Consider, for instance, the controversy that erupted at the February 2006 edition of the annual Munich Security Conference. One of the featured speakers at the conference offered a particularly stern warning about the Iranian nuclear program and a particularly dire assessment of Iranian intentions. Insisting that Iran “must be prevented” from developing nuclear weapons, the speaker chastised the Iranian regime for “willfully stepping over all the red lines” that had been made known to it by the international community and excoriated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “unacceptable provocations” in questioning Israel’s right to exist and denying the Holocaust. The remarks prompted an immediate and angry response from the deputy Foreign Minister of Iran, Abbas Araghchi, who was present among the public. But far from backing down, the speaker – now speaking without prepared text – went still further, reminding the audience that in the early 1930’s many observers had dismissed the threats of the National Socialists as mere rhetoric.

Despite his well-known and oft-criticized penchant for WWII comparisons, the speaker in question was not the then American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld also spoke at the conference. But as concerns the Iranian nuclear issue, he merely urged the NATO allies to continue “to work together to seek a diplomatic solution.” The speaker in question was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (For the German audio and an English translation of Merkel’s speech, click here. Merkel’s testy exchange with Araghchi was reported in numerous both German and foreign media.)

The tone of Merkel’s pronouncements on the Iranian nuclear threat has not changed in the meanwhile. Thus, only last August, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Merkel again stated unequivocally that Iran “cannot be permitted to have an atomic bomb.” Suggesting a September deadline, Merkel insisted that if no progress is made in talks with Iran, “we must react with additional sanctions.”

Deeds, however, have not followed Merkel’s forceful words. This despite the fact that as a member of the so-called “P5+1” group, Germany has been promoted to the status of a sort of virtual permanent member of the UN Security Council as concerns the Iranian nuclear issue. In this capacity, however, Germany has, if anything, served as a brake on international efforts to achieve a more vigorous sanctions regime. Thus in September 2007, Germany reportedly deserted its western allies in the “P5+1” group and opposed a sanctions proposal aimed at forcing Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities. (See Matthias Küntzel’s “Berlin and Vienna Stand Against the West: European Divisions on the Iranian Bomb.”) Skeptical of the ability of the UN Security Council to take effective measures, at around the same time French President Nicolas Sarkozy began pitching a proposal to his European partners for the EU to adopt economic sanctions of its own. The EU countries would thus form a kind of “united front” or “coalition of the willing” with the US. Even if it was left to then Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik to break the bad news to Sarkozy publicly, this proposal too was, in effect, shot down by Germany. (For the details, see here.)

How is one to explain the disconnect between the Chancellor’s words and Germany’s actions? A matter of hypocrisy? A symptom of schizophrenia? Well, schizophrenia perhaps – though not the Chancellor’s schizophrenia, of course, but rather that of her “grand coalition” government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. For it should not be forgotten that following the Christian Democrats’ narrow electoral victory in 2005, Chancellor Merkel found herself saddled with a powerful Social Democratic foreign minister in the person of Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In the last four years, Steinmeier has often seemed to be pursuing a foreign policy entirely of his own devising. It was following consultations with Steinmeier in Berlin that Ursula Plassnik announced her opposition to Sarkozy’s proposed European Iran sanctions. According to diplomatic sources cited in the French press, Chancellor Merkel supported the plan (Le Monde, 14 September 2007).

If Chancellor Merkel has always had clear words for the Iranians, the same cannot be said for Foreign Minister Steinmeier. Thus, barely four months after Merkel’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, Steinmeier, in effect, shifted a large measure of the onus in the Iranian nuclear controversy from Iran to the United States and the other established nuclear powers. “We are for the effective application of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Steinmeier told the German news weekly Der Spiegel in a June 2006 interview:

The treaty contains a promise by the nuclear powers to disarm, and we should put pressure on them [sie drängen] to do so. Consequently, I am in fact of the opinion that beyond the current conflict with Iran, we need to review the worldwide situation of nuclear armament.

Since that time, the Foreign Minister has not ceased to beat the drum for nuclear disarmament, always being careful to suggest a link between the latter and nonproliferation efforts. Under Barack Obama, this has, of course, become the stance of the American administration as well.

In marked contrast to the chilly atmosphere of the Merkel-Araghchi exchange at the 2006 Munich Security Conference, at this year’s edition Foreign Minister Steinmeier could be seen greeting former chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani with a broad smile. (See photo here.) Larijani would go on to cause an uproar at the conference by defending Iranian Holocaust denial, noting that there are “different points of view” on the subject.

Now, however, following the Social Democrats’ disastrous showing in Sunday’s elections, Steinmeier is being shown the door. Confirming trends that were already discernable before the elections (see my FF report here), the Social Democrats (or “SPD”) took only 23% of the vote. This is by far the party’s worst result since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany after WWII and it represents a precipitous drop of nearly one-third of the party’s support as compared to 2005. The SPD’s decline and the strong showing of the – by German standards – economically-liberal “Free Democrats” (FDP) has paved the way to the formation of more programmatically-consistent “black-yellow” coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats. It is widely assumed that FDP-chief Guido Westerwelle will replace Steinmeier as foreign minister in Merkel’s new government.

Released from the ballast of Steinmeier and the SPD, will the new Merkel government adopt a more proactive role on the question of Iran sanctions? Perhaps. But, as chance would have it, Guido Westerwelle’s publicly-stated positions on nuclear proliferation and disarmament are not appreciably different from those of Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Thus, Westerwelle enthusiastically greeted the news of the Obama administration’s back-down from the eastern European “missile shield” by calling for a “decade of disarmament” (German link). He even suggested that American nuclear warheads should be withdrawn from Germany as “Germany’s” contribution to achieving this goal. In a June interview with the Rheinische Post, moreover, Westerwelle explicitly stated his opposition to new Iran sanctions, suggesting that sanctions would undermine the domestic opposition to Ahmadinejad.

