Gereon Bollmann

Gereon Bollmann (born 20 November 1953 in Au im Murgtal, now part of Weisenbach) is a lawyer, retired judge and politician of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany. He has sat in the Bundestag since 1 October 2021 for Schleswig-Holstein, elected from the AfD state list, and has stood in constituency 4, Rendsburg–Eckernförde. The Bundestag biography records that he is married for the second time and has five children.

He attended grammar schools in Preetz, Münster and Kiel, did military service in Munich and Kronshagen, studied law in Kiel and trained in the district of the Kiel regional court. He was a judge at the Schleswig administrative court, with a long assignment that included social-assistance and asylum cases, and was seconded to the Segeberg district as head of the district youth and social-welfare offices and deputy to the Landrat, and to the Schleswig higher administrative court. He then spent five years as a division head in the legal department and as a personal adviser in the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Justice, followed by twenty years as a judge at the Schleswig Higher Regional Court, latterly in a senate for general civil and family matters. A certified mediator, he retired on 1 January 2020.

Bollmann joined the AfD in 2016. From 2017 to 2022 he was president of the party's state arbitration court in Schleswig-Holstein, and from June 2022 a judge of its federal arbitration court, serving as that court's president from November 2022 until July 2024. He has been a federal party delegate since 2017. On 1 October 2021 he succeeded to a seat from the Schleswig-Holstein list for the remainder of the 19th Bundestag, and on 26 October 2021 he entered the 20th Bundestag from the same list. In the 2021 federal election the AfD received 10,200 first votes (6.3 percent) in Rendsburg-Eckernförde, where the Social Democratic Party of Germany won the constituency with 49,474 votes (30.8 percent).

At the federal election of 23 February 2025 he again missed the direct seat. Johann Wadephul of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany won it with 56,163 votes (32.8 percent), while the AfD took 26,417 first votes (15.4 percent) and 27,498 second votes (16.0 percent) in the constituency. Across Schleswig-Holstein the AfD received 16.3 percent of second votes, and Bollmann returned to parliament from list place 2. He has been a member of the 21st Bundestag since 25 March 2025.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and of the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference, and a substitute member of the Health Committee, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Interior Committee, the committee that elects judges of the Federal Constitutional Court, and the mediation committee. On 21 March 2024 the Bundestag declined to elect him vice president: the AfD's nomination received 84 votes in favour, 578 against and 15 abstentions, short of the required majority of 368. On election night in 2025 he called the result a "day of joy" for the AfD and said he wanted Germany's external borders closed immediately, "mass" deportations, and a basic "family money" payment of 2,000 euros a month for every family. In January 2024 Der Spiegel, drawing on Stern and RTL, reported that since 2 February 2023 he had held a standing permit to visit the detained former AfD legislator Birgit Malsack-Winkemann and had written to the Federal Prosecutor General that he meant to visit about once a month, while telling those outlets that the party leadership had not been informed.

Early life and education

Birth and schooling

Gereon Bollmann was born on 20 November 1953 in Au im Murgtal, which the Bundestag biography gives as now part of Weisenbach. The parliament notes that these biographies rest on the members' own statements. The municipality states that Weisenbach has existed in its present form since 1 January 1971, when Au im Murgtal was reincorporated after 138 years as a separate commune, and that the municipality consists of the districts of Weisenbach and Au and the settlement of Neudorf. It places itself in the Murg valley, roughly midway between Rastatt and Freudenstadt.

The district of Au is described by the municipality as a Murg valley village of about 630 inhabitants, with half-timbered houses and narrow lanes. The Bundestag biography records that Bollmann attended Gymnasien in Preetz, Münster and Kiel. On his own website he states that he passed the Abitur, the university-entrance examination, at the Ernst-Barlach-Gymnasium in Kiel. The city lists that school among its Gymnasien, the secondary schools leading to the Abitur, in the school system of Schleswig-Holstein. Neither account dates the school years or explains the changes of place.

Military service

The Bundestag biography states that he performed military service (Wehrdienst) in Munich and in Kronshagen. He writes that the service was in Munich and at the chemical investigation office (Chemische Untersuchungsstelle) of the Bundeswehr hospital in Kronshagen. General conscription required men in the Federal Republic to perform military service or a civilian substitute. The Bundestag suspended that duty on 24 March 2011, with effect from 1 July 2011, about 55 years after it had been introduced; the suspension applies in peacetime, and the obligation can be revived in a state of tension or defence. The biographies do not give the year, length or unit of Bollmann's service beyond the places named.

