Todenhöfer was born in Offenburg in what is now the current German state of Baden-Württemberg, and studied law at the universities of Munich, Paris, Bonn and Freiburg.

Todenhöfer became a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in 1970 which he left on 12 November 2020, his 80th birthday, to found a new political party [1] and was a member of the Bundestag from 13 December 1972 to 20 December 1990 (five election periods) where he represented Tübingen and was affiliated with the pejoratively named "Stahlhelm-Fraktion.

[7] Following the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, he sent an open letter to the Prosecutor General of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

He asked for the reasons which led the prosecutor to indict the Sudanese dictator but not the US president George W. Bush or the British prime minister Tony Blair, seeing that neither Sudan nor the US have recognized the International Criminal Court.

The soldier told him that he was sure to return home alive because ISIS wanted to be accepted as a state, so he had the guarantee of safety from their leadership.

Todenhӧfer spent most of his time in Mosul, Iraq but he could have visited ISIS-controlled cities in Syria such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

In 2016 the German newspaper Der Spiegel analyzed Todenhöfer's book "Inside IS", in which he reports allegedly visiting the Islamic State and speaking to several of its members.

[14] In general opinion Naidoo's and Todenhöfer's song was widely criticized, citing their blunt antisemitism and relationship to Syria's dictator Assad.