Berufsverbot
 Berufsverbot  (law)   | |
|---|---|
| Ban from public service jobs in Germany based on political convicitons - in 2021 also for "conspiracy ideologies". |
Berufsverbot is an order of "professional disqualification" under German law. Berufsverbot may be translated into English as "professional ban". The most famous is the 1972 Radikalenerlass decree, which eventually fell into disuse. In 2021, the government plans to remove people believing in conspiracy ideologies.
A Berufsverbot disqualifies the recipient from engaging in certain professions or activities on the grounds of their criminal record, political convictions or membership or alignment to a particular group. The bans particularly hit academics who had gone to university for a specific profession and were now subject to scrutiny by the intelligence services for any left-wing activity. In addition to the actual bans came a chilling effect of self-censorship.
Conspiracy ideologies
In 2021, the new government stated: "To ensure the integrity of the public service, we will ensure that constitutional enemies can be removed from the service faster than hitherto". The agreement between the parties in the coalition government contains formulations such as: "We resolutely oppose all anti-constitutional, violent tendencies - whether right-wing extremism, Islamism, conspiracy ideologies, left-wing extremism or any other form of extremism."[1]
1972 Anti-Radical Decree
On 28 January 1972 the federal government and the state premiers instituted the so-called Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree). Under this decree, people who were considered to be a member or aligned to an extremist organization, were banned from work as civil servants, which includes a variety of public sector occupations such as teaching.
As before with the previous Adenauer decree of 1950, it was said that refusals of employment and dismissals were directed against radicals from the left and right, but in fact they almost exclusively affected communists and other leftists. Between 1973 and 1980, 102 applicants from the left spectrum were rejected in Bavaria, but only 2 from the right.[2]
In practice, the radical decree mainly affected civil servants, especially candidates, employees and public service workers from the left-wing spectrum. Sometimes it was enough to be active in an organization in which communists were also active or which worked with communists.
In the early days of the decree, a regular request was made to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution when someone applied for a position in the public service. According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the intelligence services received 450,000 inquiries from January 1, 1973 to June 30, 1975 alone, a period that experts consider to be particularly intense. This resulted in so-called “findings” and 328 rejections in 5,700 cases. The non-governmental organization "Weg mit den Berufsverboten" differentiated between 1,250 refusals to recruitment and 2,100 disciplinary proceedings as well as 256 dismissals from the service for the period from 1972 onwards.[3]
References
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Extremismus-der-Mitte-von-oben-6278269.html
- ↑ https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Radikalenerlass
- ↑ Hans-Gerd Jaschke: Streitbare Demokratie und Innere Sicherheit. Grundlagen, Praxis und Kritik. Opladen 1991, page 164.
