Germany’s crushing of free speech then and now

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Germany’s Michael Grosse-Brömer
Director of the Christian Democratic fraction in the Bundestag
speaking in the talkshow “Berlin Direkt” Sunday night, Dec 18

The following is from original research and translation by Egri Nok with much thanks:

From German Wikipedia:

Treachery Act

The Law against treacherous attacks on State and Party and for the protection of Party Uniforms of December 20, 1934,[1] better known as Heimtückegesetz, made the misuse of insignia and uniforms of the party a punishable offense. Furthermore, it restricted the right of freedom of speech and criminalized all critical commentary that allegedly severely harmed the wellbeing of the Reich, the reputation of the government of the Reich, and the NSDAP.

The law drew on nearly identical provisions of the “Ordinance of the President of the Reich for the Protection against Insulting Attacks against the Government of the National Uprising” of March 21, 1933 [2], but extended the range of sentences.
The punishability of value judgements (§ 2), however, which is decisive for the importance of the Treachery Law, is not yet found in the 1933 regulation which only was directed against factual claims.

[…]

Contents

“On the basis of article 48 (2) of the Constitution of the Reich, the following shall be enacted:
[…]
§ 3
(1) Whoever deliberately makes or spreads an untruthful or grossly distorted assertion which is liable to cause serious damage to the welfare of the Reich or a state, or to the prestige of the government of the Reich, or a government of a state, or the parties and associations behind these governments, will be, unless the prospect of strict punishment is already held out in other regulations, punished with imprisonment of up to two years, and, if the assertion was made or spread in public, with imprisonment not under 3 months.
(2) If serious damage has been done to the Reich or a state by the deed, penitentiary can be adjudged.
(3) Whoever commits the deed grossly negligent, will be sentenced with jail up to three months, or a fine.

[…]

Law of 1934

On December 20, 1934, the act was reshaped into the “Law against treacherous attacks on Party and State and for the protection of Party uniforms”.

Contents

First, the order of the clauses was rearranged, whereby the paragraphs against the misuse of party uniforms and insignia moved to the back. The number of proceedings initiated because of this had shown insignificant with 5%.[5]
The clause of the § 3 of the act was adopted almost word for word as § 1 of the law. Thereby, anyone was punishable, who “deliberately makes or spreads an untrue or grossly distorted assertion…”. Grossly negligent deeds were punishable too. The degree of penalty was set to up to two years of prison.

Newly added was a § 2, which could now be used to penalize, besides assertions, value judgements: “Who publicly makes spiteful, hateful or base-souled remarks about leading figures of the NSDAP, their directives, or institutions created by them…”, will be punished with prison at will. Remarks counted as “public” even when the perpetrator “must expect that the remark gets out.”
For persecution, the approval of the Deputy of the Führer – in fact his bureau Staff of the Deputy Führer – or by the Reich Ministry of Justice was needed. Thus, political control was possible.

Background and legal assessment
[…]

Impacts
[…]
From 1943 on, many critical expressions of opinion were not persecuted under the Treachery Law anymore, but increasingly the Volksgerichtshof saw them as als Wehrkraftzersetzung and and punished by death penalty.[15]

Assessment
[…]

After the War
[…]