Legal studies and examinations

He studied law in Kiel and then completed the Referendariat, the practical legal preparatory service, in the district of the Landgericht Kiel. On his website he states that the Kiel course emphasised public law, municipal law, administrative-procedure law and public international law, and that he worked as an assistant to Professor Albert von Mutius at the Lorenz-von-Stein-Institut of Kiel University (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel). The same account says that he passed the first state law examination at the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) in Schleswig; that elective stations were at Wehrbereichsverwaltung I of the Bundeswehr, at the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court in Schleswig, and on an appellate station at the Higher Regional Court there; and that the second state examination was taken before the joint examination office of Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg. It gives no date for the assistantship and no date or mark for either examination.

The institute's own history records that it began work at the start of 1980 and that von Mutius, who held the chair of public law and administrative science in the law faculty, was then appointed the managing member of its board. Under section 5 of the German Judges Act (Deutsches Richtergesetz), qualification for judicial office is acquired by completing a university course in law with the first examination and a subsequent preparatory service ending in the second state examination. For Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein that second examination is held before their joint examination office (Gemeinsames Prüfungsamt), established at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg, and the office states that the Referendariat ordinarily ends after two years with this examination.

Judicial and administrative career

Gereon Bollmann's years in the courts and justice administration of Schleswig-Holstein are documented chiefly in the biography published by the German Bundestag, which notes that members' biographical entries rest on their own information, and in his own longer account. Independent reporting confirms the outline rather than the individual postings: a long judicial career, retirement in 2020, and about twenty years at the higher regional court in Schleswig.

Administrative court and the Segeberg district

He began, on that account, as a judge of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court (Schleswig-Holsteinisches Verwaltungsgericht) in Schleswig. The court is the state's only administrative court of first instance. It hears public-law disputes in which individuals challenge official action or seek to compel it, and its caseload expressly includes foreigners' law and asylum law, alongside building, civil-service, tax, school and regulatory matters. The Bundestag text describes a long assignment as an administrative judge, including social-assistance law and asylum law. Social-assistance litigation of that kind later left the administrative courts: from 1 January 2005, new disputes over social assistance were assigned to the social courts, while cases already pending stayed where they had been filed.

He was next seconded into the administration of the rural district of Segeberg. The parliamentary biography says that he headed the district youth-welfare office and the district social-welfare office and deputised for the Landrat, the district administrator. His own site adds that the two offices together had about 250 employees and that he also stood in for the leading district administrative director. A further secondment, again according to both accounts, took him to the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Administrative Court (Oberverwaltungsgericht) in Schleswig, the appellate court above the administrative court. The state has had its own higher administrative court only since 1991; before that, appeals from Schleswig-Holstein went to the Higher Administrative Court in Lüneburg, so the secondment he describes falls after the Schleswig court was established. Neither account gives calendar years for these posts, and publicly indexed decisions do not readily identify him as the judge in particular administrative or asylum cases.

Ministry of Justice

For about five years he worked in the state Ministry of Justice in Kiel. The Bundestag biography lists him as head of a division (Referatsleiter) in the legal department and as personal adviser (persönlicher Referent) in the ministry's legal office, the Justiziariat. On his website he says that he represented the justice minister in court and took part in the Land's legislative business in the Bundesrat while that chamber still sat in Bonn. He also says that his brief covered conscription law and the sixth amendment of the Code of Administrative Court Procedure (Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung). That amendment was a federal statute of 1 November 1996, prepared as a government bill and aimed at shortening administrative-court proceedings and at streamlining planning and licensing disputes. The legislative record does not name him; the claim that the file was his is his own.

The order in the parliamentary biography places the ministry immediately before the higher regional court. About twenty years there, ending on 1 January 2020, would put the ministerial years in the later 1990s, consistent with a 1996 statute and with Bundesrat work while the chamber still sat in Bonn. That dating is an inference from the durations he reports, not from a published appointment notice.

Higher Regional Court of Schleswig

He then sat for about twenty years as a judge of the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court (Schleswig-Holsteinisches Oberlandesgericht) in Schleswig. In a February 2025 profile, shz.de stated that length of service directly and noted that he had already been a judge of the court before he joined a political party.

