tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12775594573052335752024-03-06T12:00:32.143-08:00Role Model on TrialLady Michèle Renouf faced trial in Dresden, Germany on 16th October 2020. This blog will explain the reasons why German prosecutors abandoned their case after two and a half years of preparations. What did the German state fear would be exposed in open court? This blog will explain over the coming weeks and months...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-54444842808727195622021-01-22T08:56:00.002-08:002021-01-22T12:57:15.147-08:00Revisionist champion Ahmadinejad sees through US 'democratic' charade<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY7e_EOuGe4XgVa6WrKcmOCtkaq1tfDXFwKKmUuYQXVYrWYth3tH1LySf5FovYevZY05MK7gewW8uOV7tOjWL90TD_FDQHJ5XXsrDjOsXc-5j-rK00LWBHYPBJxGfPiwcSrOMU9in7ljxK/s510/Ahmadinejad-Faurisson+2.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY7e_EOuGe4XgVa6WrKcmOCtkaq1tfDXFwKKmUuYQXVYrWYth3tH1LySf5FovYevZY05MK7gewW8uOV7tOjWL90TD_FDQHJ5XXsrDjOsXc-5j-rK00LWBHYPBJxGfPiwcSrOMU9in7ljxK/s320/Ahmadinejad-Faurisson+2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>President Ahmadinejad (above left) presents an award to Professor Robert Faurisson</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Former Iranian President <a href="https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/512669-ahmadinejad-new-war-middle-east/" target="_blank">Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is back in the headlines</a> with a characteristically perceptive view of the recent US elections.<p></p><p>While 'liberals' and 'conservatives' worldwide have lined up behind their presumed champions Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Ahmadinejad – in an interview this week with the RT programme <i>Going Underground</i> – astutely pointed out that these are mere puppets on an essentially unchanging stage.</p><p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/GoingUndergroundRT/videos/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-it-does-not-matter-who-is-president-in-the-united-states/419810872502411/" target="_blank">"It makes no difference who is President in the US, since major US policies are devised by the governing board behind the scenes."</a></p><p>In December 2006 President Ahmadinejad hosted an international conference to discuss the full range of historical views on the so-called 'Holocaust' of European Jewry. This was an event that (<a href="https://www.altcensored.com/watch?v=eU6FvOGP5mM" target="_blank">as the late, great Professor Robert Faurisson pointed out in his conference speech</a>) could not have been held in the 'democratic' West, least of all in the Professor's home country France, where any dissident research, publication or discussion on this topic is forbidden.</p><p>Academics, scientists and even their lawyers are regularly imprisoned and/or subjected to crippling fines in European courts. As this blog has recorded, Lady Renouf herself was prosecuted after an impromptu speech in Dresden in 2018, even though it did not refer to the 'homicidal gas chamber Holocaust'. Challenging the interpretation of surrounding events, such as the internment of 'enemy alien' Jews, was enough to earn criminal charges that could have resulted in Lady Renouf spending several years in a German prison.</p><p>Yet thanks to the fearless Ahmadinejad a genuinely free discussion of this entire historical topic, featuring experts from a wide range of nationalities and opposing views, was enabled in Teheran.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ9hmxZ033s" target="_blank">Lady Michèle Renouf was among the speakers at this 2006 conference</a> and she returned to Teheran in 2010 to address another event hosted by President Ahmadinejad.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDD6T6YLhZ4tYP8VNBDp4R-FPYDKbDSEPL51r226wY5cTNTqYWAbwnBtY_xPrn7Hg_i3AWv2giX_bXNYUGVVvHfC3Nm_9f92tB4ROUn9dHeXTJ3tZlFQyKipsEBul6K9nmR9BOtoLXtiRW/s339/TBR+cover+Ahmadinejad.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDD6T6YLhZ4tYP8VNBDp4R-FPYDKbDSEPL51r226wY5cTNTqYWAbwnBtY_xPrn7Hg_i3AWv2giX_bXNYUGVVvHfC3Nm_9f92tB4ROUn9dHeXTJ3tZlFQyKipsEBul6K9nmR9BOtoLXtiRW/s320/TBR+cover+Ahmadinejad.jpeg" /></a></div><br />Featured in a cover story by <i>The Barnes Review</i>, this 2010 speech presented a viable alternative to the destructive and oppressive Zionist project – the long-established first Jewish homeland of Birobidzhan, centre of a 'Jewish Republic' established by the former Soviet Union in 1928 and still in existence on the borders of modern Russia and China.<p></p><p>Following her speech, President Ahmadinejad said to Lady Renouf: “you and me, we see it the same."</p><p><a href="https://smallpdf.com/shared#st=5011c223-48bf-4781-9a0d-3a51b3fcb3ed&fn=LMR+Tehran+from+September_October_2010.pdf&ct=1611309811116&tl=share-document&rf=link" target="_blank">Click here to read the report</a> of Lady Renouf's 2010 meeting with President Ahmadinejad.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJkUBTdxCVbH-C29K7u29FTMMBMOtQQ4b9fV8n4mPIekDz28hdEQ6bdZkzld_CkE2F0tJr-y9qYUNYIQ0AXOY7QHcRXW4EFryUzZx2YqXN2-G63ZjlVZfvDmFavZRlwsiUajZ9MIQKjehY/s672/sm-Teheran-2010-Renouf-address.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="672" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJkUBTdxCVbH-C29K7u29FTMMBMOtQQ4b9fV8n4mPIekDz28hdEQ6bdZkzld_CkE2F0tJr-y9qYUNYIQ0AXOY7QHcRXW4EFryUzZx2YqXN2-G63ZjlVZfvDmFavZRlwsiUajZ9MIQKjehY/s320/sm-Teheran-2010-Renouf-address.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Renouf addressing a conference audience including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at an event hosted by the President in Teheran in 2010.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-61239748653282821242021-01-14T16:03:00.000-08:002021-01-14T16:03:52.190-08:00The banker, the model and the Jewish spy – inside a Dresden courtroom drama<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYwSSHV-nzaJ6oFDetTHpZHLCADPll4XOTYXhoHBdDw3jQeQ1WwnFKnba6FcOOzx3jaqEDCirTWcq79aPkUNLmcDERX4H2XHkIWvbvkawEDcnDYD8fcKYD3iGMhtmzOaEGWeeMuw3qmCPn/s1660/Renouf+-+Abs+-+BW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1318" data-original-width="1660" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYwSSHV-nzaJ6oFDetTHpZHLCADPll4XOTYXhoHBdDw3jQeQ1WwnFKnba6FcOOzx3jaqEDCirTWcq79aPkUNLmcDERX4H2XHkIWvbvkawEDcnDYD8fcKYD3iGMhtmzOaEGWeeMuw3qmCPn/s320/Renouf+-+Abs+-+BW.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sir Frank Renouf (above left) with his old friend and colleague Hermann Abs, the most powerful banker in postwar Europe – Dresden prosecutors in 2020 feared media examination of the Abs story.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />At the eleventh hour German prosecutors three months ago called off a criminal trial for ‘holocaust denial’. The reasons for this reversal – in a case that had been prepared for two and a half years – are still mysterious. But it appears that one motive was to avoid embarrassment over an aspect of Second World War history that has remained secret until today. Defence evidence in the trial of Australian-born international model and television commercials actress Lady Michèle Renouf would have exposed the existence of a previously unknown British spy inside the Third Reich.</p><p>***</p><p>Hermann Abs was <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/hermann-abs-german-banker-died-economist-nazi-germany-a8442711.html" target="_blank">the most powerful German banker of the 20th century</a>, despite his career having flourished under Adolf Hitler. Had the trial of Lady Renouf proceeded in Dresden last October, the Abs case would inevitably have been highlighted, because he was one of the closest friends and colleagues of her late husband Sir Francis Renouf (aka “Frank the Bank”).</p><p>This would have been a double disaster for German state prosecutors.</p><p>The most serious embarrassment would have come from the Abs story being examined in court. We can today reveal for the first time some of the devastating facts that would have been presented in Dresden.</p><p>In this abbreviated extract from a forthcoming book by Peter Rushton, who was a research consultant to the Renouf defence team, we uncover a secret that has lasted for almost eighty years – the identity of a German-Jewish spy inside the Third Reich, and his role in the postwar rehabilitation of financial godfather Hermann Abs.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKU1k8brChGdcQoIozcst8Tbz4Ty2_YOLifBnQtbHgofmyYoXXsPkMW-DmO_b6Yp77waS0TBEWKC2ezFKdtsf09Dil89Uq_Yh19aRxTcUjXP1H4KyrxfVDRfxdInmj1EFjL5EMEnfc4LeQ/s570/Renouf+wedding+Dempster+1991.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="414" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKU1k8brChGdcQoIozcst8Tbz4Ty2_YOLifBnQtbHgofmyYoXXsPkMW-DmO_b6Yp77waS0TBEWKC2ezFKdtsf09Dil89Uq_Yh19aRxTcUjXP1H4KyrxfVDRfxdInmj1EFjL5EMEnfc4LeQ/s320/Renouf+wedding+Dempster+1991.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Nigel Dempster reports the wedding of Sir Frank and Lady Michèle Renouf</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p><b>May 1990.</b> The attacks had been shrugged off for decades, but 88-year-old Hermann Abs knew the sharks were now circling. Yet another cycle of ‘Holocaust hype’ was being boosted worldwide – almost half a century after the Second World War – with construction of memorials and enacting of laws that turned ‘Holocaust’ history into an unchallengeable quasi-theological edifice. Researchers, scientists, publishers and even lawyers who dared to disagree were starting to be dragged into court, and would soon face heavy fines or even jail sentences.</p><p>Actual participants in the ‘Holocaust’ were by now few and far between, so professional ‘nazi-hunters’ were mainly reduced to pursuing small fry, such as teenage Ukrainians who had guarded a concentration camp. The UK was midway through passing a new law that would allow the prosecution of elderly Soviet and East European émigrés who had taken refuge in Britain postwar, despite their ‘crimes’ having taken place well outside UK jurisdiction and prosecution ‘evidence’ coming from the now collapsing and discredited Soviet bloc. In May 1991 <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/jul/09/war-crimes-act-1991" target="_blank">this War Crimes Act entered the UK statute book</a>.</p><p>Hermann Abs himself was one of the few surviving (indeed flourishing) big name players from the Third Reich – he was described by David Rockefeller as <b>“the most important banker of our time”</b>. <a href="https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/519a2b7b993294098d50ffa6" target="_blank">A biographical summary prepared for the chief of the CIA’s European Division</a> in December 1974 quoted Rockefeller’s assessment and added that while Abs <b>“holds no governmental positions his influence is enormous and dates back to his successful leadership in 1952 of the German Delegation which regulated the post-war German reparation question and set the basis for the FRG </b>[West Germany]<b> to regain its sovereignty in 1955. He was awarded the Federal Service Cross First Class for this achievement and repeatedly declined Cabinet posts offered by Adenauer and succeeding Chancellors. …As a rough comparison he might be called the Bernard Baruch of Germany.”</b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3_WzesWpT-u2J5IZE6PtTv83qIneP4wsGsPsXddRN9fH1FFI4eE_pinQ_wLLpyFcj58P2ZZmNkAMpWeoyZ1JJGJ3vIAtUhtDDIGORWIP9ap3Q0h98Lz80jUMsCUKFDXWKzlmn2st9crD4/s600/Hermann+Abs+-+art+collector.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3_WzesWpT-u2J5IZE6PtTv83qIneP4wsGsPsXddRN9fH1FFI4eE_pinQ_wLLpyFcj58P2ZZmNkAMpWeoyZ1JJGJ3vIAtUhtDDIGORWIP9ap3Q0h98Lz80jUMsCUKFDXWKzlmn2st9crD4/s320/Hermann+Abs+-+art+collector.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>In later life Hermann Abs acted for German galleries and museums in major art purchases worldwide, most famously at Sotheby's London auction of the Robert von Hirsch collection in 1978 where he bought sixteen masterpieces for German institutions.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />Yet during that first weekend of May 1990 a special World Jewish Congress meeting in Berlin celebrated news that this eminent financier had at last been barred (as a “nazi”) from entering the USA. Abs still held many honorary and advisory positions, and was in regular touch with old friends across the banking world including Sir Frank Renouf, the New Zealand-born tycoon who (largely thanks to his work with Abs to open up West German investment banking) had received the Federal Republic’s highest honour, the <i>Verdienstkreuz</i>.</p><p>Semi-retired in the Taunus Mountains of central Hesse, Abs lost nothing in practical terms by being banned from the USA, but it was a big propaganda victory for the Zionist lobby. This time they weren’t picking on the small fry: Hermann Abs was the biggest name in German finance, and arguably the most powerful individual in postwar banking.</p><p>He still had friends in the banking world: that very year his old ally Renouf visited Germany to collect a duplicate of his <i>Verdienstkreuz</i> (the original medal having been lost in a burglary). Sir Frank was accompanied by his new fiancée Michèle, Countess Griaznoff, <a href="https://youtu.be/CIOM8qxh9VQ" target="_blank">an Australian-born Briton and international model who had appeared worldwide in print and television advertisements</a> for Deutsche Post, Tchibo coffee, Nescafé, Lenthéric, Helena Rubenstein, Oil of Olay, Avon, Supradyn vitamins, Rowntree's After Eight chocolates, Carlos I brandy, Wedgwood, Nissan cars, BMW, British Airways, ResidenSea cruises, C&A, Heinz, France Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Capital One Credit Cards, the <i>Sunday Times</i>, <i>Daily Mail</i>, <i>Daily Mirror</i> and many others. Speaking to the <i>Daily Mail</i>’s society columnist Nigel Dempster a few months later following their marriage, Sir Frank revealed that he had proposed “after a cocktail party at St James’s Palace. Her title is Russian but it doesn’t matter now – she’s Lady Renouf.”</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh88uSBQwOb4ZAhIt1C4-bhs4IApkSN8hdFkFqfutQVUN0G3cVFU5L_1lMZa1q7e4Wi6lYVopbXLMjOv85ToBFn7tYfD1iE0XIY6_BoHAYt6aIn2_0_fG6n3LEP60g8S7wVHcYB-iVYoYZA/s1684/Michele+and+Sir+Frank+Renouf+-+photo+for+Tatler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1356" data-original-width="1684" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh88uSBQwOb4ZAhIt1C4-bhs4IApkSN8hdFkFqfutQVUN0G3cVFU5L_1lMZa1q7e4Wi6lYVopbXLMjOv85ToBFn7tYfD1iE0XIY6_BoHAYt6aIn2_0_fG6n3LEP60g8S7wVHcYB-iVYoYZA/s320/Michele+and+Sir+Frank+Renouf+-+photo+for+Tatler.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Michèle and Sir Frank Renouf</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Renouf remained a loyal supporter of Abs to the end, as did senior British bankers in his circle such as Lord Sandon (later Earl of Harrowby), deputy chairman of NatWest and Coutts.</p><p>But the verdict of history was already being written. Winston Churchill said that history would be hard on his old enemy Stanley Baldwin: “I know it will, because I shall write that history.” Until now, the same has been true of Hermann Abs – to a very large extent his enemies (and the enemies of Germany) have been writing history.</p><p>Abs died in February 1994, aged 92. Five years later one of his most determined antagonists, Anglo-Jewish television journalist and historian Tom Bower, was able to dance on his grave. Millions of <i>Daily Mail </i>readers were treated to a full page article (accompanied by a huge photo of Abs) condemning the Deutsche Bank that he had chaired for a decade. Under the headline <b>“The Genocide Bank”</b>, the <i>Mail</i> thundered:</p><p><b>“As the mighty Deutsche Bank finally admits it financed Auschwitz, we reveal how two Britons conspired to protect its Nazi founder.”</b></p><p>Bower pulled no punches: by his account, Abs and Deutsche Bank had set out to <b>“conspire with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler to murder thousands of innocent men and women for the benefit of the bank’s shareholders.”</b> Half a century later, Bower boasted, <b>“Abs’s success has been undone. His attempt to bury the past and disguise his own criminality, nearly successful in his lifetime, has been utterly destroyed.”</b></p><p>To a large extent Bower’s article was a rehash of his first book, <i>Blind Eye to Murder</i>, published in 1981 and in an updated second edition in 1995. Bower had targeted Abs on the very first page of <i>Blind Eye to Murder</i>, and his allegations were highlighted by <i>The Times</i> when serialising the book in July 1981. The latest topical addition in 1999 was that Deutsche Bank, in order to satisfy New York regulators and facilitate its $9.8 billion takeover of Bankers Trust of New York, had – as Bower candidly acknowledged – caved in to “Jewish lobby groups” and “after 54 years of adamant denials” had confessed that <b>“their predecessors did after all partly finance the construction of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp”</b>, in what Bower described as “a monumental humiliation for the Germans”.