Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution as an Instrument for Character Assassination
This, then, is the organization that considers itself authorized to peer into the private lives of members of religious minorities, bug their phones, infiltrate their churches, obtain their bank records, interrogate their relatives and bribe their friends to bear false witness against them. Writing in Merkur-Deutsche Zeitschrift fuer Europaeisches Denken, in February 1999, the attorney and author Horst Meier put it this way, “Our Constitutional Security agents need not interest themselves these days in real danger. What was once, in 1949, begun with the ‘police letter’ of the western allies when the German federal administration was permitted to gather information on ‘subversive activities’ has been manipulated from the start for inner political restrictions for alleged constitutional enemies.”
The only right course of action for the OPC is to rehabilitate its original purpose, and eschew ostracizing and stigmatizing individuals whose only crime is to belong to a newer religious community.