what was written last year will also have to suffice this year. The organizer of the past 20 years of Dresden Commemorations is feeling his age, having just turned 90 and missing his former energy. The remembrance will therefore be only found in the internet. Please accept the repetition of last year’s letter. Yes, there are all kinds of reminders of ‘‘man’s inhumanity to man’’ repeated time and again by our media, often going back as far as our own history but never about what happened to us. Thus the accompanying video, Blitz on Dresden, should remind us again of just one instance of what occurred, namely of those fateful days between February 13th and 15th of the year 1945 in Dresden. The film is surprisingly free from propaganda and a true documentary. It not only shows the bombardment of Dresden but also that of Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin. There are also interviews of survivors and participants in those events.
As stated before, we are not only remembering the fate of Dresden but also that of countless other German cities during World War II. And here are some facts: There was an agreement between European nations in 1907 in Den Hague which demanded that in war times civilian populations should be protected. This agreement was shamefully disregarded by those who thought that the mass murder of civilians could bring an early end to the war. In the 54-minute documentary we are told by a German witness that it was the Germans who started the bombing terror. Against this stands the statement of the undersecretary of the British air force, J. M. Spaight who said that “we started this type of warfare before Germany thought to do it against England”. And indeed, the first British air attack was directed against the cities of Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven on September 5th, 1939 while the first German counter measure on London took place on September 7, 1940. Winston Churchill decided on the bombardment of German cities the day after he became the British premier, which was on May 11th 1940. On the 12th of May bombs were dropped on civilian living quarters of Mönchengladbach and Aachen. It continued with Düsseldorf on May 13th, with Eschweiler, on May 15th Hamburg, on May 16th... On the 24th of June 1940 Berlin saw its first bombardment.
The accompanying movie starts with the unveiling in London of the statue of Arthur Harris, the chief of “Bomber Command” by the Queen mother, in May of 1994. It is surprising to see British people demonstrating against this ceremony with signs like “People of Dresden forgive us”. Of interest should also be the statement at the beginning of the movie that speaks of 600,000 victims. Well, it echoes Churchill’s pronouncement that he wants to “baste” the 600,000 refugees that had crowded into Dresden from the East, fleeing the advancement of the Soviet army. That number of Dresden victims has shown up in various publications but was gradually reduced – until on February 13th of 2014 it was determined by a German historical commission that the number of victims was only 25,000. This naturally has upset German survivors. It is considered a strange phenomenon that the German government tends to diminish the number of German victims but showing great empathy with those in the rest of the world. What is most disturbing for us, that have witnessed horrible atrocities committed against our people and those that have been expelled from our ancestral homeland of East Germany, is the fact, that young people in Dresden have displayed signs with the words “Do it again Bomber Harris” and have organized “Antifa” groups to shout down those who try to commemorate the Dresden atrocity peacefully.
An interview is also documented with Group Captain Ken Bachelor, a member of Arthur Harris’ “Bomber Command”. He explains that it was due to his efforts that the statue was erected. He says that the bombing of the civilians was justified in order “to free the Germans from the Nazi-Regime”. The truth is, however, that it strengthened the people’s resolve to carry on with the war. He also states that Hitler had said that he wanted to kill 20million people, at 10,000 a day. However, there is absolutely no truth to this and it is not recorded in any book on World War II.
The film finally shows the efforts of the people of Dresden to rebuild their city that had been called “the Florence on the river Elbe”, the crowning achievement of which was the resurrection of the “Church of our Lady”, the “Frauenkirche”. The controversy continues: Was the firebombing of Dresden a crime against humanity? We certainly think so.
Christian Jürgen Klein
Right-wing extremists hold up a banner reading ‘Alliierter Bombenholocaust’ (lit. ‘Allied Bombing Holocaust’) during a so-called funeral march in Dresden, Germany, 11 February 2017. The association ‘Dresden Nazifrei’ (lit. ‘Dresden Free of Nazis’) called out for protests against two announced neo-Nazi demonstrations in the Saxonian state capital. Photo: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa | usage worldwide (Photo by Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The photo below had a bubble and the following comment photoshopped into it. It was posted in June 2018!!!!. I clicked “appeal” but was told that, because of COVID, there were fewer staff and they might not get to my appeal.
Lady Michèle Renouf faces trial in Dresden,
Germany on 16th October 2020. This blog will explain the reasons for
her trial, with regular updates on the case.
