A woman in Bavaria has been fined €2,025 for her poster showing former health minister Karl Lauterbach extending his right arm, insinuating he was performing a Nazi salute.
On June 26 the court Schweinfurt found the 45 year-old woman from Northern Bavaria guilty of “using signs of an anti-constitutional organisation”, referring to the Nazi party.
This is a criminal offence in Germany, where displaying Nazi symbols is forbidden.
The defendant had originally received a €3,500 fine from the police for the images depicting the Social Democratic Party politician, which she appealed into the courts.
She is part of the Querdenker (“unconventional thinkers”) movement, a loose grouping emerging in 2020 out of popular dissatisfaction with Germany’s anti-Coronavirus measures.
The woman displayed roughly 20 posters on a stand entitled “quotes of shame” in several protests, including one in Schweinfurt in March 2024 which formed the basis of the indictment.
One of these posters showed a picture of Lauterbach with his right arm extended, juxtaposed with a picture of two Querdenker representatives, Artur Helios and Michael Fritsch, also with their right arms extended.
Both images were stills taken from videos.
Lauterbach’s came from a speech he gave in the central German city of Magdeburg in 2022 – in which he controversially attacked unvaccinated hospital workers. Helios and Fritsch’s still came from a speech they gave at a Querdenker event in Dresden in 2020.
The two men – a police officer and a soldier – were later indicted for showing the Nazi salute based on the video and received fines. However, both criminal proceedings were discontinued in 2023. Helios and Fritsch maintain they had no intention of ever giving a Nazi salute and that the accusations were “nonsense”.
In court, the woman tearfully argued she had not wanted to show the Nazi salute, but to start a debate.
“We have to come to terms with the coronavirus era”, she told the judge, according to German newspaper Mainpost.
The woman’s lawyer requested his client be acquitted, saying she had not wanted to defame the politician.
Instead, she wanted to point out a two-tier society where nobody fined Lauterbach for extending his right arm, while the Querdenker speakers had to face the courts.
The judge however said the woman was familiar with the full video of Lauterbach and knew the picture she had shown was misleading.
She will now have to make 45 daily payments of €45, for the total of €2,025, though she could still appeal the sentence.
