The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places//germany/press/reuters.031694


Archive/File: fascism/germany reuters.031694
Last-Modified: 1994/06/22

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
From: golux@world.std.com (and not a mere Device)
Subject: German Appeals Court Ruling
Message-ID: 
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 14:50:22 GMT

Reuters report in today's Boston Globe (03/16/94): 

****************************************************************************

   KARLSRUHE, Germany -- Germany's highest appeals court broke with
tradition yesterday and ruled that claiming the Holocaust never
occurred did not in itself constitute incitement to racial hatred.

   The Federal Court of Justice ordered the retrial of a far-
right leader who had been convicted of denigrating Holocaust
victims and inciting racial hatred by propagating the so-called
"Auschwitz lie" - the claim that war crimes never occurred in Nazi
death camps.

   The court said it was "too much of a generalization" to assume
that this in itself constituted incitement to racial hatred, an
apparently new interpretation of the law.

   It revoked a one-year suspended sentence and $6,000 fine imposed
in November 1991 on Guenter Deckert, head of the National Democratic
Party.

   Sources in the Jewish community objected, and a German television
commentator described it as a dangerous move that would give Nazi
apologists credibility.  The Berlin-based Die Welt newspaper said
today that the court's decision was astonishing.

   "One wipes one's eyes in amazement," it said.  "Up till now, it
has been regarded as common sense in this republic that injustice is
condemned as injustice and that Nazi apologists should not be
indulged."
   Deckert had been convicted after organizing a lecture by the
US neo-Nazi Fred Leuchter of Malden, Mass., who said Nazi war
crimes had never occurred and that the Auschwitz camp had no gas
chambers.

   The Karlsruhe-based court said in its ruling the Mannheim district
court that sentenced Deckert had not sufficiently backed up the
charge of inciting racial hatred.

   It said that claiming Auschwitz had never occurred did not, in
itself, justify the charge and that the court should have determined
whether Deckert subscribed to Nazi ideology.

   The appeals court ordered Mannheim justices to test whether Deckert
had "attacked the dignity of the Jewish community in Germany" by
claiming that the Holocaust had not occurred.

   Leuchter, a Nazi apologist who designs execution chambers for
US prisons and who is due to stand trial in Germany for inciting
racial hatred, told Deckert's party at the 1991 lecture that he had
visited Auschwitz and established that it had no gas chambers and
that war crimes had not taken place there.

   Deckert translated the Leuchter lecture into German and later
marketed video tapes of the speech.

*****************************************************************************

As you can see, Reuters still hasn't quite got it right about
Leuchter.  (Although, I suppose that he might "design[] execution
chambers for US prisons" on cocktail napkins or in his head....
Reuters didn't say the US prisons actually use his designs.)  At
least they didn't say he is an engineer.

Anyway, this report is presented in full so people can see what's what
before the Deniers and other Nazi apologists spin it into a crushing
victory.

D.J.Schaeffer       |   The Todal looks like a blob of glup.  It makes
golux@world.std.com |     a sound like rabbits screaming and smells
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^               of old, unopened rooms.
                                 James Thurber, _The 13 Clocks_



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