A former judge from Hamburg was fined 6,000 Marks by a court in Kiel for claiming that there were no gas chambers during Hitler’s regime and no Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The man, Wilhelm Staglich, the author of a recent pamphlet called “The Auschwitz Myth,” made both claims in a letter to a federal court judge.
After he was found guilty, Staglich, who was in trouble recently for making disparaging remarks about German police, was quoted by a German weekly as saying: “It cost me 450 Marks to insult policemen, while insulting Jews drew a fine of 6,000 Marks. That’s typical of the German judicial system.”
Meanwhile, the federal department in Bonn which is empowered to take action against hate literature has not moved against Staglich for his pamphlet. In addition, the department lost a case it initiated against Gerhard Frey, the publisher and editor of the neo-Nazi National Zeitung. This publication is the most widely circulated neo-Nazi newspaper in Germany and one of the most popular weeklies in the country.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
