EIt was the unusual cracks in the floor tiles of a veterinarian’s practice that led the “Stern” reporter Tina Kaiser to trace Attila Hildmann. Since the summer he had been hiding a hundred kilometers east of Istanbul in the inconspicuous small town of Kartepe – in a place where neither tourists nor strangers stray. Unless they are determined to find the conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier Hildmann, who has been under international arrest warrants since February 2021 for incitement to hatred.
When Hildmann left his house with his dogs at ten a.m. a few days ago, as he does every morning, Kaiser and a television crew from “Stern” were waiting for him. After a moment of shock, he switched to autopilot and unwound his well-known conspiracy theories, Kaiser describes the meeting in a podcast.
Again he said what he was wanted for with an arrest warrant: The Jews were to blame for everything, Corona was an invention of the Jews, the vaccine should kill us, the Ukraine war was also an invention of the Jews with the aim of deindustrializing Germany.
It is unclear whether Hildmann has since looked for a new hiding place. On Monday he put a video from the balcony of his house in his private chat group, Kaiser continues. Apparently he lived alone in the house with his dogs and cats. Even though Hildmann was born in Kreuzberg in 1981 to Turkish parents, he does not speak Turkish and does not have Turkish citizenship. Because he was adopted by a German family.
Hildmann radicalized at breakneck speed
When his obese adoptive father died in 2000, Attila Hildmann gave up meat and all animal products and became vegan. First he became known as a cook for vegan dishes. Already in his youth he had become a criminal. With the migration year 2015 and especially with the beginning of the corona pandemic, he radicalized himself at a breathtaking pace, he escaped the arrest warrant by leaving for Turkey.
He is accused of 80 criminal offenses. Apparently, however, there had been a mole in the Berlin judiciary. At least one employee of the Attorney General’s Office was suspected of having passed on information to the accused.
Undercover in Hildmann’s private support group
In February 2021, amateur detectives who call themselves “Hildbusters” began searching for the Hildmann who had gone into hiding. For example, they found out that he had applied for Turkish citizenship. Tina Kaiser joined the group in May 2021. She followed his posts on Telegram until a surprising twist happened. In April she met one of Hildmann’s former confidants, who had since turned his back on him. After that, she continued her research on her own.
Undercover, she managed to join his private support group, which he had been promoting since the summer. Anyone who donated money to him or promised to buy his vegan Bolognese and passed an attitude test could become a member. Kaiser succeeded and she received an invitation link for his “Wolfsschanze”.
There she encountered “a collection of really strong Nazis and anti-Semites who worship Hitler and are preparing for some kind of fight and who see Attila Hildmann as a kind of successor to Adolf Hitler,” she said on Wednesday in the “Stern” podcast “important today”.
A “Lonely Man”
In the “Wolfsschanze” Hildmann shared much more freely private videos and photos that show him in the house, in his garden or at the vet. Kaiser examined what she saw and compared it. The breakthrough came with the strange cracks in the floor tiles of the veterinary practice. Now she searched the Internet for veterinary practices in Turkey, which led her to the address in Kartepe. Previously, Hildmann had apparently gone into hiding in the small town of Gömec on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast without being bothered by the Turkish authorities.
