By FOIA Research on

Manuel Ochsenreiter (1976-2021) was a German far-right journalist and editor, known for his close Russian ties, particularly to the orbit around the Russian fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin.

From an early age he was politically active in the youth wing of the conservative CDU party, and became a frequent contributor of the New Right weekly Junge Freiheit. Between 2004 to 2011, he was the editor-in-chief of Dietmar Munier's Deutsche Militärzeitschrift ("German Military Magazine," DMZ). From 2009 onward, Ochsenreiter was also the editor-in-chief of the far-right journal Zuerst!, a successor to Nation Europa (1951-2009), a central organ of the Nazi diaspora after WWII.

It is not quite clear how Ochsenreiter made the acquaintance with Dugin, but ever since the early 2010s he appeared with figures associated with him. These contacts intensified following the Crimean crisis. Between 2015 to 2017, Ochsenreiter contributed articles to the Katehon think tank of the ultra-Orthodox Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.1 He was a frequent guest on TV shows by the Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik, predominantly on their respective international versions.2

In the late 2010s, Ochsenreiter appeared in the orbit of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. He spoke at several party events, and was the scientific advisor of the AfD MP Markus Frohnmaier from September 2018 until January 2019.3 He lost his post when in 2019 his involvement in a false-flag attack in Western Ukraine was established: an arson attack on a Hungarian cultural center that should be blamed on Ukrainian nationalists.4 Subsequently, his name also appeared in an investigation by the BBC and other newspapers in regards to documents that link him to Russian influence campaigns.5

In August 2021, he unexpectedly died in Moscow as a result of a heart attack, and was survived by his wife and two sons.

Timeline

1990s

Manuel Ochsenreiter was born in 1976 in the Southern German Allgäu region, and raised as a Catholic. Already in 1994, when he was still in high school, he frequently contributed articles to the New Right weekly Junge Freiheit,6 for which he wrote for over a decade.

In 1995, he was one of the authors of the anthology Wir 89er, edited by Roland Bubik, in which twelve representatives of a generation of New Right proponents presented their political goals in opposition to those of the '68 movement.7 As a result, in the same year Ochsenreiter was interviewed by the public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk,6 and in the magazine Focus.7

In his early years, Ochsenreiter was an active member of the Witikobund ("Witiko Union"),8 a völkisch association of Sudenten Germans, which is classified as right-wing extremist by the German interior ministry.9 Although the Witiko Union seems not to have played a major role in Ochsenreiter's late activities, membership is basically for life, since according to the Union's credo "The one who betrays the ancient duties today, will betray the ones to come."10

At a young age, he joined the Young Union (Junge Union), the youth wing of the Christian conservative CDU party. Within the Young Union Ochsenreiter founded the "Conservative Awakening" (Konservativer Aufbruch) faction in 1995.11 Strategically positioning himself in the right-wing camp, he also became a member of the "Christian-Conservative Germany Forum" (Christlich-Konservatives Deutschland-Forum, CKDF), close to the CDU, for which he served as deputy state chairman of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria.12

After his high school degree in 1996,13 he attended the military service, and up from 1999, studied communication and marketing in Berlin at the private "Institute for Marketing and Communication" (IMK), from which he graduated as a marketing communications specialist.14 13 During his studies he joined a dueling fraternity, the Burschenschaft der Märker ("Fraternity of the Margraviate"), and remained a member the rest of his life. Most recently, he held the rank of Alter Herr ("Old gentleman") in the fraternity.13 His fraternity had close ties to Junge Freiheit, for example it hosted the weekly's summer festival in 2003.