On the other hand, these remarks – like other remarks by Westerwelle on foreign policy matters – have a certain inchoate, even improvised, feel to them. Moreover, as compared to the relations of force that obtained in the outgoing “grand coalition,” the Christian Democrats will be entering the new coalition in a greater position of strength vis-à-vis their new coalition partners. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union, barely edged out the SPD by a score of 35.2% to 34.2% in 2005 and the “Union” parties controlled only a handful more seats than the SPD in the Bundestag. This time, however, the CDU/CSU will be entering a coalition with a party that it outpolled by a better than 2-to-1 margin (33.8% to 14.6%). Chancellor Merkel has not hesitated to point to this electoral math, noting that as a consequence we can expect to see “more Christian Democrat politics” in the new coalition. If this prognosis holds true for the Iranian nuclear issue, Tehran should have reason to be worried.

When respondents are asked to state their personal preference between Merkel and Steinmeier, the prospects look even worse. Asked who they would vote for if the German chancellor was directly elected, only 23% give the nod to Steinmeier as compared to fully 62% for Merkel.

Far from improving matters, a so-called “Germany Plan” unveiled by Steinmeier at the beginning of August has been greeted with reactions ranging from skepticism to outright derision. The “plan” promises to create some four million new jobs in Germany by 2020, thus achieving full employment. This “ambitious” figure, as the candidate himself puts it, includes some two million seemingly green-tinted jobs in heavy industries (“the next industrial revolution will bring together traditional production and environmentally-friendly technologies”), a whopping one million in the health sector, and another 500,000 in “creative” industries.

In this already grim situation, the chancellor candidate took to the airwaves earlier this month in what was billed as an American-style “townhall meeting” on Germany’s RTL television. The result has been variously described as a “flop” by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading daily of a Social-Democratic persuasion, and a “debacle” by the country’s leading conservative daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (8/18, paper edition). A mere 810,000 viewers are estimated to have tuned in to the Steinmeier “townhall meeting”: a meager 4% of the total television audience. As Berthold Kohler noted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the celebrity cooking show “The Perfect Celebrity Dinner”, which was running in the same timeslot on another channel, pulled in twice that number.

In retrospect, however, Steinmeier and the SPD might be relieved that so few viewers were watching. Only minutes into the program, Steinmeier broke out into a massive sweat rivaling the worst televised moments of Richard Nixon or Albert Brooks comic “flop sweat” attack in the movie Broadcast News. The reaction was provoked by a recorded question from an internet user, one Mike Nöcker from Hamburg, who sarcastically described the job projections in Steinmeier’s “Germany Plan” as “the mother of all campaign promises” and wondered whether Steinmeier did not think he would enter the history books as a result: namely, next to the “flourishing landscapes” [blühende Landschaften] that Helmut Köhl once envisioned for the still today economically- depressed eastern German states.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier answers German voters' questions on RTL

The scene is viewable here (1:26-2:40). Oddly enough, it has been placed on YouTube by the Social Democratic party itself. (The full RTL broadcast is available here.)

Presumably helped by the off-camera intervention of an alert make-up person, Steinmeier subsequently regained his composure. But the rest of the show did not go much better for him. The questions appeared to be almost exclusively hostile, including several from persons in economically-precarious situations who serially took to task the German government’s response to the economic crisis. Since that government – a “grand coalition” between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats – is, after all, led by Chancellor Merkel, such questions could just as readily have been interpreted as criticism of Steinmeier’s rival. Nonetheless, his responses to them were pained and awkward.

Thus, for example, a newly unemployed former sales clerk at a bankrupt German department store chain asked why the government had offered help to the automaker Opel, but had abandoned him and his colleagues to their fate. Thereupon, the candidate launched into a sort of bizarre pep-talk, conceding that the future might look bleak, but encouraging the seemingly bewildered questioner “not to hang his head” and “always to look forward.” What he did not do was to answer the question.

In a perhaps even more awkward segment, a former Bundeswehr officer who had survived a suicide attack in Afghanistan lambasted the German mission in the country for its ambiguities and insufficiencies. When Steinmeier attempted to chat up the performance of the German mission by coyly comparing its supposed successes in northern Afghanistan to the situation in “the southwest” and “the east” of the country – i.e. where American and British troops are stationed – the man stared at him with a stone-faced expression that was more eloquent than any verbal rejoinder. When Steinmeier later attempted to recapture some of the thunder from Gerhard Schröder’s 2002 election campaign by underscoring that the SPD did not support all military interventions and had notably opposed the American “adventure” in Iraq, the same soldier yelled out: “Afghanistan is an adventure!”

A former Bundeswehr officer listens to Steinmeier on RTL

As it so happens, in 2002 Steinmeier was Schröder’s chief of staff and he is widely believed to have been the architect of the Schröder government’s policy of radical opposition to the Bush administration over Iraq. In 2005, Schröder and the SPD would go down to defeat in early elections. But the SPD would make the race sufficiently close to win a spot as junior partner in a “grand coalition” and to obtain the foreign ministry for Steinmeier. Two years later, French President Jacques Chirac, Schröder’s erstwhile partner in the self-styled “axis of peace,” would likewise bow out. In the person of Steinmeier, the upcoming German elections could thus see the last vestiges of the “axis of peace” exiting from the European political scene.

In light of the polling numbers, virtually the only way that Steinmeier could actually win the chancellorship would be with the open or tacit support of the “post-Communist” Left Party. A, so to say, “united left” of the Socialists, (post-)Communists and Greens would need to recoup around 5% in the polls between now and election day to get to 50%. (For evidence that the SPD party leadership has been contemplating the prospect of such a “red-red-green” alliance, see my earlier FF report here.)

But at this point the SPD would presumably be satisfied if it could hang on as junior partner in another “grand coalition” government headed by Chancellor Merkel. The Chancellor has stated her preference for a more traditional and ideologically-consistent “right” coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP). But only a slight erosion in the current levels of support for either the Christian Democrats or the Free Democrats would open the door to another “grand coalition.”

In any case, Frank-Walter Steinmeier is evidently not prepared to go down without a fight. Thus, last Saturday, in a remarkable about-face, Steinmeier suddenly announced that if elected chancellor he would establish a “concrete plan of action” [konkreten Fahrplan] for withdrawing German troops from Afghanistan. Coming only days after he had defended the German mission on RTL, the announcement gave off a certain whiff of desperation. Whether it will have the desired effect on German voters remains to be seen. They might, after all, recall that it was none other than the government of the Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder that sent German troops to Afghanistan in the first place.