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0sD6CafdEI2pZ2XLIyTjGDujyn3_m5lyFvEtxau5bkUZf8HWfhtDVP1u__zeWMX_qXyujzcK1F8Z41W_r72NorbVAHhkYyqWf3AN7kQ4PZPAWXVnwtx_2EfOT1KjxsOs1mH87tQGahju/s641/Hermann+Abs+with+cigar+colourised.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="580" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0sD6CafdEI2pZ2XLIyTjGDujyn3_m5lyFvEtxau5bkUZf8HWfhtDVP1u__zeWMX_qXyujzcK1F8Z41W_r72NorbVAHhkYyqWf3AN7kQ4PZPAWXVnwtx_2EfOT1KjxsOs1mH87tQGahju/s320/Hermann+Abs+with+cigar+colourised.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hermann Abs: "the most important banker of our time"</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />Hermann Abs left school in the Rhineland soon after the end of the First World War. Amid the economic and financial chaos that followed Germany’s defeat he went straight into banking rather than university, serving his first apprenticeship at the Jewish-owned Louis David bank in Bonn, then as a foreign exchange dealer in Amsterdam. He swiftly advanced during the late 1920s with the elite private bank Delbrück, Schickler, where Adolf Hitler himself later held an account containing secret donations from German business leaders. By the age of 33 Abs was a partner in Delbrück, Schickler, and before his 37th birthday in 1938 he was on the managing board of the giant Deutsche Bank, becoming head of its international operations.</p><p>As a lifelong Anglophile whose father had spent two years tutoring in Victorian England, Abs’s Catholicism also helped with the networking essential to his trade as an international banker. Without criticising his own government, he could discreetly put some distance between himself and both the earlier Protestant Prussianism of the Kaiser’s Germany, and the National Socialist new order.</p><p>This distancing suited the authorities in Berlin also, who notably showed no interest in pressuring Abs to become a member of the National Socialist Party. When leading the German side in late 1930s’ negotiations on debt repayments in London or New York, it suited all concerned that Abs was not ostentatiously ‘nazi’.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq_TueO5aydVNfLXfEjZwH74PaSXEytsf5QfXGPZDcKFbYtAuhZMEupRH23YOrevP7ZsVeOLnjIK2CKuHz9KlHv1Ni5dMi1gzOaPvQsslHKjtRdwLpIi186UTc8pDbV7L_1choT943zOBq/s1200/Hjalmar+Schacht+with+AH+in+1934.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq_TueO5aydVNfLXfEjZwH74PaSXEytsf5QfXGPZDcKFbYtAuhZMEupRH23YOrevP7ZsVeOLnjIK2CKuHz9KlHv1Ni5dMi1gzOaPvQsslHKjtRdwLpIi186UTc8pDbV7L_1choT943zOBq/s320/Hjalmar+Schacht+with+AH+in+1934.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Adolf Hitler in 1934 with his first Reichsbank President, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, who helped Hermann Abs gain promotion to the key international role at Deutsche Bank</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />For a time Abs was seen as a protégé of Hitler’s first Reichsbank President and economics minister Dr Hjalmar Schacht, but he survived Schacht’s fall from power after 1939 and continued to extend his own influence as a director of no fewer than 45 companies during the war years, including IG Farben, the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. Abs’s role at Deutsche Bank and at Farben was the main reason for controversy that pursued him after 1945.</p><p>Farben had many government contracts during the Third Reich: the company’s importance to the war effort across Europe led to it being targeted for black propaganda rumours by a special subcommittee of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive. A Farben subsidiary produced Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used to destroy lice that carried the deadly disease typhus. Since typhus was especially hazardous in crowded conditions such as prisons and concentration camps, Zyklon B was extensively used in camps such as Auschwitz – but in ‘Holocaust’ mythology it has come to be assumed that Zyklon B’s purpose was to kill Jews in homicidal gas chambers.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFhiXrGRLWrMfxfewVGAfD9BQNpaUX1YExJ_FzqCdayf-tPCqKBFQ44Ugdil6jr4WmmzEd0FCwDqmEn-ubV0ZgfN34bwxoYrisYLP6ibmgDeDlD2tAmWkExsoKs1iycjzAbdGpRwfWN1mh/s340/Carl+Krauch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="281" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFhiXrGRLWrMfxfewVGAfD9BQNpaUX1YExJ_FzqCdayf-tPCqKBFQ44Ugdil6jr4WmmzEd0FCwDqmEn-ubV0ZgfN34bwxoYrisYLP6ibmgDeDlD2tAmWkExsoKs1iycjzAbdGpRwfWN1mh/s320/Carl+Krauch.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>IG Farben supervisory board chairman Carl Krauch, given a six-year sentence for 'war crimes'</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Hence Farben was demonised and many of its directors were put on trial at Nuremberg for ‘war crimes’. Nine were convicted, including supervisory board chairman Carl Krauch who was given a six-year sentence, and Walter Dürrfeld, technical manager of IG Farben Auschwitz, who got eight years.</p><p>Similarly several leading German bankers were pursued by war crimes prosecutors. The most prominent were among the accused at the so-called ‘Ministries Trial’ at Nuremberg. Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Minister of Economics throughout the Third Reich, who had worked very closely with Abs, was sentenced to ten years. (His granddaughter Beatrix von Storch is now a deputy leader of the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany – AfD.) Another of Abs’s most senior colleagues, Reichsbank vice-president Emil Pühl, was jailed for five years, and Karl Rasche, director of one of Deutsche’s rivals the Dresdner Bank, for seven years.</p><p>It is inevitable therefore that historians (whether or not they are highly partisan ‘anti-nazis’) have asked: why was Hermann Abs not among the defendants? He was in fact sentenced to 15 years <i>in absentia</i> by a communist court in Yugoslavia, but this could be put down to Cold War propaganda against the West. Elsewhere, until the World Jewish Congress succeeded in having him banned from the USA 45 years after the war, Abs had seemed untouchable.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgfaM2O8naYv1pCjJEVrduije_PBG4b3xRmODQg6jl-eBlKeLtkZdpCSO6-U1MNIOzMcecPxKxQt7N_kSsiEB77l3pb1juZoiFVyEmvAO05BDZQuRw7BPCOxYtHSth6Pg8hXcm_ihrYSeU/s314/hermann+abs+with+alois+hundhammer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="228" data-original-width="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgfaM2O8naYv1pCjJEVrduije_PBG4b3xRmODQg6jl-eBlKeLtkZdpCSO6-U1MNIOzMcecPxKxQt7N_kSsiEB77l3pb1juZoiFVyEmvAO05BDZQuRw7BPCOxYtHSth6Pg8hXcm_ihrYSeU/s0/hermann+abs+with+alois+hundhammer.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hermann Abs (above right) with fellow Roman Catholic Alois Hundhammer, co-founder of CSU, the postwar Catholic conservative party governing Bavaria.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /><b>3rd May 1945:</b> Abs swiftly vacated his suite at Hamburg’s <i>Vierjahreszeiten</i> (Four Seasons) Hotel immediately on the city’s surrender to the British 7th Armoured Division – within hours the hotel had been converted into the new headquarters for Britain’s occupying forces.</p><p>For six weeks he prudently stayed out of sight, safely hidden at the nearby home of a friend. Yet when the British eventually tracked him down it was not to arrest him – despite his name being (for alphabetical reasons) at the very top of a list of wanted ‘war criminals’. Instead the British wanted to recruit him to help rebuild Germany’s postwar banking system!</p><p>To do so, the British had to protect Abs from their vengeful allies. A US intelligence report prepared for the War Department in March 1945 had featured Abs prominently among those financial and business leaders who <b>“in an outstanding way thrived under National Socialism, …aided the Nazis to obtain power, …[and] shared the spoils of expropriation and conquest.”</b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis5-BEywtQ4LmT4ODuclGus_Sr1LcvvcuV9WsDy9Jxp6yKi8Yx1pxW7UXdTOY6KrOlhN30ekw0h1zib7FMHQZek-SINsmN0RizLf_xOC4DGXIElEKmkyRAvR_hoyPxvremELo61bA6Y4P4/s300/Bernard+Bernstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis5-BEywtQ4LmT4ODuclGus_Sr1LcvvcuV9WsDy9Jxp6yKi8Yx1pxW7UXdTOY6KrOlhN30ekw0h1zib7FMHQZek-SINsmN0RizLf_xOC4DGXIElEKmkyRAvR_hoyPxvremELo61bA6Y4P4/s0/Bernard+Bernstein.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>US Army Col. Bernard Bernstein, who was eager to prosecute Abs for 'war crimes'</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Jewish-American attorney Col. Bernard Bernstein was a partisan supporter of the Morgenthau Plan devised by his co-racialist Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, who aimed at the permanent destruction of Germany’s industrial and technical capacity, despite an assessment that this would mean the deaths of 40% of German civilians. Bernstein had himself been a US Treasury Department attorney before being transferred to the Army as financial adviser to Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Col. Bernstein led the American effort to put Abs on trial, sending a fellow Jewish officer, Maj. Andrew Kamark to interrogate him in the British zone.</p><p>This interrogation failed to obtain any evidence on which Abs could be charged, but by the start of 1946 continuing political pressure from the Americans, including threats to leak stories about Abs to the British press, meant that he had to be purged from his directorships and jailed. Even now, held in Altona prison in Hamburg, and later at the notorious Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre during the first half of 1946, Abs was locked up not so that he could be ill-treated in any way, but so that he could be kept away from the Americans.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKuT4PxrUe_6yauSSv2Ft3Fily0OwxBlli5LzSh6sCagia2ydKs75vudT9SnoE7JPWVtRyMkOyR4BZu6Y4YfW1d6lR3go5WWCVKj_bCjlOl7ooxfFUf79uKlBn3cVc61hSESrXbcPuQUjZ/s640/27+Feb+1953+Abs+signs+London+Debt+Agreement.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="447" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKuT4PxrUe_6yauSSv2Ft3Fily0OwxBlli5LzSh6sCagia2ydKs75vudT9SnoE7JPWVtRyMkOyR4BZu6Y4YfW1d6lR3go5WWCVKj_bCjlOl7ooxfFUf79uKlBn3cVc61hSESrXbcPuQUjZ/s320/27+Feb+1953+Abs+signs+London+Debt+Agreement.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hermann Abs (above centre) signing the historic London Debt Agreement on 27th February 1953</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Predictably this saga has been interpreted repeatedly by Jewish historians and other partisan observers as a tale of “perfidious Albion” – of Britain deliberately ignoring evidence of Nazi criminality. This theme has been taken up in other contexts by Jewish polemicists attacking Britain for its postwar opposition to establishment of the state of Israel, and for recruiting Russian and Eastern European anti-communists for Cold War operations against Stalin. The late Prof. David Cesarani was especially outspoken, when campaigning for introduction of the War Crimes Act 1991: Cesarani’s first book published in 1992 condemning postwar British policy was entitled <i>Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals</i>.</p><p>These witch-hunters point in particular to Abs’s role at Deutsche Bank in the ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish-owned banks, including Germany’s largest private bank, Mendelssohn & Co.</p><p>The anti-Abs campaign began soon after the war, led by the anti-British US Senator Guy Gillette, an infamous supporter of Jewish terrorists in Palestine. As I discovered in the course of detailed research, the anti-Abs theme was picked up through the 1950s by syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, notorious for his close ties to the Israeli lobby and his hounding of anti-Zionist US Defense Secretary James Forrestal, leading up to Forrestal’s suicide or murder in 1949. By 1981 it was the turn of Tom Bower (né Bauer), a BBC journalist and son of Czech refugees, to take up the charge against Abs, which he pursued for the next twenty years or more. And most recently Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, Oxford-educated political consultant and Hungarian rabbi’s son, has taken up the cudgel, <a href="https://standpointmag.co.uk/features-julyaugust11-the-holocaust-excusing-the-inexcusable-michael-pinto-duschinsky-holocaust-toepfer-richard-evans/" target="_blank">bashing Abs years after his death as part of a campaign of outrage</a> against two ‘nazi-linked’ donors to Oxford University, Alfred Toepfer and Gert-Rudolf Flick.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZGa38QFJwqQ8Bo7Hz99qFX1_q0-8fimQnSWRvexY4N1ijdycJos7YVoQQWrQY25cmhfJjTgKZ3GAp2Oxc5-5EZPNnbvPMixzsjGRJ162J3Rx_2PRpeZ25dV8CAtbRSaxCKnDr04Tla2l6/s1552/Hermann+Josef+Abs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1552" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZGa38QFJwqQ8Bo7Hz99qFX1_q0-8fimQnSWRvexY4N1ijdycJos7YVoQQWrQY25cmhfJjTgKZ3GAp2Oxc5-5EZPNnbvPMixzsjGRJ162J3Rx_2PRpeZ25dV8CAtbRSaxCKnDr04Tla2l6/s320/Hermann+Josef+Abs.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hermann Abs has been demonised by authors keen to peddle myths about a 'Fourth Reich'</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />As recently as the Brexit referendum of 2016, echoes of the anti-Abs campaign resounded. Novelist and foreign correspondent Adam LeBor wrote two non-fiction books, a novel and <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1179902/Revealed-The-secret-report-shows-Nazis-planned-Fourth-Reich--EU.html" target="_blank">several articles about “nazi bankers”, fuelling the notion that the European Union was in some sense a fulfilment of “old nazi” dreams of a Fourth Reich</a>. This theory was explicitly rooted in the so-called ‘Red House Report’, supposedly an account of a secret meeting of the Third Reich’s industrial and financial elite, held at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on 10th August 1944. Three months later the supposed minutes of this meeting reached US military intelligence, via a French source.</p><p>According to this report, the German financial elite planned a <b>“secure post-war foundation in foreign countries… existing financial reserves must be placed at the disposal of the party so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat”</b>. Front companies abroad would then carry out military research and intelligence tasks until a multinational, German-dominated empire could be rebuilt.</p><p>“Now,” the report’s author continued, “the Nazi Party stands behind the industrialists and urges them to save themselves by getting funds outside Germany and at the same time advance the party's plans for its post-war operations.”</p><p>LeBor treated the Red House Report as accurate, and some time later his story was regurgitated by the World Jewish Congress who in 2011 became the latest to ’discover’ the Red House Report. This same yellowing paper has been sensationally ‘rediscovered’ at least three times during the last twenty-five years: by Adam Lebor in 1996; by the medical doctor and controversial historian Hugh Thomas in 2001; and by the World Jewish Congress in 2011. Yet there is no convincing evidence for its authenticity. It suited the interests of both Henry Morgenthau and the Soviet Union in the mid-1940s, and was promoted by a Soviet asset in Roosevelt’s administration, Harry Dexter White, but even those mainstream historians who willingly swallow other wartime propaganda inventions now view the Red House Report with considerable scepticism.</p><p>It remains however very attractive to some pro-Brexit propagandists, especially because of Hermann Abs’ role in promoting European unity postwar. Not only was Abs instrumental in establishing the <i>Deutsche Mark</i> in 1948, giving West Germany a stable currency, he also became one of the leading advocates of what became the Common Market and later the European Union, and was a principal backer of Germany’s pro-European Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwn-pe92jyivytjXk_NKVO17rQBlgyHW3oVy6nhHTcy1AaTk2IgDVGmJjAM8yzrWznCxMcExVQ7HQ1H7kawMBOZExAsHTBTMy3Kq47Fs80meK13_scMqknULoQQIOPZTruEmPKLfrVjkpg/s189/Robi+Mendelssohn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="189" data-original-width="142" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwn-pe92jyivytjXk_NKVO17rQBlgyHW3oVy6nhHTcy1AaTk2IgDVGmJjAM8yzrWznCxMcExVQ7HQ1H7kawMBOZExAsHTBTMy3Kq47Fs80meK13_scMqknULoQQIOPZTruEmPKLfrVjkpg/w227-h302/Robi+Mendelssohn.jpg" width="227" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Robi Mendelssohn – Jewish banker and British spy at the heart of the Third Reich</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />We can now reveal – and would have revealed in court – that the key promoter of Hermann Abs in 1946 was not some undercover SS man straight out of Frederick Forsyth’s <i>The Odessa File</i>, nor some reactionary British aristocrat. In fact the British occupation authorities were lobbied to press ahead with Abs’s rehabilitation by Robi Mendelssohn, a partner in the long-established Jewish banking firm Mendelssohn & Co. Reading the accounts by Tom Bower, Adam LeBor, and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, one would assume that the Mendelssohn family were victims of brutal Nazi rapacity, facilitated by Abs, and that Robi Mendelssohn should have been first in the queue to demand Abs’s prosecution as a ‘war criminal’.