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On May 16, the anti-fascist Özgül Emre was arrested at the main train station in Heidelberg. The following evening, the two antifascists Serkan Küpeli and Ihsan Cibelik were also arrested in their apartments in Hamburg and Bochum. All of them are from Turkey. Ihsan Cibelik is known as one of the founding members of the revolutionary, anti-fascist music band Grup Yorum, which is one of the most popular political music groups in the world and regularly faces repression in Turkey as well as in Germany.
The three anti-fascists were all arrested on the basis of §129b StGB and are in various prisons in Hamburg, Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. They are accused on the basis of this paragraph of being leading members of a foreign terrorist organization, namely the DHKP-C. Already since the 80’s anti-fascists and socialists, who stand up for a democratic society and against the fascist rule in Turkey, are imprisoned on the basis of this paragraph and sentenced to long prison terms in Germany.
But what are these so-called anti-terror paragraphs 129, 129a and 129b actually about?
The 129th paragraph of the German penal code has a long and tragic history. The history of this paragraph and its predecessors goes back 200 years. The first repressions against opposition activists took place as early as 1822, when progressive propaganda and activities for the bourgeois revolution, also known as the “German Revolution”, which was on the rise, were made punishable. Used for this purpose at that time was the “Staatsschutzgesetz.” The so-called “demagogue hunt against extremist aspirations” was carried out in all small German states against the liberal, bourgeois movements. Fifty years later, the now victorious bourgeoisie was to change from prey to the hunter and use the same “anti-terror laws” against the strengthening socialists.
Under the disguise of protecting the state, republic and constitution, socialists became targets of those in power. Fifty years after the first “demagogue hunt”, this time socialists like August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were persecuted for their political activities. In 1872, the two founders of the SPD were punished for having supported the Paris Commune in parliament.
Only 8 years later, Bismarck enacted the Socialist Law, which, according to him, was to be directed “against the public danger of Social Democratic endeavours”. Accordingly, all Social Democratic, Socialist and Communist associations as well as their meetings and printed material were banned. Educational, art and gymnastics clubs were also banned if they were headed by Social Democrats, and events, meetings, and even children’s festivals were banned if they were organized by Social Democrats. In short, these laws were used by bourgeois rule to prevent the workers’ movement, to ban socialist activities and propaganda, and to alienate the working class from social democracy and socialists.
Years later, Nazi Germany would use these laws to strengthen its fascist government and hunt down communists. The fight against the “public danger of Social Democratic endeavours” under Bismarck became the fight against the “communist decay of Germany” under Hitler. Thus, early after his seizure of power, Hitler called for an “eradication of Marxism with every possible mean.” As we know today, most of the Marxists ended up in concentration camps under the fascist rule of Germany. They were sentenced to long prison terms in penitentiaries, or were executed by firing squad. In total, more than 180,000 communist party members ended up in concentration camps, and more than 25,000 were murdered.
Nazi Germany was defeated when the Red Army captured Berlin, and the country was occupied by the Allies. What followed was a historically unprecedented reappraisal of the crimes, which culminated in the Nuremberg Trials with the punishment of high-ranking Nazis. But the jointly agreed denazification relatively quickly gave way to the real focus of the capitalist powers around the United States: the persecution of communists.
In this fight against communism, the newly founded Federal Republic also relied on methods of criminal law: it reintroduced all criminal offenses from the Nazi era that had been abrogated by the occupying powers after World War II. Thus, the 1st Criminal Law Amendment Act of August 30, 1951, which was intended to free criminal law from Nazi laws, fixed the criminal provisions on high treason, threat to the state and treason from the second part of the Criminal Code.
(Dominik Rigoll: “Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland. Von der Entnazifizierung zur Extremistenabwehr,” in: Norbert Frei: “Contributions to the History of the 20th Century 13,” Göttingen 2013, p.106).
Those convicted under this law were subject to long prison sentences. Politically, this continuation of Nazi laws was directed against Communists as well as their supporters, sympathizers, and contacts.
(Sarah Langwald: Communist persecution and legal resistance: the “Defender Committee Movement” and the “Main Committee for Popular Inquiry” in: Labor Movement History, Issue I/2018, pp.92-109).
Thus, in the same year, 1500 members of the youth organization “Free German Youth” were arrested, and criminal proceedings were initiated against a total of 125,000 members, sympathizers and family members of the KPD.
The 1st Criminal Law Amendment Act, as an addition to its previous version in the Nazi regime, also defined a form of non-violent political activity without the need to objectively establish a factual threat to the state. The act of a perpetrator became a threat to the state as soon as it was influenced by an organization classified as anti-constitutional.
(Reinhard Höntsch: “Kratologische Überlegungen zur Wechselwirkung von ordentlicher Gewalt und systemoppositioneller Gewalt.” Osnabrück 1999, p.109)
A particular example of the general persecution of communists in the spirit of Nazi Germany is, among other things, the persecution of members of the “Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime (VVN), for which the SPD issued a declaration of incompatibility at the end of the 1940s. At the beginning of the 1950’s, several state leaders of federal compensation agencies had to leave them, including a group of Jewish civil servants who were themselves Nazi persecutees and members of the VVN: Phillip Auerbach, Curt Epstein, Marcel Frenkel, Alphonse Kahn and Ludwig Loeffler. Phillip Auerbach was convicted under the new laws, but committed suicide due to the immense hostility. The rival association BVN, which was close to the CDU, demanded that public aid for the director Marcel Frenkel be prevented because he would spend the budget “70% on Jews of faith, communists and socialists.” Later, Frenkel was arrested as VVN chairman and charged with high treason after the VVN supported the referendum against remilitarization. Phillip Auerbach also suffered the same fate, being put in the dock for the first time on April 16, 1952. Opposite him sat Judge Josef Mulzer (senior war court judge in the Third Reich), a former SA member as associate judge, as well as another associate judge, the public prosecutors and the psychiatric expert as former NSDAP members. Auerbach took his own life because he could “no longer endure the dishonorable verdict,” as he wrote in his suicide note.
(Peter Hüttenberger: Nordrhein-Westfalen und die Entstehung seiner parlamentarischen Demokratie. Siegburg 197, p.487)
(Spiegel Geschichte: Anti-Semitism victim Philipp Auerbach. Der unerwünschte Nazi-Jäger, by Christoph Sydow, 30.01.2013, spiegel.de)
On June 26, 1951, the VVN was ultimately banned by the German government, after Adenauer had previously declared the incompatibility of membership in the VVN with employment in the civil service.
[TO BE CONTINUED …]