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Winfried Stöcker at Lübeck Airport: The police stopped the illegal vaccination campaign
Photo:
Markus Scholz / dpa
Winfried Stöcker is a colorful personality - to put it cautiously.
The doctor and medical professor got very rich thanks to his company Euroimmun, which specializes in laboratory diagnostics, has registered many patents and is doing well around the world.
As an investor, he is making waves, especially in East Germany.
Film scene from "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
Photo: Fox Searchlight / AP
In Görlitz, Stöcker bought the historic Art Nouveau department store, visually a kind of KaDeWe of the East;
There director Wes Anderson shoots the film "Grand Budapest Hotel" with the stars Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes and Willem Dafoe.
And at his company location in Lübeck, Stöcker bought the airport and founded his own airline.
Throughout Germany, Stöcker initially made headlines with xenophobic statements, later he donated large sums to the AfD.
Most recently, he announced that he would develop his own vaccine and test it on himself.
He wanted to inoculate this vaccine to volunteers at the Lübeck airport on the weekend.
However, it has not yet been approved.
The police stopped the vaccination campaign on Saturday, as reported by "Bild".
In the afternoon, 150 people were waiting in the airport and 50 were given a vaccine dose, according to the newspaper.
When the police intervened, syringes and vaccination lists were secured and personal details were recorded.
Not for the first time, Stöcker causes a stir.
He canceled a benefit concert for refugees that was planned in his department store in Görlitz.
"So many foreign refugees are not welcome to me," said the entrepreneur of the "Sächsische Zeitung".
"I banned the event because I don't want to support the abuse of our right to asylum." Those are the more harmless sentences from the interview, after which it becomes openly racist.
First FDP member, then AfD supporter
His self-developed vaccine brought Stöcker into an investigation for a violation of the Medicines Act.
Almost at the same time, his name appeared on AfD donor lists, as SPIEGEL reported.
In 2019, the entrepreneur donated 20,000 euros to the right-wing radical party.
Stöcker was once in the FDP, his lawyer in the legal dispute over self-immunizations was the FDP politician Wolfgang Kubicki.
According to his own account, Stöcker resigned from the party after the short-term election of Thuringian FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich as prime minister.
Kemmerich was elected to office in February 2020 with the help of AfD votes and then fell out of favor in large parts of the federal FDP.
Stöcker makes no secret of his sympathy for the AfD: "The AfD has many good views and also spreads some bad ones," he told SPIEGEL.
Would he like to give the party more money?
"As always, I'll donate based on my current mood," he said.
But he would, he emphasized, "not join the party."
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