Jürgen Rieger

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Jürgen Rieger

Jürgen Hans Paul Rieger (born May 11, 1946 in Blexen near Nordenham , † October 29, 2009 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer , neo-Nazi and politician ( NPD ). In addition to his work as a criminal defense lawyer for numerous right-wing extremists , he was known as a multifunctional member of the right-wing extremist scene and as a Holocaust denier . Rieger represented racial studies in the tradition of the National Socialist racial ideologist Hans FK Günther , was chairman of the völkisch - neo-pagan species community - Germanic faith community and the main organizer of the Rudolf Hess memorial march .

Life

Jürgen Rieger was born on May 11, 1946 in Blexen near Nordenham as the son of a family of doctors. His father was a gynecologist . He became a lawyer himself and opened his own law firm in 1975 .

Rieger had a considerable fortune that he was able to gain from inheritances from deceased like-minded people and from stock and real estate deals. He was the executor of the will of the late Wilhelm Tietjen (estimated assets: more than one million euros). Even Gertrud Lord had left him her fortune. Rieger managed the estate of deceased "comrades" under the guise of the letterbox company Wilhelm Tietjen Foundation for Fertilization . In addition, Rieger and his father ran a lucrative campsite in Kollmar for many years , which the younger Rieger turned into a meeting place for neo-Nazis. When his father died, the landlord gave him notice.

During a meeting of the NPD party executive on October 24, 2009, Rieger suffered a stroke , from the consequences of which he died on October 29, 2009. Jürgen Rieger did not take the right-wing extremist NPD into account in his will, as they had hoped. His family inherited his fortune, which is said to have no connection to the neo-Nazi scene.

Rieger was considered a collector of militaria . For example, he maintained a fleet of Wehrmacht vehicles . His behavior was described as choleric and was marked by occasional violent fits of anger in public. In private he was close friends with Thomas Wulff . Rieger was married, but his wife died before him. He was the father of four children. After his death, the NPD organized a memorial demonstration for Rieger in Wunsiedel , which around 800 people attended .

After Rieger's death, his family announced that they did not want Rieger's grave to become a place of pilgrimage for right-wing extremists. A fire or sea ​​burial is therefore being considered .

Functions in parties and associations

Jürgen Rieger at the NPD federal party conference in 2006

Rieger began his political career as a law student when he joined the Aktion Oder-Neisse group in 1965 and the Federation of Heimattreuer Jugend in 1969 . In 1968 Rieger was a member of the "Hamburg Republican Student Union of Germany / Republican Schoolchildren Association" (RSD). In 1969 Rieger gave a speech at the annual meeting of the Northern League in Brighton, England , in which he referred to the racial tradition of Hans FK Günther . In the following year he also took part in the conference and called for a “Teutonic Federation” based on common “heritage” and “racial origin”.

In 1970 he was co-founder of a CSU circle of friends (outside Bavaria). In 1972 he became a board member in the Nordic Ring , chairman of the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavioral Research (GfbAEV; until 1972: German Society for Hereditary Health Care , a right-wing extremist registered association based in Ellerau ) and - until his death - editor of their journal Neue Anthropologie .

Rieger also took over functions in the NPD and the FAP, which was banned in 1995 . From the 1980s onwards, he was one of the supporters of the Wiking Youth , which was banned in 1994 , without being a member. In 1989 he rose to the position of main functionary and chairman of the folk-neo-pagan "species community" and editor of its organ, the Nordic newspaper . He was also responsible for the communications of the “German Legal Protection Association / German Legal Protection Fund” (DRSK) and a leading member of the North German Ring and the Northern League. In addition, he also appeared as a speaker at the Nationalist Front and was involved in setting up Meinolf Schönborn's National Mission Command (NEK), a predecessor of the Anti-Antifa .

In 1991 he became a board member of Heide-Heim e. V., the sponsoring association of a site in Hetendorf . Here, as the organizer, Rieger hosted the Hetendorfer conference weeks , which took place at the summer solstice , as well as a Pentecost camp "for Germans" until it was banned in 1998 . In addition to political training, military sports exercises were also held here. As the dropout from the neo-Nazi scene Ingo Hasselbach reported, Rieger had also organized a military exercise in the summer of 1990 on a Bundeswehr site, the Wagrien barracks in Putlos in Schleswig-Holstein , which had been registered as a meeting of "lovers of military vehicles".

