In January, neo-Nazi Karl-Heinz Statzberger, who was convicted as a right-wing terrorist in 2005, called for a banned demonstration near Munich’s main synagogue and resisted when he was arrested by officials from the support command (USK). A hearing scheduled for Friday before the district court was canceled after Statzberger, according to the court, accepted a penalty order.
Although the city of Munich had banned demonstrations against the anti-corona measures for January 5, Statzberger used the cat-and-mouse game that developed that evening between pandemic deniers and the police for his own purposes. According to the public prosecutor’s office, around 50 people joined the former right-wing terrorist, who maintains private contacts in the immediate vicinity of the NSU terrorist organization and is one of the Bavarian leaders of the neo-Nazi group “The Third Way”.
With his followers, Statzberger moved from Sendlinger Strasse towards Marienplatz – past the synagogue on Jakobsplatz. In 2003, Statzberger was involved in plans for a bomb attack by the “comradeship south” on the laying of the foundation stone of the Jewish community center and was serving a several-year prison sentence as a convicted member of a right-wing terrorist group led by Martin Wiese. According to the police, on January 5 he called for a banned meeting to be held nearby.
“The street is ours!” wrote an anonymous member of the Statzberger “base” a few days later on the group’s website. “Suddenly hooded police officers” appeared near the Israelite religious community, which the author from the neo-Nazi group puts in quotation marks, and there were “individual, arbitrary arrests.” Some of the right-wing extremists’ sympathizers managed to escape unnoticed. Not so Statzberger himself. USK officials held him at the Blumenstrasse bunker. When Statzberger yelled at the police officers and, according to the public prosecutor’s office, “threateningly” stood in front of them, the officers tied him up and took his cell phone. Statzberger also resisted this.
In the federal elections in September 2021, Statzberger ran as the top Bavarian candidate for his neo-Nazi group, which received 3,544 votes. His close contacts to Andre E., who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in the NSU trial, to his brother and his wife became known. Statzberger and the NSU helpers also marched with the right-wing extremist Munich Pegida offshoot. When the low sentence for her like-minded E. was announced, neo-Nazis cheered in the Munich courtroom – among them Karl-Heinz Statzberger.