When German historian Rainer Zitelmann reposted a photo of Adolf Hitler to warn against appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin, he didn’t expect it to trigger a police probe.
According to police, the problem was the image itself: Hitler was shown wearing a swastika armband — a banned symbol under Germany’s criminal code, which prohibits the public display of Nazi and other extremist insignia. Zitelmann was informed in February that authorities were examining the case.
Zitelmann’s is just one of several recent investigations into online speech, which have raised questions about how far German authorities are going in enforcing strict speech laws — and whether efforts to curb extremism are colliding with satire and political criticism.
Zitelmann said he posted the image as a warning, not an endorsement. Like Hitler, Putin cannot be trusted when he says he has no further territorial ambitions.
“I’m usually against Hitler analogies,” he said. “They’re often inaccurate and used to discredit political opponents.”
But, he added, ”the parallels practically impose themselves.”
A week earlier, a journalist found himself in a similar situation for mocking the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In a podcast, Jan Fleischhauer suggested the party’s youth wing, known as “Generation Germany,” might be better named “Generation Germany awake” — a reference to a banned Nazi slogan.
Fleischhauer’s case comes after police had searched conservative commentator Norbert Bolz’s home in October for using the same slogan to mock a left-wing newspaper that had called for the AfD to be banned.
“A good translation for ‘woke’: Germany awake!” Bolz had written.
Fleischhauer reacted to his investigation with humor. “Maybe [the complaint was filed] … by an AfD supporter who was annoyed that I made fun of the AfD youth wing,” he said.
But, he warned, such cases risk chilling free speech.
“I come from the 1968 generation,” Fleischhauer said. “I thought the path of free speech had been cleared once and for all by the ’68 movement. But as we can see, all of that can be rolled back.”
Tradeoff
The cases highlight a tension at the heart of Germany’s postwar legal order: how to guard against extremism without restricting free expression.
After World War II, lawmakers — encouraged by the occupying Allied powers — moved swiftly to ban symbols of the country’s Nazi past, seeking to prevent fascism from reasserting itself.
Critics now argue authorities are going too far. Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy leader of the pro-business Free Democrats, wants the law scrapped or narrowed.
“If one wants to keep it, it would have to be limited strictly to explicit endorsement of National Socialist ideology,” he said. “At the moment, it has become vague and ill-defined. The legislature urgently needs to change that.”
But others warn that loosening the rules could embolden extremists.
“The point is not to allow governments to suppress political expression, but rather to protect the principles of our liberal constitution,” said Lena Gumnior, a Green lawmaker. “It is about strictly prohibiting the use of unconstitutional symbols, particularly those associated with National Socialism, in order to protect our democracy.”
A separate provision of Germany’s criminal code — which designates it an offense to insult or belittle a politician — also sparked controversy recently. In January, a retiree came under investigation after posting a Facebook comment about Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s visit to his town:
“Pinocchio is coming,” he wrote, adding a long-nose “lying” emoji.
That case drew the attention of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, prompting a a post by Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, who has taken a strong stance against European laws that regulate online speech.
“Most Germans I’ve talked to don’t want their laws applied this way,” she wrote. “When you’re regulating speech at scale, on platforms based in America (whose American users, especially, deserve First Amendment protection), this creates problems worth solving.”
German authorities have dropped the probes into Fleischhauer and the Pinocchio emoji. The investigation into Zitelmann was still open as of Friday.
For Matthias Cornils, a law professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, the outcome matters more than the investigations themselves.
“Courts often reject criminal liability, even in quite harsh cases,” he said. “The strong constitutional protection of freedom of expression, developed over decades, remains intact.”