Martin Hohmann

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Martin Hohmann (born February 4, 1948) is a German lawyer and politician without party affiliation. 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 2003. He set out to repudiate the supposed accusation of the the Germans being a "nation of perpetrators" ("Tätervolk") during the Holocaust. To his end, he elaborated at length on the involvement of Jews in the violent 1917 Russian Revolution. The speech was widely held to be anti-semitic, or at least to support anti-semitic sentiment. The main reasons for this assessment were the following:

Hohmann draws the conclusion "Thus one could describe Jews with some justification as a nation of perpetrators", after having painstakingly recited evidence for his claim during most of the speech. This insinuates, intended or not, that they are indeed one. His relatively short addition towards the end of the speech that "neither the Germans nor the Jews can be termed a nation of perpetrators", was commonly regarded as insufficient to countervail the listener's impression.
Hohmann constructs a coherent group of "The Jews" and their responsibility for the violence during the Russian Revolution. This classic anti-semitic topos of Jewish Bolshevism was already used in Nazi propaganda. It ignores, firstly, that the people referred to neither had any connection to Judaism left nor acted, as the Germans did, in the name of a people, but for the sake of the Communist idea.Secondly, people of Jewish origin only formed a small part of the revolutionaries and were well represented in anti-Communist parties, too, while the Holocaust was in organisation and in execution a specifically German endeavour.
Hohmann refers with approval to classic anti-semitic literature such as Henry Ford‘s The International Jew, which in turn is based in large parts on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery with the sole goal of denouncing Jews.
Hohmann not only plays down the guilt of Germans for the Holocaust during the Nazi era, but does so impertinantly with accusations against the victims themselves.

After a lively debate in public and in the CDU, and after Hohmann refused to retract the speech, he was expelled from the parliamentary group of the CDU in the Bundestag in 2003 and from the party itself in 2004. He kept his seat as an independent member of parliament until the next Bundestag election of 2005. There, Hohmann run unsuccessfully for a seat as an independent candidate.