</p><p>Yet in fact Mendelssohn was the prime mover insisting that Abs was the man the British should immediately get onside in a key role to rebuild postwar Germany.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ5-h5XjXkF7iOlGl-NiM_iRSbZHCMNUDV73txK_BhBJlI1dfTqCaypqkZn7xJGhOctwf4jdlKp7gWumVxpZzLOMvCV0bCpo-ECKkkhoCzItmUEpLxc_RkuqVlf3TzTUXZHyXfp2V7f04W/s890/Mendelssohn+palace+berlin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ5-h5XjXkF7iOlGl-NiM_iRSbZHCMNUDV73txK_BhBJlI1dfTqCaypqkZn7xJGhOctwf4jdlKp7gWumVxpZzLOMvCV0bCpo-ECKkkhoCzItmUEpLxc_RkuqVlf3TzTUXZHyXfp2V7f04W/s320/Mendelssohn+palace+berlin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Robi Mendelssohn's palatial Berlin birthplace</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />Who was Robi Mendelssohn? Why was he in a position to give high-level advice to the postwar British authorities? And why has his role remained secret until now, more than 75 years after the war?</p><p>Robert von Mendelssohn (known to friends, family and MI6/MI5 officers as Robi) was born in 1902 at a palatial residence in the Grunewald district of western Berlin, built for his father Franz, head of the family bank Mendelssohn & Co. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had fourteen years earlier granted the family the noble prefix ‘von’ in recognition of their importance to the Reich’s economy.</p><p>The Mendelssohn bank was founded in 1795 by Joseph Mendelssohn, eldest son of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and until the 1920s all of its partners (including the composer’s father Abraham) were family members. The firm came to specialise in government debt and overseas trade.</p><p>Franz von Mendelssohn died in June 1935 aged 69. As his <i>Financial Times</i> obituary emphasised, he remained senior partner of the bank and died at his home:</p><p><b>“Rumours that he was interned in a concentration camp are entirely erroneous, neither he nor any member of his family ever having been in such a camp.”</b></p><p>His 34-year-old son Robi was now in principle head of the family and already a partner in the bank, but was regarded as more of a playboy entertainer: his role was to amuse visiting VIPs in Berlin theatres and nightclubs. Adolf Hitler had by this time been Chancellor of Germany for two and a half years, but it was three years after Franz’s death that moves were made to “Aryanise” the bank. The initial problem in 1935 came not from the National Socialist government but within the family. Both Franz and his cousin Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a fellow partner in the bank, died during 1935. In the ensuing family reshuffle Franz’s widow Marie was registered as a ‘managing partner’ but Paul’s widow Elsa was not.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioJdHTSFnWNw-pbDRGWb0yd6QmLQXgcD1l1vKnxblU_diUqXWGiqUYRORxACOEHlxDvpjEXco5CTcld24beoLTXzOcDiWqLCIj13N6UyFo63YPwFNuEwY9NRACfI3qxDThXUmjr8Ir5xrQ/s472/Robi+Mendlessohn+-+oil+painting+-+1928.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="411" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioJdHTSFnWNw-pbDRGWb0yd6QmLQXgcD1l1vKnxblU_diUqXWGiqUYRORxACOEHlxDvpjEXco5CTcld24beoLTXzOcDiWqLCIj13N6UyFo63YPwFNuEwY9NRACfI3qxDThXUmjr8Ir5xrQ/s320/Robi+Mendlessohn+-+oil+painting+-+1928.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A 1928 oil painting by Ilona Singer of the young Robi Mendelssohn </i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In the meantime Robi cemented his credentials with the government by volunteering in 1936 for four months basic training in the German Army, and in 1938 he married the architect Liselotte von Bonin. It was during that summer – five years into National Socialism – that Mendelssohn’s bank began to reach the end of its almost 150-year history. Even then, records show that the government’s preferred solution was to transfer Jewish-owned shares to Robi, who classed as a <i>mischling</i>, or half-Jew.</p><p>A major issue here was that the bank held about 27 million Reichsmarks in “lines of credit” for overseas trade. During the financial crisis of 1931 these lines of credit had been frozen and were subject to renegotiation every year under the terms of the ‘Standstill Agreement’. Hermann Abs was one of the main German negotiators. In principle the bank’s proprietors were responsible and were any of the proprietors to withdraw, foreign creditors could demand immediate payment in foreign currency, which would mean seizure of assets.</p><p>By taking over Mendelssohn’s, any German bank would be doing the Jewish partners a favour not robbing them, as these Jewish partners would then be freed from the threat of having their foreign assets seized. A further issue during the takeover was that non-Jewish employees of the bank were concerned that the partners were getting a good deal while leaving the employees vulnerable to pay cuts, redundancy or threats to their pensions (a situation familiar to every reader whose employers have been taken over). Jewish employees as opposed to the partners and owners were of course in a much worse position: they were dismissed at the end of 1938 when the bank went into liquidation.</p><p>It became clear during 1938 that the preferred solution was for Deutsche Bank to take over Mendelssohn’s, and Abs handled the negotiations. Among the ‘crimes’ commonly attributed to Hermann Abs was this Deutsche Bank takeover of Mendelssohn & Co., the largest private bank in Germany, as well as its Amsterdam branch in 1940. As is standard in such cases, the tale is of innocent Jewish businessmen having their property confiscated, their art collections seized by the state. However the truth is that the Amsterdam branch of Mendelssohn’s, which had become a separate entity under the control of Jewish crook Fritz Mannheimer, had already become insolvent in August 1939 – eight months before the German invasion of the Netherlands.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgndjlGivUTKO51HLonmKZH0ioBbQ0mw0Fo21Uzo5WcHCJq52S5VLibY9u5ev13bW9xquWFaleoNWBcu9I9aw_Tx2ZYNQXxXTZsa0n8aMCJh-OlTm7gL0D3UI3v1bqbBOGidcL24bFULA4S/s770/Fritz+Mannheimer+with+Josephine+Baker.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="770" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgndjlGivUTKO51HLonmKZH0ioBbQ0mw0Fo21Uzo5WcHCJq52S5VLibY9u5ev13bW9xquWFaleoNWBcu9I9aw_Tx2ZYNQXxXTZsa0n8aMCJh-OlTm7gL0D3UI3v1bqbBOGidcL24bFULA4S/s320/Fritz+Mannheimer+with+Josephine+Baker.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Notoriously crooked banker Fritz Mannheimer, head of Mendelssohn's Amsterdam branch, strolling with cabaret star and French intelligence agent Josephine Baker.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />As noted above, the position of Mendelssohn’s Bank in Germany was far more complicated, mainly due to its international debt obligations. From 1938 to 1943 it continued to operate as “Mendelssohn in Liquidation”, with Robi as the most important family partner – indeed by 1942 the sole partner – and by 1943 the liquidation was almost completed, with Deutsche Bank having absorbed almost all its assets and liabilities.</p><p>Meanwhile several other family members were given financial compensation for the value of their shareholdings in the liquidated bank, and very importantly were freed from their obligations regarding its debts. These included Robi’s brother-in-law Paul Kempner, a former partner in the bank who emigrated to the USA in 1939. Kempner worked postwar as treasurer of an association formed to provide financial assistance for relatives of anti-Hitler conspirators – the American Committee to Aid Survivors of the German Resistance of July 20. Kempner had been an official of the liberal German Democratic Party during the Weimar Republic, and at the end of the Weimar years was Germany’s representative on the Finance Committee of the League of Nations.</p><p>Unlike his brother-in-law Kempner, however, Robi was not overtly involved in politics.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtajy2xraqUVPyR91xOzNgl0WDuoknJI72SyERcrddFAZh3dnEY21DeUATr9j-3kmA6YIsb8GoaqYU0i0LyztM-qRNpNCHvOU2Eo2OznKyou4fiIq5ekmsETche3icTJ4bSCgbsc5ZIGXJ/s1145/Georg+Hansen+-+Abwehr.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1145" data-original-width="750" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtajy2xraqUVPyR91xOzNgl0WDuoknJI72SyERcrddFAZh3dnEY21DeUATr9j-3kmA6YIsb8GoaqYU0i0LyztM-qRNpNCHvOU2Eo2OznKyou4fiIq5ekmsETche3icTJ4bSCgbsc5ZIGXJ/s320/Georg+Hansen+-+Abwehr.jpeg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>German military intelligence officer and anti-Hitler plotter Georg Hansen, for whom Mendelssohn acted as a courier to the Western Allies</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>For most of the decade between his father’s death and the end of the war, therefore, Robi Mendelssohn continued to play an important role in what had been Germany’s largest private bank, especially in regard to international trade (limited of course after 1939 to neutral and German-allied countries).</p><p>The German government evidently felt that Robi Mendelssohn was one half-Jew who could be trusted. They were wrong.</p><p>In the summer of 1943 senior MI6 officer John Cordeaux reported to the Foreign Office (in a document revealed here for the first time) that during a trip to Stockholm, Mendelssohn had made contact with the MI6 representative in the Swedish capital, Harry Carr.</p><p>Carr was a veteran MI6 officer who first worked for British intelligence in Russia soon after the Bolshevik revolution. From 1928 to 1941 he had been in charge of the important MI6 station in Helsinki, mainly focused on anti-Soviet operations, then relocated to Sweden after Finland joined the German side in 1941.</p><p>This sensational contact from a high-level Berlin source had to be handled at top level within MI6 and the Foreign Office, whose head Sir Alexander Cadogan had written to MI6 chief Sir Stewart Menzies only a few weeks earlier about the extreme sensitivity of such operations:</p><p><b>"The danger grows in proportion as the enemy national concerned is a person of standing in his own country, and I would say that no direct contact whatever should be made (without prior reference to myself) with any really prominent enemy national, such as a Cabinet Minister, a General or a senior official. These last are precisely the sort of contacts that are likely to become known and that are most likely to arouse Russian suspicions; and even if it ever seemed desirable to authorise a contact of this kind, it would, I think, simultaneously be necessary to inform the Russians of it and probably the Americans as well."</b></p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrsYuzGHVC_rLvdX_3Z4ut6sBP6NP-2OvLqw6Bkj12JklmD1f4ysPdJYsTuTYY-G_QT8dMzCnEKEVIqMqDvwFfrgDx6Rk1Cpdo-GnboKl7doXDMPeEQ_r6Oq75cmSj15MaHq0T1KvveJFx/s800/Sir+Stewart+Menzies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="567" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrsYuzGHVC_rLvdX_3Z4ut6sBP6NP-2OvLqw6Bkj12JklmD1f4ysPdJYsTuTYY-G_QT8dMzCnEKEVIqMqDvwFfrgDx6Rk1Cpdo-GnboKl7doXDMPeEQ_r6Oq75cmSj15MaHq0T1KvveJFx/s320/Sir+Stewart+Menzies.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sir Stewart Menzies, wartime MI6 chief whose officers in Stockholm had top secret meetings with Robi Mendelssohn during 1943 and 1944</i> </td></tr></tbody></table><br />Hence Cordeaux felt it necessary to inform Cadogan (through his intelligence liaison officer Peter Loxley) about the Mendelssohn case:</p><p><b>"With reference to Sir Alexander Cadogan's personal and secret letter to my Chief of 18th June, and his letter C/3646 in reply, one of the members on the staff of our late representative in Helsinki, now working in Stockholm, has contacted Robert Mendelsohn [<i>sic</i>], a member of the German Mendelsohn Banking Firm who has been visiting Stockholm on official German foreign exchange business.</b></p><p><b>"This is a most interesting and valuable contact which we have directed the officer concerned to follow up. Our officer handling this contact is an experienced, able and very discreet man, and the contact will in any case be supervised by our late Helsinki representative whom you know but, as Mendelsohn is a man of some importance, I thought it best to inform you in accordance with the above-quoted letters."</b></p><p>After this initial contact with MI6, Mendelssohn made two further visits to Stockholm during the second half of 1943, and one in 1944, on each occasion meeting with MI6 and with an unnamed American diplomat (probably OSS officer Francis Cunningham). He appears to have been partly acting as an intermediary on behalf of German military intelligence officer Georg Hansen, right-hand man to Abwehr chief and arch-plotter Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.</p><p>In 1944 Hansen became deputy chief of the SS intelligence organisation RSHA, <a href="https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/georg-alexander-hansen/?no_cache=1" target="_blank">where he continued working with anti-Hitler conspirators</a> who attempted to assassinate the Führer in the failed Stauffenberg bomb plot of 20th July 1944. Hansen was arrested on 22nd July, convicted, and hanged on 8th September 1944.</p><p>Another influential associate of Mendelssohn’s was <a href="https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/carl-langbehn/?no_cache=1" target="_blank">the lawyer Carl Langbehn</a>, regarded by historians as in some sense an associate of Heinrich Himmler. Langbehn had preceded Mendelssohn to Stockholm six months earlier to meet with Bruce Hopper (a Harvard political science professor working for OSS), then travelled to Switzerland in September 1943. In Berne – just a few weeks after Mendelssohn’s first Stockholm mission – Langbehn discussed peace proposals with future CIA chief Allen Dulles and his fellow OSS officer Gero von Gaevernitz, an economist of German-Jewish origin. It’s not clear just how much Himmler knew about these peace feelers, and to what extent he would have been prepared to act against Hitler if necessary to secure a separate peace with the Western Allies – or indeed to what extent Himmler and Hitler were working together all along to pursue these peace feelers: this remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the Second World War, and is likely to be explained more fully later this year when David Irving published his long-awaited biography of Himmler.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdOSTJdyyv1s-zNqUSCLyckviPE9kS8AHvUYCF49DfmQc7WoX3FN8MELtaVaze7ixdcmNevdhVmwkdsldVpRXx748QWru6KjAMPTIW-7GR_IYw-fAfOtjGbcLjlevbZ-L8orB15OQM46_w/s264/Carl+Langbehn.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdOSTJdyyv1s-zNqUSCLyckviPE9kS8AHvUYCF49DfmQc7WoX3FN8MELtaVaze7ixdcmNevdhVmwkdsldVpRXx748QWru6KjAMPTIW-7GR_IYw-fAfOtjGbcLjlevbZ-L8orB15OQM46_w/s0/Carl+Langbehn.jpeg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Carl Langbehn on trial for treason in 1944</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Allegedly, unfortunately for Langbehn, an Allied telegram identifying him in relation to the trip to Switzerland was intercepted by the Gestapo: whether or not Himmler had earlier approved of the mission, he now had to dissociate himself. Langbehn was arrested and executed in October 1944.</p><p>The grim fates of Hansen and Langbehn have long been known to historians, though there remains a good deal of mystery about the Langbehn-Himmler story. But until today nothing has been written about Robi Mendelssohn, who survived all of these treason arrests and trials entirely unscathed.</p><p>What is especially interesting is that at the end of October 1946 Mendelssohn arrived in London and told a version of the Hansen and Langbehn stories to MI5. Mendelssohn already knew, for example, that Langbehn's arrest was due to the interception of an Allied telegram. The half-Jewish banker clearly still had high-level Berlin contacts, at least until mid-1944.</p><p>Most likely, after the failure of the July bomb plot, Mendelssohn decided to retire to his country home and keep out of politics. As a result he was never troubled personally by the Gestapo, even though his wife (who had her own range of contacts in Berlin artistic circles) was briefly detained during investigations of the July bomb plot conspiracy.