Horst Mahler (born 23 January 1936) is a German former lawyer and political activist. He once was a far-left militant and a founding member of the Red Army Faction who later became a Maoist, before switching to neo-Nazism. Between 2000 and 2003, he was a member of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany. Since 2003, he has repeatedly been convicted of Volksverhetzung ("incitement of popular hatred") and Holocaust denial, and he served much of a twelve-year prison sentence. In April 2017, Mahler was ordered back to prison for a further three and a half years. On 18 April 2017, he fled the Federal Republic of Germany, hoping to avoid execution of the sentence. His attempt to receive political asylum in Hungary was rejected, and he was deported back to Germany, where he was arrested and put back in jail to finish serving his sentence. Early life and career Mahler was born at Haynau in Silesia on 23 January 1936, the son of a dentist. In February 1945, as the end of World War II in Europe began, the family fled from the approaching Red Army to Naumburg an der Saale. Less than a year later they moved first to Dessau, and then in 1949 to West Berlin after Mahler's fathera fanatical Nazi and antisemitehad committed suicide. Mahler took his school-leaving exams in Wilmersdorf, Berlin in 1955 and then studied law at the Free University of Berlin with the support of the German National Merit Foundation. He joined the Thuringia Association, a right-wing Studentenverbindung, but soon afterwards became a member of the socialist student body SDS. He founded a law firm in Berlin in 1964 and specialised on advising small and medium enterprises. In 1966, he successfully argued a case before the European Court of Human Rights. Far-left wing activity Early political activism Prior to 1960, Mahler was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the leftist students' association Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS). He was expelled from the SPD in 1960, along with other members of the SDS, who were no longer an SPD youth wing but had become a radical left-wing group. He joined the new organisation's call for "extra-parliamentary opposition", or forceful resistance. Mahler joined the Außerparlamentarische Opposition in 1964. He was one of the founders of the Republican Club, a West Berlin leftist organisation established in 1966. After the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke