Something that readers may not be aware of, but which was cited in the Bundesgerichtshof press release and has been picked up by the media and legal analysts in Germany: Stolz threatened the jurors in the trial with the death penalty for 'aiding and abetting the enemy' (Feindbegünstigung)
No shit, she did. In her letter to Judge Meinerzhagen of February 21 this year, and repeated in her appeal of April 10, she claimed that the trial was invalid because the Federal Republic of Germany was illegally founded. She also cited the Reich legal code operative to 1945:
§ 91 b RStGB
Wer im Inland oder als Deutscher im Ausland es unternimmt, während eines Krieges gegen das Reich oder in Beziehung auf einen drohenden Krieg der feindlichen Macht Vorschub zu leisten oder der Kriegsmacht des Reiches oder eines Bundesgenossen einen Nachteil zuzufügen, wird mit dem Tode oder mit lebenslangem Zuchthaus bestraft.
If this is the kind of law that revisionists want to enforce in Germany, then sorry folks, libertarian sympathies go out the window.
Memo to Zündel's new lawyer: when in a hole, stop digging.
For those of us who don't speak German...what did she say?
ReplyDeleteGermany was illegally founded? I seem to recall they unconditionally surrendered in 1945. It was in all the papers.
Zundel and reality...an oxymoron.
Kiwi said:
ReplyDelete<< Germany was illegally founded? I seem to recall they unconditionally surrendered in 1945. It was in all the papers. >>
No sovereign government can legally surrender unconditionally. They can lay down arms, but that alone reaches no settlement, and no settlement has yet been reached.
a settlement was reached in 1990. Borders were affirmed.
ReplyDeleteA sovereign government can surrender unconditionally but then not reclaim sovereignty, nor even the sovereignty of the act itself.
ReplyDeleteAlso, from a diplomatic standpoint, the war is still is existence, with the legitimacy of the German government predicated upon Nazi War-Guilt and open-ended atrocity-propaganda. This was acceptable to the German people after WWII only because, unlike after Versailles, it condemned not the German nation itself but only its leaders--and wholly ignoring the popular basis of the former regime, a mythology that is kept true today, and the loss of which is greatly feared by the establishment.
Yes, Postdam borders may have been affirmed and the occupation zones discontinued and the Berlin Wall gone now, but if Germany got a severe rebuke for failing to support American Interventionism in Iraq, imagine what would happen from not just the United States but from the "world community" if the Germans no longer incorporated the judgments of Allied tribunals into their founding mythology.
As it is, Germany is already forced to pay diplomatic bribes like donating modern diesel submarines to nuclear powers like Israel in compensation for Saddam's Gulf War attacks; it's an insurance premium to realistically remain in good graces as an economic-colony of once-hostile global coalitions. Isolation would be worse for German Capital and its rulers.
But the German government cannot make itself legitimate merely by continuing to go after exiled Thoughtcriminals like Zündel, Rudolf, etc. Germans may have the mentality of a defeated people but they are not stupid.
This is an issue that the German people have to decide. Do they want to fight Fascism with Stalinism? Or do they want to reclaim their sovereignty, grow up, and embrace scary intellectual pluralism?