Germany’s ‘Speechcrime’ Raids Are a Chilling Sign of Things To Come

Pre-dawn raids sound like something out of Nazi Germany or the German "Democratic" Republic, but no, this is the Federal Republic today.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

The German state’s crackdown on online hate speech is straight out of the Orwellian playbook.

At around 6 a.m. this morning, hundreds of people across Germany awoke to police officers at their door. Their only ‘crime’ is to have openly made critical or offensive comments on the internet, many about specific politicians. 

This is not a scene from the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic, but from the Federal Republic in the 21st Century. Officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intend to make approximately 170 house visits today, to investigate ‘hateful’ or insulting comments made online. Suspects have had their tablets, laptops, and phones confiscated, and their homes searched. This operation has been taking place annually for several years now, to enforce paragraph 188 of the German criminal code. This was amended in 2021 to make it a criminal offence to insult a political figure, punishable by a maximum sentence of three years in prison. 

According to the BKA, there were 10,732 crimes related to online hate speech last year—that’s an increase of roughly 34% since 2023. Compared to 2021, the numbers have quadrupled. Naturally, the vast majority of the posts being targeted by police come from the right wing of the political spectrum. 

The BKA also encourages citizens to support the police in combating so-called hate crimes. Anyone who encounters hate speech online or becomes a victim of hate speech should report it to the local police. “Report hate posts to social network providers and request them to delete criminal content,” the Federal Criminal Police Office states. 

While it shies away from doing anything about its violent crime problem, the German state is not taking offensive memes or crude insults lightly. North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister, Christian Democrat Herbert Reul, warned: “Digital arsonists must not be able to hide behind their phones or computers. Anyone who thinks anything is allowed on social media is seriously mistaken.” Reul also complained that “people have forgotten the difference between hate and opinion.”

This hardline approach is not new. German authorities have been rapidly ramping up their enforcement of speech laws in recent years, likely out of fear of a growing right-wing backlash. Last year, the BKA conducted similar early-morning raids against those accused of posting misogynist content online. And earlier this year, CBS documented how officers raided the apartment of one man in northwest Germany accused of posting a racist meme. As part of the report, CBS spoke to German state prosecutors who explained that not only is insulting someone publicly against the law, but could also be punished more severely when done online. Apparently, according to the experts, even reposting an insult or false information online is against the law. 

Even off-colour humour can be treated as a criminal offence in Germany. Just yesterday, a pensioner was convicted for posting satirical images involving Nazi imagery. Stefan Niehoff,  a 64-year-old former Bundeswehr sergeant, was initially hauled before a court last year for calling then economy minister Robert Habeck a “professional idiot.” This case was fortunately dropped, but he has since been slapped with a €825 fine for sharing images on X that the judge failed to find sufficiently satirical. Under German law, it is illegal to use Nazi-era imagery unless it is decided to be clearly critical. 

Germany’s censorship regime is so brazen it almost beggars belief. But it is far from an isolated—or even the worst—example of a free-speech crackdown in Europe. 

Similarly, in the UK the situation has become almost comically authoritarian in recent years and has only deteriorated under the rule of Labour prime minister Keir Starmer. Recently, we have seen a spate of attacks on free speech. In May this year, it was reported that, back in 2023, the British thoughtpolice had paid a visit to the home of Julian Foulkes, a retired police officer himself. In bodycam footage released last month, officers can be seen searching Foulkes’s house, rummaging through his wife’s underwear drawer and inspecting newspaper clippings about his daughter’s funeral and her death in a tragic road accident. They also leafed through his bookshelf, which contained tomes such as Douglas Murray’s The War on The West. One policeman can be heard tutting over his “very Brexity” book collection. Foulkes was also handcuffed by six officers, locked in a cell and interrogated for eight hours. To make matters even more absurd, the reason he was investigated in the first place was because he had posted in a concerned manner online about the rise of antisemitism in the UK. 

Thankfully, Foulkes did eventually receive an apology from Kent Police, as well as compensation of £20,000 for the ordeal. But others have been much less fortunate. Perhaps the most notorious case of policing language in the UK recently is the arrest and conviction of Lucy Connolly. The childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor in Northampton was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison because of a tweet she made in the aftermath of Axel Rudakubana’s slaying of three little girls last summer. Connolly, whose own son died 14 years ago, called for “mass deportation now” and said that people could “set fire to all the [asylum hotels] for all I care.” Despite the post only being live for a matter of hours before she deleted it, this was deemed incitement worthy of a more than two-year prison sentence. She has since been denied early release to be with her ill husband and 12-year-old daughter. 

These cases are part of a sprawling, exhausting pattern. In February, a grandmother was visited by police after she made posts on Facebook criticising Labour politicians involved in a WhatsApp messaging scandal (police also began investigating the politicians in question, but concluded no action should be taken). A month later, two parents were arrested by six uniformed officers and held in a police station for eight hours because they had complained about their child’s school in a WhatsApp group. Last November, Allison Pearson, a journalist for the Telegraph, had a knock at the door because of a post she made (and swiftly deleted) a year before, misidentifying supporters of a Pakistani political party in Manchester as supporters of Hamas. Pearson was invited to attend a “voluntary” police interview, which she declined, and no further action was taken. Essex Police have since refused to apologise for the incident and even praised their officers for their “valiant attempt to maintain public confidence.” 

In the UK, you don’t even need to actually commit a crime in order to be treated like a criminal. The baffling existence of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) mean that anything vaguely upsetting, offensive or controversial—said online or otherwise—can see your name end up on a police database, without you even knowing about it. Potential ‘offences’ have included a nine-year-old child calling a classmate a “retard,” beeping your horn too loudly, a dog pooping on someone’s lawn in a ‘racist’ way, or being given a bad haircut. 

The Free Speech Union estimates that roughly 65 people every day are recorded as having committed a NCHI. Around 30 people are thought to be arrested daily for what they say online. It has become frighteningly commonplace for people to receive a knock at the door over memes or even private messages, being questioned by the police or having their details put into databases that could damage the rest of their lives. 

What we are witnessing in both Germany and the UK is the steady normalisation of censorship—of the state deciding which opinions are acceptable and which must be punished. Insults, satire, criticism of the government, and even poorly worded jokes are being treated as serious crimes, while violent offenders continue to roam free. We are quickly re-entering an era where expressing the ‘wrong’ opinion could ruin your life or even put you behind bars. This is well and truly the age of thoughtcrimes.