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’.”
Hellbound and Down 