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The AfD could soon be classified as a "suspected case" by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The respective state associations of the party are already monitored by three state offices - in Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.

I sympathize with the officials concerned.

I was under surveillance myself from 1967 to 1977.

It's not pleasant.

You have to come up with an alias, be careful what you say on the phone, hold important meetings only in pubs or parks because apartments and offices could be bugged, limiting written communication to the trivial.

It is troublesome.

And is of little use because the Office for the Protection of the Constitution hires informers.

But I'm getting ahead.

How did I get targeted by the service?

I was 17 and a school friend took me to Commune I where he was going to scotch a joint.

What we didn't know: The “pudding attack” on US Vice President Hubert Humphrey was being planned in the next room.

Because the Communards were orderly, they ran an attendance list.

Because they were chaos, they left the list lying around.

The police found her the next time she searched her home.

Files were made.

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My files quickly grew thicker because as a student I became a member of the KPD / AO, which carried its radicalism like a monstrance.

The officials documented my party career and presented the files to a professional bans commission in due course.

However, thanks in part to our caution, they had listed a few internals.

Instead, pages of demos with left-wing extremist slogans.

Even some I hadn't attended.

You can't be everywhere.

But informants got five marks per report at the time, so it was probably worth being inventive.

Since I was no longer a believer, I admitted everything and became a teacher.

Where I found that many colleagues were left-wing extremists.

But that soon happened.

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The lesson from all of this: the more the protection of the constitution expands its network, the more inefficient it becomes.

The service overlooks terrorist threats;

there is no strength for it.

Because the officials are busy collecting quotes from speeches, leaflets and newspapers in their warm offices and creating files that only prove what every citizen knows from the media.

The observation of the AfD should be stopped.

Not because the party is sympathetic, but because right-wing terrorists wouldn't be stupid enough to join it.