Neo-Nazi sent to women’s prison in Germany after changing gender
OLIVER MOODYListen to this article
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Marla-Svenja Liebich, a well-known right-wing extremist, sits in a courtroom in Leipzig. Picture: Getty Images
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58 minutes ago.
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A prominent right-wing extremist who once dismissed transgender people as fascists and “parasites on society” has won permission to serve a prison sentence in a women’s jail in Germany after formally changing their gender.
Marla-Svenja Liebich, 53, who until December went by the first name Sven, was convicted of inciting hatred, criminal insults and trespassing and handed an 18-month sentence for, among other things, trying to sell a baseball bat over the internet as a “deportation aid”.
Questions are now being raised as to whether the neo-Nazi exploited a recent reform that made it significantly easier for people to alter their officially registered gender.
Under previous German law, gender reassignment required two separate supporting opinions from medical specialists.
In November, however, the last government’s self-determination act reduced the threshold to simply signing a form at a local registry office.
Liebich has been a leader on the east German extreme-right scene since the Nineties, and ran the regional chapter of an explicitly Nazi organisation called Blood and Honour in Saxony-Anhalt. Blood and Honour was banned in 2000.
Liebich later organised numerous demonstrations in Halle, his native city, where the local branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency described Liebich’s activities as “unparalleled” across the entire country.
In recent years Liebich has campaigned energetically in support of the Putin regime and its war against Ukraine, selling the Russian ultra-nationalist “Z” symbol through his various social media channels.
Liebich organised protests across the eastern half of Germany, including a rally held during a visit of Angela Merkel, then the chancellor, to the Bayreuth opera festival, where he summoned the “Merkel youth” to stand with him - an ironic allusion to the Hitler Youth.
Liebich is also an inveterate opponent of the LGBTQ movement. In 2022 he marked Pride month by posting a picture of a burning rainbow flag with the words: “Finally, the marginalised alphabet-people are being made visible again, until for the remaining 11 months of the year everything will be about making them visible.
“Take good care of yourselves and don’t get monkeypox with your spontaneous encounters on Grindr [a gay dating app] in the railway station toilet.”
Critics have suggested that Liebich’s sudden conversion to the queer rights cause might have more to do with a desire for easier conditions in Chemnitz women’s prison than with a sincere change of heart.
LTO, a legal website, warned that Liebich could pose a danger to the prison’s inmates.
