The Neverending Voyage of the Landshut

I have posted this twice before and I will go on posting it on every suitable occasion until somebody finally pays notice.

On October 13, 1977, flight LH 181, the Lufthansa Boeing 737-200 "Landshut" with 91 people on board, several children and five crew members among them, was hijacked by Palestinian Arab terrorists on a trip from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt/Main, an event that marked a new level of terrorist brutality and government response.

The hijacking was the means to the end of freeing eleven Baader-Meinhof/Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) terrorists from prison. Crew and passengers had to fly several sectors to various airports in the Mediterranean and the Middle East under threat of death by guns or explosives. Because Yemeni authorities had blocked Aden airport, captain and first officer, facing the fact of being almost out of fuel, managed to land, in a maneuvre of unique aeronautical mastership, the 30 meter long jet safely on a sand strip nearby. At Aden it was, that Captain Jürgen Schumann was forced to kneel down in the aisle, in front of his passengers and the crew, and executed. After the cold-blooded murder of his captain, Jürgen Vietor, the first officer, had to fly the 737, which had just undergone a gruelling emergency landing, solo to touch down safely at Mogadishu, Somalia, an airport, that had before, literally and metaphorically, not been on his, a Boeing 737 pilot's, map. Both men had a military background, Captain Schumann had been a Starfighter-, Vietor a navy pilot. At Mogadishu airport, passengers and crew were forced to undergo an ordeal of almost twenty more hours before an elite unit of German federal police, the GSG 9, finally and successfully raided the plane, killing three of the four terrorists and only hurting one of the hostages. The heads of the Baader-Meinhof gang at Stammheim prison commited suicide only hours later, Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the German employers' association who had been held hostage by the RAF for the same purpose, was found the next day. He, too, had been mudered -- execution style.


The Landshut in Rome. Italy refused to comply with German wishes and let the aircraft take off.

The odyssey of the Landshut

On October 12, 2007, the Frankfurter Rundschau published a remarkable interview performed by Mark Obert with Jürgen Vietor, which I luckily happened to save, as it is now offline. I translate a few excerpts here.

[...]

Are you frequently asked whether you never made the attempt to overpower Mahmud [the leader of the terrorists]

Sometimes.

Do you consider it a reproach?

No, I always tell precisely what happend aboard. One has to understand: We couldn't risk to antagonize Mahmud. There were 86 passengers we had to bring home safely. Our four hijackers defined themselves as freedom fighters, they weren't suicide assassinators like those on September 11. Our hijackers had two goals: The freeing of eleven prisoned terrorists, including those in Stammheim [i.e. the Baader-Meinhof gang members]. And they wanted to survive -- like we did. Based on this common ground we had to cooperate.

And to cope with the fear of the hijackers?

That too. Mahmud's fear played a decisive role at one point. Before we touched down at Aden ... something happened, which explains Mahmuds later atrocious behaviour. He wasn't able to fasten his seatbelt. He sat there like paralyzed because he was obviously scared to death. Therefore Jürgen [Captain Schumann] and I had to fasten his seatbelt. [Vietor explains earlier in the interview that they had to do that because a dead Mahmud bulleting through the cockpit in case of an emergency would have endangered the entire aircraft.] After touchdown, Yemeni military came to the aircraft straight away and talked to Mahmud, who was still upset. Mahmud then told us: "They are adamant to force us to depart. They have issued an ultimatum." Imagine the humiliation for Mahmud: First the thing about the seatbelt and now the rejection by those he had considered his friends. South Yemen was at that time a training center for the PLO. [Notabene that the Baader-Meinhof terrorists received training at PLO camps, thus reviving a long-standing tradition of cooperation between Arabs and Germans.]

Did you consider Mahmud's defeat as dangerous for yourself right from the start?

Mahmud had suffered a loss of face. I understood that he was bound to compensate for it sooner or later...

[...]

At that point you have been for two days in the hands of the hijackers already. Did you have a clear picture of Mahmud and the others?

Something like a profile? No. But that they, too, were highly under stress was obvious from the first moment: all the darting around, the shouting and the gun-waving. The first thing Mahmud did was to sport Jürgen Schumann's captain's cap. That's what he wanted to be, Captain Mahmud. After that, one had to assume that he was a psychopath.

Did you anticipate that Mahmud would kill Schumann?

I had to, because Mahmud had in the meantime informed the passengers as well that he was going to hold a revolution tribunal... In Dubai he had selected passengers for execution. Stupefying. Luckily, he didn't go through with it. But then he became more mistrustful and irritated by the minute because he didn't know what Schumann [who had left the aircraft under the pretense of inspecting the undercarriage which might have suffered through the landing on the sand strip, but, so it became known later, had gone to the airport building to plead for the people in the "Landshut"] was up to. That was an additional loss of authority on top of the other humiliation. I had a very bad feeling, but what could I do?

Does the question haunt you?

It is a non-starter, really. I don't know for sure what Jürgen Schumann would have done in my place, but I think he'd done the same. It was the sensible thing to do.

Feelings of guilt can exist in spite of rational decisions.

His death makes me sad.

The hijackers had thrown his dead body out of the aircraft the next day at Mogadishu.

That wasn't quite so. In fact, they've let him down the rear emergency chute.

Is this difference important for you?

It is a little bit less undignified.

Did you know Schumann well?

He was a young pilot, I was young. [Schumann was 37, Vietor 35.] We had first met before takeoff at Mallorca. And during the hijacking there was no opportunity to talk about private matters.

Do you sometimes think of what Jürgen Schumann might have thought on his way back to the plane?

I thought of it a lot, but without result. Now, after the statement of that General [Sheikh Ahmed Mansur, head of the unit that had surrounded the "Landshut" at Aden airport] I see that he must have known what was waiting for him. And so it happened. Exactly between Economy and First Class before everybody's eyes he had to kneel and Mahmud asked him: "Are you guilty or not guilty?" And Schumann said: "I tried to…" Then Mahmud again: "Are you guilty or not guilty". And again Schumann tried to explain what happened, but Mahmud didn't want to know it at all. He murdered the captain to appear as the resolute leader.

