Historic win for anti-immigration party AfD

The anti-immigration German civic nationalist party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) took control of a town council for the first time on Sunday when AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann was elected ‘district administrator’ of Sonneberg, a town of just over 20,000 inhabitants in Thuringia.

Sonneberg is in the east of today’s Federal Republic, though in the centre of traditional Germany.

AfD was founded as a right-wing Conservative party espousing what British voters would call ‘Thatcherite’ economic policies, but has steadily moved to the right and is now mainly identified with a strong anti-immigration stance. The Thuringian region of AfD is seen as especially right-wing and controlled by the party’s so-called Flügel or ‘wing’ led by Björn Höcke, who has made controversial remarks on racial and historical topics.

The party was greatly boosted by Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than a million extra immigrants and ‘asylum seekers’ in 2016 – a policy which alienated many traditional conservative voters who had once backed Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU.

Björn Höcke

After losing its focus and slipping in the polls during the pandemic, AfD has greatly revived during the past 18 months due to economic problems that are felt especially keenly in regions such as Thuringia that were part of the old East Germany.

Voters in such areas are often nostalgic for aspects of communist rule, without being ‘left-wing’ in the usual sense of that term.

And partly for reasons discussed in a broader context by Ian Freeman in the forthcoming issue 115 of H&D, hard-pressed voters in such areas believe that environmentalist policies pushed by the German Green Party (who are coalition partners with liberals and socialists in the present federal government) are an ill-considered luxury that the country can ill-afford right now.

Foreign and defence policy has little relevance to a local election in a small town, so the controversial pro-Moscow stance taken by some AfD leaders is unlikely to have had a decisive influence on Sonneberg’s voters.

This latter AfD policy is utterly rejected both by the right-wing of CDU and CSU (who sympathised with AfD on immigration) and by the racial nationalist party III Weg (which regards Putinism as a betrayal of Germany’s and Europe’s fundamental interests, and strongly supports Ukraine’s defiance of the Kremlin).

Nevertheless, AfD’s latest electoral success has alarmed the liberal-left establishment and might be a sign that increasing numbers of German voters are no longer afraid to assert their national identity and turn back the immigration tide.

Change to German electoral system – is Sir Keir watching?

This week the German coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals began moves to reform the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in what would be their country’s biggest constitutional shake-up for many years.

With electoral reform likely to be on the UK’s political agenda after the Conservatives almost certainly lose the next general election (due by January 2025 at the very latest) the choices made in Berlin are worth examining. Especially because their present government is ideologically very similar to a likely Labour-led coalition in the UK.

Germany has a hybrid system, with some MPs elected on a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system, but others elected via a top-up list so as to make the entire Bundestag represent the nationwide percentage share of the vote.

This hybrid system means that the Bundestag is not simply divided proportionally to match the parties’ share of the vote. For example, to gain proportionally-based seats, a party must poll at least 5% nationwide, or qualify for proportional top-ups if it wins at least three directly-elected seats. This happened recently with the far-left party Die Linke.

Markus Söder, leader of the Bavarian conservative party CSU, which would be the biggest loser if this week’s reforms are passed.

On the other hand, a party with a very strong regional base can end up winning more directly elected seats than a proportional carve-up would have given them. This is the case with Bavaria’s conservative party CSU. Extra seats are created to balance out such anomalies and are known as ‘overhang’ seats: these have meant that the present Bundestag is the largest ever, with 736 MPs.

This week’s proposed reform would eliminate ‘overhang’ seats, and fix the number of German MPs at 598.

At a basic level the reform is likely to be popular with voters, since it will save money and cut bureaucracy. And it’s a cunning move by the government because it will weaken the CSU. Even though CSU is the sister party of CDU, the present system of ‘overhang’ balancing takes no account of that, and gives an artificial boost to the combined CDU-CSU strength.