</p><p>In 1943 he had paid the SS to secure his mother’s emigration to Sweden: she returned to Germany in 1946 and died in 1957 aged 90. The only casualty of the National Socialist era in Mendelssohn’s immediate family was an aunt who committed suicide in 1942, when she heard that she faced arrest.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEjqGuL8WtoXSPSwt8J8NvcR7jNSZo7Fq3tP0hofQFje6oaj9UF73piUn5y1H8fbrMIx2qY8_JA1v6hF8KFORQ9K7OGQdIPNogRQ-DX1eKqq8pWjyKv-sYsk_s5mQVyqj_OAjZIhROcxH/s800/Guy+Liddell+diaries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="506" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEjqGuL8WtoXSPSwt8J8NvcR7jNSZo7Fq3tP0hofQFje6oaj9UF73piUn5y1H8fbrMIx2qY8_JA1v6hF8KFORQ9K7OGQdIPNogRQ-DX1eKqq8pWjyKv-sYsk_s5mQVyqj_OAjZIhROcxH/s320/Guy+Liddell+diaries.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>MI5 deputy director-general Guy Liddell with pages from his diaries: these combined with Foreign Office documents provide the trail of evidence that identifies Robi Mendelssohn as a British agent.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>An October 1946 entry in the diary of Guy Liddell, deputy director-general of MI5, reveals that it was Robi Mendelssohn who pushed for Abs to be given a key postwar role in the German economy. Robi, wrote Liddell, <b>“has certain constructive proposals to make. He thinks it is hopeless to expect agreement with the Russians to run the whole of Germany as an economic unit. The only thing to do is to accept the 'iron curtain' and try and put the West on to a sound economic footing – to do this it is necessary to consult with experts in all the various fields, i.e. banking, industry, agriculture, etc..</b></p><p><b>“Robi could interrogate suitable people and they could, if necessary, be got over here. He thinks that if this is not done, and advantage is not taken of the swing to the Right in the recent elections, Germany will gradually sink into communism and starvation. He talked to Ned Reid </b>[Sir Edward Reid, a member of the Baring banking family who was MI5’s main expert on City matters]<b> about this, who agreed with his views and put him into touch with Playfair, the financial expert in the office of the Control Commission in London. </b>[This was the future Sir Edward Playfair, a Treasury civil servant who later became head of the Ministry of Defence.]<b> He told Playfair about his proposals and mentioned the kind of people he had in mind: one was a man called Abs, who was in the Reichsbank.</b></p><p><b>“Playfair took the view that it would be impossible to use a man who had served throughout the war in an institution which had been supporting the Nazi regime. Robi said that if this attitude was maintained, it would be really impossible to do anything. It was clearly no good digging out some old financier who had been out of the swim for the last fifteen years. He suggested that I should see Playfair and try and get some sense into him.”</b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq9aJ_ZcB1ES4XdMBPhJS6Tlp_Q2J56MLUr9v_Kh-qE-lRDgfA76sgn-yv6ko2b76jw2IfQ6f1gbtLn1D9Iuj2XFC4401jig3l03wz10xQ7XD0_Nm_qbOiwxa0PiJEoc0prf495MANDlw9/s300/Sir+Victor+Mallet+with+Christian+Gu%25CC%2588nther+May+12th+1945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq9aJ_ZcB1ES4XdMBPhJS6Tlp_Q2J56MLUr9v_Kh-qE-lRDgfA76sgn-yv6ko2b76jw2IfQ6f1gbtLn1D9Iuj2XFC4401jig3l03wz10xQ7XD0_Nm_qbOiwxa0PiJEoc0prf495MANDlw9/s0/Sir+Victor+Mallet+with+Christian+Gu%25CC%2588nther+May+12th+1945.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sir Victor Mallet (above left), Britain's wartime envoy to Sweden, celebrating VE Day with Swedish Foreign Minister Christian Günther. MI6 officers based at Mallet's Legation in Stockholm had secretly met their informant Robi Mendelssohn during 1943 and 1944.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>It seems that at Mendelssohn’s instigation, the British (and more reluctantly the Americans) did indeed ‘come to their senses’. The Americans (in a hangover from the Morgenthau Plan) had wanted the separate German regions (<i>Länder</i>) to have separate currencies: indeed until July 1947 the US occupation policy was governed by a Joint Chiefs of Staff directive that forbade their authorities “to take any steps to strengthen [the] German financial structure”.</p><p>In contrast Abs (with British backing) successfully proposed that there should be a common German currency – the <i>Deutsche Mark</i>, introduced in the three western zones of Germany (British, American and French) on 20th June 1948. Soviet opposition to this new currency led to the Berlin Blockade from June 1948 to May 1949, which had to be countered by an airlift of supplies after the Western allies insisted the new currency should be used in West Berlin.</p><p>The introduction of the <i>Deutsche Mark</i> was one of the ways in which Hermann Abs shaped the postwar world, along the lines suggested by Robi Mendelssohn to British intelligence: what could be termed an anti-Morgenthau Plan. Instead of permanently weakening the German economy, the Western allies should take steps to build up the Federal Republic. Hermann Abs’s other major contribution to this plan was his successful renegotiation of German debts (including both pre-war debts and reparations for the First and Second World Wars): the London Debt Agreement (<i>Londoner Schuldenabkommen</i>) was signed in February 1953, with Abs leading the German side. Not coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time the West German Bundestag ratified an agreement for long-term German payments to the new Israeli state.</p><p>Within Germany, Abs became the leading official in the Credit Institute for Reconstruction (<i>Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau</i>), established in 1948 to distribute 20 billion marks in ‘Marshall Aid’ for German reconstruction, though it was not until November 1949 that he was permitted to travel to the USA for the first time since the war.</p><p>Abs then became the key man in protracted negotiations during the 1950s for the return of German assets frozen in the USA. In a separate chapter, I shall analyse this process and some of the individuals and interests involved. In summary, it appears that a tacit agreement was reached in the late 1940s – an agreement that held until roughly 1990. German political and business leaders would agree (in general terms) that they and their nation were ‘guilty’ of whatever their enemies wanted to allege. They would act as the military frontline of the Cold War, and to some extent finance it, while giving up any notion of an independent German foreign and defence policy. And they would hand over huge amounts of money, goods and technology to the new state of Israel.</p><p>In return Germany’s enemies agreed that a line would be drawn after the first phase of Nuremberg trials. There would be no endless witch-hunt against those who had held political or economic influence during the Third Reich, and Morgenthau-style plans for the complete crushing of the German nation would be shelved. While the German Reich would still be fractured into East and West, and remains fractured to this day even after the so-called ‘reunification’ thirty years ago, a substantial part of Germany would be allowed to become something resembling a ‘normal’ country. No constitution, no real sovereignty, no independent diplomatic or military role – but for pragmatists such as Hermann Abs and Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic was at least some semblance of ‘normality’, a far cry from the utter devastation promised in various ways by the plans of Henry Morgenthau, Earnest Hooton and Theodore Kaufman.</p><p>What Abs didn’t realise when achieving this partial post-war settlement was that by 1990 the deal would have expired. With the end of the Cold War and the slow passing of the wartime generations, Germany’s enemies (in fact Europe’s enemies) chose to restart the witch-hunts. Instead of a general acknowledgment of German ‘guilt’, followed by a drawing of the line and ‘moving on’, there began a worldwide obsession with the ultimate crime – the ‘Holocaust’ – and a search for surviving individuals to place again in the literal dock of war crimes trials or the metaphorical dock of history. And acknowledgment of this ultimate crime was no longer a step towards rebuilding Germany and Europe (as Abs and Adenauer had intended), but a justification for flooding the White world with immigrants from every other race on Earth.</p><p>We can be sure that Abs and Adenauer had not foreseen this deluge: had others?</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieQls8PLcReL2Br8FA1wXWf_72Djte3UQSE2AlacfmF-E63fwAT9_yTCl3X8FJoHfy3eiXUKzdzwrWd5LMjF2Feeq-rb0_N1Uq64eRa-1oZHNcHQAVVJkuzcep6UpkcMHNX-JivoQAN9_W/s640/Robert+von+Mendelssohn+grave+-+Berlin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieQls8PLcReL2Br8FA1wXWf_72Djte3UQSE2AlacfmF-E63fwAT9_yTCl3X8FJoHfy3eiXUKzdzwrWd5LMjF2Feeq-rb0_N1Uq64eRa-1oZHNcHQAVVJkuzcep6UpkcMHNX-JivoQAN9_W/s320/Robert+von+Mendelssohn+grave+-+Berlin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Robi Mendelssohn's grave in Berlin</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>British documents unreported until today show that Robi Mendelssohn – the very man who had been a partner in the largest Jewish family bank supposedly seized by Hermann Abs on behalf of Deutsche Bank – was the man who persuaded the British to rescue this ‘nazi banker’ and secured his position postwar.</p><p>Time and again, historians have picked over the bones of the Abs story; but each time they have ignored Robi Mendelssohn. Moreover the same historians who are usually so keen to discover stories of wartime spies and Jewish heroism have completely ignored the fact that a half-Jewish banker – part of Germany’s most famous Jewish banking family – was an Allied spy inside the Third Reich.</p><p>Robi Mendelssohn died in the ‘artists’ colony’ town of Worpswede, Lower Saxony, in July 1996, aged 94. A few years earlier he had secured the return of a good deal of Mendelssohn family capital after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany. At exactly this time, his near contemporary Hermann Abs was facing a chorus of denunciation, banned from entering the USA as a ‘nazi’ and ‘war criminal’.</p><p>The successor and protégé of Hermann Abs as chairman of Deutsche Bank – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RO56QGZt0w" target="_blank">Alfred Herrhausen</a> – was the victim of what is still one of Europe’s most mysterious murders on 30th November 1989, three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Herrhausen – who like Abs was a close friend and colleague of Sir Frank Renouf – was killed by a car bomb near his home. The assassination was claimed to be the work of the far-left Red Army Faction, successors to the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the same terrorist unit was later blamed for the murder of industrialist Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, head of the ‘Treuhand’ organisation that was in charge of integrating the economy of communist East Germany into the Western system.</p><p>Rohwedder was killed by a sniper at his home on 1st April 1991. He had uncovered corruption on a vast scale within the East German apparatus, and many analysts allege that the Rohwedder and Herrhausen assassinations were carried out by ‘deep state’ elements in the Federal Republic who had benefited from corrupt East-West deals. During 2020 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73kMqCPEr6c" target="_blank">these allegations were supported by the four-part documentary series <i>A Perfect Crime</i></a>, broadcast on Netflix. The killing of Abs’s protégé Herrhausen was pivotal to the plot of <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/netflix-and-amazon-series-explore-revolutionary-era-in-germany/a-55054713" target="_blank">a fictional drama broadcast worldwide in 2020, <i>Deutschland 89</i></a>.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHgnMHMc099W3ywVz4txeu1f4SYsKbrE4HiCn2KdI398lC2A3BP2Cn-91tpjBDjoZFbAoceCigX3_bbOM1aJvJLzoorgtlpM0l6Bgq2o8TdXYrZhwZczleQpoVfqFq9Dz4MKwC2kyCcVis/s940/Herrhausen+car+bomb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="940" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHgnMHMc099W3ywVz4txeu1f4SYsKbrE4HiCn2KdI398lC2A3BP2Cn-91tpjBDjoZFbAoceCigX3_bbOM1aJvJLzoorgtlpM0l6Bgq2o8TdXYrZhwZczleQpoVfqFq9Dz4MKwC2kyCcVis/s320/Herrhausen+car+bomb.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The remains of Alfred Herrhausen's car after his assassination in November 1989. Herrhausen was another close friend and colleague of Sir Frank Renouf, and was the chosen successor of Hermann Abs at Deutsche Bank</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Almost a quarter-century after his death there remain only two brief and obscure British documents referring to Mendelssohn’s contacts with Allied intelligence. Given that he was reporting from such a high level in the Third Reich – and given his own antecedents – what did Mendelssohn tell the Allies about the events now known as the ‘Holocaust’? Given that they had such a high-level Jewish source, why are contemporaneous British documents so silent about the ‘gas chambers’ and associated matters?</p><p>On 27th August 1943, responding sceptically to early Polish reports about homicidal gas chambers, the head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, succeeded in having all reference to such supposed execution chambers removed from the text of an Allied declaration about German ‘war crimes’, insisting:</p><p><b>“I feel certain that we are making a mistake in publicly giving credence to this gas chambers story.”</b></p><p>This was more than a month after MI6 had made contact with Robi Mendelssohn in Stockholm and received his first report from the heart of the Third Reich. Mendelssohn’s recruitment was handled at the highest level of London’s intelligence bureaucracy and would certainly have come to Cavendish-Bentinck’s notice by the time of his ‘gas chamber’ scepticism. Did Mendelssohn ever provide any intelligence to change his mind, or anything at all about what we now call ‘the Holocaust’?</p><p>In October 2020, the Mendelssohn story formed part of a dossier about Hermann Abs, including other contradictory statements and actions from influential Jews – a dossier that would have formed part of the defence case for Lady Michèle Renouf, former wife of Abs’s old friend Sir Frank Renouf, had Dresden prosecutors gone ahead with their long-planned case against her for ‘Holocaust denial’.</p><p>Now the Mendelssohn story is part of a forthcoming book by Peter Rushton, research consultant to the Renouf defence team.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYvtxfN33vOyYqIFozCDIfy-Ty_JoqTRiteBTDQqsz1TLe4s8yAR6ZB2OiMf7pA0_OFEem0KSl8WqfMlnujn2GdwFQd9YhRNXoc170Bxmd_PEoQvQF7hMydHqLJ9JRI7OVuobKyjhI2yPE/s1070/wn-lmr+141020+b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1070" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYvtxfN33vOyYqIFozCDIfy-Ty_JoqTRiteBTDQqsz1TLe4s8yAR6ZB2OiMf7pA0_OFEem0KSl8WqfMlnujn2GdwFQd9YhRNXoc170Bxmd_PEoQvQF7hMydHqLJ9JRI7OVuobKyjhI2yPE/s320/wn-lmr+141020+b.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Michèle Renouf (above right) and her attorney Wolfram Nahrath celebrate victory over Dresden prosecutors in October 2020</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>With writers, lawyers, filmmakers, and many others – including Germans in their 80s and 90s such as Horst Mahler and Ursula Haverbeck – being locked up for months and years at a time for ‘holocaust denial’, surely the time for secrecy is long gone.</p><p>During the Cold War there might have been good reasons why the Western Allies never revealed the story of their German-Jewish spy Robi Mendelssohn – especially as this related to sensitive histories of German peace proposals and the role of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who like Robi Mendelssohn had mysterious ties to British and American intelligence, before disappearing in January 1945 – a case that has never been solved.</p><p>British and German authorities are now under an obligation to be fully candid about their archives on Robi Mendelssohn and German Jewry: official half-truths and evasions are unacceptable while historical sceptics are locked up for asking awkward questions.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-60006201448832834162020-12-26T16:15:00.005-08:002020-12-26T17:11:36.894-08:00Lady Michèle Renouf interviewed for Radio Albion's Christmas show<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.radioalbion.com/2020/12/truth-will-out-radio-british.html" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="700" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYWAjTwvkbpn_3OSn4DcuIIKgR2PFd9XE0YJB7lWQjKl1ZQCh2GYETfUE_YfO6xngJtzFwP_dB-oJrNBO-pB8qzeC2SXxexMG5Pi5KkRKdiy56PxDPGJQNXfbD9fjhz1zdzT6Eta8MTlpF/s320/LMR+interview+with+Sven+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Lady Michèle Renouf was interviewed by Sven Longshanks, host of <a href="https://www.radioalbion.com/2020/12/truth-will-out-radio-british.html" target="_blank">Radio Albion</a>, for his Christmas Day broadcast. The programme was recorded three days in advance, 24 hours before the death of our great friend and comrade Richard Edmonds, whose role as a British hero of historical revisionism was highlighted during the interview.