In the dispute over his management style, the first Jäger district group has now openly asked the Bavarian Jäger President Ernst Weidenbusch and his Secretary General Robert Pollner to resign. “In order to avert further significant damage (…), it is inevitable that you, Mr. Weidenbusch and Mr. Pollner, resign from your offices in the Landesjägerverband Bayern eV with immediate effect,” says a letter from the hunting protection and hunters’ association in Nuremberg -Land, which went to the presidium of the Bavarian Hunting Association (BJV) and all of the 160 or so BJV district groups.
At the same time, the chairman of the district group, Bernhard Kukula, gave Weidenbusch and Pollner an ultimatum. If they do not comply with the demand for resignation by November 20th, an extraordinary state assembly will be called and a motion of no confidence will be brought against them. “Weidenbusch’s behavior is completely unworthy of a president of such a large association as we are,” says Kukula. “If this continues, the BJV will break.”
With around 180 members, the Jägerverein Nürnberger Land is one of the rather small district groups in the BJV. Nevertheless, Kukula should speak for numerous hunters throughout Bavaria. According to the allegations, Weidenbusch and Pollner have repeatedly spoken out against other hunters so massively in their comparatively short tenure that they have felt threatened.
Similar allegations come from former full-time employees at the BJV headquarters in Feldkirchen near Munich. They speak of “disrespectful treatment”, “outbursts of anger” and “insults”. Allegedly, a number of employees have therefore given up their jobs, others have been dismissed. In his own words, Jäger district chief Kukula received “an incredible amount of response” to his open letter. The spectrum of reactions ranged from “complete agreement to complete rejection” and was “roughly balanced”.
The hunting association wants to clarify the allegations against members of its executive committee. A code of conduct is being drawn up, and employees can also contact a whistleblowing office openly or anonymously, the association announced on Tuesday in Feldkirchen. This position will be set up at a law firm in which a lawyer from the BJV legal committee works.
The association spoke of a planned defamation by means of a character assassination campaign. Weidenbusch, who also sits in the state parliament for the CSU, blames a group for this. It was always the same people who tried to gain dominance in the association with fabricated accusations. “Some of it’s just about power and money,” said Weidenbusch. However, some of them also rejected changes that he and his team wanted to push through in order to lead the association into the future. Perhaps the pace here is too fast and you have to slow down to take all members with you. If everything takes longer, Weidenbusch, in his own words, can also imagine running for the presidency again in 2026.
Weidenbusch’s critics include the chairman of the hunting protection and hunters’ association in Dachau, Ulrich Wittmann, who failed in the election of the new president in April. Wittmann speaks of insults and psychological pressure. The aim is to turn the association into a political hunting association. the German hunting newspaper also published an open letter allegedly written by a “group of former employees” who wish to remain anonymous. In the office of the BJV, fear and mistrust had spread, employees had resigned, it says.