Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution as an Instrument for Character Assassination

SCANDALS AND STASI

When it was learned that the Berlin OPC agent “Junior” who denounced police chief Otto Dreksler had been a Stasi agent, public protests were vocal and explicit. Green MP Renate Kuenast, member of the Committee for the Protection of the Constitution in the Berlin parliament, warned that former sworn enemies of democratic West Germany are not qualified to “protect the Constitution.”

It is extraordinary that an organization conceived as a bulwark against communism is now employing the agents of communism to “protect democracy.” Why?

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that no intelligence service has been more penetrated than the OPC was by the East German Ministry of State Security. Over a period of four decades, the Stasi infiltrated agents seemingly at will behind the OPC's security curtain. Had the protection of German democracy been solely in the hands of the OPC during the Cold War, there might no longer be a free democratic order in Germany.