In the May/June 2020 issue of TBR, we published an article by Peter Rushton on the arrest and intended prosecution of Lady Michele Renouf, long known as a champion of free speech and of historians and others who have been punished and/or imprisoned for talking honestly about World War II. In 2018, Renouf became one of those persecuted people herself, facing jail time in Germany for comments made at a rally commemorating those civilians killed in Dresden by Allied bombing raids. Suddenly, and some would say quite unexplicably, the charges were dropped. What follows is a TBR interview with Renouf conducted by TBR’s Dr. Edward DeVries, host of the TBR History Hour, explaining why the “re-educated” myrmidons of the German court system were too scared to face her in court. (Listen to the interview at www.BarnesReview.com.)
By Dr. Edward DeVries
British socialite Lady Michele Renouf was arrested back in 2018 and charged under the German criminal code with “incitement of the populace” (Volkverhetzung) for an impromptu politically incorrect speech at a WWII commemoration in Dresden, Germany. After several stalls and delays by the court and the prosecutors, in a sudden reversal two days before her trial on November 16, 2020, all charges brought under the notorious “Para. 130” against Renouf were dropped. She risked five years in prison—and won the first-ever “not guilty as charged” in a German WWII heresy prosecution.
Renouf’s attorney Wolfram Nahrath said: “This decision was extraordinary—almost sensational.” Either higher German constitutional consideration or special interests concluded it was too risky to put Renouf on trial, given the unique “ingredients” of her background and in her 2018 Dresden speech which, ultimately, so suddenly led prosecutors to withdraw. Obviously, the German authorities did not want to call attention to her case so that people the world over would not be made aware of the pathetic state of freedom of speech in Germany today.
The Para. 130 “Holocaust-denial” blasphemy law has been used to jail German scientists, authors and even lawyers in recent years—“infamous heretics” such as Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Wolfgang Frölich, Manfred Roeder, Günter Deckert, Monika and Alfred Schaefer and Ursula Haverbeck. Renouf had taken an eyewitness interest in attending most of those “system-compliant Basic Law-biased trials,” including the prosecution of defense attorneys Horst Mahler, Jürgen Rieger and Sylvia Stolz, during her 20 years of recording their experiences for posterity for the English-speaking world. She does this through her company Telling Films—and has reported on most of them for TBR readers. A mocking German press has dubbed Renouf the “Mother Teresa of Holocaust-deniers.”
Freed from what was essentially an exile in Covid-19-restricted Germany, Renouf has returned to London where TBR Contributing Editor Dr. Edward DeVries spoke with her about her 32-month ordeal.
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TBR: How does it feel to not be rotting in a German prison right now?
Renouf: It feels wonderful! I have had so many good American friends, like you, rooting for me throughout, including fellow TBR Contributing Editor Thomas Goodrich, the author of Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, who declared his joy in my win for real history’s acquittal by a German court: “Congratulations, dear Lady! You have given Germany a great victory … perhaps the greatest in 75 years.”
Thomas hereby reinforces the observation made about the speech by Gerard Menuhin (son of the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin), the author of (in the German version) Tell the Truth and Hunt the Devil. Menuhin said, ‘Michele, your fearless and direct utterances in Dresden, unfortunately forbidden to all Germans, blew open the window of truth in one blast.”
Gosh! How about those for an epitaph? Ready now for whenever that Israeli “settler” (Scotland Yard knows his name; no prosecution) who incited across Facebook: “Send Renouf ricin in a get well card!”
I must express enormous gratitude to my Berlin attorney, Wolfram Nahrath. All is owed to his astute assessment of his client’s character, background and my Dresden trial’s potential to embarrass Germany’s political lawmaking masters. The outcome: Judge and prosecutor caved, capitulated and bowed-out, but withheld the signed and sealed “not guilty as charged” for three weeks in hopes of evading the attention of the world press. They wanted my case to die silently. But that is not going to happen.
My attorney suspects German authorities “were afraid about the contents of Renouf’s trial and of her usual international press attention.” Above all else, one can assume “higher ups” wanted to prevent a case law precedent being set that would have undermined the basic tenet of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The late, great Austrian attorney Dr. Herbert Schaller—the one who, on appeal, got the British historian David Irving released from his three-year prison sentence in Vienna—in 2007 said to me: “The intent of the penal code is to forbid everything that is not Marxist.”
