Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
". . . My God, what did people like you think anyway? It was the Leftists, the anarchists, the Jew- and Freemasonry-infested political parties, and the licenced press which for decades had hunted down all patriots: brutally, intolerantly, relentlessly and full of hate."
Later, Schmidt would comment: "Essentially, the case hinge(d) only
on the four words translated as "Jew- and Freemason-infested"
- four words out of a letter of about 2,500 words."
As a result of these four words, Schmidt, an American citizen and well-known
American nationalist as head of GANPAC, the only Political Action Committee
in America representing German-Americans, spent almost half a year in prison
in his native Germany.
Schmidt has just written a book titled "Jailed in 'Democratic' Germany:
The Ordeal of an American Writer." (PO Box 11124, Pensacola, FL 32524,
USA, $ 19.50 plus postage). I received a copy in last week's mail and have
just started reading it.
Schmidt's story is of special interest to me because the Zundel-Haus staff
and the Zundelsite were intimately involved in eventually obtaining his
release. Ernst spent thousands of dollars in postage, printing, faxing,
stuffing envelopes etc., all sent to the farthest corners of the world.
He also had the 32 page "Anklageschift" translated. What freed
Schmidt were rivers of mail, thanks in large part to this massive publicity
sent from the Zundel-Haus of his arrest to individual, organizations and
the alternative media, resulting in thousands of telephone calls, letters,
faxes and telegrams from all parts of the world to officials both in Germany
and the United States. It soon became clear to the powers-that-be that they
had bitten off far more than they could hide and secretly chew, and Schmidt
is now back home in Pensacola, Florida.
I thought I would quote you some passages from his book so you can get a
feel for how a so-called 'democratic' system works:
"Sometime in August, during my transport from Frankfurt to Buetzow across Germany in a prison van (where I was held within a small cell in the van), one day was particularly arduous: not only was it unbearably hot in the nearly airless cabin of the van, during a five hour drive from Hanover to Hamburg, the police vehicle did not once stop either for quenching the thirst of the prisoners, nor did I have a chance to relieve myself during that time. This was an ordeal for a man nearing seventy years of age with major medical problems."
"For approximately two weeks after my arrest, and before I saw a doctor at the 160-year old Buetzow prison in former Communist east Germany, my daily medicine for high blood pressure (I have a serious heart condition as well as a prostate ailment) was purposely withheld from me. This in spite of the fact that the pills I needed were in my luggage, which was in the possession of the authorities."
"In German jails they have a system whereby everything a prisoner needs or wants has to be requested in writing. In order to do so, one has to have both the properly printed form and naturally either a pen or a pencil. However, to obtain a pen and one sheet of the formal requests, one would need both in the first place, a real Catch-22 situation. . . One of the prison employees was very much insulted when I had written my urgent demand for medicine on a piece of toilet paper."
"For the first ten days to two weeks after my arrest, I was most of the time held virtually incommunicado. Nobody, not my wife, my German attorney, or the American Embassy knew much - if anything - of my whereabouts. While prisoners are supposed to be allowed to make at least one phone call immediately after their arrest, this right was denied to me."
"For five weeks after my arrest I was unable to communicate confidentially by mail with my lawyer (who lived several hundred miles away from the prison). During this period I was forced to hand over to the authorities, unsealed, every letter addressed to my attorney, and this correspondence was probably read by the prosecutor."
"While I was in German custody, it was six weeks before I received the first letter from my wife in Florida, bringing among other things the news of the devastation wrought by a hurricane in Pensacola on August 3, 1995. During these first six weeks, her frantic telephone messages to me were only delivered thus: 'Your wife called and said hello.' Not a word more."
"Almost throughout my (entire) incarceration, the mail was delayed for an unconsciounably long time. On the average it took more than two months for me to receive answers to questions I posed in letters to friends, even though most of my correspondents had answered immediately after my missives."
