Race-mixers and conspiracist cranks – the German ‘coup plot’ farce

Here at H&D we thought we had seen every possible method of discrediting the nationalist cause, and every form of embarrassment among our so-called leaders dragging the noble ideals of racial nationalism into the gutter.

But the tragi-comedy of this week’s “far right coup plot” in Germany has plumbed new depths.

When raids took place across Germany (plus one in Austrian and one in Italy) early on Wednesday morning, we were told that a German Prince and various “far right” politicians and ex-military figures had been plotting to overthrow German “democracy” and restore the monarchy.

This was said to be based on a so-called Reichsbürger movement who deny the legitimacy of the present German state.

As it happens they have a pretty good case. German “democracy” has after all brought in tyrannical laws silencing historical debate, and is on the point of sending the 94-year-old scholar Ursula Haverbeck back to prison for the “crime” of questioning the “Holocaust” and asking whether it was truly feasible for six million Jews to have been murdered in supposed “homicidal gas chambers” on the apparently non-existent orders of Adolf Hitler.

Earlier this week this same German “democracy” staged another political show trial against the philosopher and former lawyer Horst Mahler, who will be 87 next month and has had both legs amputated due to health conditions aggravated by previous prison sentences for Orwellian “thought crimes”.

Notwithstanding this tyrannical treatment of its own citizens, the present-day Federal Republic is of very doubtful legitimacy: it doesn’t have a proper constitution, only a “Basic Law” that was drafted as a temporary measure for the former West Germany when it emerged from Anglo-American military occupation. The idea was that this Basic Law would eventually be superseded by a new constitution voted on by an eventually reunified German people.

That referendum never happened and the “temporary” Basic Law remains in force.

So the alleged coup plotters in some ways had a sound argument. We have no idea whether the lurid stories of attempted armed insurrection were true, false or half-true. Doubtless more details will emerge at future trials.

What we do know is that the ideological background of the “coup plotters” is an utter shambles, bearing no relation to any form of racial nationalism, let alone national socialism.

The latest to be unveiled is a celebrity chef who worked for the prince. This chef, Frank Heppner, was married to an Asian: his half-Asian daughter is the girlfriend of an “Austrian” negro footballer David Alaba, whose father is Nigerian and mother from the Philippines.

In short, a model European family!!!

And these are the people who were going to save Germany: a sick joke.

They have nothing to do with racial nationalism or national socialism. Rather they represent the decadent remnant of Eurotrash “aristocracy” and reactionary politics, with an ideology cobbled together from pre-war “conservative revolutionaries” and 21st century crank conspiracy theory.

It is embarrassing that they could in any way be linked to the true European cause.

Two faces of heroism: Wolfgang Fröhlich and Admiral Sir Tom Phillips

Ending a sad month for H&D, following the loss of our comrades John Bean and Ian Carser, we learned that the great Austrian revisionist – 70-year-old chemical engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich, who earlier this year was awarded the Robert Faurisson International Prize – has died. His longstanding comrade Franz Radl informs us: “As I was told he had to spend several weeks in the intensive care unit because of his Covid-19-illness.”

This tragic news arrived just as I was writing a historical article for this website about the events of December 1941, and it seems now strangely appropriate to combine the two, and reflect on two different but complementary faces of heroism with regard to the Second World War and its legacy for us in the 21st century.

Wolfgang Fröhlich’s heroism was that of a man who speaks the truth as he sees it, with the benefit of specialist technical knowledge and scholarship, knowing that the personal consequences will be catastrophic. In this respect (though from Catholic Austria) he stood in the tradition of Martin Luther who reputedly said in 1521 when summoned to recant his ‘heresy’: “Here I stand, I can do no other”. There is no reliable record that he actually said those words, but he did defy his inquisitors, and we know that he did say: “I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

Beginning in the 1990s, Wolfgang Fröhlich similarly stood by his seriously researched and thoughtfully expressed views which amount to the most serious ‘heresy’ of our times: challenging historical orthodoxy regarding the purported extermination of six million European Jews in ‘homicidal gas chambers’ on the orders of Adolf Hitler.

