Board Members of Top German School Resign

Abuse Scandal Widens

Germany’s idyllic Odenwaldschule: Thirty-three pupils were allegedly abused by eight teachers between 1966 and 1991.

Most of the governors of the German Odenwaldschule boarding school, which is no religious affiliation, resigned over the weekend following allegations that teachers sexually abused pupils between 1966 and 1991. The principal has promised a full investigation.

Most of the members of the governing body of the Odenwald School in Germany resigned over the weekend following revelations that at least 33 pupils were abused by eight teachers at the elite boarding school between 1966 and 1991.

The school near the town of Heppenheim in the western state of Hesse is not run by a Catholic organization. The allegations first became public three weeks ago at the same time as sexual abuse cases came to light at several Catholic high schools around the country.

Five of seven members of Odenwald’s governing board stepped down on Saturday, leaving only the principal, Margarita Kaufmann, and the school’s manager, Meto Salijevic, to run the school’s affairs until a new board is elected on May 29. “The public pressure was too great,” said , Sabine Richter-Ellermannthe chairwoman of the board.

The school has said 33 pupils were subjected to abuse and that eight former teachers have been accused, including Gerold Becker, who was principal at the school from 1972 until 1985. It has so far declined to confirm information gathered by SPIEGEL that 40 pupils were abused by 10 teachers. “We are still in the process of investigation,” said Salijevic.

School Promises Full Probe

Kaufmann, the principal, said there will be “a comprehensive and transparent investigation” of the abuse cases and also promised to improve procedures for selecting teachers, enhance teacher training and reorganize its management. However, Thorsten Kahl, the lawyer of several abuse victims who were at the school, said Salijevic too should have resigned.

Salijevic was a member of the school’s board in 1999, when the first suspected abuse cases emerged. “The fact that he didn’t resign is a slap in the face for the victims,” said Kahl.

Odenwald turns 100 next month and has a long list of famous former pupils, including Greens politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the author Klaus Mann. Andreas von Weizsäcker, the son of former German president Richard von Weizsäcker, also went to the school. Andreas died of cancer in 2008. His widow, Sabrina von Weizsäcker, told SPIEGEL: “Andreas knew about the incidents but did not count himself among the victims.”

Former Principal Admits Abusing Pupils 

The abuse was first reported in 1998 when two former pupils sent the board a letter in which they accused Gerold Becker. The former principal did not deny the accusations and resigned from posts he still held in societies linked to the school.

The school admits today that it did not investigate the accusations rigorously enough. “Unfortunately we assumed these were isolated cases, appalling isolated cases,” Sabine Richter-Ellermann, the board chairwoman who has just resigned, said in a statement. The board had neglected to stay in touch with the victims “and did not look for further victims.” She added: “We are aware today that that was a mistake.”

Victims have accused Gerold Becker, who joined the school as a teacher in 1969, of waking them up in the morning by grabbing their penises and of making them masturbate him. He admits today that he “sexually pestered or hurt” pupils “through advances or activities.” A music teacher at the school also abused many pupils, witnesses say. He has since died.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,686190,00.html

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A Sober Look at Hitler’s Health

Medicating a Madman

There are myriad theories out there about Hitler’s health. Some say he was a drug addict, others say he was the victim of a hypnosis gone wrong. Then there are the strange hypotheses about his genitalia. A new book, however, debunks most such ideas. Drugs and illness, the authors conclude, had little effect on his actions. 

For a mass murderer, Adolf Hitler had a downright fatherly relationship with his personal physician. “My dear doctor, I so look forward to seeing you in the morning!” the Nazi dictator told his doctor, Theodor Morell, whom he trusted implicitly. In fact, Hitler was convinced that Morell had saved his life on several occasions. “My dear doctor!” the despot said to Morell in November 1944, “if we both make it through the war in one piece, you will see how generously I’ll reward you!” 

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Generations of historians, psychologists, psychiatrists and amateur sleuths have sought to uncover Hitler’s real and imagined illnesses. It seemed a logical place to start in the search for explanations of the World War II dictator’s monstrous crimes.

Hitler’s personal physician, Theodor Morell, was known to have given him large amounts of medications. For example, Hitler took such massive amounts of a drug to combat flatulence that some of his other physicians even speculated that he was being poisoned. The drug contained small amounts of the nerve agent strychnine, which had long been used as a rat poison.

Some have theorized that Hitler was gay or schizophrenic. Others have thought he suffered for decades from the consequences of a hypnosis treatment gone wrong while being treated for injuries incurred in World War I at a military hospital in Pasewalk (pictured here). His penis was said to be as stunted as his self-esteem, and the Führer allegedly had only one testicle and had contracted syphilis. There were claims that he was constantly high on illicit drugs and popped pills with abandon, which might have made him have pathological delusions.

Morell routinely administered a solution of dextrose and vitamins to help Hitler combat fatigue. Because Hitler was skeptical of pills and capsules, the solution was injected intravenously or intramuscularly. In 1944, Morell began giving him injections of the testosterone, particularly when Eva Braun was around. Some have posited that, before his rendezvous with Braun, Hitler occasionally had Morell inject an extract derived from the seminal vesicles and prostate glands of young bulls into his bloodstream.

Now, however, in their new book “War Hitler Krank?” (“Was Hitler Ill?”), historian Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann, a professor emeritus of medicine at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital, have combined the use of documentary material with modern medical analysis to separate myth from verifiable facts.

In the book, the authors claim to have found no evidence for a cocaine or methamphetamine habit, a single testicle, deformation or hypnosis therapy gone wrong. In the end, they conclude that Hitler had Parkinson’s disease and that his declining health was obvious in the final months leading up to his suicide in April 1945. Nevertheless, they write, “at no time did Hitler suffer from pathological delusions.” In fact, they conclude that the despot was always aware of his actions: “He was fully responsible.”

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Traudl Junge, who was Hitler’s private secretary during the war, later said that he was “utterly addicted to Morell.” Ironically, however, the doctor didn’t enjoy the best of reputations. When Eva Braun, Hitler’s longtime companion, complained about Morell’s poor bodily hygiene, Hitler stubbornly defended his personal physician, saying: “Morell isn’t here to be smelled, but to keep me healthy.” 

But it was precisely Morell’s ability to treat his patient that those in Hitler’s inner circle questioned. For example, General Heinz Guderian called Morell a “fat, unappetizing quack,” and Hermann Göring, the morphine-addicted commander of the Luftwaffe, disparagingly referred to Morell as the “Reich syringe master.” Likewise, there were persistent rumors that the doctor had made Hitler dependent on certain medications and illicit drugs. 

Even after the war, hardly any aspect of Hitler’s private life fueled as much speculation as his physical ailments. Generations of historians, psychologists, psychiatrists and amateur sleuths have sought to uncover Hitler’s real and imagined illnesses. To them, it seemed only logical that the irrational raging of a man who ordered millions of Jews, Roma and myriad others to be murdered was the outgrowth of a sick mind. Of course, the theory went, Hitler must have been somehow traumatized, a drug addict or even mentally ill! 

Theories Abound 

Many facile theories were proposed soon after the war. Hitler was alternatively said to be either gay or schizophrenic. Some thought he had suffered for decades from the consequences of a hypnosis treatment gone wrong. His penis was said to be as stunted as his self-esteem, and the Führer allegedly had only one testicle and had contracted syphilis. There were claims that he was constantly high on illicit drugs and popped pills with abandon. Does this mean we’re supposed to understand Hitler as the addict par excellence of the Third Reich — and his personal physician as his main dealer? 

Such attempts to explain Hitler’s behavior are dangerous, of course. Should he be found to have had an unsound mind, wouldn’t it mean that he could be held only partially responsible for the millions of deaths he ordered? Holocaust denier David Irving, for example, claims that medical mistakes induced Hitler into “euphoric trances,” thereby suggesting that the dictator was more or less unaware of his actions. 

On the other hand, serious academics have asked valid questions about Hitler’s health and, indeed, part of the mystery lies in the paucity of significant source material available. After the war, Hitler’s medical files disappeared, and the only evidence left were notes taken by his personal physician and eyewitness accounts. 

Now, however, in their new book “War Hitler Krank?” (“Was Hitler Ill?”), historian Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann, a professor emeritus of medicine at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital, have combined the use of documentary material with modern medical analysis to separate myth from verifiable facts. The book purports to offer nothing short of “conclusive findings” on Hitler’s state of health. It also reveals quite a few ghastly details about the dictator. For example, it posits that Hitler may have had tooth fillings made of dental gold taken from Jewish concentration camp victims: His dentist had more than 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of the material in his possession. 

Testosterone for Eva 

The two authors meticulously list all 82 medications that historical documents say Hitler took during the course of his rule. The list shows that Morell was more than willing to cater to his patient’s every desire. For example, he routinely administered a solution of dextrose and vitamins to help Hitler combat fatigue. Because Hitler was skeptical of pills and capsules, the solution was injected intravenously or intramuscularly. 

In 1944, Morell began giving him injections of the testosterone, particularly when Eva Braun was around. They also posit that, before his rendezvous with Braun, Hitler occasionally had Morell inject an extract derived from the seminal vesicles and prostate glands of young bulls into his bloodstream. 

Morell’s notes also reveal that the man who considered himself to be the greatest military leader of all time suffered from several everyday fears and ailments. He was terrified of getting cancer. After having literally shouted his way into power, he was constantly hoarse and had polyps removed from his vocal chords twice. He had high blood pressure and chronic gastrointestinal cramps, and he was also relatively squeamish. When he caught a cold once from his personal barber, Hitler raged: “The man has had the sniffles for five days, and he doesn’t even tell me!” 

Rat Poison and ‘Hitler Speed’ 

Hitler’s digestion problems even prompted him to become a vegetarian: Contrary to what the Nazi propaganda machine would have one believe, it wasn’t because Germany’s dictator was an animal lover. Likewise, he took such massive amounts of a drug to combat flatulence that some of his other physicians even speculated that he was being poisoned. The drug contained small amounts of the nerve agent strychnine, which had long been used as a rat poison. 

Moreover, when Hitler exhibited symptoms of jaundice in the fall of 1944, a heated debate erupted among his physicians, fueled, no doubt, by a desire to curry favor. Some even accused their colleague Morell of having poisoned Hitler. But the dictator stood by his personal physician, dismissing Morell’s detractors as “fools” and even having two of them transferred elsewhere. 

Was Hitler an Addict? 

Today, almost six and a half decades after Hitler’s death, Eberle and Neumann have attempted to solve the mystery of whether Morell’s treatment of Hitler was, in fact, improper. By analyzing the composition and dosage of the drug Morell administered to Hitler, they’ve ruled out the possibility of poisoning. They conclude that Morell was probably correct in diagnosing Hitler’s hepatitis as having been triggered by blockage around his gall bladder. 

Such findings might indicate that Morell was actually a competent physician rather than the “quack” or “Rasputin” he has been accused of being. However, this conclusion seems to be contradicted by the fact that Morell hardly dared to deny Hitler any of his wishes and supplied him with large numbers of pills, including the stimulant Pervitin. Such behavior triggered accusations that Morell got Hitler hooked on drugs — not implausible given the fact that several members of the Nazi elite were also drug addicts. Likewise, German soldiers fighting on the front consumed large quantities of Pervitin, and the drug was even added to chocolates. Nowadays, the substance is an ingredient in the popular drug crystal meth, which is also known by the telltale nickname “Hitler speed.” 

Still, Morell’s notes only contain a single reference to his having administered Pervitin to Hitler. Some would like to believe that the complicated abbreviations in Morell’s notes or his descriptions of other, harmless concoctions are merely covers for a medication containing the addictive drug. But Eberle and Neumann are highly skeptical: “There is no indication that Hitler was only able to conduct his daily briefings because he was taking Pervitin.” They also note that there is little evidence that Hitler had a cocaine habit, as some have suspected. 

Bitten by a Goat? 

Eberle and Neumann also attempt to debunk other myths by pointing out just how thin and contradictory the source material is and raising questions based on medical analysis. One story, for example, speculates that Hitler’s fits of rage and megalomania were merely the result of an untreated case of meningitis. Likewise, Eberle and Neumann were unable to find any evidence that Hitler was missing a testicle or that his penis was deformed after allegedly being bitten by a goat in his younger days. 

They also dismiss as “absurd” the theory of historian Bernhard Horstmann, who posits that Hitler’s personality was drastically altered in 1918 during a session of hypnosis therapy because the therapist failed to wake him up from a trance. As a lance corporal in World War I, Hitler was temporarily blinded after a mustard-gas attack. He went on to receive hypnosis therapy in a military hospital in the northeastern German town of Pasewalk. 

Conspiracy theorists reading Eberle and Neumann’s book will likely be disappointed by the authors’ findings about Hitler’s supposed illnesses. In the end, they conclude that Hitler had Parkinson’s disease and that his declining health was obvious in the final months leading up to his suicide in April 1945. Nevertheless, they write, “at no time did Hitler suffer from pathological delusions.” In fact, they conclude that the despot was always aware of his actions: “He was fully responsible.” 

Strange Advice 

Regardless of their findings, Hitler’s decisions did remain impulsive, inexplicable and contemptuous of human life to the very end. Eventually, even Hitler’s “dear Doctor” Morell must have realized this. Even after Germany’s defenses had fallen apart on all fronts and the war was already lost, Hitler’s personal physician stoically attended to his patient’s blood pressure, stomach cramps and digestive problems in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. Ultimately, Hitler thanked Morell in his own way. On April 21, 1945, he dismissed his loyal physician from the bunker and sent him on his way with a strange piece of advice: He told Morell to return to his practice on Kurfürstendamm. 

Meanwhile, just outside his bunker, the last remnants of Germany’s military were battling the Red Army as it fought its way into central Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. 

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,675991,00.html

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Berlin to Resurrect its Disgraced Monuments

‘Hello Lenin’

The granite head of the Lenin Statue being removed from eastern Berlin’s Lenin Square (now called United Nations Square) in 1991.

In a sign of how time is healing Berlin’s wounds, the city plans to dig up the giant Lenin monument it famously buried in 1991 and place it in a new museum for disgraced statues. The works will span the communist and Nazi eras and date far back into Prussian times.

Berlin tore down its biggest statue of Lenin, a 19-meter (62-foot) high monster, in 1991, just two years after the fall of the Wall. The removal symbolized Berlin’s desperate rush to rid itself of all reminders of its communist past, and was featured in the hit movie “Goodbye Lenin.”

In a sign that Berlin has since gained a more dispassionate view of its history, the 3.5 ton head, buried in a sand pit on the outskirts of the city, is going to be resurrected and placed in a new permanent exhibition along with scores of other monumental statues from the Cold War era.

Nazi-era statues of idealized Aryan figures will also be put on show, along with monuments to generals that date as far back as the 18th century and exude the grandeur and militarism of Prussia.

“A certain amount of time has to pass before people can take a more relaxed approach to history,” Andrea Theissen, the project leader, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The exhibition is a wonderful way to portray how historical monuments have been dealt with. It’s typical of Berlin’s turbulent history that nothing is left standing where it was once erected.”

Tainted by History

Other cities have led the way in resurrecting unwanted monuments tainted by history, albeit in outdoor parks that resemble graveyards of communism. Budapest has its Statue Park containing bombastic statues of Lenin and Karl Marx as well as Hungarian communist leaders. Moscow has its Fallen Monument Park containing all the top stars.

Berlin appears to have decided that after decades languishing in the ground or gathering dust in forgotten vaults, its disgraced monuments have suffered enough.

A total of 100 monuments will go on show in the Spandau Citadel, a Renaissance fortress in the Spandau district of Berlin, in 2013. The exhibition will be called “Unveiled. Berlin and its Monuments.” Two halls with nine-meter-high ceilings are being prepared for the august historical exhibits.

‘Not a Site of Worship’

“This isn’t going to be a site of worship,” says Theissen. “It’s about explaining and challenging the cult of monuments.”

Some of the statues will come from the vaults of the German Historical Museum and the regional monument protection department. Others such as a marble statue of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhem III and Queen Luise are already at the Citadel and being prepared for restoration. Some were damaged in World War II and those scars will be preserved as further testimony to Germany’s troubled history.

The exhibition will also display a group of 16 grand statues of dukes, kings and emperors erected in Berlin’s Tiergarten park in 1901 under Emperor Wilhelm II. They were removed by the Allies after World War II.

One of the Nazi monuments going on show will be sculptor Arno Breker’s “Decathlete.” Gerhard Hanke, the Spandau district councillor in charge of cultural affairs, said: “The exhibition will attract international attention.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,674218,00.html

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Lobbyist Trial Could Embarrass Political Establishment

Dodgy Deals and Slush Funds

Schreiber was extradited to Germany from Canada in August 2009 following a long legal battle.

The trial of the former arms lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, who is connected to a major German political scandal of the 1990s, began Monday. Schreiber’s testimony could shed light on dodgy dealings in German politics and may prove very uncomfortable for Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union party. 

Karlheinz Schreiber still has friends in Bavaria, but no longer among the highest circles. Nowadays, the senior members of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union party, agents with the German foreign intelligence agency BND and defense industry executives he once counted among his friends barely give Schreiber the time of day. 

But Schreiber, a jovial 75-year-old from the small Bavarian town of Kaufering, is very popular among the employees at the correctional facility in the southern German city of Augsburg. While in detention awaiting trial, Schreiber made himself popular, telling the guards exciting stories from the world of international business. He knows the names of their children and even remembers their birthdays, and is on a first-name basis with some of the staff. 

Schreiber’s engaging manner even helped to convince the prison administration to refurbish the shabby latrine in his cell. His new facilities, according to prison gossip, are everything but standard issue. Schreiber knows how to inspire people, and he’s an excellent negotiator. “I’m one of the best salesman in the world,” he once said. 

In the coming weeks, Schreiber’s powers of persuasion could become very important for him — and very uncomfortable for some of his former associates. On Monday, his trial on charges of tax evasion, bribery and accessory to fraud began in Augsburg District Court in Bavaria. Schreiber’s attorney Jan Olaf Leisner read out a written statement by his client in which Schreiber categorically rejected the charges against him. 

High-Profile Scandal 

It’s 15 years since the Augsburg public prosecutor’s office first initiated an investigation against Schreiber and a number of his associates in the business and political worlds who were suspected of taking bribes from the lobbyist. It’s also 10 years since Schreiber, who holds dual Canadian and German citizenship, fled to Canada because of the investigation against him, marking the beginning of a seemingly endless extradition battle. That ended in August 2009, when Schreiber was extradited to Germany.

Back in 1999, the investigation triggered one of the biggest scandals in postwar German political history. It involved political contributions to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and led to the resignation of the then-party head Wolfgang Schäuble, who is now Germany’s finance minister, as well as tarnishing the reputation of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and helping Angela Merkel in her rise to power. The trial could now be the source of further explosive revelations involving party funding. 

Schreiber, a former arms lobbyist, has threatened several times to expose the sources of millions of German marks he received in commissions, some of which point to the CSU, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party and a partner in Angela Merkel’s coalition government. Schreiber resents the leaders of his former party for not having put a stop to the investigation against him in Bavaria. “If someone challenges me, they shouldn’t be surprised if I shoot back,” he said a few years ago, in a remark clearly directed at the CSU. 

Where Did the Cash Go? 

The Augsburg court has scheduled 26 days of hearings for the mammoth trial, which will revolve around the sale of helicopters and Airbus aircraft to Canada and 36 Fuchs armored personnel carriers to Saudi Arabia. Between 1988 and 1993, Schreiber is alleged to have received about 46 million German marks (€23.5 million), paid via front companies, in return for his brokering services. 

Aircraft manufacturers MBB and Airbus are believed to have paid commissions for the Canada deal to a firm called International Aircraft Leasing (IAL). In the case of the armored vehicles deal, investigators believe that large sums of money were paid to a Panamanian firm called ATG. Schreiber is believed to have owned both companies. 

The prosecution alleges that Schreiber never paid taxes on the money. It also alleges that some of the money was used to make contributions to political parties in Germany, via Swiss bank accounts, in the hope of securing political influence — a charge Schreiber denies. 

What can’t be denied, however, is the fact that millions were paid into the Swiss accounts by IAL and ATG. To determine how much Schreiber owes in back taxes, the court will have to find out what happened to the rest of the money. Did Schreiber keep it? Or were there others who benefited from the cash? 

Illustrious Group 

Over the next few months, the court will hear testimony from witnesses who are well known to the public from other trials involving the Schreiber affair. The familiar faces will include Max Strauss, who was acquitted, and two executives from the German company Thyssen, who were given prison terms. Then there is the convicted former CSU senior official Ludwig-Holger Pfahls and Walther Leisler Kiep who, during his tenure as CDU treasurer, accepted a briefcase filled with 1 million German marks from Schreiber during a clandestine meeting at a shopping center. Other witnesses will include former sales managers at Airbus and MBB, negotiators for Arab consortiums, Swiss bankers and trustees. The illustrious group is hardly likely to offer much in the way of additional information, however. 

The defendant’s testimony, on the other hand, could shed new light on the affair. While still in Canada, Schreiber had spoken about a fund for the CSU, a war chest of sorts, which he was supposed to set up on behalf of the then-party chairman Franz Josef Strauss. Schreiber was supposed to pay money from commissions into the fund, which was set up in the 1980s with upcoming election campaigns in mind. After all, as Schreiber pointed out, campaigns “cost a whole lot of money.” 

Schreiber claims that the only people who knew about the fund were Strauss, his son Max and the later CSU Chairman Edmund Stoiber — and, of course, the party’s powerful donations administrator, Munich attorney Franz Josef Dannecker, who died in 1992. 

Under Financial Pressure 

In addition to being the only person who was fully informed about the flow of funds and donations in and out of the CSU, Dannecker was a close adviser to the Strauss family. Strauss had authorized Dannecker to collect contributions to the party and deposit them in suitable locations. 

An account for the “election campaign” fund was allegedly set up in the tiny Alpine principality of Liechtenstein. By Nov. 25, 1994, according to Schreiber, the account had accumulated a balance of the equivalent of 4.82 million German marks. “As I recall, sums were withdrawn from this fund twice,” said Schreiber. 

Stoiber, Max Strauss and the CSU consistently dismissed such reports as pure fantasy, but now Schreiber is supposedly able to provide account statements to back up his claims. The Augsburg judges will only reduce the immense sum Schreiber presumably owes in back taxes if he can prove who actually received the money. Besides, things could become so tight financially for Schreiber that his former cronies can not expect to be spared. 

Close Friends 

New evidence has emerged that reinforces Schreiber’s description of illicit CSU accounts. The trail leads to Liechtenstein, and there is also a connection to Dannecker. For about the past year, the public prosecutor’s office in the western German city of Bochum has been investigating a businessman from Munich, who has ties to the CSU, in connection with suspected tax evasion, as the defendant’s attorney has told SPIEGEL. Information about a foundation ascribed to the businessman was found on DVDs containing data from the Liechtenstein-based private bank LGT Treuhand, which the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), purchased in 2007. The man was a close friend of CSU contribution manager Franz Josef Dannecker, as well as the executor of his estate. 

The foundation in question also played a role in a fraud trial in Switzerland. The Zurich District Court suspected that it was being used as a depository for funds stemming from questionable investment transactions. During the trial, one of the witnesses testified that he was convinced that the foundation was also used for transactions involving the CSU. Prosecutors have so far been unable to prove the claim. Nevertheless, the Bochum investigators believe that there are parallels between the Swiss case and Schreiber’s claims about the Liechtenstein party fund. 

