Germany – Page 13

‘National Socialist Underground’ trial starts in Germany – leader is a woman

A major neo-Nazi murder trial opened Monday in Germany over a killing spree that embarrassed authorities, shed a spotlight on the country’s murky far-right scene, and exposed institutional racism and incompetence.

The trial opened amid tight security in the southern city of Munich after a three-week delay over an outcry about media access which has further undermined Germany’s image on top of fundamental security flaws exposed by the murder spree.

Under a heavy police presence, chief defendant Beate Zschäpe, 38, entered the Munich court just before proceedings began, appearing relaxed and with her arms folded, while dozens of anti-racist protesters shouted slogans outside.

Many people, including reporters had lined up outside overnight to claim one of the 50 free courtroom seats for the first day of the high-profile trial whose significance extends far beyond the murders.

Zschäpe faces charges linked to 10 mostly racially motivated murders over a seven-year period as the last surviving member of a killer trio, most of whose victims were of Turkish origin.

She is the last surviving member of a neo-Nazi trio whose random discovery in November 2011 forced the country to re-assess its image of having learnt the lessons of its Nazi past.

Germany has not seen a terror trial of this scale since members of the prominent left-wing militant group, the Red Army Faction, were sentenced 36 years ago.

Ten were killed

Zschäpe is charged with complicity in the murders of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek immigrant and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. She is said to be one of three central members of the far-right gang dubbed the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

She is also accused of involvement in 15 armed robberies, arson and attempted murder in two bomb attacks.

Her lawyers deny she was directly involved in murder. Zschäpe has remained silent during her 18-month custody and supposedly has no plans to break her silence during the hearing which could last more than two years.

Dressed in a black jacket, white shirt and wearing large hoop earrings, Zschäpe entered the courtroom before the hearing got under way and stood with her back to the TV camera.

She faces life in prison if convicted. Four men alleged to be accomplices will also go on trial on lesser charges.

Families want many answers

For the victims’ families, the opening day of the highly-anticipated trial will be their first chance to see the accused in person, as they seek answers to why their loved ones were gunned down.

Lawyers for Semiya and Kerim Simsek, whose father was the first victim, said in a written statement their clients who are co-plaintiffs would be seeking many answers from the trial.

“They want to know why their father was murdered. How they came upon the flower seller Enver Simsek? Did local neo-Nazi networks help in the victim selection?” they said.

Germans were stunned to learn in November 2011 that home-grown racist killers were behind the unsolved murders – and not the foreign criminal gangs that police and the media had always assumed were to blame.

Anger was stoked by revelations that the security forces failed to home in on the killers for more than a decade, and an admission that files had been shredded that could have helped the investigation.

Lawyers for some of the victims’ relatives, who are co-plaintiffs, said, apart from a conviction, they wanted a clear naming of those who also bore responsibility.

Relatives want names of those responsible

They called in a joint statement for a discussion which seriously addresses the problem of “far-right violence and structural racism” in Germany and initiates necessary changes.

The case only came to light after Zschäpe’s alleged NSU accomplices, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, were found shot dead in an apparent murder-suicide.

Zschäpe then allegedly blew up their shared home in eastern Germany not long before handing herself in to police.

A DVD with a film in the style of a “Pink Panther” cartoon, which the group had produced earlier, claiming responsibility for the attacks, then emerged.

“I assure you that Germany will do everything necessary to shed light on the murders at all points and sentence the criminals to the punishments they deserve,” Merkel said in an interview with Turkish newspaper Hurriyet last week.

At a memorial to the victims she called the killings a “disgrace” for the country and apologised for the fact that suspicion had fallen on some victims’ relatives, which she called “particularly tormenting”.

UN Human Rights Council criticism

Berlin last month apologised before the UN Human Rights Council for mistakes in probing the NSU murders which the government’s top official on human rights described as “one of the worst human rights abuses in recent decades” in Germany.

As most of the victims originated from Turkey, the trial will be intensely scrutinised beyond Germany’s borders.

