The right-wing rot at the heart of the German state

Right-wing protests in Germany these days are an unusual spectacle: The police sometimes seem more like uniformed extras than able keepers of public order. This summer, scenes played out that were nearly unimaginable a few years before. In the eastern Saxon city of Chemnitz, thousands of people joined a right-wing protest spurred by suspicions that an Iraqi and a Syrian had killed a German man. Several protesters gave the illegal “Heil Hitler” salute and chanted, “We are fans, Adolf Hitler hooligans,” while outnumbered police officers looked on. Packs chased people of questionable skin color through the streets with little hindrance by the authorities.

Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced what she referred to as a citywide “hounding” and called for due process of the accused, who were charged with manslaughter. In response, more protests were organized by Pro Chemnitz, the latest of the right-wing street movements that have sprung up across Germany. But the darkest twist came when Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the federal domestic intelligence service known as the BFV, responded.

When a short video circulated of men chasing at least two young men in the city, Maassen, supposedly the man with all the information and himself a member of Merkel’s party, dismissed the interpretation that there were groups “hounding” foreigners, in calculated contradiction of the chancellor’s own words. Speaking to the tabloid Bild, he suggested — without professionally reviewing the material — that the clip may have been fabricated as a way to divert attention from what he hastily declared a murder of the German man. Maassen’s overtly political comments sent shockwaves through Germany’s quality press. The head of intelligence had just publicly attacked the chancellor in the pages, and with the connivance, of Germany’s largest tabloid, and appeared to be straining to defend neo-Nazis. The message to the far right could not have been clearer: You have people on your side in the heart of the state bureaucracy. When it comes to far-right extremism, German law enforcement has made little secret of its priorities.

While a paltry number of police officers responded in Chemnitz and to similar incidents elsewhere, they were deployed en masse — and with state-of-the-art gear — for a protest days later in North Rhine-Westphalia, where German environmental activists continue to defend a primeval forest against a coal-mining project. During the visit last month by the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to Germany, two police officers deployed to Berlin from Saxony were discovered to have used the code name “Uwe Böhnhardt,” the name of one of the members of the terror cell the National Socialist Underground, which over the course of the 2000s murdered 10 Turkish-Germans and others, in the most dramatic known example of domestic right-wing terror since the end of the war. Should the right-wing ties with the police really have come as a surprise? For decades, the German security services, and the BFV in particular, have been accused of operating sympathetically — even symbiotically — with elements of the far right. But with the recent rise of Alternative for Germany, the far-right, anti-immigrant party that polls rank as the second-most popular party in the country, this symbiosis has taken on new urgency.

The BFV’s precursor was founded after World War II by the American occupiers. It then became a magnet for ex-Nazis and Gestapo members looking for a second act. Its designated purpose was to spy on and root out the West German Communist Party. (The party was finally banned in 1956, based on materials turned up by the BFV) In the 1960s, Hubert Schrübbers, the head of the agency, employed former SS colleagues. By the 1970s, employees of the BFV who were Social Democrats or lacked right-wing credentials fell under suspicion.

It was hardly surprisingly that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s attempt to ban the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany in the early 2000s failed when a court ruled against the ban because much of the party’s right-wing orientation had been shaped by the state itself through paid informants. Maassen himself has hardly diminished the organization’s right-wing reputation. This year, a defector from Alternative for Germany accused him of having advised the party’s former co-leader on how to avoid surveillance. Maassen was never charged, but even the hint of such a link is detrimental to the state’s legitimacy. A constellation of forces is now relearning to cooperate: right-wing street movements, right-wing news outlets, a fully fledged political party and a murky portion of the state bureaucracy. So in a sense, Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister and Maassen’s sympathetic boss, is not wrong when he calls Maassen a “classic civil servant.”

Seehofer has proved Maassen’s most important ally, raising questions about the interior minister’s own pandering or fealty to the far right. For Maassen’s professional breach, Merkel’s fragile coalition agreed to remove him from his post as head of German intelligence. Yet instead of demoting him — or outright firing him — the coalition effectively promoted him. His new job as state secretary came with a salary increase. In reaction to the public outcry, he was shuffled once again, this time to become “special adviser” to Seehofer. Seehofer is the fiercest critic of Merkel within her governing coalition. “Migration is the mother of all problems,” he recently declared. But Merkel needs his party, the Christian Social Union, to form the right flank of her government. He, in turn, believes he needs to appeal to the far more right-wing elements in his own party, which faces a challenge in this month’s regional Bavarian election from the Greens and, crucially, Alternative for Germany. Evidently, Seehofer considers the disgraced Maassen a valuable electoral asset for keeping his conservative bona fides intact.

The entire affair is only one in a series of events that have marked a change in the public perception of the far right in Germany. Only two years ago, many right-wing politicians were still reluctant to officially endorse nationalist, anti-immigrant street movements such as Pegida. Now it is normal for not only Alternative for Germany politicians to back them officially, but even members of the putative political center to make shows of sympathy. Wolfgang Kubicki, vice chairman of the liberal Free Democratic Party, was quick to attribute “the roots of the riots” in Chemnitz to Merkel’s policy of admitting refugees and asylumseekers in 2015. For decades, the right-wing elements in the German state never had the opportunity to cooperate with a major party that shares its views. Now they do.

For hundreds of civil servants, the rise of Alternative for Germany has presented an opportunity to engage in more right-wing political activities than would have been possible only a few years ago. A senior public prosecutor in Berlin, a judge in Dresden, as well as police officers and teachers across the country: For all of them, supporting the party serves as the bridge between the functioning state apparatus and the far right.

Very often, the party’s members draw connections between their profession and what they take to be the necessity of right-wing activism. They spread rumors of the government’s secret commands to prioritize anti-right policies over the solving of crimes committed by refugees or the “left-green indoctrination of students” in public schools. Their conspiracy theories have not diminished with their proximity to power. The future is a dark one when a right-wing party surges and finds sectors of the state full of “classic civil servants.”