A Memorable Visit 

At the beginning of 1996, there was an incident at LGT Treuhand in the Liechtenstein capital Vaduz that employees there remember to this day. On Feb. 7, just after it had been revealed that Bavarian prosecutors were planning to conduct new raids relating to the Schreiber affair, an attorney from Munich appeared in person at the bank. 

The man, who had only notified bank officials of his upcoming visit at the last minute, identified himself and demanded the immediate surrender of all documents relating to the foundation in question. 

The request seemed odd to the LGT employees, particularly as their customers normally had no interest in removing potentially incriminating documents from the premises. The scope of the documents was also unusual. According to bank employees, the attorney left LGT with six to eight thick, gray files filled with copies relating to a wide range of financial transactions. Other foundations generally limited themselves to a few pages of rudimentary information about assets and beneficiaries. 

Were LGT’s Bavarian customers worried about possible searches by the authorities? According to sources at LGT, once the files had been removed, the money in the foundation was also withdrawn and transferred to an institution in Monaco. 

Clear Message 

The businessman under investigation by the Bochum prosecutors, as well as his attorney, claimed that they were unaware of any of this, and that there had been no ties between the foundation and the CSU or Karlheinz Schreiber. The attorney, for his part, said that he did not recall ever having paid a visit to LGT Treuhand. Officials at CSU party headquarters in Munich said that they had no knowledge of the Liechtenstein foundation. 

The Augsburg prosecutors are aware that they will be unable to use all of the evidence from Schreiber’s past to support their case. Much of the information that could emerge in the trial in the coming weeks is likely to be statute-barred and, therefore, will only be of political relevance. 

Besides, the prosecutors are not intent on putting Schreiber, who is in poor health, behind bars for the rest of his life. For them, the fact that the trial is taking place at all is a success, because it will send the message that “no one will be able to escape prosecution in the future by fleeing to another country.” 

Schreiber’s attorneys have so far remained silent on their trial strategy. It is clear, however, that the defendant has been spending much of his time in his Augsburg prison cell diligently sorting through documents relating to flows of funds, and that he will be well-prepared by the time he enters the courtroom. When it comes to defending his honor as a businessman, Schreiber isn’t the kind of person who is likely to take things lying down. 

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,672504,00.html

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Berlin Authorities Seize Corpse for Pre-Burial Autopsy

Rosa Luxemburg Mystery Continues

 

If Berlin officials have their way, Rosa Luxemburg’s body might finally make it to the grave that has borne her name for 90 years.

A mystery emerged in May when a doctor in Berlin discovered a torso stored for decades in his hospital’s basement that appeared to belong to left-wing icon Rosa Luxemburg. Berlin authorities have now seized the corpse to perform a final autopsy before placing it in the grave that has borne her name since 1919.

Berlin authorities have seized what is believed to be the corpse of the post-World War I German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, according to a report published in Thursday’s edition of the mass-circulation daily Bild. The public prosecutor’s office reportedly took possession of the headless, handless and footless torso of “Red Rosa” after a judge ordered an autopsy that will allow the body to be buried.

Investigators told Bild that a “formal investigation of the cause of death” will be conducted “by Friday, at the latest.”

In an ironic twist, it was an autopsy report that originally led to speculation that Luxemburg’s body had never left Berlin’s Charité hospital in June 1919 in the first place. In May, Michael Tsokos, head of the hospital’s Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences department stated his belief that a corpse he had found in the hospital’s cellar might belong to Rosa Luxemburg. When examining the medical examiner’s report associated with the corpse, Tsokos noticed a number of suspicious irregularities in both the details of the report and the way one of the originally examining physicians added an addendum in which he distanced himself from the conclusions of his colleague, which Tsokos called “a very unusual occurrence.”

Suspicious, Tsokos had a number of elaborate tests, such as carbon dating and computer tomography exams, performed on the corpse. The tests determined that it had been waterlogged, had belonged to a woman between 40 and 50 years old at the time of death, that she had suffered from osteoarthritis and that she had legs of different lengths.

‘Striking Similiarities’

As Tsokos told SPIEGEL in May, he concluded that the corpse bore “striking similarities with the real Rosa Luxemburg.”

At the time of her death, Luxemburg was the 47-year-old co-founder of Germany’s Communist Party (KPD). She suffered from a congenital hip ailment that left her with a permanent limp, which in turn caused her legs to be of different lengths. And after her violent death at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries in January 1919, her body was thrown into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal.

Even the missing hands and feet fit with Tsokos’ theory. When the revolutionary was thrown into the canal, eyewitnesses say weights were tied to her ankles and wrists with wire. During the months her corpse spent under water, they could have easily severed her extremities.

In the spring, when the canal thawed out, Luxemburg’s body was recovered and taken to Charité hospital for an autopsy. Soon thereafter, a body — though presumably not hers — was placed in a grave with her name on it in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery. The site has been visited every year by a procession of old communists and young left-wing activists, who march through the streets of the former East Berlin to lay red carnations on her gravestone and honor her as a martyr to the communist cause. The remains that were once placed in that grave could not be used in resolving the mystery because they disappeared after virulently anti-communist Nazis attacked and plundered the graves in 1935.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,667606,00.html

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See also:

German corpse ‘may be Rosa Luxemburg’

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/german-corpse-may-be-rosa-luxemburg/

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Giant Penis Sparks Bizarre Media War

Berlin’s History Res-Erected

Berlin newspaper the Taz has sparked a war with its rival Bild by displaying a risqué artwork on the outside of its building.

Four decades ago, the mass-circulation tabloid Bild did its best to squelch the 1968 student movement in Berlin. This year, the German capital has seen the conflict swell once again. And it has resulted in some rather stiff competition. 

The shimmering, gold-colored high-rise building that publisher Axel Springer had built in the 1960s is just a stone’s throw from the offices of Berlin’s legendary left-wing Tageszeitung newspaper, more commonly known simply as the “Taz.” But for someone looking from the 17th floor of the Springer building, where the main editorial offices of the influential tabloid newspaper Bild are located, a few trees block the view of the gray building that houses the editorial offices of the Taz, a publication that appears to believe even today that it has the right to dictate what it means to be left-wing in Germany. 

But what exactly does it mean to be “left-wing” these days? Is it left-wing to attach to the outside of the Taz building a sculpture of Bild editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann showing him naked, wearing red glasses and cheap brown loafers and equipped with a penis that extends all the way up the front of the Taz building? Or is it just in poor taste? 

Diekmann, 45, is standing in front of the Taz building on Rudi Dutschke Street. He is wearing a gray pinstriped suit and brown brogues that look like they cost several hundred euros. He tilts his head back to take a look at his enormous pink doppelganger. “I came all the way down here to see it because there are trees blocking my view,” says Diekmann. “But I still haven’t quite figured out who the sculpture on the front of this building is supposed to depict.” 

Well, Diekmann himself, of course. 

At this moment, Diekmann looks a little like the American comic actor Buster Keaton, who always looked slightly sad. But there is also a trace of triumph and irony in his face. “It can’t be me,” he says. “The artist, Peter Lenk, expressly denied that it’s me.” 

‘A Six-Meter-Long Schlong’ 

An odd dispute has been the source of excitement in Berlin’s media community in recent weeks. On the one side of the dispute is Taz, published by a cooperative, constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and with a paid circulation of 65,000. On the other side is the editor-in-chief of Europe’s biggest newspaper, Bild, the cash cow of the Springer Group, with a circulation of more than 3 million. 

Lenk, 62, an artist from Lake Constance, attached his anti-Springer installation, “Peace Be With You,” to the façade of the building with the approval of Taz management. It didn’t take long before the installation had triggered anger and outrage — but not from the gold-colored high-rise nearby. In fact, the displeasure over Lenk’s piece came from the fifth floor of the Taz building, where Ines Pohl moved into an office four months ago as the publication’s new editor-in-chief. 

“I’m going to have to lock up my bike every morning under a six-meter-long schlong for the next two years,” says Ines Pohl, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of the Taz.

“If the artist Peter Lenk has his way, I’m going to have to lock up my bike every morning under a six-meter-long schlong for the next two years,” Pohl says. “What a pathetic provocation. How tedious. I’m just not interested in this inflated smugness that revolves around the sad, never-ending male rivalry over who has the longest penis.” She wants the sculpture removed. 

Diekmann can hardly believe his luck, now that his adversaries are turning their weapons on themselves. The satire that was intended to expose him has become a comedy about the Taz editors and their image of themselves. While chaos was erupting at the Taz, Diekmann began a game of self-deprecating jujitsu on his blog. 

In a blog entry titled “The Naked and the Reds,” Diekmann scoffs at his counterparts at the Taz, who have apparently “become so humorless and bitter recently that you have to ask yourself: Are these people truly brothers in spirit?” In another entry, entitled “How Much Dick Is Acceptable?”, he gleefully commiserates with his esteemed colleagues over at Taz: “I had a feeling this would happen. Now my Taz comrades are tearing each other apart over that naked monument.” 

Pranksters and Reactionaries 

The world has been turned upside-down on Rudi Dutschke Street. The team that likes to claim that its job is to stir things up in bourgeois society now finds itself with its back against a wall adorned by an art installation it approved. Meanwhile, the supposedly reactionary die-hards at Bild are using the tools of the modern prankster to stir things up at the Taz. The casual observer could be forgiven for being confused by the strange goings-on at the two papers. Who exactly are the revolutionaries here, and who is bourgeois? 

Kai Diekmann, at any rate, appears to derive a certain Mephistophelian glee from playing the Springer prankster. When he walks through the door of Sale e Tabacchi, an Italian restaurant on the ground floor of the Taz building, he seems about as energetic and self-confident as if he owned the place. 

The restaurant was once a favorite of the editors at Taz, who had worked out a deal with Sale e Tabacchi whereby they could get lunch for a bargain €3.50 ($5.20). Germany’s poorest editorial staff once had the country’s best cafeteria. But then they began finding fault with the food. Nowadays Diekmann uses Sale e Tabacchi as a living room of sorts, and he even launched his book “Der grosse Selbstbetrug” (“The Great Self-Deception”), a critique of the German student protest movements of the late 1960s, at the restaurant. 

“Enemy territory? Not at all,” says Diekmann. For some time now, Taz employees have been eating lunch in their own cafeteria, where “Fennel au gratin with gorgonzola béchamel sauce, bulgur and vegetable pilaf” can be had for €5.95. 

A Long-Lasting Culture War 

It is quite possible that Berlin is now the scene of the last battle in a culture war that has lasted more than 40 years, a battle between the left-wing scene and Bild, which berated the protesters during the student unrest of the 1960s and sparked popular anger against people who were perceived to be deadbeats. The student activists held Bild and its headlines responsible for the death of student protester Benno Ohnesorg and the attempted assassination of the legendary student leader Rudi Dutschke. Even today, more than 40 years later, there is little reason to see these events differently. 

The journalistic heirs of Axel Springer are still wrestling with the past today, despite all efforts to modernize the group’s publications. Thomas Schmid, the editor-in-chief of Springer’s flagship conservative newspaper Die Welt, is a former confidant of the leftist politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the head of the Greens in the European Parliament. And Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner invited veteran German left-wing activists Christian Semler and Peter Schneider to attend a “Springer Tribunal” at the media conglomerate’s headquarters — although his offer was flatly rejected, because Semler and Schneider felt that they would be paraded around like trophies. 

There have always been, and still are, many unsettled accounts between Taz and Springer. Most of the time, Springer came away looking foolish because the writers and editors at Taz managed to expose their rivals with humor, impudence and chutzpah. For example, the Taz team, despite opposition from the Berlin branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and the Springer Group, managed to have a section of Kochstrasse, the street where their offices are located, renamed Rudi Dutschke Street as a tribute to the left-wing hero. 

The Limits of Satire 

In recent years, Diekmann was usually their most prominent victim. They gave him unflattering nicknames and accused him of cozying up to the “brutal George W. in Washington” and “whispering ass-kissing words” to him. 

Diekmann takes a bite of his sandwich. “I’ve become more prudent and have matured in the last seven years,” he says. “I have allowed myself to be convinced that satire can be given a great deal of latitude. But that has to apply across the board, not just to the satire at Taz.” 

In 2002, Taz reported in its satire column that the Bild editor-in-chief had had his penis enlarged in Miami. “In the operation,” Taz wrote, “the veins, erectile tissue and flesh from the genitals of a male corpse were supposed to be implanted into his body, but the operation went badly, and it resulted in the castration of the patient.” 

Things only became worse for Diekmann when he sued for an injunction against Taz and demanded €30,000 ($44,700) in damages. The court ruled against him. Until then, it was only a few people in the leftist scene who had been laughing at him. Now one of the most powerful editors-in-chief in Germany was looking like a fool. 

The Anti-Phallus Contingent 

The day after Diekmann walked down to inspect his alleged likeness, a company meeting was held at Taz to discuss what to do about the art installation. A number of readers had expressed their irritation, and the pink monstrosity had become a source of embarrassment for many of the editors. But hardly anyone wanted to give Diekmann the satisfaction of seeing the sculpture being taken down. 

A decision to remove the installation was postponed. There are now two camps at Taz. On the one side are those who no longer want to be made fools of by their arch-nemesis and who berate the anti-phallus contingent as “neo-bourgeois and prudish.” On the other are people like editor-in-chief Ines Pohl who just want to see the thing removed. Almost all of them find the discussion embarrassing, but even after debating the issue for almost two-and-a-half hours, they haven’t come up with an effective response to Diekmann. 

After the meeting, Pohl is standing in the cafeteria. She is wearing a green parka and her eyes seem glazed over. She shrugs her shoulders. One staff member, she says, suggested installing a fountain into the tip of the penis, but that isn’t an option. For now, she says, the unwanted sculpture is staying where it is. 

It is Pohl’s first experience of what it’s like to be in charge at a publication where direct democracy rules. In other words, she doesn’t have much say at the paper. Pohl was brought in four months ago to shift Taz a little further to the left. Many editors complained that Pohl’s urbane predecessor, Bascha Mika, had become more interested in going on talk shows than in taking part in the fight against nuclear power. 

Pohl, on the other hand, is not so interested in the spotlight. She has attended anti-nuclear and peace rallies in Mutlangen, the former site of a US military base in southwest Germany, was the women’s affairs representative at the University of Göttingen and has worked for various regional newspapers. Pohl balks at the idea of promoting herself as a public figure, something that seems to form part of the job of an editor-in-chief today. She seems somewhat outclassed in the dispute with Diekmann. 

Sympathy for the Devil 

Diekmann, on the other hand, comes across as if he has been preparing for his job as Bild editor-in-chief his whole life. When he was only 14, he held a microphone up to the face of his idol, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Today Kohl is practically part of the family; Kohl was Diekmann’s best man at his wedding in 2002, and Diekmann returned the favor when Kohl married for a second time in 2008. 

By the age of 36, Diekmann had made it to the top at Bild. Since then he has assembled a small team around him. They run a blog together with Diekmann, where he also sells hot pants imprinted with the inscription “I Heart KD” and shoulder bags with the inscription “Sympathy for the Devil.” 

Six months ago, Diekmann — in complete seriousness, of course — joined the Taz cooperative, which owns the newspaper and currently has over 8,900 members. “We wanted to reach the target of 9,000 cooperative members by the end of the year,” Diekmann told SPIEGEL. “We are currently being forced to abandon this goal,” he said, adding, in a reference to the artist who created the penis sculpture, “I’m afraid the Lenk campaign is backfiring. That’s something we need to talk about.” 

In 2003, he was even guest editor for one issue of the Taz, which garnered record circulation figures. But now many at the Taz have the feeling that they made a pact with the devil at the time. 

Meanwhile, the sculpture will stay up for another two years — at least. Peter Lenk, the artist, has cited a verbal agreement with Kalle Ruch, the managing director of the Taz. “If anyone touches it before then,” says Lenk, “it’ll cost them €130,000 — and that would be a special price because we’re friends.” 

Folk Hero 

Lenk is sitting in the kitchen of his house on Lake Constance. He worked on the piece for one year, and at the end, when he had accumulated material costs of close to €28,000, he even hocked his sailboat. His bawdy satirical pieces have made Lenk a folk hero on Lake Constance. 

Last year, he installed a triptych depicting an orgy in front of the city hall in the southwestern city of Ludwigshafen. In the piece, a naked Chancellor Angela Merkel is grabbing former Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber’s genitals, while former Volkswagen works council member Klaus Volkert gropes Brazilian whores — a reference to a much-publicized scandal at the carmaker. The piece attracted such large crowds that the city administration collected €6,000 in fines for illegally parked cars in the first eight weeks alone. The city has since installed a small viewing area with benches in front of the sculpture. 

Lenk is an anarchically minded left-winger of the old school. He attended demonstrations in Stuttgart where he would shout obscene slogans. He was later fired from his job as a teacher because he was allowing his students to give themselves grades. Lenk has been a sculptor since then. 

With his populist art, Lenk is a kind of Kai Diekmann of the Lake Constance art scene. But this isn’t enough for him anymore. Now he wants to make his mark in Berlin. 

“The ball is on the penalty spot, ready to be kicked straight into the executive floor of the the Springer building,” says Lenk. “Right under the nose of those people who are obsessed with schadenfreude and tawdry sex.” 

Ines Pohl, says Lenk, wants to turn the Taz into a serious newspaper. “But me,” says Lenk defiantly, “I’m not serious.” 

Diekmann seems to believe that the outcome of the culture war has already been decided — in his favor, of course. For this reason, he has invited the Taz staff to attend a party to bury the hatchet, with free beer courtesy of Bild. 

The thought alone turns the stomach of Taz old hand and blog manager Mathias Bröckers. “We’ve always had better parties,” says Bröckers. “Now we’ve got this pecker hanging on the wall for the next two years.” After it comes down, he says, there will still be time to make up with the people at Bild. 

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,664926,00.html

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‘Even Atheists Need to Switch Off on Sundays’

The World from Berlin

Shoppers walk among illuminated Christmas decorations in a shopping mall at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz.

Germany’s highest court has ruled that Sunday should be kept as a day of rest and has overturned a Berlin law easing restrictions on Sunday shopping. Most German newspapers on Wednesday greet the ruling, some for reasons of religion and tradition, others out of a concern for workers’ rights.

Many visitors to Germany can find themselves standing outside a closed department store, perplexed to find that they cannot do a bit of shopping during their weekend trip. This is a result of Germany’s long-held resistance to Sunday shopping even in the face of growing consumerism.

Yet many of Germany’s 16 states have already made some exceptions, allowing stores to open a few Sundays a year. And in Berlin the city government had gone the furthest in chipping away at the ban on Sunday trading. In 2006 the German capital gave the green light for retailers to open on 10 Sundays a year, including the four Advent Sundays preceding Christmas.

However, Germany’s Constitutional Court has now upheld a complaint made by the country’s Catholic and Protestant churches, based on a clause in the German constitution that Sunday should be a day of rest and “spiritual elevation.”

The court on Tuesday decided in favor of the churches, saying that Sunday opening should not take place four weeks in a row. The ruling will not affect shopping this December, but would come into force next year. However, the ruling did not overturn completely the principle of limited Sunday store opening.

The labor unions had joined the churches in their campaign to ring-fence Sunday as a day off for the nation. However, their focus was not on protecting the right to practise religion, but rather on protecting workers in the retail sector from having to work on Sundays, sometimes the only day they might get to spend with other members of their family. The services union Verdi greeted Tuesday’s ruling with “relief and joy,” saying this was a boon to shopworkers and their families.

German papers on Wednesday are broadly in favor of the ruling, though their reasons for supporting the court’s decision are strikingly different.

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“The Constitutional Court had to overthrow the Berlin law. … The judgement was not ‘out of touch with reality,’ as the Berlin Chamber of Commerce claims, but is actually very closely in touch with real life. The great diversity of working lives brings with it the fact that members of a single family are forced into different and sometimes incompatible working hours. If the state does not use some of its regulatory power to give a dependable rhythm to at least one free day — and that is still Sunday — then the family faces the threat of being pulled further apart.”

“If they have no time with each other and for each other, then the formal notion of belonging together loses value. This danger faces many families in society. … The fact that in the face of growing commercialization and fewer jobs hardly any employee ever dares to ask for a free Saturday, led the labor unions to join the churches in their campaign — with noticeable success.”

The conservative Die Welt writes:

“The churches have argued correctly that employees in the retail sector are not given the possibility of organizing their Advent Sundays according to Christian principles: going to church, being involved in the community, singing and reading aloud. It is part of religious freedom to be able to do these things.”

“The judges did not just endorse the division of time marked by Christianity, but also the necessity for this division. There is no ambiguity about this weekly rhythm. We people as social animals are duty bound and justified in dividing our time together. It is good to have free time together, it helps us to live as the social beings that we are.”

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

“The judgement sounds antiquated, maddeningly unmodern and pretty patronizing. It tells citizens when they are allowed to shop, and when they are not. It makes shopping on a Sunday an exception. It is a ruling that goes against the economic liberal zeitgeist and is a ruling against the round-the-clock commercialization of life.”

“Yet, the ruling is humane. It is an act in favor of the public spirit. … Those who regularly go shopping on Sundays today will have to work regularly on Sundays tomorrow.”

“It may sound old fashioned but it is still correct: Sunday is Sunday because it is unlike other days. This is not about tradition or religion or a social heritage. Sunday is more than just a day off for individuals. It that were so, then it wouldn’t matter if someone took a day off on Tuesday or Thursday. It is a day to synchronize society, that is what makes it so important. Without Sunday, every day would be a working day and a fixed point in the week would disappear. Of course there can be exceptions, there have always been particular professions who work on Sundays. But when the exception becomes the rule, then the commercialization of Sundays will not end at the department stores.”

“The court has given everyone the right to a day off on Sundays. You don’t have to take it. Everyone can do what they like with it. But it is good to have it.”

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

“The ruling by the Constitutional Court has revived the emotional debate about opening hours of shops on Sundays. That alone is annoying. But even more annoying is that with its strong emphasis on the religiously based day of rest on Sunday, it is interfering in individual and economic freedom.”

“Without a doubt the freedom to practise religion is of great value. However, in an increasingly secular society with more and more individualized rhythms of living, it seems an anachronism for the country’s highest court to use retail of all things to save the day of rest.”

“In the public debate there is too little mention of the freedom of shop owners to keep customers through opening on Sundays, who would otherwise order online. And the freedom of towns to use Sunday opening hours to attract tourists. Or the freedom of customers to decide for themselves if they would rather spend Sundays amidst the crowds in the shopping malls or walking in the forest.”

“Appreciating these rights does not mean throwing away the country to the false god of consumerism. It means allowing a debate … about what Sunday really means to us. That includes protecting the rights of salespeople, paying them extra for working on Sundays and not putting anyone under pressure to work on Sunday.”

“If this is achieved, then it is high time that Sunday opening hours are no longer discussed in terms of belief but rationally.”

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung, which is based in Berlin, writes:

“Sunday as a day off is a great gift. The treadmill is closed for 24 hours. The court has given relaxation, rest and ‘spiritual elevation’ precedence over the thirst for profit and the right to a consumer fix. However, it made it clear in its ruling that Sunday was not just for those who wanted to practise their religion undisturbed. It is also to play cards, go for a walk or simply to laze around. After all even the strictest atheist needs the switching off that Sundays allow.”

