Posted on February 1, 2023

Jump or Be Pushed: German Conservatives Turn on Ex-Nazi Hunter Over Race Comments

Thomas Escritt, Reuters, January 30, 2023

Once he was Germany’s top Nazi hunter. Now the conservative opposition want to kick former domestic security chief Hans-Georg Maassen out of their party for allegedly repeating anti-Semitic and racist tropes.

Until 2018, Maassen headed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, chasing down extremist threats to Germany’s constitutional order {snip}

But the long-time member and one-time parliamentary candidate of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) lost that job after being accused of ignoring video evidence of far-right gangs chasing immigrants in riots.

Now, after Maassen mused in an interview about “a green-leftist race theory” that casts “whites as inferior” and promotes “immigration by Arabic and African men”, the CDU have lost patience with a man who kept doubling down on culture war tropes, making himself a cult figure on the right fringes.

{snip}

Maassen criticised the announcement in comments to the conservative newspaper Die Welt. “What I said wasn’t racist, but what many people think,” he said. “I reject ideological positions that demand the extinction of ‘whitebreads’ – those with white skin colour – through mass immigration.”

{snip}