A controversy over the accreditation of journalists overshadowed the run-up to the trial after the court initially failed to guarantee Turkish media seats when it handed out reserved spots on a first-come, first-served basis.

This strained German-Turkish ties and forced a last-minute postponement when Germany’s top court ordered it to allocate seats to foreign reporters, leading to the final 50 media organisations being chosen in a lottery.

Turkish media now have four seats but several leading German newspapers missed out. – AFP

93-year old German prosecuted for being a cook at Auschwitz

A 93-year-old man who acknowledges he served with the SS in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp but claims he was only a cook is under investigation by German authorities as a possible accessory to murder, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Hans Lipschis was deported from the U.S. in 1983 for lying about his Nazi past when he immigrated to Chicago in the 1950s after the war.

With no evidence linking him to specific war crimes, however, it was impossible under previous German law to bring charges against him in Germany, said Thomas Will, a prosecutor with the German office that deals with Nazi war crimes.

But now the Lipschis case is being pursued on the same legal theory used to prosecute former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died last year while appealing his 2011 conviction in Germany for accessory to murder on the grounds that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

Under the new line of thinking, even without proof of participation in a specific crime, a person who served at a death camp can be charged with accessory to murder because the camp’s sole function was to kill people.

Even though the Demjanjuk conviction is not considered legally binding because he died before his appeals were exhausted, Will said that his office is investigating a total of about 50 people in the same category.

The initial investigation of the Lipschis case is now done, and the case has been handed to Stuttgart prosecutors to determine whether there is enough evidence to bring charges, Will said.

In an interview this month with Die Welt newspaper at his home in southwestern Germany, Lipschis said he spent his entire time as a cook for the other SS guards of the camp, and had witnessed none of the atrocities. He did say, however, that he “heard about” what was going on.

About 1.5 million people, primarily Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and 1945. – AP

He’s back again!

Eighty years after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, a novel that imagines his return to modern-day Berlin has become a bestseller in Germany, though a comedy about the Fuehrer is not to everyone’s taste.

Instead of committing suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945, in “He’s Back” (Er Ist Wieder Da), Hitler wakes up in 2011 without the slightest idea what has happened in the intervening 66 years.

He stumbles through Berlin, dazed by the fact that Germany is now ruled by a woman and is home to millions of Turks.

The nearly 400-page novel is by Timur Vermes, a 45-year-old journalist.

In one scene, the Nazi leader asks a group of boys for directions, addressing them as “Ronaldo Hitler youth”. He has mistaken their football shirts bearing the name of the soccer star as some kind of military uniform.

“Who’s the old guy?” the boys ask each other.

In a celebrity obsessed society where success is often gauged by follower numbers on social networks or YouTube views, Hitler soon becomes the star of an entertainment show with a Turkish host.

“You’re golden my dear! This is just the beginning, believe me,” his producer says.

Bild, Europe’s widest circulation newspaper, complains: “He killed millions of people. Today, millions cheer him on YouTube.”

In the book, Hitler discovers jeans, tries to create an email address (“Hitler 89” referring to the year of his birth is already taken) and discovers cooking shows.

A farce in poor taste to some, a political satire to others, “He’s Back” has done well in bookstores. With a print run of 360,000, the book recently made Germany’s bestseller list and is set to be published in English and more than a dozen other languages.

The author says he wanted to present Hitler in a new light.

“We too often harbour the negative attitude of those who see Hitler only as a monster to make themselves feel better,” Vermes says. “I thought it was important to show how he would operate and how he would act in today’s world.”

Unthinkable even 10 years ago, Hitler is today increasingly the subject of comedians and artists — including a comic film directed by a Jew and a burlesque musical comedy. – AFP

Economic warfare provoked Pearl Harbor

: Robert Higgs

Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its war making took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted “shoot [Germans] on sight” convoys – convoys that might include British ships — in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on U.S. shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government also provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan.[1] The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed. [2]

Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the spring of 1941—into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan’s attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United States—a declaration that did not come, to their disappointment. . . . Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must wait for an “incident,” which he was “confident that the Germans would give us.” . . . Establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt’s tactics. . . . He seems [eventually] to have concluded—correctly as it turned out—that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be. [3]

The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was . . . typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting to lose a war with the United States—and lose it disastrously—Japan’s leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States if the talks “break down” that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an “incident” in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war.[4]

These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the most part anything but new; many of them have been available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, that showed the numerous ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility for the country’s eventual engagement in World War II—showed, in short, that the Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an aggressor’s unprovoked attack.[5] As Secretary of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, “we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act.” [6]

At present, however, seventy years after these events, probably not one American in 1,000—nay, not one in 10,000—has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement in the “Good War.”

