Sven Hüber, deputy federal chairman of Germany’s largest police union, the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), chairman of the Federal Police’s main staff council and a staunch critic of Alternative for Germany (AfD), has faced serious new allegations over his time as a political officer in the East German border troops.
According to exclusive reporting by Apollo News published on August 25, 2026, a contemporary witness, Axel Krause, has given a sworn statement accusing Hüber of personally mistreating a would-be escapee from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and of helping to enforce the shoot-to-kill order along the inner-German border in the late 1980s.
The outlet cites files of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and the witness’s detailed account of an incident involving a Mauerflüchtling (wall refugee). Hüber rejects the allegations.
Hüber, born in 1964 in Görlitz, eastern Germany, trained at the border troops’ “Rosa Luxemburg” officer school in Suhl and served from 1987 until the fall of the Wall in Border Regiment 33 in Berlin-Treptow, first as political officer and deputy company commander, later as youth instructor.
His role involved the political indoctrination of conscripts.
According to the sworn eyewitness account published by Apollo News, Hüber is alleged to have forced a pistol into the mouth of a captured wall refugee who was lying restrained on the ground, causing the man to wet himself in terror.
The same witness states that Hüber then kicked the prisoner three times in the face as a Stasi transporter arrived to take him away.
In political instruction sessions he is further accused of telling soldiers that the word Vernichtung (annihilation) kept its validity after the standing border order was reworded in 1988 to drop it, and of publicly humiliating border soldiers who missed their shots.
The same regiment held the sector in which Chris Gueffroy, the last person killed at the Berlin Wall, was shot dead in February 1989.
Apollo News has reported that the regional court in Berlin found in two sets of proceedings that Hüber was neither directly nor indirectly connected to that killing, while holding that he could not disclaim a share of responsibility for sustaining the GDR border regime.
Hüber has long denied any personal involvement in shootings and has repeatedly gone to court to restrict public references to his GDR service.
Hüber continued his career after reunification in the Federal Border Police (now Federal Police) and rose to become one of the most influential figures in German police unionism. He has chaired the Federal Police main staff council since 2000 and has been a GdP deputy federal chairman since 2022. Aged 62, he is close to retirement.
Through his lawyer, Hüber has rejected the new allegations in a six-page written response to Apollo News.
The lawyer, though, prohibits quoting from the letter or “using it in any other way journalistically”.
Other outlets have also covered his East German past since the start of August 2026, particularly after he published an article urging police officers to prepare for possible resistance against an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt.
In an article published in the GdP members’ magazine, Deutsche Polizei, in August 2026 (titled “Richtig Nein sagen”, or “Saying no properly”), he argued that police officers’ oath to the Basic Law (Grundgesetz), Germany’s constitution, makes support for the AfD incompatible with their duty.
He wrote that officers “cannot vote for, support or join a constitutionally hostile party” and coined the phrase “No-Go mit der AfD”. He also described a possible AfD win as a “Machtergreifung”, the term used for the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
He went further, warning of a possible “internal state of emergency” under Article 91 of the Basic Law if an AfD-led government in a State such as Saxony-Anhalt were to undermine the constitutional order.
In that scenario, he said, readiness police from other States and the Federal Police must be prepared, on the instruction of the federal interior minister, to restore the constitutional order by police means. Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls on September 6, 2026.
Several regional branches of the GdP, among them North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin and Saxony-Anhalt, publicly distanced themselves from the wording and legal conclusions, stressing that the official oath does not remove officers’ right to vote and that the union should not engage in party-political instruction. Hüber’s own local group did the same.
The rival German Police Union (Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft, DPolG) has declined to judge the internal GdP dispute, its federal chairman Heiko Teggatz telling t-online that officers were free to decide their own political engagement provided the oath and official neutrality were preserved.
GdP federal chairman Jochen Kopelke has defended Hüber and the union has acknowledged editing his Wikipedia entry during the dispute. The GdP, which has around 200,000 members, is affiliated to the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB).
During Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician Nancy Faeser’s time as federal interior minister, he was regarded as a close and influential interlocutor on Federal Police and personnel matters.
He has previously spoken out against measures that would expand the Federal Police’s role in deportations, telling taz in 2019 that “we are not the deportation police”.
Exklusive Recherchen von Apollo News zeigen, wie der politisch einflussreiche Polizeigewerkschafter Sven Hüber als DDR-Grenzoffizier dazu beitrug, den Schießbefehl durchzusetzen. Ein Zeitzeuge belastet ihn namentlich und eidesstattlich schwer. Es geht um einen Vorfall, in dem… pic.twitter.com/UOvI1EqkEU
— Benedikt Brechtken (@ben_brechtken) August 25, 2026
