Anatomy of a Killer – a German neo-Nazi

Posted by Thomas Klikauer and Danny Antonelli

This is a story about a killer.

The story begins with homegrown German racism and culminates in a tragic murder on the night of June 1, 2019.

Stephan Ernst was a known neo-Nazi, he was a member of a neo-Nazi network, and he lives in a country that still has a tendency to trivialize right-wing terrorism.

Walter Lübcke, Kassel District President, was sitting peacefully on the backyard terrace of his house in Istha-Wolfhagen, near Kassel when the known neo-Nazi, Stephan Ernst, snuck around the back of the house and murdered him in cold blood. 

It was planned, and it was definitely encouraged by other neo-Nazis. After it was carried out, it went down as the first neo-Nazi-motivated murder of a politician in the history of post-war Germany.

Walter Lübcke, a member of Angela Merkel’s CDU, gave a speech justifying Germany’s asylum policy at a local townhall meeting in the nearby village of Lohfelden in the north-Hessen district of Kassel in October 2015. That speech was why he became the focus of neo-Nazi wrath.

At the October 2015 townhall meeting, far-right thugs from a local squad of semi-fascists called PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) infiltrated the meeting and occupied the front row. Emulating Hitler’s SA, they wanted to intimidate and bully Walter Lübcke because of his stated position with regard to immigrants. 

PEGIDIA’s SA-style attacks got so bad that Lübcke eventually turned to them and addressed them directly. His powerful statement later became known nationwide:

 “It’s worth living in our country. You have to stand up for our values, and anyone who does not represent these values can leave this country at any time if he does not agree, that is the freedom of every German.”

The Attorney General’s Office is convinced that it was from that moment on that neo-Nazi Stephan Ernst began to increasingly project his racism onto the CDU-official. 

After the townhall meeting, Ernst regarded the well-liked and respected Lübcke as a “pest” and an “enemy of the people” (hate speech also often used by the Trumpian Republicans as well as the candidate himself). Four years later this obsessive hate motivated Ernst to commit murder.

Undoubtedly, Ernst’s racist, ultra-nationalistic neo-Nazii attitude, as well as his twisted Nazi mythology indoctrination went down deep into his psyche and fed his delusion. 

He believed that once upon a time there had been an ethnically, racially and culturally homogeneous Aryan people’s community – the Volksgemeinschaft – a lie that has been debunked over and over again by historians and yet persists in the closed minds of right-wing low-information cultists.

Stephan Ernst thought that it was up to him to protect his Volksgemeinschaft and thus became increasingly fearful of people he considered “non-Aryans.” He called this diminution of white supremacy “racial estrangement.”

Nazi ideology seems to have been internalized by Ernst during his teenage years. At the age of fifteen his warped neo-Nazi worldview spurred him to his first serious and brutal racist act.  He set a gasoline fire in the basement of a house in Aarbergen-Michelbach that was inhabited by Turkish immigrants.  

Nobody died, nobody was injured, the damage was minimal, and despite evidence found at the scene that indicated a hate crime, the court saw no political motive and only convicted Ernst of property damage.

Thirty years later, he murdered Walter Lübcke. 

Stephan Ernst was born in September 1973 in the Hessian capital of Wiesbaden. Ernst’s upbringing was marked by the racist mind-set that dominated his parental home and a not insignificant racist mood that still existed in Germany’s post-war society. 

After moving to rural Hohenstein-Holzhausen in the district of Rheingau-Taunus, Ernst grew up with his brother in a petit-bourgeois family home. 

After completing secondary school with a mere “leaving certificate” at the Aarbergen-Michelbach comprehensive school in 1989, Ernst started an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. 

His apprenticeship as a bricklayer didn’t last long. He dropped out after about a year and a half because, he said, that he was injured in a fist fight and that therefore he was no longer able to cope with the workload. Involvement in fist fights and brawls are a frequent occurrence in Ernst’s right-wing biography.

In other words, racism spiced up with brutal violence shaped his younger years. It was a dominant feature of his environment. His parents were racist as were the people in his immediate surroundings. In 1993 he told a psychiatrist that his alcoholic father had repeatedly brutally beaten him. 

