As reported in the news feed last week, Björn Höcke of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) was fined for repeating a slogan that was said to have been used by the SA (Sturmabteilung, Brown Shirts) in the 1920s. Further investigation has shown that the same slogan was widely used in the SPD and other social democratic organizations, which are still in existence and have not been fined. In fact, the SA liked the slogan so much it borrowed it from the socialists!
But Björn Höcke is a member of the AfD, and that’s all it takes to convict him. History, facts, and truth don’t matter.
Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Unser Mitteleuropa:
SPD slogans from 1931 are punishable today — who else knows about them?
The SPD of the 1920s was suspected of being a gang of “journeymen without a fatherland”. This was opposed not only [by the SPD], but also by the “Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold”, founded in Magdeburg in 1924, the most successful social democratic mass organization in the Weimar Republic with sometimes up to three million members.
by Manfred Rouhs
The SPD “Reich Banner” appeared under a very specific slogan. Following changes within the association, the SPD politician Otto Hörsing, who was also the founder and long-time federal chairman of the “Reichsbanner”, explained what this was in an open letter to the organization’s federal executive board:
This internal organizational measure does not mean a change in the objectives of our association. Our old slogan remains: Nothing for us — everything for Germany!
In fact, the SA copied the slogan and had it engraved on their daggers.
The “Reichsbanner” still exists today as a registered association in which mainly conservative social democrats are organized. The organization has good contacts with the Bundeswehr. It has not yet become known that the association that exists today has distanced itself from the historical slogans of the “Reichsbanner”.
The lawyer and journalist Ansgar Neuhof writes with reference to the “Reichsbanner”:
“Contemporary sources show that the slogan ‘Everything for Germany’ was a social democratic slogan. What is important is that the sources show that the slogan was one of the organizations themselves. So they weren’t just the user’s own words. This contradicts the oft-made claim that it has been a slogan of the SA since the early or mid-1920s. There is not the slightest reason to assume that the Social Democrats Hörsing and Höltermann and the SPD or SPD-affiliated organizations and their newspapers could have used, of all things, an SA slogan.”
Afterword from the translator:
The whole drama with Höcke (AfD) raises the question of the independence of the judiciary. Björn Höcke was sentenced by the Halle district court to a fine of 100 daily rates of €130 each. Everything over 90 days will give you a criminal record and automatically excludes you from public office afterwards. Very convenient, isn’t it? The judges saw it as proven that Höcke used the banned SA slogan “Everything for Germany” in a speech in May 2021. Did the judges at least invite historians as experts to support their, shall we say, hypothesis? Certainly not! Not one. So the defense did. Which wasn’t easy; several of the approached professors reacted to the request as if it were a threat to be placed on the stake — “If I testify in favour of Höcke, I can write off my chair,” said one (what a magnificent charade about the state of intellectual freedom in this New German Republic!) — in the end only the “right-wing” historian Karlheinz Weißmann appeared in court as an expert and explained with impressive expertise that this slogan is much older than National Socialism, was used across all political camps in the Weimar Republic and could by no means be assigned to the SA.
Von Arnim warned many years ago that everything was developing towards GDR 2.0! But one could also ask: are Freisler’s great-grandchildren judges?
If that’s the case, and it looks like it to me, then Freisler can’t stop laughing in Hell, being proud of his left-green successors. As Goebbels said: “Nothing is more hateful to us than the right-wing propertied bourgeoisie”! Freisler’s ideological great-grandchildren are probably just the beginning.
You can always tell you’re dealing with communists when you start being jailed, fined, beaten and murdered for doing things they are already doing, and of course, they lie about it. I keep noticing the most effective way of getting rid of communists was the way the Nazis did it. It seems to work the world over too. I could do with the Nationalists, just not the socialism part. Sounds like the way old monarchies once worked. Germany seems intent on going down the road to suicide again.
“In fact, the SA liked the slogan so much it borrowed it from the socialists!”
The SA WERE Socialists, Brainiac.
I should have capitalized “Socialists” to indicate I was referring the party (the SPD) rather than the political philosophy. My bad.
Yes, the Nazis were socialists, as were the communists, the fascists, and almost any other non-monarchist party. Nowadays there is no major party in Western Europe that is not socialist to one degree or another. Vlaams Belang is an exception, but it hasn’t quite reached the status of a major party. The other nationalist parties are fairly socialistic — in favor of government-run health care and education, state subsidies for this and that, etc.