Stupid Watergate, Now Confirmed

Courtesy of the NZZ, we now know that Correctiv faked most of its 'reporting'

This is yet another instalment related to the ongoing absurdity masquerading as ‘politicking’ in Germany. Reference is thus made to an article from last week:

Stupid Watergate, Germany Style

This is an important development, so I’d encourage everyone to read up on the matter at-hand (further content is linked in the above piece).

Last week I called the entire absurdity Germany’s ‘Watergate’, which, of course, relates to people in Nixon’s pay breaking into an office of his political opponent. Here, in Germany, we have the federal gov’t (made up of SPD, FDP, and Greens) whose record is so exceptionally ‘good’ that the main opposition party, Alternative for Germany, doubled in the past two years.

Early in January, protests led by the farmers erupted, which have considerable support among the populace; needless to say, the gov’t wasn’t too unhappy when, a few days into the protests, Correctiv, an heavily NGO-and-gov’t-sponsored activist outlet published its now infamous exposé alleging ‘right-wing extremists@ having met in Potsdam, close to the location of the Wannsee Conference (1942), who once again plotted the ‘deportation of millions of people’.

One of the better German-language outlets is, of course, the venerable Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Switzerland’s NYT equivalent; having lived in Switzerland for a decade, I can confirm that their international reporting is qualitatively far superior than that of its peers (although, as many Swiss and other expats also note, their domestic reporting is about as bad as anyone’s).

So we turn now, once again, to what the NZZ’s foreign correspondents have done—actual journalism, by which is meant that they sent a bunch of people to talk to the host of the alleged right-wing conspiracy meeting.

This is a three-part series, with this being the first part, addressing the question WTF actually happened at the Potsdam hotel. Part two deals with the serious issue of Germany’s domestic intelligence service having masterminded what looks like a sting op, with the third instalment focusing on some of the people at Correctiv and their motivation.

Translation, emphases, and bottom lines mine.

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‘There was no master plan for remigration’: A visit to the Adlon Country House and its Owner Who no Longer Understands the World

By Alexander Kissler (text) and Nikita Teryoshin (images), NZZ, 3 Feb. 2024 [source]

Since publication by the author collective [sic] Correctiv, a villa in Potsdam has been said to be the scene of an alleged ‘deportation meeting’ of right-wing extremists. The landlord defends himself and speaks of a web of lies.

Everything is a question of perspective, including what is said to have happened on 25 November last year. For large segments of politics and the media, a ‘mass deportation planning meeting’ of right-wing extremists took place here—in the words of a Green member of the Bundestag. Meanwhile, the participants swear that everything was completely different and harmless. This is also the view of the host, who is now speaking out in detail for the first time.

Wilhelm Wilderink is a tall man with expansive gestures and a gentle voice. He owns the Landhaus Adlon, which is why a collective [sic] of authors from the Correctiv platform describes him as the host of the meeting in question. That alone is ‘absolutely absurd’, he says.

Cancellation after Cancellation Came In

When Wilderink talks himself into a rage, he doesn't get loud, he just formulates things more quickly. He continues by saying that he stays completely out of the management of the country house. The meeting in question was hosted and booked by the dentist Gernot Mörig, who later also became known throughout Germany. However, this is not the only point in which Correctiv's story appears to distort reality.

The article ‘Secret plan against Germany’ had barely been published on 10 January when the ‘Gästehaus am Lehnitzsee’ [Guesthouse at Lehnitzsee] was already receiving a flood of cancellations due to the current situation. Operations had effectively ceased and the 16 rooms were empty. The main business of the ‘Guesthouse’ is weddings, family celebrations, and corporate events. The rooms, which were lavishly refurbished by Wilderink and his former partner after the purchase in 2013, can also be booked separately. The former partner is the biologist Mathilda Huss, who Zeit online accuses of being ‘closely networked in the far-right scene’… [note the wording: there are allegations but no evidence]

According to Wilderink, a management consultant and lawyer, he invested a seven-figure sum to refurbish the property, which was built in 1926/27, along with the lakeside property. Bookings are now picking up again, he says. There are many expressions of loyalty [probably because people are seeing through this charade].

