Tag Archives: Germany

German neo-nazi terrorists on trial

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This video says about itself:

May 6, 2013

The surviving member of a neo-Nazi cell blamed for a series of racist murders that scandalized Germany and shamed its authorities goes on trial on Monday in one of the most anticipated court cases in recent German history.

The chance discovery of the gang, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which had gone undetected for more than a decade, has forced Germany to acknowledge it has a more militant and dangerous neo-Nazi fringe than previously thought, and exposed staggering intelligence failings.

The trial in Munich will focus on 38-year-old Beate Zschaepe, who is charged with complicity in the murder of eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000-2007, as well as two bombings in immigrant areas of Cologne, and 15 bank robberies.

“With its historical, social and political dimensions the NSU trial is one of the most significant of post-war German history,” lawyers for the family of the first victim, flower seller Enver Simsek, said in a statement.

The case has profoundly shaken a country that believed it had learned the lessons of its past, and has reopened an uncomfortable debate about whether Germany must do more to tackle the far-right and lingering racist attitudes.

Four others charged with assisting the NSU will sit with Zschaepe on the bench. …

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote to Zschaepe in May 2012, addressing her as “Dear Sister” and urging her to use the trial to spread far-right ideology, according to German media.

By Ulrich Rippert in Germany:

The NSU neo-Nazi gang and the German intelligence service

18 May 2013

Following a one-week break due to procedural issues, the trial of the neo-Nazi terror gang, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), has recommenced at the Higher Regional Court (OLG) in Munich.

On Tuesday, the 35-page indictment was read. The principal defendant, Beate Zschäpe, is accused of complicity in all the crimes committed by the NSU. Together with Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, who allegedly killed themselves to avoid arrest, Zschäpe is accused of playing a leading role in the activities of the neo-Nazi group, which murdered eight Turkish-born individuals, a Greek-born small businessman and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

Ralf Wohlleben, a former functionary of the far-right German National Democratic Party (NPD), and Carsten S. are accused of being accessories in the crimes. They are alleged to have provided the gun with which nine of the ten murders were committed. André E. and Holger G. are accused of supporting a terrorist organization.

Months before the trial, debates raged over various procedural issues and the behaviour of the court. Although the case is the largest involving racist murders ever held in Germany and public interest is very large–in addition to the attorney general, about 80 co-plaintiffs from the ranks of the murder victims and their families are involved in the trial–the Higher Regional Court in Munich insisted on carrying out the trial in a small courtroom.

This led to a long dispute over the allocation of the very limited number of seats available to the media. In the first round of accreditation, Turkish media outlets were entirely excluded. Turkish newspapers and politicians protested loudly because eight of the ten murder victims originally came from that country.

The Federal Constitutional Court then ruled that the court was obliged to grant a “reasonable number of seats to representatives of the foreign media, with particular reference to the victims of the indicted offences.” The Munich court then postponed the start of the trial and organized the allocation of places by drawing lots. This again led to disputes because small provincial papers were awarded places while major international news agencies were left outside.

The delay in the start of the trial and the subsequent one-week interruption meant even more stress and inconvenience for the co-plaintiffs and relatives of the murder victims, many of whom had booked vacations and paid for lodgings in order to take part in the trial.

The bureaucratic and, on occasion, provocative actions of the court have been characterized in media reports as “insensitive” and lacking “political instinct” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), but they represent something far more than that. The desperate attempt to ensure a small courtroom is directly connected to a campaign to play down the political importance of the trial and ignore the background to the series of murders, first and foremost, the involvement of German state agencies in far-right terrorism.

Presiding judge Manfred Götzl has stressed on a number of occasions that he wanted to strictly limit the trial to the direct criminal responsibility of the five defendants. The central question of how it was possible for a right-wing terrorist group to carry out its homicidal campaign for years against immigrants under the noses of the police and intelligence agencies is not to be addressed in court.

It has now been confirmed, however, that both federal (BfV) and state (LfV) intelligence agencies, as well as the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) and the Berlin state police (LKA), had placed at least 24 undercover agents in the immediate environment of the NSU.

It is also known that the far-right Thuringian Homeland Security (DBS), from which the NSU emerged in the 1990s, was set up by a German intelligence informant, Tino Brandt, and–according to a report in Der Spiegel –was funded by the Thuringian state intelligence agency to the tune of hundreds of thousands of marks.

When 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was shot dead in an Internet cafe in the city of Kassel in April 2006, an employee of the Hessian intelligence agency was present at the crime scene and–contends the relevant article on Wikipedia–left the cafe just a few seconds after the murder.

The official effort to ignore the role of the German secret service and other state agencies in the NSU case makes clear that the object of the proceeding is to cover up rather than reveal the truth.

Even a cursory examination of the known facts in regard to the origins of the NSU and the details of the murders clearly points toward the close links between the murderers and the German state.

In early 1995, the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) tried to win over Uwe Mundlos as an employee and informer. According to MAD, however, Mundlos turned down its offer. Then, in November 1997, the Thuringia state intelligence agency had both Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt under surveillance as they were buying potential bomb parts.

Two months later the police raided a garage rented by Beate Zschäpe and uncovered a bomb workshop with four functional pipe bombs. Böhnhardt was in the garage at the time of the raid, but was somehow able to leave unhindered.

Later it emerged that the explosives for the pipe bombs, about 1.4 kilograms of TNT, had been provided by Thomas Starke, a former friend of Zschäpe. Starke was an undercover agent of the Berlin State Criminal Investigation Department (LKA).

Under the headline, “NSU explosives supplier was an undercover agent of the Berlin police”, Spiegel Online reported last September that “contact between the LKA and the source S” was apparently very close. Starke later helped the trio (Zschäpe, Mundlos, Böhnhardt) in their search for a safe house in the city of Chemnitz.

It remains unclear whether Zschäpe ever collaborated with the security authorities. In November 2011, Focus Online wrote: “Beate Zschäpe is reported to have indeed worked for the secret service in Thuringia.”

