AfD exit after chats: Huber statements “openly anti-Semitic”

AfD politician Huber has announced his departure from the party – the background is apparently leaked chats in which he openly expressed himself anti-Semitic. They also prove a collaboration with the right-wing extremist Hildmann.

The claims are adventurous. Johannes Huber, member of the German Bundestag, writes: The EU Commission will not be elected, but chosen by George Soros. The Jewish billionaire is a “Rothschild agent”. “Rothschild lobbyists” wanted to “divert” tax money to banks. The Rothschilds are an old Jewish banking family and have been the subject of conspiracy myths for centuries. Johannes Huber is still a politician of the AfD – but has since announced his departure from the party, according to “Spiegel” information.

The news comes from his own group at the Telegram messenger service, once founded to coordinate the party’s election campaign in Upper Bavaria. Only AfD members should belong to the group. To the ARD politics magazine Contrasts the entire chat history has now been leaked – around 31,000 messages since 2018.

Huber wrote more than 4,000 of them himself. They reveal how he expresses himself when he thinks he is among like-minded people. Here he chats when he comments on an article about a climate activist on a news website and hides behind the pseudonym “Gender-Gaga”. It is a place where he calls the German Bundestag a “psychiatric facility” and jokingly calls a national football player with a migration history a “Mohr”.

In this environment, Huber warned against “globalists” – a term also known as an anti-Semitic code word. These “globalists”, wrote the AfD politician, wanted “that we feel powerless”. When someone linked a video by conspiracy ideologist Ken Jebsen, Huber replied that people had to be picked up where they were. “The normal sleeping sheep out there just can’t do anything with terms like ‘NWO’.” The abbreviation “NWO” stands for the conspiracy myth of a “New World Order”, according to which an elite secretly works to subjugate humanity.

Anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist conspiracy narratives

The statements of the AfD politician Huber “contain a number of signal words, which in the concrete Contexts of use clearly refer to anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist conspiracy narratives “- this is the assessment of Gideon Botsch, head of the research center for anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism at the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam. Botsch also considers a statement by Huber, according to which the Central Council of the Jews make “politics against the interests of the people”.

A request from Contrasts Huber had a Cologne law firm answer, but this too did not comment on all points. She writes that some of his statements were “pointedly exaggerated”. He did not actually mean that Soros would rule over the EU Commission. The “criticism” of the still-AfD politician of the Holocaust survivor is not aimed at his religion, but at the influence of Soros’ organizations on political debates.

Huber is also “not aware” of an anti-Semitic meaning of the term “globalism”. His lawyer writes that he is based on the understanding of the term according to Wikipedia: In the online encyclopedia it is said that globalism means that nation states are losing importance due to globalization, while actors such as companies are gaining in importance. At Wikipedia, however, the analysis of an extremism researcher is recommended, according to which “globalism” is a code understood internationally by right-wing extremists – closely related to the “NWO”.

Organic burger with Attila Hildmann

A prominent supporter of such anti-Semitic conspiracy myths is the cookbook author and right-wing extremist Attila Hildmann. About a year ago he fled abroad, since then he has been wanted with an arrest warrant – among other things for sedition.

Contrasts was able to reconstruct how the AfD politician Huber worked with Hildmann in May 2020 to submit a petition to the Bundestag against the corona measures. At that time, Huber was the chairman of his parliamentary group in the petitions committee. The two men met at Hildmann’s restaurant in Berlin.

In an interview with Hildmann, they ate organic burgers together Contrasts. “I’m the number one corona denier – of course the AfD said: We have a similar position when it comes to these vaccinations and measures. So Mr. Huber helped me at the time.” About the meeting with Hildmann, which, according to the Cologne lawyer, remained unique and was not planned, Huber later wrote in his Telegram group: “He submitted a petition for us. We also exchanged our mutual knowledge.”

How the submission of this petition could have gone off is suggested by an email to Hildmann on May 13, 2020. It also lies Contrasts before. It comes from a data set that the hacker collective “Anonymous” made available to the editorial team. Support with the technical preparation came from the journalism network OCCRP.

The subject of the email is “Info for you ;-)”. The sender is Huber’s advisor Tobias Teich. Metadata suggest that Teich apparently compiled the content of the email on his Bundestag computer. A screenshot of the petition submission that was sent along with it shows how someone with Hildmann’s name is registered in the Bundestag’s petition system – apparently also on a Bundestag computer. “Everything worked out,” wrote Teich to the right-wing extremist.

Heart in the right place

Huber’s lawyer announced that neither the member of the Bundestag nor his speaker had submitted the petition “in the name” of Hildmann or even wrote it. The fact that the petition consists largely of text passages copied together, which the AfD parliamentary group previously published on the Internet, does not change the authorship of the person submitting it. Huber’s lawyer also writes that there is no longer any contact between the two men. It falls at a time when Hildmann was known neither to the public nor to parliamentarians “as a radical conspiracy theorist”.

In fact, Hildmann made a relevant statement even before the petition was submitted on May 13, 2020. Huber could have known this. In his public Telegram channel, Hildmann announced in early May 2020 that he would go “underground” and “build an army” should democracy be abolished and a global “police state like the NWO” established. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office also addressed these statements in their later arrest warrant.

A few days after submitting the petition, Huber himself shared in party circles the recording of a speech that Hildmann had given in front of the Reichstag building. In it Hildmann claimed that there were somber plans to drastically reduce the world population – the goal was a “global elite”. “In my opinion, this is yesterday’s main speech,” Huber commented on Telegram.

His lawyer now writes on request: “With his current level of knowledge, our client would not share any contributions from Mr. Hildmann.” Apart from the content of the petition, Huber does not share Hildmann’s positions and attitudes. He didn’t even know her when he sent Hildmann’s speech. Apparently not even a few weeks later on June 7, 2020. At that time, the AfD member of the Bundestag wrote about the right-wing extremist in his chat group: “Attila’s heart is in the right place.”