Germany silences pro-lifers, homeschoolers, creationists

A 55-year-old Lutheran pastor has been found guilty of "volksverhetzung" or "incitement of the people" by a German court and will spend a year in jail after an Erlangen court claimed he made a statement denying the Holocaust suffered by the Jews at the hands of Nazi-Germany during World War II.

Johannes Lerle compared Germany's abortion rate of 150,000 annually to the murder of Jews in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

According to Life Site, though the pastor has been jailed for anti-abortion activities in the past, his current one-year jail term stemmed specifically from charges of Holocaust denial and not from his statements comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust, as it claims news sources erroneously reported.

However, Lerle has faced prison time in the past for voicing his opposition to abortion.

"Previously, he had been jailed for eight months for calling abortionists 'professional killers.' An allegation which the court ruled to be slanderous because the court says the unborn are not human," an anonymous pro-life activist in Germany told Salem Voice Ministries.

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"Berlin is Germany's abortion capital. For every 1,000 babies born in Berlin, 344 were killed in their mother's womb," Pro-life With Christ reports. "In the city with 3.4 million inhabitants 10,024 babies were aborted [in 2006]."

However, such figures fail to account for the substantial number of unrecorded abortions – which are estimated to be equal to the total number of reported abortions.

Other high-profile religious leaders have also condemned Germany's growing acceptance of abortion. According to a BBC report, the Roman Catholic Church publicly condemned government plans to allow the sale of abortion pill RU-486 in 1998. Archbishop of Cologne Joachim Meissner made a comparison between taking the abortion pill and the use of gas in the Holocaust.

Gunter Annen is another pro-life activist who has faced a similar fate at the hands of a German court. In 2005, he asked to end "unjust abortions in medical practice" and was sentenced to 50 days in jail because the courts claimed the term "unjust" can be interpreted to mean "illegal." People who have abortions are not prosecuted if patients receive counseling and terminate the pregnancy within three months of conception.

Germany uses threats of "volksverhetzung," a tactic once used by Nazis against their enemies, to intimidate many of its citizens – including homeschoolers.

As WND previously reported, a German court ordered teenager Melissa Busekros to be taken from her home by a police squad and detained in a psychiatric hospital for being homeschooled. She was later returned to her family when an appeals court ruled she was no longer in danger.

In a separate WND report, a federal prosecutor in the German state of Hesse is seeking three-month prison terms for a mother and father who homeschool their six children, even though the family already has paid fines for violating the nation's Hitler-era homeschooling ban and made plans to move.

Officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, the pre-eminent homeschool advocacy organization in the world, are actively involved in a number of cases. Estimates are that there are about 400 homeschool families in Germany – virtually all of them either forced into hiding or in court.

Many fear the ever-present threat of "volksverhetzung" in contemporary Europe, as it is being used to silence and jail conservative and orthodox citizens for voicing their own deeply felt beliefs.

The charge may soon be used to combat creationism as well. On June 26, the Council of Europe, or CoE, Europe's main human-rights body, is scheduled to vote on a proposal advocating the fight against creationism in its 47 member states.

According to CoE's Parliamentary Assembly report, creationists are dangerous "religious fundamentalists" who propagate "forms of religious extremism."

"Creationism, born of the denial of the evolution of species through natural selection, was for a long time an almost exclusively American phenomenon," the report says. "Today creationist theories are tending to find their way into Europe … [T]his is liable to encourage the development of all manner of fundamentalism and extremism, synonymous with attacks of utmost virulence on human rights."

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