“Michèle,
your fearless and direct utterances in Dresden, unfortunately forbidden
to all Germans, blew open the window of truth in one blast.” said Gerard Menuhin, son of legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, in February 2018
On
16th October 2020 an Australian-born Briton goes on trial in Dresden
for “incitement” – not for terrorism or threats, but because of a
10-minute speech given to 300 mourners at a commemoration of the Allied
terror bombing of Dresden in 1945.
The charges have been brought under Germany’s draconian volksverhetzung
law – Para 130 of the criminal code, against Lady Michèle Renouf,
former wife of New Zealand banking tycoon Sir Francis (‘Frank the Bank’)
Renouf who was honoured with the Verdienstkreuz by the then West
German government. In 1990 the engaged couple travelled to Bonn for the
award of Sir Frank’s medal, and as his fiancée Lady Renouf was given a Verdienstkreuz
lapel ribbon. This honour related to Sir Frank’s pioneering role in
persuading the German federal government to relax its conservative
policies and invest its financial surplus on world markets. (For similar
reasons he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.)
In
February 2018 Lady Renouf attended a public commemoration in central
Dresden, marking the anniversary of the 1945 terror bombing by the Royal
Air Force and the USAAF. Responding to an anti-British comment by
someone in the crowd, Lady Renouf was invited to give a brief
spontaneous speech in which she acknowledged Britain’s shame for its
deliberate wartime policy of targeting civilians.
During this speech she referred to the following facts:
a)
Many influential Britons at the time condemned Churchill’s barbaric
terror bombing policy and the associated demand for unconditional
surrender – such people included Lord Hankey (formerly Sir Maurice
Hankey, founder of the modern civil service); the Rt Rev George Bell,
Bishop of Chichester; Labour MP and future minister Richard Stokes; and
government scientist and future bestselling novelist C.P. Snow.
George Bell, Bishop of Chichester was one of several high-profile British critics of terror bombing
b)
The terror bombing of Dresden was a literal Holocaust in which tens of
thousands of civilians were burned alive. We shall never know the
atrocity’s exact death toll, because the city was packed with refugees –
uncounted and undocumented – fleeing from the advancing Soviet Red
Army.
c)
The wider relevance of the Dresden war crime – Renouf emphasised – is
that so-called ‘moral bombing’ of Dresden by the Second World War allies
has effectively acted as a precedent for postwar crimes against
civilians including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in turn has
prompted unprecedented floods of refugees into Western Europe.
d)
The Allied justification for this targeting of civilians was that
Britain and America were at war with Germany, yet this factor is ignored
when discussing what has become known as the ‘Holocaust’, an
unchallengeable dogma taking the place of history.
e)
The simple fact that Jewish civilians were interned in camps is today
regarded as a ‘war crime’ and part of ‘genocide’, regardless of what did
or did not happen in the camps themselves, a topic which Lady Renouf
did not address, knowing that it is illegal in Germany to debate such
matters. It is odd to condemn internment itself
as criminal, bearing in mind that both Britain and America interned
enemy aliens. It is scarcely surprising that European Jews were placed
in this “enemy alien” category, given the actions of the self-styled
leaders of World Jewry who had as early as 1933 declared economic war on
Germany. Moreover the future founders of Israel such as Chaim Weizmann
were actively engaged in a campaign of covert warfare, some of it
contrary to international law, in collaboration with Britain’s Special
Operations Executive. In itself it was not unreasonable for the German
authorities to intern large numbers of European Jews as potential
collaborators in this covert war.
Chaim Weizmann (above right with US President Harry Truman) openly aligned World Jewry with the Allied war effort.
It
is for making these points in her brief impromptu February 2018 speech
that Lady Renouf was arrested and now faces trial in Dresden on 15th May
2020 for offences which carry a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Her
trial will focus press and public attention on the extraordinary German
laws that deny normal historical debate and rational argument. These
and similar laws in many other European countries (though not so far in
the UK) were condemned more than a decade ago by a coalition of eminent
historians and other academics writing under the label ‘Appel de Blois’:
these critics included the late Eric Hobsbawm; Jewish journalist and
author Geoffrey Alderman; Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg; and the
Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash.
Lady
Renouf’s own background is not as an historian, scientist, lawyer or
politician. So how did someone whose lifelong career since early
childhood was as a model and advertising actress come to be on trial in
Germany charged with having expressed forbidden opinions and having
uttered forbidden historical facts?
