Lars Winkelsdorf doesn’t look good this morning. He shuffles over, hunched over, his eyes darkly shadowed. “You don’t look good!” – “I know,” says Winkelsdorf with a dismissive wave of his hand and walks forward into the restaurant next to the subway station where he will tell his story.
He has already reported about it on X, formerly Twitter. Lars Winkelsdorf is a journalist, he has a name for himself made as a weapons expert. He is asked when someone runs amok, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses did in Hamburg two years ago. “How could this happen? How could the perpetrator get a gun license?”
Lars Winkelsdorf knows how illegal weapons get into the right-wing scene; he provides information about deliveries to Russia and other war zones. You see him on television with a microphone in his face when a police officer’s gun was stolen. He was supposed to give lectures at the police leadership academy in Münster, and he was even invited as an expert in the Bundestag. There aren’t many people who know weapons like he does.
And someone like that has the police at their door in the morning with a search warrant? Illegal possession of weapons is the accusation. He was held in his bathrobe in the living room of his house; Winkelsdorf speaks of a “rolling commando”. He wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet for the first hour while the officers combed the house “all the way to my mother’s freezer in the basement.”
Police ignore letter from Mainz public prosecutor’s office
In fact, Winkelsdorf had a firearms license for a long time and owned weapons. For example, even if only for a short time, a self-loading rifle “SLK Mod. 41”, but something was wrong with it, it kept firing. He dismantled it himself “while still at the shooting range” and later handed it in to the Hamburg weapons authority, where it was registered on his gun ownership card.
The rifle was later used as evidence in a trial in Mainz against the weapon manufacturer that produced it. Winkelsdorf was called as a witness. The weapon ended up at the BKA, and Winkelsdorf received a letter from the Mainz public prosecutor’s office that provided information about the whereabouts of the weapon.
The police were looking for a rifle with exactly the same serial number, according to the search warrant. Winkelsdorf says his offer to show the letter from the Mainz public prosecutor’s office stating that he no longer has the weapon was rejected. In the end, the officers took the remaining piece of a barrel, a magazine and a shoulder stock for a submachine gun.
The search warrant cited one reason for suspicion of illegal possession of weapons Article in the taz from 2024, in which an error had crept in. It said that Winkelsdorf still had a firearms license and owned weapons, but that was no longer the case.
Winkelsdorf had to give up his firearms license after the Hamburg regional court sentenced him to a fine in 2012 for “inciting people to carry weapons”. He is said to have instigated an arms dealer to drive his weapons in the trunk to the location of a television report – the assurance from the production company of the report that Winkelsdorf was only interviewed and that the report was not his at all was not heard.
At that time, Winkelsdorf was still fighting the verdict. The taz article was about how the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office repeatedly tried to arrest a journalist who was researching the illegal arms trade for television reports. to get closer to those he reported on.
But is one sentence in a newspaper article enough to get a search warrant? Christian Teppe, Winkelsdorf’s lawyer, doesn’t believe that. “Press reports are not facts in the criminal procedural sense, but are merely an impetus for investigations, not a replacement for them,” he writes in his complaint to the district court that issued the search warrant.
The morning house search and the police intrusion into his house affected Winkelsdorf. Unfortunately, he says he is suffering from burnout, can no longer sleep, and feels persecuted “like in the GDR.” He drinks a coffee and another in the restaurant, goes out to smoke, and shows evidence photos on his cell phone. Why, he asks himself, is the public prosecutor’s office investigating him again?
Criticism of the Hamburg weapons authority
What is strange is that the self-loading rifle that is being sought in the search warrant has exactly the same serial number as the weapon that he actually once owned and then turned in. But the name of the weapons company is different. “There is no such weapon from this company,” says Winkelsdorf.
His suspicion: the entry in the weapons register was manipulated in order to accuse him of owning a weapon, which would then have been illegal because of the loss of his weapon license. Winkelsdorf has often appeared as a critic of the Hamburg weapons authority, most recently in 2023 in the case of the mentally ill gunman among Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Is it conceivable that someone in the weapons authority wants to take revenge on Winkelsdorf for pillorying her? He believes so. However, the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office is responsible for the house search. When asked, she explained that she could not say anything about the case until further notice because the file was not yet available.
Lots of open questions
So many questions remain unanswered. What evidence did the authorities have to believe that Winkelsdorf was illegally possessing weapons? He would be putting his entire reputation at risk. Why were they looking for this one rifle that he had long since given up? The meaning of the whole operation is not clear.
Winkelsdorf, the man with a military past and whose father was in the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office, has always fought to ensure that weapons do not fall into the wrong hands. It is the job that the police and prosecutors should actually do. And of all people, they are taking action against him.
In an interview on YouTube, Winkelsdorf announced that he wanted to leave the country. “My decision is clear,” he says on the phone. “I don’t need to hide anywhere else.”