In 2006 Rieger joined the NPD and in the same year was elected to the executive committee at its federal party congress, where he held the office of "Foreign Policy Department". Rieger was elected as the new state chairman at the state party convention of the Hamburg NPD on February 25, 2007, and then also as the deputy national chairman of the NPD on May 24, 2008. In April 2009 he was confirmed in office.

Rieger's relationship with the NPD

The NPD, whose policy Rieger considered too moderate for a long time, was initially critical to hostile to Rieger. Only after the party opened up to the violence-prone scene of the Free Comradeships did Rieger join the NPD in 2006. Since then he has been considered a representative of the neo-Nazi wing of the party. As early as 2005, Rieger ran as a party-independent candidate on the NPD list as the top candidate for the Hamburg NPD, whose leadership he took over in 2006. Rieger supported the party chairman Udo Voigt , whose deputy he was elected in 2008. Rieger found his internal party opponents in Udo Pastörs and Holger Apfel , who belong to a more moderate wing of the NPD. Rieger repeatedly supported the NPD with loans and credits, but did not consider the NPD directly in his will.

public perception

Rieger as a lawyer

Rieger was admitted to the bar at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court. Among other things, he specialized in inheritance law. Since 1992 he has been a member of the existing German Legal Office , a network of right-wing extremist lawyers , headed by Hamburg lawyer Gisela Pahl . Since the 1970s, Rieger has represented numerous right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers in court and in administrative proceedings , including Michael Kühnen , Christian Worch , Horst Mahler , Thies Christophersen , Ernst Zündel , Jürgen Mosler , Berthold Dinter and members of the music group Kraftschlag .

Rieger repeatedly used the special freedoms of the defense counsel to engage in incitatory propaganda himself . B. in the trials of Arpad Wigand , Thomas Wulff and Ernst Zündel (see the section on criminal proceedings below).

His tactics continued to include the procrastination of lawsuits . In 1993, for example, in a procedure before the Stuttgart Regional Court against the founders of the “ Committee for the Preparation of the Celebrations for Adolf Hitler's 100th Birthday ” (KAH for short) , he demanded the hearing of 500 witnesses, whereupon he was replaced as public defender.

Ultimately, this tactic was not very successful. As defense counsel in a multi-year criminal trial before the Hamburg Regional Court, Rieger contributed to the fact that - a novelty in German legal history - a decision by the Federal Court of Justice came about, in which it reads as follows: "In the case of applications for evidence relating to the procrastination, it is possible to prevent further delays to set a deadline for those involved in the proceedings. After this period has expired, any subsequent requests for evidence will only be decided in the grounds for the judgment. "

property

Rieger's building complex with the NPD flag raised in Hameln

Rieger repeatedly acquired properties that were to serve as conference and assembly centers for meetings of right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis. The origin of the funds is not clear. In an interview in 2005 he himself spoke of “property speculation”, another part of the capital came from the legacies of old Nazis who wanted “that their fortune would benefit the movement”.

In 1978 two clubs dominated by Rieger bought a farm on the edge of the Lüneburg Heath , in which Rieger founded the training center “ Hetendorf 13” near Hermannsburg. For years it served as a popular meeting place until the site was expropriated in 1998 after the two sponsoring associations were banned. Later Rieger wanted to establish a right-wing extremist training center in the district of Celle. After a legal dispute with the municipality of Faßberg , the acquisition of a hotel as a bidder in the announced foreclosure auction was ultimately planned.

In 1995 he bought the “Sveneby Säteri” estate near Mariestad in southern Sweden for around 1.6 million euros, a castle-like mansion with 650 hectares of land. Allegedly because of the organic pig breeding there , which Rieger had taken over, despite protests from the Swedish and German governments, he received EU funds of 300,000 marks annually. With advertisements, Rieger tried to persuade “pure-bred” Germans to resettle there, who were supposed to raise “Germanic offspring” far away from supposedly harmful influences. This project has so far been unsuccessful, as there were obviously not enough resettlers. Instead, it became known in autumn 2003 that Swedish neo-Nazis were concentrated in the area of ​​the property after leading Swedish right-wing extremist Klas Lund acquired another 650 hectares in the immediate vicinity of the Sveneby estate. By November 2003, at least four people from the leadership of the "Swedish Resistance Movement" (SMR) had moved there, a successor organization to the anti-Semitic group White Aryan Resistance , a Swedish offshoot of the American White Aryan Resistance . According to Swedish information, the SMR and the “ National Socialist Front ” had trained weapons technology and self-defense in secret camps in the woods. According to the newspaper Expressen , an outbuilding of the Rieger mansion burned down on the night of December 7, 2003.

