German Anti-Abortionist Sentenced to Jail

Lutheran Theologian Compares Abortion with Holocaust

July 2nd, 2007

By Wolfgang Polzer
Special to ASSIST News Service

A German theologian has been sentenced to one year in jail for drawing a comparison between abortion and the Holocaust.

A court in Erlangen near Nuremberg found Johannes Lerle, 55, guilty of "incitement of the people" by denying the Holocaust. Lerle has launched an appeal against the verdict.

The Lutheran theologian and anti-abortionist claims that the "infanticide" in the womb is comparable to the Nazis' systematic mass murder of Jews in concentration camps, for instance Auschwitz.

Lerle has six previous convictions for slander because he labeled physicians, who perform abortions, as "professional killers". He has already spent eight months in jail.

The current case concerned a pamphlet published on the Internet. Lerle called the murder of Jews by the Nazis as "supposed injustice". As a consequence he was accused of disturbing the public peace by denying the Holocaust.

Lerle rejected the accusation on the grounds that he had only quoted the Federal Constitutional Court. The court had refused to accept Lerle's application for a verdict against the abortion practice in! Germany. The court used the term "supposed injustice" wi th regard to the killing of unborn children.

In judicial terms all abortions are illegal in Germany. But they will not be punished if they are performed within the first three months of pregnancy and if the mother has undergone a certified consultation.

These abortions are often falsely referred to as legal. Approximately 120,000 non-punishable abortions are officially recorded in Germany each year. But Pro Life advocates estimate that up to 200,000 babies are killed in their mother's womb, if one takes the unregistered cases into account.