In the late nineteenth century, Japan’s economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of its burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials, such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in Southeast Asia, Japan’s industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941.

At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and East Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt’s ancestors had made money in the China trade. [7] Roosevelt also disliked the Germans in general and Adolf Hitler in particular, and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Thereafter he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.

The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” [8] The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia.

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”[9]

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor.[10] Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.”[11]

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Send him mail.

Notes

[1] See “Flying Tigers,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers .

[2] Robert Higgs, “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor,” The Freeman 56 (May 2006): 36-37.

[3] George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007), pp. 179-80, 184, 185, emphasis added.

[4] Ibid ., pp. 15, 202, 240.

[5] See Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953).

[6] Stimson as quoted in Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth, p. 105.

[7] Harry Elmer Barnes, “Summary and Conclusions,” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), 682-83.

[8] All quotations in this paragraph are from George Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” in Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 322-23, 327-28.

[9] Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” 329.

[10] Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000).

[11] Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor,” 343, 384.

This talk by Robert Higgs was the Arthur M. Krolman Lecture at the 30th Anniversary Supporters Summit of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on October 26, 2012. Originally posted at the Ludwig von Mises Inistitute

Poisonous gas accident at Kraft

After the accident at Kraft Foods in Bad Fallingbostel, Germany

About 1,400 people have been evacuated from their homes in Germany, authorities said on Tuesday, after a chemical accident at a factory run by US food giant Kraft caused a cloud of poisonous gas.

The accident, at the small town of Bad Fallingbostel, near Hanover in northern Germany, happened on Monday when employees accidentally poured acid into a tank containing sodium hydroxide solution, causing a chemical reaction.

About 700 firefighters were still trying to cool the container on Tuesday amid rising temperatures and fears of a possible explosion. Technical experts were trying to pump out the acid.

Local authorities have imposed emergency measures, including closing local schools and nurseries as well as parts of a major motorway running nearby. An exclusion zone of 500 metres has been set up.

A spokeswoman for the company said that no one had been injured so far.

“There has at no time been any danger for the population because we decided, along with the authorities, to evacuate as a precautionary measure,” Heike Hauerken told rolling news channel N24.

Production was halted as soon as the accident took place, she added. – Sapa/AFP

Fear of fracking

$fracking$ Fuel is usually found in unattractive places. Geologists discovered the biggest oil and natural gas reserves in the deserts of the Middle East and beneath the permafrost of Siberia. Countries in temperate Central Europe, on the other hand, have only modest reserves. One of them lies some 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) beneath the surface in Rotenburg/Wümme, an administrative district in the northwestern German state of Lower Saxony.

Using a method known as “fracking,” Germany could exploit domestic sources to meet its natural gas needs for 20 years. But safety worries have prompted government authorities to refrain from granting the permits that companies need to use the controversial technique.

ExxonMobil, which operates a well called “Bötersen Z11” uses “induced hydraulic fracturing,” or “fracking” for short.

ExxonMobil plans to inject about 350,000 liters (92,500 gallons) of water, mixed with a cocktail of chemicals, into the well under high pressure. The liquid is supposed to penetrate into the rock at the bottom of the pipe and trigger a long-term loosening effect. Hair-line fractures will create a network of tiny channels from which natural gas can escape for at least 15 years, according to ExxonMobil estimates.

But what ExxonMobil still lacks is official permission to do this. The state mining agency has been sitting on the company’s application for the last year, hesitant to move forward with its approval.

