According to “Correctiv” research, Mario Müller from the “Identitarian Movement” was also present at the right-wing network meeting in Potsdam. The 35-year-old has multiple criminal convictions – and is an employee of an AfD member of the Bundestag
The revelations from “Correctiv” about a secret meeting of leading figures in the right-wing scene continue to spread. At an event on Wednesday evening, the research network highlighted another participant at the conference in Potsdam: Mario Müller. The neo-Nazi and convicted violent criminal is, along with Martin Sellner, one of the most important figures in the “Identitarian Movement” (IB). And it could become a central point in the debate about banning the AfD.
Violent criminals and neo-Nazis with international contacts
Müller was born in Bremen in 1988 and grew up in the Oldenburg district. He came into contact with the right-wing extremist scene early on and became violent. From 2007 he is said to have been active in the NPD’s right-wing extremist youth organization “Young Nationalists” (JN). “Die Zeit” later even called him a “former JN squad”.
In 2010, Müller attacked a group of young people on the market square in Delmenhorst with a blackjack that he had made himself out of a dumbbell nut and a sock. At that time, he is said to have been a leading cadre of the neo-Nazi thug group “Aktionsbündnis Delmenhorst”, as anti-fascist research platforms report. Three years after the attack, Müller was sentenced to seven and a half months in prison for grievous bodily harm. It wouldn’t be his last crime.
He made his first contacts abroad through the loosely organized “Autonomous Nationalists” network. When the group gradually lost importance, he joined the “Identitarian Movement”. Photos show him with members of the armed, neo-Nazi “Azov Battalion” in Ukraine. There he had, among other things, a tattoo on his leg with a quote from the Nazi poet Hans Baumann: “Rebels have death and the devil as companions.”
From 2015 onwards, Müller became increasingly involved in the IB, founded the “Kontrakultur” group within the movement and wrote a book of the same name, which became a kind of dictionary for identitarians. With this publication at the latest it became clear whose spirit child he is. In his writing he appeared to be pseudo-intellectual as usual for identitarians. His most important topic: The “Great Exchange”, a conspiracy story according to which the European population is to be replaced by ethnic groups from the Arab or African region. In this book, Müller quickly falls into a style of resistance and warns that “in every classic immigration country – be it Australia, Canada or the USA”, the natives lived as a marginalized group on the edge of society; This is something that needs to be prevented – Identitarians as German Aborigines.
His acts of violence contradict the IB’s strategy
Meanwhile, he rose within the organization. He is entrusted with the “Kontrakultur Halle” project in Halle an der Saale. With the help of the right-wing extremist “One Percent Association” and the ominous “Titurel Foundation,” right-wing extremists bought a building there with sports, living and conference rooms. It should serve as a contact point for New Right. Müller apparently moved in himself with his girlfriend.
The “counterculture” group repeatedly attacked people in front of the house or on the grounds of the university opposite. In November 2017, Müller and another man stormed out of the house and attacked two men who they considered to be on the left spectrum. However, those attacked revealed themselves to be plainclothes police officers and were able to arrest Müller and his comrades. Müller was later sentenced to eight months in prison, which was suspended for two years. The second defendant was acquitted.
From the outside, Müller seems like a foreign body in the “Identitarian Movement.” His violence, his martial demeanor and the threats contradict the Identitarians’ strategy of implicitly anchoring right-wing ideas in society on an intellectual and cultural level – and not with their fist. Nevertheless, the neo-Nazi proved to be useful to the group, especially through his contacts.
Müller became known to a wider public through two incidents: Together with Martin Sellner, he heated up the mood when clashes broke out between the right and the left at the stand of the right-wing extremist publisher “Antaios” at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2017. Müller and Sellner shouted at police officers who were protecting the publishing stand from demonstrators and provocatively asked the officers in a battle cry, “Where were you on New Year’s Eve?” with allusion to the sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2015/16 in Cologne.
In addition, several media outlets reported on him in March 2019 when he was a guest at a frequently criticized birthday party for former “Spiegel” editor Matthias Mattusek, where right-wing extremists, journalists and AfD officials celebrated. Jan Böhmermann also discussed the meeting in an issue of “Neo Magazin Royale”.
Müller gains access to sensitive information
But Müller’s contacts are not only with the militant right-wing extremist scene, but also with the parliamentary arm of the movement, the AfD.
In September 2022, a picture became public that showed Müller in a room in the Bundestag where he was applying for a house pass. This would have allowed him to go in and out of the parliament building without further security checks. According to research by “Die Welt”, however, he was refused ID.
Nevertheless, Müller is currently close to the controls of German democracy. The right-wing extremist is an employee of the AfD Bundestag member Jan Wenzel Schmidt from Saxony-Anhalt. He justified Müller’s employment by saying that the rule of law gives “every person in our society a second chance”. As early as 2016, Schmidt, as a member of the state parliament at the time, employed a former NPD cadre and defended his employment in a similar way.
For Müller, as an employee of a member of the Bundestag, it is possible to gain access to classified documents and internal files, sensitive data and information. The Bundestag administration, which denied him a house pass, cannot prevent this access.
Now it has become known through “Correctiv” that Müller also took part in the right-wing network meeting in Potsdam. At the conference he boasted that he was partly responsible for a violent attack on a key witness in a court case by making his whereabouts public in the right-wing scene. He also explained that not only “Antifa”, but also other politicians, journalists and the left are his enemy. Müller denied the allegations and explained that he rejected violence out of conviction and that he did not pose a risk to anyone in the Bundestag or elsewhere.
The victims of his violent acts probably see it differently.
Sources: NWZ.de, Saxony-Anhalt on the far right, Vice.com,The right edge, Welt.de, time online