In 2017 Die Welt still described him, in the present tense, as a judge of that court and called it Schleswig-Holstein's highest court for criminal and civil cases. The court is the state's only higher regional court. It hears civil appeals from the four regional courts and is the appellate court for family cases coming up from the local courts; some of its civil senates also sit as family senates. The parliamentary biography says that his last assignment was a senate for general civil matters and family matters, and that he is a certified mediator.

His website adds that he sat as a supplementary judge (Ergänzungsrichter) in two large state-security trials. No published report names those proceedings. Until 2012 the court in Schleswig had first-instance jurisdiction over the state-security offences listed in section 120 of the Courts Constitution Act. A treaty with Hamburg, signed on 16 February 2012 and in force from 8 June 2012, transferred that jurisdiction to the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg; a case in which the indictment had already been filed in Schleswig stayed there. The statement is therefore compatible with the court's jurisdiction during part of his tenure, but it is not corroborated by a case name or a judgment.

He retired on 1 January 2020. The Bundestag lists his occupation as retired judge of a higher regional court (Richter am Oberlandesgericht a. D.). A February 2025 portrait in the Ärzte Zeitung described him as a retired judge with a long career in the justice system who had been retired since 2020, and Norddeutscher Rundfunk has identified him as a former judge of the higher regional court in Schleswig.

Party activity in the Alternative for Germany

Joining the party and state offices

The Bundestag biography, which rests on the member's own statements, records that Gereon Bollmann joined the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) in 2016 and retired from the bench on 1 January 2020, so the membership began while he was still a judge. He had sat for twenty years at the Higher Regional Court in Schleswig. The same account states that he was president of the AfD state arbitration court in Schleswig-Holstein from 2017 to 2022, and that from 2017 he was continuously a federal party delegate of his home district association.

On 5 June 2021 a state congress in Büdelsdorf failed to fill the state chair, vacant since the 2019 expulsion of Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein. A dpa report described the association as split between a national-right camp and a moderate one, and placed Bollmann, then 68 and a retired Higher Regional Court judge, with the former; Sayn-Wittgenstein had favored him. His opponent was David Jenniches, 43, chair of the AfD caucus in Lübeck's city assembly, placed with the moderate camp. Party rules required an absolute majority. In two runoffs neither man reached it. In the second, Bollmann received 92 votes, Jenniches 68, and 29 members rejected both. Deputy state chair Joachim Schneider also failed with a proposal that he take the chair and the two serve as deputies. A little over 200 people attended, out of a membership the party put at under 900 after losses, and the meeting in a boathouse ended without a new executive. Bollmann told dpa that the day had, to his regret, confirmed voters' picture of a quarreling party and would not help the Bundestag election then approaching. Sayn-Wittgenstein wrote that she was astonished he had made so many enemies. The chair stayed vacant.

He also stood locally. For the district election in Rendsburg-Eckernförde on 14 May 2023, the district election committee admitted an AfD direct candidacy in constituency 12 (Osterrönfeld) under the name "Ballmann, Gereon," identified as a retired judge and Bundestag member, born in 1953 and living in Kiel. The official final result did not elect that candidate: Beate Nielsen of the CDU won the constituency with 1,925 votes, while the AfD received 481 votes, 8.1 percent.

Federal arbitration court

The federal arbitration court decides internal party disputes, including expulsion proceedings. Judges are chosen by the federal congress. After the election of judges and substitute judges at the 13th federal congress on 17 June 2022 in Riesa, a party webpage dated 22 November 2022 listed Bollmann as president and Roland Ulbrich as vice president. Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a former Bundestag member, was listed as an assessor in the second chamber, and Bollmann also as an assessor in the third. His Bundestag biography dates his judgeship from June 2022 and his presidency from November 2022 to July 2024.

On 30 January 2024 Bollmann, as president, published the court's notice that Ulbrich had resigned the vice presidency. The notice said Ulbrich was taking responsibility for an emergency ruling from which an unprejudiced reader might conclude that the court had adopted a term and a legal proposition of National Socialism, an impression Ulbrich said he had not intended. Der Spiegel reported that the ruling had referred to the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 and that the Saxon state executive, in agreement with the federal leadership, had applied to expel him; the Saxon parliamentary group also moved to remove him. The court elected Martin Braukmann, described in the notice as a presiding judge, to succeed Ulbrich as vice president.