"It was fully ten weeks after my arrest that I was finally able to receive permission to make very short weekly telephone calls to my wife, and also talk with my mother in Germany. These phone calls were all monitored and during the remainder of my incarceration I was never allowed to call anyone else."
"On the day of my release from prison, the presiding judge handed me 150 letters that had not been given to me earlier because, due to a lack of time, it had been impossible for the German judiciary to read and check their contents."
"In Buetzow prison, the most vile pornographic magazines were freely available, while publications extolling German virtues such as thrift, honesty, the work ethic, and morality, were forbidden. Also (forbidden) was any written material that stated that "Germany belongs to the Germans."
Writes Schmidt:
". . . the question must be asked, what is the definition of 'hate material' and who are the 'hate groups'? Moreover, who decides what thoughts, opinions and conclusions may or may not be disseminated? Is it hate when a political leader of the largest ethnic group in the United States points out that another ethnic group, consisting of a minority of highly influential power brokers, has too much power and influence in vital sectors of this country, and that this all-too-great power and influence of a tiny minority may cause harm to the nation?"
"In contemporary Moscow and St. Petersburg nobody is being checked for forbidden literature when entering the country, (and no one has) to fear imprisonment in Russia for transgressions against ludicrous, politically inspired censorship laws that do not belong in the statutes of a civilized nation."
"This is not the place to explain the incongruity of why Germans may publicly display the Soviet red star, the symbol of the Communist Red Army, at whose hands millions of German civilians were raped, tortured and murdered; but German World War II veterans who fought the communist scourge, and earned the Iron Cross for doing so, cannot wear their original medals of valor in public."
Sidebar: German veterans have to go to a jeweller to have the swastika removed
because it offends 50-year-old occupation laws!
Schmidt concludes:
"Thankfully, so far they do not have any technical instruments to measure the 'revolutionary' thoughts I always seem to carry in my head."
I look forward to finish reading this book. It is of particular interest
to me because at that time I was at the Zundel-Haus and helped with the
thousands of letters and stickers that went out to help free Hans Schmidt.
Right after Christmas, upon returning home, I found myself confronted with
the first cyberwar EVER in the history of our world, triggered by the Zundelsite
and Zundel-Haus announcement that we were going to have a "Holocaust
debate" with Nizkor - right on the Internet!
As I have stated several times before, we notified the Simon Wiesenthal
Center via fax of this pending debate on January 5, 1995, chased by another
fax on January 8, 1995. To this day, it is hotly denied by the powers-that-be
that the massive, world-wide Internet censorship movement that was launched
by the Simon Wiesenthal Center on January 10 with an article in the New
York Times - a vicious censorship attempt that hasn't stopped to this day
and now involves practically every government on earth - was triggered by
our announcement of the "Zündelsite-Nizkor Debate".
In Hans Schmidt's book, we now find the following on page 15:
"At the time that I left Germany on my own recognizance, after five
months' incarceration in a 160-year-old jail, where I had been held for
no other 'crime' than freely expressing my opinion in my native German language
from my home in America, German authorities took it upon themselves to raid
the offices of the Munich subsidiary of Compuserve, the American Internet
provider.
Ostensibly, this was done to halt the transmission of child pornography
via CompuServe. However, on January 9, 1996, the German prosecutor in
charge of the investigation admitted in a television interview that, in
actuality, the real target of the interdiction was the American and Canadian
revisionist groups who were sending educational information into Germany
by means of the Internet."
Right from the horse's mouth.
Pornography? Fat chance!
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"The Zionist Lobby in this country is malicious, implacable, mendacious and dangerous . . . once the expression 'anti-Semite' hits the air, or heaven forfend, the sacred formula 'six million' is uttered, then I know from bitter experience that there is not one manager or editor in the country who will defend an underling. We are thrown to the jackals."
(Terry Lane, ABC broadcaster and journalist, in a letter to the Australian Jewish News, 4 December 1992)