“Unfortunately, fracking has become a scary word,” says Dieter Sieber, a mining engineer and fracking expert at ExxonMobil. A cart decorated with pamphlets from a local citizens’ initiative is parked at the entrance to the drilling site. The group aims to “protect God’s creation,” and one of its signs proclaims: “Stop Fracking!”

The public reservations and protests are coming at a surprisingly late point. As a method to increase the yields of hydrocarbon deposits, fracking has been in use for almost 50 years. In Germany, it has been instrumental in preventing domestic natural gas production from drying up altogether. Very few Germans are aware that, until the 1980s, almost a quarter of the natural gas being burned in Germany came from domestic sources. Although it’s still about 12 percent today, that number is declining by about 1 percent a year.

The deposits that have already been discovered are almost exhausted. About 300 wells have been fracked in Germany since the 1960s. Without imports, more than three-quarters of which come from Russia, Norway and the Netherlands, Germany would soon find itself without natural gas — if there weren’t another alternative, that is.

In May, Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) published a study concluding that there are up to 2.3 trillion cubic meters (81 trillion cubic feet) of technically recoverable natural gas under German soil, primarily in the northern state of Lower Saxony and the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. This would amount to more than 20 times Germany’s annual consumption of natural gas.

The reserves are in deposits that are described as “unconventional,” consisting of shale and coal formations, which are the primary “source rocks” of hydrocarbons. They were long considered unexploitable because they are substantially denser than “conventional” deposits found in more porous sandstone. The coveted fuel simply doesn’t flow out of shale formations — which is where fracking comes in.

Fracking is now proving to be a key technology for extracting oil and gas from shale formations. In Germany, the natural gas reserves that could be exploited in this manner would have “the potential to make up for declines in production in recent years,” explains geophysicist Dieter Franke, a geophysicist who heads the BGR’s oil and gas geology department. In light of the sheer magnitude of proven reserves, this could be seen as a conservative estimate.

Since the mid-1990s, Americans have been far more aggressive and active when it comes to fracking. Geologists estimate that — after China and, presumably, Russia — the United States has the third-largest shale natural gas reserves on Earth, or about 20 times as much as Germany. The United States is exploiting these reserves on a large scale and even hopes to use fracking to end its dependence on gas imports.

Now the United States is also taking a similar approach with shale oil. Thanks to fracking, the Midwestern state of North Dakota already produces more than half a million barrels of oil from the Bakken shale formation. As a result, this year, the state surpassed Alaska in oil production for the first time. According to a forecast by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), oil-tanker traffic to North America could very well be eliminated by 2035.

In contrast to the United States, which once met its own oil requirements and is now enthusiastic about returning to this status, government agencies in Europe are tentative. France, which is assumed to have the largest unconventional gas reserves in Western Europe, has yet to issue a single fracking permit. German authorities have only permitted isolated test fracking. The last fracking operation in German bedrock was conducted in late July 2011 — also by ExxonMobil — at the “Buchhorst T12” site, a conventional gas deposit in Bundsandstein, a type of colored sandstone that lies below large parts of Western and Central Europe.

Horror stories from the United States, an El Dorado for companies engaged in fracking, have discredited the technology. A documentary film about the practice showed a fireball emerging from a faucet, a result of the presence of methane in drinking water. People are starting to realize that pumping 13 million liters of chemical-laced water into a hole can have unpleasant consequences.

Holocaust denial: German court to punish British bishop

bishop-richard-williamson — Bishop Richard Williamson

A German court is making a fresh attempt to punish a British ultraconservative Catholic bishop for denying the Holocaust in a television interview.

The regional court in the southern city of Regensburg has issued an order of punishment against Richard Williamson after an earlier conviction was overturned on a legal technicality last year.

Court spokesman Thomas Rauscher said Thursday that if Williamson accepts the order of punishment he will be required to pay an unspecified fine. If he objects, the case will go to trial again.

The 72-year-old Williamson told a Swedish TV station in 2008 that he did not believe Jews were killed in gas chambers during World War II. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.