The landlord is sitting on the first floor, in the currently vacant master suite with a view of the garden, lake, and squirrels. The talk of a secret meeting is a clear lie, he says. Correctiv came up with this term, and it was adopted in turn. Wilderink insists that the house was freely accessible on the day in question, without additional security staff, and that there were other guests in addition to the conference participants. The Correctiv reporter [sic], who was present incognito, had gone in and out, apart from the dining room on the ground floor where the meeting had taken place.

The man who spied on the event and photographed it together with colleagues had moved into room number nine, ‘Stall innen’; Wilderink will show it later. It is located diagonally opposite the unadorned dining room, with the inner courtyard in between. It is possible that the uninvited guest was a co-author of the Correctiv story, who describes himself as an activist and journalist and also advertises himself as an ‘inventor’ of stories [we’ll talk about this in part three]. When asked, Correctiv explained that ‘for security reasons, we will not provide any further details on the exact breakdown of our research team’ and that there were ‘some personal threats’ [are you surprised after this smear campaign? I’m not for violent solutions, and I’m a free speech absolutist, but these people should stand trial].

However, it was not the nature of the meeting, but its content that caused lasting shockwaves. Without the Correctiv text [sic], hundreds of thousands of people would not have taken to the streets to demonstrate either ‘against the right’, ‘against right-wing extremism’, or ‘against the AfD’ [mind you, all called for by the gov’t]. Without Correctiv's claim that ‘the deportation of millions of people from Germany’ had been planned in Potsdam, the Federal Chancellor would not have been able to warn against this ‘diabolical plan’ and declare ‘more than 20 million citizens with a history of migration’ to be the potential victims of such a plan.

And without Correctiv's inference, abruptly woven into the text, ‘In 1940, the National Socialists planned to deport four million Jews to the island of Madagascar’, the catchphrase of the supposed Potsdam deportation meeting would hardly have arisen [we note, in passing, that the same treatment was called by pro-Covid vaxxers/gov’t stooges to be meted out vs. ‘the unvaccinated’].

Wilderink is certain and would swear: ‘Nothing bad has been said here’, nothing contrary to the German constitution or human dignity or even inciting the people. According to the CDU member, he was present when the new right-wing activist Martin Sellner [more on him here], who had travelled from Austria, spoke for around an hour about theses from his book ‘Regime Change from the Right’.

Correctiv refers to ‘a large number of sources’, which the outlet does not specify. When the NZZ asked whether a transcript of the event was available, editor-in-chief Justus von Daniels responded by saying that protecting sources was ‘the most important principle of our work’ [no doubt, but…].

But how credible is it that several of the twenty or so hand-picked participants from the right-wing and extreme right-wing milieu divulged the content of a private event in such detail to the reporters? Correctiv also answers the question of whether the event was acoustically recorded, i.e., wiretapped, by referring to source protection—and to the ‘Questions and Answers’ section that was subsequently published online. There, however, it is not explained whether recordings or statements are relied upon [sounds fishy].

The far-right speaker Sellner makes no secret of his views, but insists that they are in line with the legal system. For his video channel [on Telegram], he held the Potsdam lecture again, with, as he says, identical slides and chapters. The leading figure of the Austrian Identitarian movement does indeed refer to well-known right-wing narratives, speaking of ‘population exchange’ [see here for UN musings on this one] as the ‘greatest danger’ and of the ‘mass of illegals and criminals and unintegrated people’.

No Literal Quote from Correctiv

A ‘strong leading culture’ [orig. Leitkultur] and ‘the migration turnaround, you can also call it remigration’ are needed as an antidote. Later, when asked in Potsdam, he specified that ‘asylum seekers, non-citizens, non-assimilated people’ were the ‘target groups of remigration’. However, only those ‘obliged to leave the country’ were to be deported. He had not drafted a ‘master plan for remigration’, he said, which would be ‘a hoax’.

Correctiv talks about a ‘master plan to get rid of immigrants’ and a ‘master plan for expulsion’, but does not use a literal quote. Correctiv answers this newspaper's question as to whether there was explicit talk of a ‘master plan for remigration’ in Potsdam by referring to the text itself. However, there is no corresponding literal quote in their article.

