A
few days ago, Hans-Georg Maaßen, who until November of last year headed Germany’s
domestic security service, spoke at a political meeting and said “I did not
join the CDU (Adenauer, Kohl and Merkel’s party) thirty years ago, so that we
should now have 1.8 million Arabs coming to Germany”.
The
Nazis had the Gestapo, which stood for Geheime Staatspolizei.
When the Federal Republic of Germany was established, it also – as all
political systems do – was in need of a secret police. Calling it secret police
was no longer a good idea, so they called it ‘Office for the Protection of the Constitution’,
or Verfassungsschutz in German. As
Germany is a bottom-up federal state, it not only has a federal domestic
security agency, but also one for each of its 16 constituent states. All seventeen
of them run covert operations, and they all operate informers.
You
are, of course, unlikely to find liberals and human-rights activists staffing a
domestic security service. Who does? In the first few years after the War, both
the Verfassungsschutz and the BND, the external intelligence service
(equivalent to the CIA or Britain’s MI6), greedily and shamelessly recruited the
now-out-of-work but oh-so-experienced Nazis. (As did the security apparatuses
of quite a few other countries). But even with the supply of old Nazis drying
up, it is logical to assume that many of those who enjoy working in a
nondemocratic environment, clandestinely snooping on others, gathering material
for blackmail, blackmailing, being allowed to do what normally is illegal,
forbidden and punishable, will tend to also support tough policing and law-and-order,
i.e., right-wing and illiberal ideologies.
And
still, it came as a shock, when it turned out, that members of the Verfassungsschutz
were deeply involved in covering up murders of immigrants, bank robberies
and other crimes carried out by a neo-Nazi gang in the years 2000-2006. The
internal report into the affair will remain under lock and key for an unprecedented
120 years. It must be quite explosive, if they are that frightened to own up to
it.
Last
year, Hans-Gerog Maaßen, who had been in office at the Verfassungsschutz’s
Director for six years, was forced to
leave his job. It came out that he secretly met the extremist right-wing AfD
party, before the elections and advised them how to stay under the security
service’s radar. Maaßen wanted to help this foreigner-hating, anti-Muslim,
nationalistic, as close to Nazi as legally possible, AfD party. His boss,
Bavarian CSU party leader and Minister of the Interior Seehofer, tried hard to
support him, but at the end there was no alternative and the man had to go.
The
attempt – in theory, at least – to create a clean, and transparent secret
police in post-Nazi Germany, seems to have failed. A domestic security service
that defends the state from its internal enemies is necessary for democracy. When
it becomes too powerful it can be dangerous for democracy. Some of us still remember
FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who blackmailed his way across the US political system,
including some presidents, to stay in power. He died in office, at the age of
77, having been FBI director for 37 years. It is not as bad in Germany, but
Maaßen should not have been allowed to happen. Mrs Merkel probably no longer has
the political clout to do what must be done. However, before it is too late,
she should restructure this German absurdity of 17 secret police forces.