Out of fear of his father, the young Ernst slept with a knife under his pillow. Interestingly, Ernst still described the relationship with his parents at that time as “extremely good.”

Children are known to defend the brutality of their parents. One factor that bound them together was their shared racism. Ernst described his father’s racist attitudes as a set of doctrines that he could hold on to during his childhood. His father had been an ardent supporter of the SPD. 

Not so paradoxical for that time, he also hated “foreigners” and forbade his son to play with non-Germans.

At some point, Stephan Ernst internalized his father’s xenophobic ideas. In elementary school he attacked non-German students because he felt “harassed” by them. 

After the incident where he was let off with “property damage,” Ernst’s neo-Nazism was glossed over and declared irrelevant. This was a rather common practice throughout the early history of post-war Germany – and it still is. 

For the second time, after his psychological assessment, Germany’s judicial system did not – or did not want to – recognize his neo-Nazism, his brutality, and his readiness to act violently. All of this would have fateful consequences.

The racist attitude Ernst grew up with may have been further fueled by his immediate environment and the on-going inhumanity, xenophobia, and racism shown towards anyone who happened to be non-German. Since about the mid-1980s, the debate on the right to asylum in Germany had intensified nationwide. 

In particular, conservative politicians created a mood against so-called “asylum fraudsters” – particularly during the 1987 federal election. Conservative propaganda only served to fire up Germany’s right-wing extremists.

Extreme right-wing parties such as The Republicans (REP) and Germany’s more outspoken neo-Nazis, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), also benefited from this. Against the background of a poisoned immigration debate, the number of racially motivated acts of violence increased sharply. 

This was also the case in Ernst’s home state of Hessen. In its capital Wiesbaden, for example, a series of at least 25 arson attacks were committed during the summer of 1988 by German neo-Nazis. 

These were directed, among other things, against residential buildings of predominantly Turkish immigrants. Ernst is likely to have taken part in these attacks, but yet again, neo-Nazi Ernst got away scot-free.

A local and unknown neo-Nazi squad called the Wiesbaden Front eventually confessed to these attacks. About three weeks before Ernst’s arson attack, when he was a 15-year-old, in March 1989, the neo-Nazi NPD party and the authoritarian and dictator-worshipping REP were able to achieve a stunning success in Hessen’s municipal elections. 

In Ernst’s Rheingau-Taunus area, the REP received a whopping 10.5% of the votes (10.8% in Hohenstein, 17.8% in Ernst’s hometown of Aarbergen). 

Meanwhile, the debates about the treatment of asylum seekers got even worse at the beginning of the 1990s. At the same time, the number of violent acts by right-wing actors simply exploded. 

Today this period is known as the “baseball bat years,” and was distinguished by far-right street fights, brutal attacks by neo-Nazis, and the racist pogroms of Hoyerswerda (September 1991), Rostock-Lichtenhagen (August 1992) and the countless – sometimes deadly – arson attacks and other assaults.

Back in Hessen, the state recorded 79 far-right arson attacks, 52 bodily injuries and ten attempted homicides, just for the years 1992 and 1993. Worse, there were also several arson attacks in the Rheingau-Taunus district. At the same time, the killer neo-Nazi and his squad also committed his next serious and racially motivated attack.

In November 1992, Ernst, the neo-Nazi who was preparing to become a killer stabbed a Kurdish man from behind with a knife in the men’s rest room of Wiesbaden’s central railway station. The Kurd had recently applied for asylum. The man survived thanks to an emergency operation. 

Ernst stated that the motivation for the crime was that his victim had propositioned him sexually. Neo-Nazi Ernst successfully claimed that the situation was “stressful” for him, because he perceived the man to be a foreigner. Once again, neo-Nazi Ernst got away scot-free.

About a year later – in December 1993 – neo-Nazi Ernst and his squad tried to blow up a residential facility which served as accommodation for refugees in Hohenstein-Steckenroth. 

