Raid on Germany's ‘digital arsonists' feeds row over free speech
The target was not a drug-smuggling ring or a terror network. It was ugly language on social media. The individual cases investigated on the country's 12th national 'day of action against hate-posts' do not make for edifying reading. One man in the northern city of Bremen was accused of publishing a YouTube video with the title 'Are you a Jew? If yes, call Auschwitz.'
Another called for the 'eradication' of the Alawites, a Muslim minority predominantly centred in Syria, while a 72-year-old living in the countryside around Passau, in the far south of the country, tweeted that a politician was a 'Nazi pig' and ought to be executed.
Herbert Reul, the interior minister of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said that 'digital arsonists' needed to be reminded that they could not expect to hide behind their smartphones or laptops with impunity.
'Many people have forgotten the difference between hate and opinions,' Reul said. 'But it's so simple: if you don't do it in the real world, you shouldn't do it digitally.'
In practice, though, things are not always quite that simple. 'Hate speech' is an extremely broad umbrella concept in the German criminal system, covering everything from personal slander and the mockery of public officials to Volksverhetzung, an attempt to mobilise the masses against whole sections of the population.
The rate of prosecutions has gone through the roof. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which co-ordinated the 'day of action' on Wednesday, the number of cases has quadrupled over the past three years, from 2,411 in 2021 to 10,732 last year.
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About two thirds of them are assigned to the 'far-right' end of the political spectrum; the rest to the radical left, 'foreign' or 'religious' ideology, or miscellaneous slurs. The BKA put the increase down to more extensive online searches by police.
Yet it has left many feeling uncomfortable. One recent poll found that 43 per cent felt unable to express their opinions freely. In a separate study, 44 per cent said it was generally better to be cautious about stating your political views, compared with only 16 per cent who had said the same in 1990.
The instances of hate speech cited by the BKA in Wednesday's raids were unambiguous. 'Heil Hitler!! Again,' one of the suspects had purportedly written. 'We are Germans and a successful nation. Male foreigners out.'
Other cases have been less clear-cut, including a man who was reported to police for calling the business minister a 'dunderhead' and a hard-right journalist who was given a suspended prison sentence for posting an obviously satirical image of the interior minister posing with a sign that read: 'I hate free speech.'
Wolfgang Kubicki, a veteran former MP and deputy speaker and the present deputy leader of the centre-right Free Democratic Party, said Reul's words were a 'declaration of political bankruptcy'.
He added: 'To stage prosecutions for offensive statements as a 'day of action' is not going to shore up trust in the institutions of the state — least of all in connection with insults against politicians. [Reul] should seriously ask himself whether he is truly still defending the values of our constitution — or rather endangering them.'
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