Herr Vietor, is it permissable to think that your chance of survival increased because of Schumann's death because now you'd become indispensable for Mahmud?

One can think that. One can ask as well the basic question why Mahmud murdered the captain and not the first officer.

He almost murdered you as well.

Before Schumann died, I was going to be shot dead twice. First, because I wore a Junghans watch with a "J" on the face and a company logo that looks a bit like the Star of David. Therefore Mahmud thought I was a Jew. The second time, because I was caught calling the Baader-Meinhof group, whom Mahmud intended to free, terrorists instead of freedom fighters. Then there were all the denied clearences to land, the emergency landing in Aden. Five days long it was about nothing but to survive the next hour, not to make any mistake, to keep an eye on the technology... Captain Schumann had just been shot dead when the ancillary unit went out. If one doesn't pinch off the battery pronto, one needs a new one. I didn't want to risk that. Therefore I went to the cockpit as fast as possible and had to step over Schumann's dead body, very carefully, over his legs, his arms, and over his head. Gosh, I couldn't even mourn -- the more as it was me who had to fly the aircraft now. Because I had no idea of the condition of the plane, I had at least to try and to delay the takeoff until daylight to have a better chance for an emergency landing in case of technical problems. I thought feverish how to play for time. First I asked ... for manual refuelling... then for weather charts, which won me ten more minutes. In the end, I had to take off in the middle of the night. Believe me, to fly an aircraft that had just gone through such an emergency landing was risky enough and then Mahmud topped it all by telling me that we were flying to Mogadishu. Mogadishu? I had no idea, where that was, I didn't even know where Somalia was. As a first officer on a 737, the farest I had ever gotten was Cairo. Lucky for us, on our maps, which only showed the 737-routes, the southernmost spot was just Mogadischu, two millimeter away from the bottom margin.

How was Mahmud after his act of violence?

Very focused. I needed a first officer. And finally he was where he wanted to be all the time, in the pilot's seat, with Jürgen Schumann's cap on his head.

How did you react to him?

We all behaved just right without thinking much about a strategy. We were cooperative without sucking up to the hijackers just as every instructional film recommends.

[...]

Did it help that you had to concentrate on the technology?

Very. Being ruthlessly exposed to those people was the most difficult thing I had to suffer because I like to be in control. But at least I had something to do whereas the passengers were confined to their seats, belts fastened, without information. They weren't even allowed to speak. And because the sunshades had to be down all the time they didn't even know where we were. Sometimes they were allowed to use the lavatory, that was all. That was much worse than what I experienced -- I believe.

[...]

What do you think [of the fact that the 20th- and 25th anniversaries of the "Landshut" hijacking went almost unnoticed, different from the 30th]?

Maybe the media are so eager because most of the witnesses will be dead in a couple of years. To think of how old the then chancellor [Helmut Schmidt] is now. Not to forget the discussion about the petitions for clemency of Mohnhaupt und Klar [Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar were among the masterminds of the "second generation" of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and the crimes commited during the "German Autumn". They were detained, trialled and sentenced in the Eighties, Mohnhaupt to five terms of life in prison and additional 15 years. After the minimum term of 24 years, she was set free in March 2007 on parole. Klar was sentenced to six terms of life in prison and additional 15 years. 1992 he got an additional life sentence in a different trial.] ... This discussion irritated me very much.

Why?

... When the consequences of terrorism are discussed, it's mostly about the consequences for the state. And now the state is supposed to show mercy because state and society are past terrorism. That may be, but are the bereaved past it? If somebody is able to show mercy it's them. I think that Klar and Mohnhaupt deserve more than just those 26 years. They ought to leave prison only in a coffin.

The discussion about pardon [for the Baader-Meinhof terrorists] has offended you.

Very much so. In spite of the fact that my suffering was limited. But I don't even want to begin to imagine how Jürgen Schumann's widow feels, or the widows of Schleyer und Buback [Siegfried Buback, German chief federal prosecutor from 1974-1977, his driver and a security officer, can be considered the first victims of the "German Autumn". They were murdered in a drive-by shooting on April 7, 1977.], or the children of the security officers. I don't intend to mention all the names here, there are so many who were murdered in cold blood. Okay, there may be good reasons to ask for mercy, but then the perpetrator ought to be deserving of it. Does Mohnhaupt? I don't know. But Klar, who is still adamant that the fight insn't over yet? How can he ask a state he is fighting for mercy? That is cowardice. Alright, the president has denied Klar that [in 2007, Christian Klar's mercy petition was rejected], but I fear that Klar will be released sooner or later.

What does a life sentence for Klar mean to you?

Satisfaction? It would go together with my sence of justice. That in any case. I will tell you something: Three of our four hijackers were killed by the GSG 9, and the only survivor, Andrawes, is suffering for life. I am glad for that.

She was shot during the raid and can't walk properly anymore…

… and is in pain. Yes.

Do you wish she were suffering from a bad conscience as well?

How can one determine anything like that? It's not measurable anyway.

[Notabene that Jürgen Vietor's witness account at Souhaila Andrawe's court trial exonerated her in many details because he chose to tell the facts instead of taking revenge.]

[...]

Did you ever have nightmares?

No.

[...]

Never been scared again?

Never.

Did you assess passengers henceforth? Who looks suspicious? Who is acting oddly?

No.

But you surely forewent the "Landshut", didn't you?

I'll tell you something now that is hardly believable. When a colleague asked me years later whether I've ever flown the "Landshut" again, I said that I didn't know.

What? Tourists have nicked pukebags from the "Landshut" and you didn't care whether you had to enter that plane or not?