As a citizen, I would not like again to become the object of Anglo-Saxon financial capital. Germany does not protect me from this, but only Germany in Europe does.

Was it:

a. Franz Müntefering, the chair of the Social Democratic party (SPD) who in 2005 famously compared mostly American and British investment firms to “locusts” and who is presently leading the SPD election campaign for the upcoming general elections.

b. Andrea Nahles, the vice-chair of the SPD and leader of its so-called “left” wing.

c. Oskar Lafontaine, scourge of “neo-liberal” economics and co-chair of the further left “Leftist Party” [Die Linke] whose program excoriates “financial market capitalism.”

d. Sahra Wagenknecht, member of the executive committee of the Leftist Party and leader of its unreconstructed, self-styled “Communist” wing.

The answer is… none of the above. In any case, (c) and (d) would not be plausible answers, since they would not be likely to speak so positively of the EU.

The real answer is: Norbert Röttgen, chief parliamentary whip of the supposedly “conservative” Christian Democratic (CDU/CSU) group in the German Bundestag. The CDU is, of course, the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Röttgen made the remark in an interview that was published in the Monday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

But Wicker appears also to have made comments that were far less vague and that reveal that Langer’s anti-Israeli militancy was part and parcel of the reasons for presenting her the award. Thus in a letter that appeared in yesterday’s edition (July 23) of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski cites Wicker as having said: “For 23 years you fought against expropriations, the destruction of homes and deportations. Your clients told you about torture, forced confessions, deportations in violation of international law, and punishments resembling clan-liability such as the tearing down of suspects’ houses.” Hecht-Galinski also reveals that she was herself the person who proposed Langer for the award. As mentioned in my previous article (and discussed at length here), Hecht-Galinski is another of the prominent “Jewish critics of Israel” who play a central role in German discussions of the Middle East conflict.

Note in Wicker’s remarks the two references in quick succession to “deportations”: an idiom that clearly suggests that the Israelis are guilt of “Nazi-like” crimes. The reference to “punishments resembling clan-liability” [sippenhaftähnliche Bestrafungen] can likewise be read as an allusion to the Third Reich. “Sippenhaft” is the practice of punishing family members for an individual’s alleged crimes. The Nazis were notorious for employing this form of punishment: especially in the occupied territories.

Felicia Langer with Hubert Wicker of the Baden-Württemberg state government at her award ceremony.

Last week, Germany bestowed one of its highest honors, the “Federal Cross of Merit, first class,” upon the 79-year-old Israeli human rights lawyer and author Felicia Langer. The award is given to persons who have made “special contributions to the Federal Republic of Germany” [besondere Verdienste um die Bundesrepublik Deutschland]. Ms. Langer’s award was presented to her in a ceremony in Stuttgart in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Langer is a resident of Tübingen. Presenting the award on behalf of Governor Günther Oettinger, Hubert Wicker of the Baden-Württemberg state government praised Ms. Langer for her “exceptional engagement” for “peace and justice, as well as the protection of human rights.” Governor Oettinger, it should be noted, is a member of the “conservative” Christian Democratic party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “An uncompromising engagement on behalf of humanity is the very core of Felicia-Amalia Langer’s existence,” Wicker continued, “She is still fighting for human rights and a just peace in the Middle East, whereby she steadfastly pursues her goal of building a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.”

But it is not in fact as a “bridge-builder” between Israelis and Palestinians that Felicia Langer is known in Germany, but rather as a ferocious critic of Israel who does not hesitate to draw parallels not only between Israel and the South Africa of the apartheid era, but indeed, if somewhat more coyly, between Israel and Nazi Germany. She has, among other things, called for war-crimes trials against Israeli leaders, dismissed Palestinian suicide bombings as the product of “suicidal desperation,” endorsed the charge that Israelis were behaving like a “master race,” and insisted that Germany is somehow obligated by its history to “intervene” in the Middle East conflict…on behalf of the Palestinians.

According to a report by Peter Weidner on the Jewish-themed Austrian web magazine Die Jüdische, during an April 29th presentation in Linz, Langer praised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at the UN anti-racism conference in Geneva. “What Ahmadinejad said in Geneva is the truth,” Weidner quotes her as having said. In the same presentation, Langer is supposed to have displayed a series of photos, while making comments like

A Palestinian is forced to play a violin by a [Israeli] soldier. That reminds us of something.

and

Two Franciscan nuns at the wall [i.e. the Israeli security barrier]. From the Warsaw ghetto to the wall. That’s not yet my comparison.

Langer’s presentation in Linz was organized by several local “peace” groups to mark Israeli Independence Day.

A former member of the Central Committee of the Israeli Communist Party, Langer left Israel for Germany in 1990. She did so apparently out of protest against Israeli policies and, more specifically, Israel’s “exploitation” of German guilt. In his essay “Her Enemy is Israel”, published just one year after Langer’s arrival in Germany, the noted German author Ralph Giordano quotes her explaining her decision as follows:

I have made a politically conscious choice for Germany. It is a challenge for me, because I understood with what brutality and sophistication Israel was exploiting the Germans’ guilt. If anyone opens his mouth, one calls him an anti-Semite right away and says: How can a German dare to criticize us, with the weight of such a past on the shoulders? The Israeli government abuses the blood of our mothers and fathers.

It is particularly ironic that Langer chose to settle precisely in Tübingen: a city whose mayor for some twenty years, from 1954 to 1974, was the known former Nazi official Hans Gmelin. As discussed in my article on his daughter, “Do You Remember Herta Däubler-Gmelin?”, Gmelin was directly implicated in the deportation of tens of thousands of Slovakian Jews to the Nazi death camps.

As Giordano already pointed out in his 1991 essay, the thesis of the Israeli – or, respectively, Jewish – “exploitation” of German guilt is part of the standard repertoire of complaints of German so-called “rightwing extremists”: a euphemism in German usage for neo-Nazis. Allusions to the Third Reich in describing Israeli policies are likewise absolutely standard fare on the German “extreme Right” – as well, of course, as on the German “extreme Left,” whose discourse is in this respect indistinguishable from that of the neo-Nazis. Indeed, in claiming that a Palestinian was “forced” to play his violin at an Israeli checkpoint or in comparing Gaza and/or the West Bank to a “ghetto,” Langer is not saying anything that has not been said thousands if not millions of times before. It has, however, been the “special contribution” to German public discourse of prominent “Jewish critics of Israel” like Langer or Evelyn Hecht-Galinski to invest such comparisons with an aura of respectability also for the mainstream. If a Jew says so, after all… (On Hecht-Galinski, the daughter of a well-known former president of Germany’s semi-official “Central Council of Jews,” see my report here.)