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,664754,00.html

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German Police Capture Second Escapee

Six Days on the Lam

German police have recaptured the second of two armed convicts who escaped from a maximum-security prison last Thursday and took several people hostage during their flight. At one point, they reportedly savored their freedom by visiting Cologne’s Christmas market.

 

An undated police handout shows Peter Paul Michalski, one of two convicts who escaped from prison last Thursday. He was recaptured on Tuesday.

Germany’s most spectacular jailbreak of the year ended Tuesday with the arrest of the second of two prisoners who had been described as armed and dangerous as they led police on a cat-and-mouse chase, briefly taking several people hostage along the way.

A police SWAT team arrested Peter Paul Michalski, 46, Tuesday at 9:50 a.m. just outside the small town of Schermbeck in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Although police have yet to release details on how they located Michalski, they arrested him after chasing him in a car while he was cycling along a road. Michalski was not wounded when the car pushed his bike off the road, police said.

Michalski had escaped a maximum-security prison in the western city of Aachen last Thursday with Michael Heckhoff, 50, triggering a manhunt across northwestern Germany, which was aided by helicopters. At one point, the entire downtown area of the city of Mülheim was sealed off.

Both men were serving life sentences, Heckhoff for kidnapping and attempted murder and Michalski for a 1993 murder. They allegedly seized pistols from a prison guard during their escape.

Heckhoff was arrested on Sunday. On Tuesday, the mass-circulation daily tabloid Bild published an interview with him in which he described how they escaped by copying a key in the prison workshop and threatening two guards with a pistol they had purchased in jail from another prison guard.

They seized two more pistols, walked out of jail and hijacked taxis to Cologne. Police arrested one guard on Friday on suspicion of helping in the escape.

“The first thing we did was go to the Christmas market,” Bild quoted Heckhoff as saying. “We bought chips and mineral water at a chip stall. While we were eating, we saw a police helicopter circling above us. So we hid under a bridge.”

Cologne police said in a statement that they were investigating how Bild got hold of the interview with Heckhoff and whether his comments were true.

Heckhoff added that they spent the night freezing under the bridge and managed to wash in a nearby hospital and have breakfast in its cafeteria.

Later, they took a woman hostage and forced her to drive them out of the city. “We got out and Paul gave the girl a tenner for fuel. She had to get home somehow,” Heckhoff reportedly told the paper. Though that might make them seem like nice-enough fellows, Heckhoff was actually serving time for pouring gasoline on two people and setting them on fire.

Heckhoff also allegedly said that he and Michalski then walked into a forest. Spotting the police, they hid under two wheelbarrows. They then broke into a villa and held a man and his wife hostage overnight. “They knew who we were. We made it clear to them that they didn’t have to be afraid ofd us,” Heckhoff told the paper. They then reportedly showered, watched television, ate a meal the man cooked for them, robbed the two of €200 ($300) and took off in their BMW.

The next day, while Heckhoff was arrested in Mülheim, Michalski managed to get away. Police had asked pharmacies to watch out for Michalski because he needed prescription drugs.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,664508,00.html

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Rocker Offends Germans with Nazi-Era Anthem

Doherty Über Alles

Pete Doherty on stage at his concert in Munich Sunday following his gaffe on a live radio broadcast on Saturday.

British musician Pete Doherty was booed heavily in Germany after singing the first verse of the German national anthem. The lyrics are taboo in Germany because of their Nazi associations.

Pete Doherty, a scandal-ridden British rockstar best known for having dated supermodel Kate Moss, has made headlines again — and for once, it’s actually about his singing.

The Babyshambles frontman took to the stage Saturday evening at a festival that was being simultaneously broadcast live on the radio station Bayern 2. He had originally showed up to watch the concert, but talked his way on stage. After taking the microphone, the clearly drunk rocker started to sing the first verse of the German national anthem, which has been taboo since World War II because of its Nazi associations.

“With a quiet voice, he sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’ (‘Germany, Germany Above All’) four times,” said Rudi Küffner, a spokesman for Bayern 2′s parent company, Bayerischer Rundfunk. “Then the audience booed him so loudly that he had to start another song.” As well as boos, the crowd reacted with whistles and outstretched middle fingers.

The first verse of the German national anthem, which is known as the “Deutschlandlied” (“Germany Song”), is no longer part of the official anthem due to its association with the Nazis. The modern version of the national anthem only uses the third stanza of the song.

Bayerischer Rundfunk says the live broadcast was quickly taken off the air but Doherty remained on stage. He moved on to the next song but his manager pulled him off after his fourth song. “After that, we could no longer guarantee his safety,” Rainer Tief, the program manager for Bayerischer Rundfunk told the Munich newspaper TZ.

The broadcaster has already issued an apology and is hoping that Doherty will apologize as well. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t foresee this. Live is live,” said Rainer Tief. “As the Brits say: We were not amused.”

Doherty has long been a subject of celebrity tabloid gossip. The 30-year-old singer has appeared in court numerous times for drug possession, robbery and assault. Following another appearance in Munich, at the 2007 MTV European Music Awards, he was caught on camera relapsing into his heroin habit.

His musical talent was first noticed while he was part of The Libertines, a band which also created headlines in Germany for their song “Arbeit Macht Frei.” The title of the song, which is about racism in Britain, is an infamous slogan which was placed over the entrance of Nazi concentration camps.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,664282,00.html

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‘Germany Would Also Have Voted to Ban Minarets’

The World from Berlin

The Mahmud Mosque in Zurich has one of only four minarets in Switzerland. No more will be built following Sunday’s referendum.

Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets is a disaster for its image, write German commentators. The vote doesn’t just reflect a fear of “Islamization” but also shows that setbacks in recent years have shaken its national self-confidence. But Germans would probably vote the same way, warn some observers.

Switzerland’s decision to ban the construction of minarets in a referendum on Sunday has drawn condemnation from politicians across Europe and from Muslim leaders, but far-right politicians have welcomed it as a courageous step that should be copied by other countries.

Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the country’s top cleric, called the ban an “insult” to Muslims across the world but called on Muslims not to be provoked by the move. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he was shocked by the decision which showed “intolerance.”

However right-wing and far-right parties such as Italy’s Northern League in Italy and France’s National Front were quick to welcome the decision. The right-wing populist Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is famous for his anti-Islam views, called the result “great” and said he would push for a similar referendum in the Netherlands.

More than 57.5 percent of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted in favor of the ban on Sunday. The initiative was brought by supporters of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party and a smaller party. The campaign’s organizers had argued that minarets are a symbol of a Muslim quest to dominate others and to introduce Shariah law, and that banning them would help stop an “Islamization” of Switzerland. Muslims make up around 5 percent of the Swiss population.

In Germany, Wolfgang Bosbach, the spokesman on domestic security for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, said the vote expressed a fear of Islamization that also exists in Germany. “One has to take this concern seriously,” Bosbach told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

German media commentators writing in the Monday editions of Germany’s main newspapers said the decision reflects more than a fear of Islamization. The vote, they write, is a sign of how unsettled Switzerland has become in the last two decades that have seen its self-confidence shaken by the collapse of national economic symbols such as the airline Swissair, international criticism of its secretive banking system and setbacks in its foreign policy.

But mass circulation Bild, which can claim to have its finger on the nation’s pulse more than other newspapers, said Germans would probably vote the same way if they were allowed a referendum on the issue:

“The minaret isn’t just the symbol of a religion but of a totally different culture. Large parts of the Islamic world don’t share our basic European values: the legacy of the Enlightenment, the equality of man and woman, the separation of church and state, a justice system independent of the Bible or the Koran and the refusal to impose one’s own beliefs on others with ‘fire and the sword.’ Another factor is likely to have influenced the Swiss vote: Nowhere is life made harder for Christians than in Islamic countries. Those who are intolerant themselves cannot expect unlimited tolerance from others.”

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

“The referendum is a disaster for Switzerland. There is no such construction ban anywhere else in Europe. When those six words ‘the construction of minarets is prohibited’ are written into the Swiss constitution, they will breach that constitution in several ways, as they violate its guarantee of freedom of religion and the ban on discrimination.

“The ban also constitutes a flagrant breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. It won’t take long before someone affected by this ban takes the case to the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, which will result in an embarrassing condemnation and possibly Switzerland’s expulsion from the Council of Europe.

“There will be a storm of outrage, especially in the Muslim world. The worst mistake now would be for Switzerland to react by stiffening its stance. Because in its heart, this country is cosmopolitan and liberal.”

The conservative Die Welt writes:

“The Swiss decision gives the wrong answer to the right question. The question concerning all European societies is how to find the right way to deal with a growing Muslim minority, and where the limits of tolerance should be regarding the practice of traditions that are in some cases backward.

“The referendum has provided an excessively simplistic answer. It condemns the minaret which it interprets as a symbol of Islamic power — as if the traditional architectural feature so closely related to the Christian church steeple were more important than what is preached inside the mosques.

“It throws Switzerland back behind the level of enlightenment and tolerance that Europe has toiled to attain in the past — and which turned multi-ethnic Switzerland into such a successful model.

“The referendum shows how deep the fear of Islam runs in Europe and that the issue isn’t being taken seriously enough by the political elite — and not just in Switzerland. But it doesn’t provide a solution to Europe’s pressing integration problems.”

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“Fundamentally democratic, cosmopolitan, tolerant — that’s how the Swiss always liked to see themselves. But with the vote to ban further minarets, the country has also shown other traits that smack of narrow-mindedness, fear and the desire to wall themselves in.

“Many Muslims in Switzerland have integrated themselves well. The problems that do exist can’t be solved with a ban on minarets. But the Swiss People’s Party has succeeded in broadening the issue to Islamization. Existing problems with immigrants from Kosovo, for example, were simply combined with the religion issue.”

The left-wing Die Tageszeitung writes:

“The campaign was targeted at a Swiss population that has felt increasingly unsettled since the end of the Cold War. Switzerland, which according to official myth is ‘neutral’ but which is de facto aligned with NATO, hasn’t come to terms with the loss of the communist bogeyman as well as the members of the Western alliance have. From compensation claims for the theft of the assets of Jewish refugees by Swiss banks, to the recent softening of banking secrecy for foreign tax evaders — all corrections of obvious historical lies and foreign policy mistakes since 1989 took place not through a realization of wrongdoing on the part of Switzerland itself, but through pressure from outside.”

“In addition, the collapse of Swissair and other objects of Swiss national pride was also painful, as was the humiliating treatment by Libya’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi who has been holding two Swiss nationals as hostages for more than a year. The global economic crisis has also left clear marks on Switzerland.

“The perfectly devised campaign for a ban on minarets provided a suitable bogeyman for those who were unsettled by this general uncertainty and whose self-confidence has been shattered. Encouraged by their victory on Sunday, the initiators will next call for a ban on mosques and Islamic cultural centers. It is also to be feared that there will be more frequent acts of violence against such institutions.”

Der Spiegel

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,664231,00.html

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Suspected Nazi War Criminal Eludes German Justice System

Enjoying a Peaceful Old Age

Quietly evading justice? The alleged war criminal takes a stroll.

The suspected Nazi war criminal Klaas F., who is number five on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted list, is enjoying a quiet retirement in Bavaria. While some alleged former Nazis are facing trial in their old age, the 87-year-old has managed to slip through the cracks in the German justice system.

Klaas F. and his wife, were nice people, the affable neighbor said on the phone, apparently they “kept themselves to themselves” but were “very decent.” They went walking a lot, had three sons and drove around in a red Audi. “He used to work in an office,” the woman says. “He can tell you the rest himself.”

But Klaas F. remained silent. The 87-year-old has yet to answer a written interview request from SPIEGEL ONLINE. He must have his reasons.

Klaas F. ranks number five on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of the 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals. In 1947, F. was sentenced by a Dutch court to life in prison for multiple murders during World War II. But the former Nazi collaborator escaped from prison with a gang of fellow inmates and fled across the border into Germany.

The former menswear salesman, who was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands, has lived in an apartment building in Ingolstadt in the German state of Bavaria since the 1960s. While other suspected Nazi criminals such as Heinrich Boere, 88, and Ivan Demjanjuk, 89, have to face charges relating to their roles in World War II atrocities despite their old age, F. no longer has anything to fear from the German justice system.

A Missed Opportunity

“I no longer consider this an injustice, but a scandal,” Arnold Karskens, who is chairman of a Dutch foundation that investigates war crimes, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “He has kept a low profile for decades and that seems to actually have worked. It must be unbearable for the relatives of his victims.”

That view was shared by Germnany’s recently appointed justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, back when she was just the leader of the Bavarian branch of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party. “I demand that Germany’s chief public prosecutor or one of the relevant agencies on the national level review the case, to see what they can do to either extradite him or start legal proceedings in Germany,” she said as recently as July.

In the meantime, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has become justice minister. Nevertheless, she remains powerless to do anything about the situation, as a spokesperson from her ministry told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The situation is regrettable, but the minister cannot change anything about it,” said Ulrich Staudigl. The Bavarian judiciary had missed the opportunity to “get things moving in the case,” he said, explaining that it was now too late.

So Klaas F., it seems, can live out his old age without fear of prosecution — to Germany’s shame.

A Waffen-SS Volunteer

Dutch court documents seen by SPIEGEL ONLINE showed that F. volunteered for the Waffen-SS in July 1940 of his own accord.

During questioning after the war, F. said it was “quickly made clear … that one would be incorporated into the SS when the training came to an end. I did not want that.” He would later tell prosecutors that he had refused to take the oath “to the Führer” and had, after a few months, gone back to the Netherlands.

There, F., whose father and brother were both also ardent Nazis, joined the Weerbaarheidsafdeling, which was similar to the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung (SA) stormtroopers in Germany. For 18 guilders a week, F. served the Dutch Nazi leader Anton Adrian Mussert as a bodyguard and came across as someone who was suitable for higher-level duties. F. “has proved himself to be a conscientious and reliable employee,” noted one superior, according to the documents. He did not have a problem with “alcohol abuse and/or debts,” the document noted, “as far as is known.”

F. went on to become a constable in the state police. In September 1944, he was assigned to the SS’s Security Service in Groningen in a support function. According to statements by several former comrades, F. is said to have executed several Dutch resistance fighters during this period. In March 1946 he confessed to his interrogators that he had “shot one of the detainees” during an execution in the Westerbork transit camp.

A Christmas Prison Break

After 1945, a Dutch court initially sentenced Klaas F. to death, but that sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. But he did not stay in prison for very long. On Dec. 26, 1952, F. and six other convicted Nazi war criminals escaped from prison in Breda while a film was being shown.

They crossed the Dutch-German border at Ubbergen. The following day, the district court in Kleve fined the men 10 marks each for illegal entry — but a court employee gave them the money and even added a little extra for their onward journey. “They were all comrades in the court,” recalled one of the escaped prisoners in a 1997 interview with the German magazine Stern.

Two days later, the Dutch authorities in Germany again sought the extradition of the fugitives — without success. Bonn refused, citing a 1943 decree by Adolf Hitler, according to which all members of the Waffen-SS were automatically German citizens. But didn’t F. claim he had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the Führer? Was he therefore definitely a member of the SS or not? The questions remained unanswered.

Then in 1957, the Düsseldorf District Court also refused to initiate proceedings against the escapees, claiming that there was insufficient evidence against them. For F. it was exactly the kind of free pass that he needed. He moved to Ingolstadt and lived a suitably respectable, bourgeois life in the prosperous West Germany of the “economic miracle” era.

‘Heaps of Material’

In 2003, the Dutch government, under pressure from the victims’ families, requested that F. serve in Germany the life sentence that he had been given in 1947. But the Ingolstadt District Court, which now had jurisdiction over the former SS member, said the request was inadmissible. After all, a German court — in the form of the Düsseldorf District Court in 1957 — had already let F. off the hook.

Then the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund got involved, as its director Ulrich Maass confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE. The office’s investigators had managed to gather “heaps of material” against F. in Germany and the Netherlands. A fresh indictment on the basis of this evidence might have been possible, says Maass.

However the public prosecutor in Munich that was responsible for the case, which had received the files on Klaas F. from Maass in 2006, had a different view of the matter. In their opinion, F. had shot his victims in the conviction that he was carrying out valid death sentences against resistance fighters. In F.’s case, there is no evidence of the base motives which, under German law, are a defining characteristic of murder, said Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, a spokesman for the Munich public prosecutor. In which case, one had to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt and assume it was manslaughter, Steinkraus-Koch explained. But in the case of F., the crime of manslaughter would have become time-barred in 1990, he added.

Unless new evidence that supports the suspicion of murder turns up, the case is now closed for German investigators, Steinkraus-Koch said. The Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has repeatedly confirmed the termination of the proceedings, the last time in May 2008. In any case, the five binders relating to the case of Klaas F. have now been returned to the archive, Steinkraus-Koch said.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,663832,00.html

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German Constitutional Court OKs Curtailing of Free Speech

Neo-Nazis gather in Wunsiedel in 2001 for a parade to honor Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess.

Germany’s constitution strongly and explicitly protects the freedom of speech. Still, the country’s highest court has now said that — given the injustice and horrors of the Nazi regime — it is constitutional to make an exception that bans speech glorifying Hitler’s ideology.

Wunsiedel is a small town of about 10,000 in the northeastern corner of Bavaria. Every year, on one particular day, this otherwise sleepy town is on high alert. In late August, thousands of people come here from all over Germany and abroad. Dressed in black, these neo-Nazis come to march in commemoration of Rudolf Hess, the Hitler deputy and convicted war criminal who has been buried here since 1987.

Some of the locals board up their houses and get out of town. Others bring banners to protest the parade and even block it with vehicles used for transporting liquid manure. In 2004, the town’s mayor, Karl-Willi Beck, launched a campaign called “Wunsiedel is colorful, not brown.” Together with town councilors, church officials and citizens, he tried to block the streets. A group of skinheads insulted him as a “traitor to his fatherland” and a “grave desecrator.” The neo-Nazis threatened to run him out of town.

But, since 2005, he hasn’t had to deal with the crowds. In that year, the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s federal parliament, passed an amendment that strengthened the legal article dealing with incitement to hatred. Otto Shily, who was Germany’s interior minister at the time, said that it was done “in solidarity with the democratic public of Wunsiedel.” The amendment was meant to make it easier to outlaw neo-Nazi commemorative marches in Wunsiedel and elsewhere. The amendment worked. And, last year, the Federal Administrative Court confirmed the decision upholding a ban on such assemblies based on the new law.

Still, Jürgen Rieger, the recently deceased Hamburg-based lawyer and neo-Nazi who organized the Hess commemorations, was determined to keep marching. To do so, he placed his hope in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, based in Karlsruhe. Sure, the judges had already dismissed a number of Rieger’s expedited motions. But, in this case, they had expressly determined that the new ban “raised a series of difficult constitutional issues.” However, they also felt that these were not the type of questions that could be dealt with in expedited proceedings.

Challenging the Amendment

Now, the Constitutional Court has finally decided that the strengthening of the article in the penal code is constitutional — and that the administrative court’s ban on such assemblies can logically follow from it. Although the judges have determined that Rieger’s constitutional complaint is “unfounded,” their decision, announced on Tuesday, also shows the enduring trickiness surrounding the fourth paragraph of Article 130 of the German Penal Code. That paragraph prescribes a sentence of up to three years for whoever “approves of, glorifies or justifies the violent and despotic rule of the National Socialists” in a way that “disturbs the public peace in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims.”

In German law, if a complainant dies, a legal case is usually closed. Accordingly, Rieger’s sudden death in October almost allowed the legal dispute to remain unanswered. But, in this case, the judges believed it was warranted to still deliver a judgment that was long in the making. It was their belief that, since the decision was meant to clarify a legal issue that “transcended the highly personal matter of the complainant” and applied to “a number of future gatherings,” the decision had “a general constitutional significance.”

Wrangling over Wunsiedel

Neo-Nazis held their first march to honor Rudolf Hess, their “martyr of the fatherland,” in Wunsiedel in 1988. Two years later, the march saw violent confrontations between skinheads and counterdemonstrators. As a response, the gathering was outlawed in 1991. For years, various courts approved the ban.

But, beginning in 2000, Rieger was given the legal green light to start marching again. The increasingly astute lawyer was able to persuade the Constitutional Court with his arguments. In 2003, the court’s justices determined, on the one hand, that there was “no indication” that the police were not able to carry out “their duties” related to preventing and combating individual criminal acts and, on the other hand, that “glorifying persons and ideologies of National Socialism” could not, in and of itself, be used to justify a ban on such gatherings.

Peter Seisser, a member of the Social Democrats (SPD) who represented Wunseidel’s district in the state parliament at the time, was not impressed with the ruling. He said that — according to its legal reasoning — if it gave the go ahead for a march for Hess, then it couldn’t forbid a public ceremony to commemorate Adolf Hitler. In early 2005, 40 prominent residents of Wunsiedel — from state-level politicians to Catholic priests — traveled to Berlin to ask members of the federal parliament specializing in domestic issues to draft new criminal legislation specifically tailored to Wunsiedel’s particular situation. “They really pestered us,” recalls Cornelie Sonntag-Wolgast, who chaired the Bundestag’s Internal Affairs Committee at the time. “It was one of the major reasons we managed to get a majority to amend this law.”

Legal Wranglings

The amendment made itself felt. Whether it was in Wunsiedel, Magdeburg, Aachen or Hanover, a whole series of demonstrations were outlawed for providing “sufficient indication” that events surrounding the gatherings would violate the newly amended law.

But, in the wake of the decision, there was also serious doubt about whether the strengthening of the penal code was constitutional. It’s a doubt that has now actually been confirmed by the Constitutional Court.

According to the Basic Law, the name given to Germany’s constitution, limitations of freedom of speech are only permitted when they are based on a “general law.” In the case of this paragraph, however, the justices determined that it is not a “general law.” What’s more, earlier court decisions also hold that such a law cannot “be directed toward the expression of an opinion as such.” Instead, it must serve to protect a “legal right per se, without regard for a certain opinion.”

The Nazi Exception

Ulli Rühl is a Bremen-based expert on constitutional law and legal philosopher. Already during the process of drafting the law, he warned that, in constitutional terms, the proposed expansion of the law against incitement was very “borderline.” As he saw it, “in point of fact,” the law only applied to “adherents of old- or neo-Nazi ideologies,” which automatically meant it wasn’t “free of bias when it comes to opinions.” And Rieger criticized the law on his Web site, saying things like: “Stalin killed over 30 million people, but he can be glorified.”

Still, if you look at the reasoning of the Constitution Court in a certain way, you can see that the Germans are in no way trying to pass judgment on Stalin’s crimes. Rather, the real issue here is the horror of Hitler’s regime.

In a sense, the fact that Germany’s Basic Law was meant to consciously and decisively make a break from the Nazi era means that, in its very essence, it is designed to explicitly forbid Nazi propaganda. As the judges put it, the Basic Law can “almost be understood as the exact opposite of the totalitarianism of the Nazi regime.” For this reason, they claim, it is permissible to have “regulations that set limits on the propagandistic endorsement” of the Nazi regime and that this was permissible — as an exceptional circumstance — as a targeted restriction on one’s freedom of speech.

When it comes to Rieger’s argument that the march was only meant “to honor Rudolf Hess,” the Federal Administrative Court had already delivered a decision that shot it down. According to that court’s decision, a “reasonable observer” would have “clearly recognized” that the commemorative march — if it were to ever be held again — “would endorse the totality of the National Socialist regime without restriction.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,662031,00.html

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The limits of people power

Did we learn the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall?