According to a report from the state LKA, Zschäpe provided the authorities with information on the far-right milieu, i.e. had worked as an undercover agent, receiving protection at the time from her employer, Thuringia’s intelligence apparatus. During this period, Zschäpe is alleged to have used no less than five aliases.

The Thuringian secret service deny these reports, admitting that they had been in contact with Zschäpe and considered recruiting her as an agent, but then rejected her due to her instability and drug use.

The situation remains murky, due to the refusal of the intelligence agencies to make available important information. Immediately after learning in November 2011 of the NSU’s series of murders, officials shredded intelligence files in bulk that could have shed light on links between the terrorist cell and the authorities. Throughout this period, there were continual references to ‘mishaps and ‘regrettable mistakes’ committed by ‘unthinking’ clerical officers.

Nevertheless, the illegal behavior of the security agencies is so evident that the president of the federal intelligence agency, Heinz Fromm, and the intelligence chiefs of four state agencies (Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin) have already been forced to resign.

Despite these facts, no one in political and media circles dares to state the obvious: that the NSU murders took place in the context of close cooperation between the perpetrators and sections of the German intelligence apparatus.

This apparatus either supports or covers up for the far-right milieu because it shares much of its ideology. The revelations so far have already indicated the existence of a state within the state, which is free from any parliamentary control and pursues extreme right-wing and racist goals.

At the same time, such links have a tradition in the German secret service. The entire history of this gigantic agency, which employs thousands of staff and undercover agents operating centrally and in no less than 16 regional offices, is tainted by its right-wing past.

Founded in 1950 by the US and its allies as a tool of the Cold War, the German intelligence agency employed many former members of the Nazi regime and the Gestapo.

When the Konrad Adenauer government (1949-63) took control of the agency from the allies in 1955, it promoted a former leading Nazi to be its new chief. Hubert Schrübbers served the Nazi regime as a member of the SA [the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party] and chief prosecutor for 17 years. According to Wikipedia, Schrübbers then recruited “a large number of former SS [the most notorious Nazi paramilitary outfit, which emerged from the SA] and SD [Nazi intelligence service] members to prominent posts in the agency.”

The first BfV president’s deputy was Ernst Brückner, another former SA man. Brückner was also a member of the Nazi Party and from 1941 the head of the security police in occupied Poland, where the Nazis committed some of their worst war crimes.

These right-wing, racist and profoundly anti-democratic traditions of the German state apparatus, which indicate the close links between the NSU murders and the intelligence agencies, are to be kept secret in the Munich trial. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the trial so far.

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Auschwitz nazi arrested in Germany

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This video is called A Walk Through Auschwitz I Concentration Camp.

By Elisabeth Zimmermann in Germany:

Former guard in Nazi concentration camp arrested in Germany

15 May 2013

At the start of May, 93-year-old Hans Lipschis was arrested in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Lipschis is a former guard at the Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz who lived virtually undisturbed for decades after the Second World War in Germany, and then in the US between 1956 and 1983.

His name was recently fourth on the list of the top 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals of the Simon Wiesenthal centre. Born Antanas Lipsys in Lithuania in 1919, he worked as a guard at Auschwitz between 1941 and the beginning of 1945. In this function he was instrumental in the murders of thousands of overwhelmingly Jewish prisoners. The state prosecutor in Stuttgart released this information as the reason for the arrest.

Antanas Lipsys joined the SS in 1941 and became a member of the sixth company of the SS-Totenkopf Sturmbann (death head unit). He was granted German citizenship in 1943 under the name Hans Lipschis. The main task of the “death head units” was the supervision and administration of the concentration camps. They were responsible for the smooth running of the Nazi regime’s mass extermination machine.

As with tens of thousands of Nazi henchmen and collaborators, Lipschis was able to cover up his crimes in the SS and live at first undisturbed in the German Federal Republic after the war. In 1956, he emigrated with his wife and two children to the US. When his previous activities as a guard in a concentration camp were uncovered, he was deported in 1983. Since then, he has lived untroubled by the German authorities in Baden-Württemberg.

The background to the arrest of Lipschis was the trial of a former guard in the Sobibor concentration camp, John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years imprisonment two years ago by a Munich court for accessory to murder in the case of more than 28,000 Jews in occupied Poland.

The conviction of Demjanjuk, whose appeal was never heard by the constitutional court due to his death, has created a new basis for the pursuit of former Nazi war criminals, according to investigators.

After a protracted trial, the judge in the Demjanjuk case came to the conclusion that it was sufficient to prove the presence of an accused in a concentration camp to convict him of accessory to murder. Every SS member and guard in a concentration camp was part of the “machinery of murder”, and such camps had been established and existed for no other purpose.

After the conviction of Demjanjuk in 2011, investigators at the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes in Ludwigsburg undertook a new review of files in order to track down more former guards in the concentration camps. According to initial reports, there could be up to 50 such people still alive.

The fact that many who were active in the crimes of the Nazis continue to live in Germany undisturbed seven decades after the liberation of the concentration camps underscores once again how the political and legal authorities systematically prevented the persecution of those collaborating in Nazi atrocities.

Relatively few of the thousands of Nazi war crimes have been dealt with in the courts. Since the end of the war, German authorities have investigated more than 100,000 cases, but only 6,500 guilty individuals have been convicted. And those convicted have received comparatively lenient sentences for the monstrous actions they committed. Those accused usually justified their activities by arguing they were “acting under orders in exceptional circumstances”—a line of argument that the courts were prepared to accept.

In this context, it is a scandal that other SS crimes, like the massacre in Sant’ Anna di Stazzema on August 12, 1944, which claimed the lives of 560 Italian women, men and children, remain unpunished.

The state prosecutor in Stuttgart announced on October 1, 2012, that it would not be initiating charges against any of those who participated in the massacre who are still alive, and that the decade-long investigation would cease. The reason given was that it had been impossible to prove that those accused had committed acts that had not yet “passed the statute of limitations”.