TBR: What is that ultimate tenet of the postwar FRG’s “Basic Law”?
Renouf: So apropos to my far-reaching case—yet suppressed since 2008—is the statement by the German ex-Constitutional Court Judge Prof. Dr. Winfried Hassemer (scholar of law and former president of the Constitutional Court), to the Süddedeutsche Zeitung: “The simple questioning of an historical event can hardly be classified as an act designed to agitate. … In the end [holocaust-denial laws and accusations of agitating the public are] about stopping any reinvigoration of National Socialist sympathies.
TBR: But WWII ended, didn’t it?
Renouf: Here we are, over seven decades after WWII—begun by Britain and France—yet, since 1945, the German people have had no normal right to full self-governance; no right to enjoy full national sovereignty. The wartime “All-lies” ended up war-debt impoverished victims—but not their political masters who remain, to this day, the political overlords of Germany.
TBR: Why so?
Renouf: Because there is still no peace agreement officially ending WWII. It is as if it is still going on. Nahrath confirms and explains this in Part 2 of my Telling Films interview.1 Carlo Schmid, one of the authors of the postwar Basic Law, made the mistake of presuming that Germany’s lack of sovereignty would only be temporary until reunification.
Some laws of today’s Federal Republic, including Para. 130 Volksverhetzung, under which I was charged, are merely an extension of laws imposed by these military occupiers. Germany is not allowed to have normal politics. Academic work challenging certain interests and taboos can be defined arbitrarily as a form of “nazism,” and can therefore be banned. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 committed the Allied victors (the Soviet Union, America, Britain and France) to ensure that undefined “Nazi institutions” were not revived “in any form.” That is, WWII has not yet officially ended. And my trial would have brought this out—and other taboo truths.
Many more nations fell prey to Hollywood’s blatant anti-German race-hate propaganda. This anti-German attitude spread globally, cementing the swindle-justice of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46. This imbibed worldview was well diagnosed by Scots/French Professor Robert Faurisson. He said, “Most Americans, intoxicated by holocaust propaganda, are only too apt to find in the product of Jewish neuroses their basic view of a world made up of two camps. One is good (Jews and their associates) and the other is evil (Nazis and the like).”
TBR: Has no one else ever challenged the idea of making a stated opinion on a certain historical event a crime?
Renouf: In 2008, both Judge Hassemer and his fellow judge, Hoffmann-Riem, said, “The Holocaust-denial law should be repealed.” Judge Hassemer clarified: “I am not a friend of [imposing] a penalty on wrong opinions.” Judge Hoffmann-Reim, as cited in Tagesspiegel (June 2008), exclaimed: “I would have a problem following any political request for conviction.” He said, “The Constitutional Court has not delved much into the punishability of Holocaust denial.
My trial threatened to compel that “delve.” That is its geo-political significance.
TBR: Please tell us why you were in Germany. What were you doing there? What were the events that led up to your arrest? Why did the German police arrest you?”
Renouf: Back in 2012, I made a Telling Films documentary entitled “Dresden Holocaust 1945: An Apology to Germany Is Due.” But I had never actually been to Dresden or to one of the annual commemorations of the Anglo-American Allied firebombing of that city’s civilian population on Valentine’s Day, February 13-14, 1945. My friend Richard Edmonds, who had participated in my film, was going, so, I, too, decided to make the trip. At the scene, a German woman who had heard us chatting in English loudly declared: “You British have no right to be here!”
When the organizer heard the clamor, he invited me to address the issue publicly, and handed me the microphone. It was an impromptu moment and, yet, without hesitation, I gladly spoke for 10 minutes in English while being translated, sentence by sentence, before some 300 mourners who were surrounded by massed police cordons that were holding back hundreds of Antifa “terrorists” (as President Donald Trump has correctly identified them) who kept up a mindless, malicious and barbaric racket in an attempt to drown out the commemoration.
TBR: How did you begin your impromptu speech?
