There is not much that Alexander M., the defendant in the "NSU 2.0" trial, and Jan Böhmermann have in common.

Here the loner living on welfare, convicted of, among other things, usurpation, insult and bodily harm, there the TV presenter who is as smart as he is successful.

And M., who, according to the investigations, wrote extreme right-wing Internet posts under pseudonyms such as "SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer", and Böhmermann are also unlikely to share much in terms of ideology.

However, both agree on one point, as was shown on Monday in the proceedings before the Frankfurt district court.

Matthew Trautsch

Coordination report Rhein-Main.

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"It's true what the witness says - that's exactly how it was," the accused testified after Böhmermann had testified.

The court summoned the moderator because, like many other public figures, he had received threatening letters signed “NSU 2.0” in reference to the right-wing extremist terrorist cell National Socialist Underground.

According to the public prosecutor's office, the 54-year-old M. is the originator of the news and is therefore guilty of insult, attempted coercion and threats.

The series began in the summer of 2018 with death threats against the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz.

used to threats

Böhmermann presented the court with e-mails addressed to him, in which he was described, among other things, as a "public nuisance" and "sentenced to death".

In terms of form, language and content, the threats are similar to those against other celebrities: in structure and expression they imitate letters from the authorities, they sometimes refer to current events, then string together nasty, often racist insults and end with greetings such as "Heil Hitler".

The fact that the letters regularly contain personal, sometimes confidential data about them and their relatives contributes to the uncertainty of the addressees.

His children are also mentioned in emails to Böhmermann.

In court, however, the moderator was relaxed.

On the one hand, he is used to such threats, they are part of the job, so to speak.

"It wasn't anything that knocked me off my feet." On the other hand, the emails did not go to any address that he personally used, and the data came from a well-known source: the leak from the hacker "0rbit", who shared private information from published by politicians on the Internet and was uncovered.

Supposed appreciation for “dissocial types”

Using the example of the network “Reconquista Germanica”, Böhmermann and his team from “Neo Magazin Royale” showed how right-wing extremists collect data about people they don’t like using a kind of crowdsourcing process, and provided the satirical counter-proposal “Reconquista Internet”.

The methods of the state investigators are no match for the strategies of the right-wing extremists, Böhmermann said.

In the “NSU 2.0” process, too, an individual is on trial.

That is gratifying, but it would be more productive to deal with the structures behind it.

These structures include the online forums in which M. exchanged ideas.

As Böhmermann said, young users and "anti-social types" can gain perceived esteem there by providing information about political enemies - from photographed doorbells to hacked data sets.

The organizers of the platforms abused and despised the simple users, who were thus "not only perpetrators but also victims".

M. also tries to present himself as such a “victim”, who therefore emphatically agreed with Böhmermann's words.

He described the events in the chat group "as if he had been there".

He had experienced dealings there “under all sows”: For example, a member with whom he had just chatted was at the same time in the general forum badmouthing him.