Young neo-Nazi sentenced to nine years in prison for threats of mass killing

The drift of “Heinrich Himmler88” will have led him behind bars. A former foster child, now aged 21, long fascinated by the Third Reich, was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison by the Paris criminal court for threatening to commit a racist mass killing.

This sentence – more severe than the seven years required by the prosecution – is accompanied by a two-thirds security period, and nine years of socio-judicial monitoring at the end of the sentence, with an obligation of care. “We are going to appeal, obviously,” said one of the defendant’s lawyers, Me Antoine Ory.

In its decision, the court cited the defendant’s “radicality” and “dangerousness,” and considered “that a plan for violent action was likely to be carried out imminently” at the time of his arrest. Abandoned by his parents and tossed between several foster families and child welfare homes, Angel B. was arrested by the DGSI and placed in pre-trial detention in June 2022 in Ardèche, after his messages were spotted on social networks and on encrypted messaging services.

Interest in Nazism from childhood

Under the pseudonym Heinrich Himmler88, he described the Jews as an “impure race which must be exterminated”, and attacked “negroes” and “bugnoules”. In conversations intercepted by investigators, he also spoke of preparing “ethnic cleansing” or an “attack in the street”. The investigation also established that he had taken steps to purchase a weapon illegally. His lawyers argued that he had abandoned these steps himself, but the court did not follow them on this point.

Prosecuted for “individual terrorist enterprise”, the young man affirmed in court that he would “never have carried out the act”. “I had no serious plans, I am lucid and rational,” said the young man, in a clear and calm voice. According to investigators, the suspect had developed an interest in Nazism from the age of eight or ten, to take “revenge” on his father who had abandoned him.

Willingness to get involved in politics

On the stand, he explained his violent comments on Telegram by the “group effect”. “I wanted to make myself interesting. It was beyond my thoughts, I didn’t really mean it,” he said. “In the long term, I would like to go into politics”, but “with more measured comments, which remain within the framework of the law”, added the young man, who said he “reflected” in prison. Defining himself as a “sovereignist patriot”, he says he voted last year for RN candidate Marine Le Pen, but says he does not recognize himself in any party.

“He never renounced his convictions”, however estimated the representative of the prosecution, who requested seven years in prison against him. “Convinced by the ideology of the ultra-right movement, he tried to obtain a weapon while expressing his desire to commit violent acts,” she insisted, emphasizing that Angel B., in his prison cell, went so far as to carve an SS symbol on his chest with a metal object.