Hacker News

No, the thing he was arrested for is having classified documents in his possession.

Or Merkel for pushing 'green' russian gas. And all traitors who destroy LOCAL coal industry.

Europe has several gas, oil and coal fields (like Netherlands). We are just not allowed to use them!!! We must depend on hostile foreigners, like Putin, Trump and Saudis!!!

Maybe look at Ukraine stealing transit gas which was one of the reasons for Nord Stream. And collecting Russian transit money until 2025, long after they blew up Nord Stream.

But it is great that Germany now has more expensive "sovereign" US gas and the fallback Qatar was sabotaged in the Iran war. Great independence.

Mossad/Israel at least:

> Documents supplied to the Hamburg court indicated that Hanning was the go-between with the Israelis. According to media reports, these Hamburg court documents contained clues to his other business activity with classified BND information.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and western intelligence precedent (eg russian “illegals program”) is that when it’s Russia/China, it’s named.

So the omission here itself (and denial of Russia) is some additional speculative information, on top of his already known ties to Mossad.

Spiegel says Azerbaijan.

Actually the even more fun part is that they only found out because they raided his house due to this really sketchy case he was contracted for via his really sketcy swiss(!) private eye company: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/20/germany-christ...

As a geopolitical nerd, I've consumed a lot of non-fiction espionage content. In general, there's a general theme that German intelligence is a joke at best. He must have gotten too greedy or very lazy/sloppy.

He was a career bureaucrat who got position after position. BND was just one of them.

The list of German politicians and bureaucrats with scandals is long, ranging from Olaf Scholz to von der Leyen. So this isn't too surprising.

There is no evidence of Mossad involvement. Far from me to defend Israel's spy agency but the article only mentions a possible connection to Azerbaijan.

That's not a thing. What triggers moderation and/or banning is when accounts break the site guidelines by going into political/nationalistic/ideological flamewar, as they unfortunately often do on divisive topics.

I assume you're asking about Israel. HN Search shows about 170k comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... All of those are live. That's a far cry from "automatic cancellation".

If you meant some other country, it's easy enough to check this about any of them.

edit:wrong assumption

[dead]

Someone downvoted you, but if you do look at the sweatshirt sales webpage, it does say this

"Licensor: Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German Foreign Intelligence Service

The BND logo is a registered trademark of the Bundesnachrichtendienst in Berlin, Germany. The BND is not involved in the operation, production, or sale of these products and accepts no liability. The BND does not receive any revenue from the BND Shop."

Which does seem a little bizarre.

We also know it was Israel because they said it was Israel, as reported by other media from the few Western countries that don't like Israel: https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

> My only hope is that history will correctly label all those involved as collaborators.

Bad news, only nerds care about history.

The article says a possible connection to Azerbaijan is being investigated.

Agree with everything else you said though.

[dead]

We don’t know what country he was spying for, but we do know it’s not Russia. From the very short article: > The case does not involve Russia, according to information obtained by Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

It’s not sympathy so much with Russia, more of a complete distrust of US-led causes for war.

The US has betrayed a lot of humanity with the catastrophic wars it has fought since 2003. But in Europe, the results are very, very clear: many Europeans actually have the temerity to establish relations with the refugees who have been arriving for decades now, and through that contact, seek to understand that the world is being kept at war needlessly.

Many Western observers tend to miss the fact that there was a period between the end of the cold war and the beginning of the Ukraine conflict where Europeans were kind of glad to have peace in Europe - like actually with Russia being considered a part of the European community, where after years of distrust, peaceful relations between Europe and Russia were actually kind of happening.

This has all gone to /dev/null now, but there is still an unheard/heavily censored group of European citizens - in pretty much all of Europes’ western sphere - who simply would prefer to establish peaceful relations with Russia, and go back to actually flourishing and prospering.

Oh, and ending all wars on the Middle East, so the refugees from the US’ wars can rebuild their countries and go back home. Some day. Maybe.

Of course you won’t hear about them much, but if you pay close attention in the cafes and bars and riverside grills, you will hear them: many Europeans do actually believe in and want peace and simply don’t think the current crop of leaders are capable of it. So they express this not as sympathy with Russia, but as a willingness to effect the political change necessary to avoid catastrophe.

From what I see here it’s a mixture of anti-Americanism, „Ostslgie“ (the longing for the good old times of the DDR, a feeling often inherited from parents) and a crap ton of Russian propaganda that floods social media.

Combine this with a step economic decline and voila you got the perfect conditions for autocratic sympathies

I would not say it's many but certainly there are some. I found it surprising that in recent sabotage or spy cases in Germany there were often Ukrainian or Latvian accomplices to the Russians. But then again it's obvious that not all Ukrainians have the same opinion about the war.

Similar to why there's a significant fraction of pro-mainland China people in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Reasons include people who benefitted from the Soviet Union, often due to business and trade. Analogy would be Foxconn, a Taiwanese company which is dependent on manufacturing in China.

Nostalgia/rose-tinted glasses/rosy retrospection, Ostalgie in German.

Families that were ethnically from Russia, moved during the Soviet Union times and still have ties to Russia.

The former East Germany is way more pro-Russian than the former West Germany, showing the effects of these factors.

Some part of the population was subject to 60 years of continuous propaganda. That's three generations. You might say people should be able to see beyond that, but the ones influencing them were professionals too.

> It's weird that so many Germans are sympathetic to Russia given that they were subjugated by Russia for decades.

Do you think that Germany might have done something right before this "subjugation"?

Maybe 25-40 million things?

Are you sympathetic to MBS when you buy oil from Saudi Arabia?

> Can someone please explain what's going on here?

Putin got'em addicted to cheap Russian gas and paid up anti nuclear NGOs who also got cash from big oil.

Also Berlin still has some Russian minority since the GDR. That includes anti Putin Russian diaspora or people that just needed a break from paranoia and brespredel.

There's a certain subset of every population that just wants to be dominated. Some of these people don't have the courage to ask their romantic partner or a professional, so they try to realize their kink through political means.