Josef Foschepoth

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Josef Foschepoth (born November 19, 1947 in Werl ) is a German historian and emeritus professor of contemporary history at the University of Freiburg . His main research interests are the surveillance of citizens and the abolition of the separation of powers when parties are banned.

Life

Foschepoth studied history, theology and social sciences and received his doctorate in 1975 from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster with a thesis on the Reformation and the Peasants' War in the history of the GDR . After five years as a high school teacher at the Evangelisch Stiftisches Gymnasium Gütersloh , he became a research associate and head of the new research area "Post-War-History" at the German Historical Institute in London .

After his time in London, Foschepoth returned to Germany and held leading positions as director of the Ostakademie Königstein , was Secretary General of the German Coordinating Council of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (DKR) in Frankfurt and Chief Urban Director in the cultural department of the city of Münster. His work at DKR resulted in the book In the Shadow of the Past , which dealt critically with the history of the DKR.

From 1997 to 2005 Foschepoth worked for the private AKAD Private Universities GmbH, first as managing director, then later as professor and rector of the business and social science university of AKAD in Lahr. He was also the founding board member of the Association of Private Universities in Germany.

Since 2005, Foschepoth has been an adjunct professor for contemporary history at the chair for modern and contemporary history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg . His main research interests are the historiography of the GDR, the Cold War and allied policy on Germany, Adenauer and the German question, postal and telephone surveillance in the Federal Republic and the KPD in the German-German system conflict. Foschepoth carried out a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the role of the KPD in the German-German system conflict . In 2008 he submitted an interim report in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft . In 2017 his comprehensive overall presentation was published unconstitutional! The KPD ban in the Cold Civil War.

His research led him to the discovery of millions of federal government files that had previously been kept secret. Based on a decision by the federal government in 2009, the relevant classified information is now being systematically processed and released according to a fixed schedule until 2024.

Foschepoth's research on the breaches of postal and telecommunications secrecy in the early Bonn republic, which was published in a "monograph with documents section" in 2012, deserves the "greatest attention" according to the reviewer Rainer Blasius .

Research related to the global surveillance and espionage affair

Franziska Augstein emphasized in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 13, 2012 that Foschepoth's research showed that “the German citizens were also systematically spied on by their state until 1989” and that, despite the two-plus-four treaty in unified Germany, “the National Security Agency of the USA can activate and rule ".

In an interview with Die Zeit on October 25, 2013, he explained the consequences of the Article 10 Act :

“Since the amendment to the Basic Law in 1968, it has been the case that the person concerned does not have to be informed and legal recourse is excluded. So there are no controls. The executive says they don't know about anything or they shouldn't say anything. The courts are off. And in parliament, the G-10 measures are controlled by a four-person commission, which are dependent on information from the services, just like the secret parliamentary control body . The G-10 commission has always approved surveillance measures by the USA and the Allies. In fact, there is no effective control of the secret services in the constitutional state of the Federal Republic. "

- Ludwig Greven: "The USA may monitor Merkel" . In: Zeit Online . October 25, 2013.

In the guest article In Germany, US law from August 11, 2014 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung also stated:

“The privileges of the USA range from tax and duty exemption to co-financing of the military infrastructure, the assumption of social benefits for German civilian employees to perks for American companies that provide certain services, for example in the intelligence sector, for the US troops in Germany . There are also special rights in the area of ​​criminal justice and prosecution. "

- Josef Foschepoth: "US law also applies in Germany" . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . 11th August 2014.

Works and reception

Monitored Germany (2014)

In her review of November 13, 2011, Franziska Augstein came to the conclusion that Chancellor Adenauer had contributed to making Germany a surveillance state, which has not changed until the present: “Foschepoth shows that the old Federal Republic of Germany was one of the times of its existence The veritable surveillance state was that the Basic Law was disregarded and the rule of law was infiltrated - and this not by communists, but at the instigation of Konrad Adenauer. "He was aware that his announcement that with the Paris Treaties the West Germans were" free among free ", contradicted the reservation rights of the Allies. For the sake of the political success with the Paris Treaties, he had devised a “trick” to bypass parliament (Article 10 of the Basic Law) of postal and telecommunications secrecy, with which, according to Foschepoth, he committed a serious breach of the constitution: “Together with the Western powers, the Chancellor wrote a letter to himself in which he was asked to ensure the necessary surveillance. With this Adenauer had found an optimal solution from his point of view: The Allies were satisfied, and the letter remained secret as an annex to the Paris Treaties; only a few politicians and officials knew about it. "

It was not until the "wiretapping affair" in 1968 that the G-10 law was passed, but alongside which the rights of the Western powers continued to exist. It legalized illegal practices. Foschepoth sees a “trick” here as well: “In order not to make the citizens afraid of their heads, the G-10 law was included in the emergency legislation. The latter was hotly debated in public, when the emergency laws were passed, the G-10 law also sailed through. ”The 2 + 4 treaty of 1990 did not erase the Allies' surveillance rights, but instead laid them down in a secret document been: The 1959 supplementary agreement to the NATO troop statute continues to apply, so that the NSA can continue to collect all the data it needs.

Unconstitutional (2017)

On the basis of his analysis of previously inaccessible documents, Foschepoth comes to the conclusion that the procedure for banning the KPD was strategically, tactically and substantively coordinated between the government and the judiciary. The judiciary in the form of the BGH was given executive enforcement power over the constitution protection authorities and the police and was itself the executive body of the government's will of Adenauer and especially Thomas Dehler . Therefore, in Foschepoth's opinion, the prohibition and thus the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court is unconstitutional. He shows that the separation of powers has been abolished. For the first time since 1945, a unit of police, secret service and government reminding of the rights of the Gestapo had come into being.

