Stephan Kramer
Stephan Joachim Kramer (b. 1968 in Siegen, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a socialist political official (SPD, previously FDP, previously CDU) and the Jewish President of the State Agency for the Protection of the Constitution (Amt für Verfassungsschutz; State Domestic Intelligence Service) in Thuringia since 1 December 2015. Since he has neither a law degree nor a judicial qualification, many consider his appointment to be illegal, having received a "Jew in Germany" bonus.[1]
Life
Kramer was born into an atheist household. His father and grandfather came from Altenburg in Thuringia. He served as an officer of the German Navy of the Bundeswehr and was then discharged into the reserves (as of 2009 Korvettenkapitän der Reserve). He then began studying law, first at the Philipps University of Marburg, then at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn and finally again in Marburg, but did not complete his studies due to intellectual overload.
From 1995, Kramer, who converted to Judaism as an adult without Jewish ancestors, worked for the Jewish Claims Conference, initially as assistant to the European director. From 1998, he worked for the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He has been a member of the SPD since 2010. During his time as Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews, Kramer began studying social pedagogy at the University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, where he completed a bachelor's degree in 2011 and a master's degree in 2015. The topic of his thesis was the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
Memberships and appointments
He serves on various advisory committees for projects against so-called Racism and Intolerance, of Civil Society and Remembrance, and is also on the international advisory board of the Holocaust Museum in Macedonia. Although clearly anti-German he is a longstanding member of the German Council on Foreign Affairs and the German Atlantic Council.[2]. He was previously:
- Director, European Office on anti-Semitism of the American Jewish Committee, Trans Atlantic Institute (TAI), Brussels, between July 2014 and July 2015.
- Secretary-General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) from April 2004 until January 2014 and head of the office of the European Jewish Congress in Berlin.
- Executive Director of the Zentralrat, March 2000 until 2004.
- Personal assistant to the President of the Zentralrat, (Jewish) Ignatz Bubis (sel.A.)(1999-2000)
- Press spokesman, Consultant for individual & slave labour Compensation Funds and advisor for public and government relations, Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Frankfurt/Main Office) (1995-1999).
- During his time with the Claims Conference, he also established and supervised local offices of the Central and Eastern European Holocaust Compensation Fund of the Claims Conference in Kischinev, Moldova; Bucharest, Romania and Budapest, Hungary.[3]
He has criticized the idea of free speech and has called the Alternative fur Deutschland party a "threat to democracy" and wants it classified as "extremist".[4]
Gun violence
At the end of September 2012, Kramer was reported to the Berlin police for threatening him. During an argument, Kramer showed a 30-year-old passerby the handgun he had hidden under his jacket and threatened him. The then Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany stated that he had been carrying the pistol for at least eight years for his own protection, but also in his role as security officer for the Central Council of Jews. He has a (certainly state-subsidized) gun license. This raises serious questions, because many people who are far more at risk are regularly denied gun licenses.