Below some further translated remarks from Felicia Langer. It will be noted that the need to “liberate” Germans (and, by implication, Germany) from guilt is a recurrent theme. Could it be that the delivery of such absolution – coming, as it does, from a Jew and self-described “indirect Holocaust survivor” – is in fact Ms. Langer’s principal “special contribution to the Federal Republic of Germany”?

***

From her 1994 book “Bridge of Dreams: An Israeli Goes to Germany” (via the Research Group in Peace Studies of the University of Kassel):

In fact, especially because of their past, Germans are obligated to intervene everywhere where human rights are being violated. They kept silent once before, even if in other times and under other circumstances…. As the victims of yesterday, we, the Israelis, the Jews, can in no way claim the right to be the perpetrators of today.

From an August 2002 lecture in Vienna, as reproduced on the “Campo Antiimperialista” website:

[On Israeli “occupation” and “invasions” in the West Bank and Gaza:]

I’d like to tell you why all of this is possible. It’s possible because the boss is in Washington. The global sheriff is there. We are the regional sheriff. …In our homeland, everything is either “American made” or “American paid” [in English in the original]. The distribution of roles is as follows: the Americans supply or pay for the weapons – F16, various awful weapons that are used against civilians. The American taxpayer pays to destroy what the EU-taxpayer has built.

*

[After her remark that Israel has a “sort of democracy” provokes objections from the audience:]

Mehmon Ben Welischti, an Israeli journalist and deputy of Teddy Kollek, has said that we have developed a sort of master-race-democracy. That’s my answer.

*

As a Jew and Israeli, as a Holocaust survivor (indirectly, since directly my husband is a survivor), I have learned the lesson of the Holocaust.

*

[On Palestinian suicide bombers:]

Our conscientious journalist Amira Hass, who has drawn the same lesson from the Holocaust as I have, reports from the occupied territories. …She recounts how the road blocks are laboratories for [producing] suicide bombers, since the people are subjected to so much indignity and humiliation at the roadblocks. That makes them crazy. It is a situation of suicidal desperation.

(In winter 2003, following the American-led invasion of Iraq, the Vienna-based “Campo Antiimperialista” would gain notoriety in Europe by launching a campaign to raise money for the Iraqi “resistance.”)

From a June 2007 interview with the German daily Junge Welt (via the Research Group in Peace Studies of the University of Kassel):

It is true that German history is abused by Israel. Whoever criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite. As you know, I am myself a Jew and I decidedly reject such blanket accusations. Wherever human rights are being violated, the Germans have not only the right, but the obligation, to intervene. Precisely because they kept silent once before. Human rights are universal, international law applies to all people and states, and therefore Germany must intervene in this [the Middle East] conflict – and indeed clearly on the side of the victims of the occupation.

From a December 2008 interview with the “Muslim Markt” [Muslim Market] website:

I have long said, long before the current events [in Gaza], that many of our leading figures in Israel and the generals and also Barak – indeed especially Barak – belong at the international court in The Hague. They should be charged and tried there for war crimes….

*

Everything that is directed against civilians is illegal: also the rockets [fired] from Gaza. I also say that. But if you keep people in such a cage, in an enormous prison, in an enormous ghetto, for months at a time and longer, completely blockaded, without appropriate medical care…, one should not be surprised. …It would have been entirely possible to negotiate and one could have come to a reasonable conclusion. But they [the Israelis] did not want that. They only want to defeat Hamas. They want to create facts on the ground.

In an entry on the popular German Achse des Guten blog, Walter Schmidt reports Langer making the following comments during a January 2009 presentation at the municipal library of Leipzig.

Haniyeh and Meshaal are for peace!

Hamas is for a two-state solution. De facto this amounts to recognizing Israel!

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was pure propaganda!

In Gaza, Israel has left behind a policy of scorched earth!

The Israeli war of aggression in Gaza was prepared in minute detail.

Israel needs Palestinian blood for the upcoming elections!

Israel bombed Gaza at precisely the time when children were getting out of school.

Israel only wanted to test its new weapons in this war!

We as Germans above all must criticize Israel, since we kept silent once before!

The day will still come when justice prevails: they are betraying our dead!

Israel is blackmailing the German people by using the Holocaust and consciously instrumentalizing German feelings of guilt.

One has finally to free the Germans of their feelings of guilt!

Only Israel is encouraging anti-Semitism throughout the world!

Sixteen years later, in May 2005, an Iranian exile would meet with the Austrian Green Party MP Peter Pilz at the home of former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr in Versailles, France. The exile – known to this day simply as “witness D” – would come forward with a startling claim: one of the members of the commando that carried out the hit on Ghassemlou and his colleagues in 1989 was a young Pasdaran by the name of… Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the time, in May 2005, Ahmadinejad was a candidate for the Iranian Presidency. He would be elected President for the first time the following month. According to witness D, Ahmadinejad had been part of a three-person Pasdaran “hit squad” that coordinated the operation with the three “negotiators.” Ahmadinejad’s role had been to obtain the weapons and to serve as a “back-up.” He is supposed to have been at the scene of the crime at the time of the murders and, according to some reconstructions, he may have helped one of the killers to escape on a motorcycle purchased by the Iranians especially for the occasion. (For further details and an interview with “witness D,” see below.)

How seriously can witness D’s account be taken? Well, it should be noted that the witness is not only anonymous, but his claims are strictly based on hearsay. He says that he was told about the Vienna operation by one Nasser Taghipoor: another member of the hit squad, who, according to D, would go on to become a high-ranking officer in the Pasdaran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, in any case, would dismiss the reports as “ridiculous and unfounded,” attributing them to the influence of “Zionist circles.”

