Germany’s former head of domestic intelligence, Hans-Georg Maassen, recently announced he would be suing the agency he used to lead for using its powers to “observe government opponents.” That is to say, for surveilling him.
The initial revelation, about Maassen being monitored by the very intelligence agency he had once led, arrived in January. He accused the agency of abusing its power to “politically persecute government critics.” “In doing so, they are seriously violating their official duties and thus damaging liberal democracy,” he recently said. “Opponents of the government are not enemies of the constitution.”
But the two are not mutually exclusive. Maassen, who the Süddeutsche Zeitung called the “Steve Bannon of Thuringia,” is well known for nationalistic, far-right rhetoric. He has denounced what he calls “racism against whites” and lamented “massive migration,” which he believes has led to “parallel societies,” the “dissolution of family and local relationships,” and a threat to “national cultures.” He’s also decried “migrant clans that are active in organized crime.” (In fact, immigrants in Germany commit far fewer crimes per capita than native Germans do.) “Only nations made up of free citizens who share a common culture and rule of law,” Maassen wrote in 2020, “manage to live in internal and external peace.”
“This is typical right-wing populist rhetoric. Hans-Georg Maassen is part of the new-right milieu,” said journalist and historian Volker Weiss. “Imagine—he became president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to clean up after the NSU,” in reference to the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group that murdered and bombed immigrants in towns and cities across Germany from 1999 to 2011.
But Maassen may have done more than brush shoulders with members of Germany’s far right—he stands accused of colluding with them, too. Spiegel reported that in 2015, Maassen met with Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Frauke Petry for the purpose of helping her avoid scrutiny from the very agency that he led.According to Spiegel, Maassen was also in contact with a far-right extremist who was part of a plot to overthrow Germany in a coup. In December 2022, some 3,000 police and special forces officers raided 150 properties across the country and arrested 25 far‑right extremists associated with the Reichsbürger movement who planned to storm the Bundestag, assassinate Germany’s chancellor, and install a military regime.
These were no average citizens or small‑time soldiers. One had served in the Bundestag as a legislator for the AfD and was a standing judge at the time of her arrest. Another served in a paramilitary police unit. Another, a conspiracy theorist named Heinrich Reuss, was a Thuringian aristocrat who prosecutors say planned to install himself as Germany’s new leader. Maassen allegedly sent a birthday message to the far-right author Markus Krall, who is suspected of plotting to become finance minister in the new government post-coup. “We must keep fighting,” Maassen wrote in his message to Krall after the plot was thwarted.
As the former president of the Office of the Protection of the Constitution, Maassen ought to have been the last person in Germany to cheer on an alleged member of a plot to overthrow the country’s democratic government. And yet, for close observers of Germany’s intelligence agencies, the news wasn’t as shocking as it appeared. Maassen wasn’t Germany’s first intelligence chief to be accused of holding far-right views.
In the 1990s, a right-wing extremist named Helmut Roewer headed the regional intelligence agency in Maassen’s state of Thuringia. Roewer’s agency employed numerous far-right informants and nonetheless failed to prevent the deadliest far-right extremist plot in 21st-century Germany, the Thuringia-born NSU. Part of the reason for that failure was that Germany’s intelligence agencies were still employing some of the same tactics of the Gestapo and even the Stasi by employing a large network of informants. Critics of these agencies allege that rather than merely monitoring or infiltrating movements run by far-right extremists, by placing so much cash and confidence in them, agencies are funding and fostering those scenes instead.
This, to be sure, is what Roewer’s agency did. He would eventually admit that relying on far-right informants had gone horribly wrong. “Recruiting skinheads was an absolute disaster. They get drunk, then say they couldn’t remember anything,” said Roewer, who admitted to Thuringia’s state Parliament that he sometimes did the same. And yet, knowing this didn’t stop Roewer from recruiting them. (Roewer left in 2000 while under investigation for allegedly funneling state money into his private accounts. He became an outspoken conspiracy theorist, asserting that the NSU murders were in fact the work of a liberal “deep state” for which far‑right extremists were framed in order to make Germany look bad. He declined my interview request.)
One of his agency’s far-right informants was a man named Tino Brandt who helped indoctrinate some of the people who would later form the NSU. Brandt estimated that Roewer’s agency paid him some 200,000 taxpayer Deutsche marks over the years—worth about $115,000 at the time. Brandt later testified that he’d invested much of the money back into the very far‑right scene that the intelligence agency was employing him to watch. For all the agency’s claims about how indispensable he was as an informant, Brandt testified during the NSU trial that he never compromised a single comrade—“I never put anybody in jail.”
