He was once a respected head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Today, Hans-Georg Maaßen is being saved by his former authority in the area of right-wing extremism. Reconstruction of radicalization.
It was a Saturday morning in February 2019. Rays of sunlight fell through the windows of the Cologne hotel when Hans-Georg Maaßen broke his public silence there. Three months earlier he had been dismissed as President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). But he only spoke well of his old authority in his speech to the Union of Values. The CDU member said that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is “a kind of early warning system” for the government, a “fire alarm of democracy”.
Maaßen has now cut up his CDU membership card, he is chairman of the Union of Values and his old authority has saved him in the intelligence information system as a right-wing extremist. In a so far unique event, the former top intelligence officer has become the object of observation. For Maaßen, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is no longer the “fire alarm of democracy,” but instead speaks of an “abuse of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to combat political opponents,” “even of an attack on the free democratic basic order.”
how could it get so far?
The process is even more explosive because it became known as a party shortly before the planned founding of the Union of Values. The short-term search for a suitable hall for a party conference is currently underway feverishly. Bonn is said to be the preferred candidate, a place with symbolic power that stands for the politics of the old Federal Republic more than 30 years ago.
When the general meeting of the Values Union association decided to found the party on January 20th in Erfurt, Maaßen whispered that there would be “tough political fighting against us.” The Office for the Protection of the Constitution had already sent him the notice, which gave Maaßen certainty: He had become a case for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Maaßen’s statements did not provide the reason
The information reached a few confidants in his environment, and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution informed the responsible members of parliament in a secret meeting of the Bundestag. It finally became public through research by the ARD political magazine “Kontraste” and by t-online. The material that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has collected about him includes many interviews, quotes from tweets, speeches and reports about him. Maaßen himself made the list public, and t-online documented excerpts of it.
Maaßen himself sees “no substantiated evidence whatsoever” that would justify observation.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already collected material when it was still controversial in the Union of Values and it was not foreseeable whether there would be a Union of Values party. It had already become known in August 2023 that the BfV had submitted a so-called inquiry about Maaßen to the state security department of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
What Maaßen says or writes was not the reason: it was about possible connections to the suspected terrorist organization around Henry XIII. Prince Reuss, who is said to have made plans to storm the Bundestag. The link is Markus Krall, right-wing libertarian management consultant and crash prophet, former head of the Degussa Sonne/Mond gold trade of the now deceased August von Finck. In November 2022 he was released from there without giving reasons; in the second half of 2023 he followed Maaßen into the Union of Values and is one of its more prominent faces.
According to the investigation, he was considered a possible finance minister in the group now accused. He is said to be for Henry XIII. Prince Reuss, years before his unification was exposed, drew up a possible new constitution and wrote to Reuss that the “time of great change” was near. Krall later explained that he knew nothing of any plans for a coup. When he was searched, he was not the accused: he was listed as a possible witness.
During the search, a message from Maaßen was found on his cell phone, which started an avalanche: “We have to keep fighting,” Maaßen wrote in it, as the “Spiegel” revealed. Krall agreed and added that time was of the essence because “these crazy people” were leading the country “straight into nuclear war.”
Maaßen’s culprit is Merkel
This was followed in the summer of 2023 by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s information query to the BKA. There they apparently saw “sufficient actual evidence of efforts against the free democratic basic order” – the prerequisite for the collection and evaluation of information. The Federal Constitutional Protection Act states that the “relevant behavior (…) must be explicitly aimed at this [muss]”to realize the anti-constitutional goals”.
