Manfred Roeder (born 6 February 1929 in Berlin) is a former lawyer and Wehrmacht soldier, and a prominent Holocaust denier.
Roeder attended a National Political Institute of Education in Plön.[1] After the Second World War he was for a time a member of Germany's CDU party.[1] After leaving the party he forged ties with the far-right political scene in Germany and abroad, including the Ku Klux Klan.[1][2] From 1947 he worked for the American CIC against communism.[3] Roeder's career has been marked by an abundance of criminal charges, including resistance against state authority,[1] and battery. In 1980 the Deutschen Aktionsgruppen ("German Action Groups"), a neo-Nazi organisation founded by Roeder, carried out attacks against buildings that housed foreign workers and asylum seekers.[1][4][5] Roeder was classified as a terrorist by German legal authorities as a result of these activities.[6]
In 1997 the current affairs program Panorama revealed that in 1995, Roeder had appeared, by invitation, as a speaker at the German military's officer training academy[1] in Hamburg. This scandal, as well as the fact that Roeder had received financial donations from the military, led to the sacking of the academy's commander[6][7] and the instatement of Rear-Admiral Rudolf Lange[8] as his replacement, with the goal of restoring the good reputation of the academy.
In 1997 Roeder stood as the NPD candidate (a far-right party) for Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern during the parliamentary elections,[1][9] promoting himself as "Chancellor alternative 1998", but was unsuccessful.
Because of his integral role in a terrorist organisation Roeder was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1982,[1][6][10] and was released in 1990,[10] after serving two-thirds of his sentence, for good behaviour and a perceived social rehabilitation. In 1996 Roeder, together with other far-right extremists, perpetrated an attack on an exhibition in Erfurt detailing the role of the Wehrmacht in Nazi Germany, for which he was charged with property damage and fined DM-4,500.[11] After being sentenced to prison by the state courts of Schwerin[12] and Rostock[13] under Germany's Volksverhetzung law (incitement to hatred), and for other crimes, he was given a further ten months in September 2004 by the state court of Frankfurt for contempt of the state. In February 2005 a further sentencing for the same crime was passed by the court of Schwalmstadt. On May 12, 2005 he began a prison sentence in Gießen.