A report by the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the NSU terror was supposed to remain secret for 30 years. But now Jan Böhmermann wants to have published the paper. That makes waves.
The publication of suspected secret files by the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the NSU on the “Ask the State” platform and on Jan Böhmermann’s “ZDF Magazin Royale” caused a political stir. From the point of view of the Left, the public can thus form its own picture of how the Office for the Protection of the Constitution deals with right-wing terror. The CDU, on the other hand, accused Böhmermann of having violated the freedom of the press.
According to the cover sheet, the document that has been available since Friday is a final report on the examination of the files in the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) in Hesse in 2012. The report is dated November 20, 2014. At first there was no official confirmation of the authenticity of the documents from the Hessian Ministry of the Interior or the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
“We believe the public has the right to know what exactly is in those documents that were originally supposed to remain secret for more than a century,” says the dedicated website of “Ask the State” and “ZDF Magazin Royale”. . In order to protect the sources, the files were completely typed up and a new document was created so as not to leave any digital traces, Böhmermann wrote on Twitter.
The LfV announced that it was examining the published documents. In the event of the necessary measures resulting from this, especially “with regard to the personal data contained and the interests of the state concerned”, one is “in exchange with the police and constitutional protection authorities”.
According to the assessment of the Hessian left, the documents obviously correspond to the original. “They seem to have been transcribed completely and with the same content,” said the spokesman for domestic affairs in the state parliament, Torsten Felstehausen. The texts were placed next to each other and compared. The MEPs had access to the original files in the committee of inquiry.
The left welcomed the publication. “We fought for this for years,” said federal chairwoman Janine Wissler. “The public can finally get their own picture of how the so-called protection of the constitution has dealt with indications of right-wing terror over the years.”
The parliamentary manager of the CDU parliamentary group in the Hessian state parliament, Holger Bellino, accused Böhmermann of having violated the freedom of the press. “It cannot be ruled out that by linking this information from other documents, extremists can draw conclusions about the working methods and informants of the security authorities.” This could “endanger human lives and make the work of the security authorities more difficult in the long term”.
The “National Socialist Underground” had been able to murder through Germany for years without being recognized. The victims of the right-wing terrorists were nine traders of Turkish and Greek origin and a German policewoman.
The so-called NSU files of the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution are the result of an examination in which the authority examined its own files and documents on right-wing extremism for possible references to the NSU. There has been a dispute about her for years. The files were initially classified as secret for 120 years, but the time was later reduced to 30 years. More than 130,000 people had petitioned for publication.
The parliamentary group leader of the Greens in the Hessian state parliament, Mathias Wagner, explained that the conclusions that the “ZDF Magazin Royale” had drawn from the report called “NSU files” coincided with the assessments “that from our point of view everyone has drawn so far have who have read the files”.
The documents paint a desolate picture of the state of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in those years, Wagner explained, with the proviso that the documents are genuine. According to current knowledge, new references to the NSU could not be established.
The parliamentary control commission of the state parliament for the protection of the constitution commissioned a special investigator to review the files again, Wagner explained. The questions raised in the petition for the release of the files should also be investigated again.
