GERMAN FRATERNITIES: NATIONALISM RISES IN ACADEMIC DRESS; GERMAN MINISTER ADVOCATES FOURTH REICH

GERMAN FRATERNITIES: NATIONALISM RISES IN ACADEMIC DRESS


GERMAN MINISTER ADVOCATES FOURTH REICH


copyright (c) 2006 by Mr. Rodney Atkinson
www.freenations.freeuk.com

YERUSHALIYIM, Israelite Tribal Territories of Yehudah and Binyamin, Kingdom of David and Shlomo, United Israelite Kingdom of Yehudah and Yosef, Yom Revi'i, Day 27, Sixth Month (Elul), 5766 (Wednesday, September 20, 2006), Root & Branch Information Services [mailto:rb@rb.org.il] [www.rb.org.il]:

German Fraternities: Nationalism rises in academic dress

Free Nations
Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Introduction by Rodney Atkinson:

German Burschenschaften are traditional, historically based student fraternities with militarist characteristics which even today conduct initiation ceremonies involving sword play! They resemble a kind of freemasonry and have always been recruiting agencies for higher employment in German business, political life and the military and were more than sympathetic to the imperial ambitions of the Kaiser (First World War). Although they are mostly associated with the C.D.U., as the principal Conservative political movement in Germany, in this, as in other matters of German nationalism, there is little opposition from the Social Democrats!

Since the fall of Nazi Germany the Burschenschaften have attacked the loss of German nationalism and in particular the loss of German territory in the East. They are today associated with the ethnic German movement (founded by the Nazis and funded by the German State today) which we have covered extensively on this web site [www.freenations.freeuk.com] (please see in particular the button on our home page "Nazi Regions"). They regard as German whole areas of other countries where Germans used to live (Sudetenland in the Czech Republic) or still live (parts of Belgium, Denmark, Poland etc).

The vast majority of its members have academic qualifications and some of their lodges have invited extreme nationalistic political figures to address them -- the most notorious being an Austrian Burschenschaft's invitation to the British holocaust denier David Irving (now in prison in Austria).

German Foreign Policy [www.german-foreign-policy.com] reported earlier this year:

One of the largest academic associations in Germany, the Deutsche Burschenschaft, raises, in a recent publication, territorial claims against Poland and Russia ("German Eastern Territories").

They also claim as German parts of Austria, the Czech Republic (the Sudetenland, over which Britain almost went to war with Germany in 1938! - ed), Belgium, Italy and Denmark. The Association also demands in the recently published collection of its basic beliefs more support for German speaking minorities in the whole of Europe. Indeed such work is already supported by the German Government to the tune of 16m Euros a year.

Membership is about 15,000 (with some 13,000 having university qualifications) in 120 lodges, many working in key social and economic positions in society. Even the Social Democratic Party refused to distance itself from this ethnically based group, elements of which associate with political extremists.

As the group pointed out in 2005, "The German Reich in its borders of 31st December 1937 continues to be recognised in German law". The author, who was until recently Vice President in the Official Archive of the German State, claimed that there was "no reason to give up the German claim on these territories" [1].

In its 2005 Handbook the Burschenschaft writes: "By Germany we understand the German inhabited area in Central Europe from which Germans have been illegally expelled....Germany exists independently of State borders" [2].

Whole areas are of course "administered by Poland" but "a loss of territory in the sense of the extension of Polish sovereignty" had not taken place, claimed the Vice President of the University of Wuerzburg, Hannes Kaschkat, in the name of the Deutsche Burschenschaft.

The D.B. sees the concept of Germany "not in the State but in the settlement area of the German people". Defined as German are all those who by their descent, language and culture belong to and give their loyalty to the German people (Volk, could possibly be translated as race - ed).

This would therefore include the areas of South Tirol in Italy, German parts of Belgium and parts of "North Schleswig" in Denmark, claims the Handbook, an there can be no doubt about the "German character of the Sudeten territory". (Needless to say this kind of logic -- "people above state" -- was the principal characteristic of the racial and territorial claims of the Nazis between the two world wars - ed).

The D.B. claims that outside the official German language area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein) there live some 14 million "Foreign Germans".