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on orders from Moscow), the throngs in Prague chanting “Havel to the Castle,” the massed hecklers in Bucharest who forced Nicolae Ceausescu to try unsuccessfully to flee – and, of course, the thousands of East and West Germans who gathered restively at the Berlin Wall’s checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9 and flooded through when they opened.

Scenes like these vividly symbolize the popular conception of the upheavals of 1989: a mass uprising, rippling across Eastern Europe, that swept away the Berlin Wall and with it the brittle, corroded regimes that made up the Soviet empire.

It’s hardly surprising that this is the narrative that has taken hold. It’s a stirring idea, and a powerful one, comforting in the role it accords oppressed people to rise up and make their own fate. And the crowds in the streets are what the world saw at the time. But in the intervening two decades, as the participants themselves have written their

memoirs, as transcripts and memos have been declassified, and as documents have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain, many historians have begun to emphasize a different account. In this telling, it’s not the marching of the crowds on the street that made the difference, but something less visible: the unprecedented inaction and acquiescence of those at the top. In country after country, leaders responded to open challenges to their power by essentially giving in.

“People power,” in other words, didn’t end the Cold War, not alone. And the extent to which the popular understanding of those revolutionary months centers on the masses in the streets suggests that we may have learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Especially here in the United States, where rioting mobs helped spark the American Revolution and marchers spurred the Civil Rights movement, there is a particular faith in the power of taking it to the streets, and it was possible to see echoes of those American movements when mass protests erupted in Eastern Europe, or at various times in countries like Ukraine, Lebanon, Burma, the Philippines, or, most recently, Iran. But, historians say, what ultimately matters in authoritarian regimes is the resolve of those at the top, and that imposes stark limits on the power of the people.

It’s not just a question for Cold War scholars to debate. Misunderstanding the potential of popular protest can have tragic results, leading today’s dissidents, whether they’re in the Arab world or Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to risk life and limb in situations where there’s little prospect of success – where, unlike in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the leadership is firmly committed to doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.

“Regimes collapse when there’s a loss of will at the top to do whatever’s necessary to do to stay in power,” says Mark Kramer, a historian and head of the Harvard Project for Cold War Studies. “The Chinese communists showed that if you were willing to kill huge numbers of people and resort to ruthless violence, you could stay in power.” In Eastern Europe, he argues, “If that had been done early in the process, in August or September, had the Soviet Union given a green light for it, it certainly would have worked.”

There’s little doubt that mass demonstrations, planned and unplanned, played a vital role in the events of that fall, building on one another and making the public desire for change impossible to ignore. And there are Cold War scholars like Timothy Garton Ash who do argue that the crowds themselves were decisive. But the Soviet empire had been roiled by mass protests for decades – in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland – and the communist governments, with Soviet aid, had only tightened their grip through brutal crackdowns. Five months before the wall came down, the Chinese government had done the same at Tiananmen Square.

Today, some historians are looking in more depth at what it was that changed in the minds of the communist leaders – especially Mikhail Gorbachev, whose refusal to lend Soviet support to any crackdown forced the hand of those Eastern European governments more reluctant to change. This analysis, in which the Cold War ended not because of the many but the few, suggests that, for all the longer-term economic and political currents that shaped it, the end of the Cold War wasn’t a historical necessity. With a few different decisions, the events of 1989 might have unfolded very differently – or not at all, leaving the world frozen even today in a hostile superpower face-off. Rather than being a puzzle for historians, the end of the Cold War could still be a distant ambition of policymakers.

“There were so many points at which the whole process could have been interrupted by relatively small changes,” says Kramer. “It easily could have happened that the Cold War wouldn’t have eased much at all.”

In nearly every historian’s account, the central figure in the end of the Cold War is Gorbachev. Ronald Reagan may have disturbed the status quo with his bellicose rhetoric, and West Germany’s Helmut Kohl may have seized the initiative on uniting the two Germanys soon after the wall came down, but it was Gorbachev who bore the most responsibility, by steadfastly refusing to act as the dominos in communist Eastern Europe fell.

He acceded to the political liberalization the Hungarian regime pursued in 1988 and 1989. In the summer of 1989, when Poland elected a non-communist government – the first in postwar Eastern Europe – Gorbachev did not object. Most importantly, that fall, when Eastern European leaders like Erich Honecker in East Germany and Ceausescu in Romania pleaded with Gorbachev to use Soviet troops to suppress the swelling crowds, he repeatedly rejected the notion. Without the threat of a Soviet crackdown, the crowds only grew.

“Gorbachev was no visionary, but his choices had dramatic consequences – many of them unintended,” says William Hitchcock, a historian of 20th-century Europe and the Cold War at Temple University.

Why Gorbachev let Eastern Europe go so easily is a question that Cold War historians continue to puzzle over. A crop of new books has been published in this anniversary year, and many try to decipher Gorbachev’s behavior from different angles. In doing so they take advantage of the fact that many vital government documents from Russia, Europe, and the United States are now beginning to be released to the public. Fewer of the new books are memoirs written by participants, and more are by historians, interested not only in what happened, but how well the participants themselves understood the events they found themselves in the middle of.

Gorbachev’s reluctance does seem to have been driven in part by his horror at the violence of previous crackdowns in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and he also mistakenly believed what was unfolding in 1989 was the first stirrings of a process of gradual reform. In reality, of course, people were protesting the fact that they had been living under a de facto foreign occupation for four decades, with no political rights and fewer and fewer economic prospects.

In recent years, historians have suggested other factors, as well. Vladislav Zubok, a Soviet historian and, like Hitchcock, a professor at Temple, argues that Gorbachev was simply overwhelmed with problems closer to home – the perilous state of the Soviet economy, unrest in the Baltics – and had little time for Eastern Europe. James Sheehan of Stanford argues that Gorbachev fell in love with the idea that the Soviet Union might find a place, culturally and economically, in the steadily integrating community of Western European nations, and therefore had little interest in playing the role of Eastern Europe’s brute enforcer.

Whatever the reason, though, the protests and elections of 1989 were allowed to continue. And with the exception of Romania – where Ceausescu ordered troops to fire on protesters and, shortly thereafter, was driven from power, tried by a military court, and executed along with this wife – Eastern European governments gave way with little resistance.

In some cases, says Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, the governing elites weren’t so much giving way as coming into agreement with the protesters. “Some of the leaders at the top,” he says, “became convinced that what the dissidents were saying was right.” Top Gorbachev aides like Anatoly Gromyko and Georgy Shakhnazarov, Suri says, began to believe, like the dissidents, that the repressive nature of the Soviet system was strangling its development – leaders, in other words, became protesters themselves.

In Hungary, protests weren’t even necessary: The Communist Party there, which had always been the least dogmatic in Eastern Europe, reformed itself, then reinvented itself – the month before the wall came down, the Hungarian Communist Party was reborn as the Hungarian Socialists.

The contrast to China is stark. There, the government, led by the country’s great economic reformer, Deng Xiaoping, sent in troops to clear Tiananmen Square of the massive pro-democracy protest that had taken root there in the summer of 1989. Exact casualty figures are still not known, but estimates range from a few hundred to a thousand. The student leaders of the protests were jailed or driven out of the country. And today China is a thriving world power with a fast-growing economy and strong commercial and political bonds with the same nations that imposed sanctions in the weeks after the massacre.

“China still has a Politburo, and we still don’t know what happened to all those poor people in June 1989,” says Mary Sarotte, a historian at the University of Southern California and author of the just-published “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.”

“China shows that there’s still a path forward for countries that call themselves communist into a 21st-century world.”

China is the biggest counterexample, but it isn’t the only one: The protests that greeted the results of the Iranian election this summer also ended bloodily and, so far, fruitlessly, so did the 2007 mass demonstrations in Burma.

According to Suri, there are three major factors that determine how a government, especially an authoritarian government, responds to this sort of popular protest. The first is how effective the traditional organs of state power and repression are – everything from the police and military to the state-run media. The second is the sort of international obligations the government has: In 1989 the Soviet Union was deeply indebted to the United States and Western European countries, and Gorbachev, he argues, had much to lose by alienating them, while China’s government had more faith in its economy’s ability to survive as an international pariah. And the third is simply how comfortable, all things being equal, the country’s leadership is with violence.

Dissidents, of course, are never blessed with perfect insight into the minds and economic obligations of the authoritarian governments they seek to overthrow. And it’s hard to say the Tiananmen protesters were any more rash than those in East Germany, with its notoriously brutal secret police, where Honecker had made no secret of his admiration for the Chinese government’s response to Tiananmen. In both countries, the protesters were driven not by patient political calculations so much as a deep sense of frustration and injustice, and in both cases what they did was incredibly brave. But if the Eastern European fall of 1989 is one story of the power of protest, the Chinese summer should be at least as potent a one.

Cold War scholars still wonder what the Soviet Union might have looked like today had Gorbachev been more like Deng. Some, like Robert Hutchings, a former diplomat and top adviser on European affairs in the first Bush administration, believe Eastern Europe would nonetheless have attained a measure of autonomy and even democracy, while the Soviet Union, including the republics in the Baltics and central Asia, would have remained firmly in Moscow’s control.

Others, like Kramer, believe that the two decades between 1989 and today might have passed with little change at all. The Warsaw Pact would have continued to have serious economic difficulties, but, he argues, that isn’t necessarily a death sentence.

“They were inefficient and so forth, but lots of countries have inefficient economies. Italy does to this day,” he says.

Or the world might have ended up with a Soviet Union that looks, for all intents and purposes, like today’s Russia: a large, populous country with a powerful but aging military, widespread corruption, coffers filled with oil and gas money, an authoritarian government, and a pronounced interest in asserting its power over Central Asia and Europe. In other words, something neither Gorbachev nor the protesting masses he encouraged had in mind.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/15/did_we_learn_the_wrong_lessons_from_the_fall_of_the_berlin_wall/

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No Parade for Hans

ON DUTY A German soldier in Afghanistan.

Often, as I have passed through the main train station here in the German capital, I have seen the sad, lone figure of a soldier, heavy pack on his back, waiting for a train like the rest of us, but separated from the crowd by the uniform he wears. No one would stop to thank him for his service or to ask whether he had been deployed to Afghanistan.

The loneliness was obvious, but at times I even sensed what I thought might have been fear, at the occasional hostile looks the soldier would receive alongside the impassiveness of the broader masses on the platform, who just tried to pretend he wasn’t there.

In Afghanistan recently, where German troops are engaged in ground combat the likes of which their military hasn’t seen since World War II, I described my impressions of the home front to a group of soldiers from a reconnaissance company.

A staff sergeant, who had been risking his life almost daily outside Kunduz, recalled a trip to Berlin during which he was wearing his uniform at a train stop. He was told to make himself scarce or he would be beaten up.

“It was shocking,” said the sergeant, Marcel B., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. “We’re looked down on. With American soldiers, they tell me how they receive recognition, how people just come up to them and say they’re doing good.”

Last Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel became the first German leader to mark the armistice that ended World War I with French officials in Paris.

It was one more sign of how far her country had come in repairing relationships with its former enemies, now its allies and partners. In fact, Germany carries the European sensibility about war — forged out of centuries of violence and in particular the 20th century’s devastation — even beyond where the French, the British, the Dutch and others do.

Instead of marking Veterans Day or Armistice Day on Nov. 11, Germany on Sunday observes Volkstrauertag, its national day of mourning for soldiers and civilians alike who died in war, as well as for victims of violent oppression. German society has a complicated relationship with war, due to the Nazi era. The result has been a generally pacifist bent and an opposition to most armed conflicts; that includes majority opposition to the Afghanistan mission, which often expresses itself as a mistrust of those in uniform.

In this, there is a profound contrast to current attitudes in the United States, where even opponents of recent military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken pains to express support for the ordinary soldier who has been sent to fight and perhaps die.

The German men and women in Afghanistan set off for war without the support of the populace, and they know that when they return there won’t be crowds cheering in the streets, ready to make heroes of them. Germany has turned its back on hero worship. The soldiers fight alone.

“This sense of appreciation, you don’t get that, the feeling that wearing your uniform people are going to be proud of you,” said Heike Groos, who has written about her time as a German military doctor in Afghanistan. “Young people die. Young people are badly wounded and one feels out of place and lonely when one thinks, ‘No one in Germany understands and no one in Germany is even interested’ .”

The German military was revived in the 1950’s as a linchpin in the NATO barrier to Soviet expansion, but it was limited to a defensive role. Although they trained and took part in disaster assistance, German forces did not face combat until taking part in NATO’s Balkan campaigns in the 1990s. Now the German military is trying to come to terms with the radically different realities facing the professional soldiers in combat in Afghanistan (conscripts can be sent only if they voluntarily extend their service).

In July, Mrs. Merkel awarded four German soldiers who served in Afghanistan the first medals for bravery the country had given since World War II. In September, President Horst Köhler opened a memorial here in Berlin to all those who have died while in military service since 1955.

Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, is redesigning the former East German military museum in Dresden to be used as the main military history museum of Germany’s military, the Bundeswehr.

And last week, Germany’s new defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, traveled to Afghanistan, where he told the troops: “I believe that our common fatherland can be proud of you. I know that I am.”

But such official recognition of the changing circumstances is not the same as a broader acceptance in society.

“Support the troops” can start to sound like a hollow mantra until you live in a country that just doesn’t do it. In the United States, the little flags in store windows, the bumper stickers, the yellow ribbons around tree trunks and hanging on doors — not to mention the sense of national mourning that President Obama addressed last week after the mass shooting of soldiers at Fort Hood — weave together to form a kind of psychological safety net for soldiers.

To this American, the talk show hosts’ and football announcers’ greetings to the soldiers had begun to sound a bit obligatory until I returned from Afghanistan and started really paying attention to German television, hoping to catch just one similar gesture. So far I haven’t.

In the Vietnam era, the divisions within American society over the war meant that returning soldiers in uniform faced epithets from protesters. But a consensus has since emerged that decision makers should take the heat for war policies, and young men and women in uniform should be supported for the risks they undertake on behalf of the country.

Reinhold Robbe, the German Parliament’s military commissioner, said he remained impressed by the memory of seeing on trips to Tampa and Washington and El Paso that “complete strangers are buying soldiers beer.”

“There’s no real empathy in Germany toward the soldiers who risk life and limb every day,” said Mr. Robbe, 55.

Mr. Robbe’s own experiences track Germany’s complex mix of attitudes toward its postwar military. He refused to serve as a young man, saying he did not understand why he should shoot at relatives in East Germany. But as a member of Parliament in 1995 he became one of several dozen Social Democrats to cross party lines to support the Bosnia mission. As a result, his face ended up on posters with the words “the warmongers,” and Mr. Robbe found himself under police protection.

That was a time of open pacifism; what has taken its place is something different. “Compared to those days, we’re a bit farther along, a bit more used to it,” Mr. Robbe said. “But one basically leaves it in Parliament’s hands, and really wants nothing to do with it, and the soldier doesn’t get the moral support that he has earned.”

Nicholas Kulish, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/15kulish.html

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Obama Cancels Plans to Attend Berlin Wall Anniversary

Barack is Too Busy

US President Barack Obama has shelved his plans to attend festivities marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will reportedly take his place at the Nov. 9 celebrations.

Berlin will have to wait a while longer before Air Force One touches down for US President Barack Obama’s first official visit.

Germany is going to have to wait longer than expected for US President Barack Obama’s first official visit. Citing government sources in Berlin, Reuters reported on Friday that Obama will not attend the anniversary festivities marking two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The event will take place on Nov. 9 — just two days before Obama embarks on a long-planned trip to Asia on Nov. 11.

According to the German television channel n-tv, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will stand in for the president. It is considered unlikely that her husband, the former President Bill Clinton, will accompany her.

Berlin is going all out for the anniversary, with such luminaries as Kofi Annan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa expected to be in attendance. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing hard to complete ongoing coalition negotiations soon so that her government is fully formed in time for the festivities.

Despite Obama’s absence, however, Merkel will get some face time with the US president in early November. She is planning to travel to Washington and will be addressing a joint session of US Congress on Nov. 3.

Obama has not visited Berlin since taking power. He was in Germany briefly in June, when he made stops in Dresden and at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. It was during that trip that Merkel extended the invitation for Obama to help Germany celebrate the fall of the Wall.

Merkel’s government expressed understanding with Obama’s scheduling difficulties, Reuters reported. Obama’s first state visit to Berlin is now expected to take place in 2010.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,655632,00.html

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Germany Goes for Growth

The center-right gets a governing majority.

In the midst of its deepest postwar recession, Germany elected a conservative-free market government Sunday. Maybe the reports of capitalism’s demise have been premature.

As we went to press, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party seemed poised to garner 33.7% of the votes, the second-worst result in their history. But this would still put them some 10 percentage points ahead of the Social Democrats, who had their worst election night in 60 years.

The big winner was the pro-business Free Democratic Party, with a record 14.6% of the vote. This will be enough to end what has been an unnatural alliance between the country’s two main political rivals and secure a majority for the center-right coalition. It also gives Mrs. Merkel the opportunity to do the tax-cutting and deregulating that she campaigned on four years ago, assuming she still has the courage of those convictions.

The Free Democrats campaigned on a €35 billion tax cut combined with a radical simplification of one of the most complex tax codes in the world. The current rates, which rise gradually from 14% to 45%, would be replaced with three brackets of 15%, 25% and 35%. The proposal has come to be known as the “beer-coaster reform”—as in, you could fit the whole tax return on a beer coaster. The reform would make Germany’s tax code among the most competitive and transparent in the industrialized world.

But that depends on Mrs. Merkel promoting it. The CDU’s own reform proposal is much more modest and less economically helpful. It has suggested cutting the bottom bracket to 12% from 14% and raising the income threshold at which the top rate kicks in to €60,000 from €52,552. This would do little to tackle the system’s complexity or to change the fundamental incentives to work, save and invest.

The FDP also wants to loosen the “Kündigungsschutz”—the country’s strict dismissal rules, which make it so costly to lay off employees that it hinders hiring them in the first place. Mrs. Merkel has said she would have none of that. “The ‘C’ in CDU stands for Christian politics, which always included a respect for workers’ rights,” the Chancellor recently said. FDP proposals to cut the size of government and reform the government health-care system would also be difficult to reconcile with the CDU’s current program.

Apart from the Free Democratic surge, this was a dull, cautious German election that some called the “valium campaign.” The two main candidates, Mrs. Merkel and Social Democratic Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, avoided nearly all confrontation. This gave an opening to smaller parties to drive the debate and gain support. The Greens and the Left Party gained at the expense of the Social Democrats.

Sunday’s results suggest that irresolute moderation isn’t a winning formula in today’s Germany. Germans did not simply re-elect Mrs. Merkel. They also gave her new marching orders for economic revival. For the sake of Germany and European prosperity, we hope she heeds them.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438884290190804.html

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The Miracle of Dullness

I bumped down in Frankfurt at 10:55 AM. A German landing, I thought — unsubtle and punctual.

The sky was clear, an un-German sky, and the colors that assailed me were pink (Deutsche Telekom), yellow (Lufthansa) and gray: cool colors at some remove from Caspar David Friedrich’s ecstatic dusks in forests of Gothic gloom.

Friedrich’s passionate romanticism is under control these days in a Germany that has become reassuring to the point of dullness. Europe’s most powerful nation is electing its leader Sunday — and nobody really cares.

“Welcome to the most boring German election ever,” former foreign minister Joschka Fischer told me by way of greeting.

That was enough to compel me to write about the miracle of German dullness. It is cause for hope, a commodity the commodity-rich Middle East does not trade in.

The drudgery is also cause for concern: more on that later.

Lest anyone forget, the world spent a goodly chunk of the last century agonizing over the German question, ruing the proximity of the Polish border to Berlin, digesting the crime. It’s just 20 years since this country was made whole and, with it, Europe. Now mighty Germany chooses its chancellor and, for all people seem to care, the election might be for the Würzburg city council.

It’s not true that everything changes so that everything can remain the same. The German demon got extirpated by American tutelage, European convergence and the rule of law.

Modern Germany, the Johnny-come-lately of European powers, settled down. The German frisson faded to a yawn.

Perhaps Bärbel Bohley, the former East German dissident, summed up the experience, and let-down, of unification best: “We wanted justice and we got the rule of law.”

Another protest leader, Joachim Gauck, ran her close: “We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia.”

Such is the way of adrenalin. It dissipates.

And along comes Angela Merkel, the adrenalin-free Ossi, who has been a chancellor of unmemorable steadiness, and who, barring an upset, will be re-elected at the head of her center-right Christian Democratic Union.

Merkel has been a leader in the image of a settled Germany. Everything about her screams drama over — Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto; chain-smoking Schmidt (“a politician with vision needs to see an ophthalmologist”) fighting the fight for medium-range U.S. missiles; Kohl clasping Mitterrand’s hand at Verdun and later inhaling unification with unabashed appetite. Every risk-averse fiber in Merkel’s body proclaims the social-market consensus has prevailed, even through financial crisis.

The extent of discord may be measured by the fact that Merkel’s chief opponent is also her foreign minister in the governing Grand Coalition: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat leader. He’s a likeable technocrat who always seems to be wondering how he ever ended up as a politician.

None of the above should suggest there’s nothing at stake. There is: a little. If Merkel gets her favored option — a center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats — tax cuts, nuclear power and support for the Afghan mission (Germany has sent more than 4,000 troops) will get a boost. If not, well, more of the same is in order. My sense is most Germans feel market reforms of recent years have gone far enough.

Germans are hunkered down, not unhappy but uninspired. This has been a campaign of astonishing intellectual nullity. I spoke of hope and concern: The former springs from Germany’s absorption of its eastern third and passage into normality, the latter from the country’s numbness.

Nothing — not the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, not the faltering direction of the European Union (once a German obsession, now a sideshow), not financial Armageddon — seems able to stir Germans from contemplation of their navels. This is bad for Europe. The world wanted a boring Germany for a while, but not to this degree, and anyway that time has passed.

Perhaps the center-right option would be a better outcome if only because the Social Democrats need time in the wilderness to resolve their relationship with the Left party. The Grand Coalition is an idea-dampening soporific. Prescription for more than four years is ill-advised.

Germany is in political transition. If the East has been economically absorbed, its political legacy, in the form of the Left party, has proved inhibiting, even paralyzing.

History moves in broad sweeps murky to its hindsight-deprived actors. We can say this: The eruption into the heart of Europe of a German nation state upended the Continent from 1871 to 1945 and a full “normalization” of Germany has taken from 1945 to the present. The long arc has been painful but hopeful.

The demon of instability, German-prodded, moved to the Middle East, where another modern nation state, Israel, in turn upended the order of things. Perhaps after 74 years (1871-1945), we will see glimmerings of a new, more peaceful regional order there. Hope is almost as stubborn as facts.

Hope, at least, is what my German years bequeathed me. Unsubtle and punctual bumpings-down now comfort me, like the unique hermetic thud of a heavy German door closing, one made to last and to fit.

Roger Cohen, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/opinion/24iht-edcohen.html

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A change of partners?

Germany’s election

Angela Merkel would like to head a new coalition. That would be just the start to answering Germany’s long-term problems

SAARLAND, the smallest German state without the excuse of being just a city, is a thumbnail caricature of Germany. It was here, among the woods and hills, that Goethe in 1770 claimed to discover that “passion for reflection on economic and technical matters” that occupied much of his life. For decades the thick coal seams underneath it made Saarland a pawn in the power-games of Germany and France. And because of that history, the sort of industry that Germany is known for—cars, steel and machines—looms even larger in its economy than in the rest of the country.

