History past and present shows that judges can be corrupted and judicial proceedings enacted falsely. One can say or write it in Australia with impunity, but not in Germany: the current understanding of the Holocaust may be in serious and extensive error. This week, it appears, the Constitutional Court (Germany’s highest court) ruled that the principle of the freedom of speech does not cover “Holocaust denial”. The court’s declaration is completely false and unprincipled, a disgrace to the judges responsible and to other Germans who have allowed this travesty of justice to occur. The Court’s pronouncement was made as part of its rejection of an appeal by 89 year-old Ursula Haverbeck against previous judicial decisions that led to her recent imprisonment. She had argued that Nazi Germany’s alleged mass murder of millions of Jews and others is “only a belief” and that Auschwitz has “not been historically proven” to have been a death camp.
The Court ruled that “punishment for denying the National Socialist genocide is fundamentally compatible with Article 5(1) of the Basic Law, which guarantees freedom of speech.” It asserted that “the dissemination of claims that are proven to be untrue and of deliberately false assertions” is not covered by free speech. Those claims referred to have not been proven to be untrue and the Court has no excuse for not knowing that. The publications of a host of historical revisionists from Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson to Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno have cast enormous doubt on the central assertions of what may be justly called “the Holocaust myth”; and the nature and tenor of their writings cannot be dismissed validly in any honourable way other than by intellectual debate. It is laughable to suggest that such commentators have engaged in “deliberate falsehoods”.