Congresses and other internal roles

Beyond the state chairmanship contest, Bollmann's party work has run through federal congresses and case-by-case advice. The Bundestag biography, again on his own account, says he advises district, state and Bundestag members on legal questions and conducts mediations at internal points of conflict across the party. The Riesa congress of June 2022 was the meeting that elected the bench he then presided over.

At the two-day federal congress in Essen that closed on Sunday, 30 June 2024, n-tv reported, Bollmann spoke as the outgoing president of the arbitration court about expulsion proceedings. He told delegates that any of them could be affected and that they would be glad, in that case, to stand before an independent judge. The same report noted that he later failed to obtain a majority. n-tv's account of the congress also recorded that a candidate proposed by Björn Höcke for the court, Anna Rathert, received 45 percent and was not elected, while co-chairs Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla were returned.

By 15 August 2024 the party's published composition of the court listed Martin Braukmann as president and Peter Ditges as vice president. Bollmann no longer appeared. That listing matches the end date of July 2024 given in his Bundestag biography for the presidency. Braukmann, elected vice president in January 2024, was the successor the party site then showed.

Bundestag candidacies and election results

2017 candidacy and succession

At the federal election of 24 September 2017, Gereon Martin Bollmann was the direct candidate of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Bundestag constituency 4, Rendsburg–Eckernförde, in Schleswig-Holstein. He received 10,656 first votes, 6.8 percent of valid first votes and 3.4 percentage points more than the AfD candidate there in 2013. The constituency mandate went to Johann David Wadephul of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with 66,625 votes (42.7 percent). Sönke Rix of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) placed second with 45,070 votes (28.9 percent). Turnout was 78.4 percent among 200,831 eligible voters. In the same constituency the AfD polled 11,578 second votes (7.4 percent).

Statewide the AfD received 140,362 second votes, 8.2 percent, and two Bundestag seats, both from the state list and none as a direct mandate. The members returned were Bruno Hollnagel and Axel Gehrke. Bollmann's archived biography for the 20th Bundestag, which the Bundestag states is based on the member's own disclosures, records him as third on the AfD state list for 2017, a place the result did not reach.

Gehrke, elected in 2017 from the Schleswig-Holstein list and associated with constituency 9, Ostholstein–Stormarn-Nord, died on Wednesday, 22 September 2021. The Bundestag named Bollmann as his successor. Bollmann acquired the seat on 1 October 2021, through the state list, and was a member for the closing weeks of the 19th Bundestag. That term ended when the newly elected house met on 26 October 2021.

2021 federal election

Bollmann stood again in constituency 4 at the election of 26 September 2021. He received 10,200 first votes, 6.3 percent, 0.5 percentage points less than in 2017. Rix won the constituency for the SPD with 49,474 votes (30.8 percent). Wadephul, again the CDU candidate, took 47,688 votes (29.7 percent). AfD second votes in the constituency were 10,564, or 6.6 percent. Turnout was 80.1 percent of 202,226 eligible voters.

Across Schleswig-Holstein the AfD received 119,566 second votes (6.8 percent), down 1.4 points from 2017, and again won no constituency. The state statistical office lists two AfD members elected from the state list, Uwe Witt and Gereon Bollmann. The same Bundestag biography records Bollmann as second on the AfD list for 2021 and states that he entered the 20th Bundestag from the Schleswig-Holstein list on 26 October 2021, the day of that Bundestag's constitutive sitting.

2025 federal election

For the election of 23 February 2025 the Schleswig-Holstein state returning officer, in a notice of 30 January 2025 following the state electoral committee's sitting of 24 January, published Bollmann as second on the admitted AfD state list, after Kurt Kleinschmidt. The notice gives his name as Gereon Martin Bollmann, a retired judge born in 1953 in Au im Murgtal. He was also again the AfD direct candidate in constituency 4.

The Federal Returning Officer records the constituency winner as Dr. Johann David Walter Rudolf Wadephul of the CDU, with 56,163 first votes (32.8 percent). Felix Wilsberg of the SPD was second with 36,266 votes (21.2 percent). Bollmann received 26,417 first votes (15.4 percent), 9.1 percentage points more than in 2021. AfD second votes in the constituency were 27,498 (16.0 percent), up 9.5 points. Turnout was 85.1 percent of 202,649 eligible voters. He did not win the direct mandate.