After 2000 that was a blessing. Orders poured in, and Saarland—though once a bit of a joke to Germans in the Reich, the locals’ rueful name for the rest of the country—outpaced Germany’s growth. Though the coal was becoming too costly to mine, Saarland upgraded old industries like steel and ventured into new fields, such as information technology. But when the global financial crisis broke, hitting Germany’s export-dependent economy harder than most, the self-described “rising state” tumbled even further. Like the rest of Germany, Saarland is now praying that the recovery will be sufficiently swift and strong to stave off mass unemployment.

The crisis and its aftermath have provided unsettled political weather for Germany’s federal election, to be held on September 27th. The chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is running for re-election, promises to lead Germany “cleverly out of the crisis”. Her main challenger, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister, is trailing largely because voters doubt he would be any smarter in this respect. In surveys of voters’ opinions about the economic competence of the two biggest parties, Ms Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) handily trumps Mr Steinmeier’s Social Democratic Party (SPD).

But a second glance at Saarland tells you that crisis-management is not all that matters. Saarlanders are older than other Germans; despite its economic success, the state’s tiny population of 1m is shrinking through a falling birth rate, mortality and emigration. The rest of Germany is not far behind. It is among the world’s fastest-ageing countries (see chart 1). This year western Germany will pass a demographic milestone: the number of people of working age will shrink for the first time, as has already happened in the formerly communist east. Politicians have had little to say about this in their quest for Bundestag seats. In Saarland, for example, the hottest issue seems to be whether towns, to save money, may have to close their swimming pools. But the consequences of an ageing population will be longer-lasting than those of the economic crisis and at least as far-reaching. So Saarland’s towns are wondering whether it is worth spending money on swimming pools when the number of children is falling. The greying of Germany raises the stakes for almost everything the next government will do.

This is not what Germans call a Richtungswahl (turning-point election). Unlike the Americans or the Japanese, they are not pining for change. Germany profited handsomely from booming world trade, creating 1.6m jobs between 2005 and 2008. When the crisis hit, the government deflected the pain, at least until after the election. Ms Merkel and Mr Steinmeier—both exuding sobriety and competence, but hardly setting passions alight—have governed together in a “grand coalition” for the past four years, which gives their contest the feel of sibling rivalry. Relieved they have not suffered more, Germans seem ready to give Ms Merkel a second term without inquiring too insistently how she might use it.

Yet the election will not be a coronation. The main choice voters face is whether to extend Ms Merkel’s cranky partnership with the SPD or to heed her plea for a change of coalition: she would rather govern with the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP). That would not be a trivial change. The SPD and FDP stand almost at opposite poles of Germany’s political spectrum. The SPD preaches “solidarity”, which entails strong worker protection, minimum wages and robust social welfare. The FDP champions “freedom”, which goes along with sharply lower taxes, less regulation and friendliness to private enterprise. Ms Merkel ’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, stand uneasily in the middle. All four accept the tenets of Germany’s “social market economy”. Both the Social Democrats and the Liberals have mellowed, which means that the next government is unlikely to bring in radical change, no matter what its makeup. But a government with liberal leanings is more likely to keep Germany vigorous as it ages, and is what Ms Merkel says she wants.

Voters do not share her tastes. Less than a third favour a “black-yellow” partnership of the CDU and the FDP. With the crisis easing, voters are paying more attention to the SPD’s solidarity agenda. Mr Steinmeier outscored Ms Merkel in their only televised debate (a muted affair, to which the opposition was not invited), mostly by coming across for the first time as someone who could do her job. But he has little chance of winning outright, and virtually none of forming a left-wing coalition in the Bundestag. Hence the possibility of another grand coalition.

Lucky for some

The muddy political choices reflect the murky mood of the electorate. On the eve of the election Germany deems itself a successful country, lucky to have escaped the worst of the recession. It is among Europe’s most competitive economies and second only to China as an exporter of goods. But the fruits of success seem to be distributed unevenly. Relative poverty and inequality have risen faster in Germany than in any other OECD country since 2000, says Gustav Horn of IMK, a union-linked think-tank. And since 1999 Germans’ wages have risen less than anywhere else in the euro zone. Even before the recession Germans were grumbling about the pay of corporate fat cats. Now executive pay sometimes seems to be the most emotive campaign issue.

These discontents are reverberations from German unification in 1990, which saddled the country with gargantuan costs and led to a decade-long quest to regain competitiveness. The private sector did much of the work: enterprises restructured and trade unions accepted low pay rises and more flexible contracts. The grand coalition’s predecessor, a left-leaning partnership between the SPD and the Greens, enacted tough reforms of the labour market, including “Agenda 2010”, which chopped unemployment benefits. Ms Merkel’s government topped that up by raising the pension age (gradually, from 65 to 67, starting in 2012), cutting corporate tax rates and almost balancing the federal budget before the crisis knocked it askew.

The reforms pushed more people into work and reduced the price of labour (see chart 2), which helped firms take full advantage of the boom in world trade. Long-term unemployment dropped by 40% in 2007 and 2008, the first big retreat in absolute numbers since the 1960s, notes Joachim Möller, director of IAB, the federal employment agency’s research unit. Most Germans credit the government’s anti-recession measures, such as “cash for clunkers” and subsidies for firms to hold on to workers, for the fact that unemployment has risen only mildly so far. In fact, this “German miracle” may owe as much, if not more, to Agenda 2010.

But Germans are tired. Sure, Saarland created lots of jobs during the boom years, says Eugen Roth, head of the trade union confederation in the state and an SPD official. But too many of these were the insecure, low-paid positions encouraged by the reforms. In Saarlouis, for example, Ford is employing temporary workers alongside assembly-line veterans; in a crisis, they will be first to go. A chastened SPD has been trying to make amends. The grand coalition extended unemployment benefits for older workers, and broke a contract between generations by promising the retired that their pensions would never fall. Such reversals scare economists, many of whom say their priority for the new government is that it do no more harm.

But that will not be enough. The next government will have to fend off the credit crunch and redesign the regulation of banks, which may be in worse shape than officials have yet let on. Germany can no longer count on exports alone to turbocharge its economy, but it is not clear what else, if anything, will. Nothing comparable to the telecoms boom of the 1990s is on the horizon, notes Klaus Deutsch of Deutsche Bank Research. Politicians of all stripes tout green technology, but that is speculative, and it is not clear how the government can best nurture it. Hard choices loom in energy among dangerous nuclear power, dirty coal and expensive renewables.

Germany’s leaders will handle all this wearing fiscal manacles. Next year’s federal deficit is expected to be a record €86 billion ($126.5 billion). The next government, whatever its makeup, will reduce this: members of the euro zone are supposed to limit public-sector deficits to 3% of GDP, and a new constitutional amendment directs the federal government to cut its structural deficit (ie, adjusted for the business cycle) to 0.35% of GDP by 2016. The ageing process makes debt more toxic. The shrinking of the labour force will whittle away at potential growth, consuming the means to pay for it.

A “generation balance” drawn up by Bernd Raffelhüschen and Stefan Moog for the Market Economy Foundation in Berlin weighs the cost of today’s spending commitments for tomorrow’s taxpayers. The debt of the public sector was 65% of GDP in 2007; adding in unfunded future costs of pensions, health care and other schemes, the state’s implicit debt jumps to 250% of GDP. Recent cuts in income tax and social-security contributions softened the crisis but greatly increased the long-term burden. To cope, Germany will have to make the most of its dwindling workforce.

Wasting human capital

By 2020 Germany will lack 2.4m workers, which will cost the economy more than €1 trillion, reckons McKinsey, a consultancy. This sounds a pleasanter problem to deal with than unemployment, more often the spur to reform. There are no real culprits (you cannot denounce childless couples) and the solutions sound cheery: encouraging breeding, improving schools, promoting research and the like. But generational challenges demand reforms almost as daunting as Agenda 2010.

Germany wastes human capital like unmetered water. Despite the reforms, 53% of unemployed people have been jobless for more than a year, more than double the OECD average. A high proportion of women work, but a German obstacle course keeps them from working too much: school hours are short, kindergarten places are scarce and second incomes in families are taxed at high rates. As a result the total number of hours worked in Germany is among the lowest in the OECD.

Around a quarter of children are born into immigrant families, providing a lift to Germany’s depressed fertility rate, but they underperform. Children with “migrant backgrounds” drop out of school at more than double the rate of native Germans. Germany’s ranking in international tests of reading and maths would jump several places if the scores of migrant children were not counted. Too few Germans of any sort reach the top of the education ladder: 23% of young Germans get university degrees, compared with an OECD average of 36%.

These are the laments of a society that has changed faster than the institutions that are supposed to serve it. The school system is a holdover from an era that deemed motherhood a full-time job, an attitude that France, for example, shed long ago. Only now are Germans getting used to the idea that “guest workers” from Turkey and elsewhere, who arrived from the 1950s onwards, are going to stay. Traditional attitudes have found a home in Ms Merkel’s CDU. Although it proclaims that Germany is an “integration land”, the party’s election programme gives priority to “qualification over immigration”, rules out dual citizenship and calls for deporting foreign criminals. On such matters, the SPD is more progressive.

And so, one suspects, is Ms Merkel, for whom being a woman and a one-time physicist seems to matter more than party dogma. Her star appointment was Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven, who as family minister introduced “parents’ pay”, a benefit to encourage middle-class women to bear more children without abandoning their careers. In concert with the states she started a scheme to build pre-schools for all children of parents who want them by 2013, which will help women into the workforce. Ms Merkel brought the government’s “integration co-ordinator” into the chancellery and put together an “integration plan” to impart Germany’s language and values to immigrants and upgrade their skills.

Overpampered as well as overhatted

If Germany is going to defuse the “time bomb” of immigrant dropouts and head off a ruinous skills shortage, it will have to overhaul education. Ms Merkel knows it. But the two main parties are at odds over how to tackle it. The CDU champions the traditional three-tier high-school system, in which pupils are separated early (usually at ten) according to ability. The SPD wants children to study longer together, reckoning that slower ones will benefit. Everyone accepts the goal of raising investment in education from 4.8% of GDP to 7%, but there is no convincing plan to pay for it. The SPD wants schooling to be free, from kindergarten to university; the CDU is more open to charging fees.

Disagreement does not cause deadlock because the Länder are free to experiment. Hamburg, for example, which is governed by an unusual coalition between the CDU and the Greens, plans to extend the number of years children study together in mixed-ability primary schools from four years to six. But experiment is risky, as Länder governments are discovering. Saarland’s CDU government introduced university tuition fees and shut 100 primary schools because there are fewer children to fill them, but that was a big part of the reason the government lost its absolute majority in state elections on August 30th.

Boosting brainpower is not enough. Reform in its narrow sense, of saving on welfare, is unavoidable. The costs of the social-security system are set to soar, in the short term because of the slump and in the long run because the country is ageing so fast. The unemployment-insurance contribution, laboriously scaled back from 6.5% of gross pay to 2.8%, may soon rise, followed perhaps by the health contribution, now 14.9%. That will jeopardise the government’s goal of holding total contributions to 40% to encourage employment.

The grand coalition and its SPD-Green predecessor installed checks on the future rise of pension costs (and, in moments of timidity, weakened them). Germany’s greying argues for encouraging individuals to rely less on state-funded pensions and more on their own savings, as the FDP advocates. But the real mess is health care. The “generation balance” puts the implicit debt of the health system at 99% of GDP, but that does not include the cost of improvements in medical technology. If you include just half that cost the debt more than doubles, says Mr Raffelhüschen.

The grand coalition dealt with this half-heartedly. Payroll contributions and taxes now flow into a single fund, which distributes the money to insurers according to the number and needs of the patients they enrol. Insurers are supposed to compete for patients; those with high costs may charge a modest additional fee. But real competition has yet to start and may never really happen, since services are uniform and the extra fees are nominal. “The root of the problem still has to be dealt with,” says Michael Braun of Mercer, a consultancy. Strife between the CDU and the SPD has prevented a more-coherent solution. A black-yellow coalition might do better.

Too broad a church

A government of determined reformers would not stop there. Kündigungsschutz, a system of worker protection that makes each dismissal a judicial adventure, should be loosened, though it is hard to see the cautious Ms Merkel agreeing. One way to reduce the economy’s reliance on exports might be to liberalise the Meisterzwang, a system of guild protection that restricts competition in some 41 crafts, an idea that the small-business-friendly FDP may resist. The welfare system imposes a steep implicit tax on low-skilled workers, discouraging them from taking jobs. Germany’s federal system, which gives states little scope to raise their own revenues and mandates massive transfers among them to even out living standards, is crying out for further reform.

Merely to mention such ideas is to despair of them. Germany has an astonishing capacity to rise to big occasions, such as unification; but in ordinary times it seeks consensus among myriad power centres, which makes progress slow, if it happens at all. A black-yellow government would resist rolling back reform and block some bad ideas, like a generous economy-wide minimum wage. But it would not change the rules.

“I worry about a potential total blockade of the decision-making system,” says Hans-Olaf Henkel, a leader of Konvent für Deutschland, a reformist group. Fewer decisions are now subject to veto by the Bundesrat, the legislative chamber that represents the states. But with more states being governed by coalitions, the Bundesrat’s deliberations could become more tortuous.

The roots of consensus are deep. In the 16th century Catholics and Protestants sought ways to co-operate rather than warring. One ingenious device was the Simultankirche, a shared church where the two faiths worshipped separately. Germany itself feels like a secular Simultankirche, in which the relative strengths of the sects may change without disturbing the basic arrangements among them. Unfortunately, it will be surprising if this month’s elections break that pattern.

The Economist

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Full article and photos: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447093

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Schreiber extradited to Germany

On July 28, 2009 file, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber watches the proceedings during the final day of the Oliphant Commission at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada.

Karlheinz Schreiber was whisked onto an overnight flight by RCMP officers Sunday night after an Ontario Superior Court Judge dismissed his last-gasp court challenge to delay his extradition to Germany.

At about 7:45 p.m., about three hours after the 75-year-old lobbyist turned himself in at a Toronto area jail, he called his wife from a cellphone belonging to one of the Mounties.

“He couldn’t speak long. He only said to me he is on the plane and I should be not worried,” his wife, Barbel Schreiber, said Sunday night.

The red-eye flight back to his native country came only a few hours after he lost an emergency application for a court injunction Sunday to block his extradition.

The weekend hearing in the near-empty Toronto courthouse was negotiated by Mr. Schreiber’s legal team after the federal justice department told the German-Canadian at 5 p.m. on Friday that he had 48 hours to surrender to the authorities.

At the emergency hearing, Mr. Greenspan accused the federal government of using underhanded tactics – exploiting the holiday weekend to ensure that no courts would be open to accept another one of Mr. Schreiber’s frequent court challenges before he was on the tarmac.

Madame Justice Barbara Conway, however, sided with the federal government, ruling that Mr. Schreiber has not met the basic tests that are required for such an injunction.

“Mr. Schreiber has travelled a long road in fighting his extradition to Germany. He is now at the end of that road,” Judge Conway said Sunday.

After the hearing, Mr. Greenspan said he was confident that Mr. Schreiber had bought himself a little more time with one final move. When Mr. Schreiber walked into the Toronto West Detention Centre – just a few blocks from Pearson airport – the first thing he did was serve the director of the jail with an application for a judicial review of the Justice Minister’s latest decision to not overturn his extradition, Mr. Greenspan said. Under a provision of the Criminal Appeal Rules, inmates can serve jail officials with applications, Mr. Greenspan said.

“It acts as a stay before he can be extradited,” Mr. Greenspan said, a few hours before his client was shepherded onto the airplane. Playing on Judge Conway’s road metaphor, the veteran criminal defence lawyer added: “He’s at the end of the paved road. Now he’s on the dirt road.”

Mr. Schreiber was somewhat defiant when he spoke briefly with reporters as he approached the jail Sunday afternoon. “I don’t think it’s my last chance,” he said of the judge’s decision.

It’s been almost a decade since Mr. Schreiber was arrested at a Toronto hotel at the request of Germany, where he ignited a scandal that ruined political careers and sent others to jail. The professional middleman, who has brokered deals for tanks, helicopters and airplanes around the world – Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Canada – dominated headlines and newscasts in the German media in the 1990s when it was revealed that he made payments, sometimes in cash, to high-profile German political figures. Former German junior defence minister, Ludwig-Holger Pfahls, fled the country over payments he accepted from Mr. Schreiber, but was arrested in Paris and later convicted. When it emerged that Mr. Schreiber handed a briefcase containing more than one million deutschmarks to the treasurer of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s party, it exposed secret slush funds designated for the ruling Christian Democratic Union.

The last time Mr. Schreiber was behind the brick walls of the Toronto area jail, he resurrected one of the most complex scandals in recent Canadian political history – the Airbus affair – and extended his stay in his adopted country.

Shortly after he surrendered to the jail in 2007, he filed an affidavit in court that detailed the cash payments he made to former prime minister Brian Mulroney as well as a little-known hotel meeting between the two men in Zurich in 1998.

The day after he filed the affidavit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he was assigning an independent, investigator to review the allegations. That review led to the recently wrapped up Oliphant inquiry into the cash that Mr. Schreiber gave to Mr. Mulroney, but not the deal that earned Mr. Schreiber most of his riches – the 1988 purchase of $1.8-billion in Airbus planes by then-Crown corporation Air Canada.

During his brief, rambling interview outside the courthouse, Mr. Schreiber complained about the inquiry’s exclusion of anything related to the Airbus sale. “The elephant is still in the room,” he said, adding that the Oliphant inquiry looked at only “a small piece.”

Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, who chaired the inquiry, has until Dec. 31 to issue his report.

Standing outside Toronto’s main criminal courthouse after the judge issued her verdict, Mr. Greenspan reflected on his long ride with Mr. Schreiber.

He looked back at the courthouse, and explained that it was at 361 University Avenue where he first met the boisterous and aggressive deal maker at his first bail hearing.

“Politicians who spent time with him over the years are proof positive that he was not a difficult person to be with. He was entertaining, funny, intelligent,” the defence lawyer said.

“Whatever else there was that went on between him and some of the politicians, the fact of the matter is that he had access to the corridors of power that I don’t have.”

The justice department painted a much different picture in its submission in court, however, underscoring Mr. Schreiber’s manipulation of the court to stay in Canada.

Mr. Kramer said the German-Canadian has made 11 submissions to the minister of justice, five applications for judicial review at the Ontario Court of Appeal, and sought leave to the Supreme Court on four occasions – all of which have been denied but had the effect of extending his stay.

“If Mr. Schreiber has lacked anything in his extradition, it is not access to procedural fairness,” Mr. Kramer said.

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Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/schreiber-extradited-to-germany/article1239414/

Photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,640052,00.html

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See also:

Figure in CDU Party Donations Scandal Returns to Germany

Canadian officials have deported former German industry lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, who sought to evade prosecutors in Germany for a decade. He was at the center of one of Germany’s biggest postwar political scandals and will likely face trial on multiple charges.

The plane from Toronto arrived in Munich at 9:22 a.m. on Monday. Two police vans and three unmarked vehicles awaited the arrival. Their quarry: Karlheinz Schreiber, the infamous 75-year-old former arms lobbyist with dual Canadian-German citizenship, who had been at the center of Germany’s biggest postwar political scandal.

After the other passengers had disembarked, police escorted Schreiber to one of the waiting cars. He was taken straight to Augsburg, Bavaria, where a cell measuring nine square meters awaits the businessman who had allegedly made millions acting as a go-between for industry giants and top politicians in both Germany and Canada.

Proceedings against Schreiber, who had exhausted every legal option to escape extradition to his homeland, will begin either later on Monday or first thing on Tuesday. Schreiber is wanted for tax evasion, bribery and fraud. According to the Augsburg prosecutor’s office, Schreiber made around €15 million after he did work on behalf of German industrial giant Thyssen Krupp AG in several arms projects.

A Million Deutsche Marks In The Carpark

The accusations against the businessman also have a hefty political dimension. Schreiber was a key figure in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) donations scandal that rocked Germany’s parliament in the 1990s, cost Wolfgang Schäuble, then the chairman of the party, his job and disgraced former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who lost his position as honorary party chairman.Allegations that Schreiber had donated cash to Walther Leisler Kiep, the former treasurer of the CDU, started a scandal that only got worse when Kohl, who was in power from 1982 to 1998, admitted that he had accepted off-the-books — and therefore, illegal — donations from supporters.

From the mid-80s through to 1995, Schreiber is accused of transferring money to various German and Canadian businessmen and politicians using a network of Swiss bank accounts. He is alleged to have handed a donation of one million deutsche marks to Kiep in a supermarket parking lot on August 26, 1991. The donation allegedly came in the form of thousand mark banknotes stuffed into a suitcase. Former defense ministy official Holger Pfahls also received 3.8 million marks for his help in securing a Saudi Arabian deal involving armored vehicles. When the scandal broke, Pfahls fled, but he was eventually arrested in Paris and convicted.

A Temporary Safe Haven in Canada

Schreiber fled to Canada in 1999, and prosecutors in Germany have attempted to extradite him since August of that year. In the ensuing decade, Schreiber used every legal weapon to remain in Canada.

But on Friday evening, Canadian television channel CTV reported, representatives from Canada’s justice department paid a surprise visit to Schreiber and told him that he would be taken into custody within 48 hours, pending deportation to Germany. Schreiber then applied for an emergency hearing during the weekend, in order to obtain an injunction.

Justice Department lawyer Richard Kramer told the Toronto-based daily Globe and Mail that Schreiber had already exhausted all remaining opportunities to appeal his deportation. “If Mr. Schreiber has lacked anything in his extradition, it is not access to procedural fairness,” Kramer said, according to the newspaper.

In ruling against him this time, Ontario Superior Court Justice Barbara Ann Conway told news agencies Schreiber “has travelled a long road in fighting his extradition to Germany. He is now at the end of that road.”

Schreiber: Politics Will Prejudice Any Trial

Upon reaching the jail on Sunday evening, Schreiber held a hurried, impromptu press conference with waiting reporters. He told them that he believed the decision to extradite him now was a political one. He has said as much previously in a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which was also sent to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a member of the CDU and Kohl’s former protege, and to German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. In the letter he said he feared he would not receive a fair trial in Germany due to political prejudice against him.

“We have an election coming up in Germany in September,” he told gathered reporters on Sunday night. “The Social Democrats won three elections with my case in the past. Now you can read about it in the paper. If I would come now that would be the greatest thing. It would start a huge circus and investigation and Chancellor Kohl and everybody would be there. And with that they would think they could win the next election.”

However, Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson noted that the extradition was based on an order issued against Schreiber on Oct. 31, 2004 by Nicholson’s predecessor, Irwin Cotler. Last Thursday, his department had received a fax in which German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries — a member of the CDU’s government coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD) — urged that he consent to German extradition requests so that “the proceedings against Schreiber can finally be carried out.”

There have been other reasons for Schreiber’s ongoing stay in Canada. The former lobbyist has also been part of a Canadian political scandal. Schreiber claims that the former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney accepted money from him — 225,000 Canadian dollars – in exchange for promoting a light armoured vehicle factory on behalf of Thyssen Krupp. Mulroney says the deal was struck after he left office, but Schreiber says it happened while Mulroney was still in power — which would breach Canadian rules about ethics.

