Prosecutors demand 4½ years jail for 87-year-old Horst Mahler
March 8, 2023
At Potsdam District Court this week, German prosecutors have demanded a prison sentence of four years and eight months for the 87-year-old lawyer, philosopher and revisionist historian Horst Mahler.
The present trial began on 29th November last year: further hearings are scheduled this week and next week. Mahler is accused of publishing forbidden opinions, under the Federal Republic’s notorious
volksverhetzung (‘public incitement’) laws.
Many of these forbidden opinions relate to the ‘Holocaust’. Although he was a well-known Marxist during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was the lawyer for several leading far-left terrorists from the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’, or Red Army Faction, Mahler’s ideas began to turn in a nationalist direction during the late 1970s and ’80s.
On 9th November 2003 Mahler was the principal spokesman for an international committee of historical revisionists –
the Society for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Refutation of the Holocaust (VRBHV) – chaired by the Swiss teacher Bernhard Schaub, with Ursula Haverbeck as his deputy. Among other members of this committee were the leading revisionist scholar Professor Robert Faurisson; retired German judge Wilhelm Stäglich; German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel; exiled Swiss revisionist Jürgen Graf; exiled German chemist Germar Rudolf; Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben; German patriot Manfred Roeder (who was at this time in prison himself); and Anneliese Remer, by then resident in Spain, widow of the war hero Otto-Ernst Remer.
VRBHV drew attention to
an article that had been published the previous year in the magazine Osteuropa, by mainstream journalist Fritjof Meyer, editor-in-chief of Germany’s leading news magazine
Der Spiegel. Meyer’s article amounted to a vindication of longstanding arguments by revisionists that no homicidal gassings had taken place in those so-called ‘gas chambers’ previously identified by mainstream, ‘exterminationist’ historians (i.e. in what revisionists have identified as mortuaries at crematoria I and II).
Whereas revisionists such as Faurisson, Rudolf et al. argue that no ‘Zyklon B’ homicidal gassing programme occurred at all, Meyer suggested that such gassings ‘probably’ took place in two farm houses outside the camp, and that ‘probably’ a total of 356,000 victims (both Jews and non-Jews) were killed in this fashion.
Despite its limitations, Meyer’s semi-revisionism was a significant breakthrough into the journalistic and academic mainstream. It became a spur to action, in particular for Horst Mahler and Ursula Haverbeck. The revisionist activism which led to their repeated criminalisation and imprisonment, was in a sense triggered by the publication of Fritjof Meyer’s article in 2002. Meyer himself (who celebrated his 90th birthday last year) was never prosecuted.
Meanwhile in many European countries, the authorities have moved relentlessly to charge, fine or imprison revisionists. Notable cases have included several of the signatories to the VRBHV letter of November 2003.
Robert Faurisson was prosecuted and heavily fined many times in France, and at the time of his death in 2018 at age 89 was awaiting the decision of his most recent criminal case, which, in the circumstances, was never pronounced. His enemies pursued him in the courts via one arm, and by means of brutal physical assaults with another arm.
Ernst Zündel was extradited from Canada to Germany in what was later shown to have been an unconstitutional process, and given a five year prison sentence: he was released on 1st March 2010 but was never allowed to return to his marital home in Tennessee. Ernst Zündel died at his family home in the Black Forest, aged 78, in August 2017.
Germar Rudolf was imprisoned in Germany from 2005-2009, and has since lived in the USA where he has been active as the world’s leading revisionist publisher. In 2023 he was awarded the Robert Faurisson International Prize.
Ursula Haverbeck (now aged 94) was convicted and fined several times soon after the formation of the VRBHV. In 2016 she received the first of several prison sentences for her consistent and courageous revisionism; the latest 12-month prison sentence was imposed last year. She remains free pending further hearings as to whether and when this latest prison sentence should be served. Ursula Haverbeck was the first recipient of the Robert Faurisson International Prize in 2019.
Horst Mahler was barred from practising law in 2004, due to his forbidden opinions. In 2007 he received the first of several prison sentences for revisionism, and aside from a twenty-month period in 2015-2017, he spent most of the decade 2009-2020 behind bars.
Dr Fredrick Töben was imprisoned in Germany in 1998-1999 and in Australia in 2009 for his defiance of laws denying free debate of ‘Holocaust’ history. In October 2008 he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport under a European Arrest Warrant, but
a defence team mobilised by Lady Michèle Renouf defeated the authorities’ attempts to have him extradited to Germany where he would have faced another trial and long jail sentence. Dr Töben died in Australia in 2020, aged 76.
Manfred Roeder faced repeated prosecution for political offences in his native Germany until his death aged 85 in 2014. His most recent prison sentence was in 2005. In Roeder’s case his “crimes” included objecting to exhibitions that sought to defame the Werhmacht’s historical record. During one such demonstration, the elderly Roeder was brutally attacked by young “anti-fascists” who repeatedly struck him around the head with a metal bar, causing injuries that contributed to later health problems including a stroke.
Jürgen Graf was one of the first revisionists to face criminal charges, having been given a prison sentence by a Swiss court in 1998. He was already living in exile by the time of VRBHV’s formation in 2003, and spent many years in exile in Russia.