Williamson is a member of the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X. – AP

‘The American Dream is a Myth’

The finance industry must take the blame for the growing divide between the rich and poor in the United States, says Nobel Prize-winning economics professor Joseph Stiglitz. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he accuses the industry of preying on the poor and buying government policies that help them get richer

American economist and 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz works as a professor at Columbia University. Stiglitz discusses how wealth disparity is dividing America and how Europe can best overcome the euro crisis.

SPIEGEL: What is the scale this inequality?

Stiglitz: In the last decades, income and wealth disparity have grown dramatically in this country. Let me give you an example: In 2011, the six heirs to the Walmart empire commanded wealth of almost $70 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US society.

SPIEGEL: What has become of the American dream?

Stiglitz: This belief is still powerful, but the American dream has become a myth. The life chances of a young US citizen are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any other advanced industrial country for which there is data. The belief in the American dream is reinforced by anecdotes, by dramatic examples of individuals who have made it from the bottom to the top — but what matters most are an individual’s life chances. The belief in the American dream is not supported by the data.

There has been no improvement in well-being for the typical American family for 20 years. On the other side, the top one percent of the population gets 40 percent more in one week than the bottom fifth receive in a full year. In short, we have become a divided society. America has created a marvelous economic machine, but most of the benefits have gone to the top.

SPIEGEL: With five more weeks to go in the presidential campaign, inequality hasn’t played a serious role yet, though.

Stiglitz: It has been a topic, but typically only underneath the surface. One cannot expect a scientific debate on the Gini coefficient, the statistical measure of inequality.

SPIEGEL: But who exactly represents the one percent?

Stiglitz: It is the group of people who get 20 to 25 percent of the income. Their share has doubled in the last 30 years. And they own about 35 percent of the wealth or more. They have the best houses, the best education and the best lifestyles.

SPIEGEL: Don’t the rich also give something in return? In Germany, the upper one percent contributes almost a quarter to the tax revenue, and the top ten percent more than half of the taxes. Isn’t that an appropriate share?

Stiglitz: I don’t know about the German numbers. What I can say is that the top one percent in the United States has an average tax rate of less than 30 percent of their reported income, and the large proportion who take much of their income as capital gains pay far less. And we know that they are not reporting all of their income.

SPIEGEL: We thought that as a rule Americans don’t begrudge the rich their wealth, though.

Stiglitz: There is nothing wrong if someone who has invented the transistor or made some other technical breakthrough that is beneficial for all receives a large income. He deserves the money. But many of those in the financial sector got rich by economic manipulation, by deceptive and anti-competitive practices, by predatory lending. They took advantage of the poor and uninformed, as they made enormous amounts of money by preying upon these groups with predatory lending. They sold them costly mortgages and were hiding details of the fees in fine print.

SPIEGEL: Why didn’t the government stop this behavior?

Stiglitz: The reason is obvious: The financial elite support the political campaigns with huge contributions. They buy the rules that allow them to make the money. Much of the inequality that exists today is a result of government policies.

SPIEGEL: Can you give us an example?

Stiglitz: In 2008, President George W. Bush claimed that we did not have enough money for health insurance for poor American children, costing a few billion dollars a year. But all of a sudden we had $150 billion to bail out AIG, the insurance company. That shows that something is wrong with our political system. It is more akin to “one dollar, one vote” than to “one person, one vote.”

SPIEGEL: Ninety-nine percent against 1 percent: That actually sounds like the perfect setting for a revolution. Why are things still so calm in the US?

Stiglitz: The United States doesn’t have much of a revolutionary spirit. My real concern is that people get alienated from politics. In the last election we had a voter turnout among young people of around 20 percent. These are the people whose future is most at stake, and 80 percent of them think it’s not worth to vote because it is a rigged system and in the end the banks are going to run the country anyway.

SPIEGEL: With a debt burden of $16 trillion there is not much room for maneuvering.

Stiglitz: The United States can borrow at close to a zero percent interest rate, we would be stupid not to invest more money and create jobs. And we could also make efforts to ensure that the super-wealthy pay their fair share. We could raise more money in a variety of ways. Look at the mining companies: The government grants them the right to extract resources for far less than it should, but auctions could make sure that they pay appropriately.