In fact, the agency had to move mountains to keep Brandt out of jail himself. According to Thuringia’s Interior Ministry, police suspected him of at least 35 crimes relating to his far-right organizing in Thuringia, but a Thuringia state legislator who investigated Brandt, Katharina König, told Foreign Policy that Roewer’s agency “stopped all their cases against Tino Brandt in order to save their spy.” On one occasion, an intelligence agent tipped Brandt off that police intended to search his computer for incriminating evidence the following day. When Brandt handed over his computer, something was missing: the hard drive. Brandt had removed it. He was “grinning from ear to ear,” an officer who was there told Thuringia’s NSU investigative committee.
By subverting justice to protect far-right extremists, Germany’s so-called Offices of the Protection of the Constitution undermine it instead. Nothing exemplifies German intelligence agencies’ paradoxical relationship with far-right informants better than what happened in 2011, when the NSU came to light. That very week, a clerk at Germany’s federal intelligence agency in Cologne began feeding documents into a shredder, German news media later reported. At first, she’d refused to do it. But when she was told the order came from the top, she obliged.
In 2012, German media revealed that the documents were part of an operation to recruit far‑right informants from 1996 to 2003—a period that overlapped the NSU’s terrorist spree. The revelation caused a national scandal. Because the shredding occurred in Cologne during the city’s famous Carnival celebrations, during which confetti is thrown into the air in celebration, the media began referring to it as “Operation Confetti.”
Three days after the shredding, German intelligence agencies destroyed even more potential evidence—six transcripts of telephone calls that they’d recorded between members of the far right. This time, the order came from even higher: Germany’s Ministry of the Interior. Some newspapers reported that the files pertained to an operation to recruit right‑wing informants in Zwickau, the city in Saxony where the NSU had been hiding.
Officials swore that the files were destroyed as part of a routine procedure because they were more than 10 years old, insisting they had nothing to do with the NSU. But to the families of those that the NSU murdered, the timing suggested that authorities may not have been merely negligent for having failed to stop the killings, but also complicit in covering them up.
The case also raised enormous questions about the types of informants that these agencies were employing. One former intelligence officer in the state of Hesse, Andreas Temme, was almost certainly present at the scene of one of the NSU’s immigrant murders. He later told police officers that he wasn’t. Police searched his apartment as well as his room at his parents’ place, where he sometimes stayed. They discovered sheets of paper with quotes from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature, including copies of an SS handbook that Temme had typed up by hand. His neighbors told police they called him “Little Adolf” on account of his far‑right views.
In the NSU’s aftermath, the head of Germany’s federal intelligence agency resigned. And of all people, Maassen was the man that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet choose to take his place.
Maassen was a controversial choice for the mission of revamping an agency that had failed to see or stop Germany’s most sensational anti-immigrant plot of the 21st century. As a lawyer for Germany’s ministry of the interior he earned a reputation as being anti-immigration, mostly notably due to his decision that a German resident of Turkish citizenship named Murat Kurnaz should not be allowed to return to Germany because he’d violated his immigration terms by remaining outside Germany for more than six months–while being unlawfully held and tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
Six years into his tenure, his far-right bias would be his undoing. He was forced out after he downplayed the far-right riots and attacks against immigrants in the city of Chemnitz in August 2018. The riots started after a 23-year-old Syrian refugee, Alaa S., stabbed and killed a 35-year-old German carpenter at a city festival. The resulting anti‑immigrant protest organized by the AfD in Chemnitz devolved into white Germans attacking immigrants in the streets while police struggled to maintain control.
“As the head of Germany’s anti-extremist intelligence agency, Maassen’s job was to investigate the shocking images coming out of Chemnitz, especially after Merkel condemned protesters for ‘hunting’ foreigners,” wrote the Berlin-based political journalist Emily Schultheis. “Maassen did the opposite,” she added, refusing to treat the white German perpetrators as a threat.
In doing so, critics allege Maassen neglected his fundamental duties to protect Germany’s people—in this case, its immigrants—from violent, anti-democratic threats. Sure enough, a few weeks after the riots, eight white men formed a group that they called “Revolution Chemnitz” and began attacking immigrants with baseball bats in a Chemnitz park.
