German prosecutors charge woman for reproducing Nazi symbols after she publishes an image of Health Minister Karl Lauterbach raising his arm at suspicious angle

I and my readers disavow all National Socialist imagery, symbols and gestures.

This is probably the dumbest, most monumentally retarded speech crime case we have had here in Germany, which is really saying something.

As Apollo News are reporting, the public prosector’s office in Schweinfurt (Bavaria) have charged a woman for violating Section 86a of the German Criminal Code, which forbids the “use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations.” This is the law you break if you display a swastika or throw up a Nazi salute in the Federal Republic. Except, the defendant in this case has not reproduced any Nazi symbols at all. Rather, she has merely published a video grab of the sitting German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, as he raised his arm during much-lampooned remarks he gave in Magdeburg on 22 June 2022. The district court have already issued summary judgment in the form of a €3,500 fine, but the defendant has refused to accept this absurdity, and so a full trial has been scheduled for 12 May.

That might already sound dumb to you, dear reader, but it gets so much stupider. Our defendant reproduced Lauterbach’s image on this political poster …

… in service of a very specific political point:

The left half of this poster, captioned “Nazi salute? Arbitrary Justice?”, references this BILD article on the prosecution of the former Hannover policeman Michael Fritsch, who was likewise condemned under Section 86a for waving with a wrongly angled arm at an October 2020 Querdenker demonstration against pandemic restrictions. A Dresden judge accused Fritsch of intentionally offering a Nazi salute and fined him €5,000. The charge is obviously ridiculous; the last thing Querdenker protesters would be receptive to, is National Socialist symbolism. The whole movement is deeply invested in equating pandemic restrictions with fascist authoritarianism.

That aside, the message of our poster artist is clear: Covid protestors who wave at the wrong angles are charged with speech crimes, while sitting Health Ministers who do the same thing are left unmolested by prosecutors. As if to prove this point beyond all doubt, prosecutors charged the creator of this poster under the selfsame anti-Nazi statute, although her entire argument is that nobody depicted anywhere on her poster is making Nazi gestures at all, and despite the fact that nobody believes or would argue that Lauterbach was actually throwing Romans in Magdeburg. Interpreting these images otherwise, as the Schweinfurt prosecutors do, reduces the extremely simple message to incoherence.

On the one hand, this is just more citizen intimidation by a legal apparatus that has been driven to the edges of sanity by years of recurring NGO-coordinated campaigns “against the right.” Never have Nazis been in such great demand and such short supply. On other hand, everybody involved in prosecuting cases like this can only be a flaming fucking moron. These are some of the stupidest cases the Federal Republic has ever seen, and every time you think you’ve finally hit the limit and that surely this is the dumbest speech case ever, a new even dumber one happens around the corner.