Renouf: I began by sympathizing with that German woman’s rightful concerns. I said how important it is that she knows why many distinguished people in Britain at the time spoke out against the terror bombing of German civilians. We were not all evil. For I knew that we were all standing on what really is hallowed ground. This was where the precision firebombing was so intense that the feet of innocent civilians melted to the pavement. There they stuck, burning alive from inextinguishable phosphorous. They were human torches—the greatest “man-fire” in history, as one psychologist put it. Attorney Nahrath described these victims as “human fire logs.” Thousands of the victims were mothers and children, many of them refugees who were fleeing into Dresden to escape the advancing Soviet invaders. The Germans were fighting to keep these Bolsheviks from conquering Europe and extinguishing our sovereign heritage. Today, the neo-Bolsheviks are back! Witness how our historical monuments are being razed by Marxists in Black Lives Matter guise all across Europe and North America.
TBR: How did you proceed?
Renouf: I said there was only one literal holocaust (holocaust: a burning wholly alive) during the 1940s in Europe, and that was of German civilians. (It was also perpetrated against Japanese civilians, to be 100% accurate.) I carefully defined my terms: Cremation is not a “holocaust.”
I neither spoke about the trademarked “Holocaust,” nor sought to compare anything with the literal holocaust of German civilians. I was careful because I knew that, in Germany, it is illegal to “diminish the Holocaust.” My speech was about German civilians and Dresden’s relevance today. My focus was on the killing of civilians.
Of course I went nowhere near what Professor Faurisson had said. I would have been locked up and they would have thrown away the key. Faurisson said, “The establishment of tribunals at which the victors, acting both as judges and prosecutors, put the vanquished on trial in patently sham proceedings. … Trials of that kind allow the children of Israel to exact vengeance on octogenarians accused, on the strength of unquestioned Jewish testimony, of ‘crimes against humanity’.”
TBR: We often hear that Allied aerial bombing was simply a spontaneous tit-for-tat.
Renouf: Not so. The Allied bombing plan was premeditated and meticulously calculated—not a spontaneous military decision, as in the case of Germans who were deliberately goaded into retaliatory raids. As Dennis Richard confirms in his Official History of the RAF: “The attack on the Ruhr was an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to attack London.” There can be no doubt of the warmongering nature of British leadership (comparable to Tony Blair’s lie of Iraqi WMDs) that propel our nations into destroying other nations who never wished war with us but are forced into retaliatory actions. This resonates to this day in the tragedy of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Libya and of many other regions where the modern-day Western Allies continue to “bring democracy to the Mideast” while installing their military bases in provocative and destructive so-called peace missions. How we long for a Jeffersonian America that believes that no meddling in foreign countries must be the golden rule.
TBR: Returning to the Allied bomber versus the German bomber, what was the difference?
Renouf: Before enacting the civilian bombing strategy, the British, with their U.S. Allies, set up trial-run rehearsals in America to figure out the maximum death count of non-combatant Germans that could be achieved. This was so grotesque in its deliberateness that mathematician Dr. Jacob Bronovski aided and abetted the Allied savagery, helping them experiment in the U.S. by fabricating atmospheric conditions indicative of those usually found in Germany. His diabolical scheme aimed to assess velocity and directional wind currents likely to maximize the greatest chances of burning alive the highest number of German working-class civilians in 60 German towns and cities.
Most of their houses were packed close together. This effort had nothing to do with military targets at all. The intended targets were, in fact, merely civilian “collateral damage”! In fact, the intent was to burn nearly 1 million innocent civilians alive, as Prof. Richard Overy, one of Britain’s most distinguished military historians, has said: “[T]he RAF hoped to kill 900,000 German civilians without raising any demur among wartime leaders except over its feasibility. … Somehow, bombing [from thousands of feet in the air] created a blind spot that allowed airmen to do to the enemy [civilian] population what soldiers could not.”
TBR: Were there some principled British individuals who spoke up?
Renouf: Yes and I listed some of their names to the assembled mourners to prove we British—then as now—are not all evil. And from what source do our ongoing British-American Allies continue relying upon for their “moral bombing” mentality? That was not a question I could answer in full from the microphone whilst standing in a German market square. Yet I did call the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials a swindle. In my film I cite Lord Hankey, founder of Britain’s modern civil service, who said: “There was something cynical and revolting in the spectacle of British, French and American judges sitting on the bench with colleagues representing nations that, before, during and since the trials, have perpetrated half the [world’s] political crimes.”
