German Interior Minister Faeser, Her GDR/Stasi Connections, and the Unbearable Corruption Everyone Takes for Granted
German Interior Minister Faeser, Her GDR/Stasi Connections, and the Unbearable Corruption Everyone Takes for Granted
Wanna Know How 'Democracy' Dies? Through the Cartel of 'Big Labour' and Big Gov't, Aided and Abetted by Legacy Media and Big Business
Reference is made to two pieces I posted last week, which provide crucial context and the backstory to the following pieces on Nancy Faeser, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, who recently fired the top domestic intelligence chief for, well, allegedly ‘talking to Russians’ (Hi, Gen. Flynn):
And then Ms. Faeser, while claiming to fail to remember anything relatedly and refused to appear before the Bundestag’s Intelligence Committee, granted an interview to Germany’s leading tabloid, Bild:
For the latest developments, we now turn to alt-media outlet Apollo News, which offers guidance to what followed next. As always, translation, emphases, and bottom lines mine.
Faeser’s Shady Character [Schattenmann]
|Interior Minister] Faeser’s most important advisor on border protection issues is a former political officer [commissar] of the GDR Grenzschutz [Border Protection]: meet influential police union chief Sven Hüber. The minister holds her hand over him—and Hüber keeps her critics at bay. On the maintenance of power in the dustbin of history.
By Max Mannhart and Jerome Wnuk, Apollo News, 15 Sept. 2023 [source]
When Nancy Faeser enters the main police union council [Hauptpersonalrat] of the Federal Police, the first person she greets is ‘dear Sven’. Sven, Sven Hüber, is the chairman of the council and thus decisive for key personnel decisions in the Federal Police. He is also deputy chairman of the police union (GdP [Gewerkschaft der Polizei]). ‘Dear Nancy’, he opens official letters to to Faeser in handwriting, which Apollo News, and concludes it with ’Your Sven’. Since Faeser has been in office, Sven Hüber has been on the rise; he is now a key advisor to Faeser. Hüber is, after all, a seasoned First Chief Superintendent of Police, a long-time police union leader, and yet willing to support Faeser’s SPD ideas (such as: no border controls), especially in terms of providing public cover.
Nancy Faeser has cleaned house at the Ministry of the Interior and filled posts largely with new party members. What she lacks as a result is the connection to the depths of the authority, i.e., credibility among the police. Sven Hüber is the perfect man to fill this gap. He has long since positioned himself in the public as the voice of the Federal Police and is setting the tone, in particular in the debate on border controls.
While Faeser is actually being attacked more and more fiercely from within the federal police for her line of rejecting border controls, police union leader Hüber is completely on her side: permanent border controls are ‘nothing more than political placebo’ and ‘political election campaign fireworks’, he says. When Saxony’s Interior Minister Schuster calls for border controls, Sven Hüber is immediately on the spot: ‘Schuster is telling the untruth’, he scolds, adding that calls for border controls signify the ‘sheer stupidity of the people’. When CDU politician Christoph de Vries lashed out at Faeser on Twitter, Sven Hüber got involved in the comments column.
PR Spin and ‘Stupid Populism’
And when Nancy Faeser presents a new master plan on the topic of deportations and repatriations, she is sharply criticised for it by the states, municipalities, and other police unionists, as well as by conservative and Green politicians. Sven Hüber, on the other hand, is fully in favour of Faeser’s plan, of course. When [Germany’s largest tabloid] Bild criticised Faeser on immigration policy, Hüber tweeted: ‘The legal stupidity and stupid populism…is yet to be overtaken by their audacity.’ And, ‘modern incitement’ [orig. moderne Verhetzung].
He appears in countless media outlets and on television, and as regards the debate on border controls, Hüber is an almost daily fixture. He writes letters to editors, builds up pressure. His political influence is enormous. The extent to which Faeser and he cooperate is shown by a letter from Hüber to Faeser, which is available to Apollo News and deals with the controversial ‘personnel development concept’. In it, Hüber writes:
Against this background, it must be avoided at all costs that the personnel development concept of the Federal Police, which has already been under evaluation and redrafting since 2019 and which would now inevitably also be linked with the name of the minister, would again be negatively charged and meet with rejection among the employees.
The trade union leader, in other words, advises the minister on PR issues. They approach things together.
In a podcast by Gabor Steingart, ‘The Pioneer’, Sven Hüber talks about the life of police officers in a feel-good mood. He is introduced as a police officer ‘who knows very well how you are, ladies and gentlemen in police uniform’. That is to be doubted.
