Controversial German far-right politician Bjoern Hoecke said he was “completely innocent” Monday as he went on trial for using a banned Nazi slogan that has already earned him a conviction.
Hoecke, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), was fined €13,000 (US$14,000) in May for knowingly using the phrase “Alles fuer Deutschland” (Everything for Germany) at a 2021 campaign rally.
A motto of the Sturmabteilung paramilitary group that played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the phrase is illegal in Germany, along with the Nazi salute and other slogans and symbols from that era.
Hoecke, a former secondary school history teacher, claimed he was unaware of the slogan’s Nazi past but judges in the city of Halle agreed with prosecutors that he fully understood what he was saying.
The same court will now have to decide whether Hoecke, the leader of the AfD in the eastern region of Thuringia, is guilty of knowingly using the slogan a second time at a party gathering in his home state in December 2023.
Hoecke had called out the phrase “everything for” and allegedly incited the crowd to reply “Germany”.
Speaking in court on Monday, Hoecke insisted the phrase consisted of “commonplace words that happened to be used by a criminal organisation” in the past.
He said he was “completely innocent”, the trial was a “farce” and he felt that he had been “treated unfairly”.
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If convicted, he could face a fine or up to three years in prison, according to German media. A verdict could come as early as this week.
Considered an extremist by German intelligence services, Hoecke has long courted controversy.
He once called Berlin’s Holocaust monument a “memorial of shame” and has urged a “180-degree shift” in the country’s culture of remembrance.
But the scandals have not dented his popularity, and Hoecke is gunning to become Germany’s first far-right state premier when Thuringia holds regional elections in September.
The anti-Islam, anti-immigration AfD is currently polling in first place in Thuringia. The party is also expected to perform strongly in two other regional elections in eastern Germany in September.
But in a country where coalition governments are the norm, Germany’s mainstream parties have consistently ruled out cooperating with the AfD.
The AfD scored a record 16 per cent in the European Parliament elections earlier this month, outperforming Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party.
Elsewhere, a video of 17-year-old schoolchildren from western Germany giving the Nazi salute before a visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp has prompted criminal investigations by German authorities.
The video of five pupils is known to authorities and is the subject of an investigation into the illegal use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations, police said on Monday.
The head teacher of the school in the town of Laatzen also confirmed the incident, and emphasised that the 17-year-olds had “acted completely immaturely”.
In mid-May, a total of 13 pupils had taken a trip to Krakow in Poland with their teachers to research the city’s Jewish history, according to local media reports.
A visit to the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz, which occupying German forces set up in occupied Poland during World War 2 to use for its mass murder of more than a million people, was also on the agenda for the trip.
The incident took place on the evening before the visit to the camp, the head teacher told the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. The pupils watched videos on the internet of speeches given by Hitler.
That evening, one of the pupils filmed four of his classmates, who were obviously intoxicated, while they made a Hitler salute. The eight-second video was then posted on the social network Snapchat, which only became known to school leaders after the group returned home.
“We are naturally shocked and appalled,” the school’s head teacher told the newspaper.
According to reports, the five young people were initially suspended after the video came to light and the police were informed.
Additional reporting by dpa