Wilderink reads out the invitation to the meeting from Gernot Mörig. Sellner's ‘overall concept in the sense of a masterplan’ is announced, but as a media masterplan to support right-wing influencers. In fact, Sellner spends most of his speech, which is recorded online, thinking about how to achieve ‘cultural hegemony’ [that is, he speaks about assimilation]. According to Wilderink, the entire meeting was ‘medium sized, very small and had no financial or substantive significance’.

But do you even sit down with an activist like Sellner? Or with other participants at the meeting, some of whom have a relevant radical past? The inviting dentist Mörig, for example, was the national leader of the extreme right-wing organisation Heimattreuer Jugend [Patriotic Youth] in the 1970s. Wilderink replies: ‘I don't know whether Mörig is a right-wing extremist. There are no indications of any anti-constitutional tendencies.’ The FAZ, on the other hand, writes that Gernot Mörig is ‘closely involved in right-wing extremist structures’ and that ‘many in the Mörig clan are involved in the nationalist-right-wing extremist scene’.

In general, the Landhaus Adlon is a centre of free opinion and should remain so, says the landlord. It is by no means a focal point for various right-wing movements, as some journalists claim. And then, with the garden behind him, he enumerates: in the past two years, there have been around one hundred events here, eighty of which were family celebrations and weddings, eight events organised by the CDU, two by the FDP, and six by the Hayek Society, a liberal association that draws on the scientific work of the economist Friedrich August von Hayek. There were also a few private meetings, such as the ‘conservative aperitif’. A summer party organised by the AfD was rejected.

Wilderink says that he cannot and does not want to prevent AfD representatives from being among the guests and participants [that’s somehow ‘radical’ these days, at least in left-wing circles]. Four members of the AfD took part in the meeting in question in November, including Gerrit Huy, member of the Bundestag, and Ulrich Siegmund, chairman of the state parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt.

Will the Office for the Protection of the Constitution be Monitoring the Landhaus?

The situation remains muddled. The Potsdam CDU, of which Wilderink is an associate member, is calling for him to resign from the party. By attending the meeting as a listener, he has left the ‘values foundation’ of the Christian Democrats. If he does not comply with the request, the district executive committee intends to initiate expulsion proceedings [now go back to the preceding paragraph about Mr. Wilderink’s stance about others’ opinions]. Residents in the Potsdam neighbourhood of Neu Fahrland have written a petition: Wilderink should ‘clearly and unequivocally’ distance himself from the meeting in November and ‘ensure that meetings of this kind are not repeated’ [how does one spell ‘struggle session’ in woke-speech? /sarcasm]. The president of Brandenburg's Office for the Protection of the Constitution told the state parliament's Committee on Internal Affairs that he would not rule out monitoring the Landhaus in future [and a bit more state surveillance for thought crimes is also du jour…]

Wilderink summarises: ‘There was no secret meeting, there was no master plan for remigration, there was never any discussion about the deportation of German citizens.’ He puts his hand in the fire. Correctiv had built ‘a web of lies [orig. Lügenkonstrukt] around the fact of a meeting that is not tenable at any point’. However, the ‘attempted character assassination’ [orig. Meuchelmord] had failed.

Correctiv could also face stormy times. The network, which is financially supported by state institutions and private companies, among others, has now received ‘two letters from people named in the text’, according to their own information. They are currently being ‘examined by our lawyer’. It is known that constitutional law professor Ulrich Vosgerau, a member of the CDU and legal representative of the AfD at the Federal Constitutional Court, has had Correctiv warned about false allegations about him [i.e., threatening to sue them]. Vosgerau does not deny taking part in the meeting.

As he leaves, Wilderink stands in room number nine, ‘Stall innen’. This is where the Correctiv reporter had taken up residence, equipped with a powerful camera. All in all, the landlord sums up, it is ‘indescribably sad that a radical left-wing activist is believed more than the recognised constitutional lawyer Vosgerau or myself’. As the iron gate to the Adlon country house closes, the air is filled with old answers and new question marks behind the Correctiv research.

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Bottom Lines

You, dear readers, are now better informed than ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Germans who rendered themselves gov’t stooges in what looks more and more like a sting op to discredit the political opponents of a failing gov’t.

Stay tuned for part 2, in which we shall learn more about the possible involvement of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.