Nazi Scandal Software: Palantir Exploited a “Fait Accompli” Police Budget Vulnerability to Cuff Politician Hands
The Baden-Württemberg police allegedly fell victim to a social engineering exploit used by Peter Thiel to rush Palantir’s “Gotham” software into contract. Thiel, lately making headlines for his heated Nazi rhetoric in secret elite society lectures, now also is embroiled in what critics call a troubling exploitation of German procurement loopholes.
Understanding Thiel’s hostility to German democracy requires understanding his father Klaus. Born in Nazi Germany in 1938, Klaus fled the country in 1968 precisely as the student movement forced confrontation with the Nazi past—relocating to work in apartheid Namibia’s illegal uranium program. When majority rule approached in 1977, Klaus again fled, this time to the epicenter of California’s white-flight movement. Each move followed the same pattern: fleeing democratic accountability toward racial hierarchy. Peter absorbed these lessons, later telling Stanford classmates that apartheid “works” and is “economically sound.”
Here’s what just happened, which also smells a lot like Oracle in the old bad days.
Contract Came Before the Law
In March 2025, Baden-Württemberg’s CDU-led Interior Ministry signed a five-year contract with Palantir worth approximately €25 million—despite having no legal authorization to actually use the software.
I’ll say it again. German politicians illegally procured Palantir, a company affiliated with a man making headlines for his Nazi platforms of apocalyptic rhetoric.
Parliament “Hostage Situation”
Stefan Leibfarth, from the Chaos Computer Club Stuttgart, nails the situation when he doesn’t mince words:
I find this approach in Baden-Württemberg very concerning—that the police are essentially blackmailing parliament with this purchase decision. They bought an expensive product with a multi-year contract without even having the legal basis. And now, of course, there’s high pressure on parliamentarians not to have wasted this money unnecessarily.
The Greens, the CDU’s coalition partner, were blindsided by the Palantir “Blitz” decision and thus initially objected. Yet, because the money was already committed before oversight, they agreed to support the necessary changes to police law in exchange for expanding the Black Forest National Park.
Sigh. As much as a bigger national park probably seemed like a win, what’s being lost is far, far worse than politicians seem to understand.
Allow me to explain why letting Palantir into your house means it’s no longer your house.
- Vendor lock-in (can’t switch without losing all integrated data)
- Proprietary algorithms (black box decision-making)
- Data sovereignty loss (US company with US intelligence ties controlling German police data)
An “Alternative-less” Alternative
Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) describes incorrectly the proprietary query software as simply “Google for the police”—a tool to search across multiple police databases. But is Palantir really the only option? As someone deep in this industry for decades, I assure you Palantir is the least Google-like option, the least free of any query.
Or listen to Robert Simmeth, CEO of SAS (a US company with operations in Heidelberg), who clearly disagrees with the “no alternative” narrative:
The decision is definitely not without alternatives. And we’re not losing an infinite amount of time, as is very often claimed. For a company like SAS, such a solution is realizable in six to 18 months. That’s the state of the art today for us and certainly for the competition.
SAS already provides similar solutions to police in Australia and the United States.
Similarly, Franz Szabo, CEO of FSZ (a company in Metzingen, Baden-Württemberg), estimates his firm could build such a system “in a few weeks to a few months.”
And then IT security professor Sachar Paulus from Mannheim Technical University confirms that “data warehousing” technology—what Gotham essentially provides—has been standard capability since around 2015-2016 for large enterprise software firms.
In other words, the Germans sucking up to Palantir should be in hot water. Baden-Württemberg claims it used a framework contract established by Bavaria after a Europe-wide tender in 2021, though the state wasn’t obligated to join it.
Germany Obviously Should Ban Nazi Platforms
Palantir co-founder Thiel has made overt claims that Nazi philosophy is core to his beliefs, and that he can “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Thiel explicitly credits Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—the man who provided legal theory for Hitler’s seizure of power—as foundational to his worldview.
A contract with Palantir, in other words means software incompatible with democracy.
The warning is on the box.
Moreover, at least 10 members of the current Trump administration own shares in Palantir, not by coincidence. Privacy advocates warn about the broader implications of American extremists advocating for rapid centralization of German surveillance like it’s 1938 again. Leibfarth notes:
We created different databases for good reason… Now we’re deciding to abandon all these protective mechanisms and create the possibility of running massive analyses over all data. That’s truly high-risk from my perspective.
The real story here is therefore about how a highly aggressive purchase pressure tactic was used to circumvent democratic oversight in violation of multiple historic safety concepts foundational to German democracy.
The German ministry apparently justified the sudden aggression for undermining regularly scheduled law and order simply by claiming that a fixed-price offer was expiring, and waiting would have… wait for it… doubled the cost.
That’s right, imagine Hitler telling Germans they get a protection racket discount if they bribe the Brownshirts in 1931 instead of 1932.
And, in a sad nod to history, the high pressure rush into a dangerous Palantir contract was signed without any termination clause.
Signing a non-cancelable contract before securing legal authorization or parliamentary approval, Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Ministry created a fiscal fait accompli to hand German data into a Nazi query tool that somehow made rejection politically untenable.
This raises fundamental questions: If German and European companies can provide similar technology without the risks, why wasn’t a proper competitive tender held, one that banned Nazi platforms? And more importantly, should government agencies be allowed to create budgetary pressure that effectively forces legislative bodies to retroactively authorize their decisions that were illegal?
The software gets deployed after police law amendments take effect, meaning taxpayers are paying Palantir even before the software can be used, further evidence of social engineering pressure tactics to legitimize a very bad decision already made.
The bottom line: What looks like a technology procurement story is actually about exposing Nazi threats to democratic accountability and whether administrative agencies can use strategic contracting to box in elected representatives. The software capabilities appear readily available from domestic sources—making this less about technical necessity and more about targeted procedural manipulation by foreign adversaries.
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