Wait, it gets even more remarkable: I looked up my old flight schedules. My first scheduled flight after the hijacking was with the "Landshut". Of 80 possible 737-jets the "Landshut". I have proof of that.

[...]

The last hours on October 17 and 18.

Yes, things were coming to a head now. Day five, Mahmud was at the end of his tether. He submitted his last ultimatum. At 15:00 at the latest, the Baader-Meinhof group and the other terrorists were to arrive at Mogadishu or he'd blow us all up. Our last information was that the federal government wasn't going to give in. So they tied our hands behind our backs with the women's nylons, shoved us into seats and fastened the seatbelts. Even the children's seatbelts were fastened. Then they uncorked the duty-free spirit... and emptied the bottles on top of us. "So that you will burn better." Ah well... In the end, they applied plastic explosives everywhere. I had been in the military and saw at once that it looked like the real thing. And the detonators were definitely genuine: brass sheathing. When I looked at the clock it was ten to three.

May I ask a fallacious question?

Whether we didn't fight even then, right?

Is that the question you are asking yourself?

It has been asked before many times. I have always admitted that we let ourselves drive like lambs to the slaughter. But who has never felt a gun at his neck ought to judge very carefully.

What I really wanted to ask is whether it is true that in the face of death one seas a fast-motion playback of one's life.

That is a myth. I saw nothing at all anymore, only the hands of the clock. Now you have ten minutes more to live, now nine, when suddenly, five minutes before time, excited radio voices could be heard from the cockpit. Mahmud came running and asked me how long it would take a Boeing 707 from Frankfurt to Mogadishu. I started to do the numbers. Adrenaline works miracles. Imagine, I hadn't slept even a minute for several days. So I figured out: we are close to the equator, Frankfurt lies 50 degrees north of us, roughly 3000 miles, a bit of slope distance as well: roughly seven or eight hours. That was good because it was exactly the time they had told Mahmud via the radio. Then he cried joyfully: "They'll exchange! They'll exchange!" What a relief.

[...]

Then, when it was dark, the plane was raided. Your second birth.

One can put it like that.

The mission of the antiterror unit GSG 9 was triumphal.

Yes, brilliant.

Was it worth the risk? Just to not having to release eleven imprisoned terrorists?

I never gave it a thought.

You never gave it a thought? The state could have given in and set you free without such a risk.

That is a touchy point. Let me put it like that: Should somebody ask me whether I thought while we were in that situation that the state ought not to budge and I'd reply with yes, I'd lie. We have beseeched the chancellor to exchange, we begged over the radio. Life is important. Who wants to victimize himself. But had I been in front of a TV set I, too, would have said that the state must not budge.

[...]

So you understand [Chancellor Helmut Schmidt]?

His moral dilemma, yes. Guilt and liability are hard to escape. At that time I have simply begged for my life, as Mr. Schleyer did.

The chancellor considered himself to be in a sort of war against terrorism and put himself, together with his crisis squad, almost all of them former Wehrmacht members, in a sort of combat situation.

But it was a war the terrorists waged against the state. That a politician taps into his experience as a soldier I can, as a soldier, understand.

What do you think if hostages are taken in Iraq or Afghanistan. To pay or not to pay?

What is the state supposed to do? To budge? How big is the danger to produce copycat crimes and thus even more victims in the long run? Exactly that is the question to which nobody has an answer. I am not presumptious enough to consider my opinion important just because of my experience as a victim.

[...]

I could have died through a [GSG 9] officer's bullet. Did this thought occur to you?

The government had even taken into account that some of us hostages would die ... It is bordering on a miracle that no hostage and no GSG 9-officer died.

It must have been an incredible ruckus.

The banging away seemed endless and if the GSG 9-boys hadn't hollered all the time we hadn't even known that there were Germans attacking. "Where are you pigs?" "Here, you pigs!"

They hollered that?

Believe it or not. And it felt good to hear it.

[...]

Did you ever talk about that to the GSG-9-commander, Ulrich Wegener, the hero of Mogadishu?

I met him recently for the first time since 30 years. It was very helpful because he was able to explain some details previously unknown to me. For example that at the ladders they got at Mogadishu rungs were missing.

Not a personal word?

Only technical stuff. Nothing deep.

What do you consider deep?

Something like questions of innocence and guilt, like those we just discussed. That is deep. In the sense of profound.

You close yourself off, in a psychological sense?

I don't have any secrets.

[...]

And still, many think you are a hero.

I don't. Heroes look out for danger. I was exposed to it. And even that by mere chance. On October 13, the day we took off from Mallorca, I was on standby when the first officer fell sick and I stood in for him.

Good God, how does one ever say "thank you" for anything like that?

He never said "thank you". I am still waiting for my bottle of bubbly. But seriously, I don't even know the colleague's name. I have never tried to find it out.

Are you sometimes amazed at yourself?

A little bit. And at this point I remember a peculiar thing. When I was with Mahmud in the cockpit, I heard scratching noises and suddenly turned around and saw an empty seat in front of the emergency exit. I thought I go and sit down there. Later I learned that the GSG 9 was watching us with night sights and hoped that I would move away from Mahmud. I don't believe in telepathy but that is truly amazing, isn't it?

Do you believe in luck? In fate? Or is everything mere chance.

We were damned lucky.

There had been children on board.

Yes, it could all have been much more sad than it was anyway.

Have you ever met Jürgen Schumann's widow?

No, never. There isn't anything about her in the media. She must be very bitter.

Mr. Vietor, you are retired. What are you doing now?

My partner and I do a lot of travelling with the camper.

You are divorced?

Yes, and believe me, that really hurt me. I was vitually depressive. It had nothing to do with the hijacking.

Sure.

Sure. I am fine now. I just regret that I can not live in Canada.

Nice and far away.

In Vancouver, wonderful city. But the Canadians don't want an old age pensioner.

So far Jürgen Vietor's account. What happened to the other participants in the drama?