In addition to the 16m Euros provided by the State the D.B. gives support to the spread of German culture and sees the "cultural engagement of Germany and Austria abroad" as "also a political engagement" having "important consequences for the economic development of German interests". Since 1996 the D.B. has its own "Burschenschaft Foundation for national minority and ethnic group rights in Europe" in Saarbruecken.

Needless to say the nationalistic D.B. attacks the Allies after the Second World War for "systematically destroying the German national consciousness and the national will to self assertion (!) through a long term and deep seated re-education programme". This, together with a "one sided theory of the past" represented a kind of "psychological war" [3].

Today, therefore, the D.B. believes that the "crimes of the Allies must be exposed and published in equal manner and pursued as vigorously as German war crimes" [4]. (Here again we see, as in the inter war years under the Nazis an attempt to relativise German aggressive war by putting the defenders of democracy and nationhood on the same moral footing as their destroyers and the invaders on the same moral plane as the resistance!)

When in Government [5] the Social Democrat party refused to support an attempt to declare membership in Burschenschaften as incompatible with party membership [6], and a "Working Group for Social Democrat Corporate members" which includes D.B. members is being formed.

Individual Burschenschaften regularly offer neo-fascists an opportunity to speak. For instance the Burschenschaft Olympia in Vienna invited the holocaust denier David Irving in November, 2005, to speak. Irving has since been convicted and imprisoned for the crime of "holocaust denial".

By contrast with the provocative acts of some of the radical members of the Burschenschaften and the negative response of the mass media, the D.B.'s academic activities in promoting the revisionism of Greater Germany seem relatively harmless. But under such an academic gloss the neo-Nazi political elites establish their theories in the Universities and modernise the traditional concepts of German hegemony in State foreign policy.

[1] Klaus Oldenhage, "Die deutschen Ostgebiete und das Sudetenland", in "Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft". Ausgabe 2005.

[2] "Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft". Ausgabe 2005.

[3] "Burschenschaftliche Blaetter" Nr. 1/2005.

[4] "Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft". Ausgabe 2005.

[5] In the 1990s for instance the Burschenschaft Hansea in Hamburg claimed as members, inter alios one Ministerial adviser in the German Defence Ministry, two in the Treasury, a German military representative in N.A.T.O., countless judges, company directors and managers in significant German corporations.

[6] Kurt Beck (Ministerpraesident von Rheinland-Pfalz), Sigmar Gabriel (Bundesumweltminister), Hubertus Heil (S.P.D.-Generalsekretaer), Mathias Platzeck (S.P.D.-Vorsitzender), Inge Wettig-Danielmeier (S.P.D.-Schatzmeisterin). "Einfluss Alter Herren bis in den Parteivorstand", Spiegel Online, January 17, 2006.

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German Minister advocates Fourth Reich: German Reich the Model for Europe says German Minister
(Berlin State Minister for Culture, Bernd Neumann)

Free Nations
Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Introduction by Rodney Atkinson:


As in all other moves towards the re-creation (under the disguise of the European Union) of German Imperialism and European Fascism, the warnings of democrats are laughed at but then later confirmed and still later admitted. So it is now with the re-creation of the German Holy Roman Empire, so beloved of the Nazis that some of them created the Charlemagne Prize awarded to Blair, Jenkins, Heath and other destroyers of democratic nationhood.[www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2003-12-11.html]

Now we have a German Pope (Nazi youth and supporter of the Reich ideal who recently declared that Germans had no war guilt) [www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-06-05.html] who will be taking part in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the E.U. next year by praising that "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation".

Now we see a German Minister admitting that Germany and the Eastern European countries "belong together" and that the Reich is the model for Europe.

German Foreign Policy [www.german-foreign-policy.com] reported on August 29, 2006: (Translated by Mr. Edward Spalton for www.freenations.freeuk.com on August 30, 2006)

The medieval, Europe-wide German Reich is a valid model for the union of European countries today. So says the Berlin State Minister for Culture, Bernd Neumann. According to him, the memory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation reveals "an inner historical consistency" with the founding and steady expansion of the European Union.

These remarks are a preparation for the festivities in Berlin for the fiftieth anniversary of the European Economic Community (E.E.C.), to which the Federal Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has invited the German Pope, Joseph Ratzinger.