TBR: When was this pre-rehearsed Allied crime against humanity first disclosed?
Renouf: It was first quietly disclosed in 1961 in a little book called Science and Government by C.P. Snow. The psychopathic machinations of Professor Lindemann (not unlike the genocidal postwar plans for Germany cooked up by Henry Morgenthau), recorded by Snow, exposed that it was Lindemann who proposed a motion (later carried out) in an operation euphemistically called “de-housing,” quite as if this aerial carpetbombing would affect merely buildings and the homeless, when in fact it meant incinerating their inhabitants alive.
Snow, a government scientist, condemned Churchill and his merciless cronies for their terror-bombing war: “The British plans to bomb and destroy German working-class residential areas were plans motivated by a deep sadistic impulse to kill thousands of women and children.” Snow asked: “What will future generations think of us Britons? Will future generations think that we Britons forswore our humanity? They will have the right to say so.”
The Churchill-led advance to barbaric air warfare, concocted by the calculating likes of Bronovski, Portal and Lindemann, and carried forth by the Allies, was first brought to world attention in 1963 through the groundbreaking research of British military historian David Irving.
The Rt. Honorable Richard Stokes, (Labor MP and peace campaigner), asked: “Are we really content to bring our own civilization to ruin in order that the hammer and sickle shall fly from the North Sea to the Pacific? … I think we shall live to rue the day.”
TBR: Do you see some connection between this ever-increasing clamor for political correctness demanded today and the laws under which you were on trial in Dresden?
Renouf: Yes, but whilst I did dance on the wire when speaking at the Dresden commemoration, I did not and would not have wrong-footed myself by raising the dreaded specter of historical-source Revisionism in “the public square,” saturated as it was in secret surveillance spies and massed armed police. The frightful tragedy is this. These holocaust-denial laws even criminalize what one must not even dare ask oneself! Recall the anti-scientific consensus of 34 French historians published in Le Monde newspaper that condemned as criminal the mere thoughts of Professor Faurisson. Faurisson paraphrased German law: “One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was possible, since it happened. That is the requisite starting point of any historical inquiry into the subject. It is incumbent upon us to state this truth simply: There is not and there cannot be any debate on the existence of the [homicidal] gas chambers.”
Of course, this is borne out in the International Guidelines for Teaching About The Holocaust. On page 11 of this pamphlet it warns: “Care must be taken not to give a platform for deniers [genuine skeptics] … or seek to disprove their position through normal debate and rational argument.” So neither rational argument nor forensic self-reflection is allowed. Isn’t that more applicable to religious faith rather than forensic real-history lessons? As a former schoolteacher and university lecturer, I insist that is not so!
TBR: How did the mourners in the market square react to your words?
Renouf: Their gratitude was evident when I stressed the respect that British people have for the facts released from the War Ministry archive. Facts and documents show the Allies boasted of their carpet-bombing program designed to “baste” the civilians, as psychopathic Churchill put it.
Britain’s wartime Secretary of the Air Ministry J.M. Spaight, in his book Bombing Vindicated, put on record how Britain had to goad Adolf Hitler to bomb Britain because Hitler did not want to open that box. Spaight said: “Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany. There was no certainty, but there was a reasonable probability, that our capital and our [civilian] centers would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany.”
Moreover, not only does Churchill in his memoirs admit that “we fought Germany” (not we fought the regime), he makes plain his pathological envy of German industrial genius when, during a broadcast to the United States on April 27, 1941, he revealed it was not simply National Socialism but the German race itself he hated. He said, “There are less than 70 million malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable.”
TBR: Our readers are aware that your matrimonial home was formerly the home of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Is this somehow relevant to your trial?
Renouf: Before I answer that, I want to say that Chamberlain deserves a Nobel peace prize. He opposed the aerial warfare against civilians and sought peace. Churchill initiated the terror bombing, goaded for war and ignored every peace offer from Hitler.2
So, the answer is yes. It came up in my defense submissions. Peace settlement relates to how the very law under which I risked jail came into play. Churchill ignored every peace settlement proposed by the Third Reich, including the one brought by Rudolf Hess via Scotland in 1941. Knowledge of these peace offers was kept from the British and American public. The result: No peace settlement exists to this day between the Allied victors and Germany. Consequently Germany’s non-sovereignty leaves open a predicament whereby the Allied imposition of Holocaustianity’s blasphemy laws represses Germany’s forensic justice on matters to do with WWII historical-source criticism.
