Norbert Weidner

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Norbert Weidner (born September 13, 1972 ) was editor of the Burschenschaftliche Blätter from 2008 to 2012 and as such a member of the Association Council of the German Burschenschaft .

In the early 1990s, Weidner was a functionary of several neo-Nazi organizations.

Life

Norbert Weidner was born in 1972. He comes from a middle-class background. At the age of 15, Weidner was a member of the Wiking Youth , which was banned in 1994. As a student, he joined the neo-Nazi skinhead scene and broke off his training shortly before graduating from high school due to increasing activities in the scene. Later he was a member of the Freedom German Workers' Party (FAP), which was banned in 1995. He previously advanced to their district chairman in Bonn and most recently held the office of FAP state manager in North Rhine-Westphalia . During this time he maintained very close contacts with the neo-Nazi Gary Lauck . Weidner was convicted a total of three times for dangerous bodily harm in several cases, most recently to a prison sentence of two years on probation.

Weidner traveled from Bonn to the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 to give interviews. He joined the All-Germany Initiative and worked closely with neo-Nazi Christian Worch in 1993 . Weidner is considered to be one of the initiators of the Anti-Antifa and stated in an interview that he was involved in the creation of the anti-Antifa brochure “The Insight”, which hit the headlines across Germany. This publication was intended to "eliminate all destructive, anti-German and anti-nationalist forces in Germany" by providing information about the addresses and meeting points of left activists, journalists, trade unionists, the Greens and SPD politicians. Weidner also became known as the organizer of supraregional neo-Nazi marches. He quickly rose to become one of the “leading figures” of the neo-Nazi scene. In the 1990s he was a member of the board of directors in the neo-Nazi aid organization for national political prisoners and their relatives , which was banned in 2011 .

An activity Weidner as undercover agent is controversial. In a case against Gary Lauck, Weidner's father said that he was amazed at the good information his son provided about police and judicial measures. He knew about a search on the occasion of the FAP ban and had destroyed two bags of documents beforehand.

In the period that followed, Weidner turned away from the neo-Nazi scene, but emphasized that he was not getting out, but rather withdrawing. He wanted to differentiate himself from dropouts "who have handed others over to Antifa , the protection of the constitution or the press". For his withdrawal, he asserted, among other things, his professional perspective, a threatened prison sentence and the identification of the scene with dull thugs. Ideologically, Weidner only distinguished himself selectively from the scene in which, for example, he represented ethnopluralist instead of openly racist positions.

From September 1992 to September 1996, Weidner completed an apprenticeship as an industrial mechanic in the Bonn magnet factory. There he was a member of the works council. From 1999 he studied business law, media law and media marketing at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences , which he graduated with a degree in business law. In 1999 he joined the old Breslau fraternity of the Raczeks zu Bonn ("Raczeks" for short), of which he is now a member of the board. His fraternity belongs to the fraternity . From their ranks there were often statements that brought the umbrella association Deutsche Burschenschaft (DB) in connection with right-wing extremism .

According to his own statements, Weidner joined the FDP in 1999 ; According to the FDP, however, he had only been a party member since 2001. From January 2000 to October 2005 he worked as a press assistant for the German Animal Welfare Association in Bonn. From 2004 to June 2006 he was "Association chairman for training, publication and network work" at DB. From July 2006 to July 2008 he was press officer for DB. From July 2008 to November 2012 he was editor-in-chief ("editor") of the Burschenschaftliche Blätter in Hamburg. He thus held the only non-voluntary position currently paid at 23,000 euros a year that DB has to offer. As chairman and editor of the association, Weidner was a non-voting member of the DB Association Council; since 2009 he was also responsible for the address management of the newspaper. He is also a member of the Academic Burschenschaft Carolina zu Prague in Munich and of the Association of Old Burschenschafter (VAB) Hamburg.

Conflicts with other fraternity members

In autumn 2011, Weidner published a detailed letter to the editor about the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer , who was murdered by the National Socialists in April 1945 for participating in the resistance against National Socialism , in the member newspaper of his fraternity, the “Bundesbrief” of the Raczeks . In it he contradicted a brother of the Raczeks, who had presented Bonhoeffer as a role model in the previous federal letter. Bonhoeffer and Hans Oster's group committed treason by submitting “political and military plans, especially to the British” and thus contributed to the deaths of thousands of German soldiers in World War II. Bonhoeffer was therefore "undoubtedly a traitor"; he thought his was legal , therefore sentencing and execution "purely legal ... justified." For Bonhoeffer did not want to see that the Allies did not to overthrow Adolf Hitler , but had gone about "Germany to weaken, sustainable, smash and dominate". Weidner thus took over the justification of the Nazi judiciary, which had the resistance fighters of the Osterkreis executed on Hitler's orders shortly before the end of the war as high and national traitors, and followed the former Nazi functionary and right-wing extremist Otto Ernst Remer , who also became Bonhoeffer in 1952 as a traitor and was prosecuted for it.

Weidner's letter to the editor became public on April 11, 2012 and sparked violent protests. The Bonn local association of the FDP , in which Weidner had been a passive member for ten years, then planned his exclusion from the party . In August 2012, Weidner resigned from the FDP and thus preceded a party exclusion procedure .