A Gaping Black Hole in Next to the Iron Curtain
On the GdP website, Sven Hüber’s CV contains but three items: ‘Born in 1964; joined the police in 1990; joined the police union in 1990.’ So his active police career took place between 1990—and 1990. And it went like this:
Sven Hüber is actually a soldier—he volunteered for the GDR Grenzschutz [Border Protection] in the second half of the 1980s. There he was a political officer and deputy company commander in East Berlin. He had studied for this purpose at the GDR Grenzschutz’s Rosa Luxemburg Officers' College. His diploma thesis, which is available to Apollo News, bears the title: ‘The Bundesgrenzschutz [West Germany’s Federal Border Guard] as an Instrument of Imperialist Securing of Power and Domination.’ It is a detailed reckoning with the Federal Police (then Federal Border Guard), which is allegedly right-wing reactionary. It opens like this:
With this thesis, the authors make a contribution to the discussion of questions of the political-moral preparation of members of the border troops of the GDR for border duty and combat.
[In other words: Sven Hüber, prior to him joining the newly ‘(re)unified’ German federal police, was a ‘political officer’ of the Communist GDP, i.e., a Politkommissar not unlike those attached to regular army units throughout the former Sovier Bloc.]
Hüber was subsequently entrusted with ideologically training border guards in the last years before the Wende. Hüber led the so-called FDJ-Leitungen of the Grenzschutz Regiment No. 33 in East Berlin. These FDJ-Leitungen had the task of supporting the political training of the border guards [FDJ means the ‘Free German Youth’, the obligatory youth movement in the GDR akin to the ‘Pioneers’ in the USSR]. According to the textbook, their goal was
to educate all young army members to become class-conscious socialist soldier personalities who are willing and able…to reliably protect socialism militarily under all conditions. [i.e., unquestioningly follow questionable orders, such as the notorious Schießbefehl, the standing order authorising the use of lethal force by the Grenzschutz vs. those ‘illegally’ crossing the border; put differently, Hüber indoctrinated the enlisted men to open fire on those of his fellow countrymen who elected to flee the Communist nightmare]
The Grenzschutz unit where Hüber served was in the area where the last person to die at the Berlin Wall was also shot—in 1989, one then-20-year-old Chris Gueffroy.
The shooter in the Gueffroy case later said that it was only through the political lessons that he had been convinced that opening fire at a refugee was legal. [and, if you’re up for it, we could now open a discussion about the morality of doing so, which should, ideally, involve—you guessed it—Mr. Hüber]
What the Police Union Says About the Case of Mr. Gueffroy
Upon request, the Police Union states:
As far as the Police Union is aware, Mr. Hüber had nothing to do with the political instruction (political training [orig. politische Schulung]) of the shooter and the other participants in the crime mentioned by the Federal Supreme Court, nor with the instructors of the political instruction mentioned by the Federal Supreme Court, and did not instruct them. The FDJ leadership was not entrusted with political instruction. It has not been established that the shooter or his comrades were in the FDJ at all.
[That’s so disingenuous, for the point in the above heinous shooting—for Mr. Gueffroy was literally shot in the back while fleeing the GDR—is that the shooters were ‘politically trained’ by the likes of Mr. Hüber; incidentally, that murder took place in the area and at the time that Mr. Hüber was right *there*.]
Yet, let us note that the shooter was under 25 years old [which is to say that the target group (no pun intended) for the ‘political training’ provided by Mr. Hüber and his ilk (political commissars)].
Furthermore, we are told:
The Berlin State Court as well as the KG [district court] have also established in two proceedings that Mr. Hüber is neither directly/material [orig. unmittelbar] nor indirectly/immaterial [orig. mittelbar] connected with the crime of killing Chris Gueffroy and/or the persons involved in the crime or their motives for action, and was also not involved in their Vergatterung [the temporary subordination of regulars under dedicated parts of the code of conduct pertaining to guard duty], which is why it was forbidden at the time to effect statements to the contrary.
