The AfD leak: restricted papers in Manuel Ochsenreiter's Bundestag mailbox — edition 3

Edition 3 · 4 November 2026 · Preliminary — research in progress. Editions 1 and 2 stay online unchanged. This edition leads with a closer look at one finding from edition 2: the Bundestag mailbox of Manuel Ochsenreiter, a pro-Kremlin journalist who worked for AfD MP Markus Frohnmaier in 2018. It reports what the leaked files show. The archive covers only 11 mailboxes, so it is a partial record.

In short#

• A pro-Kremlin journalist had his own Bundestag mailbox, and restricted papers were sent to it. In autumn 2018 Manuel Ochsenreiter worked for AfD MP Markus Frohnmaier. He used a Bundestag staff mailbox and signed his mail “Manuel Ochsenreiter – Fachreferent” (policy adviser). Between 19 October and 12 November 2018 Frohnmaier’s office forwarded three internal papers to that mailbox. The last was a set of German government reports on EU foreign ministers’ meetings, marked “VS-NfD”, the lowest German level of classified information. The files show the papers were sent; they do not show whether he opened them.
• The day before the classified mailing, he was in occupied Donetsk. On 11 November 2018 a Russian newspaper quoted Ochsenreiter as an “international observer” at the “elections” held by the Russian-controlled “Donetsk People’s Republic”. Two months later a defendant in a Polish court accused him of ordering and financing an arson attack in Ukraine. He denied it and was not among the defendants; he left Frohnmaier’s office in January 2019 and reportedly died in Moscow in August 2021.
• Office mail also went to a private Gmail address in his name in October 2018: government answers to parliamentary questions and a press inquiry about himself.
• He brokered contacts before his job. The files show him finding AfD participants for a 2015 conference in Kyiv on “support for the Russian part of the population”, receiving an MP’s form, subject “WB Rußland”, less than two weeks before the March 2018 Russian presidential election, which AfD MPs “observed”, and asking in September 2018 for a “eurosceptic MP” to attend a Moldovan-Russian economic forum, where the official programme lists him as a moderator. In 2017 a party member described Frohnmaier’s Russia network as one “that goes back to Mr Ochsenreiter”.
• Frohnmaier’s private AOL address received restricted material for over a year. From February 2018 to April 2019 the office sent it 27 messages with non-public parliamentary or state material, four of them marked VS-NfD. ZDF has reported the practice.
• The pro-Russian line continued after 2022, with a new focus on energy. The federal board condemned the invasion but blamed NATO and rejected sanctions. From 2023 to 2026 the recurring demands are an end to the gas sanctions, the restart of Nord Stream, and in August 2025 “marked territorial concessions to Russia”.
• Split on NATO, hostile to the EU; market-liberal on taxes, selective on trade. The party wants lower taxes and less state, opposes Western trade deals such as TTIP and Mercosur, and wants trade with Russia restored, combined with a welfare state for Germans first.

What we examined#

The archive was published by the hacker group “Hexane” in October 2026: 421,180 emails and 48,572 attached documents from 11 AfD mailboxes, 2013–2026. The AfD has confirmed the attack but not the authenticity of individual emails, and forged “AfD leak” emails are reported to circulate — so every claim cites the original file and its hash.

The Frohnmaier office emails in this report survive as copies in one of the 11 leaked mailboxes, that of the AfD’s federal arbitration court. For 2025–26 the archive holds mostly mail from the NRW state party, the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania office of Leif-Erik Holm, the arbitration courts and the merchandise shop.

