BERLIN – A Frankfurt court on Thursday found a German neo-Nazi guilty of murdering a local politician and sentenced him to life in prison for what the prosecutor called the country’s first political assassination by extremist extremists since the end of World War II mention.
The court found Stephan Ernst, 47, guilty of the 2019 murder of Walter Lübcke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party who defended her welcome refugee policy. The accused was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole – the sentence the prosecutor asked for due to the seriousness of the crime, which he said was motivated by ‘racism and xenophobia’.
The assassination was a turning point in the settlement of Germany after the war, with the scale of the threat posed by internal neo-Nazis, which comes after years of attacks by right-wing extremists on migrants or their descendants. Over the past year, Germany has been grappling with revelations that the far-right networks have extensively penetrated its security services, including its elite special forces as well as the ranks of its police.
Prosecutor Dieter Killmer said the court should send a message to an increasingly glorified right-wing camp in the country.
“From our point of view, we must all, as is the case here, all be on our guard to ensure that others do not ignore the state’s monopoly on the use of force and take it upon themselves to kill representatives of the German people, “Killmer told reporters last week after his closing remarks.
Another man, identified under German privacy law only as Mark H., was found not guilty of aiding and abetting the murder, but was given a suspended sentence of one and a half years for a gun violation.
Mr. Lübcke was killed on June 2, 2019 on the terrace of his house near the Kassel center. His adult son found that his father had fallen into a chair with a gunshot wound to the head and called an ambulance. Mr Lübcke was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Mr. Ernst was arrested two weeks later and admitted the crime shortly thereafter, only to revoke the confession weeks later. He reiterated his confession during the trial, which began in June.
Mr. Ernst was also charged with attempted murder in the stabbing of a refugee from Iraq in August 2016 after police officers entered the house of Mr. Seriously searched and found a knife there with traces of the Iraqi man’s DNA. He was acquitted of the charge on Thursday.
Mr. Ernst was known among police as a neo-Nazi sympathizer and has a criminal history dating back to 1993, when he was convicted of attempting to bomb a refugee shelter. In the years that followed, he slipped off the radar of security services, leading to criticism that local authorities did not take the threat of right-wing domestic extremists seriously enough.
While refugee shelters began to fill in the fall of 2015 with hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in Germany due to conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Lübcke traveled throughout his region explaining the situation to his constituents.
During one town hall, he was repeatedly provoked by members of a local far-right group, including Markus H., who suppressed the criticism, saying that offering adequate housing to refugees was a matter of German and Christian values, and that anyone what they did not support was ‘free to leave this country’.
Markus H. has a video of mr. Lübcke shot and posted with the statement on social media channels visited by supporters from the far right, where it evokes angry reactions. For months after that, Mr. Lübcke receives an avalanche of hate mail, including death threats.
After the murder of mr. Lübcke, having seen Germany launch a series of far-right attacks, began attempting to bomb a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, in October 2019. Two people were killed.
Last year in February, a judge-armed man killed nine people from Turkish and Kurdish families who have lived in Germany for generations in the city of Hanau, near Frankfurt.