Now, however, Peter Pilz has published what he claims is evidence corroborating D’s accusations against Ahmadinejad. The evidence consists of the transcript of a deposition given by a German arms-trafficker to Italian prosecutor Francesco Mandoi and three Austrian officials in the prison of Trieste in April 2006. The arms-trafficker’s full name has been redacted. Only the first initial, S, is visible. He begins his deposition thus:

I would like to cooperate with the investigation.

I am prepared to make my contribution to justice and I would like to respond to the questions that you will ask me concerning the murder in Vienna, about which I already spoke to you in a previous interview.

S claims that he cooperated with the Iranian secret service (presumably, the VEVAK) from 1989 to 1993. He says that he provided the weapons for the 1989 Vienna hit via an Iranian agent by the name of Borhan, to whom he had been introduced by an Austrian business associate. What follows is an abridged translation of S’s account of his dealings with “Borhan” and Borhan’s colleagues, including a certain “Mohamed [sic], who would later become President of the Iranian Republic.” (The full version is available here in German on the website of Peter Pilz.)

The suggestion to meet the Iranian [Borhan] was made during a dinner. As a German – the Germans being, as is well known, close to the Iranians – I was asked if I would be prepared to supply weapons to the Bosnians, the brothers of the Iranian Muslims.

…I was given an appointment with Mr. Borhan…and the meeting took place in the Hilton Hotel in Vienna.

Borhan said he was a representative of the Iranian secret services. He assured me that the Iranians paid punctually and in cash, and he asked me to supply weapons for the brothers in the Middle East, as well as for the Bosnian brothers. He wanted light weaponry, tanks, rocket-launchers…

Toward the end of the meeting, Borhan made a precise request: he said that he needed 260-270 T80 tanks for their [the Iranians’] three armies. The job was of great interest to me, since I had learned from [a] Belorussian friend that a large quantity of practically new tanks was available at half price….

At the same time, Borhan requested weapons for the Middle East and indicated that help had to be arranged for the Bosnian Muslims.

Since I had good contacts in Yugoslavia, I assured him of my readiness to supply the tanks and to help the Muslim population of Bosnia by way of covert shipments [Decklieferungen].

…As we were leaving, he asked if I would be prepared to supply a friend of his, who likewise was a member of the secret services, with 5-10 pieces of light weaponry on short notice.

I assured him that this was no problem.

Following this meeting, I contacted various friends and at the end of June I met again with Borhan and was able to tell him the following:

a. I could deliver the weapons that they needed to Bosnia by way of the Croats. The price was that 20% of the weapons would remain in Croatia.

b. I could supply 250 almost new tanks at a discount of 30% on the original price…

c. I asked him for further information on possible shipments to the Middle East.

Borhan was very impressed by my declarations and said that he wanted to meet me again two weeks later, this time along with two of his colleagues who, he said, were more influential and important than himself.

At this second meeting, we had lunch together at the restaurant of the Hilton.

On this occasion, I assured him that I was able to supply the light weapons about which they had asked within 8 days of the order.

The third meeting took place at the Iranian embassy in the first week of July 1989. Borhan, a certain Mohamed, who would later become President of the Iranian Republic, and a certain Sahidi were present at this third meeting.

S goes on to explain that Borhan placed the order for the light weapons a few days after the second meeting and that he, S, delivered these weapons to Borhan, Sahidi, and “Mohamed” at the third meeting, which took place at the Iranian Embassy. Sahidi and “Mohamed,” he says, were “particularly interested, even thrilled or enthralled by the weapons.” S also claims that he has a photocopy of Sahidi’s diplomatic passport in his possession.

As discussed in my earlier FF report “How Holbrooke Invited Iran into Europe”, Iran did in fact provide covert arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and those shipments were in fact routed via Croatia, which latter retained a portion of each shipment as a “transit tax.” The obvious problem with S’s allusion to such shipments, however, is that the Bosnian War only began in 1992, three years after his alleged meetings with Borhan and Borhan’s colleagues. In light of this anomaly, S’s claims ought probably to be taken with a large grain of salt.

One thing, in any case, appears certain. The Iranian regime was behind the murder of the three Kurds in Vienna. It has indeed made a regular practice of assassinating Iranian opposition politicians in exile. In September 1992, four other members of the Iranian Kurdish opposition, including Ghassemlou’s successor, were shot dead at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. German investigations in connection with the Mykonos murders would conclude that no less than 33 opponents of the Iranian regime had been liquidated in Europe.

The timing of Peter Pilz’s latest revelations is presumably not accidental. The accusations against Ahmadinejad obviously take on added significance in the context of the current post-election unrest in Iran. Thus Pilz concludes his detailed exposé of the Vienna murders as follows:

The declarations of both witness D and the convicted arms-trafficker incriminate Ahmadinejad. Their statements complement one another without any contradictions. Mohamed Ahmadinejad was a member of the hit squad and as such he was directly involved in the murders.

I do not know if he fired a gun himself. All I know is that the Iranian President was there: he obtained the weapons in the Embassy and he brought them to the scene of the crime.

The political lessons are clear. We must:

• restart the investigations [into the murders]
• investigate the role of the Iranian Embassy as a terror hub
• prepare new indictments
• and above all: [we must] support the opposition against the murderous regime of Ahmadinejad.

But, regrettably, the political lessons of the 1989 Vienna murders are by no means as clear as Peter Pilz suggests. It should be recalled that if Ahmadinejad was in fact somehow involved in carrying out the hit on the three Kurds, he will have been so as a relatively low-level Pasdaran operative at the time. The order to liquidate the three men, as Pilz himself has maintained, must have come from the political leadership in Tehran. As it happens, the Prime Minister of Iran at the time was none other than Mir-Hossein Mousavi. (According to Pilz, the order was issued already in fall 1988. The post of prime minister would be eliminated one month after the murders, in August 1989, as the result of a constitutional reform.) Indeed, according to Pilz citing “witness D,” the order to liquidate the men was given more precisely by Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani: the then Chairman of the Iranian Majlis and the current sponsor of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his “green revolution.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

SUPPLEMENT

AN INTERVIEW WITH “WITNESS D”

BY GEORG HOFFMANN-OSTENHOF

On July 13, 1989, a frantic get-away is taking place out front an apartment house at 5 Linke Bahngasse in Vienna. In an article for the Austrian weekly profil, the journalists Sibylle Hamann und Martin Staudinger reconstruct the scene:

A secret agent has been shot and he is dragged by two other men between two parked cars. He is bleeding from multiple wounds. A man on a motorcycle pulls up beside them. All four are members of an Iranian terror commando that has left behind a blood bath in a two-room apartment on the fourth floor of the building and is now making its get-away. After a brief exchange of words, the man on the motorcycle steps on the gas, speeding away with one of the perpetrators.