How the research works: automated steps run on open-weight models. Keyword rules select candidate messages; a model classifies and extracts; a second step checks extracted facts against the original text; every quote must occur verbatim in the source. A person — or Claude as editor — reads only the extracted findings, not the mail bodies. Facts from outside the archive are attributed to the publication that reported them. For this edition:

• The Ochsenreiter mailbox: every email sent from or to the staff mailbox, and every file that mentions Ochsenreiter, 527 in all, was read by a model. It extracted who signed each mail, which papers it carried and how they were marked. Sender, recipients and dates come from the email headers.
• Restricted material: 5,645 messages with classification or confidentiality markings were rated for the kind of material.
• Positions: a sample of 1,994 messages, up to 40 per topic and year, selected by keyword and rated −2…+2 per topic for the author’s own words; 1,288 contained AfD positions with a verbatim quote. “Leadership” means federal and state leaders and MPs; “base” means local officials, members and staff.

1. Restricted papers in Manuel Ochsenreiter’s Bundestag mailbox (2018)#

Who he was#

Manuel Ochsenreiter (1976–2021) was the editor-in-chief of the far-right German monthly Zuerst!. According to RFE/RL he was “a frequent commentator in Russian state media”. According to the taz, he called the Russian far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin his “fatherly friend”. In April 2016 he co-founded the “Deutsches Zentrum für Eurasische Studien” (German Centre for Eurasian Studies) in Berlin and became its chairman, ZDF reported. Its deputy chairman was the Polish politician Mateusz Piskorski, who was later arrested in Poland on charges of spying for Russia.

According to leaked emails reported by OCCRP with Eesti Ekspress, IrpiMedia and profil in February 2023, Ochsenreiter was one of four Europeans who “worked especially closely” with a network around Sargis Mirzakhanyan, an aide in the Russian Duma. Mirzakhanyan exchanged more than 1,000 emails between 2014 and 2017 with Inal Ardzinba, a department head in the Russian presidential administration. OCCRP writes that Ochsenreiter “demanded thousands of euros to publish pro-Russia articles” by the network’s associates in Zuerst!, a campaign with a budget of 12,000 euros. According to OCCRP, the same emails “include a plan to fund the 2017 political campaign of AfD’s Markus Frohnmaier”. OCCRP’s report is based on the leaked emails. The passage on Frohnmaier speaks of a plan and does not say whether money was paid.

The mailbox and who used it#

Every Bundestag MP’s office has numbered staff mailboxes. In Frohnmaier’s office the display name of each one shows the staff member who uses it, for example “Krzysztof Walczak | Markus Frohnmaier, MdB”. From 4 October to 5 November 2018 the staff mailbox “ma03” sends mail as “Manuel Ochsenreiter | Markus Frohnmaier, MdB”. Four of the seven mails it sent are signed “Manuel Ochsenreiter – Fachreferent”. In the first, on 4 October, he asks Frohnmaier’s personal assistant to “please remember to forward me the emails promptly”, under the subject “Emails, invitations, etc. abroad”. 1 2 3 4 In the others he forwards an exchange about a speech, writes about the AfD’s draft motion against the UN migration compact, and suggests quotes for Frohnmaier.

Frohnmaier told the Frankfurter Rundschau in October 2018 that Ochsenreiter had been one of his advisers since early September (as reported by RFE/RL). ZDF reports that he was employed as a research assistant from September 2018 until January 2019. The office’s own replies to the newspaper describe him as an adviser on development cooperation and “not a member of the AfD”. 5 A to-do list sent to Frohnmaier on 10 August 2018, a month before the start date Frohnmaier gave, already assigns him tasks: budget motions due on 21 August and a briefing for a “Klausurtagung WZuE”, a working retreat. 6 In December 2018 the office still asked him for material to answer a citizen’s inquiry. 7

What the mailbox received#

While Ochsenreiter was employed, Frohnmaier’s personal assistant forwarded three internal papers to the mailbox, in routine office forwards. Each went at the same time to Frohnmaier’s private AOL address:

In the same weeks the mailbox also received, without a classification mark in the e-mail, a Defence Ministry report to parliament on the Bundeswehr’s deployments abroad (26 October) and the minutes of a meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s Standing Committee (11 October). 11 12 Restricted mailings had reached the same mailbox earlier in 2018, before it carried Ochsenreiter’s name. 13

The papers concern EU foreign policy, development and migration.

