Free Republic

FAITH UNDER FIRE Germany silences pro-lifers, homeschoolers, creationists Crime is 'incitement of the people,' court rules in ordering prison term Posted: June 28, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Chelsea Schilling © 2007 WorldNetDaily.com A 55-year-old Lutheran pastor has been found guilty of "volksverhetzung" or "incitement of the people" by a German court and will spend a year in jail after an Erlangen court claimed he made a statement denying the Holocaust suffered by the Jews at the hands of Nazi-Germany during World War II. Johannes Lerle compared Germany's abortion rate of 150,000 annually to the murder of Jews in Auschwitz...

German Leader Seeks New Start From Bush By GEIR MOULSON, Associated Press Writer BERLIN - Germany's interior minister said it was time to put aside differences with the United States over Iraq look to the future as President Bush won a second term, but another senior official reiterated Wednesday that German troops will not join the coalition there. Ties between the two countries were strained by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's vehement opposition to last year's U.S.-led war in Iraq, although the two governments since have moved to repair relations. "America is a very important partner, if not the most important one...

AHLBECK, Germany (AFP) - The German-Polish frontier slicing the Baltic island of Usedom has a whiff of the absurd, with border police perched on sand dunes, suspiciously surveying the sea grass where old Europe meets the new. Here on this island divided by a national border, a relic of World War II hostilities, a wary curiosity has taken root between German and Polish neighbors after a long separation. Since 1945, the German part of the island has been deprived of its main port and main town, Swinemuende, which became the Polish Swinoujscie. The border also cuts Usedom off from its...

Poland must compensate citizens for property their families lost when the country's eastern borders shifted westward after World War II, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled on Tuesday. Jerzy Broniowski, a Polish national born in 1944, brought his case to the court seeking compensation of €85,000 ($103,000) for his grandmother’s lost property -- a house and land in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. The case has much wider significance because it opens the door for more than 80,000 potential claims in Poland, according to government estimations. In addition to Poles, millions of Germans were expelled from their...