Tino Chrupalla, June 17, 2020, Memorial, June 17, 1953

Tino Chrupalla

Memorial, June 17, 1953

German Bundestag, June 17, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/165, pp. 20550-20551

[Tino Chrupalla is a national chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland and an AfD Bundestag member from the eastern German state of Saxony. He here participates in the Bundestag’s commemoration of the rising against communist rule in East Germany in 1953.]

Right honorable Herr President. Honored colleagues. I want also to welcome the representatives of the 17. June 1953 association on the tribune.

We today remember the people’s rising of June 17, 1953, in which at least 55 people died – by way of state violence in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany. Among the victims were women and children.

Besides Leipzig and Berlin, my home of East Saxony/Lower Silesia was a center of resistance. The protest was directed not only against the social and economic conditions under which the people had to suffer. The rage was also aimed at the communist rule of force and against the post-war order. In Gorlitz and Niesky, workers and brave citizens stormed the MfS offices and jails and disarmed the state powers. The mayor was spontaneously voted out of office. For a few hours, Gorlitz was a free city.  

But the rising was soon put down with brutal military force. In the days following the rising, the citizens were terrorized by house searches and arrest. The government designated the rising as an attempted fascist coup. In the following months, 10,000 people were arrested. 16 alleged ring leaders of the rising in Niesky were sentenced in a show trial in Dresden. The wife of the lead defendant in Gorlitz received the following two-liner from the state prosecutor:

We inform you that Lothar Markwirth was sentenced to life imprisonment on 18.7.1953. The property was confiscated.

Two death sentences were issued and carried out. Despite pleas for mercy, Erna Dorn and Ernest Jennrich were executed by guillotine.  Responsibility for the harsh judgment was ascribed to the First Lady of the DDR terror justice, Comrade Hilde Benjamin – in the West, also known as the “The Red Guillotine”.

For me, remembrance means to once again call events to mind. And to remember means to give the dead an appropriate place in our consciousness. They died as martyrs for freedom – for our freedom.

I do not understand everything that the Federal Center for Political Education is doing.Yet I welcome the fact that those murdered on June 17 have been presented on the homepage by name and with pictures. A national memorial for the victims of the communist rule by force in Germany is still outstanding – the AfD in contrast looks forward expectantly to its rapid implementation.

The era of the Stalinist Soviet occupation of Germany is ended. And Russia has also freed itself of the communist rule of force. May our countrymen who lost their lives on June 17 rest in peace. And may all the others who were politically persecuted, who in the following years had to suffer imprisonment, find their peace. May our country in the future remain spared from every form of violence and foreign rule.

I thank you.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Ulrike Schielke-Ziesing, May 29, 2020, EU Unemployment Security

Ulrike Schielke-Ziesing

EU Unemployment Security

German Bundestag, May 29, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/64, pp. 20468-20469

[Ulrike Schielke-Ziesing is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. She is a pensions administrator and member of the Bundestag social security committee. She here responds to the European Union’s proposed SURE (Support to mitigate the risks of unemployment) program.]

Ursula von der Leyen cannot quite let go of her old office as Defense Minister. The SURE program she has presented is, according to her words, a second line of defense. I do not much hold with military concepts, quite specifically not when it comes to the EU and social questions.

By means of the SURE program, loans up to 100 billion euros will be extended to the member states. For solidarity and for the securing of the risks of the EU, all member states shall at times voluntarily enter into a total counter guarantee of at least 25 percent of the means. We thereby cross the threshold to a debt union. For you, ladies and gentlemen of the government coalition, it has been basically a matter of creating a super-national EU state in which the national parliaments or courts shall not longer play a role, as we could recently well observe in the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court and, before all, in the reaction of Brussels thereto. Yet more EU harms Europe.  

How then shall the means of the distinctive European social systems be justly apportioned? In the end, the German taxpayer finances the unconditional Spanish basic income. Like a prayer wheel, you indeed just repeat ever the same mantra: It can only be good for Germany when it is good for Europe – but that is not right. In the long run, it cannot be good for Germany if our taxpayers are to permanently rescue Europe. That is the result of your European policy.

Why cannot the European neighbor countries maintain budget discipline like Germany? How can you declare to our citizens, who with steady discipline have saved and gone without, while the primarily southern EU countries have not done it, that we must now rescue these? SURE shall certainly be a credit program, secured by the guarantees of the EU states. Yet when these cannot be paid back, a debt conversion would be possible. And who guarantees that the debts will then not simply be remitted?

We in Germany have just now decided on a a supplementary budget of a sum of 156 billion euros. An additional will follow to rescue our domestic employees; since the reserves of the Federal Agency for Labor will no longer suffice. Throughout our entire social security system, the contributions are falling off. Next year at the latest, there will be required a massive, additional supply from the Federal budget. Estimates of reduced tax revenues in this year are around 40 billion euros at the federal level. It does not appear much better for next year. It would thus be important to concentrate on our employees, on our economy, on our budget, before saving the entire world. 