This challenge began when Fröhlich appeared as an expert defence witness during the trial of Swiss revisionist Jürgen Graf and his publisher Gerhard Förster in 1998. By that time he had for a few years been distributing revisionist texts to Austrian politicians, journalists and others. Based on his own expertise as a specialist in the use of poison gas for exterminating vermin, Fröhlich had concluded that the ‘official’ story about ‘homicidal gas chambers’ being used to kill Jews and others with hydrogen cyanide (‘Zyklon B’) in German ‘extermination camps’ was scientifically impossible.

Even after the Graf trial, it took some time before Fröhlich himself was troubled by the authorities. In 2001 he published a 368-page book entitled Die Gaskammer Lüge (‘The Gas Chamber Lie’). This led to a warrant for his arrest, but no immediate proceedings followed.

It was not until June 2003 that Fröhlich was arrested, an event which according to Prof. Robert Faurisson seems to have been linked to a speech in Vienna by President George W. Bush’s special envoy on combatting ‘anti-semitism’, the notorious Rudolph Giuliani, later right-hand-man to President Donald Trump.

Giuliani demanded action against revisionists, writing in the New York Times that “revisionist viewpoints put us at risk of a repetition of race-based genocide”. Washington demanded, and Vienna obeyed. Wolfgang Fröhlich was arrested on 21st June 2003 and spent twelve of the next sixteen years in prison – the rest of the time on trial or awaiting trial. During one of these intervals of semi-liberty, in 2006 Fröhlich attended the Tehran International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust – an event offered uniquely by Iran as being open to all sides of debate on this topic – accompanied by his indefatigable Viennese attorney, Dr Herbert Schaller. He received an ovation from the Iranian audience after simply telling them that he was legally prevented by the Austrian authorities from expressing his views even in Tehran.

Austria became among the most oppressive of the many European countries that during the past quarter-century have criminalised ‘Holocaust denial’, with increasingly severe penalties against those who apply normal historical methods to a period that has been taken out of history and turned into a secular religion.

Even after his release in March 2019, Fröhlich spent the rest of his life as a condemned criminal without normal pension and other citizen’s rights. He was even labelled by prosecutors (in true Stalinist fashion) as a criminal ‘lunatic’ as punishment for the lucid, rational expression of his historical and scientific views. During his last two years, Fröhlich was engaged in a series of legal battles to expose the unprofessional conduct of ‘expert’ psychiatric witnesses who had been prepared to parrot the prosecution’s line.

During one of Fröhlich’s court ordeals in 2015, Prof. Robert Faurisson wrote:
“I know Wolfgang Fröhlich. He masters his subject. He expresses himself with moderation. He is not an excited or fanatical person. On the contrary! He honours his country and historical science.
“His fate is upsetting. We must always remember the degree of ignominy to which the ‘elites’ who rule the German-speaking world have sunk and, in particular, the German or Austrian magistrates capable of sending a man of this quality to prison for thirteen years.”

Wolfgang Fröhlich’s heroic stand for truth and justice is sure to survive his death, and inspire future generations as Europe recovers its dignity, sovereignty and traditions.

By contrast another very different hero – Admiral Sir Tom Phillips – was lost in the mists of history until I found a document in the wartime diaries of Hugh Dalton, the minister in Churchill’s wartime government who took charge of the ‘dirty tricks’ department of Britain’s war effort, the Special Operations Executive.

Admiral Phillips was a hero of a type familiar to students of Greek tragedy – where one often finds a man trapped by circumstance, who has no alternative but to confront his fate.

In June 1940, just a month after Churchill had taken over as Prime Minister and taken Britain over the brink into ‘total war’ – Admiral Phillips told Dalton that this war was a disaster for Britain and was the consequence of several appalling decisions that had alienated countries that should have been our allies.

