Germany: anti-Nazi = traitor
01 January 1991
Germany: anti-Nazi = traitor
ardoc December=1992
The recent conviction of a German anti-fascist for the alleged
murder in 1947 of a Nazi military judge in a Russian
prisoner-of-warcamp has, CARF believes, important implications
for the German anti-fascist movement. Germans who set up
`Camp Antifa' in the prison camps following the defeat of
Nazism are now characterised as traitors to the `Fatherland'.
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In July, as the former East German Communist leader, Eric
Honecker, was flown from Chile to Germany to face trial for
the manslaughter of East Germans who attempted to cross the
Berlin Wall, pictures were beamed across the world by a media
hungry for its latest glimpse of post-unification German
justice. No such international spotlight, however, bore down
on a Hamburg Court in May when a frail 69-year-old man,
Gerhard Bogelein, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The facts
Bogelein was 19 when he was conscripted into the German army.
After disobeying military orders, by refusing to take part in
a mass execution of resistance fighters and Jews, he was sent
to a work camp. On his third attempt, he escaped to the
Soviet Union, where he joined the Red Army and fought against
fascism on the Soviet side.
Later, he was sent to a Russian prisoner-of-war camp for
German prisoners in Klaipeda, Lithuania, where, it was hoped,
he would identify top Nazi officers. A `Camp Antifa' was set
up by anti-Nazi POWS; it ran political education activities
for the prisoners and also identified Nazi officials in the
camp. In 1947, Erich Kallmerter, a Nazi military judge
responsible for signing 120 death sentences from 1943 to 1945,
was murdered at Klaipeda camp. At first, Bogelein was
suspected, but he was later released and he went to the Soviet
Union. Recruited by the KGB, he returned to East Germany
where, some years later, he fell foul of the authorities and
was sentenced to two years
imprisonment for activities hostile to the state. In the
1960s, he was given an honourary pension for victims of the
Nazi regime, after becoming dependent on drugs and alcohol.
Machinery of retribution
However, a former public prosecutor of the National Socialist
Special Courts, Kurt Steckel, set out to prove Bgelein guilty
of Kallmerter's murder. In 1950, Steckel, by then a Hamburg
judge, began his investigations, taking statements from more
than 200 witnesses, all rehabilitated Nazis.
At the same time, as anti-fascists point out, the
authorities were doing everything in their power to ensure
Nazi war criminals were not brought to book, by drawing out
cases until the accused were too unfit, too old - or even dead
- to stand trial, or until the period in which they could be
prosecuted had lapsed.
Steckel never found the proof he was looking for.
Instead, an indictment he prepared in 1952, putting the case
for
Bogelein's extradition, was based on a bitter attack on the
Camp Antifa and Bogelein, characterising both as traitors to
the German race. Steckel died in 1967, having been promoted
to the post of director of Hamburg's regional court.
After reunification
Following reunification, and using the pretext of new evidence
from Stasi documents, in which Bogelein allegedly admitted to
Kallmerter's murder, the case against Bogelein was reopened.
The `Prozessgruppe Bogelein', which has organised a petition
on Bgelein's behalf, maintains that there was no new evidence
against him, that the prosecution was based on the case
outlined by Steckel, and that all the prosecution witnesses
called were former Nazis.
History falsified
According to the Internationales Frauen Plenum, the case
against Bogelein symbolises all that is rotten in the new
Germany. `The new unified Germany is out to portray the
former East German Communist state as the true inheritor of
the fascist system, whilst what was W