By Theodore Shoebat

The former leader of the German intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known as the Verfassungsschutz, Hans-Georg Maassen, recently wrote an article calling for an intense government policy against socialism, and pointing to grievances of the public regarding immigration. 

In his article, Maassen believes that Germany has not yet expunged Left-wing socialism. For him, the idea that because Germany has been reunified that the problems of socialism have been solved is a chimera. Socialism is not the only issue, but also that many Germans feels that there isn’t enough freedom of speech in their country, regarding expression about immigration and foreigners. For example, he writes:

“According to the recently published Shell Youth Study, which is published annually, 68 percent of the 2,572 children, adolescents and young adults between the ages of 12 and 25 who were interviewed agreed with the statement: In Germany, you can not say anything bad about foreigners without being labeled a racist , The Institute for Demoscopy Allensbach recently came to the conclusion in its study on the “border of freedom” that nearly two-thirds of the respondents think that today one has to be very careful about which topics one looks at as oneself.”

It is true that allegations of racism can, at times, be excessive and over the top. But at the same time, it is true that people on the Right-wing side like to use this reality to prove that Whites are victims of persecution and thus must ‘stand up’ for themselves. Any time one ethnic group is called to defend their ‘race,’ this always ultimately entails racialism, tribalism, eugenics and violence. All of fascism is rooted in victimhood; first make people feel that they are victim of ‘multiculturalism’ or immigration, and from there they can be manipulated into accepting those who present themselves as their defenders. This idea lies within the paradigm of the strategy of tension: the Left lodges accusations of racism against the Right; Right-wingers, in turn, take these attacks as propaganda to prove that they are victims of the Left and they will point to real examples of Left-wing violence, libel and slander against certain citizens; this then riles up the Right and you have a ripple effect of tension. People look for heroes, on the Left and the Right, and they feel for an idealism that they believe could be made into a reality. This could lead to blood on the streets, to coups, to despotisms, to wars. 

Maassen talks about the dangers of the Left party (die Linke) and its historical predecessor, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) which was dissolved in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then became the Party of Democratic Socialism which then merged with the Left party in 2007. At the end of his article, Maassen writes:

“Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old SED, which has renamed itself three times, is the strongest force in Thuringia and in several provincial governments. And it is being downplayed in public in an unimaginable way. The SED, which today calls itself the Left, stands in astounding continuity to the ideology and personnel of the SED dictatorship. We have to become more courageous and we have to mobilize the citizens. We need again more rule of law, more democracy and more freedom in the sense of the Basic Law and not in the sense of the socialism of the GDR.  We need a policy change.”

Maassen writes in favor for more “rule of law”, which means the state must become stronger against the threat of socialism. He also calls for change in policy, which would denote state measures against the threat of socialism.

Now we can all say that this is well and good, and that any descent government would of course want to defend its people against the onslaught of socialism. But we actually have to look at the author of this article to comprehend his motivations. One thing to keep in mind are the ties between Maassen and the German nationalist party, Alternative For Germany (AfD). Franziska Schreiber, a former leader of the AfD’s youth branch, wrote in her book that Maassen gave advice to the former leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, on how to avoid being put under surveillance by his intelligence office. Maassen also repeatedly met with Alexander Gauland to give him an intelligence report on Islamic violence in Germany. While it is normal for the intelligence chief to give details on national security threats to political leaders and organizations, the fact that Maassen met Gauland numerous times; that he gave advice to Petry on how to avoid surveillance, and that he denied that violence was done to foreigners in the Chemnitz riots of 2018, makes this a reason for suspicion.

In late 2018 controversy surrounding Maassen was stirred up when he denied the veracity of a video showing German nationalist demonstrators in Chemnitz attacking a migrant. The protest in Chemnitz definitely was done by nationalists and neo-Nazis, and Merkel condemned protesters for “hunting” foreigners. Maassen went contrary to Merkel and, in an interview with Bild, said: “There is no evidence that the video circulating on the internet about this alleged incident is authentic,” adding that it was likely “a case of targeted information” meant to “distract” people from the story of a German man’s death that had riled up people in Chemnitz to begin the protests in the first place. Maassen even went so far as to the call the incident “murder” when prosecutors were officially investigating it as a case of manslaughter.