Ratzinger is a committed supporter of the "Imperial Ideal" (Reichsidee) and is to speak on the "spiritual foundations" of Europe in the German capital. This government offensive to revitalise the Imperial Ideal will underline the German leadership of the E.U. and confirm fears in France, Great Britain and almost all the states of eastern Europe.

Sections of the German elites are warning against an all-too-public assertion of German hegemony.


GREAT SIGNIFICANCE


As the Berlin State Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said, the German Reich of the Middle Ages can "from today’s viewpoint" serve "as a valid model of the functioning order of a superstate" [1]. Neumann took this opportunity when he opened an exhibition last Sunday (27 August) which is dedicated to this supposed historical exemplar ("The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, 962–1806").

Because of the prominence of the exhibition (partly in the state-controlled Historical Museum in Berlin), the individual stands and total content of the exhibition are attracting remarkable public interest. The Culture Minister's intervention has strengthened the political charisma of the exhibition. He is a committed supporter of the Federal Chancellor.

It touches on "every great trend (...) which makes very clear to us the inner historical legitimacy and consistency of European unification", said Neumann on Sunday. The explicit aim of the organisers is "to examine the past of Old Europe in a time of fundamental inner and external reorientation" [2]. According to the organisers, they have traced "structures and developmental processes" which are "of great significance for the federal construction of Europe".


THE EUROPE OF TOMORROW


The public references to the structures of the medieval Reich which are evident in Neumann's position used to be the province of the extreme right, or confined to clerical-conservative circles -– at any rate since the Second World War.

This was the opinion of the C.S.U. (Christian Social Union) politician and grandson of the Austrian Kaiser, Otto von Habsburg, who made it known at the end of the Seventies that "the European integration of our times (...) follows the grand outline and principles of the Reich, which survived 1806, because they are of lasting validity" [3].

Similarly, the Pan-Europa Union, an association of E.U. supporters close to the C.S.U. insisted that "the eternal function of the Reich must be renewed in the Europe of tomorrow in the interest of the West" [4].

Similarly, Joseph Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict XVI, acknowledged that the origins of today's E.U. should acknowledge "a common imperial ideal (Reichsidee)" [5].

In recent years, conservative newspapers have opened their columns to new advocacy for the "Reich" [6].

THE PAPAL SPEECH

As the Speaker of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert (C.D.U.) has now informed us, he has invited a supporter of the imperial ideal, Joseph Ratzinger, to Berlin next year. The invitation was extended to Ratzinger last Monday by the Federal Chancellor at a reception in Castel Gandolfo. The German Pope will be in Berlin to attend the festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome and will grace the proceedings with a speech.

The German press already reports that the religious consecration will validate the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) and will be dedicated to "the spiritual foundations of Europe's political unification" [7]. The invitation legitimates the "Reich" concept of a stable co-operation of Church and State.

It will be a particular affront to France, a founder member of the E.E.C. Paris is committed to secularism, and the separation of Church and State has been a principle of French public life since the revolution of 1789.

CENTRAL EUROPE

The Berlin Culture Minister's speech of last Sunday will also affront those European states lying to the east and south of Germany's borders. The Minister made an obvious allusion to Poland and the Czech Republic when he said that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was "a part of the past of many European states".

According to Neumann, "Germany and Central Europe are historically and culturally indissolubly linked together" [8]. By this the State Minister recalled the earlier German hegemony to the east of Germany's present frontiers, which the Federal Republic has tried to reassert since 1990.

FEARS

The reawakening of the Reich myth has run into sharp criticism. In a press interview, the historian Heinrich August Winkler pointed to the significance of the Reich myth for Nazi propaganda. According to Winkler it was decisive "that the Reich was always something else and more than a normal national state".

When, in 1939, Hitler proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia over the rump of Czechoslovakia, legal historians of pan-German views confirmed that this act was quite in line with the old Imperial ideal which had always been supranational.

Winkler warns of new tensions between European states. "Incantation of the Reich" would "unavoidably create fears of German demands if it became again the model for the ordering of Europe" [9].

As criticism of the well-know historian Winkler has been prominently publicised for three weeks [10], the Minister's [Berlin State Minister for Culture, Bernd Neumann] speech can be clearly understood as an undoubtedly intentional rebuttal on behalf of German Reich propaganda.

References [ ] to sources and supporting reports appear in German on the web site [www.german-foreign-policy.com].