Interview with Former AfD MP Dr. Heinrich Fiechtner: When Satire Becomes a Crime; Inside the Show Trials of Germany’s COVID Dissidents (Part I)
September 23, 2025
This interview was conducted by Alexander Junger and originally published by Eagle Eye Explore on September 18th, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and readability, and is republished here at The Gateway Pundit with the kind permission of Eagle Eye Explore.
Former AfD MP Dr. Heinrich Ekkehard Fiechtner has emerged as one of the most relentlessly persecuted figures in Germany, ruthlessly targeted by the country’s increasingly authoritarian ruling class.
A renowned oncologist and palliative care doctor of more than 30 years, Fiechtner has been dragged through the mud by what he calls a corrupt, regime-loyal judiciary determined to silence dissent. His ‘crime’? Daring to satirize the COVID regime, speak out against mask mandates, and question the state’s draconian overreach. For that, he faces crippling fines, the threat of losing his medical license, prison, and even court orders that authorized police to hold his head and force his phone open — tactics that would’ve been unthinkable in the free Germany the Allies helped rebuild.
This interview is nothing short of a wake-up call.
Many of our readers in Europe and the U.S. already have some idea of what’s happening in Germany. But before we get into your own political persecution—if we can call it that, and I think we can—I’d like you to paint a broader picture. How would you describe the increasingly authoritarian climate in Germany and its impact on intellectual dissenters, online critics, and ordinary people facing home raids for what they post online? And could you walk us through how this situation has developed—under Merz today, and before him under Scholz and Merkel?
Thank you for inviting me to give this speech. The situation in Germany has grown steadily harsher over the past decades, but the most drastic turn came during the Corona regime. Certain aspects of our lives have long been treated as taboo topics, making open criticism almost impossible—especially when it comes to Germany’s past. People understandably don’t want to repeat that dark chapter, but even using those historical symbols to show what we don’t want repeated can bring you before the courts.
Anyone who dares to criticize the mainstream—those pushing radical agendas, from extreme gender ideology to other social experiments—faces almost allergic reactions from the establishment. Their way of imposing things on the people has striking similarities to what East Germans endured under the old GDR before 1989.
In recent years, especially under the Corona restrictions, things have worsened dramatically. Many dissidents have been dragged into court, fined, or even imprisoned. Just recently, Dr. Heinrich Habig was forced back into prison, sentenced to three years after he was convicted, because he issued COVID-19 vaccination certificates without administering the actual vaccines. The court in Bochum found that in at least 200 proven cases, patients received official documentation of vaccination although no injection had taken place. By doing so, Habig was deemed to have falsified medical records and facilitated the circumvention of public health regulations, which the court classified as criminal misconduct. At the same time, through this action, he shielded people from receiving the toxic and potentially lethal mRNA injection, which many of his patients sought to avoid on grounds of personal conscience and medical concern.
Just last week, he had to return behind bars—even though he had already served more than a year for the same “offense.”
This is the reality in Germany today for anyone who dares to oppose the regime. And yes, I call it a regime because it has abandoned righteousness, law, and democracy. It acts more like a tyranny, sending a warning to other countries of what can happen when power goes unchecked. This must be exposed, challenged, and resisted.
Sadly, the situation here has reached a point where Germans may no longer be able to stand alone. Without outside support, we risk sliding back into the kind of system we thought we had left behind—with the help of the Allies—decades ago.
Speaking of outside support—just recently, the Rubio State Department released its annual Human Rights Report, delivering a sharp rebuke to the German government over its assault on free expression and its increasingly heavy-handed efforts to silence dissent.. The report also castigated the UK for similar overreach, and it condemned the Romanian government for baselessly claiming that its election had been “hacked” by Russia—using that claim as a pretext to annul the first-round results, in which Călin Georgescu had secured a decisive lead, before banning him outright from the entire process.
You’ve been prosecuted for a satirical gesture and statements clearly meant to criticize government overreach during the COVID era. Can you walk us through those cases, what you did, what you said, and how the regime interpreted it?
Yes, exactly—you’re referring to the gesture that brought me before the courts, the so-called greeting from 1933 to 1945. There were two public occasions where I did it, and both times I was dragged before a judge.
One example: I stood before the Brandenburg Gate and said, referring to the mask: “I stand here with the symbol of our times from Angela Merkel, the Diamond of terror, (which refers to her famous hand gesture, the so-called power Diamond). And I went on to say: it stinks behind this mask, my glasses fog up, I feel dizzy, we must tear off this symbol of slavery and Oppression.
What I meant was very clear: the mask mandate wasn’t about health, it was about political obedience. It had no medical sense, no real justification. It was simply a way to force people into compliance with the so-called corona regime. And that, of course, bore a striking resemblance to totalitarian practices of the past.
