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We regret to report that the German lawyer and political activist Horst Mahler died today, aged 89. Horst had been seriously ill for some time, including years that he spent in prison for political ‘crimes’, including ‘Holocaust denial’. He had both legs amputated while imprisoned in Brandenburg, near Berlin, and in recent years was in a wheelchair, but he remained intellectually active and politically committed.
There have been numerous nationalist activists over the years who made an ideological journey from the far left, but few if any have made that journey so publicly and in such remarkable intellectual depth as Horst Mahler.
His staunchly national socialist father committed suicide in 1949, unable to cope with the consequences of the Third Reich’s defeat. At that time Horst was still at school and the family was living in the Soviet-controlled zone of what later became ‘East Germany’ (the ‘German Democratic Republic’). They then moved to Berlin and successfully crossed into the British-controlled zone of West Berlin.
Horst completed his education in West Berlin during the mid-1950s, the front line of the Cold War, studying law at the US-funded Free University of Berlin. In his early student years he remained associated with German nationalism, but while still an undergraduate he moved towards the radical left.
Until 1960 Horst was a leading activist in the SDS, the original student wing of the main German social-democratic party SPD. In 1960 he and other SDS members were expelled from the SPD for their radicalism, and during the ensuing decade they became ever more militant. In effect, Horst and his comrades became slightly older mentors to the German ultra-left of the late 1960s, calling for revolutionary violence against the state.
In this capacity Horst was not only the lawyer for the Marxist terrorists of what is best known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), he was a senior member of this terrorist organisation. In 1970 he helped organise the escape of its senior members, and spent some time in Jordan training with the Marxist wing of Palestinian guerrilla warfare, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In October 1970 Horst was arrested and subsequently convicted for bank robberies carried out to fund Marxist terrorism, and for organising prison escapes. He remained in prison until 1980, serving ten years of a 14-year sentence.
On his release, Horst was greatly assisted by Gerhard Schröder, a young socialist lawyer who helped him resume his legal career. Schröder went on to become leader of the SPD and Chancellor of Germany (1998-2005), and is today best known for his corrupt business ties to Putin’s Russia.
During his imprisonment, Horst’s politics had shifted first (briefly) to a form of Maoist communism, then (under the influence of his increasingly intense study of Hegelian philosophy, which was to be a dominant feature of the rest of his life) towards a form of nationalism / national socialism.
He resumed political activism in 1997, this time as an increasingly radical opponent of what he saw as the continuing occupation of Germany, and an increasingly outspoken critic of what he called “the Jewish Principle” which he saw as the antithesis of the German folk-community.
From 2000-2003 he was a member of the NPD, which was then the largest German nationalist party, and represented the NPD as a lawyer, but he was never truly comfortable with party politics. In 2003 he joined Ursula Haverbeck, Udo Walendy and other revisionist historians and publishers to found a ’Society for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Denial of the Holocaust’ (VRBHV).
This historical revisionist activity led to a series of further prosecutions, beginning when Horst was already 67, and ending only with his release from his final prison sentence in October 2020 when he was almost 85 and seriously ill. Even then, prosecutions continued until his last appearance in court at the end of 2022, after which various ‘criminal’ cases against Horst were held in abeyance on the grounds of his critical illness.
Horst’s ideological evolution must be viewed in the context of the Cold War. Rightly or wrongly (and no doubt psychologically affected by his father’s suicide), Horst viewed those former national socialists who had become the backbone of the developing Federal Republic (‘West Germany’), as traitors. His intense resentment of American cultural, economic and military imperialism became a leitmotif of his politics, whether in its ‘left’ or ‘right’ phases.
His position wasn’t exactly Strasserite, since Horst was always happier in the realms of moral philosophy rather than economics, but he implicitly rejected the position of other national socialists such as Gudrun Burwitz (1929-2018), daughter of Heinrich Himmler, who continued her father’s tradition of being first and foremost anti-communist and anti-Muscovite – even to the point of working with Western intelligence services against the Soviets/Russians. Horst by contrast was at various stages accused of indirect links to the KGB and its satellites.
On each of the occasions when we met, Horst emphasised the continuing subjugation of Germany to what his fellow legal and constitutional scholar Carlo Schmid (1896-1979) described in a famous speech to the postwar parliamentary council considering a new constitution, on 8th September 1948.
Schmid argued that the ‘Basic Law’ (Grundgesetz) which was then under consideration, and which remains the basis of today’s Federal Republic, was not a constitution but merely an extension of the “written or unwritten occupation statute” imposed by the Western Allies. Germans had to recognise that this ‘Basic Law’, while in practice only applying to a western fragment of Germany, included an intrinsic assumption that once Germany was unified (i.e. once the Soviet empire had collapsed and those territories severed from the Reich had been reunited with ‘West Germany’), the entire German people would vote on a new German constitution.
Of course this has never happened. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and ‘East Germany’ ceased to exist in 1990, its six states (länder) including East Berlin were simply absorbed into an expanded Federal Republic, with the arrangements fixed by corrupt deals between politicians, bankers, and the East German version of Soviet oligarchs emerging from the wreckage of the communist nomenklatura.
No popular vote or referendum on a new constitution ever took place, and the temporary ‘Basic Law’ (with its origins in postwar occupation statutes) remained in force. Horst Mahler and other nationalist lawyers and constitutional scholars such as Sylvia Stolz have therefore consistently argued that the Federal Republic is constitutionally invalid and should not be recognised as the true Germany
Partly because no-one could accuse Carlo Schmid of being a “nazi”, his speech on the constitutional fundamentals of postwar Germany became a frequent reference not only for Horst but for a generation of German nationalists whom he influenced.
Especially in his later years, Horst Mahler became especially associated not only with these constitutional arguments and nationalist jurisprudence, but with an in-depth critique of Judaism.
Whereas Alexander Dugin (at any rate when in private conversation with European nationalists) describes Jews as literal demons – i.e. as biologically different from humans – Horst Mahler developed a view based on Hegelian philosophy which saw Jews and Judaism as a dialectical Satan.
A great deal of his work on this subject cannot legally be quoted here as it contravenes the UK’s race laws as well as Germany’s even more stringent political law against volksverhetzung.
However, it should be noted that during his later years Horst published extensively on this topic, most notably in his book Das Ende Der Wanderschaft (‘The End of the Wandering’) derived from his analysis of the anti-Zionist Jews Gilad Atzmon and Gerard Menuhin. This was written while Horst was in prison and smuggled out to be published by his comrades. It led to further criminal charges and an extended term of imprisonment while Horst was already in his 80s and had already had first one leg then the other amputated.
The last time I saw Horst was in 2021, a year after his release from his final prison sentence, when he gave a powerful speech at the Berlin funeral of our comrade Henry Hafenmayer, who had died at the tragically young age of 48. Horst was already in a wheelchair, but the standard phrase “confined to a wheelchair” is inappropriate in his case. Nothing could confine Horst Mahler – not prison bars, nor physical ailments.
Whatever the political and factional differences that have divided German comrades (and especially since 2022 have meant that I have severed most of my connections to the German nationalist scene, aside from the staunchly anti-Putin party Dritte Weg), I am certain that future generations of Europeans will salute the memory of Horst Mahler. His self-sacrifice and his ideological rigour will be an example for as long as European identity exists.