Jürgen Vietor and flight attendant Gabriele Dillmann 1977

Jürgen Vietor and Gabriele von Lutzau 2007

The "Landshut" served the Deutsche Lufthansa until 1985 and then went on an odyssey serving many owners around the globe. Until January 2008 she flew for TAF Linhas Aereas under the registration number PT-MTB in Brasil. Since January 2008, after 38 years and about 30.000 trips, she is now placed as a memorial to itself in a remote spot of Fortaleza airport. The name "Landshut" is still in use by the Lufthansa. Currently, an Airbus A330 is thus named.

The Bavarian town of Landshut named a street after Jürgen Schumann and the Lufthansa the building of their flight training school in Bremen. Different from his colleague Vietor, Schumann can not hand back the Bundesverdienstkreuz that had been awarded to him posthumously.

Monika Schumann is still, so it can be safely assumed, serving her life sentence. Waltrude Schleyer's ended when she died on March 21, 2008 at the age of 92, 31 years after the RAF had murdered her husband.

From October 1964 until June 1965, Leutnant Jürgen Schumann received training at Luke AFB under Colonel James Jabarra. Memorial page here (in German).

Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the man whose strength, authority and brains saw Germany safely through the most difficult time since WWII, was, two years ago, at the age of 89, publicly reproved because his smoking habit was setting a bad example for society. This, to show that we have got our priorities right.

Chancellor Helmut Schmidt offers his condolences to Waltrude Schleyer.

The Federal Republic of Germany, who was adamant in 1977 never to talk to terrorists again, pledged at a donor conference on December 19, 2007 twenty million Euro for the Palestinians.

Merry Christmas

Winter 2010/2011 in the Ore Mountains.

4th of July

Herzlichen Glückwunsch Gudrun!

Dr. Gudrun Eussner's www.eussner.net about politics and culture, is the best German language web site in the entire Internet. If you read German and are a lateral thinker who prefers to think outside the box, you'll find a wealth of information there. Without her encouragement, support and helpful information, this blog would long be dead.

Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns, Gudrun!

Draw Mo Day

"Punkt Punkt Komma Strich" is a German nursery rhyme to accompany the drawing of a simple face: "Dot dot comma line, finished is the moon face!"

You Go Geert!

Today, elections for the town- and city councils are held in Holland.

The politically correct hyaenae are all in a flutter.

This is the result of a Google News search for "Wilders Rechtspopulist". Rechtspopulist can be translated as "right wing populist", but I have a hunch that the latter has in English more the ring of "popular", "common touch" or "grassroots". In German, it's exclusively used to describe a demagogue.

Which is, of course, fatuous, because a demagogue tells people what they WANT TO hear, whereas Wilders tells people what they DO NOT want to hear.

You will recognise some terms, I think. "Rechts" is the ever-recurring "right wing". Germans won't recognise a liberal because they don't understand the concept. They long to be anally penetrated by totalitarism, and, after Nazism and Communism, Islam is just the option. 20 years of a totalitarism-free Germany is more than enough! In that spirit the term "Islamhasser" ought to be seen, which means, not too surprisingly, "Islam hater", and that is about the worst thing one can call a politician here.

Which tells, of course, nothing about Wilders but all about the German mainstream.

Obama's Choices

Today they celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the following text is all over the Internet:

President Obama squeezed in a trip to Copenhagen last month to lobby, unsuccessfully, for Chicago to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. He plans to travel to Oslo next month to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that even Obama has said he does not deserve. And this coming week, he sets out on a weeklong tour of Asia.

But the president does not plan to travel to Germany to attend the 20th anniversary celebration Monday of the fall of the Berlin Wall, drawing heated criticism from those who say he's ignoring a shining triumph of American-inspired democracy.

Well yes, he does. Is there any reason to be amazed? Given two alternative choices, this president will always opt for the one that is (more) detrimental to America. Besides, this isn't about HIM HIM HIM and that alone is reason enough for He-Who-Walks-On-Water not to be bothered. At least Sarkozy, despicable little attention whore he is, goes out of his way to lie about his attendance 20 years ago.

The Man Who Puts Obama To Shame

Question: Is "post-racialism" possible?
Answer: It is ... if you are not black or a Muslim.

The 36-year old Philipp Rösler will be taking office as Federal Minister of Health in the second Cabinet of Angela Merkel. (The picture above shows him at the swearing-in ceremony as Minister for Economics and Deputy Prime Minister of the federal state of Lower Saxony on February 18, 2009.) I will let you know later what makes the German Federal Minister of Health so topical today.

Rösler was born in Khanh Hoa, Vietnam, and came to Germany at the age of nine months as the adopted son of a couple that already had two biological daughters. He grew up in Hamburg and Lower Saxony. After training to become a combat medic in the Bundeswehr, Rösler was exempted to study medicine at the Hannover Medical School. Following this, he continued his education at the Bundeswehr hospital in Hamburg. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 2002, and left the military as a Stabsarzt, which equals the rank of an army captain, in 2003.

He is Catholic, which is decisively not the norm in strictly Protestant Lower Saxony, and a member of the General Conference of the Central Committee of German Catholics.

The picture shows Rösler with Bischof Norbert Trelle of Hildesheim and ex-Prime Minister (consecutively of two different federal states) Dr. Bernhard Vogel

Rösler has been a member of the market-liberal FDP since 1992. He was secretary of the FDP in the state of Lower Saxony from 2000 until 2004. From 2001 until 2006 Rösler was a member in the regional assembly of Hanover (district), where he was also deputy chairman of the parliamentary group. In May 2005 he was elected an observer of the federal FDP executive committee. At the state party conference in March 2006, Rösler was elected chairman of the Lower Saxony FDP. In April 2008, he was confirmed in the office, receiving 95% of the votes.

In July 2007, he was elected to stand as his party’s main candidate in the Lower Saxony state election to be held in January 2008. On 18 February 2009, Rösler was appointed minister for economy, labour and transport as well as deputy prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony.