Statewide the AfD received 306,165 second votes, 16.3 percent, an increase of 9.5 points. The final state result allocates the AfD five seats, all from the state list rather than constituencies, and names Bollmann as the member elected from list place 2. The 21st Bundestag held its constitutive sitting on Tuesday, 25 March 2025, and the Bundestag records Bollmann's membership from that date. NDR reported on 24 February 2025 that he was entering through second place on the Schleswig-Holstein list and had represented the party in the Bundestag since October 2021.

Parliamentary work

Committees and interparliamentary bodies

In the 21st Bundestag, which he joined on 25 March 2025 from the Schleswig-Holstein list of Alternative for Germany, the parliament's biography lists Gereon Bollmann as an ordinary member of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and of the delegation to the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference. He is a deputy on the Committee on Health, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Interior Committee, the Wahlausschuss and the Mediation Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss).

The 20th electoral term (2021–2025) was arranged differently. The archived biography lists him then as an ordinary member of the Committee on Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth — education was not in that committee's title — and of the Petitions Committee, the Children's Commission (Kinderkommission, the family committee's body for the interests of children) and the Committee on Legal Affairs, and only as a deputy on health and on the Mediation Committee. It does not list the Interior Committee, the Wahlausschuss or the Baltic Sea delegation.

The Children's Commission chair rotates. Minutes of the 40th sitting, on 3 July 2024, were still chaired by Matthias Seestern-Pauly and included a work programme for Bollmann's period in the chair; the notice of 7 November 2024 for the 43rd sitting names him as chair. The Wahlausschuss for judges of the Federal Constitutional Court is formed at the start of each term; its twelve full members are chosen in proportion to group strength under section 6(2) of the Federal Constitutional Court Act, and Bollmann sits as a substitute. The Mediation Committee, sixteen members each from the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, seeks a compromise when a bill passed by the Bundestag lacks a Bundesrat majority.

Questions, motions and debates

On 21 March 2024, in the 160th sitting, he spoke for the AfD on a CDU/CSU motion (Drucksache 20/10725) calling for the law against child marriage to be amended at once. He said a judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court already allowed Parliament to deny domestic effect to a marriage contracted abroad below a minimum age, and criticised the government for settling its line only the day before. On 6 June 2024 he and Tobias Matthias Peterka tabled, for the AfD group, a motion for a resolution (Drucksache 20/11676) on the governing parties' bill on minors in marriages concluded abroad (Drucksachen 20/11367 and 20/11659). It argued that maintenance would generally end at death, that succession was not covered, and that validation once both parties were adults did not require counselling.

On 27 June 2024, debating the Petitions Committee's report for 2023 (Drucksache 20/11600, 178th sitting), he called petitions a form of participation and an early-warning system, and cited polling which, on his account, showed a sharp fall in the share of people who felt free to express a political opinion.

On 17 October 2024, in the 194th sitting, he spoke on the family committee's report on a CDU/CSU motion to ease pregnancy and maternity protection for founders and the self-employed (Drucksachen 20/6911 and 20/12067). He cited a drop in the birth rate — 8 per cent in 2022 and 7 per cent in 2023, on the figures he used — and said pay-as-you-go social insurance would come under strain. In the same sitting, at the first reading of a government bill to raise the jurisdictional threshold of the local courts and to specialise civil justice (Drucksache 20/13251), he called an increase understandable after about thirty years of currency depreciation, but said the forecast of roughly 44,000 extra cases a year rested partly on ad hoc estimates.

In the 21st term he has co-signed AfD written questions. Drucksache 21/3527 of 8 January 2026 asks how many Ukrainian nationals who arrived since 2022 receive long-term-care insurance benefits or assistance with care costs, noting that the statistics under section 109 of Book XI of the Social Code do not record nationality, migration status or year of arrival. Drucksache 21/1998 of 7 October 2025 asks for case data on attempted and completed homicides since 2005 committed in the name of family honour, taking the murder of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin in 2005 as its point of departure.

