Stefan Niehoff, the German pensioner famous for a meme calling Robert Habeck a moron, is found guilty of five criminal retweets and one criminal reply and fined €825

Vindictive prosecutors brought new charges after their investigation into Niehoff for the Habeck meme blew up in their faces and became a national scandal

Stefan Niehoff with his daughter Alexandra.

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 judgement 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.