Ralf Husemann ( SZ ) sees this assessment in his review of October 9, 2017 as being up-to-date, insofar as BVG President Andreas Vosskuhle , in view of the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court on the prohibition of the NPD, disapproves of a “prohibition of convictions and beliefs” in 2017 had been used against the KPD in 1956, clearly distanced. There were agreements between the Karlsruhe constitutional judge and the federal government, the chancellor, justice ministers and interior ministers constantly putting the court under massive pressure, whereby the course of the procedure was determined down to the smallest detail. Max Güde criticized the process as a political judiciary that speaks law “from the same broken backbone” as the National Socialist special courts.

Foschepoth explains this from the influence of the state by the former pillars of the Nazi regime, for example in criminal law by Josef Schafheutle , which became visible in the reintroduction of the special penal chambers , which in many cases were housed in the buildings of the Nazi special courts. Foschepoth proves that not only the independence of the Federal Constitutional Court was permanently disregarded, but was also falsified “by the highest court”, insofar as Erwin Stein had simply copied an illegal interrogation protocol.

Dominik Geppert ( FAZ ), on the other hand, in his review on February 20 and March 5, 2018, finds Foschepoth's gain in knowledge rather small, despite the incomparable thoroughness of the source work, his interpretation daring and unbalanced. For Foschepoth, it is not anti-totalitarianism but “totalitarian anti-communism” that constitutes the founding consensus of the Federal Republic. With its application, the government had pursued the goal of "after the unsuccessful attempt to exterminate communism through a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union , in a second attempt, this time with the means of the rule of law, at least in western Germany to put an end to communism" . The Constitutional Court ultimately supported this. Geppert already sees the core of the facts through Hans-Peter Schwarz , albeit presented "with an incomparably more benevolent tone". The KPD ban helped "to consolidate a good institutional order and stabilize a (party) political system that was soon solid enough to endure a communist party (the DKP) again since 1968 and even the SED successor party after 1990 to integrate."

For Andreas Hasenkamp (Westfälische Nachrichten), Foschepoth's work with its return to the source work is also "a criticism of mainstream university research which seems to have made the thesis of the success story of the republic into a dogma that cannot be questioned."

In the Politische Vierteljahresschrift Michael Hein judges that although Foschepoth could not consistently prove the validity of his thesis, it was an important contribution to the history of the Federal Constitutional Court and the relationship between defensive democracy and the rule of law.

Prizes and awards

  • Richard Schmid Prize 2018, for outstanding achievements in the field of contemporary legal history

Quote

The federal government must ensure that everything is deleted from the law that was written under Allied pressure. First of all, Article 10, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law would have to be revised and at the same time the G10 law, which still enshrines the rights of the Allies in law, has to be revised. Furthermore, the relevant articles of the supplementary agreement to the NATO troop statute would have to be terminated and deleted without replacement. The same applies to all secret German-Allied agreements on surveillance and secret services. Ultimately, the German secret services must finally be subjected to effective rule-of-law control by the executive, legislative and, above all, judiciary. Only in this way can the fundamental right to the integrity of postal and telecommunications secrecy, which in fact no longer exist, be restored.

Publications (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vademecum of the historical sciences. 3rd edition (1998/1999). P. 348.
  2. ↑ a b c Homepage JOSEF FOSCHEPOTH
  3. ^ Foschepoth, Josef: Good news for contemporary history. Federal government releases millions of secret files.
  4. ^ 3sat.de: Monitoring State - GDR Postal Control in the Federal Republic
  5. ↑ Rainer Blasius: Dare more state, don't ask a lot? Josef Foschepoth uncovered the postal and telephone surveillance of the Bonn Republic . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 29, 2012, p. 8.
  6. ↑ Franziska Augstein: The never quite sovereign republic. The historian Josef Foschepoth shows how Chancellor Adenauer helped to make Germany a surveillance state (PDF; 1 MB) . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 13, 2012, p. 15.
  7. ↑ Franziska eye stone: The never quite sovereign republic. The historian Josef Foschepoth shows how Chancellor Adenauer helped make Germany a surveillance state. Süddeutsche Zeitung, meeting on November 13, 2012, accessed on August 25, 2019.
  8. ↑ Dominik Rigoll: Dispute about the militant democracy. A look back at the early decades of the Federal Republic | APuZ. Retrieved August 21, 2019 .
  9. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung - Review of October 9, 2017 by Ralf Husemann
  10. ↑ Dominik Geppert: Against extremists: The child poured out with the bathwater . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed August 22, 2019]).
  11. ↑ Andreas Hasenkamp: Party ban worked up. Retrieved August 25, 2019 .
  12. ↑ PVS, Volume 59, No. 1, March 1, 2018,
  13. ↑ Andreas Hasenkamp: Party ban worked up. Retrieved August 25, 2019 .
  14. ^ Awarded the Richard Schmid Prize, September 15, 2018, Villa ten Hompel, Münster. August 28, 2018, accessed on August 25, 2019 (German).
  15. ^ "The Allied interests have long been anchored in German law". Retrieved on August 25, 2019 (German).
personal data
SURNAME Foschepoth, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Werl