2000s

Ochsenreiter was one of the youngest editors of the weekly Junge Freiheit15 in Berlin and headed the "Zeitgeist & Lebensart" department.16 Because of the newspaper's austerity measures, he first left it in 1998, but later rejoined.17

Thorsten Thaler, deputy editor-in-chief of Junge Freiheit, sees Ochsenreiter's "merits" in his contributions on Islamism and left-wing radicalism.12 In the jubilee volume of Junge Freiheit, Ochsenreiter was described by the New Right ideologue Götz Kubitschek as a "primary rock"18 of the weekly. Ochsenreiter also contributed to other German far-right journals, such as Sezession, which is also ascribed to the New Right, as well as eigentümlich frei.19

Ochsenreiter edited Dietmar Munier’s Deutsche Militärzeitschrift (DMZ) from 2004 until February 2011, which openly glorifies the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. Dietmar Munier (*1954) is the owner of a far-right publishing empire. He is CEO and co-owner of the publishing house Lesen & Schenken, which comprises other publishers such as ARNDT, Orion-Heimreiter, Bonus and Pour le Mérite. According to estimates by the Schleswig-Holstein constitution protection authority and the Federal Government, the Arndt publishing house and its affiliates is one of the most well-known publishers of the right-wing extremist spectrum.20

Arndt’s subsidiary Bonus published one of Alexander Dugin’s books “Conflicts of the Future - The Return of Geopolitics."21 The appendix contains several interviews between Ochsenreiter and Alexander Dugin, covering topics such as the Syrian crisis, the confrontation between Putin and the West, the Ukrainian Civil War and the NSA scandal. Manuel Ochsenreiter called Dugin a “long-standing and fatherly friend."22

2009

From December 2009 onward, Ochsenreiter acted as the editor-in-chief of the far-right journal Zuerst!, a successor to the Nazi journal Nation Europa, published from 1951 until the end of 2009. The extremist former editor of Nation Europa, Harald Neubauer, has continued as a regular columnist of Zuerst!. According to a 2019 study on contacts between the Russian and the German far-right recounts Nation Europa's history as follows:3

The magazine was founded in 1951 by former SS Sturmbannführer and Chief of Anti-Partisan Warfare Arthur Erhardt and the Nazi poet and former SA Obersturmführer Herbert Böhme. An important contributor was Karl-Heinz Priester, former director of Kraft durch Freude, a large state-operated leisure organisation in Nazi Germany. After the war, he became involved in the neo-fascist circles around the European Social Movement. A close collaborator of notorious Nazi intelligence asset Otto Skorzeny, who was living in hiding in Francoist Spain at the time, Priester attempted to utilise the magazine Nation Europa to promote the idea of an ethno-pluralistic united Europe, a ‘Nation Europa’, ideas that today resonate in the Identitarian movement. Other eminent figures of Nation Europa included former SS Obersturmbannführer Helmut Sündermann, one of the most senior national- socialist journalists, and important propagandists of the Third Reich, as well as Gottlob Berger, notorious former SS Obergruppenführer and general of the Waffen-SS.

2010s

2011

In 2011, Ochsenreiter can be seen with a Hezbollah official.23

2012

In 2012, Ochsenreiter appeared on the anti-Semitic New Horizon Conference in Teheran, Iran. Other participants were "Hands Off Syria Coalition steering committee member Issa Chaer," Thierry Meyssan, "World Workers Party member Caleb Maupin, Alt Right journalist Tim Pool, Holocaust denier Kevin Barrett, and Duginists like Voltaire Network associate Mateusz Piskorski, German editor Manuel Ochsenreiter, Leonid Savin, and Claudio Mutti the leading fascist infiltrator of the Campo Antimperialista."24

The conference brought thus together cross-front agitators with important figures from the far-right neo-Eurasianist milieu. The Russian guest of the conference, Leonid Savin, is editor-in-chief of Konstantin Malofeev's Katehon think tank. From 2013-2016 Savin was publishing the Journal of Eurasian Affairs, on whose advisory board Piskorski and Dugin were listed, and which hosted articles by i.a. Ochsenreiter as well as Claudio Mutti.25