In Germany, too, several properties had come into the possession of Rieger in recent years and often served similar purposes or initially only as an investment. In 1999 he had acquired a complex of buildings with a cinema in Hameln , which allegedly cost around 2 million euros , and which also included apartments and several shops. When Rieger wanted to organize a conference there in 2005 with well-known neo-Nazi giants and "folk" music, this was banned by the Lüneburg district court on the grounds that construction defects had been found in the building. As a sign of protest against the planned event, the residents of Hameln also organized a “ring around the old town”, which was supposed to demonstrate their rejection of Rieger and neo-Nazis in general.

After 2003, Rieger acquired two properties on behalf of the Wilhelm Tietjen Foundation for Fertilization Ltd.: the Schützenhaus in Pößneck and the Heisenhof in Dörverden. A planned purchase of the “Hotel am Stadtpark” in Delmenhorst failed.

The Wilhelm Tietjen Foundation was dissolved in August 2006 due to the lack of an annual report. At the request of the city of Pößneck , the Jena district court appointed the Pößneck CDU city councilor and lawyer Alf-Heinz Borchardt as supplementary liquidator in March 2007 . However, the decision of the district court was overturned by the district court of Gera. The Thuringian Higher Regional Court confirmed "significant procedural errors" and referred the matter back to the Jena District Court for a new decision. The local court thereupon commissioned the Erfurt lawyer Görge Scheid with the winding up of the assets of the "Wilhelm Tietjen Foundation for Fertilization Limited as a residual company with its seat in Great Britain" located in Germany. At the beginning of May 2008, Rieger succeeded in reactivating the Limited, which resulted in the dismissal of the supplementary liquidator by the Jena District Court.

Rieger owned other properties in Schleswig-Holstein ( Hummelfeld ) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

At the end of September 2007 he bought the station building of Melle in Lower Saxony against the resistance of all council groups and most of Mell's citizens . However, Rieger resigned from this purchase at the end of November 2007 after the city council and the administration of Melle had stipulated the development plan for the station district over a period of three years and prohibited all changes to the use of the listed building for the purposes of the NPD.

In September 2008, Rieger wanted to purchase an inn in Warmensteinach .

According to Focus reports and his own statements, he founded a museum association in Wolfsburg in July 2009 together with other right-wing extremists such as Thomas Wulff and Dieter Riefling . The aim was to commemorate the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude and the developers of the KdF car . The city of Wolfsburg resisted the project and bought the building after Rieger's death.

Overall, however, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution assessed Rieger's alleged acquisition intentions as bogus, as these "in many cases, however, should aim to participate in the sales proceeds in consultation with the owner of difficult-to-sell real estate" because "the affected municipalities themselves through the often saw public pressure prompted to take over the property in question within the scope of their right of first refusal, whereby the purchase prices sometimes significantly exceeded the real market value. "

Rudolf Hess Memorial March

Rieger was the main organizer and initiator of the Rudolf Hess memorial march in Wunsiedel . For many years he was actively involved in the demonstration.

The march reached its climax in 2004 when, according to police, around 5,000 right-wing extremists took part. More than twice as many demonstrators, among them the CSU mayor von Wunsiedel, took an active part in counter-demonstrations and seated demonstrations.

Rieger had registered the rallies in memory of Rudolf Heß until 2010, but the march, which was scheduled for August 28, 2005, was prohibited by the Wunsiedel district office. Rieger then filed a lawsuit with which he was unsuccessful over several instances. He argued that the tightening of criminal law ( Section 130, Paragraph 4 of the Criminal Code), which criminalized advocating National Socialism, violated the freedom of expression guaranteed in the Basic Law. Restrictions on freedom of expression are only permitted if they are general . The Federal Constitutional Court repeatedly and provisionally rejected the appeals until the final decision. When the Wunsiedel decision was finally made at the end of 2009 , the highest German court, Rieger, agreed that the tightening of the sedition paragraph was a special provision , but the law was a permissible interference with the protection of freedom of expression. The Basic Law can be understood as an explicit alternative to National Socialism, which exceptionally justifies a restriction of freedom of expression.