A private Gmail address in his name. Between 22 and 31 October 2018 Frohnmaier and his personal assistant also sent six emails to a private Gmail address that carries Ochsenreiter’s name. They contained the press inquiry about himself, a graphic for a press release, the IMF’s annual report and government answers to the AfD’s parliamentary questions, which are published as Bundestag papers. 14 15 16 17 18 19

Where he was: Donetsk, 11 November 2018#

On 11 November 2018, while he was employed by Frohnmaier, the Donetsk edition of the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda interviewed Ochsenreiter at a polling station in occupied Donetsk. It described him as a German journalist and “international observer” at the “elections” of the Russian-controlled “Donetsk People’s Republic”. He was quoted as saying the vote was “probably even more in line with world standards than in the USA”. The European Platform for Democratic Elections lists him in its database of “biased observers” for that vote; its biography of him also records Crimea (March 2014) and the “Donetsk People’s Republic” (2014 and 2016). The next day, the office’s routine forward of the VS-NfD reports reached his mailbox. His last mail sent from it is dated 5 November.

The accusation and his departure#

• 14 January 2019: in Kraków, defendant Michał Prokopowicz told the court that Ochsenreiter had given instructions and money for the arson attack on the Hungarian cultural centre in Uzhhorod, western Ukraine, on 4 February 2018 (RFE/RL). The indictment called Ochsenreiter the “originator and financier” of the attack (ZDF). According to Polish case files reported by the taz, €1,000 was handed over in cash at Berlin-Tegel on 7 February 2018. Ochsenreiter called the accusation an “absurd suspicion” triggered by a “secret-service campaign” (ZDF). His lawyer said: “If it was made, it is false” (RFE/RL). Frohnmaier said his employee rejected the allegations as fictitious and suggested the accused might be implicating him to improve his own position (RFE/RL).
• 17–18 January 2019: Berlin prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation on suspicion of serious arson. Frohnmaier first said he would keep Ochsenreiter until charges were filed, then said Ochsenreiter had “offered” to leave and he had agreed (RFE/RL).
• January–April 2019: the office fielded inquiries about Ochsenreiter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, ARD Kontraste and t-online, Spiegel, ZDF and the Russian state outlet Sputnik. To Sputnik it replied that Frohnmaier and Ochsenreiter had “separated amicably”. 20 21 22 23 Mail kept arriving in the staff mailbox until May 2019.
• 23 March 2020: the Kraków court convicted the three defendants; Prokopowicz received three years in prison (RFE/RL). Ochsenreiter was not among the defendants, and no charge against him has been reported.
• August 2021: Ochsenreiter died in Moscow, reportedly of a heart attack, according to Zuerst! as reported by t-online, which called him a fugitive. Official confirmation was pending at the time.

Before the job: a broker for Russia-related trips#

Earlier mail shows Ochsenreiter recruiting AfD politicians for events in Russia’s orbit:

• June 2015: André Poggenburg, then AfD leader in Saxony-Anhalt, forwarded Ochsenreiter’s invitation to a conference in Kyiv to party colleagues in Saxony. The conference was about “federalism” and the “support of the Russian part of the population”. 24
• April 2017: in a mail to the party leaders Jörg Meuthen and Alexander Gauland, a party member described Frohnmaier’s Russia contacts as a network “that goes back to Mr Ochsenreiter”. 25
• March 2018: under the subject “WB Rußland” (election observation, Russia), MP Stefan Keuter told Frohnmaier he had “already emailed” the attached form (“Antrag”) “to Mr Ochsenreiter”; a questionnaire is included. The mail was sent less than two weeks before the Russian presidential election, which AfD MPs observed at the Duma’s invitation (see edition 1). 26
• July 2018: the Italian journalist Pietro Senaldi approached Frohnmaier for an interview with Gauland, writing that “Manuel Oksenmayer” had given him the address. 27
• September 2018: MP Thomas Seitz relayed a request from Ochsenreiter for a “eurosceptic MP” to attend the “Moldovan Forum” in Chișinău, hosted by Moldova’s then president Igor Dodon, who was widely seen as Russia-leaning, with costs covered. 28 The forum’s published programme on the Moldovan presidency’s website names it the “Moldovan-Russian Economic Forum” (Chișinău, 20–22 September 2018). It lists “Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor-in-chief of Zuerst!” as moderator of its first section, “Moldova: between East and West”. Among that section’s scheduled speakers is Siegbert Droese, “member of the Federal Parliament of Germany”, an AfD MP who is also named in the archived mail. The programme shows who was scheduled to speak, not who attended.