</p><p>The broadcast was dedicated to Richard's memory.</p><p><a href="https://www.radioalbion.com/2020/12/truth-will-out-radio-british.html" target="_blank">It can be heard via the Radio Albion website: click here to stream or download</a>.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-41650736666638532462020-12-17T16:05:00.005-08:002020-12-17T16:20:21.291-08:00Wolfram Nahrath interviewed on Nordic Frontier<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_QpzUG7M32S9tiN7jNbfLMGhv6sdsVqopw7MN8DknJ0kQsqtuIKkhyphenhyphenfK8dFt7-qOks5Yn6yrtJigTWxMXkv6liXZagv7-j_wsJF7JqXjuFIACPFAJuDl-O8rt-xIXvHP3oDELL5Ao5cMz/s1336/Nordic+Frontier+-+Ursula+-+Wolfram.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_QpzUG7M32S9tiN7jNbfLMGhv6sdsVqopw7MN8DknJ0kQsqtuIKkhyphenhyphenfK8dFt7-qOks5Yn6yrtJigTWxMXkv6liXZagv7-j_wsJF7JqXjuFIACPFAJuDl-O8rt-xIXvHP3oDELL5Ao5cMz/s320/Nordic+Frontier+-+Ursula+-+Wolfram.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Andreas Johansson of Nordic Frontier this week hosted attorney and patriot Wolfram Nahrath.</p><p>Along with guest interviewer Nestor, Andreas and his co-host welcome Wolfram Nahrath, former leader of the racial nationalist youth group Wiking Jugend – who follows in a long family tradition of patriotic leaders.</p><p>Herr Nahrath has been a brave defender of many clients accused of political "crimes", such as daring to question the so-called "Holocaust" of European Jews. Earlier this year he succeeded in defending last week's Nordic Frontier guest, Lady Michèle Renouf, and in this interview he explains how the German court feared putting her on trial.</p><p>Herr Nahrath goes on to discuss some of his other clients including the legendary 92-year-old campaigner for historical truth Ursula Haverbeck, Horst Mahler, Monika Schaefer and Bishop Richard Williamson.</p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/wolfram-nordic-frontier-15-dec-2020" target="_blank">Click here to listen to this fascinating interview either streaming or via download</a>.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-16275207685582961452020-12-14T04:33:00.030-08:002020-12-17T04:52:49.749-08:00Lady Michèle Renouf interviewed by Nordic Frontier<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/nordic-frontier-8-dec-2020-lady-renoufs-victory-in-dresden" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="697" data-original-width="1332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq9dHLkAUSX2Wm1920hlEZZ1y2dc49j1s6TGIhb6tZwn4u8y85qxWkbkv6ovXokx45yhViJKKahzm5L7XM-1lJMfBvKEicL9o2LlMe35JQ-_PVYbdyXvYrxzSRbDCzzcZBzKzdylEQIZ0d/s320/Nordic+Frontier+-+Renouf.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Lady Michèle Renouf was interviewed on 8th December by Andreas Johansson of Nordic Frontier.</p><p>They discuss her recent court victory in Dresden and the many other cases in which European (and especially German) judges have jailed scientists, historians, publishers, and even lawyers.</p><p>Though now banned from Bitchute, this Nordic Frontier interview <a href="https://archive.org/details/nordic-frontier-8-dec-2020-lady-renoufs-victory-in-dresden" target="_blank">can still be heard at archive.org</a></p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/nordic-frontier-8-dec-2020-lady-renoufs-victory-in-dresden" target="_blank">Click here to stream or download the interview</a></p><p>Here at this blog we are preparing to release details of some of the sensational evidence that would have been used had the Renouf case proceeded through the German court system.</p><p>We shall be posting some of these details in a few days time!</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-45460748751631848072020-12-08T01:07:00.003-08:002020-12-17T04:33:32.017-08:00Ursula Haverbeck again given jail sentence at 92<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaZZUFc5CcgrvRYfVG_IExBFpI3arL-9KNz5VZbJhuaU_lJl9PDNjqBmMSGXYW4L71dKPJ-63wh168N-GKwa5uqE4lsikphCPjBgPfUTdPa_Vp-0o2LrzD_rSCAUUgnBhoRFPEg9HZQkN6/s567/UrsulaRigolfMichele.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="567" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaZZUFc5CcgrvRYfVG_IExBFpI3arL-9KNz5VZbJhuaU_lJl9PDNjqBmMSGXYW4L71dKPJ-63wh168N-GKwa5uqE4lsikphCPjBgPfUTdPa_Vp-0o2LrzD_rSCAUUgnBhoRFPEg9HZQkN6/s320/UrsulaRigolfMichele.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Ursula Haverbeck (<i>above left</i>) with fellow campaigner Dr Rigolf Hennig and Lady Michèle Renouf, who was recently acquitted of <i>Volksverhetzung</i> charges.</b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The indefatigable campaigner for truth and justice Ursula Haverbeck – who celebrated her 92nd birthday on November 8th – was yet again sentenced by a German court on Friday, under the Federal Republic's notorious <i>Volksverhetzung</i> law that prohibits discussion of certain historical subjects.</p><p>Frau Haverbeck, a writer and publisher, for many years ran the educational institute Collegium Humanum with her late husband Werner Haverbeck (1909-1999). The Collegium hosted many prominent intellectuals, including the pioneering ecological author and activist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher.</p><p>In 2004 Ursula Haverbeck was fined for <i>Volksverhetzung</i>, and has been convicted several times for further offences, in particular for "denying" that the Auschwitz internment camp was used for the homicidal gassing of Jews. In reality many of her offences consisted simply of asking precise questions of a series of German and Jewish officials – seeking to pin down the exact allegations that are made against wartime German authorities.</p><p>Instead of answering these questions in the normal manner, these officials chose to drag Ursula Haverbeck into court, where she has several times been sentenced to prison terms. From May 2018 until last month she was imprisoned in Bielefeld, in the north-west German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.</p><p>Just a month later, another jail sentence – this time 12 months, though appeals will follow. Ursula Haverbeck already has pending appeals against two sentences (one of ten months, the other six) for similar 'crimes'. The 'offence' for which she was sentenced last Friday was a YouTube video interview with former schoolteacher Nikolai Nerling, known as <i>Der Volkslehrer</i> ("People's Teacher").</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQGreNzumBLwu5qsF9ps-TgoneGiHsMm_qZR4p-0NTUZke_oVZP9seQIAqQSCLKnkEe4dtZGcqtellgRO5tp9AamHFgLbi9l-k3GqpQJfO05SklCP2LiDkoPwqDS9Hl13uugOkE4bFt3YP/s600/Monika+and+Alfred+Schaefer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQGreNzumBLwu5qsF9ps-TgoneGiHsMm_qZR4p-0NTUZke_oVZP9seQIAqQSCLKnkEe4dtZGcqtellgRO5tp9AamHFgLbi9l-k3GqpQJfO05SklCP2LiDkoPwqDS9Hl13uugOkE4bFt3YP/s320/Monika+and+Alfred+Schaefer.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Monika and Alfred Schaefer</b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Many Germans are prosecuted every year for <i>Volksverhetzung</i>. The highest profile prisoner still incarcerated is <a href="https://wir-sind-monika.com" target="_blank">the German-Canadian Alfred Schaefer, whose sister Monika was also imprisoned for her part in 'Holocaust denial' videos</a>. No-one has yet calculated how much the Federal Republic spends on detection and prosecution of such 'crimes'. 84-year-old attorney and author Horst Mahler was imprisoned until last month despite having had both legs amputated during his sentence.</p><p>Retired Supreme Court judges <a href="https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/holocaust-leugnung-schuldig-bei-vergleich/1277036.html" target="_blank">Winfried Hassemer and Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem are among those who have called for the repeal of this monstrous debate-denying law</a>.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-31688472048961974432020-11-24T01:16:00.007-08:002020-11-24T01:16:53.980-08:00Lord Stoddart RIP<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq8gGaEAAjnh9zO676gLMHCOmJgXxXERKMn6RUeTVl_pWQ29MUPr4FFoZmzFxAx41fIAnFlzeIT33kGPjSg0fzshYqDIKIPlSVcmqa0S_9cXzjApJCKBNv_LZebvGB_KyANVQNGrz2147i/s1778/Palestine+Scrapbook+at+Lords+2002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1179" data-original-width="1778" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq8gGaEAAjnh9zO676gLMHCOmJgXxXERKMn6RUeTVl_pWQ29MUPr4FFoZmzFxAx41fIAnFlzeIT33kGPjSg0fzshYqDIKIPlSVcmqa0S_9cXzjApJCKBNv_LZebvGB_KyANVQNGrz2147i/s320/Palestine+Scrapbook+at+Lords+2002.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>(above left) Lord Stoddart alongside Lady Michèle Renouf at the showing of her film Palestine Scrapbook in 2002, which he and Dr James Thring (second right) organised at the House of Lords.</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />One of Britain's most independent-minded politicians has died aged 94.</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/23/lord-stoddart-of-swindon-obituary" target="_blank">Lord Stoddart, the former Labour MP Richard Stoddart</a>, was probably best known for his consistent opposition to Britain's membership of the European Union, which he campaigned against for more than half a century, living to see eventual victory in the Brexit referendum.</p><p>He was also a consistent supporter of the oppressed Palestinian people, and it was under Lord Stoddart's auspices in cooperation with Dr James Thring that Lady Michèle Renouf's first documentary film <i>Palestine Scrapbook</i> was shown at the House of Lords in 2002.</p><p>The film documents unique interviews with surviving British servicemen who fought against Zionist terrorism in Palestine during the forgotten war of 1945-48.</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/23/lord-stoddart-of-swindon-obituary" target="_blank">Today's <i>Guardian</i> obituary</a> accurately and generously (given that today's Guardianistas would almost all be passionately opposed to Lord Stoddart's anti-EU stance) describes Stoddart as "a template for the sort of diligent decency found in the Labour party in his political generation" and "a singularly independent-minded politician".</p><p>Lord Stoddart remained active and dilegent in pursuit of that independent vision until the end: Hansard records that his last parliamentary votes were cast just five days before his death.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-32787358269693298722020-11-24T00:17:00.002-08:002020-11-24T00:17:15.744-08:00Biden's new Secretary of State and his well-connected stepfather<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMA0EkzFvPv8zNKx1yKGbNlCtqE45vljawSgnQxgNwmG6ffd1tcdMByC1IPaF0vDp_OpYczXuy8-9uDmPL7FN5u9V-fPFRwP1SfMOe0zCXnHKcuQT6vj-Eqvmdr0H1WbJgg4e6RtjOuq9y/s654/Blinken+-+Biden.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="436" data-original-width="654" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMA0EkzFvPv8zNKx1yKGbNlCtqE45vljawSgnQxgNwmG6ffd1tcdMByC1IPaF0vDp_OpYczXuy8-9uDmPL7FN5u9V-fPFRwP1SfMOe0zCXnHKcuQT6vj-Eqvmdr0H1WbJgg4e6RtjOuq9y/s320/Blinken+-+Biden.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>(above right) Tony Blinken, soon to take charge of US foreign policy as the third Jewish Secretary of State, seen here with President-elect Joe Biden</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />US President-elect Joe Biden is set to confirm his long-time aide Tony Blinken as the new Secretary of State. Blinken will take office in January 2021 at the helm of US foreign policy and will be the third Jewish holder of this office, after Henry Kissinger (1973-77) and Madeleine Albright (1997-2001),</p><p>Mrs Albright famously claimed that she hadn't known she was Jewish until the <i>Washington Post</i> reported it, shortly after she took over as Bill Clinton's second Secretary of State.</p><p>By contrast Tony Blinken will never have been in any doubt about his kosher heritage. His father Donald Blinken was a founding partner in the very Jewish investment bank Warburg Pincus, but his stepfather is even more interesting for readers of this blog.</p><p>Tony Blinken's stepfather was Samuel Pisar, one of the founding high priests of Holocaustianity. the cult that has taken the place of normal historical research and logical argument where one particular corner of history is concerned.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6f5SbCNGUIWUBUYHgDoGLfEujzlnPacxJE9tv4kjCEboRDIFE4p2fV4uLugngczbECIq0-UNe9fyIcwu5e3QZ_Sxs0du9-9Cf8y7fV1IdAQbKWhrdHAsZaAkhPUcpSmYwWWLQqRPReYRv/s1280/Samuel+Pisar+and+Judith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6f5SbCNGUIWUBUYHgDoGLfEujzlnPacxJE9tv4kjCEboRDIFE4p2fV4uLugngczbECIq0-UNe9fyIcwu5e3QZ_Sxs0du9-9Cf8y7fV1IdAQbKWhrdHAsZaAkhPUcpSmYwWWLQqRPReYRv/s320/Samuel+Pisar+and+Judith.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Blinken's stepfather Samuel Pisar and the new Secretary of State's mother Judith Pisar</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Pisar miraculously survived a whole series of wartime camps including the alleged 'death camps' Majdanek and Auschwitz, before escaping from a "death march" at the end of the war. He eventually contributed to the endless literature of 'survivor memoirs' with a book whose French title translates as "The Blood of Hope" – perhaps a nod to the original sacrificial meaning of the word 'Holocaust'.</p><p>These canny survival skills didn't desert Pisar during a long postwar career as attorney for some of the shadiest characters in World Zionism.</p><p>Though the fact was magically removed from his <i>Times</i> obituary, Samuel Pisar was lifelong confidant and legal adviser to Robert Maxwell, a monstrous crook who stole from his own employees' pension funds, struck dodgy trade deals with the Soviet bloc, and betrayed Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu – kidnapped by Mossad and returned to jail in Israel.</p><p>Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell before his still mysterious death in 1991.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJo7Pw7PXOvl8rRMk7EsjirSUc9RyOO1dmOrajT9QGZ1XNmPn2vEW-X2FF3l65B_QCwwICypac89KB_v1MZGZRPeQotz4WWP_l189uu_So8ugxb0TRnT_LzzC-zzGqpjfPgQwgLYByJwwe/s960/Maxwell+-+Ghislaine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="812" data-original-width="960" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJo7Pw7PXOvl8rRMk7EsjirSUc9RyOO1dmOrajT9QGZ1XNmPn2vEW-X2FF3l65B_QCwwICypac89KB_v1MZGZRPeQotz4WWP_l189uu_So8ugxb0TRnT_LzzC-zzGqpjfPgQwgLYByJwwe/s320/Maxwell+-+Ghislaine.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>(above right) Robert Maxwell – Mossad agent, international crook, and Samuel Pisar's client and confidant for decades – seen here with his daughter Ghislaine, presently facing criminal charges in the USA for her alleged role in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Other long-term Pisar clients included Soviet agent and Zionist billionaire Armand Hammer, and the ruthless corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith.</p><p>But perhaps the most interesting was Bruce Rappaport, a crooked international banker with close ties to Israeli intelligence. During the mid-1980s Samuel Pisar helped Rappaport fix a US guarantee for an Iraqi pipeline – effectively an insurance guarantee that Israel would not attack the pipeline, and that if it did, the costs would be covered.</p><p>In return for this guarantee, Rappaport's front companies got Iraqi oil at a hefty discount, and the lawyer Pisar approached to fix things – a close associate of President Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese – received a fat commission.</p><p>After all the election hype settles down, there will be a new President in January, but with Samuel Pisar's stepson in charge of the State Department, we can be sure that the Washington-Jerusalem axis will remain unchanging as ever.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-32850744337380435652020-11-23T01:24:00.005-08:002020-11-23T01:24:57.315-08:00Sylvia Stolz to be released today<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6pkF9Nb3rbxg15NZ4GL6zKH8kHlRcnUOART-ygML8BlBmazYFM8RVhzHxrAK9-3n6AMnJFwV91ZjRV7C9TjUWROyr5va6FRLZuPhvm7t5W8QMTVEk2oQ58ADfU-qsOdbi12q9RJ183ziA/s512/Sylvia+Stolz+-+Alfred+Schaefer+-+Lady+Michele+Renouf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6pkF9Nb3rbxg15NZ4GL6zKH8kHlRcnUOART-ygML8BlBmazYFM8RVhzHxrAK9-3n6AMnJFwV91ZjRV7C9TjUWROyr5va6FRLZuPhvm7t5W8QMTVEk2oQ58ADfU-qsOdbi12q9RJ183ziA/s320/Sylvia+Stolz+-+Alfred+Schaefer+-+Lady+Michele+Renouf.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>(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.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />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.</p><p>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 href="http://www.chemtrailsgeelong.com/sylvia-stolz-transcripts.html" target="_blank">A video and transcript are online here</a>.)