Reforming this would be likely to make any future conservative-led government more dependent on a deal with parties further to the right – presently AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) or whichever party succeeds AfD if it splits/declines. Unsurprisingly, the present reform is similar to a policy that the AfD itself promoted four years ago.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (above right, meeting Prime Minister Sunak) and her SNP would be the big losers if the UK adopted a system similar to that now proposed in Germany.

Here in the UK the party in a similar position to CSU (though very different ideologically) is Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party. The present electoral system gives the SNP grossly inflated importance at Westminster, relative to its share of the UK-wide vote. At the last general election SNP won 3.9% of the UK-wide vote, and 48 MPs (i.e. 7.4% of the House of Commons). The system almost doubled the SNP’s importance at Westminster, and this would be far more important in the event of no major party gaining a Commons majority, thus making Sturgeon and her allies kingmakers.

By contrast a more purely proportional system would probably give a populist/nationalist party (i.e. whatever replaces Reform UK and UKIP) more Westminster seats than the SNP. The other big winners from a change to a German-style system would almost certainly be the Greens.

Most importantly for racial nationalists, it would end the ‘wasted vote’ argument that has so far prevented many of those who sympathise with our ideas from voting for a racial nationalist party.

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

Prince Heinrich XIII – Prince Reuss – was arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Frankfurt and is accused of leading a “right-wing coup plot”.

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.

Celebrity chef and alleged coup plotter Frank Heppner

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.

Shalimar Heppner (above right) is the daughter of supposed “far right coup plotter” Frank Heppner and his Asian former wife Eden. Shalimar is the girlfriend of ‘Austrian’ footballer David Alaba (above left), who is of mixed Nigerian-Filipino ancestry.

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.

European nationalists celebrate Ursula Haverbeck’s 94th birthday as she faces new jail sentence

Ursula Haverbeck (above left) with her lawyer Wolfram Nahrath

Ursula Haverbeck is one of Europe’s bravest and most intelligent campaigners for historical truth and justice. In 1963 she and her late husband Werner Haverbeck founded the Collegium Humanum – an educational institute based at their home in the northern German town of Vlotho.

The Collegium provided a wide range of educational and ideological training for several generations of Germans, with speakers including the intellectual founder of the modern European environmentalist movement, Dr E.F. Schumacher.

In 1992 Ursula became active in an organisation seeking to build proper memorials for the German civilian victims of the Second World War, whether victims of the terror-bombing campaign by the Western allies, or the campaign of mass rapes, murders and expulsions by Stalin’s Red Army.

This might have been thought a simple acknowledgment of historical fact, but increasingly Ursula drew the hostile attention of German state authorities who wished to impose an authorised version of history.

Increasingly this state-imposed version of history has concentrated on criminalising any attempt to question the alleged ‘Holocaust’ of six million Jews in supposed homicidal gas chambers on the presumed orders of Adolf Hitler.

Ursula Haverbeck was greatly influenced by the German judge Wilhelm Stäglish and his pioneering book The Auschwitz Myth

Historians, scientists and even lawyers who draw attention to the serious evidential problems with the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ narrative were first demonised and driven out of their jobs, then criminalised, and increasingly subjected to long jail sentences.

Ursula herself was first fined for this invented thought-crime of ‘Holocaust denial’ – defined in Germany as Volksverhetzung, or ‘public incitement’ – in 2004.

Since then she has repeatedly been dragged into court, despite her advancing years, for the ‘crime’ of asking politely worded questions about ‘Holocaust’ history in letters to academics, politicians, and other public figures; for writing historical articles in magazines; and more recently for the ‘crime’ of answering questions in an online video interview.

Ursula Haverbeck with her fellow campaigner for historical truth, Horst Mahler, who has spent many years in German prisons for thought-crimes.

From May 2018 until November 2020 Ursula served two and a half years in prison for such ‘crimes’, and earlier this year she was sentenced to a further 12 months imprisonment.

After her appeal was turned down, Ursula was due to enter prison on October 25th but this has been delayed for procedural reasons, so she was not in fact behind bars on her 94th birthday yesterday.

H&D understands that her jailing is however imminent.

