Germany is quietly building a “huge surveillance apparatus” that risks creating a denunciation culture similar to those of the Nazis and the Stasi, one of the country’s leading historians has claimed.
Hubertus Knabe claimed Berlin was setting up a sprawling system of “tip-off points” inside companies and in government authorities that will facilitate people snitching on co-workers, and was doing so “unnoticed by the public”.
Germany’s “whistleblower protection law” came into force in July with the stated purpose of protecting people who report on workplace abuses. All companies with more than 49 members of staff must set up an office where staff can anonymously report on suspected abuses of the law without fear of retribution.
But according to Mr Knabe, who ran the Hohenschönhausen Memorial on the site of the Stasi’s political prison in Berlin for close to two decades, the law is more far-reaching than simple whistleblower protection.
“The tip-off points won’t only pursue suspicions of criminality, they will also deal with misdemeanours subject to fines,” he wrote in an article for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper this week. “They will even be responsible for statements by officials that ‘constitute a violation of the obligation of loyalty to the constitution’.”
Warning that “it is just a small step from tip-off to denunciation”, Mr Knabe pointed to the example of Nazi Germany, where Germans fervently snitched on their neighbours often “for personal advantage or for revenge”.
In the worst-case scenario, these tip-off points will lead to “an atmosphere of fear similar to those seen in dictatorships”, he said.
Mr Knabe arguably has a dog in the fight on the question of how heavy-handed the state is allowed to be when punishing senior staff for reported abuses in the workplace.
In 2018, Berlin’s city hall controversially fired him as head of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial over allegations that he failed to deal with sexism in the workplace. He complained that he was dismissed without warning or the chance to give his version of events.
Political commentators and constitutional experts alike have become increasingly vexed in recent years by a proliferation of so-called “snitching centres”, which are often set up online.
An “anti-feminist tip-off portal” run by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti-discrimination NGO funded by the federal government, is particularly aggravating to conservatives. It encourages people to report on those who distribute flyers critical of “gender theory” or attempt to disrupt feminist events.
The environmental group Greenpeace set up a similar portal early this year where members of the public could report cafes that were not using reusable coffee cups. Any tip-off led to a notification being sent to the local authority.