Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Germany Made Insults a Crime. The First Amendment Is the Better Bargain.

When German police began raiding homes over online posts in 2025, the law was working exactly as designed. The First Amendment is the reason no American government can do the same.

At 6:01 on a Tuesday morning, six armed officers walked into an apartment in northwest Germany, searched it, and carried out a laptop and a phone. CBS cameras were rolling for a 60 Minutes segment that aired in February 2025. The suspected offense was not a robbery or a fraud. It was a post — a racist cartoon, prosecutors said. At the same hour, more than fifty similar raids ran across the country, part of a coordinated push to police what Germans say online.

Americans watched that footage and recoiled, and they were right to. The part worth understanding is that nothing malfunctioned. Germany did not stumble into raiding homes over speech. It wrote the law that makes insulting another person a crime, built the machinery to enforce it, and pointed that machinery at the internet. Germans are not uniquely authoritarian, and that is not the lesson. The lesson is simpler and more uncomfortable: once a government claims the power to punish disrespect, the only questions left are who wields it and whom they decide to protect.

What the statute says

In Germany, insulting someone is a criminal offense. The provision is Section 185 of the Strafgesetzbuch, the federal penal code, under the plain heading Beleidigung, “insult.” It punishes a statement of contempt or disrespect directed at another person. A simple insult carries up to a year in prison or a fine. Commit it publicly, in a gathering, or by spreading it as content, whether a post, a meme, or a broadcast, and the ceiling doubles to two years.

Two features make this stranger to American eyes than it first looks. There is no requirement that the insult be false. Unlike American defamation, which turns on a false statement of fact, Beleidigung reaches pure opinion, a value judgment that demeans. And it does not require an audience; German courts have held the offense can be complete even when the insult is delivered straight to its target with nobody else present. It is usually prosecuted only when the victim files a complaint, and most cases end in fines rather than cells. But the principle stands on its own: the disrespect itself is the crime.

None of this contradicts the German constitution. The Basic Law guarantees freedom of expression in Article 5, then, in the same article, says that right finds its limits in the general laws, in protections for young people, and in the right to personal honor. Honor is not a stray notion in German law. It is a protected legal interest with roots in the nineteenth century, and the insult statute exists to defend it. German police logged more than 200,000 insult complaints in a single recent year, by one tally. This is not a dead letter on a dusty page.

A crime that became a diplomatic tool

To see why handing the state this power is dangerous, look at the last time a German insult law collided with a thin-skinned head of state. In 2016 the satirist Jan Böhmermann read a deliberately obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on German television, daring the line between satire and abuse. Erdoğan filed a complaint, and not only under Section 185 but under Section 103, an old “lèse-majesté” provision that gave foreign heads of state extra protection and carried up to three years in prison, five for a slanderous insult.

Here is the detail that should stop you. Section 103 required the German government’s permission before prosecutors could proceed. So the question of whether a comedian could be charged for mocking a foreign autocrat landed on the desk of Chancellor Angela Merkel, at a moment when she needed Turkey’s cooperation on migration. Her government granted the consent, then announced it would scrap the law. Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the idea of lèse-majesté belonged to a bygone era and had no place in modern criminal law. The repeal of Section 103 took effect on January 1, 2018.

Good that it is gone. But notice what the episode exposed. An insult law does not stay in its lane. It becomes a weapon: for the offended, for the powerful, for a government weighing a prosecution against a diplomatic favor. The broader insult statute, Section 185, is still on the books, and it reaches every ordinary citizen the comedian’s special provision never touched.

Pointing the machinery at the internet

Germany did not stop at the statute. In 2017 it passed the Network Enforcement Act, known as NetzDG, which forced large social platforms to delete “manifestly unlawful” content within 24 hours and other illegal content within a week, or face fines reaching 50 million euros. The covered categories included public insults and defamation. The law conscripted private companies as fast, fear-driven censors, deputized to scrub posts the state had defined as criminal. Most of NetzDG was repealed in 2024 and folded into the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which now governs platform takedowns across the bloc. Same logic, far larger jurisdiction.