“He does not care anything about the Italians, who are a worthless lot, but the Spaniards are a very different story. To have Spain as an enemy would jeopardise the whole of our control, both of the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic sea routes. It is unthinkable that we should have been brought to such a point. We backed the Bolsheviks in Spain in 1936 and ’37 against the only man who, in modern times, has been able to make Spain strong. The horrors committed by the Bolsheviks in Spain were seen by our sailors and are on record.

“This was the climax of a foreign policy which had first adopted an attitude towards Germany which made war with her inevitable; had then successively alienated Japan, Italy, and now, finally, Spain. The French had not been fighting in these last weeks. This was because they too had become Bolsheviks. Weygand [the French supreme commander from May-June 1940] had said that the only tough troops in France were the Poles, and that if he had had ten more Divisions of them, he would have won the battle.”

Despite his perception that this war was a disaster for his country, Admiral Phillips took command of British naval forces in the Far East in October 1941. Immediately after Pearl Harbor he set out on his flagship HMS Prince of Wales to confront Japanese forces (the very forces whom he believed should have remained British allies – a view also taken by his former colleague, the ex-Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, who by this time had been interned without trial in England for opposing Churchill’s war policy).

On 10th December 1941, the Prince of Wales and her fellow battleship HMS Repulse were sunk by Japanese air attack. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips – who had so strongly opposed the entire war policy – went down with his ship.

Had he the opportunity, no doubt the Admiral – like Wolfgang Fröhlich – would echo Martin Luther: “I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

Piece by piece, their fellow Europeans will recover accurate knowledge of their own history.

George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Our task, in our present, is to recover that control.

Role Model on Trial – May 2020

“Michèle, your fearless and direct utterances in Dresden, unfortunately forbidden to all Germans, blew open the window of truth in one blast.”
said Gerard Menuhin, son of legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, in February 2018

On 15th May 2020 an Australian-born Briton goes on trial in Dresden for “incitement” – not for terrorism or threats, but because of a 10-minute speech given to 300 mourners at a commemoration of the Allied terror bombing of Dresden in 1945.

The charges have been brought under Germany’s draconian Volksverhetzung law – Para 130 of the criminal code, against Lady Michèle Renouf, former wife of New Zealand banking tycoon Sir Francis (‘Frank the Bank’) Renouf who was honoured with the Verdienstkreuz by the then West German government. In 1990 the engaged couple travelled to Bonn for the award of Sir Frank’s medal, and as his fiancée Lady Renouf was given a Verdienstkreuz lapel ribbon. This honour related to Sir Frank’s pioneering role in persuading the German federal government to relax its conservative policies and invest its financial surplus on world markets. (For similar reasons he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.)

In February 2018 Lady Renouf attended a public commemoration in central Dresden, marking the anniversary of the 1945 terror bombing by the Royal Air Force and the USAAF. Responding to an anti-British comment by someone in the crowd, Lady Renouf was invited to give a brief spontaneous speech in which she acknowledged Britain’s shame for its deliberate wartime policy of targeting civilians.

During this speech she referred to the following facts:

a) Many influential Britons at the time condemned Churchill’s barbaric terror bombing policy and the associated demand for unconditional surrender – such people included Lord Hankey (formerly Sir Maurice Hankey, founder of the modern civil service); the Rt Rev George Bell, Bishop of Chichester; Labour MP and future minister Richard Stokes; and government scientist and future bestselling novelist C.P. Snow.

b) The terror bombing of Dresden was a literal Holocaust in which tens of thousands of civilians were burned alive. We shall never know the atrocity’s exact death toll, because the city was packed with refugees – uncounted and undocumented – fleeing from the advancing Soviet Red Army.

c) The wider relevance of the Dresden war crime – Renouf emphasised – is that so-called ‘moral bombing’ of Dresden by the Second World War allies has effectively acted as a precedent for postwar crimes against civilians including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in turn has prompted unprecedented floods of refugees into Western Europe.

d) The Allied justification for this targeting of civilians was that Britain and America were at war with Germany, yet this factor is ignored when discussing what has become known as the ‘Holocaust’, an unchallengeable dogma taking the place of history.