Vice-presidential nomination

On 23 February 2024 the AfD group, over the signatures of Alice Weidel, Tino Chrupalla and the group, proposed Bollmann as a deputy to the President of the Bundestag (Drucksache 20/10463). The House voted on 21 March 2024, in the 160th sitting, by secret ballot and without debate, in a first round. It then had 735 members. Of 677 papers, none was invalid: 84 were in favour, 578 against and 15 abstentions. The majority required was 368, and the chair announced that he had not been elected. The same sitting rejected the AfD nominee for the Parliamentary Control Panel, Steffen Janich, by 79 votes to 588, with 10 abstentions, against the same threshold.

Der Spiegel placed the result in a sequence running since the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017: the party was, it wrote, the only group never represented in the Presidium, because every candidate had missed the majority required. The article quoted Bärbel Bas of the Social Democratic Party, then President of the Bundestag, as saying that repeated votes against the AfD did not match parliamentary tradition, but that members are free under Article 38 of the Basic Law and that the party had no right to the office. It reported that other groups were withholding votes because of what it called the party's increasingly radical course and the observation of several state associations as suspected right-wing extremist cases.

Political positions

Family and social policy

Before entering the Bundestag, Gereon Bollmann treated family policy as a main interest of his Alternative for Germany candidacy. In January 2017, still a judge at the Higher Regional Court of Schleswig, he told the Kieler Nachrichten, as reported by Die Welt, that he wanted to work on foreigners' policy and family policy. A profile by Gernot Kühl in the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung of 21 September 2021, before his candidacy in Rendsburg-Eckernförde, again named family policy and the rule of law as his priorities.

On 2 March 2023, debating deadlines for all-day primary-school care, he said the legal entitlement to a place from 2026 would fail. He cited a Bertelsmann Stiftung figure of almost 350,000 missing preschool places three years earlier, said births had risen, and described unsuitable staffing. Parents left to provide the care, he argued, might sue for lost earnings. He proposed instead a Familiengeld averaging 2,000 euros a month per family, with details on his website; an SPD member shouted "Herdprämie" ("stove premium"). After the February 2025 election, NDR reported that he still sought such a payment, then as a basic amount of 2,000 euros a month for every family.

That monthly sum is his, not a line in the 2025 programme. Tagesschau reported an "activating family policy" for more births: 20,000 euros in pension contributions repaid or credited per child, and a Betreuungsgehalt until the third birthday for care at home by parents or grandparents, with financing left open. The family was defined as father, mother and children; abortion was an absolute exception under section 218 of the Criminal Code; the Self-Determination Act was to be repealed. Die Welt reported that the January 2025 Riesa congress added the father-mother-child wording and, under stated conditions, a tax-financed "welcome premium" of 20,000 euros per newborn.

Migration, asylum and security

Foreigners' policy was the other subject he named in 2017. On the night of the 2025 election, NDR reported that he called curbing migration the party's main aim and that, by his own account, he demanded the immediate closure of Germany's external borders and "massenhafte" (mass) deportations.

On 23 February 2025 he told abgeordnetenwatch.de that a projected shortage of 300,000 skilled workers in Schleswig-Holstein by 2030 should be kept apart from migration. Immigration of people he called culturally foreign since 2015, which he blamed on Chancellor Angela Merkel's failure to close the borders, was in his view no longer acceptable, and further migration was not a remedy: arrivals mostly lacked the skills required. He proposed training immigrants already in Germany, retraining the unemployed, and tax relief to slow the emigration of qualified young Germans. Gaps that remained should be borne socially rather than by "ungeregelte Massenmigration", which he said would sharpen competition for lower-paid work and housing. The site published the reply only after revision, because an earlier version contained unsubstantiated claims, statistics or quotations.

The 2025 programme, as Die Welt summarised it from Riesa, was a list rather than that slogan: custody centres at the border, asylum procedures abroad, a "comprehensive return offensive", benefits in kind for asylum seekers, and payments to people obliged to leave cut to a "humane subsistence minimum". Remigration was added by amendment; it was not in the draft. Bollmann's demand for immediate closure and mass deportations was shorter and more absolute.