What it means#

The files show that a man with documented ties to Russian state media and the Kremlin-run “Donetsk People’s Republic” had his own Bundestag mailbox, and that restricted parliamentary papers were sent to it. They do not show whether he opened those particular messages. Frohnmaier said through his lawyer, about the forwarding to his private address, that no unauthorised person had access and that the practice “has not been carried out for some time” (ZDF, 29 October 2026). That statement concerns his private address; ZDF’s report does not mention Ochsenreiter or the staff mailbox. We have not yet asked Frohnmaier about it.

2. Restricted papers elsewhere in the archive#

• Frohnmaier’s private address. Between February 2018 and April 2019 the office sent 27 messages with non-public parliamentary or state material to Frohnmaier’s private AOL address, four of them marked VS-NfD: an EU foresight paper, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly conference papers, the EU Foreign Affairs Council reports and OSCE winter-meeting material. 29 13 10 ZDF reported the practice on 29 October 2026.
• Ulrich Oehme. In 2025 and 2026 courts upheld the Bundestag’s refusal of a building pass to the former AfD MP, citing contacts with Russian state bodies. As an MP in 2018–19 he was on the distribution lists of the same restricted committee papers. 29 30
• Other state material: the leaked 2019 Verfassungsschutz assessment of the AfD (marked VS-NfD, published by netzpolitik.org at the time) 31; a 2020 Foreign Office paper on 5G security 32; confidential Bundestag material on the Wirecard affair 33. In all, 215 of 5,645 marked messages carry state, parliamentary or EU material.

3. The party’s line on Russia, before and after 2022#

Read with care: the scale also counts calls for peace talks or an end to sanctions as mildly pro-Russian (+1), and our model rated the federal board’s condemnation of the invasion as pro-Russian too. The one “critical” text after 2022 is itself a rating error: it complains about “self-destructive Russia sanctions”. The content matters more than the count:

• Before: “Russia is a partner, not an opponent in the fight against terror” (Gauland, 2015) 34; “Dialogue and cooperation with Russia instead of confrontation and pointless sanctions” (Meuthen, 2018) 35; Weidel in 2018 welcomed Trump’s step “to normalise relations with Russia” 36; “Russia is one of our most important partners in Europe” (Nikolaus Kramer, AfD group leader in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, 2021) 37.
• 2022: the federal board “unreservedly condemned” Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but called the escalation also a result of “estrangement between NATO and Russia”, rejected economic sanctions and Ukraine’s NATO and EU membership. 38 39 Tino Chrupalla warned that NATO arms deliveries risked a third world war. 40 In 2023 federal treasurer Carsten Hütter called for tying support for Ukraine to Kyiv’s readiness to negotiate. 41
• 2023–2026 (mostly Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania): end the gas sanctions 42; “repair and reactivation of Nord Stream 1 and 2” (Petra Federau, 2026) 43; “without marked territorial concessions to Russia there will be no end to the dying” (Jan- Phillip Tadsen, August 2025, welcoming Trump’s peace effort). 44 In NRW the party’s line to members in 2025: the criticism is “not directed against the Ukrainian people nor the Russian one” but against the federal government’s foreign policy. 45
• Contacts after 2022 in the available mailboxes: an RT DE interview request to an NRW official (September 2025) 46, an NRW official’s trip to a conference in Sochi (November 2025) 47, and an internal complaint in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania about planned contacts with “Putin-near” representatives (October 2025). 48 The September 2022 trip of Saxony-Anhalt state MPs to Russia and the occupied Donbas was reported at the time. 49

