'Please put your stolen guns here!'

"No one's dropped off any guns yet," says the young woman sitting inside a guardbox outside Chancellor Angela Merkel's huge office building in central Berlin.

The small gray box she's inside is metallic, not very comfortable-looking, bearing a logo that's pretty close to the official Bundeswehr cross — it looks convincing. So do the "drop-off boxes" for weapons standing next to it, which helpfully bear the alarming list of weapons the German military has allegedly lost all trace of in the last few years: These include 60 kilos (132 lbs) of explosives, 74,161 rounds of ammunition, over two dozen fully automatic rifles, a couple of handheld ground-to-air rocket launchers, and eight missile tubes for Tornado fighter planes.

Read more: Bundeswehr needs more assault rifles

The stunt, officially permitted by the authorities, is by the Center for Political Beauty (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, ZPS), which has set up a website that also looks genuine. Under a domain name that translates as "our weapons," the German political-art collective earnestly encourages people to contact Germany's real Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) if they know where any of the Bundeswehr's missing weapons are, or whether they know of any suspected extremists in the military.

Tipping off the Bundeswehr

So this is satire that is actually willing to work together with the authorities it is satirizing. At least according to the ZPS itself: The group says it has already received reports of 44 "suspects" in the armed forces on the first day of the campaign, which they have passed on to the Defense Ministry and the German parliament's defense committee.

The Defense Ministry did not want to offer any comment on the ZPS action, on the grounds that this was mainly a work of art. "But we do take the issue of missing weapons very seriously," a spokesman told DW on Tuesday, pointing out that the ministry was planning to produce an interim report on the issue at the end of the month.

That will be part of an ongoing investigation instigated by Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer in the wake of a major scandal: In July, the Bundeswehr dissolved an entire company of its Special Commando Forces (KSK) because its members openly expressed far-right sympathy and performed Nazi salutes. At the same time, the German Defense Ministry admitted it had lost 60,000 rounds of ammunition since 2010.

Read more: Bring back conscription to fight extremism in the Bundeswehr

Two months earlier, police raided the home of one soldier from the company and found explosives and ammunition stashed underground. The tip-off came via the MAD, which had had the 45-year-old under surveillance since 2017.

Extremist networks in the Bundeswehr?

Despite this high-profile case, lost weapons have not necessarily all been stolen by far-right extremists, and the ministry does not officially acknowledge that there is a link between the lost weapons and extremism in the ranks.

But the German government has been under pressure to root out neo-Nazi networks in the security forces since at least 2017, when reports of a far-right "prepper" network in the armed forces bubbled into the media. This was centered around Bundeswehr officer Andre S., nicknamed Hannibal, who coordinated chat groups that counted well over a hundred people across the whole of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. They were allegedly planning for a "Day X" — a social breakdown doomsday scenario in Germany.

What was soon dubbed by the media as the "Hannibal network" included members of the armed services, the police force, Germany's domestic intelligence agency the BfV (whose job is to track extremists), as well as the German judicial system. The network appeared to be building up the skeleton of an underground army, organizing training exercises, and gathering weapons and other provisions.

Thanks to an investigation by the taz newspaper in 2018, as well as parliamentary information requests by the socialist Left party, it emerged that Andre S. received tip-offs from the MAD itself and that one of the soldiers, named Franco A., was caught allegedly planning a "false flag" terrorist attack disguised as a Syrian refugee.

Since then, the MAD has apparently attempted to shore up its leaky service: In May, the intelligence agency was reported to be revamping its procedures for dealing with suspected far-right networks, was recruiting some 400 new officers, and had appointed a civilian vice-president (from the BfV).

The Bundeswehr says the MAD keeps the threshold for determining whether to pursue a case of suspected extremism "deliberately low," meaning that if a soldier makes racist comments on social media, or takes part in far-right events, they can be subject to investigation. For Muslim soldiers, refusing to shake a woman's hand or propagating Sharia law as a higher standard can also lead to an investigation.

For the year 2019, the MAD reported that it had carried out 482 such investigations,of which 363 were related to far-right tendencies. The investigations resulted in one of three outcomes: "Red" meant a recognized extremist, and discharge from the military was recommended, "Orange" meant a case of anti-constitutional sympathies, and the subject should be disciplined but not necessarily sacked, and "Green" meant the suspicion was found to be unfounded.

Some 14 cases were categorized as Red, and 38 as Orange.