In the meantime, the association for the victims of Sant’ Anna have lodged an appeal with the state prosecutor. The appeal included a report by the Cologne-based historian Carlo Gentile, who is one of the most renowned academics with knowledge of the material surrounding the massacre. This was reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on April 15.

The state prosecutor had failed “absolutely” to consider important documents and statements from witnesses, wrote Gentile, and had made “clear mistakes regarding the historical data”. In their assessment of the massacre, they had “paid too little attention to the topography of the location and the time period involved”.

Above all, the massacre at Sant’ Anna could not be viewed as an “isolated episode”. The SS had left a bloody trail through Italy in 1944. Considering the number of massacres of civilians, all the available evidence pointed to a planned and well-organised war crime.

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Nazi terrorism trial in Germany

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This is a video about a demonstration in Munich, Germany, in April 2013, against nazi terrorism.

By Peter Schwarz in Germany:

Trial of neo-Nazi terrorist group begins in Munich

8 May 2013

The so-called NSU trial began on Monday at the Higher Regional Court (OLG) in Munich. The principal defendant, 38-year-old Beate Zschäpe, stands accused of forming the National Socialist Underground (NSU) together with Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos. She faces allegations of complicity in 10 murders and of particularly hazardous arson and attempted murder.

The trio, who lived for 13 years under false identities under the eyes of the German security agencies, are believed to have committed 10 murders, two bomb attacks and numerous bank robberies. Except for a female police officer, those murdered were exclusively immigrants who died as a result of racially motivated attacks.

Zschäpe herself has not been charged in any of the fatal shootings. But she is accused of sharing responsibility for all the NSU crimes due to her membership in the organisation. Following the death of Böhnhardt and Mundlos, who allegedly killed themselves after they were discovered by the police, she also set the trio’s flat on fire, seriously endangering the life of a neighbour.

Four men are on the dock along with Zschäpe.

The neo-Nazi and long-serving Thuringia National Democratic Party (the extreme right-wing NPD) functionary Ralf Wohlleben is indicted for aiding and abetting murder. He is said to have helped the NSU after it went underground and procured the weapon that was used in most of the murders. Wohlleben, like Zschäpe, has been remanded in custody.

Carsten S. is also accused of complicity in murder for passing the murder weapon on to the trio. The 33-year-old is alleged to have renounced neo-Nazi involvement years ago. He has made a formal confession of his role in the events.

André E. is answerable to abetting a robbery and a bomb attack. He and his wife, Susanne, are said to have been close friends with the NSU trio up until their detection.

Holger G. is believed to have helped the NSU procure identity documents and another weapon. Like Carsten S., he has submitted a detailed confession.

In addition to the federal prosecutor, approximately 80 plaintiffs—who are either associates of the murder victims or members of their families—are involved in the NSU proceedings. Seven of the attorneys of these plaintiffs gave a press conference in Munich last Sunday. They made it clear that they expect the proceedings to uncover the background to the NSU and its operations. According to a joint statement from the attorneys, it is very difficult to imagine that the NSU had consisted of only three dangerous right-wing extremists.

“It is not our aim to achieve maximum punishment for the accused in the shortest possible time. What we are most interested in achieving is the broadest possible clarification of how these crimes eventuated”, said attorney Angelika Lex, counsel for the widow of Theodore [Theodoros] Boulgarides, who was murdered in Munich on June 15, 2005.

Lex stressed that her client wanted to know how her husband came to be selected and spied upon, and why he became a victim of the NSU. She also wanted to know what networks in contact with the killers were able to aid them and what the authorities knew about the murder.

Representing the daughter of Mehmet Kubasik, who was murdered in Dortmund, attorney Sebastian Scharmer said: “We are not concerned about securing a conviction of the five defendants as soon as possible. We intend making the failure of the state an issue in this trial”.

Scharmer is convinced that the NSU consisted of more than 100 people, among whom were undercover agents from the secret service. He wants to clarify why the three members of the NSU—who were known to the authorities—had not been arrested in 1998, who financed the NSU, and what role undercover agents played in the gang’s crimes.

“Since neither the investigating authorities nor any of the parliamentary inquiry committees have been able to fully explain the circumstances surrounding the offences, we will now endeavour to pursue this task”, Scharmer said. He criticised the federal prosecutor for excluding from the indictment any reference at all to the failure of the state investigative bodies.

Attorney Alexander Kienzle, representing the family of Halit Yozgat, who was murdered on April 6, 2006, said in an interview with the taz newspaper that the family expects that “in transparent constitutional proceedings the involvement and knowledge of state authorities will be clarified”.

He said the family members themselves had become the subject of an investigation immediately after the deed and were required to offer investigators transparency into the most private areas of their lives. “They now expect this transparency to be mirrored by that of the intelligence agencies and police authorities”, added Kienzle.

The Munich OLG and the office of the federal prosecution have made clear that they are not willing to meet the plaintiffs’ expectations of a comprehensive clearing up of the case. They will try to restrict proceedings to inquiry into the immediate circumstances surrounding the events and focus exclusively on the defendants.

Court president Karl Huber said the court would not be another inquiry committee. It would concentrate on “the core task”—i.e., it would “conduct proper criminal proceedings, that could not be challenged in an appeal court, and verify if the defendants were guilty according to criminal law”.

In advance of the proceedings, presiding judge Manfred Götzl had pointedly displayed his contempt for the concerns of victims and the public interest in the trial. Only 50 media representatives were allowed to attend the much too small courtroom, and these failed to include a single member of the Turkish media, although 8 of the 10 murder victims were of Turkish origin.

Only after a ruling by the Supreme Court did the Munich OLG reassign seating for the media—this time, through a lottery excluding major national media bodies that could have delegated legally trained journalists.

The federal prosecutor is planning a monumental trial lasting more than two years. It has compiled 600 folders with 280,000 pages of investigation files and will summon 600 witnesses. The indictment alone consists of 488 pages. But much of this detail—such as the brand of shampoo used by Zschäpe—is largely irrelevant to an assessment of the murders. The background to the crimes, however, remains in the dark.

