The Legal Battles
 ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1990, David Irving delivered a lecture on war history to a large middle-class German audience in Weinheim, south-western Germany. The meeting was chaired by schoolteacher and politician Günter Deckert, a local councillor and national chief of the (legal) German NPD party. Police officials were, as has become customary in modern democratic Germany, present throughout and took notes. For six years, that was that. When the persecution of Messrs. Irving and Deckert began, these ancient lectures were exhumed from the police archives, and prosecutions were initiated. The court in Weinheim routinely applied to the Central Criminal Records Office in Berlin for David Irving’s criminal record, and were chagrined to receive the certificate reproduced in facsimile here: it formally certifies: Keine Eintragung — no entry. This has not prevented Australian prime minister John Howard and his minister Philipp Ruddock from broadcasting to the world that David Irving has a “criminal record” in Germany, as the ground for preventing his entry to Australia. This Website’s conclusion: the German government recognises that the so-called “offence” was purely political, not criminal. |
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©Focal Point 1999 |
