Grafeneck

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, a commemorative event was held in Freiburg at the Kaisersaal of the Historisches Kaufhaus. The event was entitled Shame, Silence, Grief, Trauma. Nazi euthanasia and the consequences for the families of those murdered.

Red Baron arrived early, but Freiburg officials and celebrities had already taken half of the limited number of seats.

After a musical introduction, Lord Mayor Martin Horn welcomed the attendees. With right-wing populists on the rise in many countries, he warned in his speech against a repeat of the political events in 1933. Within just two months, the Nazis had transformed the democracy of the Weimar Republic into an authoritarian regime.

Red Baron is not as pessimistic as his mayor because the political situation 2025 is very different from 1933. Large sections of the population rejected the Weimar Republic. They had become accustomed to an authoritarian state during the Second Reich and were thus alienated from popular rule. Further shaken by economic crises and unemployment, this democracy only lasted fifteen years.

This evening, Red Baron tried to cross Freiburg's Platz der Alten Synagoge
and was caught in a crowd demonstrating against the Right.

This photo (©dpa), taken from the opposite side, is more impressive,
with an estimated 15,000 people demonstrating.

Although Germany's economy is weakening and many people fear for their jobs, a democratic self-image has been established for 75 years, at least in the western states of the Federal Republic. Frequently, people take to the streets and demonstrate against the right-wing AfD and for democracy.

Then Thomas Stöckle, director of the Grafeneck Memorial, gave a lecture on the Nazi euthanasia program.

On the clearance of the destruction of life unworthy to live.
Its measure and its form.

Already in the early 1920s, doctors and lawyers propagated eugenics, racial hygiene, and the extermination of unworthy life.

You contribute here. Up to the age of 60,
a person with a hereditary disease costs, on average, 50,000 Reichsmarks.

Under the Nazis, posters were used to draw attention to the economic burden of preserving people with hereditary diseases.

On September 1. 1939, Hitler himself authorized the destruction of life unworthy of living, euphemistically called Gnadentod (mercy killing).

T4 Vernichtungszentren (extermination centers)

The measures were carried out under Aktion T4, which stands for the systematic mass murder of more than 70,000 people with physical, mental, and psychological disabilities in Germany from 1940 to 1941.

Weltkriegskrüppel (Cripples of the Great War) at Grafeneck in 1922

On October 14, 1939, the Grafeneck "cripple home" was the first to be confiscated by the government. "It is used for the purposes of the Reich and is to be cleared of inmates and nursing staff."

An information sheet defined the criteria according to which people were to be registered for the euthanasia program. They were deported from their previous sanitoriums and nursing homes to the extermination centers by decree of November 23, 1939.

On January 18, 1940, 25 patients from the Bavarian Eglfing-Haar sanatorium and nursing home in Munich were the first to be gassed with carbon monoxide at Grafeneck,

Nazi officials systematically lied about the cause of death to the relatives of those murdered in the extermination centers. In this context, it is shocking to read the complaint of a father on October 14, 1940, who had to learn of the death of his son, a combatant in the Great War:

According to your communication of August 23, 1940, my son Otto Bögel left your institution on August 22 to take his last walk. Despite this long time ago, I have not yet been reimbursed for my son's 39 days' overpayment of 159.51 Reichsmarks food allowance. If this does not happen in the next few days, I will be forced to complain elsewhere.

It is a tremendous impertinence to believe anything about this matter because people talk with shock and horror up and down the country about what is happening at Grafeneck.

In any case, the Fatherland's gratitude for former combatants could not be expressed more blatantly than through such a heroic death. And then it can hardly be surpassed if one still has the audacity to write that all medical efforts have unfortunately been unsuccessful.

In any case, a higher judge will pass judgment on this matter in his own time.

A deeply saddened father

Apparently, Aktion T4 was known to large sections of the population. When the Archbishop of Münster, Count Clemens August von Galen*, spoke of murder in his sermons and hinted at the killing of war invalids, Hitler gave a verbal order on August 24, 1941, to temporarily halt Aktion T4 to calm unrest in church circles. However, the killing of unworthy lives continued in secret.
*called the Lion of Münster for his harsh critics of the Nazi regime in his sermons

In a balance sheet as of December 1, 1941, statistician Edmund Brandt calculated the cost savings for the German Reich, "70,273 people were disinfected. This results in an annual cost saving for the German Reich of 88 million Reichsmarks."

Stolperstein (stumbling block) in Freiburg for Flora Baer (©Marlies Meckel)

Michelle Kaye then reported on her great-grandmother Flora Baer, who died at the age of 48. She was deported to Grafeneck together with around 70 other people on August 18, 1940, and murdered in the gas chamber on the same day.