e) The simple fact that Jewish civilians were interned in camps is today regarded as a ‘war crime’ and part of ‘genocide’, regardless of what did or did not happen in the camps themselves, a topic which Lady Renouf did not address, knowing that it is illegal in Germany to debate such matters. It is odd to condemn internment itself as criminal, bearing in mind that both Britain and America interned enemy aliens. It is scarcely surprising that European Jews were placed in this “enemy alien” category, given the actions of the self-styled leaders of World Jewry who had as early as 1933 declared economic war on Germany. Moreover the future founders of Israel such as Chaim Weizmann were actively engaged in a campaign of covert warfare, some of it contrary to international law, in collaboration with Britain’s Special Operations Executive. In itself it was not unreasonable for the German authorities to intern large numbers of European Jews as potential collaborators in this covert war.

It is for making these points in her brief impromptu February 2018 speech that Lady Renouf was arrested and now faces trial in Dresden on 15th May 2020 for offences which carry a maximum prison sentence of five years.

Her trial will focus press and public attention on the extraordinary German laws that deny normal historical debate and rational argument. These and similar laws in many other European countries (though not so far in the UK) were condemned more than a decade ago by a coalition of eminent historians and other academics writing under the label ‘Appel de Blois’: these critics included the late Eric Hobsbawm; Jewish journalist and author Geoffrey Alderman; Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg; and the Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash.

Lady Renouf’s own background is not as an historian, scientist, lawyer or politician. So how did someone whose lifelong career since early childhood was as a model and advertising actress come to be on trial in Germany charged with having expressed forbidden opinions and having uttered forbidden historical facts?

Born in 1946, Michèle Mainwaring was directed mainly to classical ballet studies from the age of 3 to 23, eventually for a licentiateship at the Royal Academy of Dancing in London. Her earlier four years of undergraduate art studies at the National Art School were partly financed by her parallel modelling career (beginning at age 7) and prizes in beauty contests, including winning Radio 2HD’s Miss Beach Girl, Miss Newcastle & Hunter Valley, and Miss Zhivago. (The latter title, twenty years later was to bemuse Dr Zhivago’s co-star Omar Sharif, when he and Lady Renouf enjoyed gaming at London’s Ritz Hotel casino.)

Having graduated with a Diploma in Art (Education) in 1968, she lectured in Fine Arts and introduced Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

At age 14 Michèle Mainwaring was performing as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel at the Sydney Conservatorium when the world-famous former Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer Kiril Vassilkovsky came backstage seeking to recruit her “ethereal quality” for the role as Clara in his production of The Nutcracker. However her mother would not allow her to leave school to joint the company!

The young Michèle performed as Radio 2HD’s Shirley Temple, singing and tap dancing for the station’s famous children’s radio presenter Twink Storey as an infant performer and symbol of innocence in the postwar years. While the actual Shirley Temple became a US Ambassador, Lady Renouf in later life was to have a rather different involvement with diplomacy and politics – considered by some to have an ‘ambassadorial’ role as a champion for the rights of historical revisionism without exceptionalism!

The future Lady Renouf came to England in the late 1960s shortly before her marriage to the late Daniel Griaznoff, descendent of a Russian noble family. During the 1970s and 1980s she used her marital title of Countess Griaznoff in association with many charitable activities and became well-known in London society. Prolific romantic novelist and socialite Barbara Cartland delighted in entertaining Count and Countess Griaznoff at her country home. Actors Edward Fox and his wife Joanna David generously contributed their celebrated artistry to charity soirees and balls hosted by the Griaznoffs at their Hampstead home.

Meanwhile from age 15 Lady Renouf had been recruited into an international career as an advertising actress in television commercials alongside her modelling career. This led to magazine and television advertisements worldwide for products and companies as diverse as Deutsche Post, Tchibo coffee, British Airways, Cable & Wireless, Nissan cars, Lenthéric perfume, and hundreds more. On screen she appeared with such legends as the Muppets and Dick Emery. In 1973 (for example) she appeared as a ‘Bond girl’ in the BBC’s arts documentary show Omnibus episode on The British Hero.

