Almost six years in prison in the process of “NSU 2.0” threatening letter

“Heil Hitler!” It said in the threatening letters, or: “We’ll kill you all.” They were signed with “Der Führer” and “NSU 2.0”, alluding to the right-wing extremist terrorist cell “National Socialist Underground” (NSU). The letters were addressed to many well-known personalities, especially women, such as Linke leader Janine Wissler, moderators Maybrit Illner and Anja Reschke, journalist Dunja Hayali, comedian Idil Baydar, publicist Hengameh Yaghoobifarah and politicians like today German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). The sender of the letters, 54-year-old Alexander M. from Berlin, was sentenced to five years and ten months in prison by the Frankfurt am Main district court on Thursday.

According to the indictment, at least 81 threatening letters were sent between August 2, 2018 and March 21, 2021 via email, SMS and fax using a Tor browser. They contained hateful messages such as “Turkish pig,” “Shit Turks,” “Public pest,” “Caraway dealer,” “Brain-dead shit doner kebab,” and “Waste products,” as well as threats that family members would be “slaughtered with barbaric sadistic severity.”

For all of this, Alexander M. has now been convicted of publicly calling for crimes, incitement to hatred, disruption of the public peace, use of anti-constitutional symbols, threats and insults. With all this, the question was and is to what extent M. received help from the police authorities.

The prosecution had asked for seven and a half years in prison. According to the public prosecutor’s pleading, M. received the personal and publicly inaccessible data of the recipients from various police stations under false identities. However, it is doubtful whether this is true.

Lively reactions on social networks

No sooner had the relatively harsh verdict been announced than there were jubilation and the same question on Twitter. The tenor of the expressions of opinion was mostly positive: “Good sign against hate,” tweeted Dunja Hayali, but further clarification was needed. Numerous others made similar statements.

The “Welt” journalist Deniz Yücel recalled what it was like when he testified before the court in March. The accused, an unemployed IT technician, had verbally abused and threatened him in the courtroom. Yücel, who is used to threatening letters, had also received mail from “NSU 2.0”.

The series of threatening letters began in 2018. The first recipient on August 2, 2018 was the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz. She had represented the families whose relatives were victims of the “National Socialist underground”. On August 2, 2018, she received a fax in which she was insulted as a “lousy Turkish pig”. The anonymous sender threatened to “slaughter” her daughter. Even more serious than the nasty threats was the fact that the lawyer’s address is not publicly accessible. It had previously been retrieved from a Frankfurt police computer. The officer who triggered the data retrieval was a member of a right-wing extremist chat group in which Hessian police officers exchanged swastikas, pictures of Hitler and racist slogans. Five officers were suspended in December 2018 and only years later charged with sedition.

Accused: “Only trolling at a high level”

In other cases, too, the letters often contained the addressee’s personal data, which had recently been queried without authorization by police computers, which led to the question of complicity by the Hessian police. In 2020, the Hessian state police chief Udo Münch resigned because of the threatening letter affair.

The joint plaintiffs – the member of the Bundestag Martina Renner (Die Linke) and the Frankfurt lawyer Basay-Yildiz – had demanded further clarification. At least for the first letter, there were doubts that M was the perpetrator. The defense also criticized the fact that the public prosecutor’s office assumed a single perpetrator and pointed to a police officer from the 1st police station in Frankfurt, whose role in the proceedings had not been sufficiently clarified.

After the verdict was pronounced, Basay-Yildiz criticized in the “Zeit” that this officer had not been charged. The first fax differs in style from later letters. In her opinion, the public prosecutor’s office has yet to indict the officer. She hadn’t dared to do that before.

M. himself had always rejected the allegations and was still trying to get an acquittal on Thursday morning. The defendant had made his own plea and asked for an acquittal. He was only a member of a chat group on the dark web, which is why parts of the threatening letters were found on his computer. The threats were never serious, he added: “The ‘NSU 2.0’ project was just trolling at a high level.” Alexander M. has multiple criminal records. As early as 1992 he is said to have posed as a police officer in order to obtain personal data; at that time he was convicted of misappropriation.

This type of “trolling,” while very common, rarely results in such significant punishment. Often the authors of such hate messages believe they cannot be found and are operating under cover of anonymity.

With agency material.