Christian Vorländer and Marian Offman are upset on Tuesday morning. Karl Richter – the right-wing extremist politician and former city councilor of the “Citizens’ Initiative for Stopping Foreigners” (BiA) – has just been acquitted in an appeals process at the regional court. In the 2020 local election campaign, he had distributed a leaflet: Under the heading “Get out of the town hall”, it shows the Munich child sweeping out five politicians with a broom, namely Mayor Dieter Reiter and former city councilor Marian Offman (both SPD), Mayor Katrin habenschaden and city councilor Dominik Krause from the Greens and CSU faction leader Manuel Pretzl. On the back they are dubbed “traitors of the people”. Habenschaden and Krause filed a criminal complaint, and in June 2021 Karl Richter was sentenced by the district court to a fine of 3,200 euros for insult. “No one has to accept being portrayed like this,” said the judge in her verdict.
Karl Richter appealed the verdict. The court hearing took place on Tuesday. Marian Offman was invited as a witness, the lawyer Vorländer, who is also deputy leader of the SPD parliamentary group, represented him as a legal witness. Offman originally started the matter. For many years he sat on the city council, first for the CSU, then briefly for the SPD. He noticed the leaflet at various BiA rallies in early 2020. He found his own portrayal particularly perfidious. He was a backbencher, he said on the sidelines of the first court hearing in June 2021. “The fact that they still accepted me has a very clear anti-Semitic connotation,” says Offman, who at the time was the only city councilor of Jewish faith.
The public prosecutor’s office has announced that it will appeal the verdict
Vorländer describes what happened on Tuesday morning in the trial: The presiding judge initially asked if he and Offman wanted to sit close together so that he could “hold hands”. In their pleading, the public prosecutor’s office saw a clear anti-Semitic defamation of Offman as a Jew and a clear parallel to a picture from the National Socialist era – in that picture you can see a man sweeping away Jews with a broom, accompanied by the saying: ” German retail must become clean.” In his oral verdict, the presiding judge described the leaflet as a caricature. Literally he said: “It’s rather funny.” The comparison to the picture from the Nazi era is “far-fetched” and “you can argue about taste.”
He sees the verdict as a “first-rate judicial scandal,” said Vorländer after the trial. In addition, it sends a “fatal signal” at a time when anti-Semitic conspiracy myths and right-wing extremist ideas are spreading. The verdict was a “slap in the face” to all those who opposed it and fought for democracy. Munich’s second mayor, Katrin Habenschaden, who originally filed a criminal complaint against Karl Richter because of the leaflet, said on request: If it was really the case that the judge didn’t rate the leaflet as that bad, “then I think it’s a really strong piece “.
When asked, the public prosecutor announced that they would appeal the verdict. For the time being, they want to wait for the written reasons for the verdict.