A campaign in support of Ursula Haverbeck is already beginning across Europe. To celebrate her birthday yesterday the Spanish organisation Devenir Europeo displayed a banner in Madrid honouring Ursula’s courage and indomitable intellectual fortitude. One of the campaign organisers is H&D‘s European correspondent Isabel Peralta.

A new generation of European patriots and intellectuals are challenging the lies that have been imposed on our continent for more than seventy years.

Young Spanish intellectuals from Devenir Europeo displayed a banner yesterday in central Madrid to celebrate Ursula Haverbeck’s 94th birthday and to inaugurate a campaign for her release and the repeal of European thought-crime laws.

Ursula Haverbeck will begin prison sentence on October 25th

Ursula Haverbeck with her Berlin attorney Wolfram Nahrath

The courageous 93-year-old German publisher and educator Ursula Haverbeck has been told that she must report to prison on 25th October to begin a 12 month sentence.

This is for the “crime” of daring to dispute aspects of her own country’s history. We have reported regularly on Ursula’s case, most recently in August when her appeal was refused.

Updates on the campaign against this disgraceful persecution of a nonagenarian intellectual and patriot will be published soon.

Death threat to H&D author as Zionist vandals hit German art gallery

As part of an escalating dispute between Zionist extremists and the pro-Palestinian movement, vandals have attacked Germany’s most famous exhibition of contemporary art, defacing the site with graffiti threatening H&D writer Isabel Peralta.

Far from intimidating Miss Peralta or H&D, these death threats perfectly illustrate the contradictions that have overtaken once-allied movements of International Zionism and the ‘multicultural’ Left.

The attack occurred earlier this week at documenta – an exhibition that takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel at the Fridericianum, one of Europe’s oldest museums, which for more than thirty years has been dedicated to ‘contemporary art’.

The Fridericianum, Kassel

While Kassel is best known as the home of the Brothers Grimm – archetypal chroniclers of German folk tales – this documenta festival was intended from its inception almost seventy years ago as a celebration of modernism and a rejection of national-socialism. It was founded in 1955 by an ‘anti-nazi’ artist and teacher – Arnold Bode, who set out to celebrate those artists who had been ‘forbidden’ or discouraged during the Third Reich.

Bode curated the first four documenta events but since 1972 a committee of experts has appointed a different artistic director each time. The 2022 event – the fifteenth in the series held every five years – is directed by ruangrupa, a ‘contemporary art collective’ based in Indonesia.

However, months before the exhibition was due to open, Jewish lobby groups began to attack these Indonesians for their support of the ‘Boycott Divestment and Sanctions’ movement (BDS) that seeks to isolate the State of Israel for its increasingly brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

The attack was focused on one of ruangrupa‘s partners in the exhibition – the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, which is Palestine’s leading artistic organisation.

The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine

As in the UK, Zionists and their support network in Germany have sought to demonise and criminalise the BDS movement, in the latest of their usual manoeuvres to portray victims as culprits.

Several meetings have been held between leading German Jews and Claudia Roth, a politician from the Green Party who is now Culture Minister in the federal German government, having overall political responsibility for major artistic events such as documenta.

Zionist commentators in the German media had been very critical of Ms Roth but were becoming more confident that their lobbying was having effect. However the violent wing of the Zionist movement has now jeopardised this ‘progress’ by taking matters into their own hands and physically attacking the exhibition a month before it is due to open.

Late last Friday night or early Saturday morning, burglars from this Zionist faction broke into the building in Kassel where the exhibition is being prepared. On the walls of the building they sprayed the number ‘187’ (typically used in ‘rap’ and graffiti ‘culture’ as a reference to Section 187 of the California Penal Code, i.e. murder) and the name ‘Peralta’.

German police and journalists all assume that this referred to Isabel Peralta, the young Spanish nationalist now writing for Heritage and Destiny who was controversially banned from entering Germany two months ago.