TBR: Did any postwar British statesmen ever expose how Churchill suppressed from British, French, and American citizens all knowledge of wartime Germany’s frequent peace proposals?
Renouf: Yes. The former Defense Minister Alan Clark did. He once said in a BBC program: “On May 28, 1940, Fairfax [Britain’s wartime foreign secretary] recommended to the War Cabinet that the Italians might be invited to arbitrate a settlement. Churchill realized that once you talk about terms, you are effectively committed to a ceasefire. And once an armistice is agreed, Churchill’s political position would be finished.”
TBR: Did you say all of this in your Dresden speech?
Renouf: No, but I would have during my trial. The extraordinary fabric of my defense case and its potential for geopolitical embarrassment is likely why, at the last minute, the German state chose to throw in the towel. No explanations need they give. We can only surmise.
In my Dresden ad lib, I did point out the relevance today of what the Allies got away with at the Nuremberg Trials, where judge and prosecutor had predetermined verdicts. Any child knows that this is hardly the way to establish the truth—via biased, anti-forensic judgment. And the world knows—even little children know—the consequences of criticizing [the false historical record or the true forces behind war and revolution] and so they fear even naming the perpetrators!
The crowd cheered and applauded gratefully when I said that people need to remember that the Allied firebombing barbarism was rained down not only on Dresden, but also upon civilians in 60 German cities. There is relevance for today. Ever since the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, when the British and Americans got away with their premeditated crime against humanity, all subsequent Allied wars have deliberately targeted civilians in evermore “moral bombing” wars. Moreover, those gratuitous wars have created millions of innocent refugees who are forced to flee into White heritage nations.
TBR: When did you get a sense that the police were moving in?
Renouf: At the moment when my spontaneous interpreter whispered he could not risk translating certain words, one of the policemen suddenly drew nearer. But no one tried to stop me.
I had said that when your country goes to war you may wish to play no part in it. But that’s not how it works in wartime; you have no choice! The simple fact that Jewish civilians were interned in camps is today regarded as a “war crime” and a “genocide,” regardless of what did or did not happen in the camps themselves. This is a topic I did not address knowing it is illegal in Germany to publicly express even the least skepticism about such matters. Indeed, we are not even allowed so much as ask (as Ursula Haverbeck has done) a question on a matter of historical forensics.
I pointed out that internment itself is hardly criminal, bearing in mind that both Britain and America interned enemy aliens as potential agents and fifth columnists. That is not to say that all aliens are fifth columnists, but that nations at war take no such risk. This applies also to world Jewry, when its leadership declared war on its host nation.3 Nations of people acting within nations cause great concern in their hosts.
Yet a prevailing “race exceptionalism” obscures what should not be surprising: that European Jews were placed in this enemy alien category, just as were German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans by FDR. As early as 1933, “Judea” declared a worldwide economic war on Germany. Recognition of this would alter the public perception about the “Holocaust” as depicted in Hollywood movies and the reasons Jews in Germany were interned by Hitler in the first place. I pointed out that it was not exceptionally cruel of Germans to intern Jews, a normal practice for nations in times of war. It was, in fact, Jewry’s world leaders at the time, Chaim Weizmann and Samuel Untermeyer, who are culpable for thus indicting all of Jewry as party to their fifth columnist declaration of what has been described by many Zionists themselves as “Judea’s holy war against Germany.” Not all Jews would have wished to be a party to this betrayal of Germany, but there is no individualism in wartime.
Consequently, the people of Germany were no more indictable for the fact that their government thereby was obliged to intern Europe’s Jews into camps than the people of the United States were indictable for their government interning Japanese residents, for instance, into camps. Yet it is encouraged universally to overlook the fact that Jewish world leaders were responsible for condemning all Jewry as enemy aliens, thereby obliging Germany to intern them.
TBR: So what happened next? Were you arrested right there?
