IN JANUARY a maintenance worker at Vienna Airport found a loaded 7.65 calibre pistol in the pipe of a public toilet. He told the Austrian police, who put the toilet under surveillance. A month later they arrested a man who appeared to be searching for the gun. He turned out to be a lieutenant in the Bundeswehr, the German army, who claimed he had drunkenly found the weapon in some bushes and had hidden it in a panic. But investigations suggested something much darker.

“Franco A”, as he is known, had allegedly been living a double life. He served in the 291 Light Infantry Battalion at a base in eastern France. In his time off, he lived at a refugee centre in Bavaria, masquerading as David Benjamin, a Syrian asylum seeker driven from his home by Islamic State. According to press reports he was an extremist planning false-flag terror attacks, including the assassinations of Germany’s ex-president and its justice minister. The saga has exposed failings at all levels of the German state. The instructors at Franco A’s French military academy had rejected his thesis for its far-right content and advised his German superiors to dismiss him. A search of his barracks revealed posters glorifying Hitler’s Wehrmacht, a swastika etched onto a gun case and handbooks on bomb-making and guerrilla warfare, as well as a stash of guns, rocket launchers and half a million rounds of ammunition. His Bavarian interviewers had not checked whether “David Benjamin” spoke more than a few phrases of Arabic.

These were not isolated oversights. “The far-right element in the Bundeswehr has strong roots among neo-Nazi radicals and their ideology,” says Hajo Funke, an expert on extremism in Germany. Icons and songs from the Hitler years live on in pockets of the army. A study in 2007 put the proportion of far-right soldiers at 13%. On May 17th, Ursula von der Leyen, the defence minister, told MPs that further barrack searches had uncovered 41 items of Nazi memorabilia. Asylum authorities have revisited hundreds of applications like that of “David Benjamin” and have reportedly found serious mistakes in 10-15% of them.

Ms von der Leyen has paid the price. Long considered a likely successor to Angela Merkel, she has been attacked from both political sides. This is unfair to a defence minister who has fought to modernise the Bundeswehr and has moved fast to erase the last reminders of the 1940s (for example, by removing the names of Wehrmacht officers from over 20 barracks). It seems strange to respond to problems in the army by castigating a minister who is taking them on.