Death Threats That Preceded a Governor's Murder
Walter Lubcke, a regional governor in Germany, defended taking in refugees and became a target of online hate and death threats for years. In June 2019 a right-wing extremist shot him dead at his home, in what was described as the first murder of a politician by a far-right sympathiser since 1945.
A remark that made him a target
In October 2015, as Germany took in large numbers of people fleeing the war in Syria, Walter Lubcke defended the policy at a public meeting near Kassel. Lubcke, the Regierungspräsident, or regional governor, of the Kassel administrative region and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, spoke in support of admitting refugees and opposed agitation against them by the local offshoot of the far-right movement Pegida, according to a summary of the case compiled by Wikipedia from court and news records.
At the meeting he told those who rejected the values behind helping refugees that they were free to leave the country, a remark that spread online and made him a hate figure for the far right, Al Jazeera reported. He “subsequently received numerous death threats for many years,” according to the case record compiled by Wikipedia.
The killing
On the night of 1–2 June 2019, Lubcke was shot in the head at close range on the terrace of his home in Wolfhagen-Istha, in the central German state of Hesse, The Local reported. Federal prosecutors took over the investigation on suspicion of a right-wing extremist or terrorist background, the outlet said.
Police arrested a suspect on 15 June 2019 after DNA evidence linked him to the scene, The Local reported. The man, Stephan Ernst, a right-wing extremist, was later charged with the murder.
A verdict of historic weight
On 28 January 2021, a court in Frankfurt convicted Ernst and sentenced him to life imprisonment, Euronews reported. The court found a “special gravity” of guilt, a determination that under German law excludes the release after 15 years normally possible for a murder conviction; the case record compiled by Wikipedia states he must serve at least 22 years before becoming eligible for parole. A co-defendant, Markus Hartmann, was acquitted of complicity in the killing but convicted of a weapons offence and given a suspended sentence, Euronews reported.
The case carried a significance beyond the courtroom. It was the first murder of a politician attributed to a far-right sympathiser since 1945, Euronews reported. Prosecutors said Ernst had acted out of racism and xenophobia, Al Jazeera reported.
From posts to violence
The years of threats that followed Lubcke's 2015 remark illustrate a pattern that officials and researchers have documented elsewhere: sustained online abuse directed at an identifiable target can precede and accompany violence in the physical world. In Germany, the killing prompted renewed warnings about far-right extremism, which the interior minister at the time described as the country's biggest security threat, Al Jazeera reported.