Horst Mahler, German Red Army Faction co-founder and Holocaust denier, dies at 89

BERLIN (Reuters) -Horst Mahler, who co-founded the leftist Red Army Faction guerrilla group suspected of killing dozens of prominent West Germans and later became a far-right ideologist and Holocaust denier, has died in Berlin, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing Mahler's lawyer. He was 89.

Mahler spent 10 years in prison for his involvement with the anti-capitalist Red Army Faction, which carried out a series of assassinations, kidnappings and bombings, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s.

After crossing the ideological divide and joining the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) in 2000, he spent several more years in jail, including for racial hatred.

Mahler was born in 1936 in Chojnow, which is now part of Poland. His father was a dentist and both his parents were staunch Nazis despite having Jewish ancestry.

In February 1945, as Soviet forces approached during the final months of World War Two, Mahler fled westwards to the town of Naumburg with his mother and brothers.

His father killed himself in 1949, several years after returning from U.S. military captivity. The family then moved to West Berlin, where Mahler studied law.

During his student days, Mahler belonged to the Thuringia Association - a right-wing student fraternity - but he soon veered left, joining the Social Democrats (SPD) before being expelled from that party when he became a member of the SDS socialist student organisation.

In 1968, Mahler received a 10-month suspended prison sentence for his involvement in violent protests against publishing house Axel Springer which followed an assassination attempt on leftist student leader Rudi Dutschke.

As a lawyer, Mahler initially focused on commercial law but later defended left-wing clients in court, including Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin who had set fire to department stores in Frankfurt.

Baader and Ensslin were members of the Red Army Faction, a group of left-wing militants that was born out of the student protests and anti-Vietnam war movements of the late 1960s.

In 1970 Mahler fled to Jordan with Baader, Ensslin and fellow militant Ulrike Meinhof to join Palestinian guerrillas in the hope of training for armed combat.

FROM MARXIST-LENINISM TO THE FAR-RIGHT

After returning to Germany later that year, Mahler spent 10 years in prison for his role in founding the Red Army Faction, in robberies and in Baader's violent escape from jail in 1970. His defence attorneys in the 1970s included Gerhard Schroeder, who later became German chancellor.

While in prison Mahler wrote about how he was being "internally liberated from the dogmatic revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism".

In the late 1990s Mahler spoke out against what he saw as the inundation of Germany by foreigners and urged a change in policy "so that Germany is preserved for the Germans".

In 2000 he joined the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) and, as a lawyer, represented the party during proceedings to ban it in the early 2000s. He quit the NPD in 2003 when those proceedings collapsed.

In 2005 Mahler was jailed for nine months for inciting racial hatred of Jews. The judge said at the time that Mahler had indicated he would keep publicising his views that Jews were an inferior race and that hatred of them was normal.

In 2009 Mahler was sentenced to another six years in prison for inciting racial hatred. He denied that the Holocaust - the Nazis' murder of six million Jews - had happened and that Jewish people had been systematically persecuted under Adolf Hitler.

Mahler was released for health reasons in 2015, when he had a leg amputated. He was arrested again in 2017 for offences committed while serving a previous prison term but was released in 2020.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage, Gareth Jones and Olivier Holmey)