Pandemic measures and climate

His first Bundestag speech, on 26 January 2022, was in the debate on a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic. He quoted Health Minister Karl Lauterbach's earlier view that such a mandate made as little sense as one for influenza, and called the change a broken election promise. Omicron, he said, was usually mild, while the facility-based mandate would drive unvaccinated care workers out by mid-March. He contrasted Denmark, England, Ireland and Spain, which were lifting restrictions, with Germany, asking in Low German whether Berlin had "rats in the attic". He told Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the government had coerced the weakest and was branding as enemies of the constitution people, including those on the Monday protest walks, who wanted freedom rather than compulsion. Some deaths, he said, were being accepted; he asked why the Robert Koch Institute gave no valid figures, why side-effect statistics were missing, and why deaths "with" and "of" COVID-19 were not separated. Children, he demanded, should be dropped from a campaign he said was dividing families. The AfD rejected the policy. The chair stopped him for overrunning his time.

On climate change, the published lead of the September 2021 Kühl interview reports, in indirect speech, that he held there was no human-caused climate change. The same opening quotes him: "Ich habe auch mal grün gewählt" ("I did once vote Green"), long ago, the paper said. On 29 November 2021 he wrote on abgeordnetenwatch.de that he would support repeal of Merkel's nuclear exit and a return to nuclear power, which he called carbon-dioxide-neutral, while noting accident risks and unsolved storage. He called the exit after Fukushima Daiichi "hysterical and completely headless", sought research funding, and described concepts he said could burn most existing waste and make a meltdown impossible by design. He claimed that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as invoked by the Greens, treated nuclear energy as necessary for carbon-dioxide targets, and accused the Greens of hypocrisy for importing French nuclear power.

The 2025 programme puts that rejection into policy. Tagesschau reported on 12 February 2025 that the AfD denied a human cause of global heating, spoke of an "unscientific climate hysteria", wanted to leave the Paris Agreement, and rejected any policy "that invokes alleged climate protection". It sought nuclear power, Russian gas through Nord Stream and longer coal-plant lives, and it claimed climate change was mostly beneficial and extreme weather was not increasing—claims Tagesschau contrasted with the German Weather Service, insurers and the Helmholtz Climate Initiative. Die Welt quoted the Riesa formula that the human share was "scientifically unsettled".

Controversies and public reception

Contact with Birgit Malsack-Winkemann

On 25 January 2024 Der Spiegel, following Stern and RTL, reported that three sitting members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Bundestag group held permanent permits to visit Birgit Malsack-Winkemann at Lichtenberg prison in Berlin. The former AfD member of parliament and judge had been in pre-trial detention since 7 December 2022. Citing confidential documents, the reports said Gereon Bollmann, then president of the AfD federal arbitration court, had held a permit since 2 February 2023 and had written to the Federal Prosecutor General that he intended to visit about once a month. He told Stern and RTL that the party leadership had not been informed. Steffen Kotré, permitted from 1 June 2023, did not answer; Jürgen Pohl, permitted from 24 August 2023, asked whether after more than a year in detention one would not also be glad of a visit.

On 11 December 2023 the Federal Prosecutor General indicted her and others before the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main for membership in a terrorist organisation and preparation of a treasonous enterprise. Prosecutors allege that she joined, in early August 2021, a group around Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß that drew on Reichsbürger narratives and planned to overthrow the constitutional order by force; that she used parliamentary access to bring others into Bundestag premises and reconnoitre them; that she supplied information about parliamentary business until at least September 2022; and that she sat on the group's "council" for justice. Those are allegations, not a court finding.

On 2 July 2025, answering abgeordnetenwatch.de, he described the permit as court business. He wrote that until the summer of 2024 he had presided over the arbitration court, that Dr Malsack-Winkemann had suddenly become unavailable because of her detention, and that the permit was for handing her open cases and the office to her deputy and later successor. He denied any influence by her. The reply did not state how often he visited, or address the monthly visits in the 2023 letter.

Statements in extremism assessments

On 2 May 2025 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution said it now assessed the federal AfD, previously a suspected case, as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour, citing a report of more than 1,000 pages. NDR reported on 16 May 2025 that the assessment reviews statements by 353 people in the party's orbit and treats an "ethnic-descent" concept of the people — passport-holders set against "ethnic" Germans — as incompatible with human dignity and the free democratic basic order. The federal AfD sued, and the office undertook to suspend the classification pending the urgent proceedings; the Schleswig-Holstein interior ministry told NDR that the published text remained officially classified.