In the mid-1990s Lady Renouf become a member of the fundraising advisory board for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, chairing the principal fundraising event. As a professional designer of garden mazes and knot gardens, she had also designed an Elizabethan knot garden and labyrinth for the Globe approved by the project’s head Sam Wanamaker, intended as part of the re-education of the general public in the coded poetic messages of flowers, familiar to a Tudor mindset but now lost: her knot garden project was featured in a major article for the Sunday Times.

In this invited role Lady Renouf mobilised a range of contacts among London’s diplomatic corps (built up as a longstanding member of the Ladies’ Committee of the European-Atlantic Group) to assist in the Shakespeare’s Globe project, including Adm. William Crowe, US Ambassador and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who became a family friend; and Australian High Commissioner Neal Blewett. After completing raising funds for the construction of the Wardrobe of Robes room, behind the Globe’s stage (marked today by a bronze plaque) – Lady Renouf’s private tribute to her mother, who was a designer of ballet costumes – she also invited another family friend Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon, to include his contribution to a time capsule buried beneath the reconstructed theatre.

Oddly the first steps towards Lady Renouf’s involvement with “political” questions came as the result of a Jewish member of her Shakespeare’s Globe committee insisting on the entire menu at a fundraising dinner being kosher. Merely the appearance of a non-kosher item on the menu sent this woman into a rant about “tyranny” and “anti-semitism”.

Understandably Lady Renouf was puzzled by this inexplicable reaction, and this led her into further investigations of the taboo subject of “anti-semitism”. She carried out extensive research into the composer Richard Wagner’s attitude to the Jewish question, and in 1997 published the monograph Richard Wagner’s Art-work of the Future and Judaism: Inspirational or Conspiratorial. The central thesis of this monograph was that “anti-semitism” is a misnomer because it implies a racial critique of Jews, whereas one ought to focus on a cultural critique of Judaism. Her thesis attracted the attention of professors from Heidelberg University, who invited Lady Renouf to participate in a conference on Wagner at the German American Institute, Heidelberg. She was regularly honoured by invitations from the late Wolfgang and Gudrun Wagner to their private supper intervals at the Bayreuth Festival, where for a decade she sat at the right-hand of the composer’s grandson. Lady Renouf’s monograph was sold at the Festspielhaus book kiosk.

Soon afterwards the notable Wagner scholar Rudolph Sabor (1914-2013) cast Lady Renouf to star in his play about the composer’s life that was due to be staged at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, which had been booked for a three-week run. Mr Sabor (a Berlin-born Jewish musicologist) came under pressure from Lady Young (wife of Thatcher-era cabinet minister Lord Young) who withdrew her and others’ funding from the production, forcing its cancellation, after Mr Sabor refused to replace Lady Renouf.

At the end of the 1990s Lady Renouf visited Palestine with her high society chum the Bey of Haifa, Jeannot Khayat, who informed her for the first time about the outrageous “absentee law” whereby Palestinian homes can be confiscated by the Israeli state if their owners leave the country even for a holiday.

Early in the 2000s she met and recorded interviews with British veterans of the war against Zionist terrorism in Palestine, 1945-48. These included unique interviews by the late Phillip Knightley with British Army veteran and author Eric Lowe – now archived at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Some of these landmark interviews (in cooperation with anti-Zionist Neturei Karta rabbis, Palestinian diplomats, and commentators including Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon) appeared in Lady Renouf’s first documentary film projects, Palestine Scrapbook and Israel in Flagrante: Caught in Acts of Twistspeak, screened at the House of Lords and House of Commons, under the auspices of Dr James Thring and Lord Stoddart.

In 2000 Lady Renouf attended the London trial of a libel case brought by the British historian David Irving against the Jewish-American author Deborah Lipstadt: this was the first she had heard of debates around the “Holocaust”, but she later became aware of a worldwide campaign of persecution against historical sceptics, notably the jailing of Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Gerd Honsik, Monika and Alfred Schaefer, and Ursula Haverbeck – including their lawyers Horst Mahler and Sylvia Stolz. In 2006 she attended David Irving’s trial in Austria, where he was sentenced to three years imprisonment, eventually being released after one year thanks to an appeal filed by celebrated Viennese attorney Dr Herbert Schaller. (In the recent film Denial, an actress plays the part of Lady Renouf, seated on the court bench as the sole observer on Irving’s side of the court throughout the hearings.)