Renouf: No, I went on to remark on a large sign hanging on a fence nearby which said: “Good Night White Pride.” I quoted the late Joe Sobran, who TBR readers will appreciate. Sobran observed that since it is people from the Third World who eagerly mass-migrate to White countries, but not the other way around, that this reality proves that White Western nations must be doing something right, something highly valuable, something people of other races want to be a part of. So I cried back: “Hello, White pride!”
TBR: What happened next?
Renouf: “I was arrested by heavily armed uniformed police officers the moment I ended my 10-minute ad lib and was hauled into a police van.
TBR: At that moment, what was going through your mind?
Renouf: When I realized my arrest also meant the event was ended half way through, I pleaded with my arresting officers to allow the scheduled speakers to continue with their commemoration, explaining that I was unscheduled and simply a person speaking from the crowd. But it was clear that they were on the lookout for any excuse to shut it down. Of course, one would expect many plainclothes and legal surveillance officers mingling among the mourners. The organizer himself had gained permission to hold the commemoration only by agreeing not to speak himself!
TBR: Later, how did the scheduled speakers react toward you?
Renouf: Alfred Schaefer, who’s now in prison, as TBR readers know,4 said (not that he was happy for me to be arrested) with typical generosity—despite losing his scheduled chance to speak—in the aftermath of my arrest: “Michele is in the international press. It’s as though we had done that in a very huge soccer stadium that was filled to the brim with people. She had said all the important stuff. And now they just amplified the message around the world by shutting her down. Having it shut down with her at the microphone—that is what we really needed to get this message out there. There’s nothing I could have said that would have been as fitting and as proper as what Lady Michele Renouf said.”
I was relieved when Richard Edmonds assuaged my sorrow on learning that the mourners were kettled afterwards on the street for four hours in the freezing cold. He said, “Had anyone else been speaking and arrested it would have been a non-event. The German media would not have even covered it. But because you were the one being hauled away, your celebrity status made it news.”
For example, leading British nationwide newspapers, The Independent and the Daily Mail, gave exceptional coverage in featured articles, as did other Australian, Russian Canadian, Jewish, Egyptian and Turkish press outlets.
TBR: What did the police charge you with?
Renouf: I was charged under Germany’s notorious criminal code with Volksverhetzung and, according to the charge sheet, I was: “Deliberately approving and downplaying the genocide carried out against the European Jews … in a manner used to endanger public peace.” What nonsense!
TBR: Had you been convicted for these crimes, what would have been the sentence?
Renouf: Possibly a minimum of at least five years for each of the cited charges.
TBR: So what happened next? Were you interrogated?
Renouf: Yes I spent nine hours with German police, who interrogated me, taking me to various locations where I was fingerprinted etc and eventually required to sign a statement. The first question my arresting officers asked was did I know Frau Haverbeck?5 I replied with pride that she was a personal friend and, in my assessment, the greatest exponent of the very finest of German qualities.
In turn I asked the police how many Antifa terrorists they had arrested who perennially brandish a huge banner Bomber Harris Do It Again! “None,” was their embarrassed reply.
In the police statement I explained my intention to come back from England to stand trial.
TBR: Were you then free to leave Germany?
Renouf: Yes. You see, I had learned from recording an interview with the late Viennese attorney Dr. Herbert Schaller for one of my Telling Film DVDs that he had gotten David Irving out of a three-year prison sentence after Irving had served 10 months behind bars in a Viennese jail. In an interview of some four hours, Dr. Schaller revealed that the law surrounding “Holocaust-denial” is kept “vague,” and that “the alleged industrial mass murder weapon [homicidal gas chambers] is not described in the legal code, at the same time it is illegal to query about it.” I will add that, because of the legal efforts of Dr. Schaller, a law had been passed to stop his legal successes.
TBR: Did you ever think of not returning to Germany? Of simply letting an attorney appear on your behalf?
Renouf: I never considered not returning, as I have a property there. I never considered letting an attorney appear without me. Certainly I wanted to face the charges. I knew that I had not quite broken the law. In fact, I remained in Germany for two months until my trial date—even cancelled booked interim flights home to avoid any possibility of Covid quarantine or travel lockdowns preventing me from coming before the Dresden court.