[check this out: we know from service records that Mr. Hüber was a political commissar with the Grenzschutz, but—miraculously—the Berlin State Court found he was ‘neither directly…nor indirectly connected with the crime’. This is about as sane or logical as the ‘magical bullet’ that killed JFK and wounded Gov. Connally from multiple angles, to say nothing about the obvious perversion of the law on this one]
However, court records available to Apollo News also state the following:
Irrespective of whether the defendant approved of the order to shoot at the inner-German border or was critical of it, as he claims, he nevertheless supported the system of ‘border security’ as a member of the command staff of a border regiment and helped to ensure that it functioned…The defendant cannot thus deny the accusation of having participated in influencing the border guards, and hence his co-responsibility [orig. Mitverantwortlichkeit] in the sense of a contribution to the maintenance of the GDR’s border regime.
[emphases in the original, but do note that this created an impossible legal (double)standard for it means, in effect, that either no-one is guilty—or everyone; this is collective punishment, and the most appropriate argumentative equivalent is to deduce that, because some US service personnel in Abu Ghraib was torturing inmates, every single individual serving among the American forces shares co-responsibility in in the sense of a contribution to the maintenance of the (US occupation) regime’; my modifications]
‘More Guilty Than the Shooter [orig. Mauerschütze]’
It is such an outrageous, direct connection that the writer Ralph Giordano—who was persecuted and abused by the Gestapo in his youth—intervened personally in the Sven Hüber case. In a letter, which is also available to Apollo News, he wrote the following lines to the then-chairman of the Police Union:
In my eyes, a proven indoctrinationist like Sven Hüber is more guilty than the wall gunner who pulled the trigger. This execution has its history, and that history points to people like Sven Hüber. Guilt and responsibility don’t start when there's blood on your hands.
Then came the turning point. When Sven Hüber joined the Federal Police (then still the Federal Border Guard), he was initially hired as a salaried employee and not as a civil servant, as was customary in order to make a subsequent security check possible. According to Apollo News, Hüber was able to avoid the security check because the Police Union seamlessly placed him on their list of candidates for the employees’ council in 1990, which resulted in an exemption [from the background check], secured his position, and made him virtually un-fireable.
How Hüber Keeps Critics at Bay
So far, Sven Hüber has gotten away with everything. His past is concealed everywhere, he is a near-permanent fixture in legacy media. Adding insult to injury, Sven Hüber even involves himself in questions of how to deal with the GDR. In the Berliner Zeitung, for example, he called for the dismissal of memorial director Hubertus Knabe in 2004 because he held the view that one dictatorship had replaced the other in East Germany in 1945: ‘Blushes of shame should rise to his face’, wrote the former GDR border guard and political commissar Sven Hüber. He also appears in a WDR school film as a contemporary witness [orig. Zeitzeuge, the term commonly used for victims of the Nazi régime]. With regard to this appearance, the police union explained on request: ‘It does not happen everyday that someone deals as open with a very early stage of life, which has earned him respect and recognition.’ [if, at this point, you feel like throwing up (again), please do join me]
Open-ness? For years, Hüber tried to prevent reports about his past. When the writer Roman Grafe mentioned Hüber’s past only in passing in a book at the beginning of the 2000s, yet the latter had a particularly rabid lawyer take legal action against it and involved the author in court proceedings that lasted for years. Not because it was wrong, but because Hüber should not be ‘de-anonymised’. Finally, Hüber obtained a court order to prevent such naming, which carry with them the threat of an administrative fine of up to 250,000 euros or six months in prison. Hüber repeatedly obtained such injunctions, against the Berliner Zeitung, the Deutschland-Archiv, and later against the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His name was cleared every time. The Hüber case is eventually reported in the media, but completely anonymously. Sven Hüber continues to be regarded as spotless and made a real career for himself. That is, until today.
Years later, the unspeakable verdict in the Hüber/Grafe case is even overturned. But the spirit of omertà remains intact. [this is my liberal translation, but I think it is apt]
Legal Costs: No Files, No Memory—and Hüber is Said to be Travelling
There is still a great deal of silence today, because the legal costs alone of defending oneself against Hüber’s attacks are threatening enough [‘slap suit’ is the technical term here]. Hüber’s aggressive legal action is possible because his police union, which is financially strong from the membership fees of over 200,000 police officers, is behind him [talk about abuse of public offices for private gain]. According to Apollo News, the union has paid Hüber’s legal costs, which in the Roman Grafe case alone are well into the five-figure range.
When asked how, how much, and on what grounds the covering of costs occurred, the police union explained that the documents in this matter were no longer archived [what a coincidence…]. The union board members who could be contacted had ‘no knowledge’ of the matter. And Sven Hüber is ‘currently travelling and cannot be asked’ about this. Capisc’, the Godfather would say.