That is the backdrop to the raids. When the prosecutors interviewed by 60 Minutes confirmed that insulting someone online is a crime, and that the fine can run higher online than in person because the audience is bigger, they were not describing an exotic edge case. They were describing routine enforcement. One prosecutor said targets are often shocked to learn their posts broke the law, and that Germans have free speech “but it also has its limits.”

The German argument, taken seriously

The case for all this is not stupid, and pretending otherwise is lazy. Germany built its postwar order on the memory of where unchecked dehumanizing speech can lead. The same chapter of the penal code that bans insult also bans Volksverhetzung, incitement to hatred against groups, and Germans treat that statute as a firewall against the kind of propaganda that softened a country up for genocide. Their constitutional tradition calls it militant democracy: a system willing to deny its enemies the tools they would use to destroy it. A swastika is illegal there; so is Holocaust denial. The insult statute sits at the mild end of that same protective instinct, and Germans largely accept the trade.

There is also a real argument about who ends up silenced. Defenders of the laws say that without limits, a small number of aggressive voices can drown out and intimidate everyone else, and that protecting honor is partly about protecting an ordinary person’s ability to speak at all. That is a serious claim, not a throwaway one. A comment section ruled by its cruelest participant is not a free marketplace of ideas either. The German bet is that a careful state, staffed by reasonable prosecutors and supervised by sober courts, can draw the line between protected criticism and punishable abuse and be trusted to hold it. For Germany, with its history, the bet is at least understandable.

Why America refused the deal

The United States made the opposite bet and wrote it into the First Amendment. There is no American crime of “insult.” Offensive speech — crude, hateful, disrespectful, wounding — is protected unless it crosses into a narrow set of unprotected categories: a true threat, incitement to imminent lawless action, or defamation built on a false statement of fact. Calling someone a moron is not a crime here. Neither is mocking a president, a general, or a god.

The Supreme Court has held that line at its ugliest edge. In Snyder v. Phelps, decided 8 to 1 in 2011, the Court ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church’s vile picketing near a Marine’s funeral was protected speech on a matter of public concern, however cruel. In Matal v. Tam, a unanimous 2017 decision, it struck down a federal rule that withheld trademark protection from “disparaging” names, calling it forbidden viewpoint discrimination. The government does not get to penalize an idea because officials find it offensive. The through-line is a refusal to let the state appoint itself referee of which opinions are too insulting to be spoken.

That refusal is not comfortable. It means the Phelps clan gets to scream at grieving parents and the bigot gets to post his cartoon. The American answer is that the alternative is worse. A government that can jail you for contempt is a government that will eventually decide its contempt for you is the contempt that counts.

The local stake

This is not a faraway problem with no bearing on New Hampshire. The impulse Germany wrote into law, that the state should police speech it deems harmful or disrespectful, is alive here: in fights over what teachers may say about race under divisive-concepts rules, over which mugshots get published, over which protests draw a permit and which draw a citation. Every one of those fights runs on the same premise, that some authority should decide which speech is too offensive to allow. Germany shows where the premise goes once it is written into criminal law and handed to a police department.

The German drafters were not monsters. That is the whole point. You do not need bad people to build a speech-crime regime. You need good people certain they can be trusted with the power, and a public willing to let them hold it. “Insult” has no fixed edges; it expands to fit whoever is offended and contracts to spare whoever is in charge. The First Amendment’s wager is that we are safer enduring the loudmouth than empowering the censor. The raids in northwest Germany are what the other wager looks like at 6:01 in the morning.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every load-bearing legal claim above was checked against primary sources (the German Criminal Code, the Basic Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court opinions) before publication; see the fact-check table. Two items are marked ATTRIBUTED: the 60 Minutes raid details, which rest on CBS’s reporting and transcript excerpts rather than court records, and the 200,000-complaint figure, reported by a secondary outlet and not independently verified against the official statistic. German statutory penalties reflect current law; the repealed § 103 is discussed as history. This piece is reported from documentary and published sources and carries no on-the-record German legal sources, a limitation noted here in the interest of candor. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.