German celebrity chef Atilla Hildmann. Photo: Imago Pictures/Reuters.

A Berlin woman is being investigated by German authorities for allegedly passing confidential information to Attila Hildmann, a celebrity-chef-turned-antisemitic-agitator who is now living in Turkey.

The 32-year-old woman, named only as M., was an employee in the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office. She is reported to have visited Hildmann in Turkey earlier this year and to have shared with him a number of documents relating to the criminal proceedings he is facing in Germany for hate speech. Hildmann fled to Turkey after police issued a warrant for his arrest last February.

A self-described “ultra right-winger” of Turkish origin who was brought up by German adoptive parents, Hildmann was widely-known in Germany for his vegan recipe books and frequent appearances on TV food programs over the previous decade. But with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Hildmann became one of the leaders of the protest movement opposed to social distancing and other public health measures that has won huge support on the German far right.

Throughout the crisis, Hildmann used his channel on the social media platform Telegram to spread antisemitic claims about the global extent of “Jewish” and “Zionist” power among more than 120,000 followers. He has regularly deployed Nazi terms like “parasites” and “subhumans” to underline his accusation that the pandemic is a symptom of wider global conspiracy run by prominent Jews such as financier George Soros and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Since arriving in Turkey, Hildmann has been posting messages on social media denouncing the “Jewish World Order,” insisting that “Hitler was good for Germany” and displaying photographs of himself posing with a gun.

The revelations of a leak in the Public Prosecutor’s Office mark another embarrassing development in the Hildmann case after the chef sent the German authorities a greetings message on Twitter from “sunny Turkey,” having successfully dodged their arrest warrant.

A police search of M’s apartment and her computer revealed that she had also made several “unauthorized inquiries” about individuals connected to “Querdenken,” a far-right group that promotes conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.