So Nancy Faeser has never received many hearts for a tweet since she became Federal Minister of the Interior. Nearly
There were 40,000 as of Monday afternoon, and almost 5,000 retweets. That’s a good value – if that’s what counts. Faeser reacted on Sunday in the social network to criticism of a publication in “Antifa”, the magazine of the “Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime – Association of Anti-Fascists” (VVN-BdA). The allegations from the “Junge Freiheit”, the AfD, the “Bild” newspaper and CDU MPs are “transparent”, she writes. “I have always shown a clear edge against right-wing extremism and all enemies of the open society – and will continue to do so.”
The publication dates back to last summer, when Faeser was still an opposition politician in Hesse. With the tweet, she justified her decision at the time to write for an organization influenced by left-wing extremists as Federal Minister of the Interior. Even if Faeser now gets a lot of applause from left-wing circles, she has made her problem bigger than it used to be.
It’s not about the content of the guest post. Faeser writes that she will not be intimidated by threatening letters from “NSU 2.0”, that the fight against right-wing extremism is part of the DNA of the SPD and its political work. The criticism, which Faeser dismisses as “transparent”, refers to the fact that VVN-BdA is an organization influenced by left-wing extremists, which is observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior does not comment
Only the Bavarian state office names the association in its constitutional protection report. There is talk of “the largest left-wing extremist organization in the field of anti-fascism in Germany”, which rates all “non-Marxist systems – including parliamentary democracy – as potentially fascist”. According to information from the FAZ, VVN-BdA is also observed by the Federal Office, as well as by the state offices in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Baden-Württemberg.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior did not comment on this when asked. In the report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, VVN-BdA has not appeared since 2005. This does not mean, however, that the activities of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have ended. The annual report does not provide information about all observation objects, only about the particularly relevant ones. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution continues to classify the association as being influenced by left-wing extremists. The VVN-BdA is considered the long arm of the German Communist Party (DKP), which, as the successor party to the KPD, appears as an object of observation in the intelligence report.
Association with a checkered history
The association has a checkered history. After the war, a broad alliance of persecuted people initially formed, including communists, social democrats and Christian democrats. The communists were influential from the start, but Konrad Adenauer was also one of the founding members. The Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats split from the initially around 300,000 members, and the group radicalized. Since 1973, VVN-BdA has been mentioned in the intelligence report.
Today, the association is said to have around 8,000 members across Germany, but only a few are said to be left-wing extremists. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution can also use intelligence resources against them. In security circles it is said that the extremist tendencies of the association have weakened in recent years. This has to do with Ulrich Sander as a person, among other things. The former deputy editor-in-chief of the DKP party organ “Unsere Zeit”, well connected in the left-wing scene, was federal spokesman for the VVN-BdA until 2020, but has now retired for reasons of age. Since then, it is said that things have calmed down in the association. Allegedly, there was even consideration of ending the observation by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
For this decision, Faeser’s controversial publication is a burden. If the constitutional protection officers were no longer concerned with the developments in the VVN-BdA, there would be suspicion that the Federal Minister of the Interior, who is responsible for the technical supervision of the constitutional protection, had exerted influence here – or that the constitutional protection officers were acting in anticipatory obedience. Such assumptions are harmful for an authority that acts in the political sphere, but is only allowed to follow the law and has to look in all directions equally.
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