NDR reported that Bollmann is mentioned repeatedly, including for writing on his website and on Facebook that Germany was being "de-Germanised" ("entdeutscht") "secretly, quietly and softly" through international programmes, which the assessment treats as a right-wing extremist conspiracy theory. He told NDR that this was criticism of migration policy — a rising share of foreigners, particularly from Muslim countries, set against "our value order" — and rejected the charge of right-wing extremism. State chairman Kurt Kleinschmidt told NDR that an ethnic concept of the people was out of the question and that the German people comprised everyone with German citizenship, while adding that a "German identity" was decisive.

In the assessment's section on ethnic-descent statements, a Facebook post by Bollmann of 1 March 2024 is quoted as imagining a "population exchange even in the women's shelter" ("Bevölkerungsaustausch auch im Frauenhaus"). The quoted text says the trend was "natives out, foreigners in", that hardly any capacity remained for native women, and that a German woman seeking protection should not be turned away with her children because more than half the places were occupied by women and children with a migration background. The same wording appeared on his website on 29 February 2024, where he also called for a quota and a statutory right of admission. The figures he used are those of Frauenhauskoordinierung for 2022: of 6,444 women recorded, 2,007 (31.1 percent) had been born in Germany, down from 34.2 percent in 2021, with Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq among the most frequent countries of origin of women with a migration history. The same report states that 36 percent had German citizenship and that 69 percent had not been born in Germany.

Media and political reaction

Other parties criticised the visiting permits the next day. Irene Mihalic, first parliamentary business manager of the Alliance 90/The Greens Bundestag group, told Stern that if the research held, it raised the question whether the alleged coup plans reached further into the AfD group's structure than had been known, and that she would take it to the factions' security officers: "We must do everything to protect Parliament and ensure that it is not attacked from within." Janine Wissler, then federal chair of Die Linke, called the AfD "the parliamentary arm of right-wing terrorism", with a "hinge function toward right-wing terror and the brown swamp", and said democratic forces had to oppose it.

An AfD Bundestag-group spokesman told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the group leadership knew of personal contacts unconnected with its work, a formulation distinct from Bollmann's statement that the party leadership had not been told. His 2025 reply limited the permit to transferring arbitration-court files. On the intelligence assessment, he and the state leadership presented the quoted remarks as criticism of migration policy rather than an ethnic definition of the German people.

Personal life

Family

Gereon Bollmann was born on 20 November 1953 in Au im Murgtal. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members' own statements, gives the place as Au im Murgtal, now Weisenbach. It states that he is married for the second time and has five children, and it does not name his wife or the children. Weisenbach, in the Rastatt district of Baden-Württemberg, records that Au im Murgtal was reincorporated on 1 January 1971, after 138 years of separation, during the state's municipal reform. His own vita adds three grandchildren. The same self-description—born in 1953 in Au im Murgtal, married, with five children and three grandchildren—appears on his profile at Parliamentwatch. The archived biography for the 20th electoral term said only that he was married and had five children, without referring to a second marriage.

Residence and disclosures

The biography gives no private home address. It lists the parliamentary office as Deutscher Bundestag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, names him as a candidate in constituency 004, Rendsburg-Eckernförde, in Schleswig-Holstein, and describes him as a continuing federal delegate of his home district association. His contact page likewise gives no residential street. It lists a telephone number for a constituency office in Rendsburg-Eckernförde and directs post to the Berlin address. In February 2025 NDR described him as a member of the Alternative for Germany from Schleswig-Holstein who had stood in the constituency and had not won it directly.

Section 45 of the Members of the Bundestag Act requires notice of the last occupation before the mandate, of paid work alongside it, of seats on company, public-law and non-local association bodies, of agreements about future activities or benefits, and of holdings above 5 percent in companies. Where income from the activities, posts and agreements in section 45(2), numbers 1 to 5, exceeds 1,000 euros in a month or 3,000 euros in a calendar year, the amount must be stated. Section 47 provides for publication of the notifiable particulars. Guidance from the Bundestag administration dated 23 June 2026 says that only categories containing information are displayed, and that a member may ask for a link to explanations on a personal homepage.

The current biography states that there are no particulars subject to publication. Its link for individual explanations opens the front page of his website, not a separate disclosure page. The 20th-term page carried the same statement and the same link. For his membership in the 19th Bundestag, from 1 October 2021, the published entry instead recorded the occupation before he entered parliament: judge at the Ministry of Justice of Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel. Parliamentwatch lists transparency promises he has given, including disclosure of income and expenditure as a member and of lobby contacts; the profile shows no sums for outside earnings.