FORMER JASPER PARK WARDEN ON TRIAL FOR HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Self-styled warrior for social justice Monika Schaefer prosecuted in Germany
Monika Schaefer spent years as a warden at Jasper National Park.
She was an environmental activist, a spokesperson for the Jasper Environmental Association.
She was a musician, a violin and viola teacher who performed all over Jasper and Hinton. She was a perennial candidate for the Green party, running in federal elections in 2006, 2008 and 2011.
But this Monday, Schaefer went on trial in a Munich courtroom. She’s charged with six counts of Volksverhetzung.
The literal translation is sedition. In German law, it’s more accurately defined as incitement of hate.
It’s the term German authorities use to prosecute those who deny the Holocaust.
Schaefer, you see, is an antiSemitic hate-monger. She uses the internet to spread her noxious, irrational belief that the Holocaust, the Nazi regime’s meticulous mission to wipe out the Jews of Europe, never happened.
And Schaefer, who once described herself to Postmedia as a social justice warrior, doesn’t just insist that one of the bestdocumented events in modern history is a lie. She blogs about the dangers of the “Jew World Order” and Jewish plots to destroy the white race by encouraging non-white immigration.
In 2016, Schaefer posted two videos to YouTube, one in English, one in German, outlining her arguments for why the Holocaust is a fraud.
The English-language video begins and ends with Schaefer playing merry tunes on her fiddle.
Schaefer, her hair in schoolgirl braids, chatters about how hard it was to grow up as the child of German immigrants, to be ashamed that her parents and grandparents were somehow monsters who had been complicit in genocide.
She talks about how “healing” it was to embrace the belief that the Holocaust never happened.
She calls the Holocaust the “six-million lie” — or what she terms “the biggest and most pernicious, persistent lie in all of history.”
“I do this out of love,” Schaefer told Postmedia at the time.
“I am at the heart of the peace movement. I would like nothing more than peace on Earth, and the lies and deception that structure our world at this moment is just creating war and turmoil.”
In the wake of the video, the Green party ejected Schaefer from its ranks.
She was barred from participating in various Jasper-area cultural events.
But in Canada, the only real penalties Schaefer faced were those of social exclusion and ostracism.
When she travelled to German to visit her brother Alfred, a notorious anti- Semite rabblerouser, she found herself in a country with very different laws.
This past Jan. 3 she was arrested for inciting hatred.
According to Andrea Mayer, press officer with the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office, Schaefer has been held in custody ever since.
The trial began this week, but Mayer says it’s scheduled to run into August. If Schaefer is found guilty, she could face a maximum penalty of three years.
Schaefer’s case hasn’t garnered much mainstream media attention, either in Canada or in Germany. She lacks, perhaps, the notoriety of the late Ernst Zundel, convicted of similar charges by a German court in 2007.
But the trial has attracted the attention of far-right bloggers and online hate-hustlers, busy lauding her as a free-speech martyr.
Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious and durable form of hate speech.
And in Germany, which has spent years reckoning with, and atoning for, its past, there’s an understandable desire to quash neo-Nazism, in all its forms, before it can metastasize.
When Schaefer, a Canadian citizen, born and raised in Canada, turns up in Germany spreading her malicious nonsense, she stirs up horrid ghosts that modern Germans have worked hard to put to rest.
Munich prosecutors are treating her as they would any homegrown hater.
And yet, as a Canadian of German and Jewish heritage, something in me recoils. Schaefer didn’t set a bomb or provoke a riot. She’s on trial for what she’s said. For what she believes, however twisted and delusional those beliefs may be.
In this era of resurgent fascism, I worry prosecuting and jailing someone like Schaefer could backfire, creating public sympathy for a woman and a cause who deserve precious little.
Social media makes it so easy for the hateful, the frightened, the deluded, the damaged, all around the globe, to seek one another out.
It gives them a connection and a platform to make common cause of their grievances, to reinforce their grudges against the world.
Yet I worry prosecuting such people only reinforces their persecution complexes, their narratives of martyrdom.
Meantime, Schaefer’s bizarre viral video remains on YouTube, still getting clicks. And hate remains a contagion no judge or jail can contain.