Vollbrecht is defeated in court and is appealing

The biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht has to accept it when she is accused of denying Nazi crimes. That is the essence of a recent judgment by the Cologne Regional Court. With this decision, the chamber reversed its own urgent decision from August, in which it initially agreed with Vollbrecht, who had defended himself against this accusation.

The accusation that Vollbrecht denied Nazi crimes was made to her on Twitter. On this platform, an unobjective and vicious battle between the different camps – trans activists on the one hand, their critics on the other – has been going on for a long time. Vollbrecht has been a target of trans activists for months. She also expresses herself clearly, for example she criticized the fact that twelve-year-olds have their genitals removed. Her tweet on the subject was a starting point that led first to the debate and now to the court decision.

Vollbrecht doubted that trans people were systematically persecuted by the Nazis and pointed out that this allegation mocked the actual victims of the Holocaust. From this it was deduced that she denied Nazi crimes against trans people. Her tweet: “I hate this narrative. It mocks the true victims of Nazi crimes.”

In the summary proceedings, she made it clear that she did not deny the crimes committed under the rule of National Socialism, including against transsexuals, and that she deeply detested them in their entirety. She only pointed out that there were “very significant differences, which are not disputed by serious historians, between the Shoah, i.e. the industrialized mass murder of European Jews solely because of their ethnicity, and the fate of all other groups of victims of the National Socialist tyranny”.

Lawyer admonishes media

The Cologne Regional Court ruled that she had to accept the statement, which was disseminated using the hashtag #MarieLeugnetNS-Kribel, as a fundamentally protected expression of opinion, because there was a “core of facts”. With her statement she denied that transsexual people were victims of Nazi crimes. Her subsequent explanations did not change the understanding and were not yet in the world at the time in question.

The 28th Civil Chamber decided on Wednesday that Vollbrecht had to endure “memorable and strong formulations” from her critics. In its summary decision at the end of August, the court recognized that the allegation of denial of Nazi crimes violated Vollbrecht’s personal rights.

Vollbrechts lawyer Ralf Höcker announced that he would appeal the decision. “As feared, the verdict will mean that the internet mob and even supposedly reputable media will go one step further and falsely accuse the client of denying the Holocaust, although she has said quite the opposite, that the Shoah, i.e. industrialized mass murder against the Jews, is a singular crime that cannot be compared with the persecution of homosexual trans people in particular,” Höcker told the NZZ on Saturday. He has already warned media that had attributed Vollbrecht with denying the Holocaust. She is not doing this right now.

Vollbrecht became known nationwide in the summer when the Humboldt University in Berlin canceled a lecture she gave because activists had announced protests against it. The title of the contract read: “Gender is not the same sex. Sex, gender and why there are only two sexes in biology». It was planned as part of the “Long Night of Science”. This popular scientific event attracts a large audience and many families to Berlin every year.

The 32-year-old Vollbrecht is a doctoral student at the Humboldt University and is doing her doctorate there on a marine biological topic. After it became clear that the lecture was completely harmless and that the cancellation was hasty, she was allowed to make up for it. In the meantime, he had been seen by many more people on Youtube than the original event could ever have reached.