Let such inhumanities never happen again.

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150 Years

Last Thursday evening, two citizens' associations of Freiburg's Wiehre district celebrated the 150th anniversary of their founding as the first Freiburg associations of their kind. The ceremony took place in the Historisches Kaufhaus.

Red Baron, a member of the Bürgerverein Mittel- and Unterwiehre, sat in the eighth row of the Kaisersaal.

In the back: A scene on Güntertalstraße in the 1950s.
The streetcar number 2 is still running.

The celebration was opened by a string trio from the Marmelade (jam) ensemble with a piece by Dvořák. The ladies once met when making jam and discovered they also played an instrument.

Lord Mayor Martin Horn then praised the 150 years of civic commitment in the Wiehre.

After a short musical transition, Professor Ulrich Eith gave a lecture entitled "Civic Engagement as a Prerequisite for Liberal Democracy."

He started by saying there is no such thing as Zuschauerdemokratie (spectator democracy) referring to the ongoing discussions in Germany on democracy and the 20% of voters who do not intend to go to the polls in our early federal election on February 23. And so he ended his lecture as he had started: There is no such thing as Zuschauerdemokratie.

The official part came to a close with a spirited Finnish dance that sounded Scottish to me, performed by the Marmelade ensemble.

It was a worthy anniversary celebration, which continued with sparkling and non-sparkling wine, beer, and a cold buffet.

A strong voice for the region

Red Baron met many friends at the festive evening and he shook hands with Lord Mayor Martin Horn and Dr. Klaus Schüle, the Christian Democrat candidate for Constituency 281, where Red Baron lives and votes.

In fact, the upcoming federal election is not just about posters.

Her slogan is best translated as "A promise is a promise,"
but why does she look so stern?

In the last federal election in 2021, the Green political scientist Chantal Kopf took the direct mandate of Constituency 281 with 28.8% of the votes from incumbent Matern von Marschall of the Christian Democrats (CDU) who got 20.6%. Matern came in only third place, as the Social Democrat (SPD) Julia Söhne won 26.3% of the votes in 2021. Before 2013, Gernot Erler from the SPD held the seat  of 281. This is why Freiburg journalists write of a swing constituency.

Scan the poster and vote SPD!

And this time, too, it promises to be exciting, with the incumbent Chantal Kopf (Greens), born in the States Dr. Klaus Schüle (CDU), and mathematician Dr. Ludwig Striet (SPD) running a three-way race on February 23.

It looks as if only two candidates have a chance of winning Constituency 281. Chantal Kopf has a slight lead in the polls over Klaus Schüle, but this is too close to call. Winning the direct mandate in Freiburg would send a strong signal to the Green Party.

However, CDU candidate Klaus Schüle also wants to come in first and commented, "The chance is there, but nothing is certain."

It remains exciting and remember: There is no such thing as Zuschauerdemokratie.

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Executive Clemency?

Today, Red Baron read in the NYT that hours before Trump's inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, President Biden signed an executive order on clemency before the political situation changed today.

Change is a weak description of what may happen within the new administration. Apparently, good old Joe took Trump's social media threads about "retribution" seriously.

Quotes of the new president were, "The whole January 6 committee 'should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, TREASON!'" Ms. Cheney "should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country," and he suggested that General Milley deserved execution.

President Biden wanted to guard some of President-elect Donald J. Trump's most high-profile adversaries by issuing pre-emptive pardons that would make it harder, if not impossible, for the next administration to prosecute them.

You name them ... (found on Facebook)

Among those receiving pre-emptive pardons were Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime government scientist who advised Mr. Trump during the coronavirus pandemic; and all the members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming.

In 2021, Dr. Fauci sat in a congressional hearing looking like a slapped student (©NYT)

Predecessors who have to fear their successors' revenge is  a spectacle unworthy of democracy. Red Baron is shocked. What happens to the America of my dreams? What did my hero of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, do wrong?

At a dinner last night, Mr. Trump said that "within hours of taking office, I will sign dozens of executive orders—close to 100, in fact," sharply reversing federal policy on immigration, the federal workforce, energy, and the environment, the economy and trade, gender issues and diversity, and equity and inclusion programs.

Ms. Vance and the freshly sworn-in president (©CNN)

In his inauguration speech, Trump boasted, "America's Golden Age begins. America's decline is over. I was saved by God to make America great again. January 20, 2025, will go down in history as liberation day. "And a promise on this very day, "We will make Martin Luther King's dream come true." Really?

