History News Network, WA

Roundup: Media’s Take

Posted on Saturday, October 4, 2008

Michael White: Should we extradite Holocaust deniers? Source:
Guardian (UK) (10-4-08)

[Michael White has been writing for the Guardian for over 30 years, as
a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist.]

What should we do about Dr Fredrick Töben, detained at Heathrow
this week under a fast-track EU arrest warrant issued by the district
court in Mannheim?

Dr who? I know, it’s been a busy week, and I hadn’t heard of him
either until he popped up to be remanded in custody by Westminster
magistrates. By the time you read this he may be on a plane to Germany
– or home to Australia.

Töben is a 64-year-old German-born historian who runs something
called the Adelaide Institute. He denies frequent accusations that he
is a Holocaust denier, but judging by some of the things he says and
writes he makes a pretty good job of passing himself off as
one. Phrases like "Holocaust racketeers, the corpse peddlers and the
Shoah business merchants" characterise some of his scholarship.

In other words he believes that the six-million-dead German Holocaust
which took place during the 1933-45 Hitler regime, a well-documented
narrative accepted by most historians, did not occur, or did so on a
much smaller scale. If you challenge the Holocaust you must expect
persecution and abuse, he says.

Well, plenty of people, not all of them Jewish, have pursued him
during a teaching career on three continents ` from New Zealand to
Nigeria. In 1999 he served nine months in a German prison for
breaching the Holocaust law there that forbids the "defaming of the
dead" in this way. Needless to add, Töben attended the
Holocaust revisionist conference held in Tehran in 2006.

A nasty piece of work by the sound of it, and some nasty websites are
exercised on Töben’s behalf.

Why should we care? Two strands of the affair trouble me. One is the
restriction on free speech inherent in the laws that some countries `
not Britain ` have against Holocaust denial. We have broader laws
against racial incitement in general, which seems acceptable to me,
though not to those who believe that older public order laws would
have proved sufficient.

I can see why the Germans felt the need to enact such specific
legislation. After all, they did it, and have an obligation to
discharge the historic debt, something, incidentally, they have done
pretty well ` at least in the old West Germany ` over the years.

In other countries, several across Europe, such law smacks of
"exceptionalism", special pleading in a world where diverse historic
injustices abound. In Turkey you can get into trouble for saying there
was a holocaust against the Armenians in 1915. In Iran they call us
hypocrites for being selective in our championship of free speech.

The other problem I have with this is process. When the European
Arrest Warrant came into force in 2004 to help police fight cross
border crime – and post 9/11 terrorism – more effectively it abolished
the "dual criminality" principle.

That had meant that a suspect could not be extradited for an alleged
offence that was not an offence in the country where he/she had been
detained. When Britain joined the new procedure ministers assured
critics who feared Kafkaesque possibilities that no one would be
extradited for actions legal in Britain, let alone crimes they didn’t
know existed.

But here we have it: Töben taken off a plane at Heathrow and
quick to protest that he is the victim of a legal ambush, an abuse of
process in a country which has not – yet – succumbed to Germany’s
"witch-hunt mentality" in this matter. Food for thought there that
makes me uncomfortable.

I am also aware of German courts, in cases involving disputed custody
cases where one parent is German, behaving pretty badly towards the
claims of a non-German spouse. Catherine Meyer, wife of Chris Meyer,
former British ambassador to both Bonn and Washington, did not see her
"kidnapped’ children for years.

Holocaust denial is a lesser offence than involvement in war crimes
themselves. Britain has a different problem here in that, in the chaos
after 1945 when it was often hard to sort victim from persecutor, a
lot of bad people slipped into this country and led quiet, guilty
lives.

In 1991 Margaret Thatcher used the parliament acts to override the
House of Lords, which had thrown out her war crimes bill, passed by
the Commons. The average age of current MPs in 1939 was six, one peer
remarked during the debate: let it go. But some 300 suspects live on
in the UK, countered the bill’s supporters.

At the time I sympathised with the critics. It was all a long time
ago, witnesses and accused were old, far away or even dead, their
memories faulty at best. We should not forget, but it smacked of
retrospective legislation, pandering again.

Last time I looked there had not been a single successful
prosecution. Other more recent war crimes dominate the
headlines. Who’s right?

Posted on Saturday, October 4, 2008