The public prosecutor’s office in Hanover has charged a former official of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and serving judge with large-scale possession of child-pornographic material.
Investigators found approximately 1.7 million files on nearly 40 hard drives, USB sticks and laptops belonging to the man, German outlet Bild reported.
A further 150,000 files were classified as youth-pornographic, taking the total beyond 1.8 million, a spokeswoman for Hanover Regional Court told German press agency dpa. The material is said to include depictions of severe sexual abuse of infants and young children.
The haul is described as one of the largest involving a single individual in Lower Saxony, northern Germany.
Hanover Regional Court has received the indictment and is examining whether to open main proceedings. The charge sheet was filed at the end of May 2026.
The presumption of innocence applies until a final conviction.
Investigators opened the case after a referral from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, a spokesman for the Hanover prosecutor’s office said.
Bild reported that the trail led to the man after an international paedophile network was dismantled.
In August 2024 police searched several premises he used, including locations in Hanover.
The accused, identified by German media as Thomas N., is 62, according to Hanover Regional Court. He had long been active in SPD bodies.
He stood as a candidate for the Thuringian state parliament and most recently sat on the party’s federal arbitration commission, its highest internal disciplinary body.
He served at the administrative court in Weimar and as a deputy member of the Thuringian Constitutional Court, and latterly at the social court in Nordhausen, Thuringia, central Germany, public broadcaster MDR reported.
The man remains at liberty. Authorities stated that no grounds for pre-trial detention exist.
His lawyer said he would not comment on the allegations.
Thuringian justice minister Beate Meißner has said she suspended the judge from duty as soon as the allegations became known, “to avert damage to the Thuringian judiciary”, the Thüringer Allgemeine reported on July 31, 2026.
She said the step was covered by civil service law and that the presumption of innocence applied to the official until a final conviction.
After the allegations became known, an SPD spokeswoman said, according to Bild, that the man had not been a party member since September 2024. He had declared the resignation himself.
A month earlier, the police had searched his apartment.
Possession of child-pornographic material carries a term of three months to five years under section 184b of the German criminal code. The minimum was cut from one year in June 2024, when the Bundestag reversed a 2021 tightening that had made possession a Verbrechen, or felony, rather than a Vergehen, or misdemeanour.
NCMEC referrals of the kind that opened this case depend on technology companies scanning their own services, an activity permitted in the European Union under a temporary exemption from the ePrivacy Directive that lapsed on April 3, 2026.
The Council of the European Union adopted a position on July 2, 2026 seeking to reinstate it until 2028, after the Federal Criminal Police Office warned that the gap would sharply reduce tip-offs to law enforcement.
German prosecutors have charged a paediatrician with 130 counts of child sexual abuse and rape allegedly committed over more than a decade at hospitals in the eastern State of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin.https://t.co/2QJhpbhVWf
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) May 15, 2026
