Retired police officer in court: Nazi propaganda on the Internet!

Retired police officer in court: Nazi propaganda on the Internet!

On Monday, a retired police officer in Graz was on trial because he is said to have shared National Socialist content on social media over a period of eight years. The accused was accused of denying the Holocaust and glorifying Adolf Hitler. Prosecutor Alexandra Ibler emphasized in her plea that the 64-year-old, who was still active until 2015, specifically spread Nazi propaganda. This was done both by sharing postings, which claimed that the conditions in Auschwitz were positive, as well as by spreading news that represented the mass murders of Jews as a lie, such as The KURIER reported .

The accused justified himself with the reference to his historical interest and said that he had not read most of the contributions. "I only saw the titles and shared them," he said in court. However, this met with skepticism, since the judge Julia Noack clarified that sharing such content brings responsibility. The defender presented the man as a marine historian who only wanted to draw attention to the fates of all victims of war, How the crown informed . Despite this reasoning, the court found problematic content in its chats, including postings about the Rheinwiesen camp, where German soldiers were captured under unsanitary conditions.

Holocaust denial as a criminal offense

The prosecutor made it clear that the denial of the Holocaust is not a historical debate, but is a criminal offense. Particularly clear examples of the contents of the accused included articles that claimed that German corpses were wrongly issued as Jewish. The defendant was of the opinion that these views did not come from him, but from the published articles to which he referred to. Despite his explanation that he shared the news in a short time and therefore did not check the content precisely, the court adheres to the urgency of the topic. A judgment is expected for the late afternoon.