"Germany exists independently of State borders"

Dateline 14th August 2006

INTRODUCTION BY RODNEY ATKINSON German Burschenschaften are traditional, historically based student fraternities with militarist characteristics which even today conduct initiation ceremonies involving sword play! They resemble a kind of freemasonry and have always been recruiting agencies for higher employment in German business, political life and the military and were more than sympathetic to the imperial ambitions of the Kaiser (First World War). Although they are mostly associated with the CDU, as the principal Conservative political movement in Germany, in this, as in other matters of German nationalism, there is little opposition from the Social Democrats!

Since the fall of Nazi Germany the Burschenschaften have attacked the loss of German nationalism and in particular the loss of German territory in the East. They are today associated with the ethnic German movement (founded by the Nazis and funded by the German State today) which we have covered extensively on this website (see in particular the button on our home page "Nazi Regions"). They regard as German whole areas of other countries where Germans used to live (Sudetenland in the Czech Republic) or still live (parts of Belgium, Denmark, Poland etc).

The vast majority of its members have academic qualifications and some of their lodges have invited extreme nationalistic political figures to address them - the most notorious being an Austrian Burschenschaft's invitation to the British holocaust denier David Irving (now in prison in Austria)

German Foreign Policy reported earlier this year:

One of the largest academic associations in Germany, the Deutsche Burschenschaft, raises, in a recent publication territorial claims against Poland and Russia ("German Eastern Territories").

They also claim as German parts of Austria, the Czech Republic (the Sudetenland, over which Britain almost went to war with Germany in 1938! - ed), Belgium, Italy and Denmark. The Association also demands in the recently published collection of its basic beliefs more support for German speaking minorities in the whole of Europe. Indeed such work is already supported by the German Government to the tune of 16m Euros a year.

Membership is about 15,000 (with some 13,000 having university qualifications) in 120 lodges, many working in key social and economic positions in society. Even the Social Democratic Party refused to distance itself from this ethnically based group elements of which associate with political extremists.

As the group pointed out in 2005 "The German Reich in its borders of 31st December 1937 continues to be recognised in German law". The author was until recently Vice President in the Official Archive of the German State claimed that there was "no reason to give up the German claim on these territories". [1]

In its 2005 Handbook the Burschenschaft writes: "By Germany we understand the German inhabited area in Central Europe from which Germans have been illegally expelled….Germany exists independently of State borders"

Whole areas are of course "administered by Poland" but "a loss of territory in the sense of the extension of Polish sovereignty" had not taken place claimed the Vice President of the University of Wuezburg, Hannes Kaschkat, in the name of the Deutsche Burschenschaft.

The DB sees the concept of Germany "not in the State but in the settlement area of the German people". Defined as German are all those who by their descent, language and culture belong to and give their loyalty to the German people (Volk, could possibly be translated as race - ed). This would therefore include the areas of South Tirol in Italy, German parts of Belgium and parts of "North Schleswig" in Denmark claims the Handbook an there can be no doubt about the "German character of the Sudeten territory". (Needless to say this kind of logic "people above state" was the principal characteristic of the racial and territorial claims of the Nazis between the two world wars - ed)

The DB claims that outside the official German language area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein) there live some 14 million "Foreign Germans".

In addition to the 16m Euros provided by the State the DB gives support to the spread of German culture and sees the "cultural engagement of Germany and Austria abroad" as "also a political engagement" having "important consequences for the economic development of German interests". Since 1996 the DB has its own "Burschenschaft Foundation for national minority and ethnic group rights in Europe" in Saarbruecken.

Needless to say the nationalistic DB attacks the Allies after the Second World War for "systematically destroying the German national consciousness and the national will to self assertion (!) through a long term and deep seated re-education programme". This, together with a "one sided theory of the past" represented a kind of "psychological war". Today therefore the DB believes that the "crimes of the Allies must be exposed and published in equal manner and pursued as vigorously as German war crimes". (4) (Here again we see, as in the inter war years under the Nazis an attempt to relativise German aggressive war by putting the defenders of democracy and nationhood on the same moral footing as their destroyers and the invaders on the same moral plane as the resistance!)

When in Governemtn the Social Democrat party refused to support an attempt to declare membership of Burschenschaften as incompatible to party membership (6) and a "Working Group for Social Democrat Corporate members" which includes DB members is being formed.

Individual Burschenschaften regularly offer neo-fascists an opportunity to speak. For instance the Burschenschaft Olympia in Vienna invited the holocaust denier David Irving in November 2005 to speak. Irvings has since been convicted and imprisoned for the crime of "holocaust denial".

By contrast with the provocative acts of some of the radical members of the Burschenschaften and the negative response of the mass media the DB's academic activities in promoting the revisionism of Greater Germany seem relatively harmless. But under such an academic gloss the neo Nazi political elites establish their theories in the Universities and modernise the traditional concepts of German hegemony in State foreign policy.

[1] Klaus Oldenhage: Die deutschen Ostgebiete und das Sudetenland, in: Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft. Ausgabe 2005.
[2] Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft. Ausgabe 2005.
[3] Burschenschaftliche Blätter Nr. 1/2005.
[4] Deutsche Burschenschaft: Handbuch der Deutschen Burschenschaft. Ausgabe 2005.
[5] In the 1990s for instance the Burschenschaft Hansea in Hamburg claimed as members, inter alios one Ministerial adviser in the German Defence Ministry two in the Treasury, a German military representative in NATO, countless judges, company directors and managers in significant German corporations.
[6] Kurt Beck (Ministerpräsident von Rheinland-Pfalz), Sigmar Gabriel (Bundesumweltminister), Hubertus Heil (SPD-Generalsekretär), Mathias Platzeck (SPD-Vorsitzender), Inge Wettig-Danielmeier (SPD-Schatzmeisterin). Einfluss Alter Herren bis in den Parteivorstand, Spiegel Online 17.01.2006.