©CNN

As CNN reported, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive actions within hours after taking office on Monday, revoking 78 of Joe Biden's policies. Among a slew of immediate orders, Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The "full, complete, and unconditional" pardons extend to people who were convicted of some of the worst crimes committed on the day of the Capitol insurrection. Trump also declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border, triggering the use of Pentagon resources and personnel that will be deployed and used to build the border wall. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization.

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Thermonuclear Fusion

Our Celestial Fusion Reactor

This is a long story of hope for pollution-free cheap energy that neither produces CO₂ nor long-lived radioactivity to dispose of.

Click to enlarge

Here is the time scale we are discussing, garnished with promises that an energy-producing fusion reactor is just around the corner.

Red Baron reported about another milestone in 2022, but then he gave up. On the other hand, some like it cold.

Worldwide research is conducted on thermonuclear fusion. Most of it involves containing and compressing hot plasma in a vessel with magnetic fields.

Recently, Sabine Hossenfelder, the girl who talks about things she knows about, reported on a new idea for a Dipole Fusion Reactor forwarded by an Australian team.

Scientists at Openstar could contain a plasma of 30,000 centigrades for 20 seconds. They proudly declare:

Really?

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A War or a Revolution that is the Question

New in 2025, and again, there is an anniversary: 500 years of the German Peasants' War, or was it a Revolution?

   

Spirited Horst Buszello making his points:
The Peasants' War is an example on par with the French Revolution.

Last Thursday, Professor Horst Buszello explored this question in his lecture entitled: "Bauernkrieg" oder "Revolution"? - Der Aufstand von 1525 im Streit der Meinungen“. 

In Wikipedia, you find the notions of the Great Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt, a widespread popular revolt in some German-speaking areas in Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. It was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution of 1789. The revolt failed because of intense opposition from the aristocracy, who slaughtered up to 100,000 of the 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers.

One of the rare originals of the 12 Artikel

The revolt was launched as a charge raised against the Swabian League in Memmingen in March 1525 in a pamphlet of 12 Articles: Dye Grundtlichen Und rechten haupt Artitkl, aller Baurschafft und Hyndersessen der Gaistlichen und Weltlichen oberkayten von wölchen sy sich beschwert vermainen  (The thorough and lawful main articles of all peasantry and vassals of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, of which they believe themselves to be aggrieved).

Under these 12 articles, the rural population from Swabia to Thuringia, from Brandenburg to Bavaria, formed fraternal associations, gathered for Christian meetings, or joined evangelical heaps in which they wanted to uphold the gospel and support justice: "Here there is neither slave nor master, we are all one in Christ."

In November 1520, Luther published one of his most essential writings, On the Freedom of a Christian. In it, he cites the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians: "A Christian is a free lord of all and subject to none. A Christian is a servant of all and subject to everyone."

The new spiritual freedom of the believer is a life in the grace of God and not a turning away from the Ten Commandments. Brother Martin demands that people give charity freely, willingly, cheerfully, and without charge out of faithful obedience to God and the authorities, too. He emphasizes verse 13 of Paul's letter to the Romans: "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."

Luther advocates his "two kingdoms doctrine," which states that the worldly kingdom and the kingdom of God are separate. Since power is ordained by God, all those who have not been called to govern are subject to the duty of obedience if they do not want to resist God's order. Let every soul be subject to the authorities with fear and honor.

Luther was of no help to the rebels. However, Christoph Schappeler wrote the political tract "An die versamlung gemayner Bawerschafft (To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry,)" probably during the gathering of Upper Swabian farmers and craftsmen at Memmingen in March 1525. The work appeared anonymously in print in Nuremberg in May 1525. 

On the pamphlet's title page, the farmers are on the left, and the nobles and prelates are on the right. They are standing armed against each other at a wheel of fortune, and the papacy is tied to the wheel. 

In his pamphlet, Schappeler justifies the right to resist tyrannical authorities with many quotations from the New Testament, trying to prove that all people have a right to personal freedom and political participation. His historical models are the Roman Republic, the Israelites, and the Swiss Confederation (Wer meret Schwytz). 

Although the authorities had been established by God, when they acted tyrannically, they forfeited their right to rule. He advocated that the rebels base their actions on divine law, opposing Luther's "two kingdoms doctrine." So Schappeler's belief that society and politics could be reformed for the better through the Old and New Testaments is close to Huldrych Zwingli, who had written, "All earthly laws must be conformed to the commandments of God and the spirit of the gospel." 

Nevertheless, throughout history, the Great Peasants' War was interpreted in the zeitgeist.

