Saxony-Anhalt: School authority cancels a teacher's warning for criticizing the AfD

Actually, Max Heckel could be happy. The warning, which he fought against for a year and a half, will be deleted from his personnel file. The state education authority removed her “due to the passage of time” – around a month before the Magdeburg labor court was due to hear the case.

But Max Heckel is not happy. He's angry. He wanted the court to decide on his case “so that teachers in this country can finally have legal certainty.”

Heckel is a teacher at a secondary school in Stendal, he teaches crafts. Shortly after the early federal election in 2025, students asked him whether he had voted for the AfD. Heckel denied this and, when asked further, explained using diagrams that the AfD's tax policy primarily favored rich people. Finally, he explained that those who vote for the AfD are either “very rich, morally free or not of sound mind.” This is how Heckel himself describes it. This is also how the state education authority described it.

Parents are said to have complained about this sentence and contacted the AfD. Ulrich Siegmund himself, who was already the AfD's top candidate at the time, got involved. His wife works at the same school as Max Heckel. Siegmund filed a supervisory complaint against Heckel and pushed for a decision from the state school authority in a public session of the Magdeburg state parliament in October 2025.

At this point, the school authority had already warned Heckel - on the grounds, among other things, that he had violated the teachers' "duty of neutrality". He did not enable his students to form an opinion, but rather wanted to convince them of his own.

According to taz research, Heckel's case is likely to be unique. The GEW education union, education experts and lawyers were also not aware of any case in which a school authority had warned a teacher for making statements about the AfD.

Heckel took action against the warning with a lawyer. He wanted to have the court determine that it was unlawful. The hearing scheduled for November 27th at the Magdeburg Labor Court has now been cancelled.

In response to a taz request, a spokesman for the responsible Ministry of Education assessed the deletion of the warning as “consistent and appropriate”. The state education authority had previously offered Heckel to remove the warning as part of a settlement. Heckel did not agree to this. He wanted a verdict. The spokesman now says that warnings would generally become less relevant to the employment relationship as time passed.

It is not unusual for warnings to be removed from personnel files. But there is no fixed deadline for when this has to happen. As a rule, various lawyers report to the taz, warnings would lose their warning function after about two to three years.

Max Heckel thinks it's no coincidence that the school authority has removed the warning just now: "That shows me that the office has no interest in having my case resolved in court." He is sure that he would have won the case. The spokesman for the Ministry of Education left it open whether the decision was related to the upcoming hearing date.

How this negotiation would have ended remains unclear. The court could also have decided that Heckel's statements in class were not permitted. Then the warning would have been rightly issued - and the judgment would actually have created legal certainty. However, not in the spirit of Max Heckel, but in the spirit of the AfD.