After controversial statements by Hans-Georg Maaßen, several CDU politicians called on the former president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to leave the party or threatened to apply to be expelled from the party. “If Mr. Maaßen is still a member of the CDU at our next federal executive board meeting on February 13, I will submit a request to the federal executive board to exclude him from our party,” said CDU federal vice president Karin Prien on Tuesday in Kiel. The Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Education accused Maassen of repeatedly using anti-Semitic and conspiracy theory codes and playing down racism.
CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja asked Maassen to leave the party. “There is no place in our party for his statements and the ideas expressed with them,” Czaja also wrote on Twitter.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz sharply criticized Maassen, but left open a procedure for party exclusion. “Mr Maassen’s statements are again unacceptable,” said Merz on Tuesday before a meeting of the Union faction in Berlin. He added: “We will continue to deal with this case and also assess it from this point of view.” When asked, Merz added that there would be no hasty decision on an exclusion procedure.
Maassen had previously claimed in a tweet that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. He also gave an interview to the publicist Alexander Wallasch for his blog. In it, Maassen also speaks of racism that is “acted against the native Germans”. “This way of thinking is an expression of a green-red racial theory, according to which whites are regarded as an inferior race and that Arab and African men must therefore be brought into the country,” said Maassen. Frequent topics on Wallasch’s blog include a supposed suspension of the rule of law during the corona pandemic and immigration, which is considered “illegal mass immigration”.
Accusation: Maassen relativizes the Holocaust
In a guest article for the “Jüdische Allgemeine”, the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation, Jens-Christian Wagner, accused Maassen of “classic extreme right-wing reversal of guilt”. “When he speaks of ‘eliminatory racism’, it’s an echo of the concept of eliminatory anti-Semitism introduced into public discourse by Daniel Goldhagen, which led to the Holocaust,” Wagner told the German Press Agency. Without having introduced the term Holocaust and without expressing himself explicitly anti-Semitic, Maaßen makes the reference to the Holocaust, “via this completely insane accusation that someone is waging a war of annihilation against whites here”. In this way, the Holocaust is played down by reversal of guilt.
Maassen himself responded to the demands for exclusion in an interview in the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit. “I am not intimidated or impressed by the request for expulsion proceedings because I do not believe that I have in any way qualified for expulsion proceedings,” he said. “I represent the positions of the basic program of the CDU and the positions of the CDU of Adenauer, Erhard and Helmut Kohl – and not those of an eco-woken party elite,” he said. He has the backing of many party friends. If you don’t like what you stand for, you have to leave the CDU.
According to Maassen, he wants to run for chairman of the Union of Values on Saturday. The arch-conservative group claims to have around 4,000 members – not all of them are also members of the CDU or CSU. The group supported Maassen. “At no time has there ever been an anti-Semitic statement by Hans-Georg Maassen,” said the union of values.
Thuringia’s CDU is also keeping its distance
The Thuringian CDU, on the other hand, distanced itself from Maaßen: “Mr. Maaßen’s statements reflect neither the language nor the mentality of the CDU Thuringia. The language of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues has no place in our midst,” said Christian Herrgott, Secretary General of the Thuringian CDU national association of which Maassen is a member.
The Berlin CDU country chief Kai Wegner told the “Tagesspiegel” that Maassen had crossed another border. “Now it has to be over. Anyone who makes such statements has no place in the CDU.”
