On this day 50 years ago,
the social-liberal coalition under Willy Brandt passed the so-called Radikalenerlass (Radical Decree), the aim of which was to check applicants for the civil service for their loyalty to the constitution. According to the Public Servants Act, they must always be committed to the Constitution and the liberal-democratic order. This decision made it possible to submit a standard inquiry to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for all applicants for the public service. If this inquiry revealed anti-constitutional activities, the person was not accepted for employment. Civil servants already working in the public sector could also be checked in this way for their loyalty to the constitution. The law was introduced by the social-liberal government to justify its Eastern policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union and the GDR, as the CDU-led opposition warned of infiltration by extremist forces in the civil service.
Publicly, the decision was directed against both left- and right-wing extremists. In practice, however, it was mainly applicants and civil servants from the left-wing who were checked for their loyalty to the constitution. Critics of the decision saw it primarily as an attack on freedom of expression, which instead of protecting the free democratic basic order was an attack on it. Furthermore, right-wing extremists were not prosecuted with the same consistency as those from the left-wing spectrum. In some professions that could only be exercised in the civil service – for example, teaching in schools – a negative assessment by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was tantamount to a ban from the profession. This practice was also criticized abroad. France in particular, which at the time was led by a left-wing government, described the decree as undemocratic. At the Free University of Berlin in 1977, there was a large strike against this practice, which was joined by all the universities in the city.
Until the abolition of the regular inquiry, a total of 1.4 million people were examined by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, 1,100 applicants were not hired, and more than 11,000 disciplinary investigations were initiated against public service employees. Starting in 1985, the decision was gradually revoked by the federal states. Those affected are still complaining about the lack of compensation and full rehabilitation. In 2016, Lower Saxony became the first German state to set up a commission to deal with the bans imposed on civil servants.
(sp)