A Prisoner Just Like Any Other

There has been an official commission of enquiry into the matter and Nicholson had agreed to a stay of extradition in 2007 so Schreiber could testify before the public inquiry. Schreiber had said he would not cooperate with the enquiry unless he was allowed to stay, and Bavarian prosecutors agreed to abide by Canadian decisions in this regard. But the final hearing took place last Tuesday and conclusions will be published by the end of the year. That development left the path clear for a surprise visit from Canadian Justice Department officials on Friday evening.

For the next few days, his home will be a nine square meter cell. “He will be treated the same as any other prisoner awaiting trial,” the head of the Augsburg prison told the German press agency DPA. He can have two half-hour visits a month, he will have a daily hour of exercise in the prison yard. And if he wants a television in his cell, he will have to pay for it himself.

It’s the same sort of cell that the ex-defense secretary Holger Pfahls also had when he was awaiting trail on charges in the corruption scandal, in which Schreiber allegedly played such an integral part.

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,640052,00.html

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Does the US Still Care about Germany?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Washington Thursday evening to receive an award for her contributions to trans-Atlantic relations. But with few politicians in attendance, she might have gotten the feeling that Germany no longer carries its former weight in the US capital.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the Library of Congress on Thursday night.

For a brief moment, the American-German relationship looked just as Germans like to imagine it. Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the stage on Thursday evening at the Library of Congress in the heart of the United States capital, where she had just received the Warburg Prize handed out by the Atlantik Brücke, an important trans-Atlantic organization. The chancellor was clearly moved, her voice full of emotion. And she spoke of a senior US politician.

He is, she said, “the personification of the partnership” between Germany and America. He took time out to meet her, she told the audience, before anyone could imagine that she might one day become chancellor, back when she was just the head of the conservative Christian Democrats. “Who takes the time these days? Who is so inquisitive?” she asked, her voice full of praise.

It was a touching scene, but the man she was speaking of is not, as one might have thought, a high-ranking member of President Barack Obama’s administration. Rather, it was the Republican Chuck Hagel.

Hagel’s service to trans-Atlantic relations has been consistent and valuable. And even still, whenever there is an important event having to do with Germany or Europe, it is a solid bet that Hagel will be there — as he was on Thursday night, when he delivered the introduction for Merkel. But when it comes to American politics, Hagel these days is far from the centers of power. He left the Senate, where he represented Nebraska for over a decade, last year. Now, the 62-year-old chairs the board of directors at a foreign policy think tank.

He still does his part for trans-Atlantic relations, but few seem interested in following in his footsteps. On the stage on Thursday night, active politicians were few and far between.

Indeed, there was just a single member of the House of Representatives (out of a possible 435) who bothered to show up to see the German chancellor. Interest for countries like Germany is no longer seen as a way to advance one’s career in the US Congress. Those who take an interest in foreign policy have begun looking to Asia first. The only other politician of note at Merkel’s reception was Alan Greenspan. But the 83-year-old is also now in retirement.

Europe in the Margins

The Thursday night event perfectly encapsulated the current state of trans-Atlantic relations. While Germany looks to the US, America looks elsewhere. In Washington, the concept of a G-2 is gaining credence, a world order in which the US and China take the lead. Europe — and Germany — is on the margins.

Merkel, it became clear during her speech, seems to have resigned herself to the shift. She hardly mentioned Germany — instead presenting herself as the consummate European. “The Europeans have grown closer together,” she said. Often, she went on, Europeans are considered to be somewhat complicated, but that is a misconception. “We have understood that we need to speak with a single voice. We are 500 million people and that is a weight that cannot be ignored.” As if sensing that she’d gone a bit too far, she added: “That doesn’t mean that Americans should only travel to Brussels now instead of to Germany.”

Just how much influence Berlin still has in Washington will become clear on Friday when the chancellor meets with President Obama. The two reportedly plan to discuss, in addition to foreign policy challenges such as Afghanistan and Iran, climate change and new regulations for the global financial markets.

The latter two issues are the sources of significant disagreement between Washington and Berlin. Germans are concerned that Obama — even as he has made domestic efforts to begin combating climate change — is uninterested in an international deal. When it comes to the economy, Merkel’s recent critique of Washington’s loose monetary policy raised many an eyebrow in the US capital.

But in the Library of Congress on Thursday evening, Merkel made just brief mention of the issues in her 30 minute address. “We have never been so close (on climate change),” she praised. “There is still room for convergence, but we are on an excellent path.”

On financial oversight, she warned: “Such a crisis cannot be allowed to repeat itself. It is the result of market excesses; we need more regulation.” She added that it isn’t yet clear whether some banks have understood the kind of damage that the crisis has done. She said nothing about current US monetary policy.

One wonders how much she will have to say on the issue when she and Obama go before the press in the Rose Garden at the White House. Even the smallest gestures of the two politicians will be exhaustively analyzed. It isn’t just the German press, after all, which has reported about the not altogether warm relationship between the two leaders. US papers have likewise begun following the story.

Still, on the eve of her meeting with Obama, Merkel’s manners were impeccable. “We have had numerous opportunities to talk,” she said in reference to the president — before rattling off the list. She claimed to have followed Obama’s initial months in office “with interest” and with “great pleasure.” She has an “elementary interest” in his success.

It was a polite thing to say. But it didn’t come across as being warm.

If the two are interested in convincing the world once and for all that their relationship is a positive one, a bit of warmth is essential. The kind of warmth she showered on Chuck Hagel on Thursday night.

Gregor Peter Schmitz, Der Spiegel

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,632780,00.html

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Chancellor Merkel Visits the Debt President

The occupant of the White House may have changed recently. But the amount of ill-advised ideology coming from Washington has remained constant. Obama’s list of economic errors is long — and continues to grow.

US President Barack Obama signs the Supplemental Appropriations Act in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA 24 June 2009. The signing adds military funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president may have changed, but the excesses of American politics have remained. Barack Obama and George W. Bush, it has become clear, are more similar than they might seem at first glance.

Ex-President Bush was nothing if not zealous in his worldwide campaign against terror, transgressing human rights and breaking international law along the way. Now, Obama is displaying the same zeal in his own war against the financial crisis — and his weapon of choice is the money-printing machine. The rules the new American president is breaking are those which govern the economy. Nobody is being killed. But the strategy comes at a price — and that price might be America’s position as a global power.

In his fight against terrorism, Bush had the ideologue Dick Cheney at his side. “We must take the battle to the enemy,” he said — and sent out the bomber squadrons toward Iraq on the basis of mere suspicion. The result of the offensive is well known.

Obama’s Cheney

Obama’s Cheney is named Larry Summers. He is Obama’s senior-most economic advisor, and like the former vice president, he is a man of conviction. The financial crisis may be large, but Summers’ self-confidence is even larger. More importantly, President Barack Obama follows him like a dog does its master.

The crisis, Summers intoned last week at a conference of Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society in Washington, was caused by too much confidence, too much credit and too many debts. It was hard not to nod along in agreement.

But then Summers added that the way to bring about an end to the crisis was — more confidence, more credit and more debt. And the nodding stopped. Experts and non-experts alike were perplexed. Even in an interview following the presentation, Summers was unable to supply an adequate explanation for how a crisis caused by frivolous lending was going to be solved through yet more frivolity.

Summers has no misgivings, and doesn’t recognize those held by others. The fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently gave a speech in which she was critical of the US economic stimulus program did not impress Summers. In our conversation, he said he thought Merkel’s position was a tactical one. “She only says that out of domestic concerns,” he said and rolled his eyes in disapproval. The battle must be taken to the enemy.

Just as the US public initially rallied behind the war President Bush — even to the point of re-electing him — Americans have now thrown their support behind the debt president Obama. The mistakes of the Bush administration are now widely accepted. The mistakes of the Obama administration are still not recognized as such. They are seen as the truth.

The Obama Administration’s Five Errors

Mistake number one: It’s not as bad as it seems. The US amassed much more debt during World War II, it is often said. That, though, is not true. According to conservative forecasts, Obama’s policies could end up being three times as expensive as US expenditures during World War II. If one calculates using today’s prices, America spent $3 trillion for the war. Obama’s budgetary calculations for the decade between 2010 and 2020 assume additional debt of $9 trillion.

Second: It is generally assumed that the money is part of an effort to resuscitate the crisis-plagued economy and is thus serving a good purpose. The truth of the matter is that the bulk of the borrowed money will be used to finance the normal US budget. American borrowing in 2009 comprises about half of Obama’s budget. The country is living beyond its means — and it still would have been even if it weren’t for the economic crisis.

The third error: Many believe that when the crisis ends, borrowing will automatically fall. The truth is that it could climb afterwards. The graying of American society creates a new fiscal policy challenge for the country that so far hasn’t been reflected in any budget plan. According to calculations by the International Monetary Fund, Washington would need to spend several times more than it is now just to service current pension entitlements and the free, state-funded medical care provided to senior citizens. In addition, Obama has promised to introduce healthcare coverage for America’s close to 46 million uninsured. That would be like adding a country the size of Spain to the US.

Lost Trust

Fourth: The world believes that the US is borrowing money from capital markets. It is often said that the Chinese and the Japanese will buy government bonds. But the truth of the matter is that trust in the gravitas and reliability of the United States has suffered to such a great degree that fewer and fewer foreigners are purchasing its government bonds. That’s why the Federal Reserve is now buying securities that it has printed itself. The Fed’s balance sheet has more than doubled since 2007, making the US central bank one of the world’s fastest-growing companies. The purpose of this company, though, is to create money out of thin air.

Fallacy No. 5: The additional money is harmless because the economy is starting to pull together again and there is no threat of inflation. The truth is that the quiet on the inflation front is deceptive. The hot money is accumulating in people’s savings accounts and in the balance sheets of banks that aren’t keen to lend money at the moment. The supply of money has increased by 45 percent in the last three years and there has not been a corresponding rise in hard assets or production. That imbalance will eventually make itself felt in the form of inflation.

The dollar, which has already lost 40 percent of its value against the euro since 2000, would then devaluate and its reputation would be further diminished. The world’s reserve currency could be pushed through the floor by the shockwaves. At that point, those waves would also wash over the rest of the world. Then people would have to look back and say that the means the US used to fight the economic crisis in fact paved the way for a currency crisis.

The German response to the excesses of the Bush era was refusal and obstinacy. Gerhard Schröder refused to go to war in Iraq with America and he organized a European resistance front the reached from Moscow to Paris.

Germany still hasn’t provided its response to the Obama administration’s fiscal policy excesses. Perhaps its time for Merkel to take her cue from Schröder.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,632494,00.html

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Terror Suspects Will Make Full Confessions

There was an unexpected twist in Germany’s high-profile terror trial when the four men accused of planning massive car bombs on US targets in Germany took a time out for several hours. When they returned, their lawyers said they wanted to make full confessions.

Adem Yilmaz with his lawyer Karl Engel back in April.

Germany’s highest-profile terror trial for decades took an unexpected turn on Tuesday when the accused said they wanted to confess. The four young men stand accused of plotting to carry out a series of terrorist attacks on US targets on German soil.

Adem Yilmaz was the first to show a change of attitude, asking the court for permission to talk things over with his three co-defendants. The judge was happy to oblige.

“I couldn’t care less what you give me, whether it’s 20 or 30 years,” Yilmaz, a Turkish national raised in Germany, told the court. “I just want all this to be done with, it is boring.” The trial, which began seven weeks ago in Düsseldorf, had been expected to last into next year with the prosecution alone planning to call 219 witnesses.

Yilmaz told the court on Tuesday that he wanted to meet with the other alleged members of the so-called “Sauerland Cell” — Fritz Gelowicz, Daniel Schneider and Atilla Selek — without their lawyers present. The four, who have been held in separate facilities, are accused of conspiring to commit murder, plotting to launch explosive attacks and of membership of a terrorist organization. They have all remained silent since their arrest 18 months ago in a quiet village in the Sauerland region of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The presiding judge, Ottmar Breidling, agreed to allow the men to hold a meeting and the prosecutors’ office raised no objections. The trial, which is being held under tight security, was adjourned as the four left the courtroom with their lawyers.

After several hours of discussions the four returned to the court and their lawyers told the judge that their clients wanted to make full confessions. One of the attorneys added that there would be “surprises” ahead.

A confession could help to reduce any sentence, but it would most likely require the defendants to provide information on the planning of the attacks and more details about the Islamic Jihad Union. “Strictly speaking a confession leads to a reduction in a sentence if it is marked by regret and understanding,” a court spokesman told reporters.

Yilmaz and his alleged accomplices are accused of forming a terror cell and planning huge car-bomb attacks on bars, discos and the US military air base at Ramstein with the aim of killing as many Americans as possible. It is thought that they wanted to influence a pending decision by the German parliament on an extension of the country’s military deployment in Afghanistan.

The police had tracked the cell for months and pounced when it became likely the suspects were preparing to carry out the attacks. They are accused of buying hydrogen peroxide-based liquid explosives with the intention of building bombs. Three of the accused were arrested in September 2007 while the fourth was arrested later in Turkey.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,629517,00.html

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See also:

Four Men Stand Accused of German Terror Plot

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,620452,00.html

The Fifth Man: Terror Suspect Eludes German Investigators

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,620171,00.html

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Europe Objects Anew to Detainees

Reluctance Centers On U.S. Refusal to Also Admit Inmates.

The Obama administration’s push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

“If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?” said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. “If all 50 states in America say, ‘Sorry, we can’t take them,’ this is not very convincing.”

Interior ministers from the 27-member European Union are pressing the Obama administration to agree to a joint declaration that would commit the United States to accept some prisoners, something Congress has been highly reluctant to do.

European officials involved in the negotiations said Obama administration officials had assured them that some detainees who are not considered security threats would be released in the United States, while others would be prosecuted in U.S. courts.

But now European governments are seeking fresh assurances that the White House will be able to follow through on its pledge, given recent opposition by Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress to permitting any prisoners on U.S. territory.

Congress has refused to authorize $80 million Obama wants to pay for closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until he reveals exactly what he plans to do with the 240 prisoners held there.

In a speech last week, Obama said that some inmates would be tried in federal courts or military commissions and that others would probably be held in preventive detention, although he did not say where. U.S. courts have ordered that 21, including the Uighurs, be released, and there are 50 more “who we have determined can be safely transferred to another country,” Obama said.

Several European countries, including Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Portugal, said they were willing to give a new home to Guantanamo inmates after Obama announced in January that he would empty the prison within a year. Guantanamo has been a human rights sore point in Europe since President George W. Bush opened it in 2002.

Agreements to resettle individual prisoners, however, have been slow in coming. Britain and France have each accepted one Guantanamo prisoner since Obama took office, but no other arrangements have come to fruition.

German Assent Evaporated

Perhaps the thorniest case so far has involved a group of prisoners that many U.S. and European officials had thought would be the easiest to resolve: the Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnic group from China.

There are 17 Uighurs at Guantanamo; all were captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A U.S. federal judge ruled in October that none poses a security threat and that they should be freed. But American officials have struggled to find a place for them.

Attorneys for the 17 men have said they cannot be sent back to China because, as members of a persecuted minority group, they would face imprisonment or even death. Other countries have been reluctant to accept them for fear of antagonizing the Chinese government, which considers them terrorists.

Recently, U.S. officials thought they had found a solution. Leaders in Germany, which hosts the largest expatriate community of Uighurs in Europe, indicated a willingness to resettle some of the men.

After weeks of informal discussions, the State Department delivered a formal request last month to the German government to accept nine Uighurs. The response was positive. German diplomats supported the idea. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a leading opponent of accepting Guantanamo prisoners, softened his position in a meeting with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., saying he would consider helping under certain conditions.

In Munich, the capital of the southern state of Bavaria, the City Council passed a resolution saying it would be glad to welcome the Uighurs. Members of Munich’s Uighur community, about 500 immigrants, promised to line up jobs and homes for the former detainees.

“It is important to send the signal that we should do what we can to help close Guantanamo,” Friedrich Graffe, director of social services for the city of Munich, said in an interview. “If the Uighurs should come to Munich, we would take care of them.”

Since then, however, negotiations have stumbled. German officials complained that the Obama administration has not shared enough details from the Uighurs’ files to allow an independent assessment of whether they pose a security risk. More trouble emerged when Washington stipulated that the Uighurs would be barred from traveling to the United States.

“If the U.S. says they should come here, but they cannot travel to the U.S., we would have to ask why not?” said a German Interior Ministry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. “Does that mean they are dangerous?”

Protest in Northern Virginia

The Obama administration is facing similar problems at home.

In a bipartisan eruption, lawmakers across the country have protested any relocation of detainees in their states. One of the most adamant has been Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R), in whose Northern Virginia district the administration hopes to resettle several Uighurs.

When constituents with inside information alerted him May 1 that a plane was being readied for the “imminent” transfer of two to five Uighurs, Wolf shot off a letter to Obama asking the president to “declassify all intelligence regarding their capture, detention, and your administration’s assessment of the threat they may pose to Americans, prior to any decision to release them.” Obama did not respond, but Wolf’s chief of staff received a call from the White House accusing him of playing politics with the issue, Wolf said.

Earlier, Wolf added, the Justice Department had given him an informal promise not to carry out any resettlements without congressional consultation in exchange for his agreement not to grill Holder on the Uighurs during the attorney general’s House testimony April 23.

Wolf’s letter to Obama was followed by one to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on May 4, and another to Holder on May 13. The Uighurs, Wolf told Holder, are “trained terrorists” and members of an al-Qaeda affiliate, allegations that the military and federal courts had dismissed.

Although neither Napolitano nor Holder responded to his letters, Wolf said, the Justice Department set up a classified meeting with him last week. The session ended abruptly and unsatisfactorily, he said, when Ronald H. Weich, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, was unable or unwilling to fully answer Wolf’s questions.

“My sense is that Holder just wants to release someone so he can go back and say [to the Europeans], ‘Well, we’ve taken one or two or three,’ ” Wolf said yesterday.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to respond directly to Wolf’s assertions, saying in an e-mail that the department has briefed Wolf and other members of Congress “on the detainee review process. . . . We will continue to do so as we work to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay.”

A White House aide noted that “a federal judge ordered the release of the Uighurs during the previous administration, and we’ve been working hard to implement that order, bearing in mind that we will not release any detainee who would endanger the security of the American people.”

“Contacts with the congressman’s office,” the aide said of Wolf, “were the result of an effort to bring him into the consultative process” of determining where the detainees should go.

Some Germans Digging In

The hitches that have developed in admitting some of the Uighurs to the United States have, in turn, severely hampered efforts to send the nine other Uighurs to Germany.

“It’s very clear that the [Obama] administration has to bring some of them to the U.S.,” said Susan Baker Manning, a Washington lawyer who represents two Uighurs seeking to go to Munich.

“Our European allies have made it quite clear that they expect our help and participation in solving the problem of Guantanamo, which we created,” she said.

Meantime, some influential German authorities are digging in their heels. Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s interior minister, said in an interview that he would not completely rule out accepting some Uighurs. But he said the Obama administration needed to do a much better job of allaying German concerns.

Herrmann also said he was not convinced by Washington’s insistence that the Uighurs do not pose a threat.

“These are people who participated in terror camps, who had military training, who are radicalized, who do not follow democratic principles, who follow radical goals,” he said. “And we do not want to accept such people.”

Siegfried Benker, a Munich City Council member and local Green Party leader, said officials such as Herrmann are trying to stir fears by portraying the Uighurs as sinister.

“With the Uighurs, there is no proof at all that they were guilty. They have been cleared from being enemy combatants, and the U.S. no longer sees them as being suspicious,” said Benker, whose party endorsed the resolution welcoming the Uighurs to Munich. “But the opponents act like anyone who comes from Guantanamo has to be a terrorist. They do not allow for innocence. Apparently they hope for votes.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803920.html?hpid=topnews

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Are German Anti-Pirate Forces Hampered by Bureaucrats?

The Special Forces Command, or KSK, is a separate elite force, under command of the German military.

A review of the political complexities behind a recent aborted anti-pirate operation off the coast of Africa has revealed that German security agencies tend to fight each other sooner than the enemy. Politicians in Berlin are trying to draw lessons from the failed mission.

The return of the would-be heroes from Harardhere took place almost as quietly as their departure three weeks earlier. After landing at Cologne-Bonn last Tuesday evening, the chartered flight from Mombasa was directed to a military section of the airport, where nondescript-looking busses awaited the 200 members of Germany’s GSG-9 elite federal police unit.

There was no champagne, no buffet, no cameras, no press. It wasn’t the reception that GSG-9 chief Olaf Lindner, or August Hanning, a junior secretary at the Interior Ministry, had in mind. Hanning had made a special trip to Cologne to greet the frustrated elite troops. He had trouble hiding his disappointment.

Lindner gave Hanning another detailed account of the highly successful dress rehearsal for storming the German freighter, the Hansa Stavanger. He also explained how thrilled the US special forces were with the Germans. And he said US colleagues on the American helicopter carrier the USS Boxer were extremely impressed with the Germans’ cutting-edge equipment.

As a police force, the GSG-9 has no long-distance equipment of its own, so it sometimes has to rely on the military to reach remote crisis areas.

Hanning knew the rest. Ever since Somali pirates had boarded and hijacked the Hansa Stavanger on April 4, and abducted the crew, including five German sailors, a crisis team had met almost every day in Berlin. Hanning himself had to announce that the US government had pulled the plug on the GSG-9 operation off the coast of the Somali pirate stronghold of Harardhere roughly two weeks ago. He’d witnessed the squabbling among ministries in Berlin, the complicated and contradictory levels of decision-making, the political blame game.

But how could he explain to the demotivated men of GSG-9 that operative ability and a political will to conduct foreign operations were sometimes light-years apart? How could he break the news to Germany’s elite forces that, when in doubt, German bureaucrats were more prepared to fight each other than to tackle Somali pirates?

It’s not the same as, say, the Labor Ministry in Berlin squabbling with colleagues from the Family Ministry over the details of rent subsidies — or the economics minister attacking the finance minister because he doesn’t agree with the amount of money offered under Germany’s car-scrapping bonus plan. That’s all part of business as usual in a democracy.

But when the Foreign, Defense, and Interior Ministries lock horns while thousands of kilometers away a strike team waits for orders, then it’s no longer democratic business as usual — it’s a matter of national security.

‘Post-Heroic’ Politics

The failed Somali mission can also be explained by the fact that, since the end of World War II, Germany has been reluctant to engage in violent interventions — in contrast to the US and France, which used their militaries to secure the release of hostages over the past few weeks. In the words of Berlin political scientist Herfried Münkler, Germany is a “post-heroic society.” Two decades after the end of the Cold War, the country would like to play a key role on the international stage. But it’s rarely prepared to bear the consequences.

The typical German response to hijacking and hostage threats has been the way of the bank account, not the special military mission. Since this strategy tends to save hostages’ lives, a broad consensus has emerged among the general public that ransom payments are acceptable. But paying ransom, in the long run, is an inadequate response to the asymmetrical warfare conducted by Afghan Taliban fighters and Somali pirates. There’s a world of difference between Berlin sensitivities and the raw realities of a failed state.

 

The units’ missions overlap, but they have separate command structures.

Over the past few months, these realities prompted German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), to search for an alternative. They’d had enough of checkbook diplomacy, so they decided to organize an aggressive hostage rescue to send a strong signal to the pirates not to mess with Germany.

