‘NGOs are government organisations in disguise’

German historian Dr. Stefan Scheil examined a recent response from the federal government to a query from the AfD.

This inflow of funds is by no means obvious from the usual budget documents. For example, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, brought to light some time ago that the German government was actually directly sponsoring human trafficking activities of many individual organisations, disguised as “sea rescue,” using millions of euros of German taxpayers’ money.

The AfD’s question was aimed at uncovering this viper’s nest, and it demanded general information about who had been favoured as “first recipient, intermediate or final recipient”.

The answer, as printed in the document 20/10952, was, as mentioned, very comprehensive and offers considerable insight into the extent to which political Berlin is literally buying the support that is commonly referred to as civil society and is presented under this brand name as evidence of “democratic structures” that are not part of the government.

The Foreign Office, which also provided money for trafficking operations in the Mediterranean, cited limitations on “classified information” to be viewed on site in Berlin only by “authorized persons”. It was maintained that the allocation of funds was not systematically recorded and, on top of that, the manual effort allegedly required to answer the AfD question was likely to “massively restrict the ability of the affected areas to work”.

So a lot of money is being spent and there is no “realistic” way to keep track of it. One can only imagine how such funds are being used in secret.

There was nevertheless quite a lot of other information that proved to be insightful. Around forty recipients were listed on each page, which made a total of around ten thousand organisations, foundations, associations, limited companies and also people who received funding.

Individuals are the exception, and they are quite unusual. A telling example of this is the name Juba Akili, who appears on the list. If you don’t know him, he is a former SPD city councillor from Regensburg who has been making headlines for some time now with his initiative to stop serving alleged “Nazis” in the region’s bars and restaurants. He received 64 000 euros from the federal budget every year over the entire five-year reporting period.

And then there was “Annemarie Schimske”, a Social Democrat who was also named as a recipient of 461 000 euros in 2020, for whatever reason. Some other recipients are not specified in more detail either, such as “Asyl eV”, and which was also given a one-off payment of 371 000 euros in 2020. Or a “LAGO” with no further details, receiving 655 000 euros in 2023. And so it goes on and on, page by page.

Of course, there are also well-known names such as “Correctiv”, the organisation that made a name for itself at the beginning of the year with the staged reporting of a Potsdam meeting of CDU and AfD politicians as an alleged new “Wannsee Conference”. There is also the Amadeu Antonio Foundation of the former agent of the GDR state security service Anette Kahane or the abortion organisation “pro familia”.

Around a million is given every year to the “Turkish Community eV” and money to hundreds of other migrant communities. As an individual item, the Central Council of Jews receives, not surprisingly, many times this amount. Caritas, the German Red Cross, German sport in many forms and also the “Foundation for Connectedness with Germans Abroad” were also given huge sums.

It will take some time to process the information obtained, especially since the government will, in case of doubt, stonewall the matter just as the Foreign Office did. What is certain, however, is that the scant documentation and the barely transparent justification for several of these payments can be read as evidence of a large pool of swamp creatures all of whom are systematically corrupted by government money. The “non-governmental organisations” are, to a large extent, in fact government organisations.