SPIEGEL: So your answer to the inequality problem is to transfer money from the top to the bottom?

Stiglitz: First, transferring money from the top to the bottom is only one suggestion. Even more important is helping the economy grow in ways that benefit those at the bottom and top, and ending the “rent seeking” that moves so much money from ordinary citizens to those at the top.

SPIEGEL: Is redistribution also the strategy when it comes to Europe and the euro crisis — moving money from the north to the south?

Stiglitz: The main problem in Europe right now are the austerity packages, they depress demand and weaken economic growth. The reversal of this policy is absolutely essential to develop growth and more equality. Spain, for example, gets weaker and weaker, money flows out of the country, and it is a vicious downward spiral.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t the real problem the lack of competitiveness? Spain and the other countries in crisis have lived beyond their means, that’s why they are in trouble.

Stiglitz: No, Europe’s crisis is not caused by excessive long-term debts and deficits. It is caused by cutbacks in government expenditures. The recession caused the deficits, not the other way around. Before the crisis Spain and Ireland ran budget surpluses. They cannot be accused of fiscal profligacy. More fiscal discipline will only worsen the downturn. No economy ever recovered from a downturn through austerity.

SPIEGEL: You assume that a government knows best where to create jobs. Don’t you overestimate that ability?

Stiglitz: We need roads, bridges and airports. That’s obvious. The returns from public investments in technology on average have been very high — think about the Internet, the Human Genome Project and the telegraph.

SPIEGEL: There are also many examples of public money that was wasted. The US space program cost a fortune, and the results were questionable.

Stiglitz: But even those expenditures are still less than the money wasted by America’s private financial sector, and the billions spent to bail out companies from the financial sector. One corporation alone, AIG, got more than $150 billion — more than was spent on welfare for needy families from 1990 to 2006.

SPIEGEL: The government also became owner of these companies and even managed to sell parts of them with a profit, though. Aren’t you afraid that this strategy of ever bigger stimulus packages might lead to inflation?

Stiglitz: Not necessarily. The central bank has the ability to take out liquidity from the system.

SPIEGEL: But it is much harder getting the liquidity out than getting it in.

Stiglitz: A well-managed central bank has lots of tools. It can raise interest rates or reserve requirements for private banks. So I think there is actually relatively little danger. The weakness in the European economy poses much more of a risk than any risk of moderate inflation. Better some job where the pay has declined in real terms by a few percent than no job at all.

SPIEGEL: What do you think Europe’s future prospects are?

Stiglitz: Europe is facing a critical point. The alternatives are “more Europe” or “no Europe.” The halfway configuration is unstable.

SPIEGEL: Which option would be better for Germany?

Stiglitz: Both strategies will cost Germany money, but the “more Europe” option will cost less. Europe needs a common banking system and a common financial framework. If Europe borrows as a whole it could have even better access to credit than the United States. So “more Europe” is not only better for Spain or Italy, but also for Germany.

Bavarian town promotes good manners

grafenau — Idyllic Grafenau in the Bavarian Alps. Now they want to have perfect manners too

It seems like a vision of a better world: bus drivers have a friendly greeting for their passengers, salespeople serve customers with a smile, husbands surprise their wives with flowers, children offer their seats to the elderly on public transportation and behave well at school and at the dinner table.

This idea could soon become everyday reality in a town in Bavaria. The German Knigge Association, a society that promotes good manners and which is named after Baron Knigge who wrote a treatise on etiquette and behaviour in 1788, is starting a pilot project in the small town of Grafenau.

“For four days the residents of Grafenau will be introduced to etiquette,” says the head of the Association, Hans-Michael Klein. The local mayor is supporting the arrival of etiquette experts from all over Germany in Grafenau from October 18th to the 21st. They aim to turn the town into an epicentre of great manners.

“Good demeanour and politeness are the solution to many everyday problems,” says Klein. He believes that living together could be many times more pleasant if people met each other with respect and friendliness. Klein says adults should keep in mind that they are role models for children.