During the summer of 2001 Lady Renouf arranged a meeting between Irving and Prince Fahd bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, eldest son of the present King Salman. Prince Fahd was owner of many racehorses including the 1991 Derby winner Generous, who was celebrated in a hillside maze garden designed by Lady Renouf, a friend of the Prince and Princess, at their Harewood estate in Surrey where Queen Elizabeth II had planted a tree. In a telephone call from Riyadh following their meeting, Prince Fahd confirmed his intention to purchase the entire property including Irving’s flat in Duke Street, Mayfair, and turn it into a “Real History Institute”, but he died suddenly a day later aged only 46.

One consequence of Lady Renouf’s defence of Irving was that a cabal of opponents engineered her expulsion from the Reform Club in 2003, following an earlier unsuccessful attempt to expel her in 2002 (when she was defended by eminent pollster Sir Bob Worcester). Lady Renouf had invited Irving to an event at the Reform Club (alongside family friend Count Nikolai Tolstoy) in the week of the Lipstadt trial verdict.

Since 2006 Lady Renouf’s Telling Films has produced many DVDs on the stifling of historical debate and the persecution of revisionist historians, scientists, authors, publishers, and latterly even their lawyers. These documentaries include Jailing Opinions, focused on the prosecutions of Irving in Vienna (Austria), Ernst Zündel in Toronto (Canada), and Robert Faurisson in Paris (France), and later documentary films such as Dresden Holocaust 1945 – An Apology to Germany is Due; Out and Unbowed, about Ernst Zündel’s trials and imprisonment; Mourning the Victims, Naming the Culprits about the British torture centre at Bad Nenndorf (Germany); and many others.

In 2006 Lady Renouf attended and spoke at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, hosted in Tehran at the instigation of Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The topic of her conference address was “Psychology of Holocaustianity” – an echo of her postgraduate studies in Psychology of Religion a few years earlier at London University’s Heythrop College. Veteran revisionist scholar and literary document analyst Professor Robert Faurisson said that he gave Lady Renouf’s speech “20 out of 20”!

Nominated by Prof. Faurisson, Lady Renouf was elected to serve on a five-member international fact-finding committee created at the end of the Tehran conference to advance research and support informed historical debate.

Between 2006 and 2020 Lady Renouf has been interviewed in many television and radio debates and discussions with (for example) Dr David Duke, Prof. Norman Finkelstein; former CIA officer Dr George Lambrakis; Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom; the Rev. Stephen Sizer; and Dmitry Shimelfarb, former adviser and press spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2005 she was honoured with the George Orwell Award by the Canadian Free Speech League, and has spoken at conferences in Canada, the USA and Mexico. Several of these speeches, films and interviews have focused on Lady Renouf’s campaign to raise awareness about the first, pre-Israel Jewish Homeland option in Birobidjan – the Jewish Autonomous Region created in 1928 in the former Soviet Union and still flourishing to this day in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

When the Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in October 2008 and subjected to a European Arrest Warrant seeking his extradition to face criminal opinion charges in Germany, Lady Renouf mobilised a defence team that successfully opposed the warrant as invalid, forcing the German authorities to back down and accept his release. The Töben case proved an important precedent in relation to the traditional Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson, who was convicted in Germany for answers he gave to a Swedish television crew in November 2008, but who as a consequence of the success in Töben’s case, could not be subjected to a European Arrest Warrant. On Bishop Williamson’s return to London in 2009 he was met at the airport by Lady Renouf, who gave interviews to BBC Radio 4 and the World Service later that day, in which she debated the issues involved with Deborah Lipstadt and the late Greville Janner of the World Jewish Congress.