Born
in 1946, Michèle Mainwaring was directed mainly to classical ballet
studies from the age of 3 to 23, eventually for a licentiateship at the
Royal Academy of Dancing in London. Her earlier four years of
undergraduate art studies at the National Art School were partly
financed by her parallel modelling career (beginning at age 7) and
prizes in beauty contests, including winning Radio 2HD’s Miss Beach
Girl, Miss Newcastle & Hunter Valley, and Miss Zhivago. (The latter
title, twenty years later was to bemuse Dr Zhivago’s co-star Omar Sharif, when he and Lady Renouf enjoyed gaming at London’s Ritz Hotel casino.)
At age 14 Michèle Mainwaring was performing as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel
at the Sydney Conservatorium when the world-famous former Ballets
Russes dancer and choreographer Kiril Vassilkovsky came backstage
seeking to recruit her “ethereal quality” for the role as Clara in his
production of The Nutcracker. However her mother would not allow her to leave school to joint the company!
The
young Michèle performed as Radio 2HD’s Shirley Temple, singing and tap
dancing for the station’s famous children’s radio presenter Twink Storey
as an infant performer and symbol of innocence in the postwar years.
While the actual Shirley Temple became a US Ambassador, Lady Renouf in
later life was to have a rather different involvement with diplomacy and
politics – considered by some to have an ‘ambassadorial’ role as a
champion for the rights of historical revisionism without
exceptionalism!
The
future Lady Renouf came to England in the late 1960s shortly before her
marriage to the late Daniel Griaznoff, descendent of a Russian noble
family. During the 1970s and 1980s she used her marital title of
Countess Griaznoff in association with many charitable activities and
became well-known in London society. Prolific romantic novelist and
socialite Barbara Cartland delighted in entertaining Count and Countess
Griaznoff at her country home. Actors Edward Fox and his wife Joanna
David generously contributed their celebrated artistry to charity
soirees and balls hosted by the Griaznoffs at their Hampstead home.
Lady Renouf’s many appearances in international advertising campaigns included this German television ad for Tchibo coffee.
Meanwhile
from age 15 Lady Renouf had been recruited into an international career
as an advertising actress in television commercials alongside her
modelling career. This led to magazine and television advertisements
worldwide for products and companies as diverse as Deutsche Post, Tchibo
coffee, British Airways, Cable & Wireless, Nissan cars, Lenthéric
perfume, and hundreds more. On screen she appeared with such legends as the Muppets and Dick Emery.
In
the mid-1990s Lady Renouf become a member of the fundraising advisory
board for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside,
chairing the principal fundraising event. As a professional designer of
garden mazes and knot gardens, she had also designed an Elizabethan knot
garden and labyrinth for the Globe approved by the project’s head Sam
Wanamaker, intended as part of the re-education of the general public in
the coded poetic messages of flowers, familiar to a Tudor mindset but
now lost: her knot garden project was featured in a major article for
the Sunday Times.
In
this invited role Lady Renouf mobilised a range of contacts among
London’s diplomatic corps (built up as a longstanding member of the
Ladies’ Committee of the European-Atlantic Group) to assist in the
Shakespeare’s Globe project, including Adm. William Crowe, US Ambassador
and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who became a family
friend; and Australian High Commissioner Neal Blewett. After completing
raising funds for the construction of the Wardrobe of Robes room, behind
the Globe’s stage (marked today by a bronze plaque) – Lady Renouf’s
private tribute to her mother, who was a designer of ballet costumes –
she also invited another family friend Buzz Aldrin, second man on the
Moon, to include his contribution to a time capsule buried beneath the
reconstructed theatre.
Oddly
the first steps towards Lady Renouf’s involvement with “political”
questions came as the result of a Jewish member of her Shakespeare’s
Globe committee insisting on the entire menu at a fundraising dinner
being kosher. Merely the appearance of a non-kosher item on the menu
sent this woman into a rant about “tyranny” and “anti-semitism”.
Understandably
Lady Renouf was puzzled by this inexplicable reaction, and this led her
into further investigations of the taboo subject of “anti-semitism”.
She carried out extensive research into the composer Richard Wagner’s
attitude to the Jewish question, and in 1997 published the monograph Richard Wagner’s Art-works of the Future and Judaism: Inspirational or Conspiratorial.
At
the end of the 1990s Lady Renouf visited Palestine with her high
society chum the Bey of Haifa, Jeannot Khayat, who informed her for the
first time about the outrageous “absentee law” whereby Palestinian homes
can be confiscated by the Israeli state if their owners leave the
country even for a holiday.
