An Obituary for Stefan Niehoff—and Free Speech in Germany?

The “Schwachkopf affair”—the controversy that started in the early morning hours of November 12, 2024, when a 64-year-old German retiree had his home in rural Bavaria raided by the police merely for having retweeted a meme that described a prominent politician as a “moron” (Schwachkopf)—has come to a tragic and shocking conclusion. Stefan Niehoff, the target of that dawn raid, passed away late last month, apparently, according to reports in the German media, following a stroke.

In fact, the controversy did not start because of the raid per se. The raid took place on a nationwide ‘Day of Action Against Antisemitic Hate Crime on the Internet,’ during which, per the official statistics, no less than 127 “police actions” were carried out against authors of allegedly “hateful” online content. It should be noted that there was nothing even remotely antisemitic about the Schwachkopf tweet nor about any of the other tweets for which Niehoff would subsequently be tried and found guilty in 2025. The November 2024 ‘Day of Action’ was, moreover, already the eleventh such ‘day of action’ organized by German law enforcement authorities.

No, the controversy started because Stefan Niehoff fought back, going public about the raid of his home by contacting a variety of German alternative news media. The suspect Schwachkopf meme was in fact just a joke—and if anything became clear about Stefan Niehoff as he himself unwittingly became a public figure, it is that he liked a good joke and was himself very funny. 

The retweeted meme showed the smiling face of Germany’s then vice-chancellor and economics minister Robert Habeck, a prominent member of the German Green Party, over the logo of the renowned German haircare product line ‘Schwarzkopf professional.’ But two letters had been changed in “Schwarzkopf,” so that “Schwarzkopf professional” became “Schwachkopf professional”—or, in English, “professional moron”!

But the fact that Habeck was the butt of the joke made the satirical meme into an affaire d’État. For the German criminal code does not only make “insults” in general illegal, if the “victim” decides to pursue the matter, but indeed, under § 188—commonly known in Germany as the “lèse-majesté law”—it even provides public officials heightened protection against “insults.”

Probably due to the publicity that his case attracted, the lèse-majesté charge against Niehoff was eventually dropped. But German justice was not finished with Stefan Niehoff. As Niehoff told filmmaker Alexander Tuschinski in April 2025, as Tuschinski was filming a documentary about his case, “What’s the saying again? ‘Smile and be happy, it could have been worse.’ Well, I smiled and was happy and it did get worse!”

Now, instead of the “insult” charge, Niehoff was to be charged with nothing less than “incitement of racial hatred” (Volksverhetzung) and the use of “unconstitutional,” i.e., Nazi, symbols. The original “incitement” charge appears to have been related to a historical photo that Niehoff tweeted showing, per the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office, “an SS or SA member”—undoubtedly, SA—and a placard bearing the words “Germans! Don’t buy from Jews!” This was, of course, the motto of the Nazis’ infamous April 1933 Jew boycott. 

But the tweet, as Tuschinski explains in his film, was a response to calls to boycott the dairy products manufacturer Müller for alleged connections to the German opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Indeed, the very wording that the public prosecutor’s office likewise cited as accompanying the photo makes the critical intent clear: “True democrats! We had this all once before!” But, in any case, this “incitement” charge would also be dropped.

Another “incitement” charge would be dropped on the day of Niehoff’s trial last June. This one too clearly involved the use—or rather, the citation—of an antisemitic remark to criticize discrimination, not to embrace it! 

Niehoff would be found guilty, however, on four remaining charges of using Nazi symbols in tweets or retweets, and he was fined €825. But here again, Niehoff’s critical intent was perfectly clear. The judge’s denial of this was the wafer-thin basis for the conviction. But, as one clever German Twitter/X user put it, “How many years of law does one have to study in order not to see it?” 

In fact, Niehoff had not really even ‘used’ Nazi symbols. Three of the four charges involved the “use,” more specifically, of the Nazi salute. But Niehoff had not used the Nazi salute. He had, for the most part, merely posted or reposted historical imagery that showed other people—not surprisingly, actual historical Nazis, but also clergymen—giving the Nazi salute. A third tweet showed a Nazi salute in an obviously satirical Photoshop; and the supposed problem with the fourth, a reply-tweet containing a photo of Adolf Hitler, remains to this day entirely obscure. But from the brief question that we know accompanied the photo—“Someone like this?” (So eins?)—we can again infer a critical intent.

So that readers could judge for themselves, I assembled some of the tweets or the imagery they contained and reconstructed their context in my “Political Justice in Germany: On the Prosecution of Stefan Niehoff.” It is a measure of the chilling effect of German ‘hate speech’ laws that even allies of Stefan Niehoff did not want to provide me the tweets or tell me where I could find them, despite their innocuousness. I had to find what I could on my own. But if the public is not allowed to see the evidence in a case like this, how can the accused get a fair trial? It is like being tried by a star chamber.

The fact of the matter is that German justice had managed to pull off the tour de force of using a law that was prima facie designed to prosecute Nazis in order to prosecute and convict someone who was plainly and obviously anti-Nazi, as indeed the very evidence used against him shows. Moreover, the Niehoff case is by no means unique in this respect. During the COVID period, Germans who objected to lockdown measures or discrimination against the unvaccinated and who used Nazi symbols to make their point were prosecuted under the same law. Indeed, already two decades ago, as recounted in “Tragicomedy in the Bavarian Alps,” a protester against a yearly gathering of Wehrmacht veterans and former SS members found himself in the surreal position of being prosecuted for “using” Nazi symbols on account of leaflets he had with him—whereas the actual Nazis were left untroubled by German justice.

Stefan Niehoff was in the process of appealing his conviction at the time of his death.

Alexander Tuschinski’s charming portrait of Stefan Niehoff and his family, The Schwachkopf Affair (Tale of a Meme), can be viewed here. My previous discussions of the Niehoff case are here and here.

Rest in peace, Stefan Niehoff. My sincere condolences to his wife and children.