2014

In March 2014, Ochsenreiter appeared among a delegation of election observers in the Russia-annexed Crimea. Besides Ochsenreiter, it included "Hikmat Al-Sabty, Torsten Koplin (former Stasi informant), Piotr Luczak and Monika Merk of the Left Party."26 On March 17, 2014, Ochsenreiter appeared on an edition of the RT talk show Cross Talk entitled “Welcome Crimea!," where he compared the Crimea invasion to the reunification of Germany.27

On June 22, 2014, Ochsenreiter took part in a far-right conference called “Identitarian Ideas VI,” hosted by the Swedish far-right think-tank Motpol ("Antithesis") and the Swedish far-right periodical Nationell Idag ("National Today"). The historian Anton Shekhovtsov reported:28

At this conference, Austrian identitarian ideologue Markus Willinger presented his new book Europa der Vaterländer (Europe of Fatherlands); Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of the far right magazine Zuerzt! (First), was talking about geopolitics of the crises in Ukraine, Syria and Kosovo; while Patrik Forsén of the Swedish right-wing extremist Nordisk Ungdom (Nordic Youth), John Morgan of Arktos, Patrik Ehn from Nationell Idag, Eva Charlotta Johansson from Motpol, and Manuel Ochsenreiter discussed Ukraine, Russia and the United States.

In October 2014, Ochsenreiter appeared at the anti-Semitic New Horizon Conference in Teheran, Iran, alongside Mateusz Piskorski, Claudio Mutti and Leonid Savin. The conference was hosted by Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein, who can also be seen with Ochsenreiter in an Iranian TV transmission.29

There are several pictures available from that event. One shows Ochsenreiter with Mateusz Piskorski at the conference.23

In October 2014, Ochsenreiter appeared at the anti-Semitic New Horizon Conference in Teheran, Iran, alongside Mateusz Piskorski.

Another photo from Teheran shows Ochsenreiter together with Leonid Savin holding up a flag sporting the "Eurasianist" symbol.

A third picture from Teheran was posted by the "Eurasian Artist Association," and includes Ochsenreiter, Mutti, and Savin.30

On November 5, 2014, the Eurasian Artists Association posted a picture on Facebook with Ochsenreiter and Dragana Trifkovic with members of the "Unite Continental Brigade."31 The latter is presumably the volunteer group Unité Continentale, which has been fighting among Russian separatist forces in Ukraine, and is made up of French, Serbian and Brazilian volunteers.32 Trifkovic is the director of the Center for Geostrategic Studies (CGS), a Russian/Serbian think tank with subsidiaries in Moscow and Belgrade, which has been running pro-Russian influence campaigns in Europe.33 The Facebook post was shared by Alexander Dugin.34

In November 2014 Martin Sellner and Alexander Markovics were introducing the Identitarian Movement Austria in a detailed interview by e Zuerst!.35

On November 28, 2014, the Eurasian Artists Association posted a picture with Ochsenreiter and Vona Gabor, leader of the Hungarian Jobbik party in Budapest.36

The same day, another picture was posted on the Facebook page of Ochsenreiter with Roberto Quaglia and Leonid Savin on the Red Square in Moscow.37

2015

During a RT show from January 20, 2015, the RT reporter Tim Kirby, obviously enthusiastic about Ochsenreiter, questioned him humorously about official German government concerns that Zuerst! was lobbying to abolish the country’s anti-Nazi laws.38

In March 2015, Alexander Dugin was invited to a readers meeting by Ochsenreiter's Zuerst! magazine.39

In June 2015 Ochsenreiter appeared in Warsaw at a discussion panel titled “Poland and Germany in the era of US hegemony: together or against each other?.” Pictures of the event show i.a. a flag with crossed machine guns behind the speakers.

Left to right: Bartosz Bekier, Mateusz Piskorski, Manuel Ochsenreiter, and Michał Prokopowicz at the “House of Polish-Russian friendship” in Warsaw, June 2015. Photo: Anton Shekhovtsov / Twitter.

