A 66-year-old German man has been given a suspended three-month prison sentence for hate speech after he distributed leaflets in his town calling migrants “parasites”.
The pensioner, referred to as Wilfried M. in local media, admitted to the crime and claimed he regretted his actions. According to prosecutors, on July 31, 2016 Wilfried handed out laminated leaflets that said,”Refugees go home” and “You are parasites” in the town of Werther, North Rhine-Westphalia, reports local paper Westfalen-Blatt.
“That was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” said the 66-year-old who is retired and lives on the government’s Hartz IV benefit system. The court said that despite his admission, he was still guilty of “incitement to the people” and gave the man the minimum sentence of 3 months in prison suspended for a three-year period.
Prosecutors also noted the leaflets had been found in the area of a local asylum home, but the pensioner denied having placed them there, saying he had only put up fliers in the area around the Kreissparkasse cash machines and in the area between Ravensberger Strasse and the Netto Markt supermarket.
The pensioner said he had put up the leaflets in response to the way new asylum seekers behaved in the small town, which is home to around eleven and a half thousand people. According to Wilfried, the asylum seekers he saw in Werther were “disrespectful, demanding, and ungrateful”.
The lawyer for the defendant, Kerstin Koch,…