Sylvia Stolz to be released today

(left to right) Sylvia Stolz at the Schaefer trial in Munich in 2018 with Wolfram Nahrath (attorney for Monika Schaefer and later for Lady Renouf); Frank Miksch (attorney for Alfred Schaefer); Alfred Schaefer; and Lady Michèle Renouf.

Today the brave German attorney Sylvia Stolz is due for release after an 18 month prison sentence for the 'crime' of having made a speech about German history and the principles underlying the search for historical truth.

First jailed in 2008 (and banned from legal practice) for her words in defence of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel, Sylvia Stolz spoke at a conference of the Anti-Censorship Coalition, held in the Swiss town of Chur in 2012. (A video and transcript are online here.)

During this speech Sylvia Stolz took issue with the very concept of "Holocaust denial":

"I suggest it is not clear what is really denied, because it is not definitively defined. There should be at least one case, against a Holocaust denier, in which the relevant crime, the Holocaust itself, is exactly established in all necessary details. I know of no such verdict. There are no judicial findings of fact concerning crime scenes, methods of killing, numbers of victims, time-frame of killings, perpetrators, bodies, or physical traces of killing. There are no judicial findings of fact concerning testimonies, documents or similar kinds of evidence. There are no judicial findings of fact concerning the existence of an intention under National Socialist rule to destroy the Jewish people in whole or in part. There are no judicial findings of fact concerning the existence of relevant decisions, plans or orders. In the verdicts to date against Holocaust deniers there are no judicial findings of fact concerning these matters, not even – and this is an essential point – not even in the form of a reference to precedent decisions. If one wants to claim something, it is naturally the scientific thing to do to refer some other verdict in which the matter is established exactly.

Sylvia Stolz (above centre) on the day of her release in 2011 from an earlier prison sentence, with Günter Deckert and Lady Michèle Renouf.

"We don't even have that. This is the problem. As long as the court will not commit to certain specified crime scenes where these mass killings are supposed to have happened, as long as the court will not commit to at least one specified piece of evidence, then a conclusive finding of fact that a mass murder occurred is not possible. And no more possible is a conclusive judgment against denial of the relevant act. If the relevant underlying crime is not established by a binding, judicial finding of fact then the denial of that crime cannot be conclusively established either."

This speech itself became the subject of further criminal charges, and eventually led to Sylvia Stolz serving an 18 month prison sentence from May 2019 until today.

As with last week's release of Horst Mahler and Ursula Haverbeck, we must hope that this is a chance for Germany and Europe to end monstrously oppressive 'historical memory' laws. This should begin with the release of Alfred Schaefer, who has been jailed since 2018 for 'holocaust denial' in his online videos.

Sylvia Stolz with fellow attorney Jürgen Rieger (1946-2009) during the trial of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel (1939-2017)

The jury is still out – not only on the historicity of the 'Holocaust' but on whether the Federal Republic of Germany can be described as a free society based on the laws of reason.

As Sylvia Stolz said during her criminalised speech in Switzerland in 2012:

"When one builds on something untrue, when one builds on something false, it might stand for a while, but at some time it must, of itself, collapse. It is like trying to erect a building with a foundation of papier mâché rather than proper stone or proper concrete. An important notion in relation to the question of 'true thinking' or 'finding the truth' is: one must hear the other side."