Now it was declared that he would succeed the painfully inept "Ulla" Schmidt as Federal Minister of Health in Angela Merkel's second Cabinet.

Rösler is married to Dr. Wiebke and since Oktober 28, 2008 they are the parents of the dizygotic twins Grietje Marie und Gesche Helene. "One looks rather East Frisian, like my wife, the other one resembles me", he told the glossy BUNTE.

---------- JUMP CUT ----------

Today, the trial of a man accused of killing an Egyptian woman in a German courtroom (we reported) opened in Dresden. Security is tight, about 200 police officers secure the court, the area is barred for traffic, the residents were asked to remove their cars from the streets and the accused sat behind bulletproof glass. Many attendants were wearing badges with the victim's face. "This trial is seen as having a higher than usual security risk," a police spokesman said and nobody laughed.

"He stabbed them out of pure hatred against non-Europeans and Muslims. He wanted to annihilate them," prosecutor Frank Heinrich told the court and nobody mentioned all the many peaceful Muslims for whom the security measures had to be taken because they want to annihilate US and have gone a long way towards that goal a darn sight more effectively already than the yob from Russia in the German courtroom in July in reverse.

Will it be enough? You must be joking!

---------- JUMP CUT ----------

January 31, 1997 the 42-year old Vietnamese Phan Van Toau's skull is broken by a German who smashes him on the concrete floor at Fredersdorf (Brandenburg) railway station. Three months later Phan dies in a clinic. The prosecutor at Frankfurt (Oder) opens the case against him on the grounds of xenophobia. During the trial, the perpetrator spouts racist slogans like "Fijis out of Germany". Still, the court does not follow the prosecutor and sees "no xenophobic motive" behind the deed. The defendant gets a sentence of nine and an half year for manslaughter.

In August 2008 a Vietnamese illegal cigarette dealer is stabbed to death by a German who wanted to play cops and robbers in Berlin-Marzahn. Witnesses confirm that the man had announced his deed and that he wanted "those Fijis" to go away. The head of the homicide squad saw no "hints that would suggest a racist crime". Accusations of manslaughter were dropped and the perpetrator confined to a mental institution.

It took me two minutes to find those cases through a Google search including the German search terms for "murder" and "Vietnamese". And neither in those two nor in any other of the other cases I found was a courthouse turned into a fort, no full-bodied declarations of "pure hatred against non-Europeans and Vietnamese" or "annihilation" were made, nobody wore badges with the dead men's faces and no politician went to the funerals carrying a white (or any) rose. In a word: nobody gave a damn.

Did the Vietnamese riot in the face of such REAL German coldheartedness, of such TRULY blatantly unjust sentences? Did they accuse the Germans collectively (if at all) of racism and hatred? Did they make demands? You must be joking! Instead, they went on with their clothes shops, their illegal cigarette dealings, their fruit and vegetable stalls, in a word, with their lifes*, just as Dr. Philipp Rösler did neither turn into an angry advocate for South Asians nor did he ever make his race an issue at all. He does not think that his success is justly deserved for past injustices of whites towards the non-white races, he does not speak for minorities, the disgruntled, the bitter, the jealous and the power-hungry, he does not offer himself as a redemption from the original sin of being white. He is just the right man for the job.

---

* This rather flip statement is supported by a 2007 study of the Ministry for Foreign Aid ("Economic Cooperation" as it is now politically correctly called). Most Vietnamese people, in West Germany more so than in the East, are well integrated. What is specifically interesting is that it was noted that they do little networking. They rather try to assimilate and to get on in life individually, based on their own merits.

In this context, the case of the rabbi who was stabbed by a friendly young man with a migration background in Frankfurt in September 2007 (we reported) deserves to be hauled from the blog bilges as well:

The 22-year-old admitted to stabbing the rabbi, prosecutors said in a statement. The man is being investigated on suspicion of attempted manslaughter and aggravated battery.

According to the rabbi, the assailant said "I’ll kill you, you Scheiß-Jude." [Expletives are hardly translatable -- Scheiß=shit, Jude=Jew].

Prosecutors said that the suspect -- whose name they did not release -- denies having either, any intention of killing the rabbi or any antisemitic motive.

Of course not. Nobody who rams a 7 1/2-centimetre blade into somebody's abdomen has intention of killing the recipient of this attention. That is true. As true as the suspect's statement that he felt threatened by and physically inferior to the middle-aged, obese rabbi and so reached for his knife. As true as he picked by mere chance a man to attack who was, by his outfit, easily identifiable as Jew. As Henryk M. Broder put it: "Here we have another case of self-defense, where the provocateur leaps aggressively into the provocatee's knife as an answer to a friendly "salam aleikum".

Jews didn't riot either in the face of such REAL German coldheartedness, of such TRULY blatantly unjust sentences. They didn't accuse the Germans collectively (if at all) of racism and hatred and they did not make demands.

Does anybody see a pattern here?

Good Friday

Happy Non-Halal New Year

Merry Christmas

Adoration of The Child Jesus by Stefan Lochner

The World's Most Beautiful Voice Fell Silent Forever

Carreras may have been better looking and infinitely more gentleman, Domingo a much nicer guy, but for sheer creatural beauty of voice he was unmatched.

A philanderer, an attentionwhore and starfucker into each and every popular cause -- and it showed.

I always wondered how could somebody with such a mug have such an out of this world voice.

I am sad.

To Express Our Sincerest Hypocrisy

Approaching the tenth anniversary of her death, the ever-growing impression that the late Princess of Wales was in some way a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her and personally embarrassed Her Majesty The Queen by her Mediterranean love-romps with the son of a discredited Egyptian businessman, is temporalirly performing a strategic withdrawal. We, together with the rest of the world-wide media, now state for today that the Princess of Hearts was in fact the most saintly woman who has ever lived.

