Europe is often heralded as the birthplace of free speech. The principle of freedom of expression was based on the work of European Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Baruch Spinoza—intellectual trailblazers who dared to challenge monarchs, scrutinise religious institutions, and defy government censorship. It was in the salons of Paris, the coffeehouses of London, and the academic halls of the Netherlands that the seeds of free speech were sown.

Yet the continent that once stood at the vanguard of this freedom now seems intent on curtailing it. Across Europe, speech crackdowns are intensifying under the pretext of combating hate, misinformation, and extremism—and these crackdowns are taking place under the watch of democratic governments. In 2023, Denmark, for example, passed a law criminalising the desecration of holy texts. In the UK, Essex Police visited Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson’s home in November 2024 to question her about a social media post from the previous year, investigating whether it constituted incitement to racial hatred online. Meanwhile, in Sweden, Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika was charged with “agitation against an ethnic group” for his widely publicised Quran burnings—a case that was not dropped until after Momika was shot dead during a TikTok livestream on 29 January 2025.

Nowhere is this shift towards censorship more pronounced than in Germany. The nation that gave the world Immanuel Kant—whose famous phrase sapere aude (“dare to know”) embodies the spirit of Aufklärung—now punishes dissent with draconian measures.

Consider the case of CJ Hopkins, an American writer living in Germany. Hopkins criticised the country’s COVID-19 policies, drawing parallels to the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany. The cover of his 2022 book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, features a medical mask emblazoned with a swastika. After posting two tweets that showed the book’s cover, Hopkins learned that he was under investigation. In September 2024, the Berlin Appellate Court found him guilty of disseminating prohibited symbols—a conviction that carries a sentence of up to three years in prison. Hopkins’s case is far from an anomaly. As a February 2025 60 Minutes segment has shown: the German police have carried out armed raids on private homes for such speech-related offences as allegedly posting a racist cartoon, sharing “malicious gossip” or “fake quotes”—even unknowingly—and calling a politician a “jerk.”

In light of its history, it is understandable that Germany has adopted such stringent measures to prevent the resurgence of extremism. The country enforces some of the toughest speech laws in Europe, which are justified as necessary safeguards against hate and intolerance. Holocaust denial is illegal, as is the public display of Nazi symbols. However, the rise of far-right ideologies and the reemergence of nationalist sentiments across Europe—and in Germany in particular—raises questions about the efficacy of these policies.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made historic gains in the 2025 German federal election, securing second place with over twenty percent of the vote. Once relegated to the political fringes, the party has capitalised on growing public discontent over censorship, migration policies, and economic grievances. Rather than stamping out extremism, Germany’s speech restrictions may have inadvertently driven radicals to underground echo chambers, where their resentment can fester away from the corrective effects of public debate and pushback. Those silenced on social media can then make themselves heard at the ballot box.

If the government’s censorship regime backfires, it will not be the first time this has happened.  

The country’s defeat in World War I and the fall of the German Empire led to the emergence of the Weimar Republic, but the country remained deeply fractured and various factions vied to undermine the fledgling democracy. Tensions came to a head in late June 1922 when Karl Helfferich of the monarchist German National People’s Party (DNVP) delivered a scathing attack on Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in the Reichstag. Helfferich held Rathenau responsible for his role in honouring Germany’s reparation payments to France after the Great War—payments he believed were to blame for the country’s economic turmoil.

“The Calvary of fulfillment [reparations]… has brought us the frightful devaluation of the German currency,” Helfferich declared. “It has crushed our middle class, dragged countless individuals and entire families into the depths of poverty, driven countless others into despair and suicide…. It has handed great chunks of our own resources over to foreigners. It has shaken our economic and social order to the foundations!”

Though Helfferich’s speech was inflammatory, it was not a direct call to violence. But outside the Reichstag, furious demonstrators took up a more sinister chant: “Kill off Walther Rathenau, the greedy Jewish sow!” The next day, 24 June 1922, Rathenau was assassinated by members of the right-wing extremist group Organisation Konsul.

In response to this brutal murder, the government swiftly passed the Law for the Protection of the Republic. This did not just outlaw violent organisations like the Organisation Konsul and the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (the German People’s Federation for Protection and Defiance). It also targeted Nazi propaganda, shutting down hundreds of publications, including Der Angriff (The Attack), a Berlin-based newspaper founded in 1927 by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist. Goebbels himself was sentenced to prison twice—first for three weeks and later for six—for insulting Bernhard Weiss, a Jewish deputy police commissioner of Berlin.

