Germany: full state honour burial for former Nazi Filbinger

by iosaf Sun Apr 15, 2007 17:54

Officially Hitler still hasn't been stripped of his German citizenship (remember he was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now Austria). But in addition to normal rights to dental care, social security & all that stuff which auslander migrant workers such as the many millions of Turkish some up to 3 generations are still denied in Germany - Hitler collected "honorary citizenship" of villages, hamlets and cities the length and breadth of Germany & indeed a lot of other places.
And all this occurred before he had even been elected to just short of majority & the accidents and incidents of history gave him a short enabling act & entrusted him and his gang with the safety of the Weimar Republic for a short period of time. As we all know Germans have a problem with memory - it's a genetic flaw which they're famous for. Pretty soon after being entrusted with the safekeeping of Weimar Democracy Hitler forgot all about it and called himself Fuhrer and well the following 12 years if not thereafter are history. Some people saw a little hint that he had forgotten all about being entrusted with keeping Weimar democracy safe in his acceptance speech that very same week. There was something about how he spat "democracy is for the bourgoise". But still they didn't worry too much about it at the time.

One of the little towns which gave him honorary citizenship (akin to the keys of Dublin offered people in our own time like Geldof or U2 or Ronald Reagan) Bad Doberan did so in 1932.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Doberan

That's where this year's G8 summit of the leaders of the most powerful economies and unequal societies will meet. & guess what? They forgot about removing Hitler from the "honorary citizen" list and plaque till this year. Oh they are very embarrassed. Doing their bit to change and all.

I told ye first in comment 3 of this article http://indymedia.ie/article/81226
See? I didn't forget either - I will be honest - I promised to remember not only for me but for others. If Adolf Hitler was alive today - he would be looking forward to his 118th birthday this coming Thursday & naturally would have a free bus pass. Significantly he would also have gone past the statutes of limitation on any books or money borrowed from the library or Reichbank he never returned. Not to matter the library got destroyed in suspicious circumstances and the bank disappeared as well - also under suspicious circumstances - indeed it was the biggest theft of gold bullion in history. Oh yes - he's not facing any other charges but I reckon he'd be unpopular nonetheless, not that he'd worry about that - he'd be more worried about brain cell degeneration by this stage & doubtlessly spending every last gold ingot on research into saving that organ - since every other decrepit part of his hypothetically sustained body would have been saved by miraculous health advances of the last 60 years. OF course we are glad all this is hypothesis it would be very embarrassing at this point in time if anyone presented him - either alive or for that matter dead.

sin é. na taímid ag sugradh. (as no-one really says in gaeilge).

by philip - smersch Sun Apr 15, 2007 23:02 cloud 9 0123456789

I wonder how the present day members of the US Supreme court will be remember 50 years from now

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20....html
One case last term involved a man convicted of a rape and murder, who later produced DNA evidence raising serious doubt that he was the culprit. The court ruled 5 to 3 that this new evidence warranted a new hearing. But Roberts led the dissenters, who felt it wasn't enough for the new evidence to cast doubt on the defendant's conviction; to grant relief, the evidence had to prove he "was actually innocent."

In another death-penalty case from 2005, then-Justice O'Connor agreed with the court's liberals that trial counsel was ineffective. That decision reversed an opinion by Samuel A. Alito Jr., then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, that would have denied relief. The signals are still mixed. In a different case, the entire court allowed death-row inmates to pursue a civil claim against lethal injection.

But also last term, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate opinion in a death-penalty case for the sole purpose of excoriating Justice David H. Souter, who had written in a dissent about exonerated innocents. Scalia's opinion was a full-bore attack on the notion of innocent exonerees "paraded by various professors" and claimed, in effect, that even if those exonerated were not guilty enough to warrant the death penalty, they were still far from "innocent." (How that made them candidates for the death penalty he did not explain.)

or U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6547244....html

by me again Sun Apr 15, 2007 23:10

Angela Merkels rebuke for the Baden-Wuerttemberg official
(http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/news/article_...judge)

is a tad hypocritical as she was a very active propagandist for the communists in the old DDR
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel)

Merkel was a member of the official, communist-led youth movement Free German Youth (FDJ). Later she became a member of the district board and secretary for agitation and propaganda at the Academy of Sciences in that organisation.

meet the new boss, same as the old one

Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement only after the fall of the Berlin Wall,

by Let's not forget Mon Apr 16, 2007 08:25

The state honours provided for Filbinger were indeed disgusting.