Gerd Honsik fled an Austrian prison sentence for forbidden historical opinions, living in exile in Spain for several years. After a prolonged legal process, he was extradited from Spain to Austria in 2007 and was given a five year prison sentence. Released after two years on age and health grounds, Honsik died in 2018, aged 76.
Several of the original VRBHV members were already elderly by 2003 and were never prosecuted, partly because of their age and eminence – notably the retired judge and revisionist pioneer
Wilhelm Stäglich, who died aged 89 in 2006. Stäglich had been forced into early retirement for political reasons in 1974, aged 58, and in a remarkable act of petty spite the University of Göttingen took steps to revoke the doctorate it had awarded him in 1951. (This revocation was not for any academic reasons – it was simply because the University disapproved of his later political and revisionist views.)
During the twenty years following the VRBHV’s formation, there have been numerous high-profile cases against revisionists:
British historian
David Irving was arrested in Austria in November 2005 and given a three-year prison sentence for views that he had expressed during speeches given in Austria sixteen years earlier. Following an appeal conducted by the eminent Viennese lawyer Dr Herbert Schaller, Irving was released after serving a year of his sentence.
Austrian engineer
Wolfgang Fröhlich, who first came to public attention as an expert defence witness during Jürgen Graf’s trial in 1998, was arrested in June 2003 and spent twelve of the next sixteen years in prison. Even after his release in March 2019, Fröhlich spent the rest of his life as a condemned criminal without normal pension and other citizen’s rights.
He received the Robert Faurisson International Prize in 2021, and died later that year aged 70.German lawyer
Sylvia Stolz, whose clients had included revisionists Horst Mahler and Ernst Zündel, was banned from practising her profession and given a 3½ year prison sentence in 2008, for the ‘crime’ for defending her revisionist clients too well and expressing revisionist views. She was given a further 20-month sentence (later reduced on appeal) in 2015, for a revisionist speech delivered at a conference in Switzerland.
Faurisson’s successor as Europe’s leading revisionist scholar – his fellow Frenchman,
Vincent Reynouard, who received the Robert Faurisson International Prize in 2020 – is presently imprisoned in Edinburgh, pending an extradition hearing scheduled for April. His first jail sentence was in 2004, due to forbidden historical opinions relating to his revisionist study of the ‘Oradour massacre’, which is his main field of research and expertise and
on which he has recently published a new book. He received further convictions and jail sentences in 2007 and 2015, but has never even been accused of any crime under English or Scottish law – nevertheless the UK authorities arrested him,
acting as the instruments of French prosecutors and international lobbyists.In 2018 the German-Canadian siblings
Alfred and Monika Schäfer were convicted in Munich for their questioning of ‘Holocaust’ history. Monika was given a ten-month jail sentence, but was immediately released and deported to Canada because she had already been in prison awaiting trial for nine months. Alfred was sentenced to three years and two months. He was recently re-arrested during a commemoration of the 1945 Dresden terror-bombing. The Schaefers were jointly awarded the Robert Faurisson International Prize in 2022, and
Monika recently published a book about her awakening to historical revisionism and the consequences.In 2010 the German revisionist
Kevin Käther, who had earlier been given an eight-month prison sentence,
made legal history in Berlin when the court abandoned the case against him because prosecutors were afraid to give publicity to his questioning of expert witnesses in relation to The Rudolf Report – a scientific examination of the feasibility of homicidal gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kevin Käther had posted CD copies of Germar Rudolf’s
Lectures on the Holocaust to Berlin prosecutors and to the two expert witnesses – Prof. Wolfgang Benz and Prof. Ernst Nolte. Since the Käther trial, courts in the Federal Republic have found procedural reasons to prevent such questioning of expert witnesses regarding the ‘Holocaust’.
Spanish author, activist and bookseller
Pedro Varela was jailed in 1998 and 2010 on various political charges, some of them related to ‘Holocaust’ revisionism, and his Barcelona bookshop
Librería Europa was closed down by the authorities in 2016. Pedro Varela is still facing prosecution in Spain for political ‘crimes’.
There are eleven counts in the present case against Horst Mahler, alleging that between 2013 and 2017 he circulated emails and the manuscript for
a book, later published in German as Das Ende der Wanderschaft and in English translation as The Wanderer’s Redemption.Some of the charges relate to a period when Mahler was serving an earlier prison sentence in Brandenburg. According to the indictment, he succeeded in writing his book while in prison and smuggled it out from the jail, to be published by his associates.
During his earlier prison sentence, Mahler suffered serious health problems leading to the amputation of his leg, and he was released on health grounds in 2015. He continued intense political activities despite his health, and in 2017 was re-arrested and imprisoned after attempting to seek political asylum in Hungary. A further amputation followed worsening health problems, but attempts to reimprison Mahler continued.
Horst Mahler has committed multiple heresies against what amounts to a new universal religion of ‘Holocaustianity’. By his own account, he is regarded by international Zionism as ‘Amalek’. Obedient prosecutors in the Federal Republic are determined to impose what would surely be a de facto life sentence.
The Real History blog will report later this month on further developments in the Horst Mahler case and the struggle for intellectual freedom in modern Europe.
