Punishment Before Trial? 'Hate Speech' Raids in Germany
German “hate speech” laws are already troubling, but their enforcement has become alarmingly disproportionate, unconstitutional, and incompatible with a free society.
Recently, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an interview that “[t]here’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech [ . . . ] We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” The path she describes is not hypothetical — it is already visible in Germany, where the police regularly raid private homes for alleged cases of “hate speech.”
In a widely publicised case, the police in Hamburg raided a flat after a Tweet calling the city’s Senator of the Interior a “Pimmel” (Engl. wiener). Many saw it as an absurd one-off. But many more of these raids have recently come to light. These actions are not hidden from the public; on the contrary, they are deliberately pursued in the form of so-called “action days”. The head of the Federal Criminal Police Office stated, “We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect the police to be at the front door afterward.” On its 12th action day to combat criminal hate postings, German police raided 46 flats in a single day.
This post does not seek to relitigate the broader dangers of European hate-speech laws, which others are documenting extensively. Even though the German approach to “hate speech” is particularly troubling —for instance, because it punishes insults against politicians more harshly than those against ordinary citizens, in the Orwellian sense that “all men are equal but some are more equal” — it likewise will not focus on these laws themselves. Instead, the focus here is on how, even within that framework, their enforcement in Germany has become alarmingly disproportionate.
Under both German constitutional law and European human rights jurisprudence, investigative measures must serve a legitimate purpose, be suitable, necessary, and appropriate. Yet in dozens of “hate speech” cases, police house raids meet none of these criteria.
The “inviolability of the home” is enshrined in the German constitution (Art. 13 GG) as well as in the “European Convention of Human Rights” (Art. 8), and its violation requires exceptional justification. Confiscating devices further drastically invades the right to privacy.
While rapid intervention may be justified in cases of imminent violence or terrorism, the fact that these raids are coordinated into “action days” proves that no immediate danger exists, undermining any claim of necessity or legitimacy.
In the “Pimmel” case, as in others, the user had already complied with a police summons and admitted to the post. There was thus no investigative need for a raid. In a 60 Minutes documentary, a prosecutor explained that confiscating the smartphone is “a kind of punishment” and would be “even worse than the fine you have to pay.” This logic fundamentally violates the presumption of innocence as a fundamental principle of the rule of law. Even when courts later deem the raids unlawful, as in the “Pimmel” case, no compensation is granted, and the damage is already done.
Nevertheless, these raids continue. The Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia recently described the “action days” as a “clear message to all those who spread hate and agitation on the Internet.” But in a constitutional democracy, fundamental rights such as privacy or the inviolability of the home cannot be suspended to “send a message.” As journalist Deniz Yücel aptly noted, “[s]uch an approach is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, but unworthy of a constitutional state.”
Even if one assumes these actions target the “right” people, a deeply dangerous assumption in itself, recent examples show how arbitrarily these cases are selected and how ultimately almost anyone can easily become a target. Here are just a few publicly known examples, and they are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg:
June 2023: Police raided a home over a Tweet parodying German politicians with fake quotes such as “I can’t remember embezzling several million”
November 2024: Police raided a home of a city councillor in Füssen for posting “FCK AfD we will not be silenced by you pissants.” The raid was later ruled unlawful.
November 2024: Police raided a house over a tweet calling the former German vice-chancellor a “Schwachkopf” (engl. “dunderhead”)
July 2025: Police raided a home over a two-year-old, already deleted Tweet featuring a picture of a far-left demonstration, where people were holding a sign illustrating a burning police car as well as the writing “Advent, Advent, the tub is on fire”* and “ACAT” (“All Cops are Target”), as well as the ironic comment “Ja sicher” (“Yes, for sure” in English). Not only did the user delete the account, including all Tweets, a while ago, but he also already admitted to being the author of the post.
Most recently, police in Berlin raided the home of a journalist and former professor for media theory over a Tweet mocking the headline of the left-leaning newspaper taz “Ban of the AfD and a petition against Höcke: Germany awakens” with the ironic addition “A good translation for “woke”: Germany awake!” accusing him of the punishable use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations.
As George Orwell warned in Animal Farm: “If you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.” The US would be well advised not to go down this path, and Europeans, who rightly criticise the hypocrisy of the current US administration as supposed “defenders of freedom of expression,” would also be well advised to reflect on the dangerous precedents being set within their own borders.
In an increasingly polarised world, we should be able to agree in everyone’s own interest that house raids for online speech that do not pose an immediate threat are disproportionate, unconstitutional, and incompatible with a free society. When investigation becomes punishment, the rule of law itself is at risk.
Alexander Hohlfeld is an affiliate fellow at The Future of Free Speech and a digital policy researcher and consultant.
* ”Advent; Advent ein Lichtlein brennt” is a saying in German before Christmas when lighting a candle. Left-wing extremists changed “Lichtlein” to “tub,” where they refer to police cars.
 | A guest post by
|