{"id":178827,"date":"2018-08-09T20:48:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/09\/germany-huh\/"},"modified":"2018-08-09T20:48:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T01:48:00","slug":"germany-huh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/09\/germany-huh\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany, Huh?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/08\/04\/germ-a04.html\">elements of the German secret services have been advising the neo-Nazi AfD party<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Hans-Georg Maa\u00dfen, the president of Germany\u2019s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), met with former Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Frauke Petry several times in 2015, advising her how to avoid nationwide surveillance of the AfD by the German secret service and having her party designated as \u201cright-wing extremist.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">This was revealed in a recently published book, <i>Inside AfD<\/i>, by AfD dropout Franziska Schreiber. The 28-year-old author was a close colleague of Petry\u2019s and was chairperson of the AfD youth organization Junge Alternative in Saxony.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cPetry informed me later that Maa\u00dfen had told her what the AfD had to do to evade surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which he had not wanted himself,\u201d writes Schreiber. \u201cThey both seem to have developed a certain sympathy for one another.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Maa\u00dfen is said to have advised the AfD leader to expel Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, a representative in the state parliament of Thuringia associated with the AfD\u2019s ethnic nationalist wing. In December 2015, shortly after meeting with Maa\u00dfen, Petry did in fact call for H\u00f6cke\u2019s resignation and prepared expulsion procedures against him. According to Schreiber, she did this \u201cat the urgent advice\u201d of the chief of intelligence.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The BfV has in the meantime indirectly confirmed that Maa\u00dfen met with Petry. One generally conducts conversations with representatives of all parties, a spokesperson told the <i>S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/i>, not denying that the meetings took place. He did, however, deny that Maa\u00dfen advised the AfD or recommended the expulsion of specific leading members.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">That there were close relations between Maa\u00dfen and Petry was already known long before the publication of Inside AfD. The news magazine Der Spiegel reported in early 2016 that they had \u201cat Petry\u2019s request\u201d met several times in the fall of 2015. The magazine referred to \u201cseveral AfD politicians,\u201d including Petry.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Is anyone else getting a 1930s vibe from all this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that elements of the German secret services have been advising the neo-Nazi AfD party: Hans-Georg Maa\u00dfen, the president of Germany\u2019s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), met with former Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Frauke Petry several times in 2015, advising her how to avoid nationwide surveillance of the AfD &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,371,364,629,389,374],"class_list":["post-178827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-europe","tag-evil","tag-fascism","tag-history","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}