Article Archive
A police officer stands in front of the German flag during a demonstration in Berlin on March 22, 2025.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl
— June 19, 2025
The story that made the headlines recently in the German media seems almost absurd in a tragically existential sense—as if lifted from the pages of a Camus novel. Wolfgang Conzelmann, a 76-year-old physician who had spent decades treating drug addicts, was found dead in his practice last week. The Berlin doctor was violently murdered just three days after being acquitted in a free-speech trial.
On June 10th, he had finally been acquitted of charges of slander. While his murder appears unrelated to his legal troubles—he worked in Berlin’s crime-ridden Leopoldplatz area—the bitter irony illuminates the increasingly opaque and absurd nature of Germany’s war on expression.
Conzelmann’s ‘crime’ was posting a Facebook caricature in October 2022 that criticized government COVID-19 measures. The image showed a Nazi-era propaganda poster with the Green Party logo replacing the swastika, alongside a portrait of then Economics Minister Robert Habeck. For this, he faced Germany’s notorious Section 188 penal law, which criminalizes “insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life.”
What followed exemplifies the workings of Germany’s censorship apparatus. Police raided Conzelmann’s home, seizing computers and phones. He was slapped with a €3,000 fine, which he refused to pay, appealing instead. A rebellious ’68 leftover and a true Berlin ‘institution,’ Conzelmann fought back through his website with posts titled “Criminal State or Democracy” and “The Drug Mafia State.” His practice’s window at one time also bore the sign: “Democracy means: shut up!“ as one paper reports.
Conzelmann was merely one casualty among the many hundreds charged under Section 188—a law expanded to its current form in 2021. The prosecutions emanate from Göttingen‘s Zentralstelle zur Bekämpfung von Hasskriminalität im Internet (Central Office for Combating Internet Hate Crime), an office that gained notoriety through a CBS News documentary showing prosecutors smugly describing how “painful” it was for citizens to have their devices seized.
What lurks behind these prosecutions is a less visible web of NGOs that have transformed denunciation into a business model. These groups scour the internet for potentially offensive content, feeding charges to prosecutors, while operating with minimal transparency despite heavy state subsidies.
HateAid is a salient example. Recently designated a “trusted flagger” under the Digital Services Act by the new government, it wields significant power in determining which posts disappear and which trigger prosecutions. CEO Josephine Ballon, featured in the CBS documentary, argued that unlimited free speech allows “a very small group of people” to “say anything they wanted” while intimidating everyone else—a remarkable inversion of censorship’s actual effects.
HateAid’s structure is revealing: comprised of sub-organizations including Campact (which organized anti-AfD demonstrations) and ‘Fearless Democracy e.V.,’ its advisory board reads like a retirement home for failed politicians: Nadine Schön (CDU), who lost her seat in 2021; former Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries (SPD), who left politics in 2017; and Renate Künast (Green Party), whose mayoral ambitions in Berlin famously always ended in failure.
The network, designed in such a way that it avoids accountability, extends far beyond HateAid. Organizations like REspekt and So done employ dozens of digital snoops—HateAid alone has over 50 staff members—who spend their days hunting for violations.
This creates what journalist Jakob Schirrmacher aptly terms “the technocratic shift of decision-making power—away from the public to semi-private reporting structures that organize communication spaces according to … political criteria.”
The apparatus feeds on itself. Each organization justifies the others’ existence while expanding the definition of harmful speech. Success is measured by the volume of reports filed and prosecutions initiated. REspekt, for example, reported 11,241 cases to police in 2024—31 cases per day—a figure the organization proudly advertises as proof of its indispensable work and justification for its trusted flagger status.
We have, as the brilliant blogger eugyppius states, “established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation.“
Those hoping Germany’s current government would dismantle this apparatus have been disappointed. Instead, the network expands, as HateAid’s recent promotion demonstrates. A state this nervous about citizen speech will not voluntarily relinquish its surveillance tools. The technocratic machinery, once established, develops its own momentum and justification.
The biggest danger lies in the chilling effect on free speech. When anonymous organizations can trigger police raids over political cartoons, when semi-private entities determine what acceptable discourse is, when bureaucratic procedures replace democratic debate, the poison of censorship spreads far beyond individual cases.
The tragic irony of Conzelmann’s case has cast a spotlight on this machinery of bureaucratic censorship. It has exposed the Kafkaesque reality of Germany’s speech laws—where anonymous functionaries can trigger police raids, where the process itself becomes the punishment regardless of ultimate outcome.
His story has only reached prominence because of its tragedy—but its true absurdity lies in a system that confuses the protection of democracy with its suffocation. His tragic story should remind us that the struggle for free expression will be a hard one, but it must be fought.
