Defense officials are investigating the theft of American and German national flags from a building at a U.S. military base in Germany, and the raising of a Confederate flag on a nearby flagpole at the same installation, an Army spokesman said on Tuesday.

The flags were stolen by “an unknown individual” who entered the headquarters building of the Army’s Second Cavalry Regiment – a 5,000-person detachment based in Vilseck, Germany, according to a statement from Maj. John Ambelang, the unit spokesman.

The theft of the flags constitutes larceny of government property, Ambelang said. Investigators are looking at camera recordings, he added. The Confederate flag discovered on a pole outside the regiment’s headquarters was removed immediately, he said.

The unit doesn’t have reason to believe the incident was anything more than an isolated act of misconduct by one person, Ambelang said. “As with any misconduct, the command will take appropriate action after considering all the facts surrounding the incident,” he said. That could mean administrative or judicial disciplinary actions up to trial by court-martial, he said.

Last year, then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper issued a memo asking military commanders to reject “divisive symbols,” though he did not explicitly mention the Confederate flag. Individual commands however, have subsequently ordered such flags removed.

The episode also comes amid the increased use of Confederate flags by far-right activists expressing hate against sexual and racial minorities in America, and amid Pentagon concerns about the rise of extremism in its ranks. During the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, insurrectionists were seen carrying the Confederate flag; active service members and veterans are among those charged in the riot.

In a study released in July and aimed at assisting the Pentagon in tackling extremism, researchers at the University of Maryland said that, from 1990 through the first five months of 2021, at least 354 people with U.S. military backgrounds committed criminal acts that were “motivated by their political, economic, social, or religious goals” and that incidents had risen in the past decade. Among those identified were 82 who face charges in the Capitol riot.

The Confederate flag has also become more noticeable in Germany, where symbols of racial extremism such as Nazi swastikas are strictly banned. The flags were flown at an anti-lockdown protest in Dresden in March, and they have also been spotted in apartment windows.

That reflects a tendency among some Germans to search for alternative symbols that could represent racial hate as they are restricted from hailing symbols from the Nazi regime, according to Jordan Brasher, a professor of geography at Columbus University in Georgia.

It could also reflect some Germans’ equation of the Confederate flag to contemporary far-right politics in general, Sanders Bernstein, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, wrote in an article this spring.