An older statute, Section 166 of the German Penal Code, also played a role in restricting speech:

Anyone who gives offence by publicly blaspheming God with offensive expressions, and anyone who in public insults a Christian church or any religious community with incorporated rights existing in the federal territory or the constitution or usages of any such, as also anyone who is guilty of insulting behaviour in a church or other place set apart for religious meetings, shall be liable to confinement not exceeding three years.

These legal provisions led to the imprisonment of prominent Nazis like Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher. Adolf Hitler himself was barred from speaking in several German states between 1925 and 1927 after his failed attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. However, instead of weakening the Nazi movement, these actions were grist to their persecution narrative, elevating them to the status of martyrs and lending credibility to their claims of being victims of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave “Aryans.” One propaganda poster asked: “Why is Adolf Hitler not allowed to speak? Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews and their lackeys, the Democrats, Marxists, Jesuits, and Freemasons! Because he wants to free the workers from the domination of big money!” Other posters plastered across public spaces depicted Hitler with tape over his mouth, unfairly silenced by the system. One widely circulated caption read: “Crooks can speak anywhere in Germany, but Hitler is banned.”

As former ACLU president Nadine Strossen has explained, this created a “forbidden fruit phenomenon,” and “the net impact of those laws censoring Nazi speech was to amplify their message, to give them attention that they otherwise would never have received, and to gain sympathy that they otherwise would never have received.”

In 1930, the Law for the Protection of the Republic was broadened, granting the government even greater power to quash organisations and publications it deemed a threat. In 1931, President Paul von Hindenburg invoked Article 48 of the constitution to issue an emergency decree, allowing the government to suspend newspapers for up to two months if they were considered a danger to public order. The decree also compelled newspapers to publish corrections and official statements dictated by the authorities. The liberal press endorsed these measures arguing that, as one newspaper put it, “In order to protect itself effectively against lies and slander, the state has to be allowed to compromise basic rights, like the freedom of the press.” In June 1932, yet another emergency decree was issued, tightening government control over newspapers even further and expanding the justifications for their suppression.

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Between March 1930 and May 1932, 284 newspapers were temporarily suspended in Prussia alone—99 of these were Nazi-affiliated papers, 77 were communist, and 43 belonged to the extreme right. Even satirical cartoons mocking individual politicians could result in a ban. By this point, the liberal media had finally begun to realise that the regulations were an existential threat to press freedom itself. The liberal Berliner Tageblatt likened Germany’s estimated 100 newspaper shut-downs per month to the repressions of fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. A few months later, the Tageblatt grimly declared “the end of freedom.”

But by that point, it was too late. Weimar Germany operated under a hybrid presidential-parliamentary system, and while Hitler lost his 1932 presidential bid to independent incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, the Nazi Party won 37.3 percent of the Reichstag’s seats—more than any other party—in the federal parliamentary election later that year. In response, President Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen, an aristocrat with no real political base, as chancellor. But the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed a no-confidence motion, ousting Papen in November 1932. The following month, Hindenburg replaced him with General Kurt von Schleicher.

Schleicher tried to weaken the Nazi Party by offering a power-sharing deal to Gregor Strasser, a Nazi leader who opposed Hitler, but Hitler outmanoeuvred Schleicher and managed to keep the party united. Schleicher failed to gain support from the Nazi-dominated Reichstag and on 28 January 1933, with the government deadlocked and unable to function, he was forced to resign.

Two days later, with the support of the German conservative elites, Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as chancellor, believing he could keep him in check. But within months, Hitler had consolidated his power. The Führer inherited a legal framework and a political culture already set up for speech policing and therefore ideally suited to his authoritarian ambitions. By exploiting preexisting censorship mechanisms, he was able to swiftly silence dissent, crush opposition, muzzle the press, and tighten his grip on the nation.

In March 1933, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz), which authorised Hitler to enact laws without parliamentary approval, amend the constitution, and bypass the president altogether—effectively rendering Hindenburg a mere figurehead. Hitler was now a dictator, ruling by decree. Free speech in Germany was officially dead. That same month, the Malicious Practices Act (Verordnung zur Abwehr heimtückischer Diskreditierung der nationalen Regierung) criminalised even the faintest expressions of dissent. Simply “gossiping” about the government or mocking its officials became grounds for imprisonment or internment in a concentration camp.

By July 1933, Hitler had outlawed all other political parties, thus eliminating any semblance of democratic opposition. In October, the Editors’ Law (Schriftleitergesetz) further tightened his stranglehold on information, barring “non-Aryans” from working in journalism. Over the course of less than a year, Hitler had transformed Germany into a totalitarian state. His ability to control speech played a crucial role in enabling this. 