Image Source
http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/01/09/organized-b…

On August 14, 2015, the Eurasian Artists Association posted a picture with Ochsenreiter and the Russian visual artist Alexey Guintovt holding up a flag with the Eurasianist symbol.40

Presumably during the same trip in August 2015, the Eurasian Artists Association posted a picture or Manuel Ochsenreiter with the daughter of Alexander Dugin, Daria Dugina.41

In 2015, Ochsenreiter appeared at a conference in Moscow organized by the organization Euro-Rus of the Belgian neo-Nazi Kris Roman. The other foreign speakers included three Syrians and the Serbian Dragana Trifkovic of the CGS.42 Roman’s network has shown some overlaps with the one of Ochsenreiter. For example, in 2018 they had the following Facebook friends in common : Andreas Maurer, Andrey Afanasyev, Dimitri Rempel, Emmanuel Leroy, Iurie Rosca, Leonid Savin, Andrey Iryschkow, Konstantin Dobrilovic, and Tim Kirby.

Facebook post by Dragana Trifkovic (Драгана Трифковић), October 14, 2015.

Image Source
http://archive.is/4FUo0

2016

In spring 2016, Mateusz Piskorski, Manuel Ochsenreiter, Markus Frohnmaier, the chairman of the AfD youth organization, and spokesman of AfD deputy chairman Alice Weidel, and the Thuringian AfD MP Thomas Rudy registered a German branch of Piskorski's European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, the Deutsches Zentrum für Eurasische Studien (German Center for Eurasian Studies, GCES),43 at the district court Berlin-Charlottenburg. Its website names both geopolitika.rs and the Journal of Eurasian Affairs as cooperation partners.44

Despite Piskorski’s detention in May 2016 by Poland’s Internal Security Agency, the Berlin association under Ochsenreiter started its activities. It was around that time, the Eurasia Artists Association posted a picture with Alexander Dugin and Ochsenreiter. Dugin is holding a German translation of one of his books in his hand.45

In July and September 2016, Ochsenreiter was sent to "observance missions" to Donetsk and Lugansk, where he corroborated that the primaries were not violating any provisions of the Minsk Agreement.46 With him were the AfD MPs Thomas Rudy and Udo Stein. The event was also reported on the Katehon website.47

According to Ochsenreiter, the GCES became practically inactive and destitute after the arrest of his friend and business partner Piskorski. Its co-founder Thomas Rudy, however, affirmed the association was kept on receiving donations.

2017

Between 2017 and 2018, Ochsenreiter contributed to the Swedish far-right weekly Nyd Tider, edited by the Czechoslovakia-born Vávra Suk.48

In February 2017, Ochsenreiter appeared at the Isticharia Round Table (Advisory Committee for Strategic Studies and Communication founded by Lebanese Iman Rizk) under the headline "Donald Trump’s Middle East Policy."49

On February 2, 2017, he appeared on an AfD event in Gotha, together with AfD MP Robby Schlund, where the two held up a Novorossiya flag.50 The event was also reported on Konstantin Malofeev's Katehon website.51

Anne Applebaum et al. in their study "Make Germany Great Again" mentioned a high-level meeting between representatives of European far-right parties, attended by a high-ranking member of the Russian Communist Party as well as Manuel Ochsenreiter:

In April 2017, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Alexander Yushchenko, attended an anti-sanctions conference organized by the AfD in Freiberg. It was a gathering of the European far right, with members of the following parties present: Austrian FPÖ, Belgian Vlaams Belang, Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy, Italian Lega Nord. The AfD was represented at a high level by Alexander Gauland. The influential right-wing journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of the German magazine Zuerst! was also present.52

In April 2017, Ochsenreiter appeared together with the (in the meantime killed) daughter of the Russian fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin, Daria Dugina, as well as Andrew Kovalenko. On April 25, 2017, a certain Igor Starkov posted a picture on Facebook saying: “Manuel came to visit” (Мануэль в гости заходил). In the room hung banners with skull motives with the slogan "Orthodoxy or Death - Orthodoxy and 'Fanatos'" (Православие или смерть - Ортодоксия и Ѳанатос).53

Although the name of the group behind the flag could not be identified, the motive seems to be a modified version of a military flag used by Chetnik detachments of the Yugoslav Army, which formed during the war against the Turks in 1876-1878. Later, Chetnik detachments fought i.a. under Hitler and Mussolini in WWII. The original version of the flag says: "For king and fatherland; freedom or death."