Three men lie dead in the apartment: Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), and his two associates Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassoul. The three had been lured into an ambush under the pretense of conducting negotiations with representatives of the Iranian government.

Some sixteen years later in summer 2005, one “witness D,” an Iranian in exile in France, would charge that the man on the motorcycle that day was none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In July 2005, Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof of profil spoke with witness D by telephone.

- John Rosenthal

The Iranian journalist D is standing in a telephone booth someplace in France when profil calls. D has recently fled Iran and he does not want to give away his identity. He is scared. Shortly before dying under mysterious circumstances, an officer of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or Pasdaran, by the name of Nasser Taghipoor made an explosive revelation to him: Taghipoor is supposed to have admitted that he was himself a member of the terror commando that in July 1989 shot to death the Iranian Kurdish leader, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, and two other Kurds in Vienna. The recently elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Taghipoor is supposed to have told D, was also a member of the commando. On May 20 [2005], the Green member of the Austrian parliament, Peter Pilz, had a long talk with D. At this point, Ahmadinejad was already a candidate for the Iranian Presidency, but he hardly figured among the favorites. His name, according to Pilz, turned up “only on the margins” of the conversation. How credible is D? How plausible are his claims? This is what profil wanted to find out in speaking with him.

profil: How did it come to pass that Nasser Taghipoor spoke to you about the hit-team’s action in Vienna?

D: I knew Taghipoor since the mid-1990s. He was a friend of the family. He followed my career: where I studied, how I became a journalist. We were genuinely close. We met casually once or twice a month and discussed all sorts of current subjects.

profil: Did you already discuss controversial topics?

D: For a very long time, Taghipoor was loyal to the government. We often had disagreements. He was very active in the Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, from the time of their founding. The values that led to the Revolution were extremely important for him.

profil: What was Taghipoor’s position?

D: When the Pasdaran were founded, they did not yet have any definite organizational structure. They came into being in the revolution against the Shah. The people took up arms. At the beginning, there was no such thing as a career as an officer. When the organization was formalized, he became a colonel and he was active in the Al-Quds unit, which was responsible for obtaining and securing intelligence and other activities.

profil: What was his rank when he related to you the story about the murder of the Kurds?

D: He was a Sardar. That is an Islamic rank: something like a general.

profil: Did he have contact with the country’s political leadership?

D: He was a good friend of the son of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

profil: What was the son’s name?

D: Jazer Rafsanjani.

profil: What was his position?

D: He did not have any particular rank. He worked in his father’s office when the latter was President.

profil: When did Taghipoor tell you about the murder in Vienna?

D: In 1380 by the Iranian calendar – so, about three and a half years ago.

profil: Why do you think he told specifically you, rather than someone else, about it?

D: I asked him precisely this question at the time and he gave me two reasons: “Firstly, since I know you from childhood. I trust you. Secondly, because you are a journalist. If the information should ever be published, you will know when and where, since you know the field.”

profil: Where did the conversation take place and under what circumstances?

D: I lived near his place of work. He called me. He wanted to speak to me. I asked him if I should come directly to his office. He said no, that I should come instead to his parents’ house. So, it was there that we met, after ten PM. At first, he talked about all sorts of subjects for over an hour. I noticed that he was somewhat tense. Then I asked him what he wanted to tell me: he surely did not invite me over just to have a chat. That’s right, he said, he wanted to make a sort of deposition to me: “I’m expecting an assignment and I’ll have to go on a trip. If I come back, then you have to promise to forget everything that you are going to hear. But if anything happens to me, then you may publish the information.” And then he said: “If you do what I tell you, then you’ll have no problems.”

profil: And then he told you the story about the murder. Why? Did he want to hurt somebody? Did he want to get it off his chest?

D: I didn’t know myself why he told me. It was only later that I understood what he was aiming at. I think he had come to the conclusion that the regime was instrumentalizing the Pasdaran and the Al-Quds special unit for which he was responsible. He felt somehow that he had been fooled.

profil: How?

D: The chief purpose of Al Quds was originally to support liberation movements throughout the world. But the unit had moved further and further away from its original aims and had become an instrument used to eliminate opponents of the regime.

profil: And he played along.

D: The leadership had begun to enrich itself. They had money at their disposal, which they diverted for personal ends.

profil: At the time of your conversation, was Taghipoor convinced that it had been right to commit the murder in Vienna.

D: I don’t think so. He certainly felt remorse. Otherwise, he would not have told me about it.

profil: What was the assignment about which he was worried?

D: The Pasdaran also participated in development projects: out of a kind of populism. In light of his qualifications, he was extremely surprised that he would be deployed for such a development project. And he was clearly afraid. A short while later, what he was afraid of in fact occurred. He was found drowned in the south of Iran: after having gone diving in the Karun River, it was said.

profil: Did he explicitly say that Ahmadinejad participated in the commando action in Vienna?

D: He mentioned him several times.

profil: You submitted a written report to the former Iranian President [Abolhassan] Bani Sadr, who now lives in exile in Paris as an opponent of the regime. But Ahmadinejad did not appear in it?

D: That was a general report and I had agreed with Bani Sadr not to name names.

profil: But there are names named in the report.

D: Only those that were already known. There were other persons whom I did not mention, in order to avoid giving my identity away.

profil: When did you write the report?

D: The first report I wrote when I was still in Iran, not here in France. It was on the hard drive of my computer and it was then seized by the government. The report on the hard drive was encoded.

profil: After your home was searched in Tehran, you fled Iran. When was that?

D: I do not want to give you an exact date. Let’s say: less than a year ago.

profil: And how did you then come in contact with Bani Sadr?