At the press conference, the co-plaintiffs’ attorneys were confident they will be able to penetrate the obstructive stance of the federal prosecutor and the court.

Attorney Scharmer explained that they were intent on finding out more than what was mentioned in the indictment, and on making the background of the NSU a subject of the proceedings. “These questions cannot be suppressed. And we will ask them”, he said.

Representing the children of Enver Simsek, who was murdered in Nuremberg, attorney Stephen Lucas added that the plaintiffs had not only been victims of the murder of their family members; they were also victims of misguided official investigations, where “negligence or intent may well have played a role”.

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German nazi terrorism update

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This video says about itself:

Germany’s Neo-Nazi Killers

16 April 2013

The murder trial of Beate Zschäpe is a media spectacle in Germany. Beginning on April 17th, prosecutors will seek to prove her complicity in the murders of 10 people as part of a right wing extremist group calling itself the National Socialist Underground..the NSU.

Since her arrest, additional video recordings and interviews have been uncovered, allowing a deeper look inside the terror cell. It shows how easily Zschäpe and her accomplices, Uwe Böhnhardt und Uwe Mundlos evaded law enforcement as they went about their racist murder spree. German authorities failed in their investigations as law enforcement officials ruled out extreme right wing motives. It was a decision that cost many lives.

By Sven Heymann in Germany:

Latest disclosures link German state with neo-Nazi terrorists

1 May 2013

In recent weeks, numerous details have come to light, indicating close connections between German government bodies and the neo-Nazi terrorist network, the National Socialist Underground (NSU). The revelations confirm that state authorities and security services were directly in touch with persons closely associated with the NSU terrorists. It has also become clear that these state bodies are continuing their attempt to hinder and sabotage a full understanding of the background to the series of murder.

Many of the new allegations relate to the period immediately before January 1998, when the three suspected terrorists—Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos—went into hiding. The three NSU members now stand accused of 10 acts of murder.

Prior to the disappearance of the three terrorists, several government agencies had numerous opportunities to arrest Uwe Böhnhardt. The failure to arrest him shows that the authorities were apparently not interested in taking the neo-Nazis into custody.

According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, Böhnhardt was sentenced on October 16, 1997, to two years and three months incarceration for sedition and other offences. The verdict did not become final until December 10 of that year. Long-serving Berlin juvenile magistrate Helmut Frenzel complained to the Frankfurter Rundschau that this was followed by seven weeks, during which the then 20-year-old Böhnhardt was neither summoned to serve his sentence nor placed under arrest. On January 26, 1998, he finally dropped out of police surveillance while they were foraging through the trio’s bomb workshop.

However, Judge Frenzel criticises not only the Thuringia state judiciary’s negligent handling of the condemned Böhnhardt, who—he alleges—could have been arrested “before Christmas 1997”. In Frenzel’s view, the police had deliberately delayed the arrest. The emergence of the NSU could thus have been easily prevented.

But there are other points indicating that Uwe Böhnhardt was deliberately placed undercover and allowed to run free. Such a suspicion arises primarily from the operations of the state of Thuringia’s secret service department (LfV).

As the Frankfurter Rundschau reported in another article, the Thuringia criminal detection department (LKA) put Böhnhardt under observation in October 1997, after unknown persons had planted several dummy bombs in the town of Jena. But the LKA had to end their surveillance after three days, according to the testimony of several police officers to the Thuringia committee of inquiry.

Instead of the LKA, the secret service department was then tasked with the surveillance—something “uniquely exceptional”, said the officers. They claim they are still unaware of the reasons for the move. They also state that, during their surveillance, they had the impression they were not the only ones monitoring Böhnhardt. One officer testified: “We realised that someone else was already on to Böhnhardt. But we still don’t know who that was”.

It is also remarkable that the LfV secret service agents needed only two days to find the bomb workshop—and then let six weeks pass before informing the LKA about it. According to an earlier statement by former Thuringia LfV President Helmut Roewer, his office had been notified “by a human source” that the right-wing milieu was busily engaged in plotting with explosives. So there was probably another informant, whose existence and identity are so far unknown to the public.

As observed by television current affairs programme Die Story im Ersten, the investigation of the bomb workshop on January 26, 1998, did not result in any arrest warrants for the trio. Böhnhardt’s car, in which he was able to flee without hindrance, was also not searched. Moreover, it is striking that the police officers, who were dealing with the case until then, were not required to participate in the action undertaken on that day.

Mario Melzer, the leading detective involved in the case and determined to conduct a rigorous pursuit of the trio at the time, was subsequently transferred to another post. Since his testimony to the committees of inquiry in Erfurt and Berlin in 2012, he has been prohibited from receiving any further official information from the current leadership of the Thuringia LKA. Apparently, that authority still has important things to hide.

The TV programme suggested that the LfV wanted to protect its undercover agent, Tino Brandt, after the trio went into hiding. Whether this was the only reason for allowing the trio to remain free is currently unclear. It appears at least from the televised report that the federal criminal detection department (BKA) was aware of the official practice of covering up for secret service agents, even when involved in serious crimes.

The apparent sabotage of the investigation, which the responsible authorities in Thuringia are continuing to this day, is not a one-off affair. Elsewhere, state institutions are thwarting attempts to get to the bottom of the near decade-long series of murders and their connections to the state apparatus.

A few weeks ago, the state of Brandenburg’s LfV was forced to admit to having improperly passed on crucial facts about the NSU trio’s social environment to other state offices. In 1998, Brandenburg undercover agent “Piato” is said to have reported that three neo-Nazis in hiding were planning to obtain guns, commit robberies, gain access to passports, and then take refuge abroad. According to a report by the N-TV television station, the authorities in Thuringia and Saxony heard nothing of this intelligence information.