TBR: You had mentioned Alfred Schaefer. We all know his trial was held in a kangaroo court. You were not afraid that they would treat you in the same manner?
Renouf: Irrepressible Alfred is now in prison for three years with additional time for putting his politically incorrect arm up in a “Roman salute”—that is all it takes to land you in a German prison, putting up the wrong arm. He was mocking the nonsense of jailing gestures: “I was only showing how high my dog can jump,” he said. More jail time! Monika, his charming, musically gifted sister spent 10 months in a Munich jail for making a short video (unfortunately while on German soil) saying, “Sorry Mum. I was Wrong About the Holocaust.” The Schaefer siblings are dear friends, good souls.
TBR: What is to be done?
Renouf: There is no use in defying the law since judges are obliged to judge by their state-imposed tenets or suffer prosecution themselves—same goes for the attorneys. The only way to change things is to draw attention to the lawmakers. My trial would have taken that path. It would have challenged the very laws by which I would have been tried. In my 2008 Telling Films documentary about these trials, I cited two former German constitutional court judges, Hassemer and Hoffmann-Riem, mentioned earlier, who declared quite unequivocally that in their eminent opinion Germany should “repeal the Holocaust-denial law.” People should be free to consider historical events without fear of persecution, or losing their livelihoods by denouncers.
TBR: How did your attorney present you in your defense?
Renouf: When aged three, I was Australia’s version of Shirley Temple—singing and tap-dancing on radio for charity shows, in an era of cynical postwar need of childlike innocence. As I grew, I performed as a ballerina for a variety of charities and in beauty queen pageant fundraisers for the Spastic Center. Later on I chaired many major fundraisers and offered my services as an Elizabethan and labyrinth landscape designer and a major event organizer on the advisory board for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre etc. My attorney presented me as a “charity lady,” thus my Dresden presentation was characterized as products of a charitable disposition—hardly a disposition inclined toward committing “hate crimes.”
Nahrath brought out other particularly apropos aspects in my background. In 1941-45, my late husband, then aged 21, was a POW in Bavaria. He was a captured and interned New Zealand RAF captain. He learned German from his prison camp guard who taught him via Schiller’s poems—an amusing comparison I intended to make had I been jailed.
After the war, later known as “Frank the Bank” (so-called for founding New Zealand’s first merchant bank, later selling it to Barclays) he worked with Hermann Abs, then head of the Deutsche Bank with whom he helped return (alas!) wartime Germany’s independent banking, back into the hands of the international monetary system. For this work, Francis Renouf was awarded the highest Order of the Federal Republic of Germany as a tribute to individuals for services provided to the nation. For helping to make Germany’s prewar surpluses available to Britain’s trade benefit, he was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen.
My particular connections with these historical figures and events meant that “vivid history would be performed there in court,” as foreseen by my astute attorney.
TBR: Please share with us some of that evidence.
Renouf: Something must have happened higher up because the system-compliant German court suddenly went into reverse. It has no obligation to explain why. After 32 months—determined to put me on trial—suddenly, two days before the trial, they abandoned their case. One can only surmise why. Putting a British citizen on trial (or at least this one) technically was putting a member of the Allies on trial since no peace treaty with Germany was ever actually signed to end the war. That does not mean they cannot put me on trial. They can. British citizens can be extradited from England to Germany for such things.
Widely unknown, the fact is that the war is still going on. Germany remains technically under occupation and its legal system still remains under the Allies’ wartime influence. That is why the anti-Jeffersonian Americans (versus Jeffersonian “no meddling in foreign countries”) can maintain such a large military presence there. And, as my attorney points out, Germany cannot refuse to invade other countries, like Afghanistan, if so ordered.
TBR: Was there a deal, or, as we would call it in America, a pre-trial settlement?
Renouf: No. There was absolutely no deal at all! Astonishing as it sounds, in my peculiar case, the court and the prosecutors were the ones who suddenly asked my attorney to ask me if I would be willing to let them lay down the case. Have you ever heard of such a thing—a prosecutor asking the accused for permission to drop their charges? I think they did this because there is newly released material from the British Archive that would have been introduced during my appeals to higher courts. This could have embarrassed the state. We have reason to believe that the prosecutors became aware that they were at great risk of losing their case and, had I been acquitted in a public courtroom, my case would stand every chance of shaking ongoing affection for some of their anti-free speech laws.
