Wilhelm Stäglich

Wilhelm Stäglich (b. 11 November 1916 in Hamburg, German Empire; d. 5 April 2006 in Glücksburg, Schleswig-Holstein) was a German World War II Luftwaffe officer, later a jurist, judge, and a Holocaust revisionist.

Life

During the Second World War, he served from mid-July to mid-September 1944 as an Ordonnanzoffizier (orderly officer) on the staff of an anti-aircraft detachment (Fallschirm-Flakabteilung/Fallschirm-Flak-Regiment 12) stationed near the Auschwitz camp. As part of his duties, he maintained contact with the SS camp command, and had unlimited access to the Auschwitz main camp, where the command was headquartered.

He studied law and political science at the University of Rostock and the University of Göttingen, from where he received a doctorate in law (Dr. jur.) in 1951. For years he served as a Finance Court judge in Hamburg. He was the author of numerous articles on legal and historical subjects.

Disturbed by the obvious discrepancies between what he had witnessed during the war at Auschwitz, and the portrayal of the camp that emerged at war’s end, he resolved -- after years of silence -- to speak out, and to undertake a serious investigation of this important subject. His detailed book, Der Auschwitz-Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit, was published in 1979. The book is a systematic, critical examination of the documents, testimonies, confessions and personal accounts that portray Auschwitz as a center of programmatic extermination by gassing and other means. In 1986, an English-language edition of his book was published under the title Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence.

As punishment for a revisionist essay, he was dismissed as a judge in 1975 by court order, and forced into early retirement with a reduction of his statutory pension. His book was soon banned by German authorities, and in 1983 German police raided his publisher’s offices and confiscated the remaining unsold copies.That same year the University of Göttingen “withdrew” or cancelled Stäglich’s doctoral degree.

In 1979 the Tübingen-based Grabert published Stäglich's book Der Auschwitz-Mythos – Legende oder Wirklichkeit (The Auschwitz Myth - Legend or Reality), in which he denied the existence of gas chambers in the National Socialist concentration camps and concentration camps, and stated that all documents relating to the Holocaust were forgeries. As early as 1980 this book was seized nationwide[3] on the order of the state court of Stuttgart, and in 1982 it was placed on a list of materials that may not be distributed to young readers, following a decision by Germany's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons. The decision to confiscate the book was upheld by the Federal Court of Justice in 1983. Following this, the University of Göttingen enacted proceedings against Stäglich in order to formally disaccredit the doctoral degree he had earned there in 1951. Eckhard Jesse, a German political scientist and authority on radical politics, has defended the publication of the book The Auschwitz Myth. Stäglich, he says, was stripped of his doctoral title because it was deemed to be undeserved, following a law dating from 1939. Jesse: "Even those who see his work as anti-Semitic – and here comes the warning – must question these decisions for two reasons. Firstly it is patronising to the public, who are assumed to lack judgement, hardly evidence of liberality; second, the far-right sees the decision as an affirmation, and outsiders might also believe, that there 'must be something' to Stäglich's arguments. You get the impression an example is being made [of Stäglich]." Stäglich appeared together with Jürgen Rieger as a speaker at a far-right event commemorating the Holocaust critic Thies Christophersen, who died in 1997.

External links

• Revisionists.com: Wilhelm Stäglich

Article archives

• Revisionst Personalities: Stäglich, Wilhelm (Codoh)