A German neo-Nazi has been jailed for life for the murder of Walter Lübcke, a pro-immigration politician with Angela Merkel’s CDU.
Lübcke, a regional governor for the centre-right governing party, was shot in the head on the terrace of his home in Wolfhagen-Istha, near Kassel, on the night of 2 June 2019, in what is considered the first political assassination with a rightwing extremist motive since the end of the Nazi era.
Stephan Ernst, who had a history of involvement in far-right militant groups and a string of hate crime convictions, was arrested in Kassel two weeks after the killing, after investigators found skin cells on Lübcke’s shirt that matched Ernst’s DNA.
Ernst admitted to the shooting at a court in Frankfurt in August last year. On Thursday the judge Thomas Sagebiel handed Ernst, 47, a life sentence and acknowledged the “special gravity” of his crime, meaning he is unlikely to be considered for parole for at least 22 years.
Ernst was acquitted of the attempted murder in January 2016 of an Iraqi refugee who was stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant outside the shelter where he lived.
An alleged accomplice in the Lübcke shooting, Markus Hartmann, a known neo-Nazi, was acquitted of accessory to politician’s murder but handed an 18-month-suspended jail term for illegal gun possession.
The trial painted a picture of a man driven by hatred of foreigners and non-native Germans since childhood. At the age of 15, Ernst tried to set fire to a building housing Turkish migrant families. Four years later he stabbed and nearly killed a Turkish imam in a train station bathroom in Wiesbaden. In 1993 he was imprisoned after placing a pipe bomb next to the dormitories of a refugee hostel in the Hessian town of Hohenstein-Steckenroth.
Ernst’s Turkish-born defence lawyer Mustafa Kaplan, who previously represented victims’ families in the trial of the rightwing extremist National Socialist Underground terror group, described his client as a xenophobe.
After marrying and starting a family, Ernst dropped off the radar of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. But evidence presented in court suggest he continued to participate in neo-Nazi marches, as well as donating to the far-right Identitarian Movement and handing out flyers for the Alternative für Deutschland party.
In autumn 2015, Ernst and Hartmann attended and filmed a town hall meeting in Lohfelden where Lübcke defended a recently built refugee shelter.
In a video that the pair uploaded to the internet shortly afterwards, Lübcke is heard saying: “This is a country worth living in. You have to stand up for values, and anyone who doesn’t stand up for those values can leave this country if he doesn’t agree with it. Every German is free to do that.”
The trial was marred by Ernst twice retracting his confession, offering three different versions of the events leading to Lübcke’s murder. In the first, he said he had killed the politician on his own. In the second, he was a mere accomplice of Hartmann’s, who accidentally fired the shot in a tussle. In the third and final version, Ernst said he fired the shot while Hartmann was present.
The accused described Hartmann as a central figure in his own radicalisation and the plan to assassinate Lübcke. “It was his idea, he was the thinker,” said Ernst. But the prosecution could find no DNA traces, witness sightings or mobile phone data to present as evidence in court.
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