Early
in the 2000s she met and recorded interviews with British veterans of
the war against Zionist terrorism in Palestine, 1945-48. These included
unique interviews by the late Phillip Knightley with British Army
veteran and author Eric Lowe – now archived at St Antony’s College,
Oxford. Some of these landmark interviews (in cooperation with
anti-Zionist Neturei Karta rabbis, Palestinian diplomats, and
commentators including Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon) appeared in Lady
Renouf’s first documentary film projects, Palestine Scrapbook and Israel in Flagrante: Caught in Acts of Twistspeak, screened at the House of Lords and House of Commons, under the auspices of Dr James Thring and Lord Stoddart.
In
2000 Lady Renouf attended the London trial of a libel case brought by
the British historian David Irving against the Jewish-American author
Deborah Lipstadt: this was the first she had heard of debates around the
“Holocaust”, but she later became aware of a worldwide campaign of
persecution against historical sceptics, notably the jailing of Ernst
Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Gerd Honsik, Monika and Alfred
Schaefer, and Ursula Haverbeck – including their lawyers Horst Mahler
and Sylvia Stolz. In 2006
she attended David Irving’s trial in Austria, where he was sentenced to
three years imprisonment, eventually being released after one year
thanks to an appeal filed by celebrated Viennese attorney Dr Herbert
Schaller. (In the recent film Denial, an actress plays the part
of Lady Renouf, seated on the court bench as the sole observer on
Irving’s side of the court throughout the hearings.)
During
the summer of 2001 Lady Renouf arranged a meeting between Irving and
Prince Fahd bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, eldest son of the present King
Salman. Prince Fahd was owner of many racehorses including the 1991
Derby winner Generous, who was celebrated in a hillside maze garden
designed by Lady Renouf, a friend of the Prince and Princess, at their
Harewood estate in Surrey where Queen Elizabeth II had planted a tree.
In a telephone call from Riyadh following their meeting, Prince Fahd
confirmed his intention to purchase the entire property including
Irving’s flat in Duke Street, Mayfair, and turn it into a “Real History
Institute”, but he died suddenly a day later aged only 46.
One
consequence of Lady Renouf’s defence of Irving was that a cabal of
opponents engineered her expulsion from the Reform Club in 2003,
following an earlier unsuccessful attempt to expel her in 2002 (when she
was defended by eminent pollster Sir Bob Worcester). Lady Renouf had
invited Irving to an event at the Reform Club (alongside family friend
Count Nikolai Tolstoy) in the week of the Lipstadt trial verdict.
Since
2006 Lady Renouf’s Telling Films has produced many DVDs on the stifling
of historical debate and the persecution of revisionist historians,
scientists, authors, publishers, and latterly even their lawyers. These
documentaries include Jailing Opinions, focused on the
prosecutions of Irving in Vienna (Austria), Ernst Zündel in Toronto
(Canada), and Robert Faurisson in Paris (France), and later documentary
films such as Dresden Holocaust 1945 – An Apology to Germany is Due; Out and Unbowed, about Ernst Zündel’s trials and imprisonment; Mourning the Victims, Naming the Culprits about the British torture centre at Bad Nenndorf (Germany); and many others.
In
2006 Lady Renouf attended and spoke at the International Conference to
Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, hosted in Tehran at the
instigation of Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The topic of
her conference address was “Psychology of Holocaustianity” – an echo of
her postgraduate studies in Psychology of Religion a few years earlier
at London University’s Heythrop College. Veteran revisionist scholar and
literary document analyst Professor Robert Faurisson said that he gave
Lady Renouf’s speech “20 out of 20”!
Nominated
by Prof. Faurisson, Lady Renouf was elected to serve on a five-member
international fact-finding committee created at the end of the Tehran
conference to advance research and support informed historical debate.
Between
2006 and 2020 Lady Renouf has been interviewed in many television and
radio debates and discussions opposite (for example) Prof. Norman
Finkelstein; former CIA officer Dr George Lambrakis; Dr Nicholas
Kollerstrom; the Rev. Stephen Sizer; and Dmitry Shimelfarb, former
adviser and press spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. In 2005 she was honoured with the George Orwell Award by the
Canadian Free Speech League, and has spoken at conferences in Canada,
the USA and Mexico. Several of these speeches, films and interviews have
focused on Lady Renouf’s campaign to raise awareness about the first,
pre-Israel Jewish Homeland option in Birobidjan – the Jewish Autonomous
Region created in 1928 in the former Soviet Union and still flourishing
to this day in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Lady Renouf with the late Dr Fredrick Töben after the defeat of German government efforts to extradite Dr Töben in 2008
When
the Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben was arrested at London’s
Heathrow Airport in October 2008 and subjected to a European Arrest
Warrant seeking his extradition to face criminal opinion charges in
Germany, Lady Renouf mobilised a defence team that successfully opposed
the warrant as invalid, forcing the German authorities to back down and
accept his release. The Töben case proved an important precedent in
relation to the traditional Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson, who was
convicted in Germany for answers he gave to a Swedish television crew in
November 2008, but who as a consequence of the success in Töben’s case,
could not be subjected to a European Arrest Warrant. On Bishop
Williamson’s return to London in 2009 he was met at the airport by Lady
Renouf, who gave interviews to BBC Radio 4 and the World Service later
that day, in which she debated the issues involved with Deborah Lipstadt
and the late Greville Janner of the World Jewish Congress.
