Senior judges and eminent historians called for scrapping of ‘historical memory laws’ that seek to jail 93-year-old
Posted by admin978 on March 21, 2022 · Leave a Comment
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.)
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.
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”.
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.”
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.
