Since the 1950s, a memorial plaque has been emblazoned on the wall of the second floor of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. This plaque commemorates 34 members of the Reich Court and the Reich Prosecutor's Office who died in the prisoner-of-war camps Buchenwald and Mühlberg on the Elbe, which were run by the Soviet Union. The problem however is that these are lawyers and judges of the fascist German Reich ruled by the Nazis.

Even some bourgeois newspapers and historians are now critical of the fact that this memorial plaque is there. For example, at a symposium on the handling of this plaque, the bourgeois legal historian Andreas Roth spoke of the fact that, especially among the criminal judges, more or less all of those being commemorated had been involved in Nazi injustice. They had participated in sentences for "racial defilement" and in death sentences. Only among the civilian judges, according to his words, there were individual persons who could not be proven to have made incriminating decisions. Obviously Roth had researched the past of the 34 dead jurists on the board. So he also came to the conclusion that 23 of them were active NSDAP members.

So let us note: To this day, on the wall of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe, there is a memorial plaque commemorating jurists of Hitler's fascist Germany, almost all of whom were openly recognizable as having participated in crimes. But even those who did not directly pronounce death sentences against anti-fascists and Jews were nevertheless representatives of fascist rule and had the task of enforcing Nazi laws.


That such a commemorative plaque stands on a central building of the state is really absolutely disgusting. Because what this says is nothing but absolute revision of history. Thus such a commemorative plaque makes the perpetrators victims. No longer the Jews, the Sinti, the anti-fascists, all those who were tortured and murdered in the concentration camps, but those who are responsible for these crimes are seen as victims. And as criminals the Soviet Union and the Red Army are presented, which had the most essential part in freeing Germany from fascism.



This repugnant form of perpetrator-victim reversal is deeply outrageous, but it is not surprising. Let us remember what kind of state this is in which we live. The FRG, with all its institutions, was built from the beginning by avowed fascists.

And there was never a break with it. A well-known example of this is the then President of the Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, who was able to exercise his function unhindered despite his past as an SS war criminal. For his crimes against the peoples he was executed by the RAF in 1977, which is still called a "left-wing terrorist crime" by all kinds of bourgeois politicians and media. In Stuttgart there is even a hall named after this pig.



So the fact that the FRG defends fascist criminals is a historical continuity. And as already said, that this is so must not surprise us. Because this system in which we live is imperialism, the system that also gave birth to German fascism, in order to enforce the interests of the German bourgeoisie. And nothing essential has changed in this system. Nowadays there is a different form of government, the rulers give themselves a slightly more democratic and liberal mask. But form of the state remains the same and when it is necessary, they tear their mask and enforce their interests even with sheer fascist terror.