D: Before I came to Paris, I did not know him personally. But I knew some things about him. And at first I did not tell him anything about the Vienna affair. It was only after there had developed a certain trust between us that I gave him my report.

profil: As you were writing your report, did you know that Ahmadinejad was a candidate for the Presidency?

D: When I wrote the report on my computer in Iran, I did not yet know that. Later, when I was with Bani Sadr, I did.

profil: What role did Ahmadinejad play in Vienna?

D: He was a kind of backup. If something should happen to one of the commando members, he would have been the replacement. But he was not needed.

profil: But he was there at the scene.

D: He waited in front of the building.

profil: In 1989, what position did Ahmadinejad have in the Pasdaran?

D: At the time, there were no ranks in the Pasdaran or in Al Quds. They were only introduced later. I’m not exactly sure when. Please hurry. I have to hang up soon.

profil: Just a couple of more questions. The commando in Vienna consisted of how many people?

D: There was a team of negotiators and a hit squad. Ahmadinejad was the link between the Iranian Embassy in Vienna and the hit squad. It was also his job to supply the weapons. He brought them from the Embassy to the house where the murders took place.

profil: How many people were there in the hit squad? Various sources now claim that in addition to this group and the negotiating team, there was also a third unit.

D: Counting Ahmadinejad as the backup, there were three people in the hit squad. One cannot speak of a third unit. There were other people – who supplemented the hit squad. If the latter had failed, they would have jumped in.

profil: In your report, you write that the two who pulled the triggers had traveled to Austria from Abu Dhabi under assumed names. How did Ahmadinejad enter the country?

D: With a diplomatic passport.

profil: Using his real name?

D: I don’t know.

profil: A personal question: you don’t want to reveal your identity. Why not?

D: I do not want to put my family in Iran in danger. And I have an uneasy feeling. I am also living in danger. I have gotten support here in France. But I have to watch out that nothing happens to me.

profil: Are you prepared to give a deposition to Austrian investigators?

D: Yes, on the condition that my identity not be revealed.

profil: Have you already been contacted by Austrian officials.

D: Yes, by the Ministry of the Interior.

Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof’s interview with “witness D” first appeared in the Austrian weekly profil in July 2005. The original German version can be consulted here. The English translation is by John Rosenthal.

Thus in a recent article on an Obama Administration proposal to let the men “plead guilty without a full trial,” the New York Times tells us that the proposal “could also allow the five detainees… to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.” This observation appears in turn to refer to the June 2008 arraignment of the five men, during which KSM is reported by both the Times and other news organizations to have expressed a wish to be martyred. KSM’s co-defendant Ramzi Binalshibh is reported to have made similar remarks.

But the problem is that we have no way of verifying the reporting of the Times and the other news organizations, since neither the transcript of the June 2008 hearing nor that of the December 2008 hearing have been made public. The page dedicated to the five accused co-conspirators on the Department of Defense website contains pleadings and motions and rulings, but no transcripts. Shortly after the December hearing, I contacted the Pentagon by both phone and e-mail to inquire about obtaining the transcripts. My queries went unanswered. Debra Burlingame, the co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, likewise inquired about the transcripts. Ms. Burlingame was told that transcripts were not being published due to cost considerations. It should be noted that detailed Records of Trial, including session transcripts, have been published for other Military Commission cases. Similarly, extensive transcripts and even audio of Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) hearings were published on the Department of Defense website as a matter of course. (For an archive of transcripts, see here; for audio files, see here. The CSRT was established by the Bush administration to review the cases of Guantanamo detainees and determine on a case by case basis whether they should continue to be classified as enemy combatants.)

But if virtually all the media concur that KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh expressed the “wish” to be put to death and that this indeed was the “story” of the hearings, can we not simply believe them? Well, the answer is “no” and the proof is the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui: the only 9/11 co-conspirator thus far to be judged by an American court.

In 2007, I conducted a study of the media coverage of the Moussaoui trial as compared to the verbatim transcripts of the trial and pre-trial hearings. The result of that study was my December 2007 article in Policy Review magazine “Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui”. The comparison demonstrates that with only one or two exceptions, the reporting of the major American news media in fact systematically distorted what was transpiring in the courtroom. The most glaring of such distortions has become in turn the single most abiding myth of the Moussaoui trial: namely, the notion that Zacarias Moussaoui wanted to be put to death in order to achieve martyrdom. This supposition has been used to discount both Moussaoui’s guilty pleas and his dramatic March 2006 confession on the witness stand.

As a matter of fact, from the time of his arraignment in January 2002 until the day he left the courtroom shouting “America lost, I won!” over four years later, the leitmotif of virtually all Moussaoui’s motions and statements before the court was precisely his efforts to save his life: or, as he put it, “the defense of the life that Allah, the most masterful, has granted to me.” Even when he first tried to plead guilty in July 2002, Moussaoui made unmistakably clear that he wanted to do so not in order to end his life, but rather:

…because this will ensure to save my life. … It’s much more complicated than what you want to make people to believe, because even if I plead guilty, I will be able to prove that I have certain knowledge about September 11, and I know exactly who done it. … [I]t will ensure me to save my life, because the jury … will be able to evaluate how much responsibility I have in this. … You know perfectly that there is a guilt phase and there is a penalty phase, okay? … So now I’m saying that for the guilt phase, I’m guilty. … But for the death penalty, we will see.

When the presiding Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to accept his guilty plea, Moussaoui reacted with a series of angry pro se motions, including one sarcastically titled “PROLIFE Motion to Stipulate my RIGHT AND DUTY TO LIVE ON THIS EARTH A LONG HAPPY LIFE (with four wives) and to stop this Judge misrepresenting my fight for life. ” In his “pro-life motion,” Moussaoui accused Brinkema of “trying to reinforce prejudice and the stereotype of the fanatical Muslim. Brain wash to kill himself and go to paradise to have 72 pure virgin.” “Leonie Brinkema does not understand anything about Islam or Jihad,” he continued, alluding to the Quranic prohibition on suicide, “or she will have understood that to plead guilt for your execution will bring a Muslim to hellfire (Allah know best).”