</p><p>During this speech Sylvia Stolz took issue with the very concept of "Holocaust denial":</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><b>"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.</b></p><p><b><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU0gYIe6_wjsYHccG895Zwz1sNtQxSa_YLxamQVZRXNawmSLC56NAAmvpKdyA3kpdh4pyctdTEfIQQkHpcb1nWeqk1QOSabGOLrmvhfJpKTi-vXd06EBGZX5iUuJTzn_iv8iFMuNOC4Hy1/s250/Stolz+-+Deckert+-+Renouf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU0gYIe6_wjsYHccG895Zwz1sNtQxSa_YLxamQVZRXNawmSLC56NAAmvpKdyA3kpdh4pyctdTEfIQQkHpcb1nWeqk1QOSabGOLrmvhfJpKTi-vXd06EBGZX5iUuJTzn_iv8iFMuNOC4Hy1/s0/Stolz+-+Deckert+-+Renouf.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Sylvia Stolz (above centre) on the day of her release in 2011 from an earlier prison sentence, with Günter Deckert and Lady Michèle Renouf.</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />"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."</b></p></blockquote><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRsiPLi5X4EJUKCz55aVant7jwh9wteyC-pA-SEM8PU0y-51a0i3CXg_ElrNbynsBZygq5VI8kfBxY1cn2lQWV20ua_WoWp39isoNK8BWNsYsTMa4LeJdqlzLnimHhwkhyphenhyphenJMKpU0m_ypLF/s280/Sylvia+Stolz+-+Juergen+Rieger.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRsiPLi5X4EJUKCz55aVant7jwh9wteyC-pA-SEM8PU0y-51a0i3CXg_ElrNbynsBZygq5VI8kfBxY1cn2lQWV20ua_WoWp39isoNK8BWNsYsTMa4LeJdqlzLnimHhwkhyphenhyphenJMKpU0m_ypLF/s0/Sylvia+Stolz+-+Juergen+Rieger.jpeg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Sylvia Stolz with fellow attorney Jürgen Rieger (1946-2009) during the trial of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel (1939-2017)</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />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.</p><p>As Sylvia Stolz said during her criminalised speech in Switzerland in 2012:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><b>"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."</b></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-58445088175347573642020-11-20T16:35:00.007-08:002020-11-20T18:52:28.153-08:00Nuremberg anniversary should prompt shame not celebration<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEewN56liW8XbT_-sPswVo0Gw-cZQjWoQmquQFWZQOTUWCXBWYUN6YjV7l3wOhMRdrkVLEtjhbg99i0KMTGVL1_PsFuveKmxFKzFHhIMOxb7XO9wk-SMpvtVSF2iCHr5mZGryHllZeAjQ/s980/Steinmeier+-+Dresden+75th.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="980" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEewN56liW8XbT_-sPswVo0Gw-cZQjWoQmquQFWZQOTUWCXBWYUN6YjV7l3wOhMRdrkVLEtjhbg99i0KMTGVL1_PsFuveKmxFKzFHhIMOxb7XO9wk-SMpvtVSF2iCHr5mZGryHllZeAjQ/s320/Steinmeier+-+Dresden+75th.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>President Steinmeier at Nuremberg today</b></i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Earlier today Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of the German Federal Republic, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/20/germany-hails-legacy-of-nuremberg-trials-on-75th-anniversary" target="_blank">presided over a commemoration at Nuremberg's Palace of Justice</a>, marking the 75th anniversary of the start of the infamous 'Nuremberg trials' on November 20th 1945.<div><br /></div><div>As President Steinmeier put it today:</div><div>"Here, in this very room, while the rubble was being cleared away outside, the four victorious powers of World War II laid the foundation for the legal order of a new world."</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet this anniversary should have been not an honoured occasion but a source of shame for all concerned, <a href="https://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2010/11/nuremberg-trial-1945-1946-is-crime-of.html?m=0" target="_blank">as the late Professor Robert Faurisson pointed out at the time of the 65th anniversary</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Right from the start, informed observers recognised that the Nuremberg trials were a travesty. Among many eminent critics was the veteran US Senator Robert Taft, who denounced the trial process as early as October 1946 in a comprehensive critique that included the point that trial of the "vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with forms of justice", and that the process was based on a "Russian idea of the purpose of trials, government policy and not justice, having little relation to our Anglo-Saxon heritage".</div><div><br /></div><div>By Russian, Sen. Taft of course meant Soviet – and his use of the term "Anglo-Saxon" hinted at an underlying characteristic of many Soviet rulers that was neither Russian nor Anglo-Saxon.</div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeQ-iCbQW-l9Vou8OktSksxbi9jgFSBMAI10zEkz-CEYrPJ38Bf0nEmg2MIoKUJPuFW17m3LhWo09wlEYUATUgckYoLXkyv-Ut8JNm9-4aJXjWyQym7H_q_TW3iX7gB0SUHtGo4Vag_7UM/s2048/Harlan+F+Stone.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1614" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeQ-iCbQW-l9Vou8OktSksxbi9jgFSBMAI10zEkz-CEYrPJ38Bf0nEmg2MIoKUJPuFW17m3LhWo09wlEYUATUgckYoLXkyv-Ut8JNm9-4aJXjWyQym7H_q_TW3iX7gB0SUHtGo4Vag_7UM/s320/Harlan+F+Stone.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone was equally contemptuous of the Nuremberg trials, which he described as a "high-grade lynching" and "a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas".</div><div><br /></div><div>In fact high-level criticism of the Nuremberg charade began right from the moment in October 1941 when the Allies (which in practice at that time meant the British Empire and the Soviet Union, with diplomatic lip-service paid to others) first began discussing the notion of "war crimes trials".</div><div><br /></div><div>Maurice Hankey (by this time Lord Hankey) was the effective founder of the modern Civil Service, having been Cabinet Secretary from 1916 to 1938 and forged Britain's war-winning government machine during the First World War.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hankey had a key role in the Versailles peace conferences that followed that war, and during the autumn of 1941 he wrote to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden urging him not to repeat the mistakes of that foolishly vengeful 'peace'.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eden replied that he agreed with much of Hankey's critique, but warned that Britain's allies (for which we must read the Soviets, Poles and others) were already planning to go ahead with a declaration on "war crimes" that "would go a good deal further than ours".</div><div><br /></div><div>Therefore, Eden warned Hankey, he should accept the relatively "inoffensive" Foreign Office draft, otherwise "we are likely to find the Allies coming out with something far more embarrassing".</div><div><br /></div><div>The embarrassment was to last more than 75 years, insofar as Eden and his successors were embarrassable. Despite his initial reluctance and Hankey's even franker opposition, Eden and his government were drawn into accepting a ludicrous catalogue of "war crimes" charges that have become set in stone as unchallengeable history. The Nuremberg judgment even asserted that Germany was responsible for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers and intellectuals – a charge that everyone now accepts as nonsense.</div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qdV4_7xdB32AtiRIgMi6EorOfXF59vkrDQ3asKArhAxHASbPf-HtVRghZ5AcHF44WfJc4hrTw25h-9sHFyzzC3IETgOnyFy6jRxjE0CqKI4K5cCnrLKfs_t4bfHaKAGVScQhyphenhyphenyvKeYJv/s1600/Maurice+Hankey.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1358" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qdV4_7xdB32AtiRIgMi6EorOfXF59vkrDQ3asKArhAxHASbPf-HtVRghZ5AcHF44WfJc4hrTw25h-9sHFyzzC3IETgOnyFy6jRxjE0CqKI4K5cCnrLKfs_t4bfHaKAGVScQhyphenhyphenyvKeYJv/s320/Maurice+Hankey.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lord Hankey (formerly Sir Maurice Hankey), one of the earliest critics of the 'war crimes' charade</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Yet we are required in 2020 to celebrate and honour the sham justice of Nuremberg that incorporated this nonsense as truth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eden's warning about "embarrassing" judicial processes did have one echo almost eight decades later.</div><div><br /></div><div>Just a few weeks before this 75th anniversary, German prosecutors in Dresden were due to bring Lady Michèle Renouf to court over a speech that she made on an earlier anniversary in February 2018 – the 73rd anniversary of the Allied terror bombing of Dresden.</div><div><br /></div><div>Among the remarks in this speech – for which Lady Renouf was arrested, charged and faced a possible five-year prison sentence – was a quotation from Lord Hankey, who had opposed the terror bombing as well as the postwar Nuremberg trial travesty.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eventually German prosecutors realised the embarrassment they would face in having a court (and accompanying press) hear the documented historical truth about Hankey and others quoted by Lady Renouf, regarding Nuremberg, Dresden and other aspects of the Second World War, including the alleged 'Holocaust' of European Jewry.</div><div><br /></div><div>This was among the several reasons why charges against Lady Renouf were dropped at the eleventh hour.</div><div><br /></div><div>Over coming weeks and months this blog and associated social media accounts will continue to examine reasons for the Federal Republic's judicial embarrassment.</div><div><br /></div><div>This week Lady Renouf discussed aspects of her case with Dr Ed DeVries on the TBR History Hour – see link below.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oliQfBWLRKY" width="320" youtube-src-id="oliQfBWLRKY"></iframe></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-66719843436671229862020-11-17T12:59:00.002-08:002020-11-17T13:02:06.682-08:00Britain and Germany begin reckoning with historical truth<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixuZAfNRcnSYCSXzXGP8P3-uLdH3j31tPZtYkG-k87XR7UOlJkbu5DUCpIt0aPfR5UvzOQ1HzVup4XUKPNqC4eamxA2Gsh1P3OxzrrXpRZkvgF05uyYpLYC5tS2kzVcuyrUtA_CTdT3vSs/s1080/Horst+and+Ursula.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="811" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixuZAfNRcnSYCSXzXGP8P3-uLdH3j31tPZtYkG-k87XR7UOlJkbu5DUCpIt0aPfR5UvzOQ1HzVup4XUKPNqC4eamxA2Gsh1P3OxzrrXpRZkvgF05uyYpLYC5tS2kzVcuyrUtA_CTdT3vSs/s320/Horst+and+Ursula.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Horst Mahler and Ursula Haverbeck celebrate their release this week<br /></b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />This week two incarcerated Germans – 84-year-old Horst Mahler and 92-year-old Ursula Haverbeck – celebrated their release from jail. The outside world finds it incredible that people of this age should be jailed for anything – still more incredible that their 'crimes' were political: daring to question orthodox versions of mid-20th century European history.</p><p>Horst Mahler had been prosecuted for several political offences since 2003, and had been in a Brandenburg prison since June 2017, having earlier been jailed from 2009 to 2015. During his sentence he has suffered increasing ill health including the amputation of both legs.</p><p>Ursula Haverbeck had been imprisoned for two and a half years since May 2018 and has faced repeated trials after daring to ask questions of the German authorities about what she terms "the biggest and most persistent lie in history" – the alleged 'holocaust' of European Jewry.</p><p>Meanwhile a new era in Anglo-German relations was hailed this same week with the visit of the heir to the British throne – the Prince of Wales – to Germany, the first member of the British Royal Family to attend Germany's National Day of Mourning which began in 1919 to commemorate the dead of the First World War.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoKm05DFyy1kfXBG3QR8yJzyT5sV43_zG-o7wqP5lgoef0Cm3OOxvRJ35SO-qZrFiBlhDYOkMfVJRz3Ez18qV82XESPCSrybxqpG3J2RQ_onU9N_Vq2EjWkz9F1VQyUo2jTeMAEAyxugK/s743/Prince+Charles+-+Steinmeier.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="468" data-original-width="743" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoKm05DFyy1kfXBG3QR8yJzyT5sV43_zG-o7wqP5lgoef0Cm3OOxvRJ35SO-qZrFiBlhDYOkMfVJRz3Ez18qV82XESPCSrybxqpG3J2RQ_onU9N_Vq2EjWkz9F1VQyUo2jTeMAEAyxugK/s320/Prince+Charles+-+Steinmeier.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Prince of Wales and German President Steinmeier lay wreaths to commemorate Germany's National Day of Mourning on November 15th</i></b><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The Prince noted that Berlin "embodies so much of the history of our continent, and all that we have been through". His wish for reconciliation depends of course on a truthful and honest reckoning with the past – which would require Germany to abandon its notorious <i>Volksverhetzung</i> law 130. That law prohibits the normal historical argument and conflicting research that in every other field is regarded as essential to establish truth and falsehood.</p><p>Just a month earlier the German state averted severe embarrassment when prosecutors dropped their case against a British citizen who had been arrested while addressing a memorial event in Dresden in February 2018.</p><p>Lady Michèle Renouf had overheard a German lady at this event saying that Britons had no right to be in Dresden, because of the Royal Air Force's terror bombing of the city in February 1945.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIjabNmaSNB7_hlVjMxXMZYIjtDtS3jNEebaS4WwDBD-60sgji3LEM0G0zUzj7VGVYVklR6i9g9uSkHuL19u3WiZSrI-KK3sNPhAtrfawKdf4fNphv-G0iDvZPqNMootiBBnKjMyYKI9C_/s1723/IMG_5975.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1711" data-original-width="1723" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIjabNmaSNB7_hlVjMxXMZYIjtDtS3jNEebaS4WwDBD-60sgji3LEM0G0zUzj7VGVYVklR6i9g9uSkHuL19u3WiZSrI-KK3sNPhAtrfawKdf4fNphv-G0iDvZPqNMootiBBnKjMyYKI9C_/s320/IMG_5975.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Lady Renouf with the Prince of Wales at his family residence, Highgrove House</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />In a brief impromptu speech replying to these comments, Lady Renouf sought to explain why she and fellow Britons had come to Dresden to apologise for the real holocaust of German civilians there and in other German towns and cities during the Second World War.</p><p>For this and other comments Lady Renouf was arrested and charged under German laws that prohibit 'Holocaust denial' and generally end in prison sentences.</p><p>However for reasons that will be explored on this blog over the next few weeks, Dresden prosecutors eventually concluded (after two and a half years preparing their case) that a trial would be too embarrassing as it risked drawing attention to matters referred to in Lady Renouf's speech that the political establishment would rather forget. They dropped the charges just two days before the trial was to begin in October 2020.</p><p>Ursula Haverbeck faces fresh criminal charges this month but increasing numbers of legal and constitutional experts, as well as political and historical commentators, now believe that 'anti-revisionist' or 'historical memory' laws are untenable. As Britain marked the 100th anniversary last week of the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey – the emblematic victim of 20th century European brothers' wars – is it too much to expect the Second World War and its legacy to be examined as history rather than distorted as theology?</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7voaTtLPnwnAuPoHldVeG084ibAbpQ5JJIBsPh4IPa0ZpH-e52Od_UaHTZ1qxFUnPc_wYRm1kyZLYYbw_oD10bOeb4YzS3QBdotRsMWn6GT_njOnoli7Z70glGrf_ZrvW2D4R3EZZbkdG/s1554/IMG_5990.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7voaTtLPnwnAuPoHldVeG084ibAbpQ5JJIBsPh4IPa0ZpH-e52Od_UaHTZ1qxFUnPc_wYRm1kyZLYYbw_oD10bOeb4YzS3QBdotRsMWn6GT_njOnoli7Z70glGrf_ZrvW2D4R3EZZbkdG/s320/IMG_5990.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Lady Renouf with Wolfgang Wagner – grandson of the composer – at the 1997 Bayreuth Festival. As the son of a German father and English mother, Wolfgang Wagner was a symbol of our shared heritage.</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-31188677046292095422020-11-10T17:38:00.002-08:002020-11-10T17:38:15.404-08:00Dresden Court Victory – Michèle, Lady Renouf Acquitted<h1 style="text-align: left;">Lady Renouf vindicated over Dresden speech</h1><h3 style="text-align: left;">After 32 months German courts back down, Renouf acquitted</h3><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC1-_DrO6tsURJd5Jq-ouCIuViMutrBMKCIhtHPcmaI_hTaU5gk4wGV0oNZfks7r6UH6Xbw4izNxfBGfWuEHo6fo4dqtKaq6sDK7ll6zF9V7tpOI7OLq4yMM_3LUlkg_kkBfBQqgGopTdG/s1070/wn-lmr+141020+b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1070" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC1-_DrO6tsURJd5Jq-ouCIuViMutrBMKCIhtHPcmaI_hTaU5gk4wGV0oNZfks7r6UH6Xbw4izNxfBGfWuEHo6fo4dqtKaq6sDK7ll6zF9V7tpOI7OLq4yMM_3LUlkg_kkBfBQqgGopTdG/s320/wn-lmr+141020+b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>In a last minute reversal, German prosecutors and a district court judge in Dresden have ended their criminal case against Lady Michèle Renouf, terminating a 32-month process, days before it was to come to trial.