Regarding the salute: In this case, the satire is heightened by the fact that, by divine decree, my right hand is missing, so that any such salute would amount to a kind of cripple’s salute. And I already stated in the first instance that I am anatomically incapable of offering this salute.
For saying that—and for raising my arm as part of the satire—I was hauled into court. The judges claimed I was promoting tyranny on German soil, or giving people the impression I supported such a system. In reality, I was doing the exact opposite. It was clearly satire, clearly criticism. But the courts didn’t care. They twisted it however they wanted, interpreting it in bad faith, simply because they could. The goal was obvious: to intimidate, to punish, to either throw people like me into prison or, at the very least, bury us under crippling fines.
For readers unfamiliar with German law, could you explain how it works when it comes to certain banned gestures? Specifically, if someone uses them in a satirical or critical context, is that still treated as illegal—or is there supposed to be a distinction?
Well, it really depends on who you are and where you stand in relation to today’s regime. If you’re someone who supports all the fashionable ‘woke’ causes, you can get away with using these gestures in satire or comedy—leftist comedians do it all the time. Even some politicians have raised their right hands in ways that closely resembled the infamous salute, and when I pointed it out, accusing them of effectively doing it, nothing happened. The cases were dismissed without consequence.
But when it comes to people like me—or any other dissident—it’s a completely different story. If we so much as make a gesture in satire, they’ll twist it, prosecute us, and hand down punishments. It’s not really about the gesture itself; it’s about silencing anyone who challenges the system. The courts and politicians use the law selectively, applying it against critics while shielding their own. It’s a way to suppress dissent and keep people obedient through fear.
At what point during the COVID-19 pandemic did you reach the conclusions you did? Was it fairly early, perhaps within the first few weeks?
At first, I’ll admit, I was caught up in the excitement and uncertainty. I felt insecure about what would happen to my medical career, and like many others, I was cautious. I’d seen so many health scares before—the flu, BSE, and others—that were hyped into mass panic, and I wondered if this was another case of fear overwhelming reason.
When the news first came out of Wuhan about this strange new respiratory illness, I initially accepted the idea that masks might help. But then my wife showed me a critical analysis on YouTube, and it caught my attention. I started digging into the research myself, and to my surprise, I found the opposite of what I had assumed: masks offered little to no real benefit. In fact, I began to question whether masks even had a significant role in medical environments outside very specialized settings.
What became clear was that masks had side effects, and when used broadly in the way governments imposed them, they made little sense. From there, I began to question the severity of the virus itself. I came across the work of John Ioannidis, Greek-American physician-scientist, writer, and Stanford University professor, who showed that the lethality numbers were much lower than the apocalyptic figures being pushed globally. That discovery sent my doubts skyrocketing.
By February or March 2020, I had fully changed course. I realized these measures weren’t about health at all—they were a coordinated assault on civil rights, personal freedom, and even people’s well-being.
Your medical expertise is in oncology, hematology, and palliative care. During the pandemic, were you directly treating COVID-19 patients?
Yes, patients came to my practice as well. I was one of the very few doctors who kept the doors open—for everyone. With or without masks, alone or with relatives, I never turned people away. The only exception was if someone told me outright that they’d tested positive for COVID. In that case, I asked them to stay outside—not because I was afraid, but because I didn’t want the authorities to shut down my practice.
Otherwise, people came in with respiratory symptoms, fevers, or simply fear, and I treated them. But the truth is, those tests had poor sensitivity and specificity, so you could never be entirely sure: was it COVID, the flu, or something else? To me, it was a flu-like illness that needed proper care.
At that time, I also came across the so-called Zelensky Protocol, developed by a Jewish physician in upstate New York. I decided to try it, and I followed it carefully. The results spoke for themselves: every patient who came to me was successfully treated. Nobody died, and all of them recovered well.
I’d like to ask about the patients you treated during COVID. On a spectrum of severity, where did most of them fall? Because the public often heard horror stories—people testing positive, rushing to the hospital, being put on ventilators, and then tragically not surviving. And many of those cases, as we later learned, involved vaccinated patients. From your perspective, what was the reality in your practice?
I only had two severe cases. One patient ended up being intubated, even though I tried everything possible to avoid ventilation, because I quickly realized it was often more harmful than helpful. My approach was to keep people out of the hospital whenever I could, treating them in an outpatient setting to avoid dangerous interventions—like ventilation or other questionable treatments—that were, unfortunately, widely used in the West.