Isabel has attracted controversy since February last year when she spoke at a memorial for the Division Azul, Spanish volunteers who fought alongside German forces against Stalin’s Red Army on the Eastern Front after 1941.

Isabel Peralta and comrades at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Madrid – click here for video

She has also spoken out against the Spanish government’s failure to control immigration, and has addressed demonstrations in support of the embattled Palestinians.

It seems clear that the Zionist vandals were intending to threaten both Isabel Peralta and the pro-Palestinian groups involved in organising the documenta exhibition.

To his credit, the Mayor of Kassel quickly denounced the attack: “Having discussions about documenta fifteen is one thing, wanting to intimidate artists with criminal offences goes far beyond what is acceptable.”

H&D is continuing to investigate the extremist Zionist networks behind this attack.

One irony is that for most of the 20th century (and even today) prominent Jews and Organised Jewry were champions of the most extreme forms of contemporary art, seeking to ‘deconstruct’ Western civilisation. The former treasurer of the Conservative Party – Ehud Sheleg, presently the focus of controversy over an allegedly illegal Russian donation – is a prime example.

As with other forms of ‘multiculturalism’ promoted for a century by leading Jewish spokesmen – notably mass non-White immigration into Europe – Zionists are now reaping what they have sown.

The next issue of H&D will include an article by Isabel Peralta viewing the ‘Decline of the West’ through the prism of art. This week’s criminal vandalism and death threats will not deter her or us.

Part of the Zionist vandalism this week in Kassel

Senior judges and eminent historians called for scrapping of ‘historical memory laws’ that seek to jail 93-year-old

Ursula Haverbeck (above, far left) with friends including Dr Rigolf Hennig, who died yesterday, and the Austrian attorney Dr Herbert Schaller, on the day that Ernst Zündel (above centre) was released from Mannheim prison.

93-year-old educator and publisher Ursula Haverbeck was in court again in Berlin today for a further appeal hearing related to a 12-month prison sentence for two ‘offences’ of ‘Holocaust denial’.

We reported aspects of this case on Friday, and will continue to give further details as it develops. The latest update comes in this video from Berlin, recorded by Ursula’s friend Nikolai Nerling and ending with a tribute to our great comrade Dr Rigolf Hennig, which H&D has now republished with English subtitles. (You can expand the video to full size so as to read the subtitles.)

For further video updates on this and other stories please follow our new Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/heritageanddestiny/

One extraordinary aspect of the story is that more than a decade ago two of Germany’s most senior judges, as well as a panel of eminent historians (mainly Marxists or liberal-leftists) called for the scrapping of the ‘Holocaust denial’ laws that have since been used to jail many Germans including Ursula Haverbeck and Horst Mahler.

Judge Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem

In 2008 the recently retired Constitutional Court (i.e. Supreme Court) judge Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem told a conference in Berlin: “Were I a legislator, I would not criminalise Holocaust denial.”

A few weeks earlier his fellow Constitutional Court Judge Winfried Hassemer told one of Germany’s leading newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he was “not a supporter of Holocaust denial being punishable. Of course, this is a special German problem, which is due to our unfortunate history. But it would be fine with me if we didn’t have this special problem any more.”

In principle, Judge Hassemer said he was “not a supporter of such laws that make wrong opinions a punishable offence”.

Judge Winfried Hassemer

And in October 2008 a group of eminent European historians meeting in France issued what became known as the Appel de Blois, similarly opposing laws that sought to regulate and criminalise historical memory.

The test of the appeal, whose signatories included two of the world’s most famous Jewish historians Eric Hobsbawm and Carlo Ginzburg, read:

“Concerned about the retrospective moralization of history and intellectual censure, we call for the mobilization of European historians and for the wisdom of politicians.
“History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.
“We call on historians to marshal their forces within each of their countries and to create structures similar to our own, and, for the time being, to individually sign the present appeal, to put a stop to this movement toward laws aimed at controlling history memory.
“We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.
“In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.”