Over four days people of all ages will receive extra tuition in etiquette. Trainers will introduce “respect” in schools and kindergartens and the primary school’s drama group will stage a play about Baron Knigge. Adults will be able to enjoy wine tasting and a seminar about proper behaviour. Local hairdressers will help their customers find the right hairstyle and the dancing school will offer a course in Viennese waltz. A fashion show will teach the Do’s and Don’ts of dressing.

“Grafenau was not chosen because we need to catch up on manners,” says Grafenau’s mayor, Max Niedermeyer. But as the town lives from tourism there is always space for improvement. “Children in particular should have the same standard of behaviour towards parents, teachers, co-pupils and elderly people,” stresses Niedermeier. He doesn’t consider himself perfectly versed in etiquette either and hopes the weekend will have a lasting effect on locals.

Etiquette-expert Klein is hoping to spread his message even further. “Several cities have inquired already about our etiquette coaching.” He doesn’t want to reveal which ones but the etiquette instructors are not planning to visit big cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt or Cologne for now.

“We Lower Bavarians work hard, are reliable and helpful, but we constantly want to improve ourselves,” says Ludwig Lankl. The district’s chief administrator believes society often lacks friendliness and respect. He thinks the weekend will help reintroduce a more “Christian” way of behaviour in the region.

Lankl does not make an exception for himself. “I have to make a mental note as well to surprise my wife with a bouquet of flowers.” – DPA

German president asks for ‘courage’ against racism

German President Joachim Gauck on Sunday demanded courage from civilians and more action from officials to prevent a repeat of the orgy of racist violence that shook Rostock two decades ago. Commentators say the speech said too little on the amount of racism still prevalent in German society.

“We are strong. We know that we are strong. Our homeland will not fall into Nazi hands!” That was the central message delivered by German President Joachim Gauck on Sunday at events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the racist attacks on an asylum-seekers hostel on the outskirts of Rostock.

“We can’t erase the biggest xenophobic riots in the history of post-war Germany,” he said. “As such, we are all the more obligated to prevent the incident from being forgotten.”

As he spoke, Gauck stood in front of the so-called “Sunflower House,” a concrete block building in the Rostock suburb of Lichtenhagen which was once used to shelter asylum seekers. For four days, from Aug. 22 to Aug. 26, 1992, a right-wing mob — supported by thousands of sympathetic locals — surrounded the building, chanted xenophobic slogans, threw rocks and, ultimately, set a neighboring building on fire where over 100 guest workers from Vietnam lived.

The police response was largely ineffective. Incredibly, nobody died in the attack, but the sheer scale of it came as a shock to post-reunification Germany and turned it into a symbol of the several, large-scale xenophobic attacks that marred the country in the early 1990s. Rostock became shorthand for similar riots in Hoyerswerda in 1991 and for the deadly arson attacks in Solingen and Mölln in 1992 and 1993.

‘We Need Courageous Citizens’

The president’s speech was the apex of a week of events, activities and discussions organized to mark the anniversary. And thousands turned out on Sunday for Gauck’s appearance, one of particular importance to the president. Gauck, after all, was born in Rostock and worked for many years as a pastor in a nearby town. Born during Nazi times, Gauck grew up in communist East Germany, getting to know two brands of totalitarianism in the process.

“Seldom in our recent history has an event made it so clear to me as the riots in Rostock that we need both: We need courageous citizens who don’t look away when our democratic and peaceful society is challenged,” Gauck went on. “But we especially need a state that is both willing and able to protect the dignity and lives of people.”

The president was speaking to the ineffectiveness of the police response two decades ago. But it was also a reference to recently revealed official failings relating to the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a trio of neo-Nazis who were able to murder 10 people between 2000 and 2007 — nine of immigrant descent and a policewoman — without being caught. Investigators failed to identify the killing spree as being racially motivated until late last year.

The German press on Monday likewise takes a look back to Rostock and examines Gauck’s speech.

