived in boarding school in this hostile environment between the ages of 9 and 17. Is this experience the cause of his phobia multiculturalism and his obsession with civil war, which he thinks inevitable? According to the educator who took charge of him after his indictment, Nazism would have offered a “reassuring ready-to-think” to this young man “dismayed by the chaos of the world”which he calls the “Lion Cage”. For the expert psychiatrist, “his fear of no longer existing as an ethnic group joined his fear of no longer exciting as a person”.
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