</p><p>Having arrested and charged Lady Renouf in 2018 immediately after her impromptu speech at a commemoration in Dresden, German prosecutors opened proceedings a year later under Germany’s notorious §130 <i>Volksverhetzung</i> law alleging “public incitement”, but the case has now ended without Lady Renouf being found guilty of any offence. (She has had to pay only a modest fee for the costs of a translator.)</p><p>“This decision was extraordinary – almost sensational”, says Wolfram Nahrath (Lady Renouf’s German attorney) who points out that such an ACQUITTAL of the charges in a ‘Holocaust’-related trial is a first in Germany. The German authorities did not want to take the risk of putting Lady Renouf on trial, given her background and the German constitutional issues that would inevitably be highlighted.</p><p>The §130 <i>Volksverhetzung</i> law has been used to jail German scientists, authors and even lawyers in recent years. ‘Holocaust’-related offences of ‘public incitement’ almost inevitably lead to long prison sentences.</p><p>Yet the unique circumstances of Lady Renouf and her 2018 Dresden speech led prosecutors to withdraw.</p><p>This blog and related social media accounts will examine the extraordinary fabric of the Renouf case and explain why the German state chose to throw in the towel.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K-KDbusxopM" width="320" youtube-src-id="K-KDbusxopM"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-90275819918588326382020-10-12T14:40:00.000-07:002020-10-12T14:40:42.779-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0JiIYz5stUU" width="320" youtube-src-id="0JiIYz5stUU"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>In her speech at Dresden for which the German state now seeks to criminalise Lady Renouf, she referred to the mass terror bombing (driven by deliberate murderous policy of Allied governments) which burned alive countless numbers of German civilians in February 1945. She pointed out the relevance today of the Dresden Holocaust – that this so-called "moral bombing" (having avoided being classed as a war crime), has licensed the targeting of civilians as standard policy ever since – borne out by the powers that ruled the post-1945 world order in their further terror bombings of civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>A similar "twistspeak" is employed via a compliant mainstream media to mislead the public on a range of issues – ranging from the "weapons of mass destruction" lie that led to the illegal war in Iraq, to lies about 20th century history, including the Second World War, that continue to addle the minds of Britons and fellow Europeans.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a televised broadcast (<i>above</i>) recorded in December 2007 with sociologist Dr M. Saeed Bahmanpour of the Islamic College for Advanced Studies, Middlesex University, Lady Michèle Renouf alludes to the Iraq War WMD lie and discusses the "fraudulent freedoms" offered by Western "democracy". In particular she focuses on the "twistspeak" that exploits credulous consumers for the benefit of powerful vested interests.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lady Renouf's analysis of "twistspeak" is informed by her decades of inside knowledge of the advertising industry, following her lifelong career as an international advertising actress and model (<i>see a small sample of Lady Renouf's advertising work in video below</i>).</div><br />
<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CIOM8qxh9VQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="CIOM8qxh9VQ"></iframe></div><br /> <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-58049461702588971842020-10-08T07:56:00.001-07:002020-10-08T07:56:10.824-07:00excerpts from Israel in Flagrante – Caught in Acts of Twistspeak<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/46yjTEdGal8" width="459"></iframe><br /><br />
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Twenty years ago Lady Renouf was contacted by British veterans who had served in Palestine, 1945-48. They told a very different story from the 'official history' of the Middle East, and Lady Renouf went on to make the film excerpted here, which was shown at both Houses of Parliament in 2004. Lady Renouf's unique interviews with British ex-servicemen from the anti-terrorist campaign in Palestine 1945-48 are now archived at St Antony's College, Oxford.<br /><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-44971440059395140982020-10-07T02:39:00.004-07:002020-10-07T02:42:53.166-07:00Model on Trial – the background<p><b style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px;"></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-eqUZFZfPgr1m80lItyRogdoClL640tcRlGC4iKPGj-8hDivWmoVOvsQcFFUrEV7NghtkjjrcNFObeEy4wgsUf2J3Ljb0riJdTHKR9SEErEyA_W28xZK8SBK9CrbtxwMQ2kwzZMqj4WtA/s1565/cover+pic+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1565" data-original-width="1209" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-eqUZFZfPgr1m80lItyRogdoClL640tcRlGC4iKPGj-8hDivWmoVOvsQcFFUrEV7NghtkjjrcNFObeEy4wgsUf2J3Ljb0riJdTHKR9SEErEyA_W28xZK8SBK9CrbtxwMQ2kwzZMqj4WtA/s320/cover+pic+2.jpg" /></a></b></div><b style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px;"><br /><i><br /></i></b><p></p><p><b style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px;"><i>“Michèle, your fearless and direct utterances in Dresden, unfortunately forbidden to all Germans, blew open the window of truth in one blast.” </i></b><b style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px;">said Gerard Menuhin, son of legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, in February 2018</b></p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">On 16th October 2020 an Australian-born Briton goes on trial in Dresden for “incitement” – not for terrorism or threats, but because of a 10-minute speech given to 300 mourners at a commemoration of the Allied terror bombing of Dresden in 1945.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The charges have been brought under Germany’s draconian <i>volksverhetzung</i> law – Para 130 of the criminal code, against Lady Michèle Renouf, former wife of New Zealand banking tycoon Sir Francis (‘Frank the Bank’) Renouf who was honoured with the <i>Verdienstkreuz</i> by the then West German government. In 1990 the engaged couple travelled to Bonn for the award of Sir Frank’s medal, and as his fiancée Lady Renouf was given a <i>Verdienstkreuz</i> lapel ribbon. This honour related to Sir Frank’s pioneering role in persuading the German federal government to relax its conservative policies and invest its financial surplus on world markets. (For similar reasons he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.)</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In February 2018 Lady Renouf attended a public commemoration in central Dresden, marking the anniversary of the 1945 terror bombing by the Royal Air Force and the USAAF. Responding to an anti-British comment by someone in the crowd, Lady Renouf was invited to give a brief spontaneous speech in which she acknowledged Britain’s shame for its deliberate wartime policy of targeting civilians.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">During this speech she referred to the following facts:</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">a) Many influential Britons at the time condemned Churchill’s barbaric terror bombing policy and the associated demand for unconditional surrender – such people included Lord Hankey (formerly Sir Maurice Hankey, founder of the modern civil service); the Rt Rev George Bell, Bishop of Chichester; Labour MP and future minister Richard Stokes; and government scientist and future bestselling novelist C.P. Snow.</p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQhuU_n_PIIkeR3O-C4YPf_Aj-wgcML97T1fc28Jn7amzEnBiVzoz7GSSs7bHC9yFfDnuuUu2ryvvONLf1RR6p97kT-EUCyL4LihXDpKJR097ITHyJulcHPoX75QbMqXXugW5SlZydZ_k/s355/Bishop+Bell.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="355" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQhuU_n_PIIkeR3O-C4YPf_Aj-wgcML97T1fc28Jn7amzEnBiVzoz7GSSs7bHC9yFfDnuuUu2ryvvONLf1RR6p97kT-EUCyL4LihXDpKJR097ITHyJulcHPoX75QbMqXXugW5SlZydZ_k/w320-h231/Bishop+Bell.jpg" title="George Bell, Bishop of Chichester" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>George Bell, Bishop of Chichester was one of several<br />high-profile British critics of terror bombing</i></div><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">b) The terror bombing of Dresden was a literal Holocaust in which tens of thousands of civilians were burned alive. We shall never know the atrocity’s exact death toll, because the city was packed with refugees – uncounted and undocumented – fleeing from the advancing Soviet Red Army.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>c) The wider relevance of the Dresden war crime – Renouf emphasised – is that so-called ‘moral bombing’ of Dresden by the Second World War allies has effectively acted as a precedent for postwar crimes against civilians including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in turn has prompted unprecedented floods of refugees into Western Europe.</b></p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">d) The Allied justification for this targeting of civilians was that Britain and America were at war with Germany, yet this factor is ignored when discussing what has become known as the ‘Holocaust’, an unchallengeable dogma taking the place of history.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">e) The simple fact that Jewish civilians were interned in camps is today regarded as a ‘war crime’ and part of ‘genocide’, regardless of what did or did not happen in the camps themselves, a topic which Lady Renouf did not address, knowing that it is illegal in Germany to debate such matters. It is odd to condemn <span class="s1" style="text-decoration-line: underline;">internment itself</span> as criminal, bearing in mind that both Britain and America interned enemy aliens. It is scarcely surprising that European Jews were placed in this “enemy alien” category, given the actions of the self-styled leaders of World Jewry who had as early as 1933 declared economic war on Germany. Moreover the future founders of Israel such as Chaim Weizmann were actively engaged in a campaign of covert warfare, some of it contrary to international law, in collaboration with Britain’s Special Operations Executive. In itself it was not unreasonable for the German authorities to intern large numbers of European Jews as potential collaborators in this covert war.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZh5PbVNeUPRwArx6MNmiY-9mPDhIcToq6-FiAq9jujQiCJW6UDpaVLTTFV03kahtPdMPLI96ANJ4-41dTdcsGY2tydW0tv9gQeU-2XR9KB4U6kTupcdGhTuo7VWoWioX5mW63i4xRz1ZZ/s782/Weizmann+with+Truman.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="782" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZh5PbVNeUPRwArx6MNmiY-9mPDhIcToq6-FiAq9jujQiCJW6UDpaVLTTFV03kahtPdMPLI96ANJ4-41dTdcsGY2tydW0tv9gQeU-2XR9KB4U6kTupcdGhTuo7VWoWioX5mW63i4xRz1ZZ/s320/Weizmann+with+Truman.jpeg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Chaim Weizmann (above right with<br />US President Harry Truman) openly<br />aligned World Jewry with the Allied war effort.</i></div><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It is for making these points in her brief impromptu February 2018 speech that Lady Renouf was arrested and now faces trial in Dresden on 15th May 2020 for offences which carry a maximum prison sentence of five years.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Her trial will focus press and public attention on the extraordinary German laws that deny normal historical debate and rational argument. These and similar laws in many other European countries (though not so far in the UK) were condemned more than a decade ago by a coalition of eminent historians and other academics writing under the label ‘Appel de Blois’: these critics included the late Eric Hobsbawm; Jewish journalist and author Geoffrey Alderman; Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg; and the Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Lady Renouf’s own background is not as an historian, scientist, lawyer or politician. So how did someone whose lifelong career since early childhood was as a model and advertising actress come to be on trial in Germany charged with having expressed forbidden opinions and having uttered forbidden historical facts?</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Born in 1946, Michèle Mainwaring was directed mainly to classical ballet studies from the age of 3 to 23, eventually for a licentiateship at the Royal Academy of Dancing in London. Her earlier four years of undergraduate art studies at the National Art School were partly financed by her parallel modelling career (beginning at age 7) and prizes in beauty contests, including winning Radio 2HD’s Miss Beach Girl, Miss Newcastle & Hunter Valley, and Miss Zhivago. (The latter title, twenty years later was to bemuse <i>Dr Zhivago</i>’s co-star Omar Sharif, when he and Lady Renouf enjoyed gaming at London’s Ritz Hotel casino.)</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">At age 14 Michèle Mainwaring was performing as Gretel in <i>Hansel and Gretel</i> at the Sydney Conservatorium when the world-famous former Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer Kiril Vassilkovsky came backstage seeking to recruit her “ethereal quality” for the role as Clara in his production of <i>The Nutcracker</i>. However her mother would not allow her to leave school to joint the company!</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The young Michèle performed as Radio 2HD’s Shirley Temple, singing and tap dancing for the station’s famous children’s radio presenter Twink Storey as an infant performer and symbol of innocence in the postwar years. While the actual Shirley Temple became a US Ambassador, Lady Renouf in later life was to have a rather different involvement with diplomacy and politics – considered by some to have an ‘ambassadorial’ role as a champion for the rights of historical revisionism without exceptionalism!</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The future Lady Renouf came to England in the late 1960s shortly before her marriage to the late Daniel Griaznoff, descendent of a Russian noble family. During the 1970s and 1980s she used her marital title of Countess Griaznoff in association with many charitable activities and became well-known in London society. Prolific romantic novelist and socialite Barbara Cartland delighted in entertaining Count and Countess Griaznoff at her country home. Actors Edward Fox and his wife Joanna David generously contributed their celebrated artistry to charity soirees and balls hosted by the Griaznoffs at their Hampstead home.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgws6spGUOOkS3LoEC_16pJvM6GOFvU4UDXvR9FA7JQ2NukLM6jyZGYu4vvNdN5NEzEe1VaLbitnIDIZlh8houOzkwcoP5nuxDfvW1JWqdzcdgpMuZg2egVF8Ocg8Hw7Jdb-NADp0RbIDrK/s727/Tchibo+with+logo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="727" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgws6spGUOOkS3LoEC_16pJvM6GOFvU4UDXvR9FA7JQ2NukLM6jyZGYu4vvNdN5NEzEe1VaLbitnIDIZlh8houOzkwcoP5nuxDfvW1JWqdzcdgpMuZg2egVF8Ocg8Hw7Jdb-NADp0RbIDrK/s320/Tchibo+with+logo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Renouf's many appearances in international<br />advertising campaigns included this German<br />television ad for Tchibo coffee.</i></div><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Meanwhile from age 15 Lady Renouf had been recruited into an international career as an advertising actress in television commercials alongside her modelling career. This led to magazine and television advertisements worldwide for products and companies as diverse as Deutsche Post, Tchibo coffee, British Airways, Cable & Wireless, Nissan cars, Lenthéric perfume, and hundreds more.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On screen she appeared with such legends as the Muppets and Dick Emery.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the mid-1990s Lady Renouf become a member of the fundraising advisory board for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, chairing the principal fundraising event. As a professional designer of garden mazes and knot gardens, she had also designed an Elizabethan knot garden and labyrinth for the Globe approved by the project’s head Sam Wanamaker, intended as part of the re-education of the general public in the coded poetic messages of flowers, familiar to a Tudor mindset but now lost: her knot garden project was featured in a major article for the <i>Sunday Times</i>.