Assessment of the protection of the constitution

Jürgen Rieger's activities, including the attempt to establish the Rudolf Hess memorial march , efforts to buy real estate for the NPD to set up “right-wing extremist training centers”, and participation in a demonstration in October 2006 for the revision of the Nuremberg war crimes trial of 1945/46 , as well as his election as deputy of the federal NPD and the state chairman of the Hamburg NPD, were observed between 2005 and 2008 by the protection of the constitution . In the reports on the protection of the constitution, Rieger was classified several times as “ neo-Nazi ”, “ right-wing extremists ”. and “ protagonists of the neo-Nazi camp”.

Criminal proceedings

Rieger himself was convicted several times: in 1971 he was involved in the fake kidnapping of Berthold Rubin . In 1974 he was charged with sedition and aggravated assault charged, but initially acquitted by a court of Wuerzburg. In the same year, Rieger was sentenced to a fine of 3500  DM for two cases of bodily harm in connection with a demonstration by the " Action Resistance " on October 31, 1970 in Würzburg .

In 1981, in proceedings against his client, SS-Sturmbannführer Arpad Wigand , he claimed that no Jew would have starved to death in the Warsaw ghetto if the ghetto inmates had shown solidarity with one another. As a result, a fine was initially imposed on Rieger. However, the Federal Court of Justice overturned this in 1987, as it was credited with having acted as a defense lawyer in the “safeguarding of the legitimate interests (§ 193 StGB) of his client”.

In 1989, Rieger was sentenced to one year imprisonment by the Hamburg Regional Court for legal party betrayal (criminal betrayal of the interests of his client in favor of the opposing party). The sentence has been suspended.

After driving through Reinbek near Hamburg in an old Waffen SS military vehicle in 1993 , he was sentenced to a fine of 14,400 marks the following year for using anti-constitutional symbols . The SS runes on the historic license plate were not adequately covered.

In 1996 Rieger represented the Hamburg neo-Nazi Thomas Wulff in a criminal case for sedition because he had denied the Holocaust in the neo-Nazi newspaper index . In order to exonerate his client, Rieger had applied to question a qualified chemist as an expert who would support the thesis that gassings of people in Auschwitz-Birkenau with Zyklon B "did not take place" under the Nazi regime . He was then charged with sedition himself. The proceedings against Rieger initially ended with an acquittal, but the Leipzig-based 5th Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice overturned this in April 2002. The hate speech proceedings were referred to another chamber of the Hamburg Regional Court for a new hearing. These proceedings ended in April 2003 with Rieger being sentenced to a fine of 80 daily rates of 42 euros each, whereby the defendant benefited from the fact that the act was already seven years ago.

In 2007 Rieger was again convicted of assault. A fine of 4,500 euros was imposed on him. According to the findings of the Magdeburg Regional Court , he had hit a PDS district delegate in the face on the sidelines of a demonstration.

In September 2007, the Mannheim public prosecutor brought charges against Rieger for sedition. He was accused of having publicly denied or played down the National Socialist genocide of the Jews in nine cases as the defender of the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel . In addition, the public prosecutor sought a professional ban against Rieger because of his relevant criminal record.

literature

Web links

Commons : Jürgen Rieger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
 Wikinews: Category: Jürgen Rieger  - in the news

