Martin Hohmann

Martin Hohmann (born February 4, 1948 in Fulda, Hessen) is a German lawyer and politician (currently AfD). He was a member of the German Parliament ("Bundestag") for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), from 1998 until 2005.

He attracted public attention with a speech on German Unity Day on October 3, 2003. He set out to repudiate the supposed accusation that during the Holocaust, the Germans were considered a "nation of perpetrators" (German: Tätervolk, a term which was later named German Un-Word of the Year by a jury of linguistic scholars). To his end, he elaborated at length on the involvement of Jews in the violent 1917 Russian Revolution.

Hohmann starts from noting a strong sense of self-contempt among Germans and quotes Hans-Olaf Henkel, the vice president of the Federation of German Industry, who has stated that "Our original sin paralyzes the country". Hohmann thinks that an undue occupation with Germany's past - which he distinguishes from a necessary admission and remembrance of German crimes - lies behind discrimination against fellow-countrymen. Among examples, he mentions the refusal of German government officials to consider demanding compensations by Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic on behalf of forced German labourers in World War II, in the same way as Germany pays compensation for those they forced to labor camps.

He notes that, while the notion of collective guilt is usually denied, it is very much applied to Germans. Other nations tend to white-wash their history, like the French who hail the bloody French revolution as some kind of emancipation and the imperialist dictator Napoleon as a benevolent father of the people. The Germans, on the other hand are depicted in black and white as perpetrators and their enemies as innocent lambs. He vehemently denies the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen about a general German complicity in Hitler's politics.

...
Wikipedia