It may have occurred in certain quarters that it would not suit certain German interests for the media to take an interest in my historical proximity, via my late husband, to two of Sir Frank’s good friends and successive heads of the Deutsche Bank. In the case of Abs, Sir Frank closely collaborated with the de-Nazified Abs in their reconstructing of Germany’s banking system. In the case of Abs’s successor, the young head of the Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, he likewise was Sir Frank’s chum. Herrhausen’s assassination remains an unsolved mystery. These and other peculiar connections to my background led my attorney to foresee that what he called “vivid history” might be “performed in court.”
In addition, for the first time since WWII, a senior member of the British royal family and heir to the throne, Prince Charles, went to Berlin to lay a wreath on Germany’s Commemoration Day. That too may have played into why my trial was ended so suddenly. Perhaps fear of a geo-political embarrassment. What if I, as the last wife of the late Sir Francis Renouf—decorated by the German government, as I mentioned earlier—had been featured again in world headlines for sitting in a Dresden prison for speaking of my heartfelt sympathy for all civilians targeted in wartime? At the same time, post-Brexit trade economists were celebrating a new dawn of German-British special trading arrangements. They did not want to risk a waggish media even mentioning Renoufgate! Court and prosecutor were scared of being mocked in the worldwide mass media.
TBR: We’re living in a crazy world. Would you advise people who may be, shall we say, not exactly politically correct to just stay out of Germany?
Renouf: It’s not just Germany. There are 18 countries in Europe (including Israel) that have made it a crime to question the official narrative of WWII or engage in politically incorrect speculation.
TBR: Will you ever be going back to Germany? Is there a possibility that you could still face legal jeopardy if you return to Germany?
Renouf: Yes. I shall go back to Germany. No, I face no further jeopardy, save that of forgetting where I am and—oops—frankly uttering a historical fact! For instance, I happened to be overheard, when out walking, saying “criminal Israel” and—oops—I was frontpage news in the Hessen regional newspaper, again. I was characterized as a “blot on its landscape”! At any rate, about 10 years ago, I bought the home, (a 1911 country hunting house and hotel then owned by the late German attorney, nationalist and historical Revisionist Manfred Roeder. The house has been dubbed the “Reichshof” by newspapers across Germany due to Manfred’s historic connections. You see, when Adolf Hitler handed the baton to Grand Adm. Karl Dönitz in 1945, Dönitz in turn handed it over to Roeder. It is situated on the Brothers Grimm Fairytale Trail in central Germany, known as Rotkäppchenland due to the region’s discovery there of the Little Red Riding Hood cautionary tale. So, yes, I will keep returning to my home in Germany. Those legal charges against me are ended and cannot be retried.
TBR: Any last word?
Renouf: I am proud to be associated with The Barnes Review and its mission to bring history into accord with the facts. In my Telling Films, I have endeavored to champion the right of historical source-critical Revisionists to be heard.
Endnotes:
1 Can be found on the internet at modeltrial.blogspot.com.
2 See What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933-1940. By Dr. Friedrich Stieve. Written by Germany’s foremost diplomatic historian of the early 20th century, this work maps out all the numerous times that Adolf Hitler made unconditional offers of peace to all the nations of Europe—and how the major anti-German belligerents, France and Britain, turned down these offers every time. Softcover, 93 pages, #693, $10 minus 10% for TBR subscribers from TBR, P.O. Box 550, White Plains, MD 20695.
3 See TBR, January/February 2014, “Adolf Hitler’s Swift Response to Judea’s Declaration of War.” Hitler speech translated by Theresa Wettstein, p. 9.
4 See TBR, November/December 2020 for an extensive interview by TBR’s John Friend with Monika Schaefer about her experiences.
5 Ninety-two-year-old Ursula Haverbeck has been in and out of prison for years. She has been called the “Grande Dame of Revisionism.” According to Renouf, Frau Haverbeck embodies the four inseparable Classical Greek virtues in which wisdom with a forensic approach is never to be surrendered. After serving a recent jail sentence, the nonogenarian was charged again for discussing her case in a YouTube video.
This article appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of The Barnes Review. Click here for more information.