German Pensioner Who Called Green Politician Robert Habeck a Moron Found Guilty of Five Criminal Retweets and Fined €825
Maybe you remember Stefan Niehoff.
He’s the 64 year-old retiree from Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia who runs a small X account, from which he rains retweet upon merciless retweet down upon the Federal Republic of Germany. He is probably the most dangerous retweeter in the entire nation.
Niehoff became famous in late 2024, when police raided his house because he’d retweeted a very dangerous meme suggesting that then-Economics Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens might be a moron.
The lead Bamberg prosecutor who oversaw the investigation into Niehoff’s activity turned out to be a pinched woman named Ursula Redler.
Redler told the Main Post last February that “I’ve always wanted to fight for good, like a Jedi knight”, which makes her absolutely the kind of person you want at the top of your criminal justice system. You just know that if retweeting were a thing in the Star Wars universe, Jedi knights would be against it.
Anyway, because the Federal Republic lacks visionaries of Redler’s calibre, news of the raid on Niehoff’s residence set off what is known in Germany as a shitstorm. Some suggested that police raids over the crime of merely retweeting an image might be excessive, while others realised that Niehoff’s prosecution was entirely typical and that dozens and dozens of people every week are similarly indicted for tweeting and retweeting highly dangerous statements. The American television programme 60 Minutes even ran a brief documentary on speech crime prosecutions in the Federal Republic, and that also went over poorly for reasons nobody can fathom.
The first thing our brave Jedi knight prosecutors did in the midst of this shitstorm was shut the fuck up and wait quietly to proceed with their case until after the elections. The second thing they did – and I really don’t understand this part – is forget all about Niehoff’s ‘moron’ retweet. It’s like they decided their chances of winning that case weren’t all that great. Perhaps it is only the prosecutors, and not the judges, who are Jedi knights in Bamberg. However that may be, they went back to the drawing board and undertook a proper investigation of Niehoff’s quite dangerous X account, all to find some properly prosecutable retweets they could really nail him on. Some of you may think that sounds like retaliation for the crime of humiliating the prosecutors before the entire country, but that just shows what little you know about how Jedi knights work.
Finally, last month, prosecutors applied for and won summary judgment against Niehoff for his Twitter activity. Because Niehoff is a very evil and subversive man who has brought my country basically to its knees via the retweet function on X dot com, he naturally refused to pay the fine and opted for a full trial instead. Today that trial happened before a judge named Patrick Keller, under very strict information security measures. The District Court laid a highly unusual blanket prohibition on all interviews and filming in the entire building while Niehoff’s trial unfolded. They even specified that “interview-like conversations” were forbidden. You can’t just have ordinary conversations around retweeters.
The court could not, however, entirely exclude journalists from the trial, which means that we finally learned the specifics of Niehoff’s indictment. The man stood accused of five very dangerous Nazi retweets and one very dangerous Nazi reply:
- He answered an unspecified post on X with a picture of Adolf Hitler and the question “Is this the one?”
- He retweeted an old photograph of clerics offering a Nazi salute with a caption implying that present-day ecclesiastical condemnations of Alternative für Deutschland represent a related tendency.
- He retweeted an image of Hitler shaking some cleric’s hand, apparently to make the same point.
- He retweeted a meme in which the Green politician Katharina Schulze offers a Nazi salute above a caption referring to “the Green Reich”.
- He retweeted a ‘then/now’ meme, with somebody in an SA uniform under the “then” caption and an Antifa rioter under the “now” caption.
- He retweeted a meme that indirectly compared Third Reich-era attitudes towards Jews with pandemic-era attitudes towards the unvaccinated.
Mysteriously, the judge and the prosecutors agreed to drop the final two retweets from the indictment. In an ideal world they would both be investigated for National Socialist sympathies over this, because honestly I don’t know what else their permissive attitude could betoken. After a few hours the court found Niehoff guilty for his Hitler reply and his other three Hitler retweets, and slapped him with a fine of €825. “Interview-like conversations” were then permitted to resume in the courthouse.
Niehoff has promised to appeal the conviction.
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I hope Eugyppius will get together with RW on here to set up a “Free Speech Union of Germany”.
DFSU, perhaps.
Vielen Dank für die Blumen¹, but while I’m very good at making computers do stuff I want them to do, I’m completely hopeless at doing the same with people². Public activities of Germans in Germany which could be construed as disloyality to the constitution have always been illegal since the former revolutionary socialists from the SPD liberated us from the oppressive monarchy where fundamental criticism of the established political order used to be tolerated for as long as the monarch wasn’t being personally attacked. ¹ Thanks for the flowers, German idiom to reply to a complimentary statement by someone who doesn’t believe that he’s really up to it. ² Bizarre recent event: Some weeks ago, while I was having a cigarette in my garden, I noticed an unpleasant looking guy standing in our backyard. He was clearly a member of the homeless/ drug addict/ professional beggars community and also immediately approached me to start pestering me for money to help him with his undeserved troubles, the standard story. I told him to go away and since this was decidedly a new quality of antisocial behaviour — menacing people in their homes — I filed an online report about this with… Read more »
Speaking of Germany and morons, somebody needs to fine this woman for being a nasty bag. Actually a lobotomy would be preferable. At least she got her arse handed to her;
”A Green Party councilor, Julia Probst from the city of Weißenhorn, publicly asked in a survey whether her followers would agree to an organ donation if the potential recipient was an Alternative for Germany (AfD) voter.
The survey, taken by nearly 4,000 users, saw about a quarter say they would not agree to an organ donation; however, the vast majority said they would, amounting to 76 percent.
Her post was met with severe criticism from many users, with some accusing her of linking organ donation to political leanings.
One user, who wrote he was an “AfD opponent,” argued that as a first responder, he “first helps a person and not a ‘party affiliation.” He noted that linking organ donation to political affiliation was “inconceivable.”
The user also said: The wording of the question is very confusing to me? Do I have left-wing or right-wing blood?”
https://rmx.news/article/should-germanys-afd-voters-be-refused-organ-donations-a-green-party-politician-launches-a-controversial-survey-on-x/
Blimey! Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
It is really about time the Germans dropped this silly ‘you can’t talk about A**** H*****’ and associated topics laws. If you can’t talk or debate about them, how are the ideas going to be rebuffed. Moreover, by prosecuting people like Niehoff, you create an environment where people can hide behind the threat of others’ prosecution. That can never be beneficial.
Such laws don’t even exist. It’s prohibited to act publically for the benefit of organisations or people which have been declared enemies of the constitution. Anything else is supposed to be legal. That’s just not the theory of the German hard left parties whose idea is that any criticism of anything they propose is right-wing extremism and ought to be prosecuted as such.