As recently announced, the federal intelligence agency (BfV) evidently shielded a former undercover agent until 2012 to save him from prosecution. In the summer of 2001, “Primus”—alias Ralf M., from Zwickau—was suspected of hiring the two vehicles in which the members of the NSU drove to southern Germany to commit two of their murders.

The name of the rental firm that provided the cars remains unknown. “Primus” denies any complicity in the crimes. But former intelligence officer Michael Faber considers the denial implausible, due to the timing of the rental and the murders, and “Primus’s” close connections with the right-wing milieu.

As the N-TV programme indicated in a further report, “Primus” was in close contact with the suspected arms suppliers, Jan Werner and André E. The latter is also in the dock at the NSU trial. The Zwickau undercover agent is thought to have been financially supported to a lavish extent by the BfV. If Faber is to be believed, “Primus” was initially only a casual worker: “Then, after an extremely short time, he opened a business and ended up as a haulage contractor. He must have earned a lot of money from federal government”, said Faber.

If “Primus” did indeed support the trio, then it is clear why the BfV waited until 2012 to reveal his employment as an undercover man: legal culpability for “supporting a terrorist organisation” lapses after a period of 10 years at the latest. The declaration that he had resigned from service in 2002 could have been used as an excuse for shredding his record “in accordance with the procedural deadline” in 2010.

It is also possible that state agencies in North Rhine-Westphalia are more deeply involved in the machinations of the right-wing terrorism than previously known. As a Cologne businessman said in a sworn statement, two civilian police officers appeared conspicuously early on the scene shortly after the bombing on Cologne’s Keupstraße. The June 2004 nail-bomb attack, which is attributed to the NSU, injured 22 people, some seriously; many of them were migrants.

The North Rhine-Westphalia interior ministry has now admitted to the presence of the two police officers—more than eight years after the attack. Even the federal parliamentary investigation committee refuses to consider the occurrence coincidental. Clemens Binninger, chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, said that Keupstraße did not lie within the patrol domain of the two officers and their guard dogs. Furthermore, one of the city’s two police superintendents was also there—a rank hardly to be encountered on a normal police patrol.

As soon as 5 to 10 minutes before the arrival of the first police and fire vehicles, the two junior officers were on the scene, where—in Binninger’s words—they must have “almost stumbled over the feet” of the perpetrators.

Neonazi murder trial opens to protests: here.

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German government targets anti-nazi pastor instead of nazis

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This is a video about German Protestant preacher Lothar König, speaking at an anti-racist demonstration in Jena.

By Martin Nowak in Germany:

State prosecutors in Dresden, Germany, target anti-Nazi protesters

26 April 2013

The state prosecutor in Dresden is systematically targeting opponents of Nazi groups, in a region that is one of the centres of right-wing extremism in Germany. Along with Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Saxony is the only state where the neo-fascist German National Democratic Party (NPD) is represented in the state parliament. The party also has representation in all city councils and many community councils. Saxony was the epicentre of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a right-wing terrorist group responsible for at least nine murders between 2000 and 2006.

The trial against a youth pastor from the town of Jena, Lothar König, which began on April 4, is the high point of the campaign by the state authorities in Dresden. König has been accused of serious breach of the peace, obstruction of justice and resisting police officers. He supposedly incited demonstrators to attack the police at an annual demonstration against right-wing extremism in February 2011.

König, who is almost 60, has been involved for years in protests against the extreme right and Nazi groups. With his young followers, he supported protests in the 1990s against right-wing extremism and anti-immigrant chauvinism. At these events, he was known for opposing any sort of violence and intervening to de-escalate situations. His work among youth in Jena is well-regarded, and he has received awards from several anti-racist foundations.

As he has done every year, König travelled to Dresden on February 19, 2011, to demonstrate with a broad coalition of political parties, trade unions and victim-support groups against a march held by neo-Nazis to commemorate German victims of the allied bombing of the city during WWII. In his renovated Volkswagen (VW) bus with loudspeakers, nicknamed “Noisy”, he accompanied roughly 20,000 demonstrators, who protested against some 3,000 neo-Nazis.

In the course of the protest, clashes took place between demonstrators and the police, which according to police sources resulted in 118 severe injuries to officers. In reality, only eight police officers were hurt, while others suffered only minor injuries as they waded in against demonstrators.

Countless eyewitnesses and recordings have confirmed that König sought to de-escalate the situation, even when the police closed off all routes for the protesters. He used the loudspeakers on his vehicle to play music, show demonstrators where to go, and call for peaceful protest against the neo-Nazis.

Nonetheless, the state prosecutor has accused him of encouraging violence, either with declarations he apparently made or merely by his presence. According to officials, with the aid of “Noisy”, König acted as a “communications point and coordinator of violent acts.” “From his vehicle”, they claim, “he called upon leftists to commit violence.” The prosecutor alleges König’s vehicle issued a call to “cover the pigs with stones” and attempted to force a police vehicle off the road.

All of the available video and sound recordings of the demonstration directly contradict the accusations made against König by the state prosecutor.

In a video extract that the prosecution has used against him, König says, “Come on people. There are a lot of us here. Just move on. Go further on. The police have no shields, no weapons.” Then he turned his vehicle around and called for everyone to follow him.

The claim by the prosecutor that König called at this point for violence against the police is absurd. In an interview with ZDF television, Professor Martin Kutscha, an expert on constitutional law who had seen the video, declared, “I have the impression that the pastor tried to encourage moderation among the demonstrators by turning his vehicle around and calling upon them to stay with his car, and certainly did not attempt to incite people to throw stones or something similar.”

The prosecutor is even trying to use the fact that König played music against him. The prosecutor’s office refers to the “aggressive and inflammatory” character of the music—i.e., “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones and “Kein Macht für Niemand” (“No Power for Anybody”) by the German group Ton Steine Scherben—which supposedly promoted violence.

The trial of König is such a blatant travesty of basic constitutional principles and democratic rights that no fewer than four human rights organisations have denounced it as a “political trial.”

