Manfred Roeder

Manfred Roeder (6 February 1929 – 30 July 2014) was a German lawyer, Wehrmacht soldier, prominent Holocaust denier and a far-right activist.

Life

Born in Berlin, Roeder attended a National Political Institute of Education in Plön. As a teenage soldier, he participated of the Battle of Berlin in 1945. After the Second World War he was for a time a member of Germany's CDU party. After leaving the party he forged ties with the far-right political scene in Germany and abroad, including the Ku Klux Klan. Roeder's career has been marked by an abundance of criminal charges, including resistance against state authority, and battery. In 1980 the Deutschen Aktionsgruppen ("German Action Groups"), a neo-Nazi organisation founded by Roeder, carried out attacks against buildings that housed foreign workers and asylum seekers. Roeder was classified as a terrorist by German legal authorities as a result of these activities.

In 1997 the current affairs program Panorama revealed that in 1995, Roeder had appeared, by invitation, as a speaker at the German military's officer training academy in Hamburg. This scandal, as well as the fact that Roeder had received financial donations from the military, led to the sacking of the academy's commander and the instatement of Rear-Admiral Rudolf Lange as his replacement, with the goal of restoring the good reputation of the academy.

In 1997 Roeder stood as the NPD candidate (a far-right party) for Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern during the parliamentary elections, promoting himself as "Chancellor alternative 1998", but was unsuccessful.

Roeder died on 30 July 2014 at the age of 85.

Criminal record

Because of his integral role in a terrorist organisation Roeder was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1982, and was released in 1990, after serving two-thirds of his sentence, for good behaviour and a perceived social rehabilitation. In 1996 Roeder, together with other far-right extremists, perpetrated an attack on an exhibition in Erfurt detailing the role of the Wehrmacht in Nazi Germany, for which he was charged with property damage and fined DM-4,500. After being sentenced to prison by the state courts of Schwerin and Rostock under Germany's Volksverhetzung law (incitement to hatred), and for other crimes, he was given a further ten months in September 2004 by the state court of Frankfurt for contempt of the state. In February 2005 a further sentencing for the same crime was passed by the court of Schwalmstadt. On May 12, 2005 he began a prison sentence in Gießen, but he was released shortly after on health grounds.