Hohmann Expelled from CDU Group over Anti-Semitic Remarks

"It's a difficult day for everyone," said CDU party leader Angela Merkel shortly after Friday morning's vote. Minutes earlier, 195 of the parliamentary group's 248 members had voted to expel Hohmann, ensuring a two-thirds majority necessary for the move.

"The result is unambiguous," Merkel said, adding that the expulsion was the right thing to do from a political standpoint.

Futile final plea by Hohmann, supporters

A last-ditch attempt by Hohmann to avoid the expulsion obviously had no effect on the vote. In an explanation to the parliamentary group, he said he had apologized several times, and was prepared to do anything he could to heal the wounds he had caused.

In the explanation, published by a newspaper in Hohmann's central German hometown of Fulda, he said he had not described Jews as "a race of perpetrators," but that the media had taken his words out of context.

CDU leaders said they had given Hohmann several chances to apologize and retract his statements before pushing for a vote to expel him. While willing to apologize, Hohmann allegedly said he would only do so for tactical reasons to keep his group and party membership and not because he had changed his views on the matter, party officials revealed.

Jewish leaders have complained about Hohmann on a number of occassions and media reported this week that he had given speeches of a similar tone in the past.

Hohmann's supporters also tried one more time to sway parliamentarians. On Friday, they called for a "critical solidarity" with Hohmann in ads in national newspapers. Several of the 26 people who signed the appeal to party leaders have made right extremist remarks in the past.

Expulsion a first for German conservatives

Hohmann's expulsion is a first for the CDU and her sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union. Group leaders expressed their disappointment that 28 parliamentarians had voted against the expulsion -- 16 others abstained, four votes were invalid and five MPs were absent.

"I'd wished for a different result," Wolfgang Bosbach, a deputy group leader, said. Angela Merkel explained the opposing votes as a reflection of people's personal sympathies for Hohmann rather than an implicit endorsement of his remarks.

Hohmann's expulsion from the party is also under way, but that process could take several months.

Anti-Semitic remarks caused national debate

In a speech given on Germany's national day on Oct. 3, Hohmann had compared the Russian revolution with the Holocaust.

Hohmann said that primarily Jewish Bolsheviks were responsible for crimes committed against civilians during the Russian revolution. He then went on to compare what he claimed was bloodshed orchestrated by Jews in Russia in the early 1900s with the murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis in the Third Reich.

"Jews were active in great numbers in the leadership as well as in the Soviet secret police firing squads," Hohmann told constituents in his hometown of Neuhof. "Thus one could describe Jews with some justification as a Tätervolk [roughly translated as race of perpetrators]."

Although he admitted in his speech that such a comparison "may sound horrible," Hohmann said it followed the "same logic with which one describes the Germans as a race of perpetrators."

The contents of that speech became highly publicized after a public television station broadcast a report on it. It sparked a national debate about anti-Semitic sentiment among German politicians and military leaders. A former Brigadier Gen. Reinhard Günzel, head of Germany’s KSK Special Forces, was sacked by the government after he publicly endorsed Hohmann’s comments.