A conference of eminent historians at Blois, France, in October 2008 appealed for an end to laws against ‘Holocaust denial’

Commenting on this appeal, another of its signatories Professor Timothy Garton Ash wrote that such criminalisation of history was “dangerous nonsense”.

Garton Ash continued:
“Who will decide what historical events count as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, and what constitutes ‘grossly trivialising’ them?
“…The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted, and various possible interpretations tested against it.
“It’s this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom – subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander, designed to protect living persons but not governments, states or national pride.”

Unfortunately German prosecutors do not agree. They continue to drag Ursula Haverbeck and others before the courts. In doing so these prosecutors bring shame on the Federal Republic and expose ‘democracy’ to justified contempt.


Spot the criminal – Germany seeks to jail 93-year-old publisher while ‘Holocaust’ museums hang on to billionaire gangster’s donations

Ursula Haverbeck at the Berlin appeal court, 18th March 2022

Ursula Haverbeck – the extraordinarily courageous German patriot and educator now aged 93 – was back in court earlier today in Berlin, appealing against convictions for ‘Holocaust denial’ and a 12-month prison sentence.

This is a combined appeal against two convictions and sentences for similar ‘crimes’, one in 2017 involving a speech to an audience of 80 people in Berlin; the other in 2020 relating to a YouTube interview conducted by Nikolai Nehrling, known in German nationalist circles as the Volkslehrer.

Mainstream German press reports see nothing wrong in dragging a 93-year-old lady through the courts for the ‘crime’ of doubting and asking questions about the alleged murder of six million Jews by a mysterious unique mass murder weapon – the alleged homicidal gas chambers.

H&D’s assistant editor has met Ursula several times, and she could not be further from the stereotype of an ‘inciter of hate’. She is a polite, very well-educated lady who expresses her views in reasonable terms. And it should be noted that she is one of the last generation of Germans who experienced the horrors of fleeing with her family from the invading barbarians of Stalin’s Red Army in 1945.

Ursula Haverbeck knows what it means to be a genuine refugee.

Ursula Haverbeck (above centre) with her Berlin attorney Wolfram Nahrath (above right) at today’s hearing

A very different type of human being is Roman Abramovich, chief financial fixer for the bloodstained tyrant Vladimir Putin.

BBC’s Panorama broadcast a detailed investigation of Abramovich’s criminal career on Monday evening. It is crystal clear that – aided and abetted by both Boris Yeltsin and in particular Putin – Abramovich built his fortune on defrauding the Russian people of literally billions of pounds worth of their national assets.

The beneficiaries of Abramovich’s loot include two of the world’s leading ‘Holocaust’ museums. A few days ago we discussed his links to Yad Vashem in Israel. Now it has become clear that the Imperial War Museum in London has no intention of returning the money given by Abramovich for its vastly expensive new ‘Holocaust’ gallery.

The museum has not disclosed quite how much Abramovich donated, but the total budget for the exhibition is at least £30.5 million.  In addition to his personal contribution (or should we say the contribution of the long-suffering Russian people, since Abramovich’s wealth comes from assets stolen from them) Abramovich also staged a fundraising event for the project at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football Club, which he owned until his London assets were frozen this week.

London’s world-famous Imperial War Museum, founded in 1917, bends over backwards to avoid any association with ‘racism’ or ‘slavery’ – yet shamelessly hangs on to millions donated from the ill-gotten fortune of Roman Abramovich

At the time of the donation in October 2018, the Imperial War Museum’s director gushed that: “This donation will enable IWM to reinterpret these galleries, which will present critical insights into the Holocaust as well as integrate the devastating events of the Holocaust into the broader history of the Second World War, revealing why this often overlooked dimension is so important.”

Quite shamelessly – given that it is one of the world’s leading military museums so ought to be taking a close interest in the world-changing events currently under way in Ukraine – the IWM says it will be “retaining the funds from Roman Abramovich”, and in the sly tradition of the barrack room lawyer insists: “This is compliant with all government regulations regarding sanctions”.

