The right-wing extremist “people's teacher” Nikolai Nerling, who a year ago was sentenced to a heavy fine by the Dachau district court for sedition, has been on trial again in Munich since Thursday.
Nerling had appealed against the Dachau verdict - just like the public prosecutor's office, which had demanded a prison sentence.
Munich / Dachau
- The Dachau district judge Lukas Neubeck had shown courage on December 8, 2019.
He had found Nikolai Nerling, a 40-year-old former teacher, who had gained notoriety in the right-wing scene in recent years as a self-proclaimed “public teacher”, guilty of denying the Holocaust during a visit to the Dachau concentration camp memorial in February 2019 have - even if Nerling explicitly did not mention the word “Holocaust”.
In his judgment, however, Neubeck had considered it to be proven that Nerling's “overall statements aim not only to play down the genocide but also to deny it”.
The consequence: he had sentenced Nerling to a fine of 10,800 euros for sedition and trespassing.
Nerling's companion, a cameraman, had received a fine of 3,000 euros for aiding and abetting sedition and trespassing.
Nerling and his cameraman, however, appealed against the judgment;
the public prosecutor's office, which had demanded a prison sentence in Dachau, also appealed, which is why the case will be opened again yesterday and today before the Munich II district court chaired by Judge Johannes Feneberg.
Witnesses are the same as a year ago
The witnesses who were heard yesterday were the same as a year ago in Dachau.
Her statements, apart from the fading memory, hadn't changed in the meantime.
Accordingly, Nerling and his cameraman came to Dachau on February 4, 2019 to film against the "guilt cult".
Nerling had regularly posted anti-Semitic and conspiracy-ideological videos on his YouTube channel at the time, generating thousands of followers.
Due to his prominence in the right-wing scene, a speaker at the memorial, who had just wanted to show a school class around the site, recognized him.
In her statement yesterday, the speaker reiterated that she had forbidden Nerling to film on the premises.
She then alerted the administration of the facility.
Students confirm sayings by Nerling
Meanwhile, the students confirmed yesterday, Nerling slammed the gate of the former concentration camp with the cynical inscription “Arbeit macht frei” and called out to the students behind it that they were now locked up.
In addition, Nerling had warned the students not to believe everything that was told to them in the memorial;
that the referent's grandfather, a communist, survived the Dachau concentration camp as a prisoner, was proof enough that it “was probably not that bad”.
The defenders did not want to acknowledge yesterday that this is a mockery not only of the more than 41,000 Dachau concentration camp victims, but also of all other victims of National Socialism.
They were more concerned with the question of whether the “people's teacher” was even on the site of the concentration camp memorial when he shot his YouTube video there, and whether Nerling had actually denied the Holocaust with his statements if he did never put it in my mouth?
They achieved a small victory in this line of argument: The speaker found that Nerling was probably not a Holocaust denier, but rather a “trivialized” person.
As a former teacher, according to the speaker, the 40-year-old is probably “intelligent enough to accept facts”.
The process will continue on Friday.