The Schweriner Volkszeitung, a daily in the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania where Rostock is located, writes:

“President Joachim Gauck, himself from Rostock and now an honorary citizen of the city, issued clear demands on Sunday. Democracy, he said, needs courageous citizens … and an effective state…. Well said, but now it must be implemented in every case and in every place. Forceful action against right-wing extremism demands courage, the willingness to intervene on the behalf of others instead of allowing oneself to be intimidated. In western Germany, nobody should act as though xenophobia or right-wing ideas are just a problem in former East Germany, the product of a mixture of a lack of experience with democracy during communist times combined with the disappointment of those whose lives did not dramatically improve following reunification.”

“Immigrant houses burned in the west too, in Mölln and Solingen, xenophobic ideas are also alive and well in the west too, as can be seen by the right-wing mobs that form there. The confrontation must take place across the entire country, particularly in the schools, so that right-wing hate does not take root in people’s heads.”

Left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:

“Gauck delivered an excellent speech. But it was only a speech. What else could it have been? It could, for example, have been an analysis — and attempt to come to terms with the present. A reference, for example, to the number of right-wing criminal acts in Germany — it was 34 per day in the first six months of this year — would have been welcome…. As would a few thoughts on how police — officially — do what they can to arrive at as few right-wing extremists and xenophobic crimes as possible.”

“Maybe it is clever of the president not to say everything that citizens already know. But Gauck surely knows that a flashy speech doesn’t just serve to educate, it can also blind people…. ‘We are strong. We know that, we are strong!’ he said. But merely knowing it won’t be enough.”

Center-right daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“Gauck’s speech in Rostock was, at its core, a call for realism. A society that has no fear of that which is foreign is an illusion. The cohabitation of people from different backgrounds and cultures is hardly possible without conflict. As a result, an immigration country such as Germany must reach agreement on the ‘amount and conditions of immigration,’ as Gauck noted, in order to create the conditions for cohabitation within which conflicts are resolved with mutual respect.

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes:

“Gauck’s speech leaves a bitter aftertaste. The president didn’t say a word about the failure of state security officials in other right-wing crimes, like those of the National Socialist Underground, which involved 10 unresolved killings, one of them in Rostock. Gauck avoided drawing concrete connections to the present. His plea to ‘not let grass grow’ over the events doesn’t change that. As such, the commemoration in Rostock-Lichtenhagen became a history lesson, far away from the racism that is prevalent in the year 2012.” – Spiegel Online

Hackers publish German military secrets

Hackers from the group Anonymous said Wednesday they had accessed classified German files and posted them online, revealing details of the country’s military operations in Afghanistan.

Anonymous said it obtained the data from a server at the Bundestag or German parliament. The group has claimed responsibility for a series of leaks of confidential data worldwide in the past year.

The military documents were collected for an inquiry, now finished, into a September 2009 airstrike by US jets under German orders that killed more than 140 Taliban fighters and Afghan civilians.

Omid Nouripour, a Green Party legislator who was on the inquiry committee, told dpa the documents posted online were authentic. He said he had not seen anything in the online version that would put lives in danger.

The Bundestag administration said it was checking the leak. A spokeswoman said it was possible the documents had been merely appendices to the inquiry’s report.

The inquiry criticized the 2009 airstrike.

German authorities advise against use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer

German’s web safety authority has warned web users not to use the Internet Explorer browser until a newly discovered and serious security defect has been fixed.

The Federal Information Technology Safety Office BSI said computers could be infected with a virus simply by visiting a tainted website. The threat was described as zero-day virus, meaning one that cannot yet be detected by anti-virus software.

The late Monday warning was rare in advising users to avoid the browser completely and to use alternative browsers. The Berlin-based BSI said it was in touch with Microsoft, the software company, and would issue an all-clear when the vulnerability had been fixed.

The computers affected are those running Internet Explorer 8 and 9 with the Windows 7 operating system and versions 7 or 8 with Windows XP. BSI said the vulnerability had not been previously published, but had already been exploited.

Microsoft responded that its newest Internet Explorer version, 10, was not affected and said in a blog it was working to fix the problem. It said there had been “only a small number of targeted attacks” as a result of the vulnerability. – DPA