Individual Evidence
1. RGBl. 1934 I, S. 1269 f.
2. RGBl. 1933 I, S. 135 f.
3. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke:“ Das Gesetz als Waffe. Paderborn 1998, ISBN 3-506-77509-X, S. 18.
4. Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zur Abwehr heimtückischer Angriffe gegen die Regierung der nationalen Erhebung vom 21. März 1933
5. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 67
6. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 21
7. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 31
8. Thomas Mang: „gestapo-leitstelle Wien, mein Name ist Huber“, Lit Verlag, Berlin/Hamburg/Münster 2004, ISBN 3-825-87258-0, S. 49.
9. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 9/10, weitere Angaben S. 324
10. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 275
11. Meike Wöhlert: Der politische Witz in der NS-Zeit am Beispiel ausgesuchter SD-Berichte und Gestapo-Akten. Frankfurt a.M. 1997, ISBN 3-631-30779-9, S. 96.
12. Gunther Schmitz: Wider die „Miesmacher“, „Nörgler“ und „Kritikaster“. In: Justizbehörde Hamburg (Hrsg.): „Für Führer, Volk und Vaterland…“, Hamburg 1992, S. 294
13. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 151 u. a.
14. Meldungen aus dem Reich hrsg. von Heinz Boberach, Bd. 2, Herrsching 1984, ISBN 3-88199-158-1, S. 912/913 (15. März 1940)
15. Ein Beispiel bei Dietrich Güstrow: Tödlicher Alltag. dtv 10308, München 1984, ISBN 3-423-10303-5, S. 116
16. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 313
17. Hans Wüllenweber: Sondergerichte im Dritten Reich. Frankfurt a.M. 1990, ISBN 3-630-61909-6, S. 34
18. Bernward Dörner: „Heimtücke“, S. 327
19. Zitat aus einem Urteil von 1950 / Bernward Dörner: Heimtücke, 343.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

15 Replies to “Germany’s crushing of free speech then and now”

  1. Look at that shameless slimeball pretending to be a normal human with a moral compass and everything. The way he goes on to explain, wide-eyed with innocence, how a democracy cannot function if the electorate doesn’t get reliable information from the media. Meanwhile, Mr. Slimeball is forgetting to mention that his side has had complete control of the media for decades and have systematically been removing any and all content that makes the left look bad or the right look good the whole time. I can really see how some people believe these monsters are alien lizard men with copper blood and snakey tongues who eat live rats when no one is looking…

    • You nailed it, Chris. The secret for these commie tyrants is in how they say things. “Wide-eyed and matter-of-fact. Holy gosh and jeepers-creepers…con-men and con-women through and through.

      I just hope someone is taking names.

      • I imagine several people are, the big question is will they be able to do anything? During the Hitler years there were over 15 attempts to assassinate Hitler. The job of the resistance is made more difficult because of the strict weapons control laws.

        What I am wondering is how many people in Germany got the programing for a 3D printer to print the plastic handgun or got the list of components to build a ghost gun machine that can make the parts for steel firearms? It is beginning to look like they may be needed in the near future.

    • New Christmas board game: Marx to Berlin.

      Opponents:
      Hitler
      Stalin
      Merkel
      Muhammad
      Obama

      Germans will kneel to anyone who captures their city first.

      Bonus faction: Rebel Alliance and MarySue action figure.

  4. “The Fourth Reich, the reunification of Germany (1990 – ).”

    You beat me to it, Perfectchild. Wherever Liberals gain an inordinate degree of power, look for The Law of Unintended Consequences to kick in with a vengeance.

    As I have noted elsewhere, 0bama and Hillary were the most effective campaigners for Donald Trump. Perhaps most telling of all is that, repulsive as the President-elect’s overall demeanor and personality might seem, when held up against 0bama’s abject incompetence and insincerity—or Hillary’s utterly wooden personality and blatantly anti-American rhetoric—suddenly Trump’s patriotic, nationalist pandering takes on an aura of forthrightness which simply eclipses whatever petty and divisive politics that the Democratic Party has spewed upon this nation’s people for the past eight years.

    I use the derisive term “pandering” because, far too often, Trump’s public dialogue descended to such levels. None of which changes the fact that America’s Democratic Party has been engaged in an equal or greater degree of pandering to its own voter base. Feel free to look upon Trump’s rhetoric as “fighting fire with fire” (a recurring theme). And this is a key distinction: the Democratic voter base has little interest in America’s long-term survival success. Be it through lack of assimilation, insistence upon “separate but equal” status, maintaining a “protected species” identity (e.g., gay, Muslim, Feminist, etc.), having a monumental sense of Millennial entitlement, or just multi-generational perpetual reliance upon welfare social benefits, the Democratic Party has seduced generations of voters with this promise of a Big Government nanny state.

