Thies Christophersen

Thies Christophersen (27 January 1918 – 13 February 1997) was a German neo-Nazi publisher, SS-officer, and pamphleteer of Holocaust denial literature. His activism, which included unabashed support of Nazi Germany and self-styled Reichstag meetings, are generally considered an early precursor to the Reichsbürger movement.

Early life Christophersen was born in Kiel to a farming family residing in Kälberhagen near Mohrkirch. After completing compulsory school attendance, he was trained in agriculture to become a full-time farmer.

Nazi Party In 1931, Christophersen joined Deutsches Jungvolk, a suborganisation of the Hitler Youth. On 25 October 1937, he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP number 4.765.641). In autumn 1939, Christophersen enlisted in the Wehrmacht to serve as a private on the Western Front during World War II, but he was removed from combat duty the following year due to a facial injury that left him with a "children's fist-sized" indentation at the nasal root. After reassignment to civil service in German-occupied Ukraine, Christophersen joined the Waffen-SS in 1943, where he received the rank of Sonderführer.

By 1944, Christophersen worked for the research department of the SS Main Office. In January of the same year, he was assigned to the natural rubber production program of , at the gardening sector of the livestock farm facility Rajsko, a subcamp of KZ Auschwitz, which was located three kilometres (1.9 mi) from the farming site. Staff identified Christophersen as a supervisor at the Russian dandelion greenhouses, where he frequently interacted with the roughly 300 female prisoners labouring as horticulturists, who had nicknamed him "Locher" ("hole puncher"). He personally picked several of them for the work during selection, as well as several Romani prisoners that would play music at his command. He did not, however, interact with the farmhands on the fields, who were frequently beaten on the spot for low productivity. He then insisted that, being in close proximity to the area, he would have been certain to identify mass killings and claimed that he never witnessed or was made aware of any such incidents. In a memoir, Christophersen wrote that he "experienced no atrocities or executions and neither [noticed] gas chambers nor flames from crematorium chimneys", describing his own stay as "pleasant". Although he never left Rajsko during his twelve-month station, in Die Auschwitz Lüge, he claimed to have toured the whole of Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Monowitz, and that prisoners were well-fed, sung while working, and that Jewish workers were dressed in "fancy stolen clothes". also publishing articles on farming as an agricultural journalist. During the 1950s, Christophersen successively joined and left several right-wing parties, initially the Christian democratic CDU party, then the national conservative German Party and briefly the neo-Nazi NPD party,

In 1965, Christophersen wrote and published the monthly polemic magazine Deutscher Bauer ("German Farmer"), which was politically aligned against the local CDU-majority farmer's league. Despite its small readership of some 2000 and locally limited circulation, the magazine was sold in 1968 on 17 June to Gerhard Frey, who published it as part of his extreme right newspaper Deutsche National-Zeitung. However, as Christophersen was now relegated to writing advertising material rather than opinion pieces, he filed a legal case against Frey on 14 November, which resulted in Christophersen getting fired. The case went on for a month until both parties withdrew on 31 December after a private settlement, though Christophersen continued to comment negatively on his business relation with Frey. In 1969, he handed control of his farm to his son and founded the brochure Die Bauernschaft ("The Farming Community"), in which Christophersen disseminated further Holocaust-denying material. The brochure was distributed through a self-owned publishing house, Kritik-Verlag, and book trader, Nordwind. In his writings, Christophersen denounced the German constitution, accused guest workers of "weaponizing their natural fertility" and called for the establishment of a Fourth Reich.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he forged close contacts, both domestically and internationally, with other proponents of the "Auschwitz lie" such as Udo Walendy, Robert Faurisson, David Irving, Otto Ernst Remer, and Florentine Rost van Tonningen, and with Stille Hilfe ("Silent Help"), an organisation assisting neo-Nazi activists. Christophersen appeared as a witness in the trial of Ernst Zündel in Canada.

In July 1972, Christophersen gained national attention after he publicly dumped a truckload of manure at the gates of the Fridericianum in Kassel to protest the documenta 5 exhibit being hosted there. He criticised the display as "western decadence" and a "waste of government funds", proclaiming his opposition to "the public advancement of women" and advertised his brochure Die Bauernschaft.