On the witness stand four years later, Moussaoui dropped the sarcasm and instead offered the jury a well-nigh scholarly exposition of the Islamic notion of the martyr or shaheed:

For us a shaheed mean martyr at war. And you do not aim to be a shaheed. You fight, and if you meant to come, you come [if your time has come, your time has come]. You don’t decide, okay, I’m going to be a shaheed. For a suicide operation, it is only valid when you do this for Allah and also when you couldn’t do anything else. For example, you couldn’t achieve the result of 9/11 without having suicide operation, so you are a shaheed.

“You do not aim to be a shaheed.” Moussaoui’s explanation rendered the standard narrative of his trial being peddled by the major media an obvious absurdity. Hence, it was simply ignored. The consensus narrative took precedence over the facts.

Of course, it is possible that in the June 2008 arraignment hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said something like the words that have been attributed to him. KSM does not speak English well – nowhere near as well as Moussaoui – and, as his rambling March 2007 performance before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal makes clear, he is highly prone to verbosity. Moreover, it is equally clear from his statements that KSM manages to follow the American media and he frequently, in effect, plays to the gallery by adopting what he knows are popular “winning” themes (Abu Ghraib, Israeli “war crimes,” even apparently the “extremism” of evangelical Christians).

In any case, when confronted by an American judge with the prospect of the death penalty, far be it from the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Ramzi Binalshibh to let on that they might cherish life greater than death. It is notable, however, that in the five defendants’ “9/11 Shura Council” statement from March of this year, there is no obvious sign of their supposed thirst for martyrdom. The statement is titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations”. The impression that the “Shura Council” statement gives is not that the five men want to die, but rather that they are eager to kill. In this respect, it is entirely of a piece with the testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui at his 2006 trial. “With regards to these nine accusations that you are putting us on trial for,” the five defendants write,

to us, they are not accusations. To us they are badges of honor, which we carry with pride. Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God.

The principal moral to be drawn from the Moussaoui trial as concerns the trial of KSM and his co-defendants is that the trial must be made accessible to the public. At the very least, all session transcripts must be published. Only Al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers can benefit from the American public being misinformed and the established news media cannot be trusted to report the proceedings accurately.

But readers do not have to take my word for it. As a public service, Frum Forum today publishes for the first time the complete transcripts of Zacarias Moussaoui’s testimony at his 2006 trial, as well as the transcripts of three other crucial hearings connected to the trial. See “The Moussaoui Transcripts” here.

United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui; March 27, 2006 (Moussaoui testimony: pp. 2307-2417)

United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui; April 13, 2006 (Moussaoui testimony: pp. 3600-3699)

NewMajority is also making available three other transcripts of crucial hearings connected to the Moussaoui trial: the transcript of an April 2005 hearing called to determine whether Moussaoui was competent to plead guilty; the transcript of the April 2005 plea hearing in which Moussaoui pled guilty; and the transcript of the May 2006 sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui including Moussaoui’s final statement to the court.

United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui; Competency Hearing; April 20, 2005

United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui; Plea Hearing; April 22, 2005

United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui; Sentencing; May 4, 2006

The significance of the transcripts is discussed in my 2007 article in Policy Review magazine “Doing Justice to Zacarias Moussaoui”.

What explains the huge discrepancy? What explains it is the fact that while Buchenwald was indeed a concentration camp, it was not one of those camps – like Auschwitz or Treblinka or Belzec – that was specifically devoted to exterminating Jews, as Obama’s remarks mistakenly imply. Some historians grasp this distinction by speaking of “normal” concentration camps, on the one hand, and “death camps,” on the other. This is not to say that hundreds of thousands of inmates did not also die in the “normal” concentration camps. They died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease or as the victims of medical experiments and sometimes they were simply executed. Murder and death were regular features of the “normal” camps. But, nonetheless, killing was not, so to say, their raison d’être. When it was a matter, for instance, of killing Jews interred at Buchenwald en masse, they were as rule shipped to Auschwitz.

Moreover, the majority of the inmates at Buchenwald, like in the other “normal” camps, were not Jewish. The Nazis liked to lock people up and they did so for all sorts of reasons, not only on “racial” grounds. The persons interred at Buchenwald included political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “gypsies,” homosexuals, common criminals, and the so-called “asocial.” (The latter category was not precisely defined in Nazi law, but it included, for instance, vagrants and persons who were judged by the authorities to be “work-shy.”) Jews were treated as a subcategory of other categories. (These and other details on Buchenwald are discussed in Eugen Kogon’s classic study of the concentration camp system Der SS-Staat, which is available in English as The Theory and Practice of Hell.)

After the start of the War, foreign prisoners were shipped to Buchenwald from all over German-occupied Europe. They would later be joined by captured Red Army soldiers. The fate reserved for the latter was perhaps the most unequivocal of all: an estimated 8000 Soviet prisoners of war were summarily executed by gunshots to the back of the head. Altogether, again according to the estimate of the Buchenwald Memorial, some 56,000 of Buchenwald’s inmates would perish in the camp.

In short, Buchenwald is a highly fitting symbol of Nazi barbarism: which barbarism, as Buchenwald’s history shows, was by no means reserved for Jews. As a matter of fact, however, Buchenwald was not one of the principal sites of the Holocaust. Why, then, would Obama treat it as such?

Well, let us recall that during last year’s electoral campaign, then candidate Obama said that his “uncle” had helped to liberate “Auschwitz” as an American soldier during WWII. As it turned out, it was not his uncle, but rather a great-uncle and it was not Auschwitz, but rather Buchenwald. And in fact it was not quite Buchenwald either, but rather Ohrdruf: a satellite camp of Buchenwald some sixty kilometers away. By commemorating the Holocaust at Buchenwald, it is as if Obama was trying to make the historical reality conform to his own gaffes and misconceptions.

Analyzing the political purpose of Obama’s Buchenwald visit, Peter Frey of Germany’s ZDF television writes:

In Buchenwald, Obama wants to send a signal to the Jewish community in the USA and to the Israelis: we may be involved at the moment in a political conflict over the [Israeli] settlement policy, but we are well aware of the history of the Jewish people and of the origins of the Israeli state.

But in fact the Buchenwald visit demonstrates precisely the contrary. It shows that Obama knows precious little about the Holocaust and even less about the full scope of Nazi Germany’s crimes.