The lead-up to the trial and the course it has run so far make clear that the prosecution of König is aimed at criminalising all opposition to the annual neo-Nazi march in Dresden.

The trial was first postponed from its original start date of March 19. The defence requested this after discovering just a few days earlier that there were up to 170 pages of documents and a CD in the evidence files of which they had not been aware. The prosecution and a spokesperson for the court falsely claimed that this was insignificant material.

The first day of the trial focused on the accusations against König. The defence argued that the indictment should not be read out at the start, stating it was vague and suggestive, and did not even contain a concrete charge. Nevertheless, the charges were read out, after which König and his defence lawyer gave statements in which they accused the prosecution of suppressing evidence, sloppiness, laziness and making allegations damaging to König.

The Dresden state prosecutor has initiated thousands of investigations targeting participants in demonstrations against neo-Nazis. The police collected data from more than a million mobile phones through illegal surveillance. Thousands of charges were brought against opponents of neo-Nazis, including 1,500 alone for alleged offences against a law covering demonstrations.

Special forces commandos have stormed and searched the homes of suspects, in some cases without any permission, including König’s office in Jena. When König was away on a trip to the Alps, police officers broke into his home without any authorisation and confiscated a computer, some CDs and his VW bus, which was parked in front of the house.

The raid on August 10 of last year came just days after König gave an interview to the news magazine Der Spiegel, in which he criticised the authorities in Saxony, comparing their actions to the notorious Stasi security forces in the GDR (former East Germany), and denounced the police for their brutal methods.

The close ties between the authorities in Dresden and the extreme right are so evident that even the bourgeois press has published critical articles. Der Spiegel commented on the large-scale measures taken by the police against anti-Nazi demonstrators at the protest last year. “In fact, it seems like the authorities and the judiciary in Saxony seek to hound citizens who oppose the Nazis with full force, while the extreme right are able to do what they like”, noted the newspaper.

The Dresden district court intends to make an example of König. Just a few months before the beginning of his trial, another anti-Nazi protester, Tim H, was sentenced to 22 months imprisonment without bail for a severe breach of the peace, grievous bodily harm and verbal abuse. In this case, too, neither the court nor the prosecution was able to prove the alleged offences or even any general involvement in criminal activities on the part of the defendant.

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Nazi danger in Europe

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This video says about itself:

Belsen Concentration Camp’s Liberation (1945) WARNING: DISTRESSING FOOTAGE.

Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp, taken from the1945 British Pathe reel ‘Concentration Camp Footage’.

Unedited footage showing the discovery and subsequent liberation of Belsen concentration camp by British soldiers in Germany. Recent prisoners are seen smiling behind the barbed wire fences, including women and children with numbers branded on them.

Then the camera shows shots of dazed and starving detainees wondering around, or hungrily eating and drinking supplies brought by the British.

This reel then continues to show disturbing images of dead bodies. The full video can be found oin British Pathe’s online archive, it has been cut short for the sake of this YouTube channel. You can see it here.

By Menachem Rosensaft, professor of law in the USA and son of Holocaust survivors:

Ominous Clouds Hover Once Again Over Europe

Posted: 04/24/2013 8:14 am

Speech delivered on Sunday, April 21, 2013, at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, at the commemoration marking the 68th anniversary of that Nazi concentration camp’s liberation.

Standing here in the midst of the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen, we are inexorably reminded that evil exists in this world. Ominous clouds hover once again over parts of Europe. Sixty-eight years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 68 years after the end of the Holocaust, we may not ignore a disturbing resurgence of racist and neo-fascist political groups in at least three countries that belong to both the European Union and NATO.

In Greece, the viciously racist, anti-Semitic and anti-migrant Golden Dawn party is emerging, in World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder’s words, as “the new Nazis.” And we cannot, we must not, ignore reports that Golden Dawn is at least in contact if not conspiring with like-minded groups in other countries and has opened offices in the United States, Canada, Australia, as well as in Germany.

In Hungary, where 70 years ago hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to their death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the government was forced to ban a rally by anti-Semitic thugs in front of the main synagogue of Budapest under the horrific slogan, “Give Gas.” Early next month, while the World Jewish Congress will be holding its plenary assembly in Budapest as a demonstration of solidarity with the Hungarian Jewish community, members of the reactionary anti-Jewish, anti-Roma and anti-gay Jobbik party are planning an “anti-Zionist” demonstration there.

There can be no doubt that, as President Lauder wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month, the anti-Semitic declarations of Jobbik‘s leaders “deliberately evoke memories of the pro-Hitler wartime regime in Hungary.”

Here in Germany, we note with profound consternation and dismay that the federal government seems to be acquiescing in the legitimization of contemporary far-right extremism by refusing to support efforts to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, or NPD. Last month, the New York Times quoted Philipp Rösler, the head of the Free Democratic Party as defending his government’s decision not to seek to outlaw the NPD with the comment, “Stupidity can’t be banned.”

Standing here beside the Jewish Monument of Bergen-Belsen which my father dedicated on the first anniversary of the liberation in 1946, we must remind Germany’s political and intellectual leaders that racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, intolerance, homophobia, and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and memorials to the Nazi deportation of Roma and Sinti should never be dismissed cavalierly as mere indications of stupidity. They are manifestations of evil, of the very evil that led to the murder of the tens of thousands who lie buried in the mass-graves that surround us and the millions who were gassed at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and the other death camps of Nazi Europe. We will not, we may not, tolerate their resurrection in any form anywhere, but especially not in Germany.

We are gratified by the news that the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg is considering prosecuting some 50 former Auschwitz guards for their role in the genocide of the Jews of Europe, but we cannot ignore the fact that such prosecutions, if they ever take place, will occur many decades too late.