Two Russians connected to the Belgian neo-Nazi Kris Roman and the AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier, with whom Ochsenreiter would develop particularly close contacts, seem to have contact to people associated with the unknown group which identifies with the skull flag.54

In July 2017, Ochsenreiter took part in a discussion round by the People’s Council of the Donetsk People’s Republic foreign affairs committee alongside the Belgian Kris Roman.55

2018

On February 6, 2018, Ochsenreiter appeared as a speaker at an event of the far-right party AfD in Niedersachsen, which advertised Zuerst! in the event teaser.

In April 2018, Ochsenreiter was speaking at a conference organized by the far-right think tank Institut für Staatspolitik ("Institute for State Policy"), considered the most important ideological forge of the German far right. The topic of the talk was “Russia, USA, Europe. On Sovereignty and Hegemony."

Manuel Ochsenreiter speaking at a conference organized by the far-right think tank Institut für Staatspolitik on April 14, 2018.

Russian far-right agent provocateur, Maria Katasanova, met with Manuel Ochsenreiter and Andrew Kovalenko, according to her Facebook post from April 24, 2018. The photo is subtitled "Russian-German team - Our people are everywhere."56

Katasanova made headlines in 2016, when she was holding up the by now famous triptych of Putin, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump during a press conference. In March 2017, she met with Marine Le Pen to deliver a personal copy of the triptych. There she dropped the line: “We do everything we can to support you on the internet.”57

Katasonova, then 23, was at the time an assistant of Yevgeny Fyodorov of the United Russia party, a member of the Rodina party,58 and involved in the “National Liberation Movement,” for which she served as poster child.59

She was also actively collaborating with Konstantin Rykov,60 said to be the éminence grise behind the social media campaigns in favour of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, as well as the political smear campaigns against Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron.61

A picture from May 9, 2018, shows Ochsenreiter together with Kris Roman at a conference organized by the far-right Belgian publisher De Blauwe Tijger in Antwerp.62

Manuel Ochsenreiter and Kris Roman at a conference in May 2018 organized by De Blauwe Tijger in Antwerp. With Koen Merel, Yorick Van de Weyer, Louis Francis, Stephan Patrick, Robin Vandenberghe, Marko Jelić, and Tom Zwitser.

Image Source
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=102164133…

In mid-May 2018, Ochsenreiter appeared at a ceremony in Donbass together with the Linke politician Andreas Maurer, laying down flowers at a memorial to the dead residents.63

In September 2018, Ochsenreiter led an interview with the French far-right lawyer Élie Hatem entitled "The project of world chaos."64

2019

In early 2019 reports appeared that connected Ochsenreiter with a false-flag arson attack on a Hungarian cultural center in Western Ukraine to be blamed on Ukrainian nationalists. According to an article by the German public broadcaster tagesschau.de65 :

In the early hours of February 4, 2018, two hooded men had set fire to the facade of a cultural center of the Hungarian minority in the Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod and left Nazi symbols on the building. The act, which was documented by a surveillance camera, was apparently intended to appear as if Ukrainian neo-Nazis had attacked the Hungarian minority in the country. This was presumably intended to strain relations between Hungary and Ukraine ...

