The former Berlin elementary school teacher, who became known as a “people’s teacher”, right-wing extremist video blogger and Holocaust denier, greeted his sympathizers in the audience with a smile. He spoke for a long time, admitted some of the allegations made by the prosecution regarding their processes and qualified them in his eloquent way – “I wasn’t experienced at the time”.
After a trial lasting several hours, Nikolai Nerling was sentenced on Friday: Nine months’ imprisonment on probation for two cases of hate speech and trespassing, use of signs of unconstitutional organizations, insult and breach of confidentiality of the word. In addition, the Tiergarten district court decided that he should pay 3,000 euros to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation against racism and violence as a condition.
Nerling became well-known with his YouTube channel “The People’s Teacher”, on which he regularly displayed his right-wing attitude and agitated against minorities. Until 2018, the 42-year-old worked as a teacher at a primary school in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen.
When the Tagesspiegel made Nerling’s right-wing extremist network activities public, the educational administration fired him without notice. He “gradually counted himself among the right-wing scene,” says the accused. However, he does not finance himself through donations from fans – “I work for an online mail order company”.
There were six charges: He had disturbed a meeting, published an interview with a notorious Holocaust denier on the Internet, wanted to attack a man in his Jewish identity and make him look ridiculous, showed the Hitler salute and filmed the scene, then in September 2018 without consent of his interlocutors videotaped a phone conversation and uploaded it to his channel. Most recently, it was about a video that showed him in Lüneburg at an information board about Nazi crimes.
Why did he publish an interview with Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck on his YouTube channel in March 2018? The 93-year-old had once again agitated right-wing extremists. Nerling relied on ignorance: “I wasn’t aware at the time that what she said could be punishable,” he told the court.
[Holocaust deniers in Brazil: The “folk teacher” on the run (T )]
He wouldn’t upload anything like that now, he tones. Only to sound like Haverbeck himself a little later in front of the hall door in a conversation with journalists.
From what happened, the right-wing extremist essentially admitted the allegations, but repeatedly used “art and satire”. Once he only took a “critical” look at a city poster – he raised his right arm, “but not to glorify National Socialism”.
In another case, he stated that he “did not dislike Jews per se.” However, the person concerned made sure that his bank accounts were closed.
The prosecutor pleaded for eleven months’ probation – “he shows no remorse, he’s still blowing the same horn”. Nerling is about spreading anti-Semitic and ethnic ideologies.
His defense attorney saw only a few allegations of the indictment confirmed and pleaded for a fine of 4000 euros (100 daily rates of 40 euros each). But the judge also said that Nerling was historically revisionist – “on the razor blade of criminal liability”. In the present cases, he exceeded that limit. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
It’s not the first either. The Dachau district court sentenced him to a fine for incitement to hatred because he denied the Holocaust in February 2019 in front of a group of schoolchildren at the Dachau concentration camp memorial.
Since the beginning of the corona pandemic, Nerling has been reporting on lateral thinking demonstrations for his channel on the Telegram messenger service. At the same time, Nerling describes himself as a “right-wing extremist”. He maintains close connections to the ethnic scene and to right-wing esoteric settler and Reich citizen projects in Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt.
In August 2020, Nerling stormed the steps of the Reichstag with hundreds of other demonstrators as part of a major lateral thinking demonstration. Nerling is currently appearing again regularly at right-wing protests, most recently in Neuruppin in Brandenburg at a demo against the appearance of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD).
