The Union wants to get rid of Hans-Georg Maassen – but he doesn’t want to go. Image: imago images/ ari
analysis
“We are the warriors, we are the fans, Adolf Hitler, hooligans.” A mob of right-wingers, right-wing extremists, hooligans and citizens of the Reich moves through downtown Chemnitz. They demonstrate against refugees, immigration, “mass migration”. It is August 26, 2018. A day earlier, a man was stabbed to death by a refugee at the Chemnitz city festival – Daniel H.
What followed were days of riots. media and politics spoke of hunts that had taken place in the city. One, however, does not want to have seen such excesses. The then head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen. Chemnitz cost Maassen the post.
Now, in 2023, the CDU opted for a party exclusion procedure. The Christian Democrats want to get rid of Maassen. But how did the lawyer whose job it was to protect our constitution get there in the first place?
Even before Chemnitz, the top constitutional protection officer had moved further and further to the right. After the riots in 2018, however, it was no longer acceptable for the federal government. The then Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) had to dismiss him. The culprits of this misery from Maassen’s point of view: “Radical Left Forces” within the federal government.
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To classify: At that time, the Union ruled under Chancellor Angela Merkel together with the SPD in a grand coalition.
It is true that parts of the SPD threatened to collapse the coalition if Maassen retained his post. Because Chemnitz was not Maassen’s first total failure. Where did the former intelligence officer take a wrong turn?
Axel Salheiser from the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society at the University of Jena says that radicalization did not start from scratch.
When asked by Watson, he says Maassen has always been a hardliner – and he’s not the only one in a high position with such an attitude. However, he fell through the grid of the term extremism. “The fact that Maassen has a critical to negative attitude towards immigration and asylum policy can already be deduced from his doctoral thesis from 1997,” says the social scientist.
Maassen: Hardliners even before the Office for the Protection of the Constitution
This doctoral thesis suggests how badass the lawyer really is. The title: “The Legal Status of Asylum Seekers in International Law”. The “Southgerman newspaper” quotes the right-wing populist term “asylum tourism”. The aim of the work was to provide evidence that there was still untapped scope for a restrictive refugee policy.
Hans-Georg Maassen sees himself as part of the middle of society.Image: dpa / Michael Reichel
Maassen finally used this restrictive scope when he worked in 2002 as head of the department for immigration law in the Federal Ministry of the Interior. It is specifically the case Murat Kurnaz. A man with Turkish citizenship who lived in Bremen.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the USA, Kurnaz attended a Koran school in Pakistan – and from there he was deported by the USA to the high-security prison in Guantánamo and tortured there. As it turned out, he was innocent.
When the USA wanted to deport Kurnaz to Bremen, Germany refused to take him in. Also because Maassen, like the “Southgerman newspaper” reported, prepared a corresponding legal opinion. The residence permit expired because Kurnaz had been out of the country for too long.
In 2005, a word of authority was needed from the newly elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.Image: imago images/ Eventpress/ Mathias Krohn
Maassen probably didn’t care that “out of the country” meant torture in Guantánamo. The man from Bremen was only allowed to return in 2006 – after Angela Merkel (CDU) campaigned for him and after he had spent four more years in Guantanamo.
With admission of refugees 2015 further to the right
However, Maassen became even more offensive during the civil wars after the Arab Spring and the refugees who fled with it. “Even with his opinion on Angela Merkel’s asylum policy in 2015/2016, he never kept quiet,” says extremism expert Salheiser. After his time as head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Maassen continued to openly settle accounts with Merkel’s asylum policy.
The sluice is still open criticized Maassen in 2019 on Hungarian state television. The necessary precautions were not taken to ensure that those fleeing did not come to us. Maassen expressed concern that significantly more people could come to Europe and Germany in the years to come.
Everything to the chancellor’s right, Maaßen criticized in the right-wing newspaper “young freedom“, is considered unacceptable. Maassen publicly defamed other CDU members who supported Merkel.
In retrospect, of course, it is easy to trace exactly when Maassen “radicalized,” says expert Salheiser. The social mood has changed in recent years – Racism and xenophobia have been more and more open, especially since 2015, but are now also being criticized more frequently than before.
By 2014/2015 at the latest, the Greens politician Irene Mihalic, in the past her group’s spokeswoman on domestic affairs, noticed that Maaßen was “acting on the right-wing conservative edge of the democratic spectrum.” She was struck, for example, by the fact that Maassen had continued to downplay the threat from the right when presenting the reports from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Maassen seeks proximity to the AfD
Mihalic tells watson: “It culminated in the fact that he downgraded the Reich citizens to our questions in the interior committee as rather harmless cranks.” Maassen also “didn’t exactly support” the investigative committee to investigate NSU terror.
It is also known that Maassen had unusually close contact with senior AfD officials during his time as a secret service officer. Among other things, he is said to have met with the former party leader Frauke Petry and her Tips given on how to avoid a possible observation could. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution denies that these meetings took place. But she describes a confidante of Petry in her book “Inside AfD”.
Radicalization continues after eviction
Maassen did not get much calmer after his release. Extremism expert Salheiser admits that after he was kicked out of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Maassen sharpened the tone in order to heat up the discourse. Probably also because he felt provoked and challenged.
During the corona pandemic, he continued to turn to corona deniers, shared posts by Boris Reitschuster on Twitter, among others. A right-wing journalist with his own blog where he disinformation spread.
On the other hand, Maassen demanded that journalists in public service broadcasting be subjected to an attitude test. His concern: the “daily News“Editors are involved with the left-wing extremist scene. The proposal caused great outrage in 2021.
Maassen’s candidacy for the Bundestag also caused a stir. There was also criticism from within their own ranks. Then, as now, Maassen repeatedly drew attention to himself with racist and anti-Semitic statements. For example, the repeated “racism against whites”which the CDUler wants to perceive.
Maassen did not win his constituency and did not enter the Bundestag. He has been chairman of the Union of Values since January 2023. A right-wing conservative association that is not an official group of the CDU. If the Christian Democrats have their way, Maassen himself should no longer be part of the CDU.
The fact is, however, that party exclusion procedures are lengthy and often unsuccessful.
