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Germany's Kampf Furor Renews

by Steve Kettmann

Dec. 1, 2000 PST BERLIN -- News this week that a Munich state prosecutor was investigating allegations that Yahoo Deutschland had sold copies of Mein Kampf could help build momentum in Germany for more sweeping restrictions on such material.

"I'm disappointed and shocked," Michel Friedman, a leading spokesman for Germany's Jewish community, said. "We believe that the distribution of anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic literature through Internet services has to be forbidden," he said. "The case of Yahoo in France showed us that in the next weeks and months there will be a new view in Europe on that. There must be a new legal structure in which distribution of hate literature is not allowed. I believe that this is a global, humanitarian message that hate literature is not distributed."

An international debate on cross-border Internet purchases was kicked off last week when a French judge issued a ruling saying that Yahoo must find a way to stop people in France from purchasing Nazi materials via online auctions at the site. Yahoo was given three months to come up with a technical solution to the problem, but in the meantime, the company was expected to appeal. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers head Vint Cerf, one of the experts called to testify to French judge Jean-Jacques Gomez, told the BBC that the ruling failed to heed the "limitations and risks" of such restrictions.

"Ignored was the observation that if every jurisdiction in the world insisted on some form of filtering for its particular geographic territory, the World Wide Web would stop functioning," he said.

The German case differs in that it concerns a German company doing business via the Internet in Germany, as opposed to an American company doing business internationally via the Internet. For Yahoo Deutschland to sell a copy of the book in Germany would be counter to German law. The German government places severe restrictions on sales of the book and other material that falls under the rubric of "hate literature." But contrary to some press accounts, Mein Kampf is not illegal per se in Germany -- what's illegal is the sort of unrestricted sales that can take place via the Internet.

Late last year, controversy erupted in Germany over Amazon.com shipping copies of Mein Kampf to people in Germany. Prodded by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, Minister of Justice Däubler-Gmelin sent letters to Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com asking the booksellers to put a halt to sales of the book to people in Germany. Amazon.com agreed to ban such sales -- even though some people might have legitimate scholarly (or journalistic) reasons to want the book.

As a German Justice Ministry spokesman explained at the time: "If you go to a bookshop, the bookseller can have a look at you and decide if you are really interested, like if you are a student. It's not the book that's forbidden, it's selling it to everyone. If you sell it through the Internet, you don't know who wants to buy the book; you give it to everybody, and that's forbidden."

Gudrun Girnghuber, another Justice Ministry spokesman, clarified the policy. "The point is, you can buy Mein Kampf as a person being interested in historical events," she said. "There are versions of Mein Kampf that are edited, containing remarks explaining the things. But you can't buy the version having been sold during World War II. It's a criminal offense to sell in a non-edited version. In Germany, the only versions are edited versions. They are not the original copies. "It's a criminal offense to sell it to persons who are interested in Nazi things and symbols. It's a problem of the different standards. I know that Mein Kampf is sold in the U.S., but it can't be sold here. The Internet makes it possible for everyone to get it. So you have to talk about standards and find a way of dealing with it."

The fresh controversy over Mein Kampf comes at an awkward time. A full-scale national debate has raged for months over government plans to ban the far-right National Democratic Party, which draws its inspiration from Hitler's National Socialist party. Just last weekend, police stopped a march of more than 1,000 skinheads from the NPD at Berlin's Alexanderplatz when a counter-protest made the situation too chaotic for them to control.

Under a steady drizzle, police repeatedly announced, "This demonstration is over" and loaded the NPD party members on special trains to transport them to Berlin's periphery. The NPD marchers carried German flags and signs with slogans including "Germans, defend yourself," a phrase used in Nazi propaganda. Friedman said that even small numbers of sales of hate literature have to be seen as part of the problem of a growing far-right presence in Germany. "The problem is not that you study if you buy Mein Kampf, it is that it can be used for propaganda," he said. "It is the bible of the anti-Semitic hate literature. That's why it's forbidden to distribute the book in Germany."

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