Hans-Georg Maassen could be described as the spymaster who went out into the cold.
From 2012, he headed Germany’s domestic intelligence service, officially called the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He was appointed by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led (CDU) cabinet and had been a member of her party for around three decades.
However, in 2018, Maassen was ungraciously ousted from the top intelligence position. Last year, he left the conservative CDU and founded his own far-right party, the WerteUnion or Values Union, which will be on the ballot in some federal states for the first time as Germany goes to the polls on February 23.
More remarkably, however, Maassen is now considered a right-wing extremist by the very intelligence service he used to lead, which has placed its own ex-boss under surveillance. The former spymaster is now apparently considered a threat to the constitution he was once in charge of protecting.
Maassen was born in 1962 in West Germany. Aged 16, he joined the conservative CDU. He studied law and wrote his PhD thesis on the legal status of asylum seekers under International Law. From the 1990s, he worked in the German Interior Ministry and was appointed head of the Immigration Project Group in 2001.
Controversially, Maassen penned a legal opinion for the government in 2002 that stated that Murat Kurnaz – a Turkish citizen who had lived in Germany and was detained illegally without trial for six years by the United States in Guantanamo Bay before being released – had violated the terms of his residency permit and would not be allowed to re-enter the country. This was based on the fact that Kurnaz had been abroad for more than six months and had not contacted authorities during that time.
THE REAL story, which reads like John le Carré fan fiction, begins with Maassen’s appointment to head Germany’s domestic intelligence service in 2012. It had been rocked to its core by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) scandal when a network of militant neo-Nazis was able to murder 10 people in the 2000s right under its nose.
Despite the service’s numerous paid informants within the orbit of the far Right terror group, it allegedly knew nothing. As the scandal unfolded, it hastily shredded scores of relevant internal documents, hindering any proper investigation into the matter.
Maassen, with his trademark minuscule spectacles and three-piece suit, was the man hired to clean up the mess and restore the service’s reputation.
Fast forward to 2018, and Maassen was forced into early retirement by one of his own, Horst Seehofer, a member of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party CSU.
Racist far Right riots
As racist, far Right riots swept the east German city of Chemnitz that summer, Maassen publicly denied there had been any “hunts” against migrants. He doubted whether a widely circulating video documenting the attacks was authentic. The man brought in to restore trust had, in the opinion of many, broken it by indulging in conspiracy theories that downplayed the right-wing violence unfolding before the very eyes of the nation.
Since leaving domestic intelligence, Maassen’s own radicalization has snowballed. He has repeatedly doubled down on his claims that migrants were not hunted in the city of Chemnitz in 2018 and that a video showing this had been “manipulated” – even devoting an entire page on his website to it.
A spokesperson for Maassen responded to a query from The Jerusalem Post by claiming that he had never denied that there were “extreme-right riots” in Chemnitz, only specifically that there were no “hunts” targeting migrants.
According to his former employer, Maassen also has connections to right-wing extremists and Reichsbuerger (Reich citizen) – a conspiracy movement that believes the post-war state of Germany is illegitimate and must therefore be overthrown.
When investigators foiled a far Right coup plot to storm the Bundestag in December 2022 and install a new Reich, they came across text messages between Maassen and an associate of the group’s leader, a self-styled prince and Reichsbuerger. “We have to keep fighting,” Maassen wrote to the associate, an anti-democratic crash prophet, in one message.
Maassen responded to the Post that he had merely wished the associate, who was not a Reichsbuerger, “Happy Birthday,” and that his words referred to their shared criticism of the federal government.
He distanced himself from the Reichsbuerger movement and stressed that it was under his watch that it was first placed under surveillance by German intelligence.
AFTER LEAVING the intelligence service, Maassen was interviewed in numerous fringe far Right and conspiracy media outlets, such as the Austrian website AUF1 and the German-language YouTube channel Hallo Meinung. He also appeared on the Russian state-sponsored propaganda channel RT Deutsch, before it was banned in the European Union, following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And he functions as the authoritative mouthpiece of the radical Right fringe.
Interview everyone as a democrat and free speech advocate
Maassen replied that as a democrat and advocate of free speech, he gives everyone an interview without exception, but denies having been interviewed by right-wing extremist media.
“I despise right-wing extremists, and, in 2012, as president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, I rebuilt the department for combating right-wing extremism that was dissolved by my predecessor,” he said.
In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for Maassen said that if he had, in fact, spoken with right-wing extremist media, it was unknowingly. He went on call the term “right-wing extremist” a “generalization” and defamatory.