However, let's not forget that not a few former-Nazis, who were never made answer for individual crimes, were provided with political, militiary and police positions in East Germany/German Democratic Republic. They may have openly espoused the new dominant ideology, but they were never tried for the crimes they committed, and like Fibinger, were given state funerals when they died.

Neither should be forget that some leading East German communist leaders were complicit in the murder of hundreds of fellow members of the Communist Party of Germany. Surely we should condemn equally those who organised the execution of military deserters and those who contributed to the murder of antu-fascist communists?

While I accept the problem was much greater in the West, let's not fool ourselves with the old traded line about the FRG being a Nazi state in new clothes.

by nn Mon Apr 16, 2007 10:16

People are becoming more and more distanced from the nazi times from generation to generation, but the former nazi government has still created a nation in its ideals (not entirely of course, but you have to give leeway for imposed sanctions and international attention to the FRGs behaviour).

Consider yourself under 25 now and imagine you were from germany or austria; your parents would either of been hitler youth, supporting the nazi party, nazi party members, soldiers, ss, gestappo, or they would of been murdered or "removed".

The same people that were in the nazi party and the same people that were nourished as youngsters by the nazi party are the very same people in power today.

So even if it isnt a nazi state in new clothes; the people in power still hold the same views as the nazis-their entire up bringing conspired them to become nazis.

The nazis were the most efficent at mass brainwashing since some clever bastard invented religion!

by m. Mon Apr 16, 2007 12:23

you wrote:

"However, let's not forget that not a few former-Nazis, who were never made answer for individual crimes, were provided with political, militiary and police positions in East Germany/German Democratic Republic."

That is simply not true. GDR was a consequent anti-fascist state.

by m. Mon Apr 16, 2007 12:28

you wrote:

"Neither should be forget that some leading East German communist leaders were complicit in the murder of hundreds of fellow members of the Communist Party of Germany."

also not true. could you explain? may be you mix something up with Stalin and the Sovjet Union.

by Let's not forget Mon Apr 16, 2007 13:31

M, it is true. Former Nazis were given positions in the East German military and police.

Take Arno von Lenski for example.

From 1939-1942, he was an honorary member of the Nazi Volksgerichtshof and was involved in passing sentence which resulted in at least one execution. Once, in 1960, a journalist asked him about his activies in the court. Here's how the exchange went:

Journalist: "Mir liegt noch an einem anderen Kapitel Ihres Lebens, Herr General-major ... Von den zu Tode verurteilten Widerstandskämpfern, die der Volksgerichtshof aburteilte, kann keiner mehr reden, anklagen oder verzeihen. Wie stehen Sie dazu, bedrückt Sie..."
Lenski: "Was erlauben Sie sich! Diese Dinge sind alle mit den zuständigen Stellen geklärt, darauf antworte ich nicht. Ich beende unser Gespräch und werde mich beschwerdeführend an den Presseverband wenden. Das ist eine Provokation! Für wen, für welche Redaktion fragen Sie eigentlich?"

Lenski had a great career in the GDR, building up the police, the army, landing himself a functionaries position in the NDPD, and receiving the "Anti-Fascist Figher's Medal" to boot!

Obviously, M, in your eyes, compared to the soldiers Filbinger shot, Lenski's victims are irrelevant as he suddenly became an "anti-fascist" somewhere along the line. Disgusting.

He was not alone as a former Wehrmacht General and Admiral in the East German NVA, and a full list is provided here: http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=5706

Members of the KPD were involved in the cleansing of the ranks 1937/38. A three-member commission of KPD functionaries "interviewed" members in Moscow at the time and passed details on to the Soviets. Those same people returned to Germany and later surfaced in the SED bureaucracy. One such individual was put in charge of political refugees and what a cold-hearted bastard he was.

The GDR was anything but a "consequent anti-Fascist state". Just look at how it treated foreigners: deporting foreign students who married East German women, for example, or socially ostracising East German who married foregn men.

by m. Mon Apr 16, 2007 14:08

your quote of Lenski and the journalist does prove NOTHING. When asked a crtical question by the journalist Lenski answered by saying "this is a provocation". so what?

the point is: in west germany the political and economic elite was after the war almost the same than before the war.
in east germany there was an exchange of the political elite - and the former economic elite lost its influence COMPLETELY.

and I still have no idea what you mean with:

"Neither should be forget that some leading East German communist leaders were complicit in the murder of hundreds of fellow members of the Communist Party of Germany."

Such cleansing and killing did never happen in the german communist party. so please explain!