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NAZIS

Print Mein Kampf to fight neo-Nazi extremism

The proposed publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf in Germany has sparked outrage and worries it would give voice to neo-Nazis. But The Local’s Moises Mendoza argues it is time for the country to fight extremism by supporting free speech.

Print Mein Kampf to fight neo-Nazi extremism
Photo: DPA

In any other country, the recent announcement would have been greeted with shrugs: British publisher Peter McGee wants to sell excerpts of Adolf Hitler’s racist tome Mein Kampf in Germany.

Of course, there’s a reason the Bavarian state government, which holds the copyright to Mein Kampf, has fought McGee’s plans and even received a court injunction this week blocking them.

It’s the same reason anti-Semitic speech is illegal in Germany, as is the open display of the swastika or holocaust denial – and it’s why publishing Mein Kampf would incense so many.

This is where Hitler began his campaign to exterminate Jews, socialists, homosexuals and Roma, among countless others. Germany can never let this tragic Nazi history repeat itself. So the country has put in place some of the toughest laws regulating “hate speech” in the western world.

But, nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, banning free speech in Germany is doing nothing to prevent far-right hatred. In fact, it mystifies it, making extremist propaganda more appealing to those yearning for primary source information.

Worst of all, attempting to censor hate speech suggests that the German people have learned nothing from their dark past.

It implies the country is inherently racist, that young Germans share guilt for the Holocaust, that without patronising rules they will inevitably repeat the awful sins of their grandfathers.

Of course, there’s the clear and present danger posed by the country’s extreme right-wing scene. But sceptical young people don’t take kindly to being told something is evil without being able to examine it in all its unvarnished horror (technically Nazi propaganda can be reproduced for educational purposes, but it often comes heavily censored or with invasive commentary).

We know from the recent past – especially the revelations of neo-Nazi killers among us – that the most extreme elements of the far-right underground are bolder than we thought and thriving out of sight of mainstream society.

But we don’t know how strong they really are. Because they are forced into the shadows we must rely on reports from the government and activist organisations to gauge their danger – and these groups have their own agenda to push. In an environment where it’s preferable to censor speech rather than counter it, young people can get sucked into the world of right-wing extremism without being exposed to differing perspectives. In an increasingly interconnected world, it’s foolish to think that society’s restrictions will prevent them from encountering extremism in the first place.

The entire point of banning speech in Germany is being defeated every day on the internet.

The solution is simple: Allow every perspective to be heard freely. Let the neo-Nazis spout their hate. Let them wave their flags. Let Mein Kampf be read freely by the masses. But let’s make sure we shout them down and educate the next generation to think critically and reject their evil propaganda.

Germany knows its painful history and Germans want to confront it. We’re well past laws that stifle even odious speech.

Rather than fretting that the publication of Mein Kampf will somehow damage society, we should view it for what it is: A first chance to directly confront those who hate.

Moises Mendoza

[email protected]

twitter.com/moisesdmendoza

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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