4. NATO, the EU and the economy#

Counts are documents in our sample with an AfD position (leadership / base). Rank-and-file texts are fewer, and many come from state party offices answering members. They point the same way as the leadership, except on the economy, where the base leans more towards the state.

The economy counts understate the market-liberal side: the model sometimes rated demands for tax cuts as “state-oriented”. The quotes are more reliable than the counts.

• NATO: “remaining in NATO is indispensable”, with a stronger European pillar (Gauland, 2017) 50; “we are already members of a functioning defence alliance, NATO” (Georg Pazderski, 2018) 51; but “the AfD opposes any further eastward expansion of NATO” (Harald Laatsch, 2018). 52 After 2022 the NATO question becomes Ukraine’s accession (rejected) — while state MPs in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania call Bundeswehr investment “long overdue”. 53
• EU: from the euro to Dexit — “We need a nationwide campaign for Brexit / Dexit!” (Weidel, 2016) 54; “Dexit is the logical consequence” (Weidel, 2018). 55
• Economy — Musk’s “free-market” AfD? The market-liberal side is real. It ran from Meuthen and Weidel in 2015–2017 (“economic order policy as the best social policy”) to Frohnmaier against rent control as “planned economy” (2017) 56 57. It is now the everyday line of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania group: “We need extensive and targeted tax cuts. Not more state, but less state, not more subsidies, but lower levies” (Martin Schmidt, 2022). 58 In 2025 the same group called for lower non-wage labour costs “instead of the quasi-planned-economy wage targets” (Michael Meister). 59
• Selective on trade. The party opposed TTIP (Georg Pazderski, 2016) 60 and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania backs the farmers’ “resistance to the Mercosur agreement” (2024). 61 The same group wants to “restore interrupted supply chains for Russian raw materials” (Martin Schmidt, 2023). 62 Bundestag MPs called for “a free-trade zone between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Community” (Eurasische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft, as the MPs called the Russian-led bloc; Waldemar Herdt and Anton Friesen, 2017). 63
• A welfare state for Germans first. East German MPs call for state investment programmes 64. The NRW state party office wrote in 2025 that the party stands “for a strong welfare state – but for one that helps its own citizens first”. 65 In 2026 the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania leader Enrico Schult rejects any later retirement age for people who have worked 45 years. 66
• Our assessment: on taxes, regulation and energy the AfD speaks the language Musk likes. On trade it is protectionist towards Western agreements and open towards Russia. It pairs both with a welfare state meant first for Germans: a strong social-protectionist strand, more visible in the East and at the base. This is a keyword sample, mostly from two state-level mailboxes for recent years.

5. Americans and the AfD#

• Telegrams to Trump. After the 2016 election the federal board voted by circular resolution to congratulate Trump; the telegram, signed by Frauke Petry, expressed confidence that he would “end the wars in Syria and Ukraine by mutual agreement with Russia”. 67 At his inauguration in January 2017 Petry and Jörg Meuthen called the AfD Trump’s “natural allies” and asked: “Please support us in our effort to remove the enemy-state clause from the UN Charter.” 68 The Guardian reported the 2016 telegram from the leak (via Raw Story).
• Steve Bannon. Weidel met Bannon in Zurich on 6 March 2018; the emails show the meeting was arranged through intermediaries including Vincent Harris, whose Texas firm Harris Media worked for the AfD’s 2017 campaign. 69 70 The meeting was reported by dpa in 2018 (Quartz).
• US government. According to an AfD press release, in June 2018 foreign-policy spokesman Armin-Paulus Hampel and defence committee member Jens Kestner held talks at the State Department, on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon, including with a security adviser to Senator Ron Johnson. 71
• 2025: Vance’s February 2025 Munich speech is taken up in AfD press releases. 72 In August 2025 Jan-Phillip Tadsen welcomed Trump’s peace effort: “Donald Trump has the chance today to show that peace in Europe is possible.” 44

