Jürgen Rose (publicist)

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Jürgen Rose, Paul Schäfer and Ralf Siemens (from left to right), 2011

Hans-Jürgen Rose (born July 18, 1958 in Worms ) is a German publicist , former officer and SPD member. In 2007 the lieutenant colonel was the first soldier in the Bundeswehr to refuse to participate in the tornado mission in Afghanistan for reasons of conscience . He presents his critical view of security and foreign policy in numerous publications . He is a board member of the Darmstädter Signal working group, which is closely related to the peace movement .

Life

Military career

Rose signed up in 1977 as a regular soldier and officer candidate in the German Air Force . During the Second World War, his father was a non-commissioned fighter pilot in Jagdgeschwader 6 "Horst Wessel" (JG 6) , both grandfathers were officers. After Rose's military training, including at the Hawk FlaRak system in Fort Bliss , Texas , he completed a degree in pedagogy at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich from 1983 , which he graduated as a qualified pedagogue . From 1988 to 1991 he worked at the Bundeswehr Academy for Information and Communication in Waldbröl in the research area of security and defense policy . During this time he was training manager for the interactive simulation POL & IS . From 1991 to 1995 he was a research assistant at the Institute for International Politics, Security Policy, Defense Law and International Law at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. During this time he published articles and a. on the end of the Cold War and nuclear strategies in military and security policy journals: Truppenpraxis (1989, 1993), Allgemeine Schweizerische Militärzeitschrift (1992), S + F (1992, 1995), European Security (1993) and Austrian Military Journal (1995). From 1995 to 1998 he was a research assistant at the German-American study center George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and an external fellow at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). From 1997 onwards, Rose became increasingly critical of the Bundeswehr and the foreign and security policy of the Federal Republic of Germany, both officially and publicly, which led to disciplinary proceedings , transfers and lawsuits at the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights . He was retired in January 2010.

Controversy

Transfer due to criticism of conscription in 1997

On October 2, 1997, he criticized general conscription in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , which brought him into conflict with the Bundeswehr leadership. He had advocated suspending compulsory military service so that the Bundeswehr could be financed, flexible and brought up to date.

As a result, disciplinary action was taken against him until he was transferred to a different subject. Rose was questioned by the Deputy Inspector General , Vice Admiral Hans Frank , and transferred to the Cologne Air Force Office.

According to the Spiegel , there was Defense Minister Volker Rühe behind it , who had Rose “harassed”. Also Bernhard Gertz , chairman of the Federal Armed Forces Association criticized the fact that Rose will set "from above" under pressure. The investigations against Rose were discontinued because of the legality of his expression of opinion. Nevertheless, on instructions "from a higher authority" in 1999, Rose was assigned to the Air Force Office in Cologne-Wahn “to count socks”. Rose complained to the Armed Forces Commissioner Claire Marienfeld against the measure, which he perceived as a “punitive transfer” . The behavior of Rühes was condemned by Bernhard Gertz. Horst Prayon , former head of the Bundeswehr Academy for Information and Communication , criticized the “climate of mistrust” in the Bundeswehr: Instead of the spirit of openness that the Innereführung actually demands, the Bundeswehr leadership “practices the opposite, that you do everything and wants to regulate everyone so that nothing happens ”.

Convicted for demeaning superiors in 2006

In 2006 Rose published an article in the magazine " Ossietzky " entitled "Geist und Ungeist der Generalität" in which he critically dealt with the behavior of the German generals during the Iraq war . The decisive passage read: “The fact that the generals could not have recognized what was going on due to intellectual insufficiency can be rightly excluded. […] Since stupidity can be ruled out, there is only the second alternative to the explanation - and that is: opportunism, cowardice and unscrupulousness. [...] If the German generals had even a spark of honor as well as legal and moral awareness in their bodies, the inspector general, together with his armed forces inspectors, would have refused to obey the international and unconstitutional ordinances of the red-green federal government. "Weil Rose so that superiors had "degraded in a defamatory manner", imposed the commander of the Military District Command IV Munich as a disciplinary superior on July 24, 2006 a disciplinary fine of 750 euros. The legality of his decision was later confirmed by the Troop Service Court South.

The events led to a small question from the Die Linke parliamentary group in the German Bundestag , which was answered by the federal government : Rose's accusation is unfounded because the Bundeswehr did not provide any “support for the illegal war in Iraq”. The assessment of the Federal Administrative Court in the case of Florian Pfaff is controversial in international law. Article 4.1 of the Basic Law also does not imply the right of a superior to be able to demand a similar decision of conscience from others, relying on his own conscience. The own highly personal decision of conscience does not protect any active advertising ( propaganda ) for certain actions of others. The federal government regards Rose's statements as defamation that goes beyond the scope of freedom of expression.

Rose's constitutional complaint for violation of freedom of expression before the 3rd Chamber of the 2nd Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court was rejected by the judges as unfounded in April 2007. The court criticized the original justification for the disciplinary punishment : it was a permitted expression of opinion that did not, as claimed, violate the human dignity of the person concerned. Nonetheless, the court considered the disciplinary punishment to be justified because the soldiers' law restricted freedom of expression with the aim of making the Bundeswehr functional. Rose's criticism endangers the necessary authority and loyalty. His individual complaint was also rejected in a decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from September 2010 on the grounds of inadmissibility. In the reasoning, the judges stated following the Federal Constitutional Court's decision that Rose had not been convicted under disciplinary law because of his subjective opinion, but because of the defamatory and reputation-damaging statements .