For this purpose, neo-Nazi Ernst planted a 17-centimeter-long pipe bomb in the back seat of a car that was parked between two residential facilities. Neo-Nazi Ernst wanted to detonate the bomb with a time delay using an elaborate device.

Fortunately, the detonation was prevented because residents accidentally discovered the explosive device. Instead of exploding, it was burning. His police interrogation makes it clear that Ernst sympathized with the REP, the NPD and the obscure neo-Nazi micro-party FAP. 

After the crime, state investigators found a self-painted leaflet with the slogan “Germany for the Germans” (Deutschland den Deutschen) and No Voting Rights for Foreigners (Kein Ausländerwahlrecht) in Ernst’s bedroom.

Nevertheless, as happened time and again, Ernst was let off the hook.

In short, violent neo-Nazis – including Ernst – were highly active in the Wiesbaden and Taunus area. At that time Ernst insisted that he neither supported nor had contact with neo-Nazis. 

He cooked up the widely believed “lone wolf” folklore, even though in fascist mythology, it is always the “Fasci Italiani di Combattimento”, the group, the squad, the platoon that is key. 

Photos and reports from that time, as well as from Ernst’s region, testify to racist and Nazi-glorifying spray-paint graffiti everywhere.

The residential accommodation in Steckenroth had already been smeared with a swastika and SS runes before Ernst’s arson attack. 

A local resident said that there were right-wing heavies in the region. Meanwhile, local youth clubs had also been infiltrated by Germany’s far-right. 

A neo-Nazi music trend called Rechtsrock could be heard regularly in the district, and occasionally material from a Hitler-HJ look-alike organization called “NPD Jugend” (NJ) was distributed. 

The same local resident also said that repeated hostility towards Kurdish refugees and people who were committed to refugees had been seen. 

What influence these conditions had on Ernst – or to what extent Ernst himself was involved in them – remains open to speculation. Ernst’s deep-seated racism and violent neo-Nazism can also be seen from his psychiatric reports. 

In one report, Ernst said that being “German was a value in itself” for him. For neo-Nazi Ernst, racism supported his own self-esteem. Racism gave him a personality, he claimed. Ernst’s racism was also revealed in his repeated perception of “foreigners as a threat.” 

This carries connotations of Nazi-demagogue Schmitt’s “them vs. us” in which the “them” is the enemy and must be destroyed. Again, the same stochastic technique used by the Republican party in the USA and their leader.

Such twisted feelings also led Ernst to cause serious bodily injury to a fellow prisoner, a Turk, with the leg of a metal chair while he was in pre-trial detention. 

For this act, as well as the knife attack in Wiesbaden and the explosive attack in Steckenroth, in the summer of 1995 the then 21-year-old neo-Nazi was sentenced as a juvenile to a measly six years in a juvenile detention center. 

It was for attempted manslaughter and the attempted of causing an explosion with property damage. One could say that once again Ernst got off rather lightly.

Ernst started his time in prison in the town of Butzbach where there was an organized hard-core neo-Nazi scene. Later he was transferred to Kassel, where he completed a retraining course as an industrial mechanic and where he met his future wife. 

Despite a positive prognosis for his social integration, Ernst became ever more radicalized during his time in prison, where he also established valuable neo-Nazi contacts with members of the extreme right-wing.

In September 1999, Ernst got “early release” on parole. He settled in Kassel and worked for an employment agency. At the same time, he actively sought contacts to organized neo-Nazi combat groups. In October 2000 he joined the NPD and connected with people like himself. 

Ernst regularly attended neo-Nazi meetings and also got to know leading activists from the far-right militant comrade squad in Kassel. 

This included former members of a banned neo-Nazi outfit called Blood & Honor. This is also where he met weapon-obsessed neo-Nazi Markus Hartmann, who later became his co-defendant in the Lübcke murder trial.

In 2002, Ernst declined an offer to take up the chairmanship of the neo-Nazi NPD party in his district. Rather than party politics, Ernst liked to move in the violent neo-Nazi circles which he felt attracted to. 