On April 20, 2012, the Bonn public prosecutor's office initiated an investigation into the suspicion of denigrating the memory of deceased people against Weidner. More than 600 fraternity members demanded in a signature action that he be voted out of office as editor-in-chief of the fraternity leaves. After Weidner failed to vote out at the Burschentag in June 2012, some DB officials resigned from their positions. An extraordinary boys' day was convened for November 2012.

Christian J. Becker, like Weidner a member of the Bonner Raczeks, had founded the Burschenschafter against neo-Nazis initiative before this Burschentag , which campaigned for Weidner to be voted out of office. Becker wrote by e-mail to the members of his association that Weidner was “most likely one of the heads of the right-wing extremist movement, which consists of fraternities, NPD and comradeships”. In June 2012, Weidner complained that this statement and other statements by Becker had not been made, that he had hacked computers of his opponents and wanted to found a right-wing extremist student party with other nationalist lads. Weidner was represented by lawyer Björn Clemens at the trial before the Bonn Regional Court on July 4, 2012 . According to the judgment of the Bonn Regional Court of July 11, 2012, Becker's statements were blanket value judgments without specific statements about Weidner's activities and were not covered by inadmissible abuse. Only the statement that Weidner had hacked an e-mail account was judged by the court to be an unproven factual assertion and prohibited repetition.

In its response to a small question in the Bundestag in July 2012, the Federal Government saw Weidner's views on Bonhoeffer as a possible clue for anti-constitutionalism , but doubted that the German fraternity represented Weidner's views.

Becker was expelled from the Raczek fraternity in September 2012. Weidner was voted out prematurely at the extraordinary boys' day in November 2012. Michael Paulwitz was elected as his successor . The Bonn District Court sentenced Weidner to 40 daily rates of 30 euros each based on his statements about Bonhoeffer on January 15, 2013 for denigrating the memory of the deceased. After Weidner appealed the judgment, it was upheld by the Bonn Regional Court in September 2013. The judgment was also confirmed in the appeal hearing before the Cologne Higher Regional Court in February 2014, making the conviction legally binding.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Lisa Inhoffen, Rita Klein: FDP member used to be a neo-Nazi . In: General-Anzeiger . April 14, 2012.
  2. a b c d Christoph Seils : The dropout. In: the daily newspaper , May 13, 1995, p. 12. ( Text in Nadir )
  3. Oliver Schröm, I was neo-Nazi , In: Focus 36 of September 4, 2000, p. 120
  4. a b c d Florian Diekmann (Der Spiegel, April 11, 2012): Burschenschafter incites against Nazi resistance fighters.
  5. Der Spiegel 49/1993: Eyes in the back of the head
  6. a b c Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb, April 23, 2007): “Honor, freedom, fatherland!” - fraternities as a refuge for intellectual right-wing extremists.
  7. Stefan Aust , Dirk Laabs : Heimatschutz. The state and the NSU series of murders. Pantheon Verlag Munich 2014, p. 197; Tilman Steffen: A fraternity member in the atmosphere of the protection of the constitution , Zeit Online from January 10, 2014, accessed on February 10, 2016.
  8. Der Spiegel, July 3, 2012: Fraternity members fight legal disputes.
  9. ^ Bulletin 291 of the German Burschenschaft of September 28, 2004
  10. ^ Andreas Speit (Taz, April 13, 2012): Too much even among conservatives.
  11. ^ Association of the Associations of Old Burschenschafter: Conference documents for the Old Gentlemen's Day 2011
  12. Florian Diekmann, Oliver Trenkamp (Der Spiegel, April 12, 2012): After inciting against Nazi resistance fighters, the FDP wants to exclude fraternity members
  13. ^ Rita Klein (General-Anzeiger Bonn, August 9, 2012): Ex-FAP functionary resigns voluntarily from the FDP.
  14. General-Anzeiger, April 20, 2012: The Bonn public prosecutor's office received criminal charges.
  15. ^ Johann Osel (Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 27, 2012): Quarreled boys go to court.
  16. Barbara Schmidt-Mattern (Deutschlandfunk, July 4, 2012): Fraternity members in court in Bonn
  17. ^ Tilman Steffen (Die Zeit, July 11, 2012): Freedom of expression wins in the fraternity dispute.
  18. German Bundestag, printed matter 17/10079, July 12, 2012: The Federal Government's answer to the minor question from MPs Ulla Jelpke, Heidrun Dittrich, Nicole Gohlke, other MPs and the DIE LINKE parliamentary group. - Right-wing extremist tendencies in the German fraternity (PDF; 95 kB)
  19. Der Spiegel, September 16, 2012: Right-wing extremism allegations: Burschenschaft throws out critics
  20. ^ Sebastian Christ, Florian Diekmann (Der Spiegel, November 24, 2012): Special meeting in Stuttgart: Fraternities create right-wing extremist functionaries
  21. ^ Tilman Steffen: Right-wing extremism dispute: Burschenschaftsverband loses strongest member , on: Störungsmelder (Zeit online), February 12, 2013, last accessed: February 13, 2013.
  22. Sebastian Christ (Der Spiegel, January 15, 2013): Incitement against Nazi opponents: Court condemns right-wing fraternities
  23. Tilman Steffen: fraternity member is subject to the dispute over denigration of Bonhoeffer. . In: Zeit Online. September 9, 2013.
  24. Weidner's conviction remains in place, Spiegel online from February 7, 2014