Only a short time later, the alleged perpetrators were identified: the two Poles Adrian M. and Tomasz S. had entered Ukraine shortly before under their real names. M. and S. confessed to the crime and named the right-wing extremist Pole Michal P. as their client. P. is a member of the Polish far-right group "Falanga." P. is also a defendant in Krakow - and has confessed. He testified in court that Ochsenreiter had incited him to commit the crime and paid him a total of 1,500 euros. Ochsenreiter had given detailed instructions on how the arson attack, which is considered a terrorist attack in Poland, was to be carried out. According to the report, it was particularly important to Ochsenreiter that burn marks be visible on the facade. In addition, he demanded a video of the scorched facade to be sent to him via the messenger service Telegram, Michal P. claims. When he saw the effects of the attack, Ochsenreiter would have written to P., "More than enough," according to the files. Three days after the attack, Michal P. claims to have met Ochsenreiter in a restaurant at Berlin's Tegel airport. Ochsenreiter handed him 1000 euros in five 200-euro bills in a book, after he had already sent him 500 euros inside a book to Poland.

Not long afterwards, Ochsenreiter made headlines again when a document was leaked to the BBC, of which he apparently was the author, and that placed him in the context of a Russian influence campaign.5 According to a BBC documentary, the document was entitled "Frohnmaier election campaign - Action plan (Draft)," relating to the MP of the far-right AfD party, Markus Frohnmaier5 :

What it apparently shows is someone writing on behalf of Mr. Frohnmaier's campaign. "For the election campaign we urgently would need some support," the latter states, and it goes on: "Besides material support we would need media support as well. Any type of interviews, reports and opportunities to appear in the Russian media is helpful," it says.

An undated photo shown in the documentary shows Ochsenreiter with Sargis Mirzakhanian, alleged Russian liaison to AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier.

It must have been sometime after the BBC interview that Ochsenreiter left Germany. At the time, he was the subject of an extradition request from the Polish prosecutor's office, standing accused of being involved in the organization of the terrorist attack in Ukraine.66

From September 20-26, 2019, Ochsenreiter took party in the antisemitic New Horizon Conference (NHC) in Beirut, Teheran, which brought together an illustrious group of fascist ideologues, among them Alexander Dugin, Tobias Pfennig, Emmanuel Leroy and Leonid Savin.67 Most of the speeches are available on the New Horizon YouTube channel.68

2020s

2020

As of April 2020, Ochsenreiter's whereabouts were unknown, but he continued his work as editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine Zuerst!.69 He also started a podcast, "The Good People" (Die Guten Menschen),70 together with the Polish Mateusz Piskorski, who was released on bail in May 2019, after having been imprisoned in 2016 because of spying for Russia.71

In late September 2020, Ochsenreiter led an interview with David Babayan for Konstantin Malofeev's Katehon website, the international relations advisor to the "President of the Artsakh Republic" (also called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic), a breakaway state in the South Caucasus supported by Armenia, whose territory is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.72 Conflicts had erupted there in late September 2020 (2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war) most likely with an Azerbaijani offensive code-named Operation Iron Fist (Azerbaijani: Dəmir Yumruq əməliyyatı), with the primary goal of reclaiming the districts of southern Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan was supported by Turkey in the operation, while the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh had backing from Armenia. It was the latest escalation of an unresolved conflict over the region that reaches back to the end of WWI.

The makers of the extreme right-wing magazine Arcadi were in contact with Ochsenreiter back then, since they published an interview with him on November 13, 2020, in which Ochsenreiter presented his views on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.73

2021

In May 2021, Ochsenreiter appeared as an interview partner on the TV show MidEaStream, aired by the Iranian PressTV, discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict. At the beginning of the interview the host, Marwa Osman, stated that Ochsenreiter was back in Berlin, Germany.74 In the interview he ostensibly took a pro-Palestinian stance, a phenomenon widespread among extreme anti-Semites, such as Ochsenreiter, who would backed any force that weakens Israel. It would be erroneous to assume he did so out of truly pro-Palestinian sympathies.

It was reported that Manuel Ochsenreiter died unexpectedly from a heart attack on August 18, 2021, in Moscow, where he spent most of his time from 2019 onward, according to Zuerst!.75 Who will take over as editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine has not transpired yet.

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