In the first case tried in Germany on the basis of a law directed specifically against anti-Semitism, two Russian emitter leaders have been fined by a Munich judge for inciting racial hatred.
After a court session at which an anti-Jewish demonstration was staged by the defendants and their Nazi lawyer, a $240 fine was imposed on Eugene Arciuk, alias Dershavin, head of the RONDD movement that carries on the tradition of the “Black Hundreds,” the notorious pogroms league of Tsarist Russia. RONDD secretary-general Vsevolod Mositchkin, alias Kudinov, received a $140 fine.
The sentence is considered a mild one, particularly in view of the fact that nothing other than jail terms are prescribed in the law under which they were found guilty. Everyone concerned knows, moreover, that the present verdict will be wiped off the books by the impending German amnesty. Defendants and prosecution alike are, nonetheless, going through the motions of filing appeals which, because of the amnesty, are unlikely ever to come to trial.
The RONDD, which takes its name from the Russian-language initials of “Russian National Organization of the People’s Imperial Movement,” is an extremist group seeking to restore a centralized Russian empire. For the present it is engaged in bitter feuds with most other emitter organizations. Its headquarters are in Munich, where it publishes Russian, German and English versions of its monthly bulletin, “Nabat” or “The Alarm”
Arciuk and Mositchkin were indicted because, in one of the issues of “Nabat, ” they published unbridled attacks upon the Jews. A Rick’s article insisted, for instance, that a certain section of the Jewish people knowingly and deliberately incites pogroms. Much Jewish blood will yet be shed, he further predicted. A Jewish woman, who felt libelled by the defamatory articles, filed a criminal complaint last year. This was at first dismissed, because German law does not recognize group libel.
Later they were prosecuted under a Bavarian decree against anti-Semitism that had been promulgated in early 1946 and had not been applied a single time since.
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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.