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In this invited role Lady Renouf mobilised a range of contacts among London’s diplomatic corps (built up as a longstanding member of the Ladies’ Committee of the European-Atlantic Group) to assist in the Shakespeare’s Globe project, including Adm. William Crowe, US Ambassador and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who became a family friend; and Australian High Commissioner Neal Blewett. After completing raising funds for the construction of the Wardrobe of Robes room, behind the Globe’s stage (marked today by a bronze plaque) – Lady Renouf’s private tribute to her mother, who was a designer of ballet costumes – she also invited another family friend Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon, to include his contribution to a time capsule buried beneath the reconstructed theatre.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Oddly the first steps towards Lady Renouf’s involvement with “political” questions came as the result of a Jewish member of her Shakespeare’s Globe committee insisting on the entire menu at a fundraising dinner being kosher. Merely the appearance of a non-kosher item on the menu sent this woman into a rant about “tyranny” and “anti-semitism”.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Understandably Lady Renouf was puzzled by this inexplicable reaction, and this led her into further investigations of the taboo subject of “anti-semitism”. She carried out extensive research into the composer Richard Wagner’s attitude to the Jewish question, and in 1997 published the monograph <i>Richard Wagner's Art-works of the Future and Judaism: Inspirational or Conspiratorial</i>.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">At the end of the 1990s Lady Renouf visited Palestine with her high society chum the Bey of Haifa, Jeannot Khayat, who informed her for the first time about the outrageous “absentee law” whereby Palestinian homes can be confiscated by the Israeli state if their owners leave the country even for a holiday.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Early in the 2000s she met and recorded interviews with British veterans of the war against Zionist terrorism in Palestine, 1945-48. These included unique interviews by the late Phillip Knightley with British Army veteran and author Eric Lowe – now archived at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Some of these landmark interviews (in cooperation with anti-Zionist Neturei Karta rabbis, Palestinian diplomats, and commentators including Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon) appeared in Lady Renouf’s first documentary film projects, <i>Palestine Scrapbook</i> and <i>Israel in Flagrante: Caught in Acts of Twistspeak</i>, screened at the House of Lords and House of Commons, under the auspices of Dr James Thring and Lord Stoddart.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://youtu.be/46yjTEdGal8" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="733" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMT5QKMFxIhOCWZAscCTHhn79qgGuNIrHcs2iA0MLgZdxjw4oh-ddY7JMdWNjMsAXUe9ujGtZ17LBGo67KK1QJNa5u9cdwCK_7-lDdx82w3tp6ckPzSbpYyrgs_5sqUj62VCzjJOkzJwEW/s320/vlcsnap-2020-10-05-17h25m43s094.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In 2000 Lady Renouf attended the London trial of a libel case brought by the British historian David Irving against the Jewish-American author Deborah Lipstadt: this was the first she had heard of debates around the “Holocaust”, but she later became aware of a worldwide campaign of persecution against historical sceptics, notably the jailing of Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Gerd Honsik, Monika and Alfred Schaefer, and Ursula Haverbeck – including their lawyers Horst Mahler and Sylvia Stolz.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In 2006 she attended David Irving’s trial in Austria, where he was sentenced to three years imprisonment, eventually being released after one year thanks to an appeal filed by celebrated Viennese attorney Dr Herbert Schaller. (In the recent film <i>Denial</i>, an actress plays the part of Lady Renouf, seated on the court bench as the sole observer on Irving’s side of the court throughout the hearings.)</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>During the summer of 2001 Lady Renouf arranged a meeting between Irving and Prince Fahd bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, eldest son of the present King Salman. Prince Fahd was owner of many racehorses including the 1991 Derby winner Generous, who was celebrated in a hillside maze garden designed by Lady Renouf, a friend of the Prince and Princess, at their Harewood estate in Surrey where Queen Elizabeth II had planted a tree. In a telephone call from Riyadh following their meeting, Prince Fahd confirmed his intention to purchase the entire property including Irving’s flat in Duke Street, Mayfair, and turn it into a “Real History Institute”, but he died suddenly a day later aged only 46.</b></p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">One consequence of Lady Renouf’s defence of Irving was that a cabal of opponents engineered her expulsion from the Reform Club in 2003, following an earlier unsuccessful attempt to expel her in 2002 (when she was defended by eminent pollster Sir Bob Worcester). Lady Renouf had invited Irving to an event at the Reform Club (alongside family friend Count Nikolai Tolstoy) in the week of the Lipstadt trial verdict.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Since 2006 Lady Renouf’s Telling Films has produced many DVDs on the stifling of historical debate and the persecution of revisionist historians, scientists, authors, publishers, and latterly even their lawyers. These documentaries include <i>Jailing Opinions</i>, focused on the prosecutions of Irving in Vienna (Austria), Ernst Zündel in Toronto (Canada), and Robert Faurisson in Paris (France), and later documentary films such as <i>Dresden Holocaust 1945 – An Apology to Germany is Due</i>; <i>Out and Unbowed</i>, about Ernst Zündel’s trials and imprisonment; <i>Mourning the Victims, Naming the Culprits</i> about the British torture centre at Bad Nenndorf (Germany); and many others.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In 2006 Lady Renouf attended and spoke at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, hosted in Tehran at the instigation of Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The topic of her conference address was “Psychology of Holocaustianity” – an echo of her postgraduate studies in Psychology of Religion a few years earlier at London University’s Heythrop College. Veteran revisionist scholar and literary document analyst Professor Robert Faurisson said that he gave Lady Renouf’s speech “20 out of 20”!</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Nominated by Prof. Faurisson, Lady Renouf was elected to serve on a five-member international fact-finding committee created at the end of the Tehran conference to advance research and support informed historical debate.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Between 2006 and 2020 Lady Renouf has been interviewed in many television and radio debates and discussions opposite (for example) Prof. Norman Finkelstein; former CIA officer Dr George Lambrakis; Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom; the Rev. Stephen Sizer; and Dmitry Shimelfarb, former adviser and press spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2005 she was honoured with the George Orwell Award by the Canadian Free Speech League, and has spoken at conferences in Canada, the USA and Mexico. Several of these speeches, films and interviews have focused on Lady Renouf’s campaign to raise awareness about the first, pre-Israel Jewish Homeland option in Birobidjan – the Jewish Autonomous Region created in 1928 in the former Soviet Union and still flourishing to this day in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQRyr-7lQNFkpynR20ysSk_P5eORTinmi6YaMa40y0ZHkeHSwszZvSKjISdLCzbBFvIQS97Q0Y5a9JxOpDKXfmMDRHhDK5gWb3RwGe6yb2yPSxCWCdsbrzTUnHNrKejBUt6D6bL2LTDCW/s297/TobenRenouf21nov08b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQRyr-7lQNFkpynR20ysSk_P5eORTinmi6YaMa40y0ZHkeHSwszZvSKjISdLCzbBFvIQS97Q0Y5a9JxOpDKXfmMDRHhDK5gWb3RwGe6yb2yPSxCWCdsbrzTUnHNrKejBUt6D6bL2LTDCW/s0/TobenRenouf21nov08b.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Renouf with the late Dr Fredrick Töben<br />after the defeat of German government<br />efforts to extradite Dr Töben in 2008</i></div><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When the Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in October 2008 and subjected to a European Arrest Warrant seeking his extradition to face criminal opinion charges in Germany, Lady Renouf mobilised a defence team that successfully opposed the warrant as invalid, forcing the German authorities to back down and accept his release. The Töben case proved an important precedent in relation to the traditional Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson, who was convicted in Germany for answers he gave to a Swedish television crew in November 2008, but who as a consequence of the success in Töben’s case, could not be subjected to a European Arrest Warrant. On Bishop Williamson’s return to London in 2009 he was met at the airport by Lady Renouf, who gave interviews to BBC Radio 4 and the World Service later that day, in which she debated the issues involved with Deborah Lipstadt and the late Greville Janner of the World Jewish Congress.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Now those same German authorities are seeking revenge in a wholly unwarranted prosecution of a British citizen for a perfectly normal and reasonable (though unplanned and unprepared) speech in Dresden two years ago, a speech intended as a humble acknowledgment of British guilt and contrition for a terrible crime against German civilians committed 75 years ago.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">By this politically-motivated prosecution, the moribund Merkel government’s servants in the German state apparatus dishonour their own dead, and discredit themselves before the world’s media.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Lady Renouf’s former husband Sir Frank Renouf was a prisoner-of-war in Germany for four years following his capture after parachuting into Greece on 26th April 1941.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>His time in an officers’ prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria was well spent learning German from a friendly guard with the aid of Schiller’s poetry, building a tennis court, enjoying Red Cross food parcels, and conducting a correspondence course with Worcester College, Oxford, where he was admitted for a postwar degree.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>His German connections were strengthened after the war as a friend of British Prime Minister Edward Heath and eminent figures in European banking including the British Lord Kindersley (a director of the Bank of England) and the German Hermann Abs (a director of Deutsche Bank). The Renoufs’ matrimonial home at 37 Eaton Square, Belgravia, had during the 1930s been the home of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who immediately before the Second World War rented out this same property as the home of German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop – the first prisoner executed by the Allies at Nuremberg in 1946.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It remains to be seen whether 21st century Germany will be as hospitable to Lady Renouf as wartime Germany was to her former husband!</p><p class="p1" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-1291134446941382622020-10-06T07:55:00.010-07:002020-10-06T15:15:44.262-07:00Renouf trial to go ahead on 16th October in Dresden<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrpt3v1L2WO52LInekzA4sxfaReCjhMxxphU8uRVJxjOs8-Bei_8NOgD5elxx2OZcxi0Fk8Z3yaqBB_xfdR9lQ52WmucqLqRuqeYk07E5gZVTw4pbkQ0o8qTW1k73e5meJuZRAvdIw-ZnJ/s727/Tchibo+with+logo.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="727" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrpt3v1L2WO52LInekzA4sxfaReCjhMxxphU8uRVJxjOs8-Bei_8NOgD5elxx2OZcxi0Fk8Z3yaqBB_xfdR9lQ52WmucqLqRuqeYk07E5gZVTw4pbkQ0o8qTW1k73e5meJuZRAvdIw-ZnJ/s320/Tchibo+with+logo.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Lady Renouf's lifelong career as an advertising actress and model included German TV ads for Tchibo coffee – now she will appear as defendant in a Dresden criminal trial</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Lady Michèle Renouf's trial will take place next week – Friday 16th October – at the Dresden <i>Amtsgericht</i> (district court).<p></p><p>She is accused under Germany's notorious §130 which defines as criminal <i>Volksverhetzung</i> (public incitement) a wide range of activity that would be perfectly normal in other democracies.</p><p>On this occasion the 'criminal conduct' was an impromptu speech by Lady Renouf at a memorial event in Dresden in 2018, commemorating the RAF and USAAF terror bombing of the city and the incineration of countless civilians in February 1945.</p><p>RAF Wing Commander Hubert Raymond Allen wrote:<br />"The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away the worst. Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in war was to become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers will be remembered a thousand years hence."<br />(H.R. Allen, <i>The Legacy of Lord Trenchard</i> (Cassell, 1972), p. 168)</p><p>German prosecutors now seek to criminalise memory of that outrage, and have brought a British citizen to trial for the 'crime' of paying tribute to the memory of the dead and for acknowledging the crimes of her own country's leaders.</p><p>That's one reason why the trial on 16th October 2020 is so remarkable. Further news and reflections about this case will appear here and on associated social media sites throughout the next fortnight and during the weeks and months to come.</p><p><br /></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-43497048790567217882020-05-07T03:43:00.003-07:002020-10-06T07:53:16.253-07:00Renouf trial postponed due to Covid pandemic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-l3oJ2EHiw97liXEsdgp789CEpdwn5awE-PpLpJvM2-JDbO7VUUr6EYiEbEQnvGbFoXGxRoSl8YM6E4PgJdIc__iACapIM4tptUkfmilBfKyUk5nSA4b0amx19nZYdBnMM37_5w2qPYNI/s1600/LMR+jpg+re+trial+update+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1132" data-original-width="1600" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-l3oJ2EHiw97liXEsdgp789CEpdwn5awE-PpLpJvM2-JDbO7VUUr6EYiEbEQnvGbFoXGxRoSl8YM6E4PgJdIc__iACapIM4tptUkfmilBfKyUk5nSA4b0amx19nZYdBnMM37_5w2qPYNI/s320/LMR+jpg+re+trial+update+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Lady Michèle Renouf's trial in Dresden – due to begin on 15th May – has been postponed due to the impact of Covid-19.<br />
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The trial is now rescheduled to begin on 16th October 2020 – again in Dresden's District Court (Amtsgericht).<br />
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Charges relate to Lady Renouf's impromptu speech on 17th February 2018 at a commemoration of the 1945 British and American terror bombing of Dresden.<br />
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Lady Renouf's attorney Wolfram Nahrath is continuing to build a detailed rebuttal of these charges with the help of witnesses from several countries. Further details will be released closer to the trial date, and will appear on this blog and related social media accounts.<br />
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The defence team thank all correspondents for their kind messages of support.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-45301915709726935242020-03-13T14:17:00.005-07:002020-03-13T14:29:42.521-07:00Trial Date Set<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCJdWdkiB1OjlTiCPTWK6i73F1T38xdEVUG9Qo4U7WGzqKghfXUjQU3KHiWJ_J5Iu63eeJ4adIK8wZZr0hk5ayyXItNnrdBMseBnq94vpYlyeft1cU_xZgPSd8AysXMV5tP3F8714rc_8X/s1600/1c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1477" data-original-width="1088" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCJdWdkiB1OjlTiCPTWK6i73F1T38xdEVUG9Qo4U7WGzqKghfXUjQU3KHiWJ_J5Iu63eeJ4adIK8wZZr0hk5ayyXItNnrdBMseBnq94vpYlyeft1cU_xZgPSd8AysXMV5tP3F8714rc_8X/s400/1c.jpg" width="293" /></a></div>
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Lady Michèle Renouf faces trial in Dresden, Germany on 15th May 2020. This account will explain the reasons for her trial, with regular updates on the case.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1277559457305233575.post-32544538009683445142020-03-12T14:27:00.000-07:002020-03-13T14:28:57.039-07:00Press enquiries<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Press enquiries regarding Lady Renouf's Dresden trial should be sent to press@jailingopinions.com</b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1