Police raid home of elderly German man for sharing a meme calling left-wing vice chancellor a ‘moron’

BURGPREPPACH, Germany (LifeSiteNews) — German police raided the home of a 64-year-old man for sharing a meme calling Germany’s vice chancellor a “moron.”

Shortly after 6 a.m. on November 12, policemen arrived at Stefan Niehoff’s house in Burgpreppach, Bavaria. According to the German outlet NIUS, the police interrogated the man and seized his tablet.

Niehoff’s wife and his 33-year-old daughter with Down syndrome had to watch the scenes in shock.

The court order showed that the search warrant was issued because of a meme Niehoff shared on X in June 2024. The meme showed a picture of German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck from the Green Party with the caption “Schwachkopf Professional” (“moron professional”), a word play on the advertisement of the “Schwarzkopf” brand.

The Bamberg district court order handed to Niehoff ordered that all rooms and vehicles be searched for cell phones and other digital devices “without a prior hearing.”

Niehoff told NIUS that he had “to laugh out loud in disbelief” whenever he recounted the incident.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was in a really bad movie,” Niehoff said.

“My daughter was completely devastated,” he recalled. “You don’t have something like that every day.”

“I’m 64 years old. I would never have imagined it would come to this. It definitely has the taste of the GDR,” the man said.

The court order stated that the meme shared by Niehoff defamed Robert Habeck and was aimed at making “his work as a member of the Federal Government more difficult,” and the public prosecutor claimed that the insult of Habeck was of “public interest.”

According to NIUS, the public prosecutor’s office in Bamberg classified the retweet of the meme as potential “incitement to hatred.”

After the incident caused a scandal in Germany and the hashtag “Schwachkopf” (“moron”) trended on social media, Habeck, who personally filed the complaint against Niehoff, was asked about the incident by a journalist and had to respond.

The vice chancellor and economy minister said he had decided “at the beginning of the legislature” to “report insults and threats.”

“This is filtered through by agencies, and in this case, it came from the Bavarian police. Of course, moron is not the worst insult that has ever been uttered,” he admitted.

He said that his complaint was only “the trigger” that caused the house search and that the man was also under suspicion of making racist or anti-Semitic comments.

As NIUS reports, the raid on Niehoff’s house took place in the context of the “action day against anti-Semitic hate crime on the Internet.” Habeck and the public prosecutor’s office cited a picture shared by Niehoff that showed a sign known from the Nazi era saying, “Don’t buy from Jews.” However, critics said that this picture was obviously meant as a warning of the conditions under Nazi rule and not a promotion of National-Socialist ideology.

NIUS journalist Tim Thorer reported that Habeck had filed 805 criminal complaints between September 2021 and August 2024 due to threats and insults directed at him. Thorer also pointed out that the term “Schwachkopf” (“moron”) has been used multiple times in the German Parliament over the past decades without any criminal complaint.

Habeck’s Green Party is known for its far-left policies, including its pro-abortion and pro-LGBT policies, as well as its promotion of online censorship and radical “green” energy policies.

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