She died for our sins.

We would like to express our sincere and deepest hypocrisy to all our readers on the anniversary of this tragic day and hope and pray that they will carry on reading our blog notwithstanding.

My private memorial? Good riddance.

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I stole the idea from Private Eye.

The woman from whom Marlene stole Lili Marleen

I love "Lili Marleen"! It is archetypically German, artless, yet deep and full of heavy melancholy. A young German soldier, Hans Leip, wrote the words 1915, in WWI.

"Marlene showing her loyalty to the 3rd Division."
I've never seen a more absurd euphemism. Loyalties indeed, my behind! When I walk my dogs in bad weather I hide my loyalties in green gum­boots.

To be honest, I do heartily dislike Marlene Dietrich. Was there really any NEED baring her legs to American GIs while her brothers were killed in Russia (metaphorically speaking)? No doubt whatsoever that it was right to support the American war effort, but it wouldn't have finished the war one day earlier had she stayed at home in Hollywood or had at least kept her legs covered. As it is, she appears as both, a war profiteer and an attention whore. So many Jews, who, different from her, HAD suffered, came back to Germany after the war, including Lucie Mannheim, another notable performer of yet another version recorded by the BBC in 1943. What effect did that pompous "...never on German soil again!" have, but some brownie points with the Americans? Germany had become a seventh-rate-entity when it came to arts and entertainment anyway. Gosh, WAS her anti-Germanism a cheap shot!

Here's the background: In 1940, a song appeared which, at first, nobody seemed to like. It was called "Lili Marleen" and Lale Andersen was the singer. Her feminine voice seemed somewhat incongrous for words, supposedly those of a soldier recalling the farewell from his girl in front of the barracks gate. After its launch, the record remained on the sales shelves. No one wanted to hear it.

By sheer chance, in 1941, "Lili Marleen" became the hallmark of the German armed forces radio station "Soldatensender Belgrad", broadcasting to the German occupation army in Yugoslavia.

The rest of the story is history. The slow, melancholic tune became addictive to all who listened to it, first the Germans from Spitzbergen to El Alamein. Later, people, soldiers, all over the world hummed the melody to themselves or sang out loud "Vor der Kaserne, vor dem großen Tor…" ("Outside the barracks, at the great big gate…"). In its melancholy, its artlessness and simplicity — the antithesis of dyke-drama-queen Marlene's version. And, as some might say, a voice of normality and humanness in the ferocity of war and thus so appealing to every soldier on both sides.

Unknown until then, the singer, Lale Andersen (Lieselotte Helene Berta Bunnenberg) born on March 23, 1905 in Bremerhaven, Bremen's seaport, became a star. A woman as unpretentious as the song, that led her into a legendary personal drama, when the borders between song and singer disappeared as it happens often if an artist is strongly identified with one performance only. For millions of listeners, Lale Andersen became Lili Marleen and the song for her both, her lucky charm and curse. However, at the height of her fame, Goebbels banned the singer from performing and from leaving the country because of her correspondence with Jewish emigrants in Switzerland. But in the meantime, the song had become so popular and the soldiers' demand for "their" Lili Marleen so high, that Lale Andersen was allowed to perform again after nine months.

Lale Andersen had considerable talents, one of them was the performance of folksongs in Plattdeutsch, the tongue of her native North Germany, but she continued after the war to sing Lili Marleen at every concert, and up unto her death, as if it were her only tune and her only talent. She sang it in other languages as well and it always made me smile. How can anybody sing as little as: "Outside the barracks…" and it is clear ALREADY that she is from Bremerhaven?

Lieselotte Helene Berta Bunnenberg, Lale Andersen to the world, died on a promotional tour in Vienna today, 35 years ago.

Norbert Schulze, who wrote the tune of "Lili Marleen", was (before the end of WWII, that is) a prolific composer of military marches, usually to aggressive texts. It is a sort of historical irony that this soft, un-martial song would be what mainly survived from his work. After the war he composed quite a few popular, though, somehow not surprisingly, unmilitary, tunes again and used to be, for many years, President of the GEMA, the only too-important German society for the protection of performing rights for composers, arrangers, authors and publishers. He died on October 14, 2002 in Bad Tölz at the age of 91.

The "Official Lili Marleen Page" contains several versions of the song, including the original version from 1939, Marlene Dietrich's version and the bitter parody recorded by the BBC in 1943, performed by Lucy Mannheim.

Obituary for Kurt Waldheim

Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose reputation abroad suffered when it expired that he was involved in war crimes on the Balkan in WWII, died Thursday at the age of 88.

About time.

Operation Chastise

To remember the day, a story from home:

Almost everybody has heard of the "Dambusters", an elite Lancaster bomber unit in WWII. They have become a major part of WWII "folklore". What exactly did they do?

It all started with Dr. Barnes Wallis. Dr. Wallis was an employee of the Vickers Aircraft Company. In March 1941, he completed a paper "A note on the method of attacking the Axis powers". Wallis idea was a to use a gigantic bomb against the Germans so that any structure would become vulnerable to aerial attacks, even if built underground. Wallis proved that a 10 ton bomb dropped at 40,000 feet would go 135 feet into a normal surface and would create no crater as all energy would be directed into an earthquake effect with highly destructive consequences. However, no one was particularly interested in what Wallis had written. No one had ever built a 10 tons bomb, no bomber had ever been built able to carry such a bomb, not to speak of a plane flying at 40,000 feet.

However, one part of his paper did attract the attention of the War Office. Wallis believed that Germany’s industrial heart could be destroyed –- literally drowned -– if the dams of the tributaries to the river Ruhr were destroyed, emptying the reservoirs and unleashing a deluge into the densely populated industrial Ruhr area. An ‘Air Attack on Dams Committee’ was formed in 1941, who decided that the primary target should be the Möhne Dam in the idyllic South Westphalian uplands of the Sauerland. The Möhne reservoir was (and still is) the main water supply for the Ruhr area. The dam was 130 feet high and 112 feet wide at its base and still 25 feet wide at the top. In July 1941, the Air Attack on Dams Committee concluded that "There seems to be no doubt that an attack on the Möhne Dam is impracticable with existing weapons."