Günther Franz published the most extensive monography about The German Peasants' War on October 1, 1933, the Day of the German Farmer. He, a devout Nazi, could not help but criticize earlier publications in the preface to his book, "Consciously or unconsciously, all these works made the history of the Peasants' War serve political purposes and thus blocked the path to fundamental knowledge."

"Today, at the end of the first victorious German revolution, the peasant in the Third Reich has finally gained the position in the nation's life that he was already striving for in 1525."

This obviously was no political statement. Still, Franz's book, written in a narrative style and expurgated of Nazi passages in later editions, remains a standard reference of German peasants' revolts that started much earlier than 1524. Red Baron reported about a precursor in the Freiburg region.

In 1524, the common man (der gemeine Mann) stood up and demanded that the Old Law be re-established. The divine law stipulates that men/women are created equal. As Adam was plowing and Eve was stretching, where was the nobleman?

The Great Peasants' War was a genuine political revolution, 

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Timescape

From previous blogs, my readers know that both Dark Matter and Energy are needed to fit data to the standard cold dark matter (⁠ΛCDM) cosmology.

Very unsatisfactory. Only about 5% of the universe consists of matter known to us.

Dark matter pulls things together, forming galaxies, while dark energy is necessary to explain the accelerated speed with which our universe expands.

As the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) model gets rid of Dark Matter, the Timescape model does away with Dark Energy.

The mathematics for both models looks complicated.

The Timescape model is based on evidence from cosmological data showing that mass in the universe is not as continuously distributed as presumed in ΛCDM but instead structured. There are voids with regular time scales and clusters of matter where clocks, according to the General Relativity Theory, run slower.

The results rely on data from a supernova database.

  

The data were analyzed and plotted against the minimum redshift cutoffs for the observed supernovae.

Overall, Timescape (red area) fits the data better than ΛCDM (blue area). However, the authors stress the need for further analysis on how the redshift distribution of supernovae and the probed redshift range impact evidence for cosmological models.

No reason for astrophysicists (not astronomers) to cheat,
but they should still be allowed to look

So, as in the case of MOND, the data are not conclusive enough to write a new “standard” cosmology model, but cracks in ΛCDM are getting wider.

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Le Colloque

 In November last year, Red Baron reported about a colloquium at Ensisheim. Still, he left the question, "Why did Ensisheim become a central place for the Habsburgs in the region?" unanswered but promised to do it in a future blog providing some highlights.

Here is a "crown" made from wood showing the Austrian colors and the Upper Alsace's coat of arms. It was on display during the colloquium.

Habsburg territories in the Upper Rhine region around 1100

The Habsburgs had a slow start in the region. They only owned small estates but ruled the earldom of Upper Alsace.

Click to enlarge

Around 1260, Alsace was a dispersed region. In addition to free imperial cities, small princes held land, prince bishops, and prince abbots had vast territorial possessions, and Habsburg rights were distributed in between.

Click to enlarge

By 1500, the Habsburgs' territorial situation was somewhat better, as they now possessed larger contiguous areas in Upper Alsace and in Breisgau on the other side of the Rhine River (white color), notably the cities of Mulhouse and Freiburg.

It would have been natural for territorial conflicts to break out in this mingled situation. However, the close neighbors were concerned about their freedom and aware that peace was central to the stability of their territories and domains. 

That we, to the praise of Almighty God and in honor of our most gracious lord,
the Roman emperor, and especially as members of the Holy Roman Empire,
in the strength of the imperial peace of 1471 at Regensburg, by all our subjects
 and allies and all other members of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
have all come together in unity.

And indeed, the so-called Lower League of 1474 on the Upper Rhine successfully defeated Charles the Bold of Burgundy. 

Still, peace did not remain over the years because the imperial central power had little presence in the southwest of the empire; the region was left on its own. 

A league of ten imperial cities formed in the 14th century, the Decapolis, worked better and lasted longer. They still stood to the emperor for their liberty when the Habsburg possessions in Alsace had reverted to the French crown in the Westfalian peace treaty in 1648.

So, the Habsburg authorities moved from Ensisheim to the right bank of the Rhine River and opened in Freiburg. Were the Habsburgs perhaps glad to get rid of Alsace because of their permanent financial difficulties?

In the final discussion at the colloquium, the question arose as to why Ensisheim was so significant for the Habsburgs until the Thirty Years' War?

It was proposed since the founder of the House of Austria, Rudolf, had fortified the place and also moved the district court there that the later Habsburgs remembered the past. So small Ensisheim became their central administrative center in the southwest.
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