A police officer stands in front of the German flag during a demonstration in Berlin on March 22, 2025.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl
— June 19, 2025
The story that made the headlines recently in the German media seems almost absurd in a tragically existential sense—as if lifted from the pages of a Camus novel. Wolfgang Conzelmann, a 76-year-old physician who had spent decades treating drug addicts, was found dead in his practice last week. The Berlin doctor was violently murdered just three days after being acquitted in a free-speech trial.
On June 10th, he had finally been acquitted of charges of slander. While his murder appears unrelated to his legal troubles—he worked in Berlin’s crime-ridden Leopoldplatz area—the bitter irony illuminates the increasingly opaque and absurd nature of Germany’s war on expression.
Conzelmann’s ‘crime’ was posting a Facebook caricature in October 2022 that criticized government COVID-19 measures. The image showed a Nazi-era propaganda poster with the Green Party logo replacing the swastika, alongside a portrait of then Economics Minister Robert Habeck. For this, he faced Germany’s notorious Section 188 penal law, which criminalizes “insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life.”
What followed exemplifies the workings of Germany’s censorship apparatus. Police raided Conzelmann’s home, seizing computers and phones. He was slapped with a €3,000 fine, which he refused to pay, appealing instead. A rebellious ’68 leftover and a true Berlin ‘institution,’ Conzelmann fought back through his website with posts titled “Criminal State or Democracy” and “The Drug Mafia State.” His practice’s window at one time also bore the sign: “Democracy means: shut up!“ as one paper reports.
Conzelmann was merely one casualty among the many hundreds charged under Section 188—a law expanded to its current form in 2021. The prosecutions emanate from Göttingen‘s Zentralstelle zur Bekämpfung von Hasskriminalität im Internet (Central Office for Combating Internet Hate Crime), an office that gained notoriety through a CBS News documentary showing prosecutors smugly describing how “painful” it was for citizens to have their devices seized.
What lurks behind these prosecutions is a less visible web of NGOs that have transformed denunciation into a business model. These groups scour the internet for potentially offensive content, feeding charges to prosecutors, while operating with minimal transparency despite heavy state subsidies.
HateAid is a salient example. Recently designated a “trusted flagger” under the Digital Services Act by the new government, it wields significant power in determining which posts disappear and which trigger prosecutions. CEO Josephine Ballon, featured in the CBS documentary, argued that unlimited free speech allows “a very small group of people” to “say anything they wanted” while intimidating everyone else—a remarkable inversion of censorship’s actual effects.
HateAid’s structure is revealing: comprised of sub-organizations including Campact (which organized anti-AfD demonstrations) and ‘Fearless Democracy e.V.,’ its advisory board reads like a retirement home for failed politicians: Nadine Schön (CDU), who lost her seat in 2021; former Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries (SPD), who left politics in 2017; and Renate Künast (Green Party), whose mayoral ambitions in Berlin famously always ended in failure.
The network, designed in such a way that it avoids accountability, extends far beyond HateAid. Organizations like REspekt and So done employ dozens of digital snoops—HateAid alone has over 50 staff members—who spend their days hunting for violations.
This creates what journalist Jakob Schirrmacher aptly terms “the technocratic shift of decision-making power—away from the public to semi-private reporting structures that organize communication spaces according to … political criteria.”
The apparatus feeds on itself. Each organization justifies the others’ existence while expanding the definition of harmful speech. Success is measured by the volume of reports filed and prosecutions initiated. REspekt, for example, reported 11,241 cases to police in 2024—31 cases per day—a figure the organization proudly advertises as proof of its indispensable work and justification for its trusted flagger status.
We have, as the brilliant blogger eugyppius states, “established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation.“
Those hoping Germany’s current government would dismantle this apparatus have been disappointed. Instead, the network expands, as HateAid’s recent promotion demonstrates. A state this nervous about citizen speech will not voluntarily relinquish its surveillance tools. The technocratic machinery, once established, develops its own momentum and justification.
The biggest danger lies in the chilling effect on free speech. When anonymous organizations can trigger police raids over political cartoons, when semi-private entities determine what acceptable discourse is, when bureaucratic procedures replace democratic debate, the poison of censorship spreads far beyond individual cases.
The tragic irony of Conzelmann’s case has cast a spotlight on this machinery of bureaucratic censorship. It has exposed the Kafkaesque reality of Germany’s speech laws—where anonymous functionaries can trigger police raids, where the process itself becomes the punishment regardless of ultimate outcome.
His story has only reached prominence because of its tragedy—but its true absurdity lies in a system that confuses the protection of democracy with its suffocation. His tragic story should remind us that the struggle for free expression will be a hard one, but it must be fought.