Now
those same German authorities are seeking revenge in a wholly
unwarranted prosecution of a British citizen for a perfectly normal and
reasonable (though unplanned and unprepared) speech in Dresden two years
ago, a speech intended as a humble acknowledgment of British guilt and
contrition for a terrible crime against German civilians committed 75
years ago.
By
this politically-motivated prosecution, the moribund Merkel
government’s servants in the German state apparatus dishonour their own
dead, and discredit themselves before the world’s media.
Lady
Renouf’s former husband Sir Frank Renouf was a prisoner-of-war in
Germany for four years following his capture after parachuting into
Greece on 26th April 1941. His
time in an officers’ prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria was well spent
learning German from a friendly guard with the aid of Schiller’s poetry,
building a tennis court, enjoying Red Cross food parcels, and
conducting a correspondence course with Worcester College, Oxford, where
he was admitted for a postwar degree. His
German connections were strengthened after the war as a friend of
British Prime Minister Edward Heath and eminent figures in European
banking including the British Lord Kindersley (a director of the Bank of
England) and the German Hermann Abs (a director of Deutsche Bank). The
Renoufs’ matrimonial home at 37 Eaton Square, Belgravia, had during the
1930s been the home of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who
immediately before the Second World War rented out this same property as
the home of German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop – the first
prisoner executed by the Allies at Nuremberg in 1946.
It
remains to be seen whether 21st century Germany will be as hospitable
to Lady Renouf as wartime Germany was to her former husband!
–
October 07, 2020
No comments:
Lady
Renouf’s lifelong career as an advertising actress and model included
German TV ads for Tchibo coffee – now she will appear as defendant in a
Dresden criminal trial
Lady Michèle Renouf’s trial will take place next week – Friday 16th October – at the Dresden Amtsgericht (district court).
She is accused under Germany’s notorious §130 which defines as criminal Volksverhetzung (public incitement) a wide range of activity that would be perfectly normal in other democracies.
On
this occasion the ‘criminal conduct’ was an impromptu speech by Lady
Renouf at a memorial event in Dresden in 2018, commemorating the RAF and
USAAF terror bombing of the city and the incineration of countless
civilians in February 1945.
RAF Wing Commander Hubert Raymond Allen wrote: “The
final phase of Bomber Command’s operations was far and away the worst.
Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in war was to
become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers will be
remembered a thousand years hence.” (H.R. Allen, The Legacy of Lord Trenchard (Cassell, 1972), p. 168)
German
prosecutors now seek to criminalise memory of that outrage, and have
brought a British citizen to trial for the ‘crime’ of paying tribute to
the memory of the dead and for acknowledging the crimes of her own
country’s leaders.
That’s one reason why the trial on 16th October
2020 is so remarkable. Further news and reflections about this case
will appear here and on associated social media sites throughout the
next fortnight and during the weeks and months to come.
–
October 06, 2020
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Labels:
Dresden bombing,
press statements,
RAF
Lady Michèle Renouf’s trial in Dresden – due to begin on 15th May – has been postponed due to the impact of Covid-19.
The trial is now rescheduled to begin on 16th October 2020 – again in Dresden’s District Court (Amtsgericht).
Charges relate to Lady Renouf’s impromptu speech on 17th February 2018
at a commemoration of the 1945 British and American terror bombing of
Dresden.
Lady Renouf’s attorney Wolfram Nahrath is continuing to build a detailed
rebuttal of these charges with the help of witnesses from several
countries. Further details will be released closer to the trial date,
and will appear on this blog and related social media accounts.
The defence team thank all correspondents for their kind messages of support.
–
May 07, 2020
1 comment:
Lady Michèle Renouf faces trial in Dresden, Germany on 15th May 2020.
This account will explain the reasons for her trial, with regular
updates on the case.
–
March 13, 2020
No comments:
