Günter Deckert 1940-2022
Posted by admin978 on April 1, 2022 · Leave a Comment
H&D is shocked and saddened to report that our great friend and comrade Günter Deckert, former leader of Germany’s nationalist party NPD, has died aged 82. In fact those readers who knew Günter will appreciate that we could never really believe he was 82 years old, let alone that he has died. Günter always seemed the most energetic and committed comrade in the room, even when surrounded by fellow nationalists decades younger.
Born in January 1940 Günter Deckert developed a talent for languages as a very young man, first visiting London and staying with an English family in the 1950s (which was also when he first encountered British nationalists, when he happened upon a street rally of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement). He went on to study English, French and other languages at the universities of Heidelberg, Kiel and Montpellier.
For twenty years (from 1968 to 1988) he taught English and French at German schools and colleges, until he was dismissed for political reasons. In fact the authorities had tried three times to dismiss him, but the first two attempts were defeated in the courts.
Some readers might be surprised that his initial political activism was with West Germany’s liberal party the Free Democrats (FDP) in the early 1960s, though at that time (for complicated historical reasons) it was not unusual for German nationalists (and for that matter old national-socialists) to be in the FDP.
Günter first joined the NPD in 1966 and was active during its most successful election campaigns of the late 1960s, when the party was led by Mosley’s close friend and ally Adolf von Thadden. He was a parliamentary (Bundestag) candidate for the first time in 1972 and went on to contest many federal, state and local elections. One of his best election results was in 1974 when he received more than 25% of the vote in Weinheim’s mayoral election. From 1975 to 1999 and from 2019 until his death he was a municipal councillor in Weinheim, sometimes for the NPD and sometimes for the ‘Deutsche Liste’ which he created during a time when he was forced to relinquish NPD membership.
Just a few weeks before he died, Günter posted his party’s official video response to the Weinheim city council budget and would have been an election candidate again this year. Last month (shortly before his illness) he was expelled from the council chamber by police for allegedly ‘racist’ comments during a speech criticising the council budget.
Günter was elected leader of the NPD – Germany’s largest nationalist party – in 1991, and remained party leader until 2005.
Following a conference in 1991 where Günter was translator for the American revisionist Fred Leuchter, he was prosecuted for ‘inciting racial hatred’. Even though he was actually translating someone else’s words, prosecutors argued that he had translated too sympathetically and had therefore committed a crime.
Günter’s case was a landmark in German legal history, because though at first convicted he won on appeal. This victory was because the appeal court ruled ‘Holocaust denial’ was not by itself criminal. In response the German parliament changed the law, making ‘Holocaust denial’ itself an offence. Consequently Günter was tried again in 1995, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
He was imprisoned at Bruchsal from 1995 to 2000, then again for five months at Mannheim prison early in 2013.
Günter Deckert was my first German comrade. We first met in 1993 when he addressed the BNP annual rally, and we later spoke together on many platforms in Britain, Germany and France. He addressed numerous meetings of British comrades in London, Yorkshire and elsewhere in England.
Last autumn we met (and were again fellow speakers) for the last time. It seems impossible to believe that I shall never see Günter Deckert again, but his irrepressible spirit will continue to inspire our activism for decades to come.
An obituary to Günter Deckert will appear in the next edition of H&D.