One patient came to me very late in the course of illness, struggling to breathe. In his condition, I had no choice but to send him to the hospital. The next day, he was intubated. He even called me from the hospital asking what he should do. A friend of his, a neighbor, a nurse, told him that if he wanted to survive, he would have to be put on a ventilator now. And I told him on the phone that he should do so.
He had received just a short course of the protocol I was using—hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc, among others—but I’m convinced it gave his body enough strength to fight back. After about 10 days, he was able to extubate himself, stunning the nurses with how quickly he recovered. After three or four weeks, he was discharged and fully recovered. Today, he’s perfectly healthy. It was a very dangerous situation at the time, but thank God, he made it.
I’d like to shift our focus to the COVID-19 vaccines. Recently, Bobby Kennedy stated that countries with the lowest vaccination rates seemed to have the best health outcomes, while the United States, which has one of the highest vaccination rates, accounted for 16% of global COVID-19 deaths despite making up only 4.2% of the world’s population. He suggested that the vaccines may have caused more harm than good. What’s your position on the vaccines? Do you think they were simply developed too quickly and had flaws, or do you see the situation differently?
Robert Kennedy touched on a very sensitive issue: vaccination itself. This is urgent to discuss because vaccination has, over time, become almost a mantra among physicians. Since the early 1900s, doubt about vaccines has often been seen as incompatible with being a ‘real’ doctor. Belief in vaccines has, in many ways, become a mandatory expectation—less about science and more like a form of dogma.
Historically, researchers like those at Johns Hopkins made important contributions to vaccines, which is why there’s such a strong tradition supporting them. Even today, most physicians simply assert that vaccines are safe and one of medicine’s greatest inventions. But if you look closely at the data—and I did this after the COVID-19 crisis—you find very few rigorous clinical trials examining vaccine efficacy or side effects. This is a real problem, and it’s one that Robert Kennedy has rightly highlighted.
Vaccination is also a highly sensitive topic because it’s tied to significant financial and institutional interests. Many people rely on it for their livelihoods, which can discourage critical discussion.
The COVID-19 vaccines introduced an additional, fundamentally different issue. Traditional vaccines involve introducing a weakened or inactivated form of a virus or bacteria so the body can build immunity. COVID-19 vaccines, however, use genetic-based technology that instructs the body to produce certain proteins itself. This is a completely different biological process. It raises serious questions about long-term effects and safety that haven’t yet been fully addressed.
Politicians and some media blurred the terminology, labeling these genetic-based interventions simply as ‘vaccines,’ which is misleading. This misrepresentation is concerning because people believed they were receiving a traditional vaccine, when in fact, they were receiving a substance that could trigger unexpected biological responses. These responses could range from severe illness to, in rare cases, sudden death or long-term health issues such as autoimmune conditions.
So while vaccines as a concept have a long and complex history, the COVID-19 vaccines introduced entirely new variables, and the discussion around them needs to be honest and nuanced.”
In the years following the pandemic, what kinds of aftereffects or long-term impacts have you observed in your patients?
Well, my practice isn’t very large—I see a few hundred patients, about 600 per quarter—so I can’t make statistically representative claims. But I do have observations, and some of them are striking. Among vaccinated patients, I’ve noticed cases where cancer seems to progress with alarming speed, almost like it’s “running away.” Treatments that usually work, like chemotherapy or immunotherapy, appear ineffective. It reminds me of the pre-chemotherapy era for pancreatic cancer, where median survival was only a few months.
I can’t provide exact numbers—these are anecdotal impressions—but the pattern is concerning. One thing I’ve observed repeatedly is that veins of vaccinated patients can behave very differently. Veins that were once easy to access can become almost unusable, feeling jelly-like, making it extremely difficult to draw blood or administer therapy.
For example, I recently treated an elderly patient with pancreatic carcinoma. He had received three vaccine doses. Placing a needle in his veins was extraordinarily difficult—I had to try five times before I could successfully draw blood and administer treatment. In my experience, going back to the 1990s when I started my oncology career, I’ve never seen anything like this. And only recently, I treated another elderly gentleman with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, in whom the situation was quite similar.
A late colleague, Arne Burkhardt, a pathologist who sadly passed away two years ago, noticed similar abnormalities in patients’ veins during autopsies. He suspected there was a connection to vaccination and requested blood samples from several patients for analysis. The studies showed that spike proteins were forming jelly-like structures in the veins. These structures had thrombogenic properties, meaning they could promote clotting independently of the body’s normal coagulation processes. He drowned two years ago, and there are rumors that this was not really an accident.
In my oncology career, which began in 1996 at the Katharinenhospital in Stuttgart and continued in my own practice from 2000 onward, I’ve never encountered these kinds of vascular changes. Over the past five years, I’ve seen patterns I hadn’t seen before, and they’re deeply concerning.
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