From 2019 to 2021, the young person had increasingly shared National Socialist content in various WhatsApp groups, and also in a right-wing extremist group from Germany, which he claims to have discovered through video games. The judgment is not final.
The defendant pleaded guilty to the jury chaired by Judge Uwe Dumpelnik. He confessed to having regularly sent Nazi image files on WhatsApp between the ages of 14 and 16. Among them were mainly pictures or so-called memes with inscriptions such as “Hitler did nothing wrong” (Hitler did nothing wrong, note) or “Heil my German comrade”. Some of the pictures went to his friends on WhatsApp, some ended up in right-wing extremist German online forums.
The police from Paderborn (Germany) became aware of the 17-year-old after examining such a forum. The teenager himself claimed in court that he hadn’t thought about what he had sent and that he never wanted to play down National Socialism: “I wanted to belong to the group of friends, so sending pictures like this has somehow become normal, nobody has pondered.” According to him, he has not sent anything since the first contact with the police.
Defense attorney Philipp Tschernitz argued that today’s young people often have little or no awareness of the Nazi era and are therefore often unable to assess what is fun and what is serious – like the accused.
Due to his young age and his previous clean record, the youth was sentenced to a conditional prison sentence of six months. He was also asked to attend the “Dialogue instead of Hate” training program. One of the aims of the program is to raise awareness of issues such as discrimination. The 17-year-old accepted the verdict immediately, prosecutor Doris Kügler gave no explanation.
Source: Nachrichten
