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Horst Mahler, 89, dies; voice of the German far left, then the far right

In 1970, he helped found the Red Army Faction, or RAF, a guerrilla group that terrorized German society for years. Three decades later, he returned to the national spotlight when he successfully defended the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany against an effort to ban it. Advertisement Mr. Mahler spent long stretches of his adult life in prison -- first for his part in a string of bank robberies by the RAF and then, in the 2000s and 2010s, for repeatedly denying the Holocaust and praising Adolf Hitler, both of which are crimes in Germany. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of Mr. Mahler's erstwhile comrades on the left, including Gerhard Schröder, who went on to become chancellor, and Joschka Fischer, who later became foreign minister, considered him a tragic figure, if not mentally deranged. But Mr. Mahler insisted that they were the ones who had changed, having left behind their anti-imperialist ideals to accumulate power. 'We have a political class which betrays Germany,' he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2000. 'Joschka Fischer is a traitor. Schröder is also a traitor. He is not uninformed. He knows what's at stake.' Advertisement Mr. Mahler's enemy, he insisted, had always been the global capitalist system, which he had come to believe was trying to destroy German society through immigration and privatization. He pushed his right-wing beliefs to the extreme. After defending the National Democrats in court, he renounced the party, saying that its aspirations to join the federal parliament legitimized the postwar German state -- something that he himself rejected. He claimed that the German Constitution, adopted after the fall of the Nazis, was just a place holder awaiting the rise of a Fourth Reich, a belief he shared with the ultraradical Reichsbürger movement. Horst Werner Dieter Mahler was born on Jan. 23, 1936, in Haynou (now Chojnow), in what was then German Silesia and is now part of Poland. His parents were enthusiastic Nazis. His mother, Dorothea (Nixdorf) Mahler, received the Mutterkreuz, or Mother's Cross, for raising four children according to the ideals of the Nazi regime. In 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on their town, the Mahlers moved to Rosslau, southwest of Berlin, where his father, Willy, worked as a dentist. Germany's defeat and the end of the Nazi era left Willy bereft, and he died by suicide in 1949. The Mahlers moved again, this time to West Berlin, where Horst blossomed as a student, studying law at the Free University of Berlin. After receiving his degree in 1963, he opened his own legal practice. His early work was apolitical -- mostly corporate law -- and quite successful. But as a student, he had joined a series of left-wing organizations, and as a lawyer, he began to offer his services to activists who had run afoul of the courts. Advertisement His client list, a who's who of the 1960s German left, included Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, earning Mahler the nickname the Hippie Lawyer. In time, he became one of them. He was implicated in a 1968 arson attack on a department store in Frankfurt, for which Baader was convicted. That same year, conservative publisher Axel Springer sued Mr. Mahler, claiming that he had led a riot outside its Berlin offices, hours after a right-wing activist shot and severely wounded Dutschke. In 1970, Mr. Mahler joined journalist Ulrike Meinhof and others to break Baader out of prison. They fled to Jordan, where they trained in guerrilla warfare under the tutelage of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Calling themselves the Red Army Faction, but often known in the news media as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, they returned to Germany to launch nearly a decade of bank robberies, kidnappings, bombings and assassinations. Most of the original leaders, including Mr. Mahler, were not there to see any of it. Mahler was arrested in October 1970 and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Meinhof and Baader were captured in 1972; both died by suicide in prison, Meinhof in 1976 and Baader in 1977. In prison, Mr. Mahler renounced the RAF and rejected a deal between the group and the authorities to release him in exchange for a kidnapped German politician, Peter Lorenz. (Lorenz was later freed in exchange for other prisoners.) He also began to read the works of philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel, whose concept of the historical dialectic, he later said, had shaped his conversion to far-right nationalism. The German people, he claimed, were in conflict with 'foreign' forces, chief among them Jews, and he committed himself to the struggle. Advertisement Mr. Mahler won early release in 1980. His lawyers included other veterans of the 1960s left, including Schröder, the future chancellor, and Otto Schily, who became Schröder's interior minister. In a turn of fate, Schily would face off against Mahler in the government's effort to ban the National Democratic Party. Mr. Mahler emerged as a far-right convert in the late 1990s, denouncing immigrants and calling for Germany to leave behind its guilt over the Nazi era. He founded a group called For Our Country, which, among other things, protested plans for a national Holocaust memorial. He became a fixture in the German news media for his outlandishly offensive comments. In 2001, he praised the Sept. 11 terrorists, while simultaneously claiming that the attacks had been staged by the United States. After leaving the National Democrats, he founded a group called the Association for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Denying the Holocaust. The German government banned it in 2008. Starting in 2007, Mr. Mahler spent nearly 13 years in prison for making antisemitic statements. After being released in 2015 for health reasons -- part of his left leg was amputated because of an infection -- he fled to Hungary, where he sought asylum. The Hungarians returned him to Germany, and he finished his sentence in 2020. Mr. Mahler is survived by his wife, Elizabeth (Kujawa) Mahler, and two children from a previous marriage, Wiebke and Axel Mahler. Mr. Mahler returned to court in 2022, once again for making antisemitic statements. The trial was temporarily suspended in 2023, however, after the court determined that Mahler was too sick to appear before the judge. He died before it could resume. Advertisement This article originally appeared in