In the coming years, Ernst continued to travel with adjacent neo-Nazis from his far-right spectrum. He attended neo-Nazi marches and other nationwide neo-Nazi gatherings. 

On the sidelines of these events, violent acts occurred again and again. Ernst also continued to be violent. At a rally in Neumünster (Schleswig-Holstein) in 2003, Ernst attacked an anti-Nazi demonstrator and tried to strangle a woman. Although he was convicted of assault, he only received a suspended sentence – despite his criminal record.

Off the hook again.

With a blank cheque issued by the state, Ernst and his neo-Nazi comrades continued to attack people in Kassel and the surrounding area. 

In August 2003, for example, at a local folk festival, neo-Nazis fatally stabbed a young German woman they mistook for Chinese. Ernst’s neo-Nazi group also attacked political opponents. 

In February 2007, neo-Nazis provoked a brawl at a lecture to which Germany’s trade union confederation – the DGB – had been invited. 

Beyond that, neo-Nazi squads systematically collected extensive personal data and coordinated with the so-called “anti-Antifa” movement. 

Neo-Nazis took photos of car license plates and of people who actively engaged in Germany’s civil society and democratic political parties, journalists and, guided by violent anti-Semitism, visitors to Kassel’s synagogue. 

In 2019, a neo-Nazi USB flash drive containing the personal data of no less than 143 people was found at Ernst’s place. The data collection was from the years 2001 to 2007. 

Neo-Nazi Markus Hartmann collected it with Ernst. Violent neo-Nazi Markus Hartmann was also involved when Ernst and other neo-Nazi comrades brutally attacked a DGB demonstration in Dortmund on May 1, 2009. 

In 2010, Ernst received – again – an insignificant suspended sentence for throwing a stone at police officers. In short, neo-Nazi Ernst got away scot-free – again. According to his lying statements at the time, he had withdrawn from organized neo-Nazi activity. 

In Ernst’s 2020 trial, however, it was clear that he had participated in neo-Nazi celebrations in Thuringia in June 2011. The leading neo-Nazi squad Führer of the neo-Nazi NPD party, Thorsten Heise, had invited him to come. 

Together with other neo-Nazis from Kassel, Ernst helped set up a so-called “house of defense” for neo-Nazi Heise. The house was designed to be protection against possible attacks by political opponents. 

Despite a photo showing Ernst at the neo-Nazi event, it “escaped” the notice of Hessen’s LfV HE (the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution of Hesse) that violent neo-Nazi Ernst was present at the neo-Nazi event. 

The LfV HE assumed that Ernst hadn’t made an appearance since 2010. As a consequence, his file was simply closed in June 2015. 

State police mistakenly registered him as a “cooled down extremist.” Worse, violent neo-Nazi Stephan Ernst was no longer on their radar. Not surprisingly, for the years after 2011, no participation of Ernst in neo-Nazi events is shown in their books. 

This is not surprising at all as the state police had closed Ernst’s file and no longer kept an eye on this particular violent neo-Nazi. 

The speculation is that Ernst’s withdrawal from hard-core neo-Nazism was a ruse. Some people thought that it was probably because of fears of a new prison sentence. 

In any case, the supposed “withdrawal from organized hard-core neo-Nazis” had nothing to do with him turning away from his extreme right-wing ideology as well as his conviction that the use of violence is justified.

This became clear in his trial for the murder of Walter Lübcke. Meanwhile, Ernst’s sidekick Markus Hartmann had also supposedly changed his life because he too found a new job in 2011. 

Against the background of increasing numbers of asylum seekers, Ernst continued to share his neo-Nazi ideology with Hartmann and likeminded racists.

Both men agreed that they had to get weapons in order to be prepared for a looming “race war.” That had been their belief since at least 2014. 

Instead of being a cooled down extremist as Hessen’s state police believed, over the next few years Ernst acquired several firearms, including a semi-automatic submachine gun, and 1,400 rounds of ammunition. 

In addition, the now well armed cooled down extremist completed numerous shooting trainings with his neo-Nazi friend Markus Hartmann. 