Let us never lose sight of the simple fact that Anne Frank, who died here of typhus a month before the liberation, wrote her famous observation — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart” — while she was still in her hiding place in Amsterdam, while she still felt protected by Miep Gies and the other Dutch Christians who tried to save her and her family. I have no doubt that Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of humankind was profoundly shaken if not completely erased after she was betrayed on August 4, 1944, and taken first to the Westerbork transit camp, then to Auschwitz, and eventually to Bergen-Belsen.

Which is not to say that we should ever forget those non-Jews like Miep Gies, like Pastor André Trocmé in le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and like former Polish Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski who helped Jews in the years of the Holocaust, often at the risk of their own lives. And we remember with profound gratitude the British officers and soldiers who announced to the inmates of the “horror camp” of Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, that “you are free,” “Ihr seit frei.” Together with the US troops who liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, and so many other German concentration camps in the spring of 1945, and the Soviet soldiers who entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, these Allied soldiers gave the gift of life to the surviving remnants of European Jewry, and we are eternally in their debt.

Seventy years ago today, the Warsaw Ghetto was in flames on the third day of the armed uprising, with its heroic Jewish fighters writing a glorious page of defiance into the annals of history. But let us also not forget the thousands upon thousands of Poles in Warsaw who heard the gun fire and saw the smoke but went about their business. And while more than 40,000 Jews died a horrific public death, a merry-go-round was entertaining Poles just outside the Ghetto walls in Krasiński Square.

Today, let us remember that our obligation is to the dead who lie buried here as well as to history and to the future. The Holocaust, the Shoah, was possible because human beings who could have stopped it allowed it to take place, just as they allowed the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere to take place.

We come here every year to assure the dead of Belsen that we have not abandoned them, that we will never abandon them. But equally important, we must recommit ourselves once again in this sacred place to do everything in our collective power not to allow the spiritual and ideological heirs of the National Socialist regime to arise anywhere in the world as a new scourge of humankind.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen on May 1, 1948, is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities.

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New Israeli film on nazi history

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This video is called The Flat, Documentary Film Trailer.

By Fred Mazelis:

The Flat: A family examines a Nazi-Zionist friendship

22 April 2013

Written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger

The Flat, a prize-winning Israeli documentary released in 2011 and now available on DVD, raises important historical issues. While the filmmaker, Arnon Goldfinger, is neither willing nor able to fully explore them, there is still much that is of interest in his story, which deals with experiences of his German-born grandparents that occurred well before he was born.

The documentary begins in the Tel Aviv apartment of Gerda Tuchler. Her grandson has taken on the task, along with his mother Hannah and other relatives, of clearing out his grandmother’s flat after her death at the age of 98. She had lived in the same apartment for 70 years, since arriving in Palestine with her husband Kurt in 1937 as refugees from Nazi Germany.

As they proceed with the difficult and sometimes tedious job of sifting through decades of memories, Arnon and his mother come across what seems to them a startling, almost unbelievable discovery—a carefully preserved German newspaper article from 1934 entitled (in English translation), “A Nazi Travels to Palestine.”

The article comes from Der Angriff ( The Attack ), a leading Nazi publication. It describes a trip undertaken in 1933 by a high Nazi official, Leopold von Mildenstein, and his wife to Palestine, accompanied by Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. The article shows the Mildensteins and Tuchlers in Palestine, and includes photos favorably depicting the lives of Jewish settlers.

It is this discovery that leads Goldfinger to make his documentary. He wonders, in his voice-over narration, “What is Nazi propaganda doing in my grandparents’ flat?” The apparent mystery is only deepened when he comes across numerous photos and correspondence showing that the Tuchlers and Mildensteins resumed their friendship after the war. His mother says she knows nothing about these friends of her parents, nor is she very interested in finding out more.

Goldfinger’s parents’ generation as a rule avoided looking too deeply into the fate of their family members in the Holocaust. In fact, it is only during the course of the investigation of his grandparents’ history that the filmmaker learns the details of the fate of his great-grandmothers. Kurt’s mother died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Gerda’s mother, Susan Lehmann, was deported to the Riga ghetto where she perished.

The issue of his grandparents’ friends becomes even more disturbing when Goldfinger examines accounts of the famous 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, which ended with his conviction and execution. Eichmann testified that Mildenstein, an advocate of resettling German Jews in Palestine, was his superior between 1934 and 1937 in the department of the Nazi SS dealing with Jewish affairs.

The relationship between the Tuchlers and Mildensteins obviously haunts Goldfinger. He repeats the above question in different words, and his face registers puzzlement and concern.

The documentary follows Goldfinger’s attempts to trace his grandparents’ history. The search leads him to the German city of Wuppertal, near Dusseldorf, where he visits the Mildensteins’ daughter, Edda Milz von Mildenstein. Edda, a woman who is now about 70 years old, lived in Britain for 30 years after the war and speaks perfect English. She welcomes him warmly and tells him she knew his grandparents quite well, from their frequent visits to her parents in the 1950s and 60s.

This cultured and educated woman, who was only five years old when the war ended, suggests that her father, though he was a Nazi party member early on, left the party and took up a career in journalism during the war. He later became an official for Coca-Cola in West Germany.

Goldfinger finds evidence that contradicts Edda’s account. He speaks to a retired journalist, the author of a 1966 article in Der Spiegel on von Mildenstein that confirmed his membership in the Nazi SS in the mid-1930s. The filmmaker then examines historical archives in Berlin that provide additional information, showing that Mildenstein joined the Nazis before they took power in 1933, and that he never left the party, instead working in Goebbels’s propaganda ministry throughout the war.

As the film proceeds, Goldfinger more and more shifts his emphasis away from examining his grandparents’ motives and instead toward exposing the role of Mildenstein. He goes back to visit Edda and confronts her with the evidence of her father’s fuller career as a Nazi functionary. She at first resists and then claims she was kept in the dark, which may in fact be the case.

It seems clear that Mildenstein, though probably not an active participant in planning and carrying out the “final solution,” was a longtime Nazi functionary. Like thousands of others who prospered in industry or the state apparatus after the war, including some who occupied far more important postwar positions than he did, Mildenstein paid no penalty.