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Sven Röbel: Prominent right-wing extremist - NPD Deputy Chief Rieger is dead . Spiegel Online , October 29, 2009
  2. ^ A b Neo-Nazi Rieger ( memento from September 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Verfassungsschutz Report 2007, PDF p. 49.
  3. ↑ http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rieger106.html ( Memento from February 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ a b c Andrea Röpke : Multi-activist and stimulant figure . ( Memento of the original from November 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. October 30, 2009. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de
  5. ^ A b c Michael Billig: The racist international . Göttingen 1980, p. 121 .
  6. ↑ a b Juliane Wetzel : The meshes of the right net. National and international connections in the right-wing extremist spectrum . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Right-wing extremism in Germany. Requirements, connections, effects . 4th edition. Munich 1994, pp. 154–178, here p. 171. See hilfsschule-im-nationalsozialismus.de .
  7. ^ Michael Cheap: The Racist International . Göttingen 1980, p. 118 f .
  8. ^ Gideon Botsch : The extreme right in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949 until today. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2012, ISBN 978-3-534-23832-3 , p. 96.
  9. ^ Ingo Hasselbach: The accounting . Berlin / Weimar, p. 117 ff.
  10. ↑ taz, September 7, 2006.
  11. ↑ NPD comes out empty-handed at Rieger-Erbe . In: Focus , November 5, 2009.
  12. ↑ BGH, decision of the 5th Criminal Senate of June 14, 2005, Az. 5 StR 129/05 (PDF; 52 kB).
  13. ↑ turn right. The underestimated danger: neo-Nazis in Lower Saxony . Edited by Weserkurier and NDR info, Bremen 2008, ISBN 978-3-938795-05-7 , p. 74.
  14. ↑ turn right. The underestimated danger: neo-Nazis in Lower Saxony . Edited by Weserkurier and NDR info, Bremen 2008, ISBN 978-3-938795-05-7 , pp. 74f.
  15. ^ Village fights against neo-Nazi hotel. Die Welt, October 7, 2009, accessed November 1, 2009 .
  16. ↑ Nazistgård i brand. (No longer available online.) Expressen .se dated December 7, 2003, archived from the original on October 11, 2009 ; Retrieved May 18, 2010 (Swedish). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.expressen.se
  17. ↑ Andrea Röpke: "We conquer the cities from the country!" - focus activities of the NPD and comradeship scene in Lower Saxony . Educational Association Work and Life, Braunschweig 2005, ISBN 3-932082-15-X .
  18. ↑ Last chapter in the embarrassing dispute over a hotel. Die Welt, March 21, 2009, accessed August 10, 2015 .
  19. ↑ We do not play into the hands of the Nazis and do not buy . New OZ online. October 1, 2007.
  20. ^ Meller Bahnhof: Rieger surrenders. (No longer available online.) New OZ online, November 28, 2007, archived from the original on January 16, 2010 ; Retrieved September 23, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.neue-oz.de
  21. ↑ Thilo Schmidt : blue-white-brown. The NPD wants to conquer Bavaria. Deutschlandradio Kultur, September 9, 2008, archived from the original ; Retrieved November 8, 2013 .
  22. ↑ KdF museum in Wolfsburg ( Memento of 19 July 2011 at the Internet Archive )
  23. ↑ City defends itself against right-wing extremist museum “Strength through Joy” . focus.de, June 25, 2009.
  24. ↑ No more "strength through joy" . taz.de
  25. ^ (Fake) real estate transactions of the NPD ( Memento from October 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) Verfassungsschutzbericht 2008, p. 92 f.
  26. ↑ Thomas Dörfler, Andreas Klärner: The "Rudolf-Heß-Gedenkmarsch" in Wunsiedel. Reconstruction of a nationalist phantasm. In: Mittelweg 36 , issue 4/2004, pp. 74–91. Available online .
  27. ↑ Press release No. 129/2009 of November 17, 2009 . bundesverfassungsgericht.de.
  28. ^ Decision in Karlsruhe: Paragraph against sedition is legal . spiegel.de. November 17, 2009.
  29. ↑ Establishment of right-wing extremist training centers ( memento of October 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Verfassungsschutz Report 2008, p. 92.
  30. ^ Right-wing extremist Rieger ( memento of October 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Verfassungsschutz Report 2005, PDF p. 70.
  31. ^ Rieger as the protagonist of the neo-Nazi camp ( memento of August 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Verfassungsschutz Report 2006, PDF p. 89.
  32. ↑ Az. 5 StR 485/01
  33. ↑ Neo-Nazi lawyer Rieger sentenced to a fine (tagesschau.de archive) Tagesschau , May 31, 2007.
  34. ^ Indictment against Nazi lawyer Jürgen Rieger . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , September 19, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Rieger, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rieger, Jürgen Hans Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and politician (NPD)
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Blinking
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 2009
Place of death Berlin