After the widely acclaimed publication of the NSU files, the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution is now examining the documents. The "ZDF Magazin Royale" and "Frag den Staat" leaked the documents on a website the night before. The response to the coup in the party landscape is divided.
After the publication of Hessian NSU files that were allegedly classified as secret by "ZDF Magazin Royale", Hessian intelligence officers are now examining the documents in question. The state office "took note" of Jan Böhmermann's broadcast on Friday evening. A spokesman said it was checking the "documents created in connection with the program and published on the Internet". In the statement, the office did not go into the content of the files.
The "Ask the State" platform and Jan Böhmermann's "ZDF Magazin Royale" published Hesse NSU files classified as secret on Friday. "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," the website said. Accordingly, the documents classified as secret reveal "a more than dubious picture of the work of the Hessian protection of the constitution; especially during the 1990s". The files show: "At that time, the service was collecting extensive data, but it had neither an overview of its inventory, nor did the information collected always have consequences."
In order to protect the sources, the files were completely typed up and a new document created so as not to leave any digital traces, Böhmermann wrote on Twitter. According to the cover sheet, the document, which has been available since Friday, is a final report on the review of files in the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Hesse in 2012. The report is dated November 20, 2014.
The Hessian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) announced in a seven-line statement that it was examining the published documents. In the case of the resulting necessary measures, 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”. A spokesman declined to give any further details.
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. According to the assessment of the Hessian left, they obviously correspond to the original. "They seem to have been transcribed completely and with the same content," said Torsten Felstehausen, the Left Party's domestic policy spokesman in the Hessian state parliament. 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 faction in Wiesbaden welcomed the publication. Felstehausen said that victims' families had been demanding this for a long time. "The public can finally get their own picture of how the so-called secret service for the protection of the constitution has dealt with indications of right-wing terror over the years." According to the Left, the report "casts a devastating picture of the work of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution." Felstehausen said the intelligence agencies did not follow up on hundreds of tips that neo-Nazis owned weapons and explosives. The protection of the constitution should be abolished. The federal leader of the left, Janine Wissler, said at a state party conference in Dietzenbach, Hesse, about Böhmermann's publication: "We fought for this for years." She accused the Hessian state government of secrecy instead of enlightenment. The other fractions in the Hessian state parliament reacted rather cautiously.
The SPD parliamentary group said they initially did not want to say anything about it. The Greens in the state parliament said: "We are looking at the process very closely and will evaluate it in due course." 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 life and make the work of the security authorities more difficult in the long term".
The left-wing faction in the Thuringian state parliament demanded that the secret services be deprived of the files on the right-wing extremist terrorist group NSU. MP Katharina König-Preuss explained that it was necessary to hand over the files that could help clarify the NSU complex to an archive in order to advance the processing. The Hessian documents also contained a lot of information about Thuringian neo-Nazis, she said.
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 had checked 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. Hesse's Interior Minister Peter Beuth defended the decision not to publish the files in May 2021. "It is inherent in the work of our security authorities that they cannot disclose their working methods to everyone," he said at the time in the state parliament in Wiesbaden. "Otherwise, the enemies of the constitution could themselves use this information to fight our common values or to endanger people in a targeted manner."
Greens Parliament Secretary Irene Mihalic told the "Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland": "Unfortunately, the published files do not reveal any new facts about the background to the crimes of the NSU." It is all the more important "to finally fulfill the promise of unreserved investigation of the NSU complex".
Mihalic sees the credibility of the responsible authorities at risk. "The credibility of the security authorities involved at federal and state level depends largely on whether they can finally explain the overall context after all these years and after the investigation efforts of numerous committees of inquiry," said the Green politician. "Right-wing terror continues to this day and the lessons learned from the NSU disaster are a serious stumbling block for combating it."