“The skepticism towards the media reports on right-wing extremist hunts in Chemnitz are shared by me,” Maassen told Bild. “Based on my cautious assessment,” he added, “there are good reasons to believe that this was intentional false information, possibly to detract attention from the murder in Chemnitz.”

Maassen did not specify which video he was referring to and nor did he prove why and how this particular video was fake. Reports on violence against foreigners in Chemnitz turned out to be true since internal documents from the local police force in Chemnitz revealed that there were multiple attempts by nationalists to attack foreigners and anti-fascist counter-demonstrators. The police report, obtained by Frontal 21, details how at 9:42 p.m, “100 hooded persons” were “looking for foreigners.” The same report describes how “20 to 30 masked persons armed with stones in the direction of Brühl, restaurant ‘Shalom.’” The neo-Nazis pelted the Jewish restaurant  with stones and bottles, injuring its owner, and shouted, “Get out of Germany, you Jewish swine”. Regardless of these facts, Maassen, overnight, became a hero for nationalists who saw him as combatting the lügenpresse (“lying press,” a term that goes back to Nazi propaganda). In fact, in a demonstration in Köthen one protestor held up a sign saying “Thank you for the truth, Mr. Maassen.”

Maassen was also the receiver of media outrage. Perhaps, getting the support of the Right an the ire of the Left was his motivation for saying what he said. Maassen then defended himself, retorting that he had been “misunderstood,” and that he was not questioning the contents of the video, but rather people’s interpretation of the video. But, why would Maassen deny the authenticity of the video and then say that he was misunderstood? One could argue that Bild misrepresented him, but how could that be when in Germany journalists get confirmation from the people they interview about which of their statements they can quote? As it reads in the Atlantic: “But in Germany, it’s common practice for journalists to clear quotes from public officials before printing them—he and his staff likely knew what they were doing when they let Bild publish his words.”  Why say words and then cry foul when people get outraged by your words? Perhaps Maassen’s goal was to say what he said — in a time of political hysteria in Chemnitz which, no doubt, reverberated throughout the country — in order to antagonize the Left and boost up the Right. 

The intelligence office that Maassen led, the Verfassungsschutz, has a reputation of covering up for Right-wing terrorist violence, specifically the murders done by the National Socialist Underground from 2000 to 2007. The terrorists, Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, murdered ten people of ethnic minorities. The place of German intelligence in the story of the violence is indicated in what occurred in the murder of Halit Yozgat. He was killed as he was running his internet cafe where an intelligence agent, Andreas Temme, was present.  After the murder was done, Temme walked up to the front desk, and acting completely oblivious to the dead corpse behind the register and the blood on the desk, paid his bill by leaving coins on the desk and left.  Later on in the investigation, Temme did not report that he was in the cafe during the murder, and when he was pressed about it during the trial, he said that he simply did not notice the blood nor the corpse. A police officer from the same village as Temme testified that the German intelligence officer was known as “Little Adolf”. After claims were made that Temme owned a personal library of Nazi literature, police wanted to dig deeper and investigate it. But, the governor of the state of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, prevented any such investigation from occurring, protecting Temme — “little Adolf” — from being exposed by investigators and also the press.

From a secretive and cultic paramilitary circle led by a member of Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service and consisting of German special forces and police, to the former head of German intelligence helping the AfD and downplaying Right-wing violence, one can see that Germany’s intelligence and military apparatus has a Nazi problem. It presages a danger that parallels what took place before the rise of Adolf Hitler. One thing that backed the National Socialists was a paramilitary network called the Freikorps (Free Corps), Right-wing veterans of the First World War enraged with the Weimar Republic and willing to kill for a restoration of the reich (see Taylor, Course of German History, ch. 12, p. 245). Today there are paramilitaries who want to revive Nazism, just as before the rise of Hitler there were the Freikorps who wanted to revive the reich and combat Communism; today, there are agents in German intelligence who wish to see a revival in fascism, just like there was a certain German intelligence agent, Adolf Hitler, who infiltrated the German Workers’ Party and transformed it into the Nazi Party. Hitler was a Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance unit) of the Reichswehr, and he was commissioned to investigate the Right-wing German Workers Party, only to transform it into the most powerful party in Germany. It makes one wonder, whether or not the supposed surveillance of the Right in Germany today will one day transform into the rise of the Right, and a revitalization of pan-Germanic despotism.