A torpedo type bomb, too, was out of the question as the Germans had already thought of that and had protected the dam with anti-torpedo nets. The final plan Wallis came up with was, according to him, "childishly simple". He stated that a "bouncing bomb" would clear the protective nets, smash into the dam wall, stay intact and then sink to a depth of 30 feet before exploding using a hydrostatic fuse.

Lancaster bombers: An artist's understanding of the events.

Wallis received permission to develop the bomb – code-named "Upkeep". The bomb was 50 inches in diameter, 60 inches long and weighed 9250 lbs. Of this weight, 6,600 lbs was RDX explosive, it was designed to be mounted across the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber.

It was clearly not an easy bomb to deliver and an elite new bomber squadron, 617, was formed in March 1943 to deliver the goods. The crew had to release the bomb while flying at exactly 220 mph and at a height of exactly 60 feet above the water. Top-precision flying was needed to get the bomb in motion. To add to it, the crew had to drop the bomb at exactly 425 yards from the dam wall. There could only be 25 yards in either side of this figure, not to forget that German guns would be targeting them and the fact that the attack had to be carried out at night.



Wing Commander Guy Gibson (center) and his airmen.

617 Squadron was lead by Wing Commander Guy Gibson and he was allowed to select the men who were to be on the attack among those who had survived about 60 bombing raids. The operation was given the code-name Chastise. 617 Squadron undertook extensive practising sessions of low flying but none of them knew the target. This they were told at the last minute.

On the night of May 16th, 1943, nineteen Lancaster bombers took off from Scampton in Lincolnshire. They had three primary targets: the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams and two secondary ones, the Lister and the Ennepe dams. Of the nineteen planes, five would be held in reserve during the attacks. To achieve the correct height (altimeters using air pressure were unreliable in the mountainous terrain so close to the ground) they fixed two spotlights to the nose and tail of the Lancaster and directed their beams downwards so that they crossed 60 feet under the craft. The navigator would direct the pilot up or down until the spots touched, forming a figure 8. The bomb aimer found the correct distance from the dam by looking through a simple hand-held wooden triangle with dowel markers. When the dowels lined up with the towers on the dam he would release the bomb.

The Möhne dam immediately after the attack.

Gibson led the first attack. At 00.56 hours, the Möhne Dam was breached and by 01.54 hours so was the Eder Dam. The Sorpe Dam was attacked by planes from the reserve force but, though hit, held out.

The attack had enormous propaganda value and made Gibson a hero of national importance. In the following euphoria, the unusually high losses were forgotten. Over 50 percent of the flyers never returned. 53 men died, 13 of them Canadians.

A picture of the devastation further down the river.

Quickly, the Germans repaired the damaged dams. Steel production in the Ruhr valley doubled that year. Few remember, or know, that much more than 1,000 (the casualty numbers vary grossly depending on the source) people died in the floods following the dam bombing, many of them Ukrainian women and children, trapped in a camp below the Möhne dam.

The most important impact of the raid was that 20,000 men working on the Atlantic Wall had been moved to the Ruhr to carry out repairs to the damaged and breached dams.

Guy Gibson returned to operational duties in 1944 and was killed on a bombing raid on Rheydt (a borough of Mönchengladbach) operating as the Master Bomber, when his de Havilland Mosquito crashed near Steenbergen, Netherlands, on 19 September 1944. It was assumed for many years that he had been shot down, but following the discovery of the wreckage of his plane, it was found that his aircraft had simply run out of fuel.

Playing Dr. Mengele: Obituary for David Reimer

Today is the obit of David Reimer. Who was David Reimer?

David Reimer was one of the most famous patients in the annals of medicine. Born in 1965 in Winnipeg as Bruce Reimer, he was 8 months old when a doctor used an electrocautery needle instead of a scalpel during a routine circumcision, burning off the little boy's entire penis. David's, very young, parents were referred to John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and to psychologist Dr. John Money, one of the world's leading experts in "gender identity". Money recommended a surgical sex change, from male to female. David's parents eventually agreed, believing Dr. Money's claims that this was their sole hope for raising a child who could have heterosexual intercourse -- even though as a "woman".

For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate experiment to prove that nurture, not nature, determines "gender" and sexual orientation -- an experiment all the more irresistible, notabene, because David was an identical twin. His brother Brian would provide the perfect matched control.

David's infant "sex reassignment" was the first ever conducted on a developmentally normal (not hermaphrodite) child. According to Money's published reports through the 1970s, the experiment was a success. The twins, so Money, were happy in their assigned roles: Brian a rough and tumble boy, his sister Brenda a happy little girl. Money was featured in Time magazine and included a chapter on the twins in his book "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl".

The reality was far more involved and much less happy. At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In school, she was relentlessly teased for her masculine traits and behaviour. She let her parents and teachers know that she felt like a boy but was, on Dr. Money's strict orders of secrecy, just told that she was only going "through a phase". Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide, her father lapsed into drinking and the twin, Brian, neglected and problem-ridden as well, descended into drug use, petty crime and depression.

When "Brenda" was 14, a local psychiatrist convinced her parents that she ought to be told the truth. David later said about the revelation: "Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn't some sort of weirdo. I wasn't crazy."

Changing his name to David, he then embarked on the painful process of converting back to his biological sex. A double mastectomy removed the breasts that had grown as a result of estrogen therapy, multiple operations created an artificial penis and testicles. Regular testosterone injections masculinised his musculature. Yet David was depressed over what he believed was the impossibility of his ever marrying. He twice attempted suicide in his early 20s. Eventually, he DID marry, but he remained haunted by memories of the frightening annual visits to Dr. Money, who had used pictures of naked adults to "reinforce" Brenda's gender identity and who had pushed him to have further surgery on his "vagina".