In October 2015, both of them turned up at the townhall meeting in Lohfelden where Walter Lübcke advocated that locals might like to display a friendly reception of refugees.

Probably fired up by an increasingly anti-asylum and racist sentiment in parts of Germany’s society, the evening became a “key experience” for neo-Nazi Ernst. 

Markus Hartmann even filmed Lübcke and uploaded a passage of his speech onto YouTube on the same evening as the townhall meeting had taken place. 

The video quickly spread on right-wing online platforms and adjacent filter bubbles. It was distributed by Kassel’s neo-fascist PEGIDA, on a hate portal called “PI News”, by the former CDU politician and subsequent AfD apparatchik Erika Steinbach as well as wider AfD circles. 

In a short time, the far-right hate video was viewed over 100,000 times. The viral success of the video gave Ernst the false feeling of being part of a broad movement. 

Neo-Nazi Ernst wrote in a chat, “we are no longer alone and we are becoming more and more.” The not-so–cooled down extremist also found approval for his delusion that Merkel’s refugee policy would lead to the Germans dying out – a rather common delusion of Germany’s neo-Nazis, the far right, and supporters of the AfD.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazi Ernst also took part in local PEGIDA marches. At the same time, Walter Lübcke became a hate figure for Ernst. 

In his bent far-right ideology, Ernst even made him co-responsible for the immigrant attacks on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, the Islamist attack in Nice in 2016 as well as the murder of two backpackers by Islamists in Morocco in 2018. 

Circulating neo-Nazi narratives of alienation, the Volkstod of Germany (the death of Germans), the so-called Great Replacement, Islamization and an impending racial war only enhanced neo-Nazi camaraderie. 

It is not surprising that neo-Nazi Ernst placed his political hopes in new neo-Nazi groups that were increasingly gaining popularity in Germany: the neo-Nazi AfD party, the thuggish street-fighting PEGIDA and the neo-fascist but deceptively labelled Identitarian Movement. 

Ernst supported these groups with monetary donations. He also recommended workmates to vote for the neo-fascist AfD. From 2015, Ernst himself took part in various AfD meetings in Erfurt and Eisenach. 

He was also part of regular AfD gatherings in Kassel – often together with neo-Nazi comrade Markus Hartmann. 

Before Hessen’s state elections in October 2018, neo-Nazi Ernst assisted the AfD in hanging election posters. Stephan Ernst also attended an AfD rally with AfD-Führer Björn Höcke on May 1, 2018 in Eisenach.

Perhaps, a decisive factor for Ernst’s decision to kill Lübcke was the AfD’s so-called funeral march on September 1, 2018 in the eastern German city of Chemnitz – streamed online on AfD-TV. 

After days of AfD racist howling, leading AfD politicians mobilized around 4,500 people to Chemnitz. Among them were the neo-Nazi killer Stephan Ernst and his co-conspirator Markus Hartmann. 

Both neo-Nazis followed Führer Björn Höcke’s appeal and marched through Chemnitz with AfD boss, mini-criminal and neo-fascist Pegida leader Lutz Bachmann, leading members of the far-right Identitarian Movement and countless neo-Nazis. In short, everyone the AfD and adjacent neo-Nazis could muster.

At the neo-Nazi rally, Ernst also met activists from the vicious neo-Nazi squad called Free Forces Schwalm-Eder. Ernst was in contact with this neo-Nazi outfit, and not only through encrypted messenger services. 

The neo-Nazi duo of Ernst and Hartmann went to target practice shooting with this neo-Nazi gang. In other words, Stephan Ernst was no lone wolf – he was part of a wider neo-Nazi network.

Beyond all this, and among plenty of other neo-Nazi activities, contact to the Schwalm-Eder group alone testifies that Ernst had never made a clean break with his local neo-Nazi network. Yet this is what he had rather cunningly made Hessen’s state police believe. 

On June 2, 2019, the Regional High Court in Frankfurt am Main sentenced Stephan Ernst to life imprisonment for the murder of Walter Lübke on the night of June 1, 2019. It took four long years to put him behind bars for life. 

