Walter Luebcke

  • Germany: Walter Lübcke, the CDU politician who defended migrants in 2015, killed

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January 28, 2021 The Frankfurt Court of Appeal sentenced Stephan Ernst to life in prison for the murder of Walter Luebcke, the president of the district of Kassel, who was killed on 2 June 2019 inside his home.



The CDU politician, killed with a gunshot to the head, had promoted a welcome policy towards migrants, making many enemies.



The murderer

Stephan Ernst 45-year-old right-wing extremist with a history of violence and, above all, close relations with the most dangerous realities of neo-Nazism, including the "Combat 18" group that is inspired by the name of Adolf Hitler.



The crime could be of a political nature, linked to Luebcke's stances in defense of migrants, for whom he had been the subject of insults and death threats in life, and of a new wave of offenses even after death, online. 



Arrested by German leatherheads in Kassel based on traces of DNA found at the crime scene, according to Spiegel, Stephan Ernst.

he had ties to the neo-Nazi group "Combat 18", considered one of the "most significant" far-right groups in Germany.



The militants of this formation, says the weekly, "are ready to use violence, have had to deal with arms trafficking, have spread hate messages, have published instructions for the construction of explosive devices" and have boasted relationships with the "Blood & Honor" network, which at times had given support to the militants of the Nsu, the far-right terrorist organization which between 200 and 2007 was guilty of a long series of racist murders.



Spiegel does not fail to point out that the number 18 of the group name refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet: A and H, like Adolf and Hitler. 



A long radical militancy

The man's biography also reserves other details, all linked to the far right scene.

According to Zeit, in 1993 the then 20-year-old Stephan Ernst allegedly attacked a reception center for asylum seekers in Hohenstein-Steckenroth, a town in Hesse, with an explosive.

Moreover, his name also appeared in the works of the commission of inquiry on the terrorist group NSU, where he was described as a "right-wing extremist ready to resort to violence".



It is also Spiegel to report that Stephan had been a militant of the NPD, the neo-Nazi party, in Hesse.

Ten years ago he was stopped by police along with some 400 "autonomous nationalists" in Dortmund following an attack on a May Day demonstration by trade unions.