When David was almost 30, he met Dr. Milton Diamond, a psychologist and biologist and expert in anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaii and a long-standing rival of Dr. Money. Diamond had always been interested in the fate of the twins, and specifically so because Money had ceased to publish follow-ups on the case in the late Seventies. Through Diamond, David learned that the supposed success of his sex "reassignment" had been used to legitimise the widespread use of infant sex change in cases of hermaphroditism and genital injury. David agreed to participate in a follow-up by Dr. Diamond, whose myth-shattering paper (co-authored by Dr. Keith Sigmundson) was published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in March 1997.

In 2002, David's twin Brian died of an overdose of antidepressants. Genetics may have contributed to his suicide. However, the question how much of David's misery was due to inherited depression and how much to the nightmarish life which he had been forced to live FOR THE SAKE OF A FASHIONABLE CAUSE is futile.

Not futile is the question why a term stinking of politically correct bigotry like "gender reinforcement" was invented when it was all clearly about quite a different thing, namely the castration of an infant boy and that within the larger and highly political context of -- yes -- reinforcement of the male sex as a disposable one. Nobody ever even discussed the possibility that such a "method" might be applied in reverse to a little girl. Or why healthy little boys should be subjected to a stunting, superfluous and potentially dangerous mutilation like circumcision in the first place, for that, and that when protests against genital mutilation of little girls in third-world countries are by no means unknown. (Although by far not strident enough. It is, after all, only about third-world little girls and not about the most complaining and most mollycoddled group in the the Western world, white middleclass women.)

Money may have stopped publishing about his "historical scientific success" in the late Seventies, but no admittance of error was ever made, let alone an apology for the ruined life of David Reimer. And no, not either by Alice Schwarzer, THE German feminist who had stated in her epochal book "The Little Differerence and Its Big Effects":

The girl is submitted to a permanent hormone treatment, and post puberty she will get an artificial vagina implanted. Then she will be a normal woman -- just without the ability to give birth. And that ability is really the only difference, which remains between man and woman. Everything else is artificially imposed, a question of the nurtured mental identity.

Emphasis added by me.

On the morning of May 5, 2004, David Reimer took a sawn-off shotgun, drove to the nearby parking lot of a grocery store and ended his sufferings for ever.

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More information by John Colapinto at Slate and by Bettina Roehl at Cicero.

Happy Easter

Ten Years of Innocence Abused

As I am inordinately busy lately, not just outside the blogosphere, but offline generally, it comes in handy that we are celebrating today the 10th anniversary of The Onion's inspired and so true portrayal of innocence abused, which I herewith publish in its entirety, because it's so much better than anything I could write anyway.

Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered By Stereotypes

March 5, 1997 | Issue 31•08

HEBRON, WEST BANK — In an emotionally charged press conference Monday, crazed Palestinian gunman Faisal al Hamad expressed frustration over the stereotyping of his people.



Faisal al Hamad, seen here shrieking anti-U.S. slogans, says that "not every crazed Palestinian gunman is exactly alike."

"As a crazed Palestinian gunman, I feel hurt by the negative portrayal of my people in the media," said al Hamad, 31, a Hebron-area terrorist maniac. "None of us should have to live with stereotyping and ignorance."

He then began screaming and firing into a busload of Israeli schoolchildren.

"It hurts that in this supposedly enlightened day and age, people still make assumptions about other people," al Hamad said. "We should not rely on simple generalizations. Each crazed Palestinian gunman is an individual."

Al Hamad said that he himself has often been unfairly stereotyped. "Any time I enter a crowded temple with fully loaded AK-47s in both hands, people just assume I'm going to open fire," he said. "That really hurts."

"Yes, I sometimes do gun people down in the name of the One True God," he noted. "But there is so much more to me."

Several weeks ago, al Hamad was again the victim of stereotyping during a vacation he took with his family to Washington, D.C.

"When we arrived at the airport in Washington, security guards detained us for more than 12 hours, just because I had 140 pounds of plastic explosives strapped to my chest," al Hamad said. "Do you think they would have called the FBI if I weren't a crazed Palestinian who's on their Ten Most Wanted List? I don't think so."



When this truck blew up in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur last year, Israeli officials suspected PLO involvement. "That really hurt that they would just think that right off the bat," al Hamad said.

Al Hamad said his vacation was ruined when federal agents seized a crate of chemical weapons he had brought into the U.S. as a gift for a friend in New York.

"I explained to them that the weapons were a birthday present for the blind cleric Sayid al Farouq, a good friend of mine from high school," he said. "But they did not believe me and took me into federal custody for nine weeks. Again, it's a case of people jumping to conclusions on the basis of skin color. And that can be very frustrating."

According to al Hamad, stereotypes against crazed Palestinian gunmen don't work because they don't take into account the vast variety of proud histories and diverse cultures among them.

"There are so many different kinds of crazed Palestinian gunmen. Each of us has our own unique reasons and motivations for our bus bombings and suicide missions," he said. "No two fundamentalist agendas are alike."

Al Hamad also stressed the importance of understanding and celebrating the cultural differences between crazed Palestinian gunmen and non-crazed, non-Palestinian non-gunmen.

"All the different peoples of the world have something special to offer each other," he said. "Our diversity is our greatest strength. Let's not make a weakness out of that strength."

To emphasize his point, al Hamad fired into a crowd, killing nine.

"I'm proud to be a crazed Palestinian gunman, obviously," he said in between shouts of anti-imperialist slogans. "But I'm an individual first. I'm me. Die, Yankee infidel pig swine!"

The Onion's ridicule hasn't lost a bit of its clout over the years, quite the contrary. Just do a simple Google search and see how reality beats even the most inspired of satire.