When will you, as representatives of the people – I yet again emphasize: As politicians elected by the German people – finally draw a line and stop squeezing to the last drops of tax money our hard working people in Germany? Germany is a global leader in duties and taxes.

            Carsten Schneider (SPD): What nonsense!

As of today, we have diverse European aid mechanisms, a great portion of which are financed by Germany. To me, Germany appears to be the lifeguard of Europe. No matter who, and for which reason, gets into trouble in the water, the German taxpayer jumps in and saves the day. Yet what happens when the lifeguard himself is drowning?

Precisely that could happen with this plan. We save countries whose citizens are wealthier than we are. Aid for self-help in this situation would be more effective. In a Europe of Vaterländer, we must help our neighbors. Yet we should not do all work for them. The present misery is of political origin and for that the governments of the member states must answer, and not the German taxpayers.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Tobias Peterka, May 28, 2020, EU State Prosecutor’s Office

Tobias Peterka

EU State Prosecutor’s Office

German Bundestag, May 28, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/163, p. 20323

[Tobias Peterka is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria. He is a lawyer and here responds to various proposals concerning the establishment of a European Union State Prosecutor’s Office.]

Frau President. Right honorable colleagues.

The European Union confirmed that it has a corruption problem – look just now at the present hour. The money which it self-evidently gathers in from its capable members is quite plainly, Herr Fechner, diverted into dark channels and indeed often into projects of little good to the countries.  Bike paths in Italy were simply built three times on paper. Orders for bridge construction in Spain were simply placed with known relations. With late Roman decadence, the EU is being drained, and thereby naturally to its heart’s last, beating chamber: Germany.

            Patrick Sensburg (CDU/CSU): The AfD is still blathering!

Thus, what is to be done? At the summit level, nothing was done. There certainly was conversation, yet the majorities lie with the “Club Med”. Loosening the standards of the bureaucratic apparatus simply expands the arrangements of the permanent bureaucratic structures, one of which, independent of the national states, is the EUStA [European State Prosecutor’s Office]. This then also just as wonderfully fits into the union’s narrative of statehood – that, politically, no more cabbage is to be grown. Fine. The Romanians then still sought to somehow to prevent someone, who is understood to be particularly well acquainted with Romanian carpet, from becoming chief of the governing authority. Well, fine; those are Brussels details.

We thus now have it, the EU State Prosecutor. Competence: To proceed against European law to the financial detriment of the Union. Foundation of inquiry organization: None, since the self-abnegation of the individual states fortunately does not yet go that far. For actual, on-site measures, it will be necessary to continue to refer to the national authorities. Whether that may generally work – for example, in Romania – could already be an afterthought.

Yet here again primarily appears the exemplary hubris of the EU. It even could again be plainly said: It is desired to behave, across the board and piece by piece, like a state; just minimal and inconspicuous; growing, yet daring and completely open. And thus plainly not just concerning the revenge fantasies about the insubordinate German decision in regards the ECB [European Central Bank], but also in regards the EUStA. The highest-paid, de facto directed completely from Brussels, State Prosecutor – an attack upon the primacy of the member states which alone are democratic. It is good that here a portion will hold out; among others, Poland and Sweden will not take part.  

Yet, each knows quite precisely who actually sets the pace at this EUStA. A political coup [Durchgriff], in fact not publicly formal, as unfortunately in Germany, but by a covert oligarchy, as previously – everyone knows it – at the EUGH [European Court of Justice]. Frau Kövesi wants to quite well acquaint herself with the Romanian social swamp [Sozisumpf] – for that, bravo! – yet she is equally quite well acquainted with how the EU bureaucratic structure operates: First, demand more money at once. Second, more competence!

In many of the member states, it is also openly fantasized – we have heard it here – of the fight against terror as a new competence field or equally as a complete competence in criminal law. The Bund Deutscher Kriminal Beamte [Union of German Criminal Officials] quite openly desires an EU criminal law with EU rules of procedure and even an EU-FBI – which already in name carries the coerced degradation of the member states into mere states of the Union.  

The existing EU Agency for Voluntary Criminal Justice Cooperation will thereby be definitely undermined. That was something which once halfway functioned, together with the EJN [European Judicial Network] and the OLAF [European Anti-fraud Office]. But no, centralism is the means of choice; we have seen it here. Germany will willingly open itself, while other countries will allow the EUStA to run idle. Once again, in neo-German, a lose-lose for Goody Two-shoes. From us, a clear and decisive Nein to this proceeding.

Many thanks.

[Translated by Todd Martin]