Now those same German authorities are seeking revenge in a wholly unwarranted prosecution of a British citizen for a perfectly normal and reasonable (though unplanned and unprepared) speech in Dresden two years ago, a speech intended as a humble acknowledgment of British guilt and contrition for a terrible crime against German civilians committed 75 years ago.

By this politically-motivated prosecution, the moribund Merkel government’s servants in the German state apparatus dishonour their own dead, and discredit themselves before the world’s media.

Lady Renouf’s former husband Sir Frank Renouf was a prisoner-of-war in Germany for four years following his capture after parachuting into Greece on 26th April 1941. His time in an officers’ prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria was well spent learning German from a friendly guard with the aid of Schiller’s poetry, building a tennis court, enjoying Red Cross food parcels, and conducting a correspondence course with Worcester College, Oxford, where he was admitted for a postwar degree. His German connections were strengthened after the war as a friend of British Prime Minister Edward Heath and eminent figures in European banking including the British Lord Kindersley (a director of the Bank of England) and the German Hermann Abs (a director of Deutsche Bank). The Renoufs’ matrimonial home at 37 Eaton Square, Belgravia, had during the 1930s been the home of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who immediately before the Second World War rented out this same property as the home of German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop – the first prisoner executed by the Allies at Nuremberg in 1946.

It remains to be seen whether 21st century Germany will be as hospitable to Lady Renouf as wartime Germany was to her former husband!

• Friends and international observers will be welcome to attend the trial. Twitter and blog accounts carrying regular updates on the Renouf case will be online soon; check https://twitter.com/ModelTrial for details.

Winners and losers as Europe’s populist tide ebbs and flows

While Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party celebrated big victories in this week’s European elections, the much-advertised populist breakthrough proved to be at best a patchy affair.

Predictably the big populist winners included Italy‘s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, whose anti-immigration Lega party topped the polls with 34.3% and 29 seats – a huge increase on their 6.2% and five seats in 2014, when the party was known as Lega Nord (Northern League).

Also continuing to advance were the nationalist-conservative governing parties in Poland and Hungary.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party are suspended from the European conservative group EPP, but Orban had the last laugh this week. While most European conservative parties are in crisis, Fidesz increased their support to 52.3%, up from 51.5% in 2014.

A very radical nationalist party polled exceptionally well in Slovakia. Marian Kotleba’s People’s Party Our Slovakia – a party that stands staunchly in the tradition of Slovakia’s wartime leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso – gained two MEPs after polling 12.1% (up from 1.8% in 2014).

By contrast some previously successful populist and anti-Islam parties suffered poor results. The once-influential Dutch Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders was wiped out, losing all four of their MEPs and polling 3.5% (down from 13.2% in 2014).

Also badly beaten was the Danish People’s Party who lost three of their four MEPs after their vote fell from 26.6% to 10.7%. Voters in Denmark showed the strongest evidence of a trend also witnessed in some other European countries: an anti-populist backlash with increased turnouts among previously apathetic voters.

Marine Le Pen, once Europe’s most successful anti-immigration politician, has been to some extent eclipsed by her Italian ally Salvini, but Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) – previously the National Front (FN) – again topped the poll in France with 23.3% (slightly down from the FN’s 24.9% in 2014). The more ‘moderate’ French eurosceptic party France Arise (DLF) led by Farage’s main French ally Nicolas Dupont-Aignan fell below the 5% threshold to obtain MEPs. DLF polled 3.5% (down from 3.8% under an earlier party name in 2014).

Le Pen’s former FN vice-president Florian Philippot broke away in September 2017 to form a splinter party called The Patriots, mainly on the European issue: unlike Le Pen he wants France to leave the European Union. Philippot’s party polled only 0.7% despite seeking to appropriate the name of the anti-establishment “yellow vest” street protestors.

Having lost one of her main European parliamentary allies with the demise of Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom Party, Le Pen will have been greatly cheered by the landslide gains for the Flemish nationalists Vlaams Belang. In simultaneous Belgian regional, parliamentary and European elections, VB’s young leader Tom Van Grieken (elected in 2014 as a 28-year-old) succeeded in turning round the party’s fortunes.

