Request to leave: Maassen lets the CDU ultimatum pass

Former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution Maassen has not yet left the CDU despite an ultimatum from the party. Now the executive committee wants to initiate a party exclusion procedure and withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect.

The controversial former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, has let the ultimatum set by the CDU leadership to voluntarily leave the party expire, according to the CDU. “The federal office of the CDU in Germany has not received a resignation from Dr. Maassen,” said a CDU spokesman. Thuringia’s CDU General Secretary Christian Herrgott also confirms: “We have had no reaction from Mr. Maassen.”

The spokesman for the federal party also announced that “in the event that has now apparently occurred that Dr. Maassen does not leave the party voluntarily by 5 February at 12 noon”, the presidium has applied to the federal executive board of the CDU to initiate party exclusion proceedings against Maassen and to withdraw his membership rights with immediate effect.

Maassen is heard in writing

In the run-up to the corresponding meeting of the CDU federal executive board planned for February 13, Maassen will have the opportunity to comment in writing, the party spokesman said. Maassen was informed by email and letter last Wednesday that he had the opportunity to get involved in writing until next Thursday.

The former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution said on Tuesday that he had only heard about the exit request from the media. He added: “First of all, I want to see the CDU’s briefs, I’ll check them with my lawyers, and then we’ll see.”

Again and again controversial statements

Maassen was initially criticized as then President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in late summer 2018 for a statement about the demonstrations in Chemnitz. The trigger for the controversy was a video that is said to show scenes of hunting foreigners. At the time, Maassen had doubted that there had been any “hunting” and thus sparked a debate about himself and his position. The then Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, put Maassen on temporary retirement after much back and forth.

Since then, the CDU party leadership has accused Maassen of repeatedly using “the language from the milieu of anti-Semites and conspiracy ideologues to the point of ethnic expressions”. In the past few weeks, Maaßen has again come under massive criticism for statements. In a tweet, he claimed that the thrust of the “driving forces in the political and media space” was “eliminatory racism against whites”. The historian and head of the Buchenwald Memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, then accused him of “classic extreme right-wing reversal of guilt” and trivializing the Holocaust. In an interview, Maassen also spoke of a “red-green racial theory”.

Maassen was elected the new chairman of the Union of Values ​​last week. According to its own statements, it has 4,000 members, 85 percent of whom come from the CDU and CSU.