Berlin court sets crazy timetable for Ursula Haverbeck, 93
Posted by admin978 on February 20, 2022 · Leave a Comment
H&D readers will be familiar with the case of Ursula Haverbeck, the courageous German publisher and activist – now aged 93 – who has been subjected to repeated persecution by the German authorities for the ‘crime’ of asking questions about her own country’s history.
Former co-organiser of the Collegium Humanum which staged conferences and lectures featuring some of the greatest names in German academia, Ursula Haverbeck is herself a survivor of one of the most traumatic episodes in German history, having had to flee East Prussia as a 16-year-old when her country was invaded by Stalin’s brutal Asiatic hordes of the ‘Red Army’.
From 1992 to 2003 she founded and chaired the Verein Gedächtnisstätte (Memorial Sites Association) which aimed to build a suitable memorial to German civilian victims of the Second World War, and to end “the unjustified unilateral nature of the view of history”.
Since 2004 she has been repeatedly prosecuted under Germany’s notorious Volksverhetzung law which forbids rational discussion of alleged events now taken out of history and sacralised as the quasi-religion of ‘Holocaust remembrance’. It is forbidden in Germany to investigate whether, where and how the alleged murder of six million Jews in homicidal ‘gas chambers’ on the alleged orders of Adolf Hitler actually took place.
Following several convictions, Ursula Haverbeck was jailed in May 2018 at the age of 88 and remained incarcerated for more than two years. H&D‘s great comrade the late Richard Edmonds addressed a rally in Germany on Ursula’s 91st birthday in 2019 – click here for details.
At the age of 93 there are several further ‘criminal’ proceedings against her. (In Germany it’s common for several stages of appeal to take place before a jail sentence is actually served.)
Court hearings like other aspects of life have been affected by the pandemic, but the Berlin appeal court has now ordered that this 93-year-old lady must attend four days of hearings spread over three weeks, on March 18th, 21st and 25th, and April 4th 2022.
This necessarily involves either repeated travel from Frau Haverbeck’s home (more than 200 miles from Berlin) or a long stay in a Berlin hotel, which might not even be allowed under CoVID regulations.
There are strong differences of opinion among H&D readers about these CoVID regulations, so that aspect of the argument should be for the moment ignored. Even if one regards the German government’s CoVID measures as entirely justified, what surely cannot be justified is the continued persecution of a brave 93-year-old simply for asking questions about her own country’s history.
Frau Haverbeck’s alleged ‘crimes’ would of course be perfectly legal in the UK, and in the USA would be protected by constitutional rights.
The continued existence of the Volksverhetzung law and its use in this manner to silence dissent is a disgrace to a nominally ‘democratic’ nation. H&D‘s assistant editor remembers his arrest and interrogation by the East German communist secret police in 1987, when he was a young student. Today’s ‘democratic’ authorities in the Federal Republic have shown themselves to be no better.