Meanwhile Yad Vashem has said only that it is “suspending its strategic partnership” with Abramovich and has yet to confirm whether it will hand back any of the stolen money.

While the Kremlin dictator Putin attempts a real genocide, valiantly resisted by Ukrainian patriots, his gangster henchman Abramovich has funded several prominent examples of a one-sided view of history – exploited for the benefit of yesterday’s Soviet butchers, today’s Russian imperialists, and the shameless Zionist pirates of both yesterday and today.

Those like Ursula Haverbeck who face trials across Europe for the ‘crime’ of ‘denying the Holocaust’ doubtless appreciate the irony that official ‘Holocaust history’ is funded by one of the world’s worst fraudsters, whose career of theft and brutality has been protected by a genuine war criminal.

On Monday Ursula Haverbeck’s latest court ordeal continues in Berlin. H&D will carry further updates throughout the case, both here and in forthcoming issues of our magazine.

Berlin court sets crazy timetable for Ursula Haverbeck, 93

(above left to right) Ursula Haverbeck, Rigolf Hennig and Lady Michèle Renouf

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.

H&D has just published a groundbreaking revisionist essay by assistant editor Peter Rushton, dedicated to Ursula Haverbeck and her fellow campaigners for free historical research Lady Michèle Renouf and Isabel Peralta. 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.

Ursula Haverbeck at one of many court appearances with her Berlin attorney Wolfram Nahrath

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.

German anti-immigration party split as co-leader resigns

Jörg Meuthen has quit as co-leader of AfD, and resigned from the party

Regular H&D readers will know that the German anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was originally a eurosceptic party focused on a Thatcher-style tax-cutting, state-shrinking, anti-Brussels agenda: a more moderate version of UKIP.

After Angela Merkel’s infamous championing of asylum seekers during the immigration crisis of 2015 – summed up in her phrase at a press conference on August 31st that year: “We can do this!” (i.e. Germany can admit millions of ‘refugees’) – AfD rapidly became more of an anti-immigration party than a eurosceptic party, and began shedding its more moderate conservative activists including several MEPs.

Even so, there have always been deep ideological divisions within AfD. One wing – actually called Der Flügel (“the wing”) – is much closer to explicit racial nationalism and sometimes approaches ‘forbidden’ historical questions. The most prominent Flügel leader is Björn Höcke, AfD leader in the central German state of Thuringia (once part of communist East Germany), where the party is especially strong.

In 2020 Germany’s domestic security service BfV (equivalent to Britain’s MI5) announced that the Flügel was under surveillance as a potential threat to the democratic order.

Until this week the most prominent figure in AfD’s ‘moderate’ wing was its national co-leader Jörg Meuthen, who has now resigned not only from his leadership post but from the party.

Meuthen claims that he was losing the battle against the Flügel faction and that as a result AfD was no longer clearly a “democratic” party.

“The party’s heart is beating very far to the right today, and permanently at an elevated rate. I do see quite clear totalitarian echoes there.”

These are very strong words to use (especially in a German context) about a party of which you were co-leader until the previous day!

Meuthen’s resignation has boosted the influence of Björn Höcke, leader of AfD’s radical faction, Der Flügel.

Many observers predict that Meuthen will join forces with the main German conservative party CDU, which recently elected a new and more ‘right-wing’ leader, Friedrich Merz. If so, this would be a significant boost to the CDU, which polled a record low vote in last year’s federal election.

Meuthen has suggested that as it becomes more radical, AfD will only be relevant in the more economically depressed and radicalised regions of the former East Germany, including Höcke’s Thuringia and the neighbouring state Saxony.

This split has been brewing for some time, though until recently it seemed more likely that the Flügel would be expelled rather than the ‘moderates’ resigning. A crucial role has been played by the middle ground of the party, including co-leader Alice Weidel, who seems to have sided with Höcke and the radicals.

Alongside recent developments in France, Spain and Portugal, Meuthen’s resignation is one of several significant changes on the European ‘far right’, which will be analysed in the March edition of Heritage and Destiny.

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