    While I might seem overly harsh in my estimation of Trump, his statesmanship skills are far from adequate. With that behind us, the erosion of America’s global power that 0bama personally engineered makes traditionally “nuanced” diplomacy something of entirely secondary concern. As in, it’s time to kick @ss and take names.

    Back to Merkle’s Germany. Much as 0bama and Hillary, literally, drove the American electorate into Trump’s open arms political camp, so shall Merkel eventually stampede rational Germans into a reenactment of earlier national militancy—up to and including the Nazi horrors. I refer all of you to, “fighting fire with fire”. The crucial difference being that, this time around, Germany’s foe will not be a propagandistic Jewish straw man population but, instead, an existential (i.e., Islamic) threat of such proportions that forcible deportations will be amongst the most gentle measures likely to be experienced by these illegal immigrants economic tourists.

    It would be an over-simplification to call this new-found populism (American or German) a “backlash”. Especially in Germany, there is involved a culturally survivalist component which lends an emphatic tenor of urgency. This high-pressure atmosphere presages outcomes so serious as to merit immediate counteraction and, if needed, outright rebellion—if only to preclude a drastic slide off the structural shoulder of rule by law and onto the slippery slope of outright vigilantism.

    Be that as it may, Angela Merkel’s insistent refusal to recognize the will of the German people is hastening a contest of wills that has little promise of any happy ending. Just as the schisms within Islam itself have almost ZERO assurance of peaceful resolution ever, so does Merkel’s German government project not even the slightest hope of a nonviolent outcome. Quite to the contrary, Germany’s judicial oppression of contrary (i.e., anti-immigration) views and persecution of any freedom to speak out against this ongoing travesty, all point towards a catastrophic conclusion.

    This is The Law of Unintended Consequences exacting its inexorable due from those who remain willfully blind to the historic record. As Perfectchild so accurately observed, Merkel’s attempt to deconstruct German culture will—if the past is any reliable indicator—give rise to the The Fourth Reich.

    The flagrantly predatory behavior of Germany’s newest Muslim invaders spells their doom. And I, for one, can only instruct those who expect from me even a scintilla of sympathy for Muslims to please take note how the dictionary places that particular word between “sh!t” and “syphilis”.

    • Donald Trump isn’t the most polished man to serve as President but his showmanship and his patriotism are what we need right now. We don’t need a diplomatic politician who will talk and talk and end up doing very little, we need a man with the attitude of Teddy Roosevelt (I know he was a progressive, it is his attitude we need) he was not afraid to stand up and say what was right and wrong and that is what we need right now. We are facing threats greater then those we faced in WWI and WWII combined, the coming war will be a long war and all of the people who survive it will be changed. Those who manage to remain free and those who are liberated after a time of occupation will all recognize the need for individual rights, individual arms and decentralized government. The nations that remain free will change their Constitutions to prevent the new tyrants from gaining power again and the ones who must be liberated will write new constitutions to enshrine the rights and powers that will help them remain free.

      • “Those who manage to remain free and those who are liberated after a time of occupation will all recognize the need for individual rights, individual arms and decentralized government.”

        For a time. What did Western society learn from WWII? From the First World War, for that matter? What did the Baby Boomers learn from their parents who had survived the war, the Great Depression? Any lessons seem to have been short lived. I despair sometimes for humanity as a whole, not just the West. My favorite Churchill quote (from a speech that arguably took place in a world much like what we now face, one – on the verge of global war):

        “There is nothing new in the story…. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

        • Many great authors have made the point that to a very large extent Humans are ungovernable, some will always want to achieve total control of every other person and others will want total freedom with no restrictions. Good governance is finding a balance between the two extremes. A task many have achieved in history but have seen it fail because the people grow lazy and less vigilante and become willing to let others do their thinking for them and become willing to give up freedom in the pursuit of an illusion called safety. Those who do this end up as slaves and struggle for generations to once again find freedom.

          What I am hoping for is a Century or two of sanity before a new generation of slaves and slave masters emerges.

    • While I might seem overly harsh in my estimation of Trump, his statesmanship skills are far from adequate.

      The election’s over. Trump won.