Society for Threatened Peoples lodges a complaint against Hanover’s police superintendent, Hans-Dieter Klosa

Racist remarks by the police superintendent in Hanover, Hans-Dieter Klosa, against "Aussiedler” (Russians of German origin, i.e. settlers or descendents of settlers from former German settlements) who are returning to Germany have caused the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) to lodge a complaint at the public prosecutor’s office in Hanover for possible incitement of the people, collective racist slander of a German minority and for the violation of the most elementary rules of law. The planned deployment of Russian policemen in Hanover against German citizens infringes in the opinion of the human rights organisation the liberal constitutional rule of law of Germany.

Klosa had attacked the Russian-German resettlers as a "clientele” which stands out "by its readiness for violence”: this was reported in the "Göttinger Tageblatt” and the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung on 31st May. "Unfortunately it is not always the case that a friendly approach towards the ‘Aussiedler’ brings the desired result.” Russian policemen from Hanover’s twin city, Ivanovo, were to play a guest role for up to three months a year. Klosa was said to be looking for cooperation with policemen from the half-totalitarian Russia in order to "find out more about how to deal with Russian ‘Aussiedler’”. And then the idea was to send policemen from Hanover nowhere else but to Ivanovo to learn an energetic and resolute approach towards resettlers.

"The Society for Threatened Peoples regards these blanket collective accusations as racist agitation”, said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch. "Klosa must know the evaluation of the criminal statistics in Lower Saxony, which show that the resettlers’ criminality rate in the province of Lower Saxony is lower than that of the foreigners living here and of the native Germans.” Comparable statistics of the province of Hessen (a lower level of criminal criminality of the German resettlers) and of the city of Hamburg (the same level of criminality as the German population) of the year 2006 should be general knowledge. In a study of the Ministry for Health, Social Affairs, Women and Family of the province of North Rhine-Westphalia the number of ‘Aussiedler’ suspected of having committed an offence in the province is given as 2.4% as a proportion of the population of 4.5%. Criminal young people make up a small group, there is no criminal resettler as such. A great deal of the criminality among young people is a passing development, which often takes the form of an episode.

"Our human rights organisation draws attention to the fact that the police in Russia are involved in many murders of opposition politicians, journalists and human rights workers, that demonstrations of political parties are beaten down by force, that the police arrest citizens who are protesting in a non-violent manner”, criticised Zülch. In the assessment of the freedom of the press by "Reporters without Borders” Russia takes 147th place behind many dictatorships. According to "Transparency International” Russia is one of the most corrupt states in the world (in place 121 out of 163 countries covered in the survey). "Instead of employing prejudiced policemen against German citizens Hanover’s police should at last engage a sufficient number of police of Russian-German origin and employ Russian-German psychologists”, said Zülch.

The newspaper "Bild” agitates in the style of the old Nazi newspaper "Der Stürmer”

The Society for Threatened Peoples regrets that precisely the Hanover edition of "Bild” welcomed on 30th May 2007 in the style of "Der Stürmer” ("The Stormtrooper”) the use of Russian policemen accompanied by a German colleague in the capital of Lower Saxony and terms the German resettlers as "drunken Russian resettlers”. This is a choice of words reminiscent of Nazi terminology, which was thought to belong to the past and which really contradicts the principles of the publishing-house of Springer.

350,000 dead – every fourth Russian German fell a victim to Stalin

The Society for Threatened Peoples takes up the agitation of the police superintendent of Hanover against the Russian German ethnic group to point out the dreadful fate of the Russian Germans under the Soviet rule.

Already in the years of revolution and civil war thousands of Russian German farmers were the victims of mass shootings by the Red Army, the special units of the Bolsheviks and the so-called Makhno-formations. The catastrophic famine of 1921/22 also claimed many human victims. In the later autonomous socialist Volga Republic 48,000 there were 48,000 dead registered as a result of the famine. At the beginning of collectivisation in 1929 50,000 well-off farmers were deported to Siberia. About 20% of them suffered a premature death. Six to seven million people died in the years 1932/33 in the famine which was caused by the state, and among them were 100,000 Germans. In the mass shootings during the terror of 1937/38 between 53,000 and 56,000 Russian Germans were killed. At least these victims have been completely rehabilitated today.

During the Second World War 794,000 Russian Germans were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. 350,000 women, young people and men were put into forced labour camps during the war. It must be assumed that some 60,000 to 70,000 Germans were victims of these camps. It must also be assumed that 70,000 – 80,000 died during deportation or as a result of the hardly bearable conditions in the places to which they were exiled, meaning that there were altogether 150,000 victims of the compulsory measures in the years 1941 – 1945.

These figures have been set very low. The number of victims will have been about 350,000. If one is to take the Convention of the United Nations for the prevention and sanction of genocide as a reference for these crimes, the elements of a crime, i.e. genocide would in human terms certainly apply.