German Christian Democrats want to kick out party’s ex-spy chief

By Timur Kirez

BERLIN (AA) - The party of Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wants to kick out the ex-president of the domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen.

The CDU Federal Executive Committee has unanimously decided to initiate proceedings to expel him from the party, CDU Chairman Friedrich Merz said Monday in Berlin. In addition, Maassen's membership rights had been revoked "with immediate effect."

The CDU accuses him of being close to right-wing extremism, conspiracy theories and using "language from the milieu of anti-Semites." Maassen, who was president of the BfV from 2012 to 2018, had sparked criticism with various statements.

On Twitter, for example, he declared in January that the thrust of the "driving forces in the political-media sphere" was "eliminatory racism against whites." He also spoke of a "racial doctrine" of the left-wing parties the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens.

Maassen has also been repeatedly accused by the opposition of failing to come to terms with the murders of the neo-Nazi group NSU. Above all, the role of informants has not been clearly clarified to date.

Representatives of the Left Party and the Green Party had already stated in 2016 that "after years of state failure in the NSU terror being uncovered," they no longer wanted to hear Maassen rashly claim that someone was "unrelated to the NSU."

The opposition had demanded that "finally everything about what state agencies, including the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), knew about the NSU terror" be put on the table.

The NSU killed eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek citizen and a German policewoman in 2000-2007, but the murders have long remained unresolved.

Recent revelations in the media have shown that the BfV and its local branches had dozens of informants who had contacts with the NSU suspects in the past.

But officials insisted that they had no prior information about the existence of the NSU terror cell and its role behind the killings.