Anton Maegerle is the nom de plume of a German left-wing journalist and author of books against far-right politics, right-wing radicalism, the New Right, and right-wing policy in general.
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Since right-wing activists have issued death threats against Maegerle, his true identity is secret and he and his family live under police protection. Only very few personal details of his life and career are known to the public. He was allegedly 40 years old in 2002, and lives in a village in Southern Germany, where he always lived excerpt the time he was studying social sience.[1] During the time of his studies, the German right-wing party The Republicans was founded.[1] He describes this occasion as the “priming” for his activism.[1] He himself is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). After finishing his studies he moved home and started to make his inquiries.[1] His neighbors deemed him to be unemployed because they never saw him working, until he was visited by the police because he had received several threats.[1] His articles and books are published under his pseudonym.[1]
Maegerle started collecting information on the right-wing party The Republicans in 1983, and is observing right-wing extremists as well as right-wing conservative circles in Germany and abroad. Maegerle's database contains some 550,000 items and data on ca. 17,000 individuals, and is said to be one of the largest of its kind, providing information to journalists and governments agencies, e.g. the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In 2001 he published a book against right-wing extremism in Baden-Württemberg together with the president of the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz Helmut Rannacher.[2] Maegerle also collects information on right-wing extremist, xenophobic and anti-semitic acts of violence, regularly publishing chronicles of such events.
In the past he has worked for the public broadcasting German TV shows Panorama [4] and Report Mainz[5]; the Berliner Zeitung [6]; the Federal Agency for Civic Education [7]; the news magazine Stern [8]; and Die Welt Die WELT. He is a regular contributor to the controversial government-funded Internet newsletter View to the Right, and wrote for the Information Service against Right-Wing Extremism until it was closed down in 2006. As a result of his feature in Report Mainz in 2000 several banks cancelled the bank accounts of right-wing extremists.[1]
Maegerle belongs to the critics of the Ingolstadt Research Institute for Contemporary Historical Research, a portrayal of which published he published in 1996 in the View to the Right[3].
On 16 November 2007 Netzwerk Recherche, awarded Maegerle, Andrea Röpke and Thomas Kuban its "Lighttower Award".[4]
Some Conservatives accuse Maegerle's work to contain a leftist bias because he makes nearly no distinction between Conservatives and Nazis in it, and criticize that he receives public money for this.[5] For example, Maegerle defends the use of Political Correctness, and published an article in the left-wing newspaper Jungle World during the German federal election, 2002 in which he, as an SPD member, accused CDU chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber to have "best ties to the twillight zone of right-wing extremism".[6][7]
In 1996 some right-wing activists and media of the New Right[8] started a campaign against Maegerle, exposing his real name.[9]
Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf published under the name Anton Mägerle in order to discredit the journalist's research on holocaust denial.[1]
In 2007 Felix Krautkrämer, an editor of the right-wing weekly Young Freedom claimed, Maegerle was a far left extremist, because he published in their media. Maegerle filed lawsuit against this and succeeded. Krautkrämer, as well as Focus' Michael Klonovsky were later ordered by a court not to repeat these claims.[10][11]