In a New Year’s Eve tweet, the journalist Taylor Hudak noted that “As 2023 comes a close, one of the biggest victories this year was the acquittal of Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi”. This was a victory, and it would be a reason to be cheerful, except for the fact Bhakdi is in fact still being prosecuted in Germany for “incitement to hatred”, namely against Jews, and “trivialisation of the Holocaust”.
Last May, as covered by Hudak and others, Bhakdi was acquitted of these charges by a local court in the small town of Plön. But this victory was short-lived. For defendants in Germany do not enjoy double jeopardy protection in the Anglo-Saxon sense, and just two months later, the public prosecutor appealed the acquittal. Indeed, just days after the original judgment, the public prosecutor’s office had already announced that it would appeal the acquittal in some form – a fact which somehow escaped the notice of Bhakdi’s international admirers.
Bhakdi is now to be tried again on exactly the same charges in the district court of Kiel. A date for the trial has not yet been set.
The charges refer to bitter and somewhat abstruse remarks which Bhakdi made in an April 2021 online interview about what he described as “forced” mass COVID-19 vaccination in Israel. Israel was at the time famously serving as the world’s mRNA vaccination ‘laboratory’ and had introduced a ‘green pass’ system to enforce compliance from the population.
Bhakdi, a retired Professor of Microbiology, rose to prominence as a fierce critic of the mRNA vaccine platform, which he predicted would give rise to widespread harm by making the body’s immune system attack its own cells and whose use under emergency authorisation, in Israel and elsewhere, he denounced as illegal “human experimentation”.
“I admired this people, the Israelis, more than any other people in the world. I was an admirer of the Jews,” Bhakdi said in the interview.
But, after talking at length about his “veneration” of Jewish artists and musicians, he then went on to say, in the words targeted by the indictment:
The people that fled from this country [Germany], this country where there was absolute evil, and founded their own country, have now transformed their country into something that is even worse than Germany was.
Shortly before making these remarks, Bhakdi had told the interviewer that Israelis could not even flee, that “the country is shut”, which perhaps helps to explain the otherwise puzzling remark that Israel had become something “even worse than Germany was”.
Giving vent to his frustration and disappointment, Bhakdi called the developments in Israel “inconceivable”. And then he continued:
This is the bad thing about the Jews. They learn well. There is no people that learns better than they do. But they have learned evil and are putting it into practice. And that’s why Israel is a living hell.
The full interview, which has rarely been cited in the German media, apart from the supposedly “incriminating” passages, is available here.
Bhakdi made no explicit mention of the Holocaust in his remarks. This is perhaps why the prosecution also included a second citation in its indictment. This one comes from a speech which Bhakdi made at a campaign event in September 2021. He was at the time a candidate for the Basis Party in the German Bundestag elections. The party had been formed in 2020 on a platform of opposition to COVID-19 measures.
This second citation has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel or Jews, but refers rather to the standard full (as opposed to merely emergency) authorisation of mRNA vaccines, which had just taken place. It reads as follows:
It is clear to everyone who is knowledgeable about it that with the formal authorisation of the vaccines, the first milestone of the agenda has been reached and the race to reach the final goal [Endziel] has begun. This final goal is the creation of a new reality and involves nothing less than the second Holocaust. The abolition of humanity in its current form.
Much has been made in the German media of Bhakdi’s use of the expression “final goal”, as if this were somehow an allusion to the “final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish problem” sought by the Nazi regime. mRNA vaccine critics would appear to be so suspect in Germany that even their mere use of the adjective “final” is suspicious.
Translations from the German by the author.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
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