The Germans proved themselves last Thursday when the special forces command of the German military, or KSK, captured a Taliban leader in a spectacular operation in northern Afghanistan. After the flop in Somalia, it was a sign that Germany would resist falling back into old patterns.

But news of the Afghan military operation also shed cruel light on the reasons the hostage rescue operation off the coast of Harardhere was doomed to fail. The Bundeswehr, or German military, is solely responsible for the KSK elite unit, but no less than three ministries were involved in the planned GSG-9 operation: Foreign, Interior and Defense. The German Federal Police, the Bundeswehr and various commando and leadership levels also wrangled over power and influence. The scuppered operation to free the hostages illustrates what is wrong with the nation’s security architecture.

Germany’s closest allies operate differently in such crises. In France and the US the presidents decide whether hostages abroad should be freed by force. Then experts on the ground carry out the plan as well as they can, and if it fails, the president — as commander in chief — takes the heat.

Government leaders in Berlin prefer to pass such issues down the ladder, where interministerial struggles often take over. It can be impossible to reconstruct afterwards just who supported and who opposed a given operation. This is compounded by a chancellor who, as a matter out of principle, avoids commitment, issues no directives and delegates problems to her cabinet.

There are “no recognizable coordination efforts from the chancellery,” says Sascha Lange from a think tank called the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Merkel dispatched only a departmental head to the crisis team meetings, while she herself took a trip over the Easter break — right in the middle of the critical operational planning phase — and enjoyed a holiday on the Italian resort island of Ischia. Merkel’s chief of staff Thomas de Maizière was briefed on the situation, but he indicated no preference for a particular course of action.

With no firm political leadership, the squabbles between participating ministries can spiral out of control. The German Foreign Office heads the crisis team and thus has the job of freeing the hostages — but it has no authority over an operation by the GSG-9. The elite police force is under command of the German interior minister, who cannot deploy the commandos without the defense minister, whose navy patrols the Indian Ocean to combat piracy.

Everyone is in charge, in other words, but no one is at the helm.

The chancellor has maintained a safe distance from all participants. She seems unwilling to risk a botched operation just a few months before an upcoming election. This would make the foreign minister — her rival in the fall — responsible for any fiasco. If the GSG-9 mission had failed, Interior Minister Schäuble might have resigned too, because he, according to German law, has to give the final strike order together with the foreign minister. Merkel could have dodged any political flak.

Two Warring Units

This lack of political leadership is compounded by other problems. The German government has two elite units intended for crisis situations like the one in Somalia. Both have their hands slightly tied. The KSK was established in 1996 to “save and evacuate” Germans in trouble abroad, but this military force is chronically undermanned and hard pressed in Afghanistan. Only some 200 out of a total of 400 available positions in the German special forces are currently filled, meaning that the KSK is unavailable for missions in Somalia. KSK operations also require approval by the German parliament.

The roughly 200 men of the GSG-9 police unit are perfectly trained for hostage-taking situations, but they have trouble reaching remote locations. The GSG-9 is therefore dependent on the military’s aircraft and ships.

Why can’t the GSG-9 and KSK cooperate to balance these deficits? The answer is simple and sobering: The two units can’t stand each other, and the aversion grows every time they try to work together.

Spats, Rivalries, Contradictory Field Assessments

Ever since the two elite units freed hostages last summer, “they haven’t been on good speaking terms,” says a member of the military. At the time, a group of criminals in the border region between Egypt and Sudan had abducted 11 tourists, including five Germans. The German government dispatched over 100 GSG-9 police along with KSK forces, workers with the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, and Transall cargo planes.

The hostages were released before the special units could fire a shot. But the actual trench warfare took place between GSG-9 head Lindner and KSK Brigadier General Hans-Christoph Ammon. The police were afraid that the KSK wanted to seize command of the operation, and the army was annoyed because the GSG-9 had sent an advance commando before the KSK units had reached the area.

The soldiers were particularly offended by a show staged by the police when they returned to Germany. At the airport in Berlin, the GSG-9 men ostentatiously lined up in front of their Lufthansa plane in parade formation — without their usual masks. While the police filed past, the KSK soldiers had to stay humbly in their seats, waiting for the photographers to disappear, so no one could recognize them.

In Berlin the GSG-9 is said to be better suited for missions like the one in Egypt. But the aborted mission in Somalia also revealed a range of weaknesses. Spats, rivalries and contradictory field assessments are certainly not limited to interactions with the KSK. During the Somalia mission there were also deep divisions within the Federal Police that nearly immobilized the agency. Police overrode police, and the head of operations in Potsdam contradicted the head of operations on board the US helicopter carrier Boxer. It became clear that the German Federal Police, which had been reformed only a year ago, wasn’t equipped to handle crises, or at least not a crisis on the other side of the globe.

A Fair-Weather Structure

On April 4, after the first reports reached Germany that the Hansa Stavanger had been seized by pirates, the country’s police force formed a special organizational structure which was to be based in Potsdam, at the headquarters of the Federal Police. The command was assumed by Joachim Franklin, head of the Federal Police Regional Headquarters in Bad Bramstedt, where he could be responsible for emergencies at sea.

This made Franklin the most important man in the operation. But he was 6,000 km (3,700 miles) from Harardhere.

Under Franklin’s command was GSG-9 head Lindner, as “on-scene commander.” This fair-weather structure is outstandingly well suited to handling domestic disasters like a train wreck in Germany’s industrial heartland, or even a hostage situation at a small bank in the otherwise quiet town of Winsen an der Luhe. It’s unsuitable for freeing a freighter in a remote corner of the world, where criminals have the upper hand.

While Lindner had access to reconnaissance aircraft photographs, US military analyses and on-location reports, the Federal Police in Potsdam had to rely on other sources to assess the situation for the Interior Ministry, including freely available information such as Google Maps on the Internet. This conflict came to a head in the last few days before the mission. Franklin made an appointment with Interior Ministry State Secretary Hanning to voice his concerns.

Franklin said the Federal Police in Potsdam was advising against the operation — it was too risky. He said it was still unclear where the hostages were being held on the ship, and he added that the time between the possible discovery of the attack commando and the boarding of the Stavanger was too long. Berlin was left with the impression that the man from the Federal Police wanted to abort the operation.

In fact, the situation looked very different in the Indian Ocean. While Franklin was conveying his concerns in Berlin, Lindner was training his troops day and night. The GSG-9 tested rappelling from the air and using suction equipment to climb the side of a vessel. The US Navy SEALs on board the USS Boxer assisted during these exercises, adding to a growing sense of optimism on board the helicopter carrier. On April 27, the Monday before the planned operation, Lindner wired an upbeat risk assessment to Berlin. But he said the dress rehearsal would determine the final decision.

The last rehearsal was conducted during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. According to sources in Berlin, the result was “outstanding.” Lindner now believed he could launch the operation with a justifiable amount of risk. He’d also picked a specific time. He wanted the GSG-9 to strike early on May 1, Friday morning. Just a few hours before US National Security Advisor James Jones withdrew American support for the operation, the GSG-9 commander sent his optimistic message to Berlin.

But who or what had moved Jones to pull the plug on the mission? There is a rumor circulating in a number of ministries and agencies in Berlin that the Bundeswehr had contributed to this decision with critical assessments of the situation, which had allegedly also been sent to US Central Command in Bahrain. According to this version of events, although the commanders on board the Boxer supported the operation, the headquarters in Bahrain voted against it in Washington.

The decision prompted Hanning to ask his counterpart from the Defense Ministry, Peter Wichert, for a word on the sidelines of the crisis team. He wanted to know if there was any truth to the rumor. Had the Bundeswehr actually passed on a statement to the Americans? Wichert denied it. No such statement had been issued, he said.

‘The Sword is Dull’

In the wake of the failed Somalia mission, most of the major players in Berlin now realize that things can’t continue in the same vein. There won’t be a second operation without reforms because “the sword,” as a high-ranking official from the crisis team says, “is dull.” A repeat failure is too predictable. Interior Minister Schäuble and Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung now want to hold talks with other European countries and the US government to ensure that the transport of the GSG-9 at sea and in the air will go smoothly in the future.

“Germany apparently can’t resolve hostage crises like this on its own, but is instead reliant on outside help,” says Peter Struck, a former defense minister who leads the Social Democrats’ parliamentary faction, and “we have to seriously consider the question of whether we should build up our own capabilities to handle similar situations.”

Both special units lack large cargo aircraft for long-distance transports, big ships to transfer troops, reconnaissance instruments and modern communications technology. “The deficits are well-known,” says defense expert Lange with biting sarcasm. “We’ve been debating them for 15 years.”

Little has apparently changed since the first foreign mission by Bundeswehr infantry and supply troops. In 1994, US and German units beat a hasty retreat after abandoning the disastrous United Nations operation in Somalia. Since the Americans didn’t allow their allies on board their landing ships, the Bundeswehr had to evacuate its rearguard troops by cramming them onto a narrow frigate. After the recent failed GSG-9 mission, Defense Minister Jung may exhume old plans for a German landing ship.

More equipment alone won’t be enough. From now on, Germany will undoubtedly avoid having dual strategists in Potsdam and on location in the field. Birgit Homburger, a defense expert with the opposition liberal Free Democrats, is calling for a new policy decision to use the KSK instead of the GSG-9 in the future. She says this would place the leadership of an operation “unequivocally under one agency” — the military. Her SPD colleague Rainer Arnold advocates that the two units should at least “train together and collaborate.”

Schäuble took Jung aside during a cabinet meeting last week. He wanted to know if the Defense Ministry would be willing to station a kind of mobile task force consisting of KSK soldiers and frogmen on the German frigates in the Indian Ocean, at least as a provisional measure? This could make it possible to quickly end hijackings before the seized ships reach the pirate ports on the coast. Jung remained noncommittal.

He’s aware that Schäuble’s suggestions don’t have a good track record. In response to a request by the Interior Ministry, Jung sent a submarine to Somalia to secretly observe the pirate stronghold from periscope depth and drop off GSG-9 men. On the way there, the much-praised fuel cell propulsion system — which allows the world’s most advanced conventional submarine to stay under water for weeks on end — came to a grinding halt. Before it even reached the Suez Canal, U-34 was stopped in the Mediterranean by engine trouble.

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,624908,00.html

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Hamburg Reaches Deal with Google on Street View

After numerous citizen complaints, Hamburg says it has reached a tentative deal with Google limiting the scope of its Street View service, which offers ground-level photos of city streets around the world. The service is highly controversial in Germany, despite not yet having launched here.

Internet search giant Google has reached a tentative deal with the government official in the city of Hamburg responsible for data privacy issues surrounding the company’s controversial Street View project. The official, Johannes Caspar, said Google had responded to an ultimatum on the firm placed by the city-state to address 12 potential violations of German data privacy laws.

Google Street View is controversial due to its linking of ground-level images of streets (complete with buildings and monuments) to its comprehensive Google Maps. In Germany and other European countries — where privacy and data protection laws are far stricter than in the United States — the project has proven highly controversial.Google Street View is already available for other parts of Europe, allowing a user to take a virtual tour of the streets of Paris or London’s Piccadilly Circus, for example. It’s simple to operate: Users just drag a symbol of a small yellow man over the desired street. A street-view image then opens, allowing a 360-degree view of homes, front yards, cars, people and whatever other objects were captured when the camera-equipped cars dispatched by Google travelled through the area.

And some of the images tell more than Google anticipated. Several months ago, the service drew controversy in Britain when a woman divorced her husband after finding evidence on Street View that he had cheated on her. An image on the service showed his car parked in front of the home of his mistress.

In Germany, Hamburg isn’t the only city to have expressed its grief against Google over Street View. In Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, the state’s top data protection official, Thilo Weichert, has described the way Google collects data for the project as “horrible.” Last October, a homeowner in Molfsee, a suburb of the German port city of Kiel, saw one of black Opel Astra cars the company is using to take street images in German cities and complained to local officials, sparking community outrage over the search engine’s ambitious and, they felt, prying endeavor. The state parliament even took up the issue. Communal resistance to the ambitious projects also spread to other German cities like Hamburg. As a result of the protest, Google initially suspended its work in northern Germany. But now it is continuing to busily take snapshots of street scenes in cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen and Kiel.Pixillate or Perish

In Hamburg, the city had issued an ultimatum on Monday that it must adhere to data protection demands or face an injunction against its project, which it would like to complete globally. In a letter to both Google Germany and Google in the United States, the state official in charge of data protection ordered the company to submit a written guarantee that it would adhere to the rules by Wednesday. Hamburg officials said a deal would not be finalized until Google’s US headquarters provided a written pledge to adhere to the rules.

Hamburg is demanding that the faces of people captured in the images are pixilated to the point they cannot be recognized before they are used or archived. It wants the same for license plates and other potentially identifiable private data. And it wants the company to delete any images of homes if asked to by owners — both online and in any data it saves.On Wednesday, Caspar praised Google for meeting the deadline, and said that planned talks in the coming week would focus on written assurances that Google would delete any raw data that has not been pixilated and has already been transferred to the US.

Hamburg data-protection officials said numerous residents and communities had issued complaints in recent weeks about Google Street View, with at least two upset citizens calling by phone each day.

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,626075,00.html

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Google Threatened With Sanctions Over Photo Mapping Service in Germany

A German data protection official on Tuesday threatened Google, the world’s largest search company, with “unspecified sanctions” if the company did not change its Street View panoramic photo mapping service to conform to the country’s strict privacy laws.

Johannes Caspar, the data protection regulator for the German city-state of Hamburg, where Google has its German headquarters, said officials would be forced to pursue unspecified sanctions if he did not receive written guarantees from Google agreeing to changes before 10 a.m. local time Wednesday.

Mr. Caspar said during an interview that Google and the German data protection officials were at odds on 12 points involving the operation of Street View. German privacy law forbids dissemination of photos of people or their property without their consent.

The most significant disputes involving Street View, Mr. Caspar said, concern Google’s unauthorized filming of houses and private property and the company’s handling of the photographic data it records but which is later removed from Street View following complaints by property owners.

“I have asked for written guarantees on 12 points,” Mr. Caspar said, “and if Google doesn’t deliver the guarantees by the deadline, we will be forced to investigate the possibility of sanctions.” He declined to specify what the other 10 points were or what sanctions were contemplated.

Dietmar Müller, a spokesman for the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Bonn, said the Hamburg agency could levy fines against Google of up to €100,000, or $136,000, which Google could appeal in court. Private citizens could also sue Google in German court over unauthorized filming, he added.

“But generally, the penalties for this type of activity are limited in Germany,” Mr. Müller said.

The data protection administrators of 16 German states, led by Hamburg and the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, have objected to Google’s plans for its Street View service. In Kiel, a city on the Baltic Sea, residents last year put stickers on their front doors warning Google not to film their property for the service.

Google has been compiling a photographic inventory since 2008 of major streets in Germany for Street View, which is available in 11 countries, including France, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands in Europe.

But about 300 people in Germany have complained to local officials about the filming, Mr. Caspar said, and Google has not set a date for introducing the service in Germany, the largest European economy.

In an attempt to resolve the dispute, representatives for Google and the state data protection officials met in April. Stefan Keuchel, a Google spokesman in Hamburg, said Google had made real progress at the meeting toward a resolution to the impasse.

“We are committed to reaching an agreement which respects local laws,” Mr. Keuchel said.

Google, Mr. Keuchel said, agreed at the meeting, in Schwerin, to give Germans the right to opt out of Street View filming in advance by visiting a Web site. Also, property owners can contact Google after Street View goes online and have their property or images removed or made unintelligible by pixelation.

It is standard practice, Mr. Keuchel said, for Google to make vehicle license plates indecipherable and obscure the faces of individuals filmed unwittingly by Google’s 360-degree panoramic camera.

But Mr. Keuchel declined to say whether Google would accede to all the German objections, which a confidentiality agreement prevented him from detailing.

“We will definitely be submitting our answers to all of the questions raised by the state officials by tomorrow’s deadline,” Mr. Keuchel said.

Mr. Caspar said that his agency so far had received only a verbal promise from Google and that it was seeking written guarantees from authorized representatives at Google’s headquarters in California.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/technology/companies/20google.html?hpw

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Greece put brakes on Street View

The Hellenic Data Protection Authority wants more information.

Greece’s data protection agency has banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Street View gives users a 360-degree view of a road via Google Maps.

Authorities want to know how long the images would be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

A similar street mapping service, run by local ISP Kapou, was also suspended for the same reason.

In a statement, Google said that it had not seen the full details of the The Hellenic Data Protection Authority’s request, but had taken steps to protect people’s privacy.

“Google takes privacy very seriously, and that’s why we have put in place a number of features, including the blurring of faces and licence plates, to ensure that Street View will respect local norms when it launches in Greece,” the statement read.

“We have already spoken with the Hellenic Data Protection Authority to ensure that they understand the importance we place on protecting user privacy.

“Although that dialogue is ongoing, we believe that launching in Greece will offer enormous benefits to both Greek users and the people elsewhere who are interested in taking a virtual tour of some of its many tourist attractions.”

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View has now covers nine countries, including the United Kingdom and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a given location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture view of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

Under fire

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

While many of these charges have been dismissed, either through the courts or by regional information commissioners, in some cases people have taken a more direct approach.

In April, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

Google’s street mapping cars are, for now, being kept in neutral.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

The director of the UK-based privacy watchdog Privacy International, Simon Davies, said the Greeks’ decision would set a precedent for other nations.

“This is fantastic news. The Greek regulators understand the risks of future technology creep. They have watched what has happened in the US and UK very carefully and will be familiar with the arguments on both sides.

“This highlights the difference between regulators – some will allow the public space to be exploited, others acknowledge that people’s privacy needs to be protected.

“Now we wait for the domino effect, as the Greek decision sets an example that others may follow – we will see what happens next in Central Europe.”

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See also:

All clear for Google Street View

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/all-clear-for-google-street-view/

Broughton residents challenge Google camera

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/residents-challenge-google-camera/

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Street View under fire in Japan

Residents say the Street View images let users see more than they should.

Google’s Street View service suffered a second blow this week after numerous complaints in Japan forced the firm to start reshooting all the photos.

Cameras attached to the Street View car were “too high” for Japanese buildings, allowing them to see over walls into private areas.

Google said it would lower the cameras on its cars by 40cm (16in).

On 12 May, Greece’s data protection agency ordered Google to stop filming because of privacy concerns.

In a statement, Google said it would make “locally appropriate modifications to ensure a better user experience”.

“We have lowered the height of the camera due to the unique characteristics of many Japanese roads; they tend to be narrow, without pavements and driveways, and houses are built close to the street,” the statement said.

“We think the new camera height allows us to get a high-quality image of the street while respecting the privacy of homeowners.”

The Street View service covers 12 cities in Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka.

Timeline

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View now covers nine countries including the United Kingdom, and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

Earlier this week, Greece’s data protection agency banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Authorities want to know how long the images will be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

In the UK, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car in April when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049490.stm

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German Towns Saying ‘Nein’ to Google ‘Street View’

Google’s corporate slogan might be “don’t be evil,” but some communities in northwestern Germany see something nefarious in the company’s photographing all their streets and houses. If they get their way, they will remain black holes in Google’s ambitious mapping of the universe.

Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information” has just met a formidable foe in the form of the town of Molfsee near Kiel in the northwestern German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

The picturesque, but not picture-friendly town hopes to block the Internet giant from filming its streets and the houses of its fewer than 5,000 inhabitants for its “Street View” program — a service that provides 360-degree, street level images via the Google Maps search engine.

“We are not going to let this happen,” Reinhold Harwart, the leader of the CDU on the town council, told the Lübecker Nachrichten daily Sunday. “You can see everything in those photos! That is opening house and home to criminals!”

Harwart’s worries are shared at the state and federal levels. “We find the project extremely alarming,” Marit Hansen, the state’s deputy officer in charge of privacy protection, told the same paper. “It gathers personal data and puts it on the Internet. That will not do.” Peter Schaar, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had major misgivings about Google’s plans.

The Street View program, which uses a combination of photographs taken from cameras mounted on the roofs of cars and global positioning technology, has elicited similar responses around the world since it was first introduced in San Francisco in May 2007. Since then it has spread to dozens of other cities across the globe. The worries range from those of people worrying that the program could be used to help would-be kidnappers, people patronizing adult entertainment establishments or even people trying to hide the fact that they smoke from a spouse.

As far as Google is concerned, the complaints are much ado about nothing. “You can’t really see anything more than a person walking down the street would,” Kay Oberbeck, Google’s spokesman for North and Central Europe told the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung. “But, whereas that person can look over the hedge, our cameras can’t.” He added that the program automatically blurs out the faces of people and license plate numbers caught in the images.

Filming residential streets, which Google has been doing in this country for a few months, is not illegal in Germany. But to stop Google from filming its community, Molfsee plans to require the company to get a permit, citing laws related to traffic and commercial activities in public spaces. “We will require that they get a special-use permit for the streets,” Harwart told Die Tageszeitung. “People can’t just put tables or benches out on the street to sell ice cream. In such cases, people need permits.”

“And when they ask for a permit,” Harwart added, “we will say no.”

But Google doesn’t seem bothered by the threat. “We don’t need permits,” Oberbeck says, arguing that the streets are public property. “Street View is not a tool designed for criminals.”

In the meantime, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Molfsee, Lübeck and a number of communities in Schleswig-Holstein are looking into taking legal actions to protect themselves from Google’s prying eyes.

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,581177,00.html

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The Village and the Nazi Labor Camp

Traces of horror: This stone was chiseled by one of the Lieberose prisoners.

Jamlitz is a quiet German village like many others. But there is one difference: It was also the site of a brutal Nazi labor camp. Hundreds of corpses are thought to be buried in the soil here. But the search for the mass grave has yet to unearth more than stories of wartime horror.

“Go ahead and write that we country bumpkins don’t think much of this talk of graves,” said Heinrich Keritz, a Jamlitz local in his mid-50s, leaning against the barbed wire fence holding a telescope. “All our taxes are being used and, in the end, nothing will be found.” Keritz looked angrily at the piles of earth, meter-high weeds and the backhoe.

Heinrich Keritz is the stereotype of a morose backwoodsman. To understand him, one has to know the story of his village. Jamlitz is a small town with some 600 residents on the border of the Spreewald forest south of Berlin. Tucked between rapeseed fields and a spruce forest, the village only rarely sees an urban tourist. Jamlitz residents don’t like the flurry of publicity. The only feature setting this village apart from any other is its proximity to the “camp.”

That is how Jamlitz locals refer to the Lieberose camp, a satellite of the Nazis’ Sachenhausen concentration camp. At the end of 1943, some prisoners from Sachsenhausen were transported to Jamlitz and forced to build a training area for the SS division “Kurmark.” There were more deaths in the Jamlitz barracks than in similar labor camps. Every day, dozens of prisoners were killed or died from exhaustion. Only 400 of a total 8,000 prisoners survived the war.

An Elusive Grave

Sixty years have now passed since the horrific crimes in the camp. But the stories live on in Jamlitz — about bones hidden in the forest, about haggard camp victims, about people on a death march begging for water, about SS men spending nights drinking and shooting. In 1971 builders working in the neighboring settlement of Staakow stumbled upon remains of nearly 600 prisoners from Lieberose, victims of a mass shooting in the final days of the camp. The Stasi, the former East German secret police, spent months interviewing people to try to identify those responsible for the crimes. But the investigations were soon shelved.

