Herman Xennt Has “Many Plans” After His Prison Release

Netflix’s Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld begins by describing Herman Xennt as a “007 James Bond typical villain.” Moments later, Xennt appears on camera, ready to answer the true-crime documentary crew’s questions from inside a prison in Trier, Germany, where he is now serving a six-year sentence, as of 2023.

In Cyberbunker, directors Max Rainer and Kilian Lieb explore how Xennt — a charismatic man with long blond hair and a black leather coat — and his gang of “mysterious Dutchmen” purchased a NATO bunker under the German tourist town of Traben-Trarbach in 2013. Xennt’s new underground home, dubbed CyberBunker 2.0, soon became home to international criminal businesses.

A Mysterious Criminal Underworld

Beginning at another former NATO bunker in Goes, The Netherlands, in 1995, CyberBunker offered “bulletproof hosting” to websites. That meant, for a steep price, they provided highly secure hosting for websites that contained sensitive or illicit material. In the late ’90s, most customers ran pornographic sites, per The New Yorker.

Within years, however, the operation shifted to Germany’s Traben-Trarbach, and the Julian Assange-founded WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay were among the websites CyberBunker hosted. Police also claimed it was the source of a botnet attack on German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom in late 2016 that knocked out about 1 million customers’ routers, according to the Associated Press.

In 2015, a German cybercrime unit began investigating Xennt’s activities. Using intercepted web traffic, authorities discovered that Xennt’s data processing center was hosting sites on the Dark Web, including illicit marketplaces — some sold drugs, facilitated credit-card fraud, or conducted other scams. In the interim, Xennt was also building his “money maker” — an encrypted phone network and applications — with Irish drug gang godfather George “The Penguin” Mitchell.

More than 600 German police raided the bunker in September 2019, seizing servers and resulting in seven arrests, including Xennt, and his two adult sons, Xyonn and Yennoah, aka X and Y. (Xennt’s third son was born in 2019.) He was acquitted of aiding and abetting the crimes on the CyberBunker-hosted sites, but in December 2021, Xennt was found guilty of forming a criminal organization.

Xennt was sentenced to serve just under six years in prison. A German court rejected his appeal in September 2023, rendering the verdict final.

Xennt Issues A Cryptic Warning

Two years into his sentence, Xennt spoke out about the verdict with the Cyberbunker filmmakers. “My trial was not fair, and so neither was the judgment,” he said from a prison in Trier, Germany, adding that he doesn’t consider himself a criminal. “Nothing I could have said would have mattered. I was already convicted before I was arrested.”

Xennt’s defends that he “[didn’t] even notice” customers were using his servers for criminal purposes. He also reiterated his belief that “privacy is a fundamental right,” warning that “the more communication evolves, the easier it becomes for third parties to eavesdrop and spy on” citizens.

Xennt, who turned 64 years old in 2023, also cryptically said he has “many plans for the future,” following his prison release.

“I know that there is no one else who wants to or can do what I want to do,” he concluded. “You cannot stop me. I will still achieve my goals. Everything is ready. I just have to go home. I want to, and I will eventually be able to realize my vision for a better world. No one can stop me.”