Complacency like Maassen’s has enormous implications for Germany’s ability to protect immigrants today. Last year, Germany saw some 2,300 attacks against refugees—more than any time since the so-called global refugee crisis began. Police and, to a lesser extent, intelligence agencies are failing to prevent thousands of far-right extremist attacks against Muslims, immigrants, and Jews—a failure that cannot easily be corrected if the heads of Germany’s security agencies are run by far-right men such as Maassen who sometimes refuse to see the threat.
In 2022, Germany counted at least 327 far-right extremists working in its military, intelligence, and police. In April, the German paper Stern reported that there were some 400 cases pending against state police officers for espousing or acting upon far-right extremist beliefs.
“If you have criminal activity among your own people, it’s very hard to detect it,” the president of Thuringia’s intelligence agency, Stephan Kramer, told Foreign Policy. “It’s very hard to go after it. And it’s very hard to break.’”
“Right-wing terrorism—or right-wing extremism—is the major subject that we’re dealing with,” Kramer added—but it isn’t new. “The blood trail of right-wing extremism-slash-terrorism has existed as long as the federal republic of Germany, and for a very long time it was played down by the security agencies focusing, for their own political reasons, on other stuff—for example communism, left-wing extremism,” Kramer said, adding, “If you look at the blood trail that neo-Nazism and right-wing extremists in Germany have left since the beginning of the 60s and 70s—and the numbers of victims killed by them—there was never a time when there was not a vital threat from the right-wing.”
“Yes, the intelligence community … made grave mistakes—even collaborated with the extremists that they were supposed to fight against,” in the case of the NSU, Kramer said. “Mr. Rower, one of my predecessors who was the head of the whole conspiracy—yes, he did that. No question about it.”
But Kramer insisted that intelligence agencies cannot keep the public safe without employing far-right moles. “All the old informants during the time of the NSU were taken out of business”—including people such as Tino Brandt, Kramer insisted.
But the NSU scandal wasn’t the only occasion that Germany’s proliferation of far‑right informants has backfired spectacularly. Months before 9/11, in January 2001, German legislators and cabinet members under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder petitioned Germany’s highest court to ban the country’s neo-Nazi NPD party on the grounds that it sought to overthrow Germany’s democratic order.
But in March 2003, the court rejected the ban for a revealing reason: Germany’s intelligence agencies had recruited and funded so many informants within the party’s ranks—some 30 of the NPD’s 200 leaders, or one out of every seven—that the court couldn’t discern which of the party’s anti-constitutional ideas belonged to its genuine members, and which belonged to government spies.
This should have been a stark and humiliating lesson about the overuse of informants. But whenever intelligence chiefs and their informants share some of the same right-wing beliefs, the lines between mole and minder blur.
But to Maassen, contrary to what Kramer told me, Germany’s intelligence agencies were never “blind in the right eye”—that is to say, blind to far-right threats, as the German saying goes—but in the left. It took the Chemnitz riots to force Germany’s leaders to acknowledge that Maassen’s eyes were shut.
And yet, in the deal that orchestrated his ouster in 2018, the CDU gave Maassen a pay raise and a promotion to deputy interior minister. “It’s absolutely irresponsible to promote him to an even better job with even more power than now for a failure and for spreading conspiracy ideas,” said Quent, the aforementioned scholar, at the time. Maassen was ousted from that role less than two months later, but his political ambitions were far from through. In 2021, he ran for a seat in the Bundestag and lost.
In early 2023, Maassen was elected president of a small, far-right union, from which his present political ambitions emerged. This January, he announced plans to waylay the organization into his own political party, the Values Union, to compete in Germany’s September elections in three key, right-leaning federal states.
Such new, identity-cult political parties are in vogue: That same month, a former Die Linke faction leader in the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht, launched her own, narcissistically named party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, to draw anti-immigrant voters from the left. While most opinion polls place her at 5 percent to 8 percent nationally, one recent poll estimated the number of eastern Germans who would consider voting for her in this September’s state elections as high as 40 percent.
It’s too early to predict whether Maassen’s party could seriously contend in September’s state elections in Brandenburg, Saxony, and his home state of Thuringia. But the former spy chief intends to try.
“We will do everything we can to ensure that there will be an anti-socialist turnaround in Thuringia next year,” he warned in a recent post on X.
Maassen did not grant a request for interview.
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