According to The Guardian “… the judge Thomas Sagebiel handed Ernst, 47, a life sentence and acknowledged the “special gravity” of his crime, meaning he is unlikely to be considered for parole for at least 22 years.”

His brother-in-arms, Markus Hartmann, a known neo-Nazi, was acquitted of accessory to the murder. He got a slap-on-the-wrist 18-month-suspended sentence for illegal gun possession. The blinders remain in place. The nasty beat goes on and on and on.

The Stephan Ernst case makes it clear that the supposedly cooled down neo-Nazi who allegedly had withdrawn from active neo-Nazi network had, in fact, continued to be danger. 

The case is also an example of the fact that right-wing acts of violence originate from people who do not have to be part of a meticulously organized neo-Nazi formation. Instead, Ernst was part of a wider neo-Nazi network – possibly even including the NSU. 

On top of all that, one must not forget that Ernst’s early radicalization, as well as his first racially motivated violence, occurred long before his time as a member of an organized neo-Nazi network. 

Although his racist worldview seems to have been shaped by his family, also due to the background environment of countless racially motivated violent attacks at the beginning of the 1990s, Ernst convinced himself that he and his cohorts were acting in the interests of the majority of the population. 

This, again, is a constant feature of the right-wing violence stochastically encouraged by the new Republican neofascists in the USA. The true fact is that most people do not want an authoritarian dictatorial regime akin to Nazism.

Ernst’s neo-Nazi conviction was so deeply engrained that even the prison sentence imposed in 1995 did not initiate any kind of rethinking – rather the opposite. During Ernst’s active time in Germany’s militant neo-Nazi divisions, his far-right ideology became hardened. 

With regard to his contacts to leading neo-Nazi activists and his journey ever deeper into Germany’s militant terrorist spectrum, Ernst had also received the kind of support that he could draw on for the murder of Walter Lübcke. 

It is most noteworthy that – despite a long list of violence and plenty of convictions for his criminal, violent and brutal acts – time and again Ernst escaped without any serious prison sentence. 

Again and again, neo-Nazi Ernst got away scot-free. The state of Hessen appeared to have been blind, the state police, Verfassungsschutz, and courts simply did not see or did not want to see neo-Nazi terrorism.

Interestingly and perhaps not by accident, neo-Nazi Ernst’s home state of Hessen has been governed since 1999 by the conservative CDU – Roland Koch (1999, 2003, 2009), Volker Bouffier (2013 and 2018), and Boris Rhein (since 2023). 

Remarkably, it was one of the CDU’s own – Walter Lübcke – who was killed by a neo-Nazi terrorist who was let off the hook by the CDU-governed state. And this includes CDU minister for the interior Peter Beuth. 

In short, the state was run by Walter Lübcke’s own political party and they did nothing to protect him, even though after his speech it was clear that he was becoming a target.

Perhaps because of the conservative collusion with Hitler’s NSDAP in 1933, the current conservative CDU doesn’t like to be reminded of their perfidy and therefore remains in denial, which prohibits them from actually acknowledging that there is a neo-Nazi threat. It is this type of denialism that breeds arrogance in the racist and violent elements of society.

Stephan Ernst, the killer neo-Nazi was also the consequence of “thirty years of cuddly justice” that belittled neo-Nazi terrorism. Ernst’s pretended withdrawal from active neo-Nazism had nothing to do with any form of ideological departure – the opposite is actually the case. 

In the end, the murder of Walter Lübcke is the result of the explosive mixture of a neo-Nazi upbringing, a sufficiently active neo-Nazi network spiced up with neo-Nazi ideology, his ever-supportive neo-Nazi friend Markus Hartmann, a political party (the AfD) that gave Stephan Ernst the illusion of being supported by wider society, and a conservative state that deliberately looked the other way as neo-Nazis marched in Hessen and elsewhere and eventually planned and carried out the brutal murder of Walter Lübcke.

Photo: Neo-Nazi killer Stephan Ernst on the right in 2018 at an AfD rally in Chemnitz in eastern Germany. Screenshot: https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2020/10/06/rech-o06.html

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