Russia findings from edition 1#

All edition 1 findings stand; see edition 1 for details and press sources. In brief:

• Occupied Crimea: the February 2018 delegation was invited via Yuri Gempel of the Crimean “State Council”, whose side offered to cover accommodation, transfers and interpreters; the federal board discussed MPs’ trip to the April 2018 Yalta forum, and Weidel recommended entering via Odessa. 73 74 75
• The March 2018 “election observers” were, according to the emails, invited by Duma chairman Volodin and foreign-affairs chair Slutsky; the Bundestag group approved its own financial support. 76 77
• The NRW network around Eugen Schmidt arranged and invoiced AfD advertising on Rossiya 1 and Rossiya 24 in 2017 — AfD money to Russian state TV. 78 79
• The Moscow City Government provided a private jet for Petry, Pretzell and Flak in February 2017 (reported); Meuthen met the Ulyanovsk governor and Duma committee chair Gutenev in July 2018; Kalbitz announced an “informal exchange of information” with sanctioned oligarch Konstantin Malofeev in Moscow in February 2019 (first reported by CORRECTIV from this leak). 80 35 81
• The Russian embassy invited Petry and Weidel to a Crimea conference (2017); Robby Schlund invited Duma budget chair Andrei Makarov to the Bundestag (2018). 82 83

How to verify#

Every reference [n] points to a file in the published archive. The afd:// address gives the mailbox and the mbox file (or document); the SHA-256 is the hash of the raw message and identifies it uniquely. Message-IDs and private email addresses are left out.

• sha256 ok means the file is unchanged since we indexed it — not that the email is genuine.
• DKIM pass means the sender’s server signed the message and the signature still verifies today — strong evidence of authenticity. Most cited emails are internal AfD or Bundestag mail without a signature; the display names and dates in section 1 come from these unsigned headers.

Positions are model ratings of a keyword sample and contain errors; the quotes are verbatim and were checked against the source.

Press sources#

• ZDFheute, 29 Oct 2026 — AfD-Leaks: Sammelte Abgeordneter Infos für das Assad-Regime?
• RFE/RL, 14 Jan 2019 — Far-right German journalist implicated in firebombing of Hungarian center in Ukraine
• RFE/RL, 18 Jan 2019 — Berlin prosecutors investigate German journalist named in Ukraine arson attack
• RFE/RL, 24 Mar 2020 — Polish court convicts three men for torching Hungarian center in Ukraine
• ZDF Frontal 21, 9 Apr 2019 — Der Fall Frohnmaier
• taz — The Firebugs
• t-online, 20 Aug 2021 — Flüchtiger AfD-Netzwerker Manuel Ochsenreiter in Moskau gestorben
• Komsomolskaya Pravda (Donetsk edition), 11 Nov 2018 — interview at a Donetsk polling station
• OCCRP, Eesti Ekspress, IrpiMedia, profil, 3 Feb 2023 — Kremlin-Linked Group Arranged Payments to European Politicians to Support Russia’s Annexation of Crimea
• Presidency of the Republic of Moldova, Sept 2018 — programme of the Moldovan-Russian Economic Forum
• European Platform for Democratic Elections — Biased Observers Database: Manuel Ochsenreiter
• Verwaltungsgericht Berlin, 2025 — press release on the refused Bundestag pass
• Raw Story, on the Guardian’s review of the leak — AfD and Trump
• Quartz, 2018 — Alice Weidel is getting advice from Steve Bannon
• CORRECTIV, 21 Oct 2026 — Was im AfD-Leak steckt

Evidence index#