To attribute the Nazi Party’s ascent to unchecked free speech, then, is to misdiagnose the defining weakness of the Weimar Republic. It was not his freedom to speak that paved Hitler’s path to power, but the destruction of the rule of law and the state’s reluctance to reprimand Nazis for the tangible—not merely verbal—crimes they committed. While their rhetoric was stifled by the censors, the judiciary granted their violent actions a level of impunity that their political opponents were rarely afforded.

Consider the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, in which Hitler, together with more than 600 accomplices—including future Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess—staged a violent military coup in Munich that resulted in at least twenty deaths. Hitler was arrested and charged with high treason—an offence that, in most democratic countries, was punishable by life imprisonment or even death. Hitler was sentenced to a mere five years, of which he only served eight months, in a comfortable prison, where he enjoyed special privileges and received a steady stream of visitors. It was here that he wrote Mein Kampf. His co-conspirator, Rudolf Hess, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was released after only eight. Other co-conspirators received barely a slap on the wrist.

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By comparison, leftist uprisings such as the Spartacist revolt of 1919 were brutally crushed. Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were extrajudicially murdered by the Freikorps, a nationalist-aligned paramilitary unit. The judiciary, which was still dominated by conservative judges from the pre-Weimar era, routinely extended leniency towards right-wing extremists, while imposing harsh sentences on their left-wing counterparts.

Had the Weimar Republic upheld the rule of law and punished Nazi crimes with the severity they deserved, Hitler might have been stopped. Had he been sentenced to life in prison for treason, the trajectory of history could have been very different. But while the state’s draconian censorship laws targeted Nazi propaganda, they did little to diminish the Nazis’ capacity for violence.

The modern German state risks treading a similar path to its Weimar predecessor. The same poor instincts that led that government to ban Nazi publications and imprison propagandists are prompting a new campaign of censorship today.

Take the case of Martin Sellner, a prominent Austrian nationalist who is the leader of the pan-European Identitarian Movement. In March 2024, German authorities banned him from entering the country for three years, citing concerns over public order. The decision followed a speech he gave at a November 2023 gathering in Potsdam, in which he advocated “remigration,” i.e. the mass deportation of immigrants. The event, which was attended by representatives of the AfD and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parties, triggered nationwide protests. Critics condemned it as a veiled call for ethnic cleansing.

Sellner’s exclusion from Germany, however, only amplified his profile, fuelling resentment at government overreach and lending credibility to his claims that the state was trying to silence his inconvenient truths. As one user on X remarked, “Why, in 2024, are we acting like laws or constitutions are going to protect us? These tyrannical governments will just retroactively change the law to entrap people like Martin, who, btw, is like the world’s most jolly and kind fella.” 

The government’s actions quickly attracted international attention. As a direct result of the ban, Sellner gained a platform in the US and made a guest appearance on The War Room, Owen Shroyer’s popular show hosted by Alex Jones’s InfoWars network.

Likewise, in July 2024, the German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser officially banned Compact magazine (a German publication not to be confused the US magazine of the same name) and ordered a raid on editor-in-chief Jürgen Elsässer’s property, on the grounds that his magazine was a “central mouthpiece of the right-wing extremist scene,” which incited hatred against Jews and immigrants and sought to undermine parliamentary democracy. This ban galvanised right-wing factions worldwide, uniting them in opposition to what they see as the escalating persecution of dissent.

While the government has had some success in preventing far-right speech, far-right violence has surged to a worrying 1,136 recorded cases in 2024—many of which resulted in serious physical harm. In December 2024, a fifty-year-old doctor with ties to the AfD ploughed his car into the crowd at the Magdeburg Christmas market, killing at least five people and injuring over 200. In March 2025, five individuals were convicted of plotting to overthrow the government and kidnap the former health minister in a far-right coup.

As German authorities expand their nationwide speech crackdowns—raiding the homes of individuals merely suspected of posting hate speech online—we must ask: Have we learned nothing from Weimar? Have we forgotten how legal precedents set under one regime can empower another, should the political tide turn? And that turn is no longer merely theoretical, given the record-breaking support the AfD secured in this year’s federal election.

In their efforts to police speech in the name of protecting democracy, the Germans risk repeating the mistakes that doomed the Weimar Republic—fuelling radicalisation by lending credibility to claims of victimisation, making the censored seem like folk heroes fighting against a repressive state, and weakening the government’s own ability to know what people actually think and feel. In seeking to prevent history from repeating itself, today’s leaders may be unwittingly laying the groundwork for the resurgence of extremism. If democracy is to survive, it must not only stand against extremism but resist the temptation to mirror its tactics. The true measure of the strength of a democracy is not how good it is at silencing its foes, but how steadfastly it upholds its principles—especially when they are at their most inconvenient.