When researching the Hüber case, we experienced one thing above all: if you mention the name Sven Hüber in conversation, his counterpart suddenly falls silent. And once a possible source abruptly hangs up while we are still mentioning the name Hüber. After a nice initial phone call. Sven Hüber’s reputation precedes him. His bulging legal coffers and his powerful political friends are having a chilling effect.
His methods are unique. When Apollo News once reported on Sven Hübers Twitter account a fortnight ago, a few hours later the entire account was deleted, disappeared. Evidence destroyed. No wonder: Sven Hüber is a professional, after all.
He has long since made himself indispensable for ‘Dear Nancy’. As the architect of her border policy—and a constant, vocal advocate of her policy [sic]. Thus, the dark spots on his CV are reliably overlooked and the protective hand of the minister is held over him.
When asked, neither Sven Hüber nor Nancy Faeser wanted to comment.
Bottom Lines: Schrödinger’s Law
First of all, what a mess, eh? If you thought that ‘it can’t happen here’, well, there you go. Also, if you’d need to throw up once more, be my guest.
That said, there’s many other reasons Ms. Faeser has to go, but Mr. Hüber, the former political commissar, should actually be fired, too, perhaps ‘even’ before Ms. Faeser is kicked out of office.
Also, what does a former Politkommissar of the GDR do with the police union in Germany? I mean, there is a reason no-one wanted to see first-line Gestapo of Wehrmacht cadres in the old West German polity, in particular in such positions of power?
Yet, there you have it—more and more evidence of the subversion of ostensibly democratic-liberal norms and assumptions by individuals of questionable character, to say nothing about the bottomless pit masquerading as their conscience or that of legacy media, for that matter.
I recall a panel discussion in Zurich, Switzerland, some years ago that involved both Egon Krenz, the GDR’s last prime minister, and West Germany’s first (un)official ambassador (a man in a grey flannel suit whose name I long forgot).
Krenz, upon ‘unification’ of the two Germanies, was eventually tried, convicted, and sent to prison, by the way, because he was held ‘in charge’ and hence ‘responsible’ for the Schießbefehl. I’ll let Wikipedia take over from here for a bit for the ‘official’ version (me emphases):
In 1997, Krenz was sentenced to six-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for Cold War crimes, specifically manslaughter of four Germans attempting to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall…
He appealed, arguing that the legal framework of the newly reunited German state did not apply to events that had taken place in the former East Germany. Krenz also argued that the prosecution of former East German officials was a breach of a personal agreement given by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during their talks, which led to German reunification. However, the verdict was upheld in 1999. Krenz reportedly described his conviction as ‘victor’s justice’ and ‘cold war in court’, saying, ‘The victorious power is avenging itself on the representatives of the defeated power’ (Die siegreiche Macht rächt sich an den Vertretern der besiegten Macht)…
Krenz’s application to the European Court of Human Rights on alleged misuse of East German criminal laws reached the Grand Chamber, but was rejected in 2001.
So, there you have it: German law absolves one individual (Hüber) from (co)responsibility for the Schießbefehl while someone else (Krenz) is incarcerated. True story.
At that afore-mentioned panel discussion, when Krenz spoke about himself as a ‘political prisoner’ after the Wende, though, a middle-aged German from (judging from his accent) South-West Germany living and working in Switzerland got up and agitatedly snapped: ‘But the GDR was an Unrechtsstaat [a country without the rule of law, in particular equality there-under].’
#firefaes #firehüber
More by and on Krenz may be read here, by the way:
Speculation: the EU and the WEF have recruited so many former once-young Stasi, KGB, and similar over the years, these now severly affect the course and actions of both.
To use a local example of my thinking: the swedish KFML, KPML and KPML(r)* were highly active in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, the majority of them quietly dropped out of sight, dropped the rethorics and got themselves hired as journalists, TV-producers, writers and editors/publishers within state an state-adjacent media, as well as within the dep. of education.
Isn't it likely that this happened in Germany, only even more so given the division into two states, after 1990, and that it has created a cascading effect throughout all political, economical and social systems involving germans of the right age-brackets and Germany at large?
*The acronyms stand for, translated:
KFML: Communist Union of Marxist-Leninists; splinter-group from which was KPML: Communist Party of Marxist-Leninsts; splinter-group from which was the KPML(r), the 'r' meaning Radical. The latter had ties to Baader-Meinhof, RAF, and other such groups and greatly admired them for daring to use violence.