Posted on 07/05/2009 5:54:15 PM PDT by forkinsocket
BERLIN (JTA) -- A Dresden politician was fined for playing loud klezmer music outside City Hall to disturb a neo-Nazi march.
Stephan Kuhn of the Green Party was ordered Wednesday to pay a $210 fine, which will benefit an organization that helps victims of right-wing violence.
Neo-Nazis held a commemorative march on Feb.13, 2008, on the anniversary of the World War II firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces, which right-wing extremists have taken to calling the "bombing Holocaust."
In protest, Kuhn blasted the music at the neo-Nazis from the windows of the Green Party parliamentary fraction offices.
According to the indictment, the state prosecutor said it was proven that "loud Jewish music" was played from the window, interrupting a speech that a neo-Nazi was trying to deliver. Kuhn, the state said, thus interfered with the right to free assembly.
Kuhn said he did not regret his actions.
"If I was able to stop the flow of brown [Nazi] verbal muck, I am more than willing to accept the payment of a fine," he told reporters.
Reportedly, in a similar case in 2006, a state prosecutor in Mittenberg, in the former west German state of Baden-Württemberg, dismissed charges against a Catholic priest who rang church bells during a neo-Nazi gathering in the local marketplace.
The members of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany were unable to continue their rally and filed suit.
The only time in my life I’ve ever sided with a Green. God bless him.
yea..bump that
And I'm born Baptist. We don't dance.
/johnny
The Green Party guy who sought to disrupt whatever it was the local skinheads and their running dog lackeys were doing was probably thought of by the locals as some sort of Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church.
He did none of us any favors.
I didn’t know that Neo-Nazis could pass literature much less march in Germany.
Cognitive dissonance. NAZIs and Fascists are LEFT WING. Socialists, even National Socialists are left wing.
/johnny
Ok, you asked for it....
Joke: “Why don’t Baptists have sexual intercourse, standing up, face to face??
answer...( “It might lead to dancing.”)
Said with good natured humor.
Not Drinking, Dancing, or Wanting to (to what? I never got an answer, but I did get kicked out)
/johnny
The truth was bad enough, but the Nazis under Hitler openly declared that they were using terror bombing of civilians as a means of coercing surrender. The Americans and British, certainly the Americans, clearly targeted legitimate military and industrial targets.
I'm a former zoomie that was studying LeMay back when I was a kid, and joined to fight commies. I had family that fought that war.
We had legit targets in the area. But you don't load explosives first, and then incendiaries for industrial targets. We did the same with Japan. Own it. We won.
/johnny
In Europe incendaries were dropped by the pathfinder aircraft with GEE or other navigational aids to make a target for the later waves carrying high explosives. Percision was none to good, but it would be hard to say that civilians were the primary targets. (Downed allied airmen were treated decently, for evidence.)
In Japan it was a different war and the Japanese played by different rules. The high fuel loading of Japanese cities made them too inviting as targets, since burning out large portions of industrial cities clearly hampered war industries.
I hate Dresden Nazis.
Dresden was the notable exception to that general policy...as it was the center historic/cultural center of Dresden that was hit...NOT the huge military base immediately to the north, nor, the rail lines (the supposed target)...as the bridges over the Elbe in Dresden were untouched.
The Germans did an incredibly thorough study of the death toll just last year--as it has always been disputed, with wildly different estimates. The best estimate is about 25,000 civilian deaths in the firebombed region. This was done first by RAF bombers, then by American bombers, over just 2 days...
Many people suffocated in underground air raid shelters--as the fires above sucked out the oxygen. Over 90% destruction in the center city... We really did make Dresden a hell on earth...
As a post says above, the Germans haven't forgotten Dresden--I lived there for a summer in '06--however, none of the Germans I knew were neo-Nazi, and none made excuses for the Nazi terrors, which all know were much worse. Still, they mourn old Dresden, a city called "The Florence of the north."
Definitely, as Winston Churchill admitted about 6 weeks after the bombing, it was a mistake.
Even if you can justify destroying the central core of Dresden it's less easy to justify doing the same thing to Leipzig.
One of the reasons Vonnegut's discussion of the matter got such wide circulation is he was there at the time as a POW. He probably had first cousins there in the Homeguard for that matter.
Did higher level Nazis lie about it? Of course they did.
Here's what is meant by a "military target" ~ the city of Indianapolis (well protected by being well inland) had the Naval Ordinance facility where the bomb sights were built, and various sorts of interesting missiles, et al, and on the West Side of town there was the Allison plant building engines for fighters and bombers. In between was the International Harvester plant that built all sorts of engines for trucks and other military vehicles.
Those three plants accounted for a very substantial percentage of the war materiele supporting both the American, Russian and British armies.
Still, that wasn't the primary target ~ that'd be the old Kingan Packing Plant ~ with a contract for SPAM which was sent directly to Russia and was winning the Battle of Stalingrad.
Louisville KY was another major inland military target. It produced munitions and modern gunpowder, and bombs, and all sorts of things of that order.
Indianapolis and Louisville were, at that time, about the size of Dresden and Leipzig. On a scale of 10 to 1 with 10 the highest in terms of percentage of materiele produced for WWII, Indianapolis was a 9, Louisville a 10, and Dresden and Leipzig about 1/2.
Clearly neither town was far enough "inland".
The other problem with the German cities as compared to the two named American cities is the Americans stopped speaking German in 1918 ~ which was a good thing as it turned out.
Some military analysts say that freed up the remaining industrial workers to spend all their time at their jobs rather than worrying about their families. Dr. Sutton was one of the first to argue that area bombing of German cities probably increased German war production several times over.
I have no idea what happened, but bombing the rail-lines, rejected by a number of the top war managers (John McCloy for one), would have done more good.
I regret the entire Second World War, and the horrors visited on everyone. Still, it seems that of all people the Germans are in the absolute worst position to complain. (Tied, perhaps with the Japanese.) It was official German policy that their racial superiority gave them the right to abuse all the other peoples of the world.
If the Germans had had the means, they would have leveled New York, London and Moscow and enslaved the entire world. They only regret that it didn’t work out for them, so now they cringe behind risible claims of victimhood.
FWIW, Speer relates that the Nazi Party leaders were disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm among the German people for the War, even after the fall of France. Rather than euphoria, the Germans, according to Speer, seem to harbor misgivings. He points out that the Nazi Party was made up of people who almost never traveled outside of Germany.
Can’t quite say the Nazi party was made up of people who didn’t even have relatives abroad. Martin Bormann, for example, was the uncle of Frank Borman, who led the first US team of astronauts around the Moon.
I cannot not authenticate that assertion about Martin Bormann and Frank Borman (one "n"). Got a source? Speer was talking about top Nazis. Just before the War began Speer and his family took a driving vacation in Italy and it is in relating this event that he reflects on the insularity of the Nazi Party. Goering did live for a while in Sweden and had a Swedish girlfriend, he was a Nordophile as were a lot of Nazis. He would probably not have been comfortable in Italy. Hitler personally wanted to reverse the "Romanization" - as he perceived it - of the German people. He wanted to abandon the Roman alphabet for the much less legible and harder to write Gothic alphabet (actually the same alphabet with more ornate symbols). Albrecht Dürer would have been disappointed.
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