Since its founding in the year 1950, the Federal office for the protection of the Constitution has provided for scandals. They reflect the political atmosphere in Germany. The six best-known cases.
The darkest Chapter: the NSU
The members of the so-called national socialist underground (NSU) murdered nine migrants and a policewoman. The environment of the terrorists is estimated to be 100 to 200 people – including V-people of the constitutional protection.
Thus, the Thuringian Constitution should be co-financed protection, according to a statement by the former V-man of Tino Brandt, indirectly, the underground, the living members of the NSU. Brandt, once the second national Chairman of the NPD in Thuringia, said that he had as a V-man to get money from the protection of the Constitution of Thuringia. He had donated in part for the terrorist group. This was done with Knowledge of the constitutional protection, according to former neo-Nazis, the investigative Committee of the baden-württemberg in Stuttgart.
More offfene questions: a protest rally after the end of the NSU-process in July 2018
In addition, there is a suspicion on the staff of the Hessian Constitution protection Andreas Temme fell. Among the Victims of the NSU also Halit Yozgat. The terrorists murdered the owner of an Internet cafe in Kassel in April 2006. At the time, or shortly before, the time, the protection of the Constitution staff Temme was in the Internet café. Investigators arrested him as a suspect, could find no evidence. Temmes role is unclear – he denies to this day to have of the fact, noticed something. The national office for the protection of the Constitution has dismissed him.
38 years of illegal monitored: Rolf Gössner
The lawyer and author Rolf Gössner is one of the German citizens, which have been observed the longest from the protection of the Constitution. The Federal office suspected him to have contacts to organizations affected than the left extreme, left-wing extremist, such as the German Communist party (DKP), the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi regime – Federation of Anti-fascists and anti-fascists (VVN-BdA) or the Association of Red help. On this basis, Gössner was monitored for 38 years by the protection of the Constitution. In contrast, Gössner 2006 complained.
Decades of illegal spying: human rights and data protection activist Rolf Gössner, 2013
Shortly before the first oral proceedings before the Cologne administrative court, which should determine the illegality of the Surveillance, informed the Federal office for the protection of the Constitution, that the observation “had been set according to the current completion of the examination”. The Cologne court ruled in 2011 that the investigation of the civil law have been activists throughout unlawful. The court could find in the protection of the Constitution, submitted to Material no evidence of anti-constitutional activities Gössners.
The thickness blunder: the NPD prohibition proceedings (2001-2003)
In January 2001, the then Federal government proposed under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) at the German Federal constitutional court, the unconstitutionality of the national democratic party of Germany (NPD). Then, the extreme-right party could be banned. At the end of March 2001 the Bundestag and the Bundesrat set up their own ban requests.
The procedure burst. The Federal constitutional court in March 2003 on a legal technicality, because of the V-people of the constitutional protection in the NPD-management level.
Aggressive and ready to fight: scene of a NPD rally in 2000 in Essen
They controlled, among other things, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia land Association of the NPD. The Chairman, his Deputy and the chief editor of the regional party newspaper have been revealed as V-people of the constitutional protection. The planned proof of the unconstitutionality of the NPD was based largely on quotations of these V-people.
It remained unclear, how and to what extent the protection of the Constitution influence on the appearance of the NPD had taken.
The spies: Klaus Kuron and Hans Joachim Tiedge
Klaus Kuron was in 1962, employees of the Federal office for the protection of the Constitution. In October 1981, he offered of the main intelligence Directorate of the Ministry for state security of the GDR, his services as Agent. For 150,000 marks, and a monthly fee of 4000 marks, he left the Stasi with information. Had agreed that the GDR could not take action against people, against the determined, on the basis of the full information obtained.
1985 Kurons supervisor Hans Joachim Tiedge delivery in the GDR. As Kuron him drove financial problems, he was also after the death of his wife is mentally unstable. In the GDR, he wanted to start a new life. The security of the state then stated that certain personal information you’ve obtained not by Kuron, but of Tiedge, and arrested several of Kuron.
After the German reunification in 1990, Kuron turned himself in to the authorities and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Tiedje fled in 1989 to Moscow, where he died in 2011.
On the run: Hans Joachim Tiedge in East-Berlin, 1985
The Whistleblower: Werner Pätsch
After the founding of the Federal Republic of 1949, the protection of the Constitution and recruited most of its staff consists of former employees of the national socialist Reich security main office. You should politically spy on the suspicious German citizens – as such, Communists were considered. One of these employees Werner Pätsch was it greater doubts as to the legality of this work. At the same time, he didn’t want to accept that a number of former Nazis and SS were relatives to the protection of the Constitution. In the summer of 1963, he confided, first to a lawyer, in September, the weekly newspaper reported revelations”, The time” on Pätschs. The appeared shortly thereafter.
In his hiding place, he gave the TV magazine “Panorama” Interview, the charisma, the Federal government prevented the legal profession. Excerpts printed in the October, the magazine “star”. The then Minister of the interior Hermann Höcherl, said that officials could not run around “all day with the basic law, under the Arm”. The “time” countered: “Under these constitutional activists, but people who run around all day while not with the basic law, but with the SS blood-group tattoo under his Arm.”
The protection of the Constitution announced Pätsch, complained against by the labour court. The case went to the Federal court of justice had to decide the question of whether state secrets are worth protecting, if they have been obtained by unconstitutional practices. No, ruled the court officials were called, on the contrary, illegal practices reveal.
Pätsch, was sentenced to four months in prison on probation because he had not complied with the chain of command. “Time”-Journalist David Johst, the judgment described at the time as a “break with the state’s authoritarian Tradition.”
Still unclear: The affair of Otto John
His first – and at the same time, one of his most spectacular scandals experienced by the Federal office for the protection of the Constitution in 1954. Its first President, Otto John, during the Nazi period, in the context of the resistance fighter Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, broke in July of 1954, with an old friend, the physician Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, from West Berlin in the Eastern part of the city. Whether John took the journey voluntarily, is still unclear. There were unconfirmed rumors that he was stunned and then in the GDR, were taken.
In East Berlin, John joined later in front of the press and established his exchange in the GDR, so that more and more former Nazis take over senior positions in the public service of the Federal Republic of Germany. Also it is clear that the militarization and ties to the West, the Federal Republic of Germany will worsen under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. “I have decided after much Deliberation to go to East Germany and to stay here, because I see here the best ways to be there for the re-unification of Germany and against the threat of a new war.”
Beyond the West: the protection of the Constitution President Otto John in East Berlin, 1955
John was interrogated to December 1954 and again and again by the Soviet secret service KGB in Moscow. The KGB, later explained one of his employees, I want to bring John propaganda against Adenauer’s course in position. The not but wanted to join John. At the end of 1955, he returned from Moscow about the GDR to Western Germany. But he was no longer welcome. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Until his death in 1997 in Austria, John tried, unsuccessfully, to his rehabilitation.