MAASSEN HAS become a proponent of conspiracy theories, even regarding the term “conspiracy theory”: In a 2019 interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung he suggested it had been “invented by certain foreign intelligence services” in order to “discredit political opponents,” a claim he doubled down on when replying to the Post.
He has also spoken of a “red-green racial ideology” that views white people as inferior, therefore leading to more Arabic and African men being brought into Germany – a statement highly reminiscent of the far Right “great replacement” conspiracy theory. A spokesperson for Maassen responded by saying that this comment was not racist and was aimed at criticizing another comment that he deemed to be racist against white people. At a recent event in the city of Koblenz, Maassen stated that he sees himself more as a “conspiracy analyst,” the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported.
Maassen responded to the Post: “I hope you understand the difference between disseminating and analyzing conspiracy narratives. I do the latter.”
Government health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have been a particular source of political anger for Maassen and he has criticized it by further propagating conspiracy theories. He has stated that the measures in Germany were the “most serious human rights crimes we have experienced” and wants to send politicians and scientists to jail for it.
Accusations of antisemitism
Maassen has also been repeatedly accused of using antisemitic codes, ranting about “globalists,” a “new world order,” or an impending “great reset” – buzzwords on the fringe far Right that often have antisemitic connotations.
Stephan Kramer, head of the state intelligence service in Thuringia and previously general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused Maassen of using “classic antisemitic stereotypes” in speeches and on social media. Kramer made the claim in an interview with state broadcaster ARD in 2021.
THE FEDERAL Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Maassen’s former intelligence service, has since compiled a list detailing his numerous extremist statements, his apparent belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories, and his connections to the far Right.
Its dossier was seen by the Post after Maassen’s lawyer requested a copy under data protection laws and Maassen himself uploaded it to his website in January 2024, commenting on social media platform X: “The federal government is obviously scared of me and the Values Union.”
Approached for comment on this dossier, Maassen sent the Post a 134-page response his lawyer had filed with the intelligence service on January 6 of this year. In it, the lawyer defends Maasen’s use of terms that experts have described as “antisemitic” by touting his client’s former contact to the Mossad and Shin Bet while still German domestic intelligence chief.
The Israeli intelligence services “repeatedly honored” Maassen, his lawyer wrote, in bold, in his defense.
A spokesperson for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, his former intelligence service, responded to the Post that it does not comment on individuals or internal processes.
The fact that Maassen held such a central position within intelligence for years has left many within German civil society feeling deeply alarmed.
“Emotionally, it means a massive loss of trust in state authorities, particularly among victims of far-right violence,” Simone Rafael, a spokesperson for the Berlin-based think-tank CeMAS focusing on the far Right told the Post.
She criticized that under Maassen’s watch, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was not classified as an extreme right-wing organization, with Maassen even coaching the party on how to avoid being placed under surveillance, according to German media reports.
CDU period
SINCE LEAVING the domestic intelligence service, Maassen has styled himself as a populist, anti-establishment force that wants to shake up the German political landscape. In the previous general election in 2021, he ran for a CDU seat in the eastern state of Thuringia – a stronghold of the far-right AfD – but lost out to the Social Democrats.
As criticism within the party grew louder over his comments, Maassen chose to jump before he was pushed: He resigned from the CDU in January 2024, posting a cut-up picture of his membership card – after the party had already tried to kick him out.
Now, having left the CDU and founded a party of his own – which was a non-official ultra-conservative group affiliated with the CDU before being registered as a party – he had hoped to enter the Bundestag. But Maassen’s political ambitions are not quite going to plan.
In regional elections in three east German states last autumn, his party received only between 0.3 and 0.6% of the vote. With the next federal election taking place on February 23, months earlier than planned after the governing coalition crumbled, Maassen’s new party has been caught unprepared. It announced that it would only run in six federal states, including the capital Berlin. In the end, it was only able to gather enough signatures to be admitted to the election in just one state, North Rhine-Westphalia – of which Cologne, Bonn, and many industrial cities are part.
Rafael still sees a danger in Maassen’s constant challenges to the so-called “firewall” or cordon sanitaire, the German political consensus against any cooperation with the AfD.
“He can do more damage with that than through his own micro-party,” she said.
Former AfD chair Joerg Meuthen has already joined the Values Union, with former AfD Bundestag member Dirk Spaniel following him this month. And Maassen can still count on a loyal ultra-conservative-to-far-right supporter base that is happy to wait with him out in the cold, at least for a little while longer.