VB now have 18 seats in the Belgian Parliament (up from 3 in 2014) and three MEPs (up from one in 2014).

The other important Le Pen ally is the Austrian Freedom Party, who managed to hold on 18.1% (down from 19.7% in 2014) despite a financial scandal that has destroyed the career of party leader and former Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache. In fact these European elections pale into insignificance against the background of Austria’s political crisis, which has now brought down the government and provoked a general election to be held in September.

Rather than consistent populist/nationalist success, the main event of this year’s European elections in most of the continent was a dramatic increase in turnout: up from 42.2% to 50.1% in France; from 48.1% to 61.4% in Germany; and from 43.8% to 64.3% in Spain.

The new Spanish anti-immigration party Vox elected three MEPs for the first time after polling 6.2% (up from 1.6% in 2014 but down from 10.3% at this year’s general election).

In Germany the civic nationalist and anti-immigration party AfD (Alternative for Germany) polled 4.1m votes (11.0%), up from 2.1m votes (7.1%) in 2014, increasing their tally of MEPs from seven to eleven.

One side-effect of AfD’s success was the defeat of the long-established German nationalist party NPD, who polled 101,000 votes (0.3%), down from 301,000 votes (1.0%) in 2014. The NPD’s sole MEP Udo Voigt consequently lost his seat. Two smaller German nationalist parties also contested the Euro-election. Die Rechte polled 25,000 votes for a slate headed by 90-year-old author and historical justice campaigner Ursula Haverbeck, who is presently serving a prison sentence for “holocaust denial”. The III Path (Dritte Weg) polled 13,000 votes.

Greek national socialist party Golden Dawn lost one of their three MEPs after polling 4.8%, down from 9.4% in 2014 (though in contrast to some populist parties Golden Dawn is disproportionately strong among young voters). Their Maltese counterparts Imperium Europa, a national socialist party led by Norman Lowell, polled 3.2%, up from 2.8% in 2014.

Gerd Honsik, 1941-2018

Poet and historical revisionist Gerd Honsik died on Saturday 7th April at his home in Sopron, Hungary, just across the border from his native Austria.

A political activist since the 1960s, Honsik had been a federal executive member of Austria’s National Democratic Party, which was banned in 1988 under increasingly draconian anti-democratic laws designed to protect the political establishment.

That same year Honsik wrote a book titled Freisprüch für Hitler? (Acquittal for Hitler?), questioning the historical orthodoxies that are now backed by the full force of criminal law in much of Europe.  This began thirty years of legal persecution.  In 1992 he was given an 18-month prison sentence by a Vienna court, having already been convicted in Munich: both the Austrian and German legal systems ruled that historical revisionism amounted to “incitement” and that, as under British race laws (which do not yet criminalise revisionism), the truth is no defence.

Honsik fled to Spain to escape this persecution, and while in Spain published further revisionist article in the magazine Halt.  He remained in exile until Spanish law was changed to permit his arrest and extradition to Austria in 2007, then began serving the 18-month sentence from fifteen years earlier, and in 2009 was convicted of additional offences and given a further five year prison sentence. This was reduced on appeal to four years, but an extra two year sentence was added in 2010.

The famous 2006 Tehran Conference on the Holocaust was partly at Honsik’s instigation, after he had asked Iran’s Ambassador to Germany in December 2005 whether the Islamic Republic could provide legal or diplomatic assistance for the Canadian-German revisionist publisher Ernst Zündel.  Honsik was forbidden to travel to Iran, but the Tehran Conference was addressed by his attorney Dr Herbert Schaller. In 2011 Dr Schaller won his client an early release from prison, but nevertheless Honsik had served four years merely for the normal pursuit of historical enquiry.

Gerd Honsik took refuge in Hungary last year, as the Austrian authorities were threatening further legal moves against him. His death marks another heroic milestone in the pursuit of historical truth and justice. Within the last eight months we have lost Ernst Zündel, his widow Ingrid Rimland Zündel, Don Salvador Borrego, Dr Herbert Schaller, and now Gerd Honsik. They lit a flame that younger generations must now carry forward.