On 23 May 1975, Christophersen, together with Manfred Roeder, organised a rally at in Flensburg, which was attended by around 60 supporters. The date had been chosen because it coincided with the 30th anniversary on which the remaining Nazi leadership, including Karl Dönitz, the head of state after Hitler's suicide, surrendered to arrest by Allied forces. Christophersen had received a notice by city officials that such a gathering would be forbidden due to its unconstitutional nature, but Christophersen claimed that he wanted to wait until the rally began to inform his followers. During the rally, Christophersen proclaimed that the current administration was illegitimate and that he considered Karl Dönitz, who had since been released from prison and retired without further political involvement, the true reigning leader, claiming his arrest by the Allies was unlawful. Christophersen went on to say that he and his constituents were the follow-up government under Dönitz, the self-named "Reichstag zu Flensburg", which he said had regularly assembled under feigned book meetings. The rally was picketed by progressive counter-protesters who chanted "Nazis out", to which Christophersen's crowd chanted "Down with the democrats, down with the red scum". Christophersen's rally originally intended to march to Mürwik Naval School, where Dönitz and his entourage were arrested after the war, but prevented by the counter-protest and police. The right-wing protesters sang Germany's national anthem, including the usually omitted first and second stanza, and began lighting torches and burning the flags of the United States and the United Kingdom. Police subsequently broke up the rally, taking Christophersen and Roeder into custody for a few hours before releasing them. In 1980, he was charged alongside Michael Kühnen with Volksverhetzung related to Nazi apologist material but the proceedings were halted against Christophersen. Christophersen needed to be escorted off the premises when security caught him attempting to urinate on the court building's wall. Both men received financial backing from regional neo-Nazi organisations. He described German judicial processes against him as "persecution for one's beliefs, just like the first Christians". Danish authorities were unwilling to extradite Christophersen since he had a valid residency permit and had applied for political asylum. Despite repeated communications between Germany and Denmark, Christophersen spent the next 10 years in the country. Attempts to stage right-wing rallys were denied by local government councils. Fearing that this might lead to his extradition, as he had never been granted asylum nor have Danish citizenship, Christophersen left Kollund in April 1995 due to complaints by locals. He stayed on the island Fünen for a month before leaving Denmark trevelling through Europe for the rest of the year. He moved to the United Kingdom, then Belgium before settling in Switzerland, from where he was deported in early 1996. After spending a few months in Spain, he was forced to return to Germany, where he was arrested in late January 1997. Christophersen faced trial for his 1986 charges, but was judged to be unfit for detention due to his advanced age and poor health.

Personal life and death Christophersen married his wife Edith Tenzler (1909–2001) on 20 April 1943, having planned the date in advance to coincide with Adolf Hitler's birthday. The couple had two sons, both of whom were deceased by 2022.

Christophersen died on 13 February 1997 at Henry Dunant-Heim senior facility in Molfsee, less than two weeks after his appearance in court. Christophersen's obituary, written by the Free German Workers' Party, used a variation of the phrase, "Ewig lebt der Toten Tatenruhm" ("The glory of the dead lives forever"),

Christophersen and the "Auschwitz Lie" The widely known phrase "Auschwitz lie" (German Auschwitzlüge) can be traced to Christophersen, whose 1973 book of that name disputed the existence of gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The book, "Auschwitz lie" was first published in German in 1973 under the title Die Auschwitz Lüge. The first English edition appeared in 1974 under the title The Auschwitz Lie. In August 1979, it was published in a completely revised and supplemented new edition. The brochure sold around 100,000 legal copies and continued circulation after its ban.

Along with Christophersen's own writings, that book also contains further contributions and forewords from other Holocaust deniers, including the former lawyer and convicted violent criminal Manfred Roeder (classified as a terrorist in Germany) and the former judge Wilhelm Stäglich. Since 1993 the book has been included on a list of materials that may not be distributed to young people, as ruled by Germany's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons, due to its Holocaust-denying content. The foreword by Manfred Roeder was characterised by that department as inflammatory anti-Semitic propaganda, which constitutes an infringement of Germany's Volksverhetzung law (incitement to hatred). Roeder rescinded his foreword in 1980 after being tried for a fatal fire bombing in Hamburg, with Christophersen commenting in Die Bauernschaft that Roeder had "crumbled to pressure" from judicial authorities.