Interest in the camp resurfaced in the mid 1990s. Many suspected that victims from the mass shooting still lie buried in the ground. According to old camp plans, the graves may lie in the center of Jamlitz. There are thought to be remains from some 700 people, but there’s no list of names. “All we have to go on are numbers,” said Günter Morsch, director of the Sachsenhausen Memorial Foundation and the author of a detailed report about Jamlitz. Dozens of suspected sites were dug up in the years until 2004, but no evidence was found. The air force flew over the settlement with their radar detection devices — also without uncovering any sign of the graves.

The list of suspected sites was eventually whittled down to just one location, but the land owner blocked excavation work for more than a decade. Last autumn an agreement was reached with a Brandenburg state court, and Jamlitz’s history was stirred up again. A team of archeologists from the local authority dug up the soil, layer by layer, uncovering some 500 square meters of the overgrown land around an abandoned house.

But Heinrich Keritz turned out to be right, at least for the time being — no human remains were found. The dig was completed on Tuesday, but the search for traces of the murdered camp prisoners will continue.

“We cannot stop the search there, not after the findings of the latest excavations,” Brandenburg Interior Minister Jörg Schönbohm said on Thursday. Some relics from the concentration camp were indeed found: cooking equipment, glasses, canteen porcelain, building materials. These findings “lead to the possibility that the victims do not lie far away,” said Schönbohm. “We were possibly never so near to the grave.”

The results of the search are important for the Jewish community, historians and the state of Brandenburg. However, they won’t affect the dark history of the village, nor change the facts of what happened during the war right on residents’ doorsteps. Before the first barracks were built, Jewish prisoners were housed in a local guesthouse. Some families put up the families of SS men; others hid people who had managed to escape from the camp.

“People who live here know about the camp,” said Christa Wiernowolski, a woman living next door to the excavation site. When she and her husband built their home in Jamlitz, both felt ill at ease. “It was clear what sort of land our house was standing on,” she said. When her husband dug a hole to erect a fence, he stumbled upon two old SS steel helmets. Neighbors found some teeth while digging in their garden.

Christa Wiernowolski was a young woman when she first heard stories of the emaciated people driven through the villages and beaten on the streets. The 56-year-old teacher speaks openly about the barracks. Her family always talked about the camp, and the wife and baby of one SS soldier even lived in her parents’ attic during the war.

Today Jamlitz has a documentation site with information boards. But eyewitness accounts and historical facts have long been merged with fiction in the village. In the local bar people speculate that the corpses are buried meters below the foundations of houses near the latest excavation site. The state of Brandenburg shares this suspicion. The government, according to Schönbohm, plans to dig up two neighboring plots of land.

“But most people here don’t want to talk about the camp,” said Christa Wiernowolski. “They simply want their peace and quiet.” When the local council held a meeting to inform people about the excavations, not a single Jamlitz resident showed up.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,625044,00.html

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Germany agrees ‘bad bank’ scheme

German cabinet has agreed a “bad bank” scheme, to enable the country’s lenders to remove remaining toxic assets from their balance sheets.

Under the plan, the banks will be able to swap their toxic debt for government-backed bonds, in return for paying an annual fee.

The government hopes the move will encourage banks to start lending again, both to each other and consumers.

It still requires parliament to back the proposal before it can become law.

Reports have said that Angela Merkel’s government wants to see this achieved before the summer recess starts in early July.

‘Huge freezer’

Although the exact details have yet to be released, reports say banks that wish to take part in the voluntary scheme will be given bonds worth 90% of the value of the toxic assets.

The toxic debt will then be stored for up to 20 years.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said no German bank had made a concrete request so far, but that interest in the scheme was significant.

He added that it would be paid for through Germany’s existing 500bn euros ($683bn; £450bn) bank rescue fund.

Andreas Schmitz, from the federation of German private banks, said the plan could be described as “a huge freezer in which each bank will have a shelf”.

“Their problem assets will be stored there and frozen,” he said.

“After the crisis, we will see if the merchandise can still be sold.”

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8047760.stm

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See also:

Toxic assets dump

Merkel Cabinet Seals Bad Banks Deal

After months of debate, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet on Wednesday finally agreed on a plan to establish “bad banks” to rid bank balance sheets of toxic assets. Berlin hopes the plan will not further burden German taxpayers.

 

It has been a long time in coming, with divisive debates and numerous changes. But on Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet in Berlin finally decided in favor of a “bad bank” law designed to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets. The hope is that the plan, put together by Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, will jump start the flow of credit into the German economy, which is suffering through the worst recession since World War II.

The plan must still be approved by Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, but the size of the majority held by Merkel’s coalition government makes passage likely.It is estimated that German banks hold more than €200 billion ($274 billion) in toxic assets — of an estimated €3 trillion worldwide. Berlin’s new plan calls for banks to set up their own companies in which to park these junk securities. The new companies would then refinance the toxic assets — essentially loans in danger of default — by issuing state-backed bonds to the mother bank.

The plan would remove the risk of major writedowns from bank balance sheets and thus, Steinbrück hopes, restart the flow of capital among banks and into the real economy. And, best of all, the funding would come from the €500 billion bailout fund, known as Soffin, passed last autumn.

“We don’t need any additional capital,” said Steinbrück on Wednesday. “The umbrella that we currently have is sufficient.” He said that the Soffin fund has some €260 billion left.

If it works, the plan would put an end to the quarterly announcements by banks of huge writedowns as the junk debts default. Such writedowns have had grave consequences for banks’ reserve capital holdings, leading many financial institutions to the brink of collapse. 

Still, the banks would not be completely free of their past business mistakes. Should a bank’s “bad bank” make losses, shareholders would forego part or all of their dividend. Furthermore, banks would have to provide overseers a detailed look into the toxic assets being parked in the bad bank, an attempt to improve transparency.

A similar plan is currently in the works for Germany’s wobbling state-owned banks, but it has not yet been finalized. Germany’s economy, Europe’s biggest, is expected to contract by 6 percent this year with worries growing that unemployment will tick sharply upwards to over 5 million by the end of next year.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,624568,00.html

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Demjanjuk ‘fit to stay in jail’

John Demjanjuk denies working as a death camp guard

Suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk is fit enough to be held in jail until such time as he goes on trial, German prison doctors say.

Mr Demjanjuk, 89, was flown to Germany on Tuesday from the United States, where he waged a long battle against deportation, partly on health grounds.

But a spokesman for Stadelheim jail in Munich said “doctors have determined he is fit to remain in custody”.

He faces charges of being an accessory to the deaths of 29,000 Jews.

The arrest warrant was read to him hours after his arrival in Germany.

His lawyer, Guenter Maull, said the suspect had sat in a chair while the 21-page warrant was read and translated into his native Ukrainian language.

Mr Demjanjuk “showed no emotion, with few facial movements” but had understood the charges, he said.

He denies accusations that he worked as a guard in the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II.

Mr Demjanjuk, who settled in the US in 1952, says he was captured by the Germans in his native Ukraine during the war and kept as a prisoner of war.

‘In good shape’

He is being kept under medical observation to allow experts to determine whether he is fit to go to trial – an assessment which may take weeks.

But deputy prison director Jochen Menzel said Mr Demjanjuk was in strikingly good condition.

“He is not typical for his age… he is in better shape than usual for an 89-year-old,” he told German news channel N24.

His lawyers had argued in US courts that he was too frail to be deported, but the US government, which secretly shot footage showing him walking without assistance, argued he was fit to travel.

An appeals court ruled against him, saying it was satisfied that he would be provided with adequate care.

Mr Demjanjuk arrived in the US in 1952 as a refugee, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the car industry.

In 1988 he was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity, after Holocaust survivors identified him as a notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction and he returned to the US.

Prosecutors now say they have documents which prove his Nazi background, including an SS identity card which shows he was posted to the death camp in Sobibor in 1943, and many witness testimonies.

Mr Demjanjuk’s deportation was welcomed by observers.

Wolfgang Benz, head of the Centre for Anti-Semitism Research at Berlin university, welcomed Mr Demjanjuk’s deportation.

“This is about guilt, about avenging a crime, about responsibility for a criminal act,” he told told Deutschlandfunk public radio.

“Whether this old man who possibly is in a pathetic state spends his last years in a prison hospital or does not serve his sentence due to ill health, that’s of secondary importance.”

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Video: 

US government surveillance video showing John Demjanjuk walking without help

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8045730.stm

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8047553.stm

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Man Accused of Crimes at a Nazi Camp, Demjanjuk, Is Deported

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/man-accused-of-crimes-at-a-nazi-camp-demjanjuk-is-deported/

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In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

Many people move to Vauban not for environmental reasons, but because they feel that a car-free environment is far better for children. Indeed, children are everywhere! With no cars on the streets, many residents call Vauban a children’s paradise, where youngsters wander from a young age in safety. Even some residents who say they miss the convenience of a car at their doorstep have concluded that it is worth the tradeoff.

Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”

Vauban, Germany, is an affluent new suburban community that differs from traditional suburbs in many respects. The most important difference is that cars are forbidden on most of Vauban’s streets, and houses cannot have driveways or garages. Though not quite car-free, Vauban, a district of Freiburg, near the Swiss border, is a highly “car-reduced” suburb.

Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe — a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency — and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.

“All of our development since World War II has been centered on the car, and that will have to change,” said David Goldberg, an official of Transportation for America, a fast-growing coalition of hundreds of groups in the United States — including environmental groups, mayors’ offices and the American Association of Retired People — who are promoting new communities that are less dependent on cars. Mr. Goldberg added: “How much you drive is as important as whether you have a hybrid.”

Levittown and Scarsdale, New York suburbs with spread-out homes and private garages, were the dream towns of the 1950s and still exert a strong appeal. But some new suburbs may well look more Vauban-like, not only in developed countries but also in the developing world, where emissions from an increasing number of private cars owned by the burgeoning middle class are choking cities.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting “car reduced” communities, and legislators are starting to act, if cautiously. Many experts expect public transport serving suburbs to play a much larger role in a new six-year federal transportation bill to be approved this year, Mr. Goldberg said. In previous bills, 80 percent of appropriations have by law gone to highways and only 20 percent to other transport.

In California, the Hayward Area Planning Association is developing a Vauban-like community called Quarry Village on the outskirts of Oakland, accessible without a car to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and to the California State University’s campus in Hayward.

Sherman Lewis, a professor emeritus at Cal State and a leader of the association, says he “can’t wait to move in” and hopes that Quarry Village will allow his family to reduce its car ownership from two to one, and potentially to zero. But the current system is still stacked against the project, he said, noting that mortgage lenders worry about resale value of half-million-dollar homes that have no place for cars, and most zoning laws in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit. Quarry Village has obtained an exception from Hayward.

Besides, convincing people to give up their cars is often an uphill run. “People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” said David Ceaser, co-founder of CarFree City USA, who said no car-free suburban project the size of Vauban had been successful in the United States.

In Europe, some governments are thinking on a national scale. In 2000, Britain began a comprehensive effort to reform planning, to discourage car use by requiring that new development be accessible by public transit.

“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning document. Dozens of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and housing compounds have been refused planning permits based on the new British regulations.

In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. The town is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.

For trips to stores like IKEA or the ski slopes, families buy cars together or use communal cars rented out by Vauban’s car-sharing club. Ms. Walter had previously lived — with a private car — in Freiburg as well as the United States.

“If you have one, you tend to use it,” she said. “Some people move in here and move out rather quickly — they miss the car next door.”

Vauban, the site of a former Nazi army base, was occupied by the French Army from the end of World War II until the reunification of Germany two decades ago. Because it was planned as a base, the grid was never meant to accommodate private car use: the “roads” were narrow passageways between barracks.

The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.

By nature, people who buy homes in Vauban are inclined to be green guinea pigs — indeed, more than half vote for the German Green Party. Still, many say it is the quality of life that keeps them here.

Henk Schulz, a scientist who on one afternoon last month was watching his three young children wander around Vauban, remembers his excitement at buying his first car. Now, he said, he is glad to be raising his children away from cars; he does not worry much about their safety in the street.

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question.

More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s “car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2 million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.

But if it doesn’t work, his backup proposal is to build a development on the same plot that permits unfettered car use. It would be called Village d’Italia.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.html?em

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Germany bet on burlesque charm of Dita von Teese for Eurovision, but Norway won

Dita Von Teese poses in a bra to launch the new Wonderbra by Dita Von Teese collection on September 23, 2008 in London, England.

After getting nowhere in the 2008 Eurovision song contest, Germany is getting a bit desperate for attention. This year’s entry will have on-stage support from burlesque beauty Dita von Teese.

The American performer will apply her feminine touch to the “Miss Kiss Kiss Bang” song performed by “Alex Swings, Oscar Sings!” – a duo made up of Alex Christensen from Hamburg and Oscar Loya from the US.

Von Teese will dance to the pair’s swing-influenced ditty, wearing an outfit true to her personal style, straight out of the 1940s.

Burlesque artist Dita von Teese performs at the opening night party for the “Very Lingerie Week – Dita Von Teese Photo Exhibition” at the Spiral Gallery on June 19, 2007 in Tokyo, Japan.

“It was our goal to have an internationally known artist on the stage in Moscow as Miss Kiss,” said Thomas Schreiber, head of entertainment at ARD, the consortium of German broadcasters that organizes Germany’s entry.

Von Teese was the perfect choice, he said, because ”she plays with the fantasies of her audience.” 

The modern-day pin-up is known for her dedicated retro look, love of lingerie, and a marriage with shock rocker Marilyn Manson that ended in divorce.

None of that may sound very German, but that’s the name of the game at Eurovision, where national distinctions are downplayed and the goal is to be liked by Europeans of all nationalities.

Von Teese and Alex Swings Oscar Sings! will do their best to charm voters on Saturday, May 16.

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Full article: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4221930,00.html

Photos:  http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/0,1518,622281,00.html

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See also:

Eurovision Extravaganza

Europe’s Schmaltz Contest to Climax in Moscow

This year’s Eurovision finalists have been chosen — and Saturday’s showbiz spectacular should be nothing short of everything.

Violinist and singer Alexander Rybak has become a fantasy figure in his homeland of Norway — in fact his fiddling wizardry has earned him the nickname “Harry Potter.” And judging from an exuberant audience response to his song “Fairytale” at yesterday’s semifinal, Harry may very well have cast a winning spell on this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Rybak himself evidently ascribes magical powers to the song. The 23-year-old told the dpa news agency that his song was “about the positive feeling of first love and has given me lots of good fortune.”

But Norway was not the only lucky nation on Thursday night. In the Olimpiyskiy Indoor Arena in downtown Moscow, the last 10 finalists for the world’s largest musical competition were determined. Among the winners were Greece, Albania, Croatia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova, Denmark and Estonia.

Eurovision is one of the most-watched television events in Europe, with nearly 300 million viewers around the world. In its 53-year history, the sometimes trashy contest has managed to launch world careers, like those of Celine Dion and Abba. A recent system of selecting Eurovision winners based on telephone voting alone has been changed this year, to level the playing field: All decisions will now be filtered through national juries as well as TV viewers punching their phones.

And a German Burlesque Act

After Russia’s opening performance on Thursday — complete with pomp, ballet, and folklore — candidates from nine countries were eliminated. Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia all failed to make the cut.

Also missing from this year’s final competition will be Ireland, whose past glory has recently been obscured by odd candidates like last year’s puppet act, “Dustin the Turkey.” The Dutch flopped as well with their ’70s-style glitz in the number “Shine.”

In Saturday’s final Eurovision showdown, acts from 25 different countries will be competing, out of a total field of 42. Ukrainian Svetlana Loboda will perform “Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl)” — accompanied by go-go dancers clad in gladiator garb — while Sasha Son, a sort of Lithuanian Elton John, and Estonian schmaltz-rockers Urban Symphony, should provide a dose of sentimental cheese.

The 10 winners of the first semifinal will join the new candidates at Saturday’s show, along with performers from Germany, France, Britain, Spain and Russia.

German duo Alex Swings Oscar Sings will compete with their song “Miss Kiss Kiss Bang,” and appear onstage with burlesque babe Dita von Teese, who says her performance was inspired by ’30s-era Berlin cabaret. “I’m not here to save Germany from placing badly — the boys can do that themselves,” the American striptease artist told reporters in Moscow on Friday

Burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese will join German duo Alex Swings Oscar Sings at Saturday’s show.

Burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese performs her number ‘Le Bain Noir’ (Black Bath), with a creation by fashion designer Elie Saab, during a rehearsal for her show at the Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris on January 28, 2009.

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,625094,00.html

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Norwegians celebrate in Moscow

The smart money had long been on Norway to snatch victory in Eurovision 2009 – although many had assumed it would be a hard-fought contest with at least five other countries in the frame.But in the end, 23-year-old violinist Alexander Rybak romped home with his simple, high-energy song Fairytale – taking a record 387 points, way ahead of nearest rival Iceland.

Rybak, with his troupe of acrobatic dancers and quintessentially blonde backing-singers, raced into the post-results press conference, jumped onto the podium and gave another breathless performance of the winning ditty – just in case anyone had missed it the first (or second) time round.

Rybak’s energetic performance won a succession of 12-point votes

The assembled Eurovision press corps – more participants than critics – yelped with joy and congratulated him personally before lobbing him some exquisitely easy questions.

Rybak, bubbling with fresh-faced innocence, said he knew he’d been the favourite to win in Moscow but was modest about the scale of his victory.

“I still think I am far from being the best singer in the competition tonight,” he said.

“But I had a story to tell and I guess people liked that story.”

He wrote the song himself and, as he admitted, simplicity is the formula for Eurovision glory.

So now a record deal and a tour await the Norwegian fiddler who was born in Belarus and speaks fluent Russian.

His euphoria was matched by the European Broadcasting Union official hosting the press conference, who proclaimed Moscow 2009 as the best Eurovision Song contest there’d ever been, with the strongest line-up of finalists.

Strip-tease

The vast Olympic stadium in central Moscow was certainly packed with an enthusiastic crowd, which was entertained with the usual mix of the bold, the beautiful, the bad and the utterly bizarre.

From the opening moments when Russian heart-throb Dima Bilan, winner of last year’s competition, flew above the crowd and smashed through a series of polystyrene walls in front of the stage, the audience knew it would be an extravagant and lavish evening.

And one with its comic moments too.

Dima  himself almost came unstuck when his jacket snagged in the wires suspending him from the ceiling, after an over-zealous strip-tease routine.

The other strip-tease of the night also brought a hush to the audience.

The German song “Miss Kiss Kiss Bang” featured American artiste Dita Von Teese flinging an array of her clothing to the floor in an attempt to spice up the tedious music.

But she was more modest than in her performance earlier this week, and stopped short of continuing the strip down to a pair of sparkling nipple warmers.

The performances of the 25 finalists were as diverse as ever with emotional ballads, mock opera, classic pop and a half-hearted attempt at some hybrid-rap.

Even Britain, which is notoriously sceptical about Eurovision (while still watching it in vast numbers on television), put some serious effort into this year’s entry with a song written by composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber who also hand-picked the singer Jade Ewen.

The song, It’s My Time, succeeded in raising Britain’s fortunes from last position in 2008 to a respectable fifth here in Moscow.

Jade believed she stood a chance of winning, but on the night, her song – a rather familiar-sounding Lloyd-Webber ballad – failed to really excite the audience.

Oslo 2010

Greece’s Sakis Rouvas had one of the more ambitious dance routines

Even so, Western European countries will perhaps takes heart that the new voting system is making a difference, decreasing the influence of the traditional block voting of the Eastern half of the continent.

Audiences across Europe now only provide 50% of the votes with the rest coming from juries of musical experts in participating countries.

So now Norway will host the next Eurovision Song Contest in 2010.

They have a tough act to follow. The show here in Moscow was spectacular and expensive, costing more than $30 million (£19.8m).

Let’s hope Rybak can bring that exuberant energy all the way back to Oslo.

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Video: Norway scales top Eurovision spot

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8054015.stm

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Full article and photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8054281.stm

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National Tragedy

Eurovision Flop Spurs German Soul Searching

Germany has a tradition of landing near the bottom at the Eurovision Song Contest. This year, though, was supposed to be different. But despite the addition of burlesque dancer Dita von Teese, the act came in 20th place — and those responsible are trying to figure out what went wrong.

Perhaps it’s not surprising in a country that celebrates a five-time Olympic luge medallist as a national hero. But Germany’s thin skin when it comes to international competition is once again on full display after coming in a disappointing 20th place in the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night.

Never mind the fact that the winner was a 23-year-old going on 14 from Norway who was singing about his first love — leading some viewers to suspect the piece was actually an ode to his kindergarten teacher. Germany wants to win. And is considering a radical revamp of the way in which it selects the acts representing the country at the annual pop extravaganza.

Thomas Schreiber, in charge of the selection procedure for German public broadcaster ARD, told the daily Neue Presse that “we will have to think radically different next year.” He went on to say that the changes in the selection process would be announced as soon as possible. The Song Contest is run by the European Broadcasting Union with a public broadcaster from each country responsible for sending in an act.

In 2008, the casting-show cast-offs No Angels represented Germany at the Eurovision schlock-fest in Belgrade, Serbia — only to come in dead last. ARD immediately changed from an audience call-in selection format to one relying exclusively on a jury.

For this year’s act, the jury chose the duo Alex Swings, Oscar Sings. The pair presented a frat-boy anthem titled “Miss Kiss Kiss Bang” complete with confused looking posh stripper Dita von Teese wielding a whip as lead singer Oscar Loya broke into a brief bit of decidedly non-Animal-House tap dancing.

The German Eurovision act was hoping that stripper Dita von Teese would be enough to help them to a strong finish at the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow on Saturday. The costume she wore during rehearsals, pictured here, was deemed too risque.

On Saturday night, her costume was a bit more respectable. But the German act, Alex Swings Oscar Sings! was only enough for a 20th place finish.

She did, however, help singer Oscar Loya show some skin of his own.

Still, it wasn’t totally obvious what exactly Dita von Teese was doing on stage. German jury member Guildo Horn said it was “maybe a bit too much plastic.”

Oscar Loya (l.), Alex Christensen (r.), and Dita von Teese. The act was supposed to be Germany’s answer to its last place finish in 2008. They didn’t do much better this time around though.

The 120 million television viewers were decidedly unimpressed — as was the jury, added to audience voting this year in an effort to break the recent strangle-hold Eastern European acts have had on the contest. Together, the voting public and the presumed experts gave the German act just 35 points, fully 353 points behind the Norwegian act led by Alexander Rybak. Iceland came in a distant second closely followed by Azerbaijan.

Germany’s Eurovision dreams have now gone unfulfilled for 27 years, ever since “Ein bisschen Frieden” (A bit of peace) won in 1982. Many of those years have been marred by embarrassments at or near the very bottom of the heap — a dubious honor taken by Finland this year.

Just why Germany didn’t do any better this year remains something of a riddle. Some have noted that innocence was in this year and that the Norwegian number seemed “authentic” as Guildo Horn, the jury member from Germany said.

“It was the moment of my life,” said Loya after the show. “I had mega fun. It was a dream, despite our result.”

Horn, though, criticized the addition of Teese. “Maybe,” he said, apparently free of irony, j”Dita von Teese was a bit to much plastic.”

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Full article and photos, except photo (2): http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,625500,00.html

Photo (2): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/photo_galleries/article6305145.ece?slideshowPopup=true&articleId=6305145&nSlide=4&sectionName=PhotoGalleries

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