There is another side to the story, however, one that is also important. Why were the Tuchlers and Mildensteins such good friends in the first place? In the end, Goldfinger settles for a very limited and superficial explanation. He finds a German expert on “Nazi denial,” who speculates that the intense German patriotism of the Tuchlers led them to value their connection to the Mildensteins, and that they “did not know necessarily” that Mildenstein had been a high official.

This may be true. Perhaps Mildenstein resumed the relationship in the postwar period as a way of shielding himself against charges relating to his Nazi past. Perhaps he hid from the Tuchlers the fact that he remained a Nazi until Hitler’s defeat. This still skirts the most important issue: what was the political basis of a relationship that lasted several decades? Why did they hit it off so well? Why were the Tuchlers so willing to accept at face value Mildenstein’s explanation of his wartime career, if that is what happened?

The fact remains that the two couples traveled together on a trip that lasted for months in 1933-1934. This was after the Nazis had come to power, physically smashed the trade unions and the workers’ parties, threw thousands of Communists and other political prisoners into concentration camps and instituted a regime of brutal terror. None of this disturbed the Tuchlers enough to prevent their trip to Palestine with their Nazi friends, a trip that was featured in the fascist press.

Early in the film there is a brief but significant interview, one that Goldfinger chooses not to discuss further. An elderly Israeli historian of German Jewish emigration to Palestine explains that the story of the Tuchlers is not unbelievable at all. He talks about the “common interest” between the National Socialists and the Zionists during the 1930s. Kurt Tuchler, who was a Berlin traffic court judge at the time, was an active member of the German Zionist Federation. This Federation, in an apparent attempt to boost support within Nazi circles for Jewish emigration, sent Tuchler to accompany Mildenstein on the trip to Palestine.

A family memoir cannot deal in depth with historical questions that demand much longer treatment, but the story of the Tuchlers cannot be fully understood without examining the role of Zionism. During this pre-World War II period, it was a distinctly minority viewpoint within the Jewish population, in Germany and everywhere else. Dedicated above all to nationalism and national exclusivism, it drew support primarily from middle class layers, and was hostile to assimilation and above all to a mass socialist movement encompassing all sections of the working class.

It was not unheard of for upper middle class German Jews, including those, like Kurt Tuchler, who proudly wore their medals from the First World War, to voice some “understanding” of the program and the appeal of the National Socialists. Furthermore, the Tuchlers would have favorably compared the cultivated Mildensteins to the Nazi “rabble,” and perhaps have placed their hopes on a moderation of Nazi policies and the emergence of a more “moderate” German nationalism under people like Mildenstein. The tragic fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust transformed the fortunes of Zionism. Many, with their hopes for the future shattered after the loss of 6 million Jews, came to embrace the doctrine of an exclusive Jewish homeland. Major sections of world capitalism, above all the United States, which had emerged as the chief victor from the Second World War, transferred their support to the Zionists.

History was rewritten in accord with the need for a Zionist mythology. Zionism, rather than being a minority view, now became officially synonymous with the Jewish people. Anti-Zionists were depicted as anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews.” The leading role of Jewish socialists and communists in the Warsaw Ghetto and other heroic resistance to the Nazis was pushed aside. Not only was Zionist collaboration with the National Socialists erased, as in the relatively minor example of the Tuchlers, but the German people as a whole were portrayed as collectively responsible for Hitler, as in the notorious book Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Arnon Goldfinger and his generation were raised on this myth, and that may be why he reacted to the revelations about his grandparents with shock and incomprehension. Coming to grips with this history, however, will be crucial if Israeli Jews are to find an answer to the blind alley and increasing crisis that Zionism has produced for them, decades after the events discussed in The Flat.

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Afghan NATO bombing victims’ legal victory

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This video is about the German Kunduz massacre in Afghanistan.

This video is also about the Nato airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2009, which killed up to 142 people, mainly civilians. US forces launched the strike on fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, following advice from German ground troops.

From Associated Press:

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at 3:19 AM

German court sees merit in Afghan airstrike case

BERLIN — A German court says a case brought by relatives of Afghans killed in a 2009 NATO airstrike ordered by German forces has merit, and it now plans to proceed with a review of evidence.

The Bonn regional court says it wants to see video material recorded by the American fighter jets ordered by a German colonel to bomb two stolen fuel tankers in the Afghan region of Kunduz.

The airstrike killed 91 Afghans and injured 11, most of them civilians, causing a political furor and the resignation of several senior officials in Germany.

The Bonn court said Wednesday that the two plaintiffs might be entitled to compensation if the German colonel is shown to have failed to protect civilians as required by the Geneva Conventions.

Photo Gallery: Afghan Workers Left in Danger by German Military: here.

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Wild European bison returning to Germany

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This video isd called Russia moves to save European bison.

From Wildlife Extra:

European bison released into the wild in Germany

European bison roaming in Germany for the first time for 400 years

April 2013. On 11 April 2013, a fence was cut down in the Bad Berleburg region of Germany. Nothing unusual in that, except the fence was restricting a small herd of European bison (sometimes known as wisent) into the wild in Germany, the first free roaming herd in Western Europe for 400 years.

The opening of the fence released a small herd, consisting of one adult bull, five cows and two calves, into a 10,000 hectare forest. Two of the animals are fitted with radio transmitters to allow scientists to track and follow them. The animals will roam entirely free in the large forests of the Rothaar Mountains around Bad Berleburg in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is hoped that the herd will grow to about 25 animals. The World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) called the project a ground-breaking step in nature conservation of Germany.

The herd has been kept in an 88 hectare enclosure for the last three years and has been intensively studied by scientists and universities. They have studied the behavior between man and bison, they have analyzed the role of the bison in the ecosystem and the impacts on biodiversity and also examined the impact on forestry. The conclusion was that: ‘bison are indeed great and powerful, but also very peace loving and shy animals, and present no risk to humans.’ More information can be found on the German bison website.

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