Criticism of the 2007 Afghanistan mission

In November 2006 Rose became a member of the board of the “ Darmstädter Signal Working Group ”. Despite his outsider status, he used this forum to criticize what he saw as the “militarization of foreign policy”. At the beginning of 2007 he signed an open letter with Major Helmuth Prieß and Sergeant Christiane Ernst-Zettl to the members of the German Bundestag , in which they were asked to reject the Federal Government's application for a tornado operation in Afghanistan.

On March 15, 2007, for reasons of conscience , Rose wrote to his supervisor asking for a transfer and release from all assignments relating to his involvement in logistical support services for the use of tornado jets of Reconnaissance Squadron 51 "Immelmann" in Afghanistan.

In July 2007, the left-wing parliamentary group filed a lawsuit against the Tornado mission with the Federal Constitutional Court . The expanded ISAF mission is cooperating with Operation Enduring Freedom , which means that the alleged illegality of this operation can be attributed to the NATO countries. The use of military force either lacks a mandate from the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the United Nations Constitution or there must be a case of collective self-defense within the meaning of Article 51 of the United Nations Constitution. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected the applications as unfounded. The main point of the ruling is that ISAF and Operation Enduring Freedom are based "on separate purposes, different legal bases and clearly defined spheres of responsibility". One cannot speak of integrated combat missions. An attribution of actions contrary to international law in individual cases cannot be ruled out; if, for example, an operation by Operation Enduring Freedom would not be in accordance with international law and could also be traced back to the results of the reconnaissance of the tornadoes, this could possibly make NATO or its member states responsible under international law. However, these possible isolated violations could not call the entire ISAF operation into question.

Various media and a. the political television magazine Panorama reported on Rose's decision; he gave several interviews. He received expressions of sympathy and a. by politicians from the Greens and the Left. The CSU defense expert Hans Raidel , on the other hand, said that he was degrading his comrades "to compliant recipients of orders". The SPD defense expert Rainer Arnold called on Rose, in view of his massive reservations, to quit the service with the weapon and to resign from the Bundeswehr. Rose refused.

In an interview with the online newspaper Telepolis in March 2007, Rose accused the inspector of the army, General Hans-Otto Budde, of “ armed forces-inspired fighter cult” and “ latrine slogans ”, as he propagated the abandonment of the outdated model of the citizen in uniform and instead propagated the “archaic fighter” have. FDP member of the Bundestag, Rainer Stinner, complained about this in the Federal Ministry of Defense . Rose dubbed Stinner as a " denunciator " on Friday in May 2007 .

A captain of the KSK wrote Rose regarding his criticism of the Bundeswehr in a private email in July 2007 that he would direct him as an “enemy within” and that his actions would be “to smash this enemy in focus.” He helped to characterize the Darmstadt signal the expressions "left (s) Zeitgeist conglomerate of uniformed food recipients" and "swamps of Stone Age Marxism". In the end he threatened "You are being watched, no, not by impotent, instrumentalized services, but by officers of a new generation who will act when the time makes it necessary." The KSK captain received a mild official reprimand for this . The defense commissioner Reinhold Robbe (SPD) assessed the reprimand as "completely inadequate". The Green Bundestag member Winfried Nachtwei stated that the measures against Daniel K. and Rose were clearly slanted, as Rose's statements were punished more severely than "an unconstitutional and even criminally relevant threat". The historian Wolfram Wette classified the "smear letter" from the KSK captain historically: "Here we hear the original sound of the right-wing free corps fighters from the early years of the Weimar Republic , who later all ended up with the NSDAP and the SS ."

In his reaction to the email, Rose publicly referred to the KSK as a “sewer” and accused right-wing subversive tendencies in the Bundeswehr. Because of this and other violations of the Soldiers Act ("duty of restraint", " duty of confidentiality " and "duty to serve faithfully") Rose was given a disciplinary fine of € 3,000, against which he lodged an unsuccessful complaint.

Publications and lectures

Rose published numerous articles in specialist journals and national newspapers . He writes regularly as an author for publications such as Friday , the blog NRhZ-Online and Ossietzky , but also for WOZ Die Wochenzeitung , das Neues Deutschland , Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Renewal and spw - magazine for socialist politics and economics .

Rose published a. a. in magazines such as papers for German and international politics and science & peace . In 2003 he began to speak regularly in the weekly newspaper Der Freitag . In an article dated July 22, 2005, Rose criticized a KSK sniper mission in Afghanistan under the title Spezialkiller Command to eliminate drug lords, which he said was contrary to international law, the constitution and its mandate.

Even before his refusal, he gave lectures at a number of institutions in Germany and abroad, including the universities in Munich, Oldenburg , Birmingham , Budapest , Kassel and Hamburg , at various academies and foundations (including the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences) , National Defense Academy , Evangelical Academy , Georg-von-Vollmar-Akademie , Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research , Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung ) as well as at the organizations Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces , International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War .

Rose published a monograph for the Center for Conflict Research at the Philipps University of Marburg on the question of democratization in the Bundeswehr . Citing Wolf Graf von Baudissin , Johann Adolf Graf Kielmansegg , Theodor Blank and others, Rose takes the view that - without prejudice to the functional requirements of an army - freedom of opinion and freedom of opinion could and must be guaranteed. As in other NATO armed forces, the duty of obedience in Germany must be strictly limited to strictly following legal orders; in Germany, however, the "legal chimera of the illegal but nonetheless binding order" still exists.

In 2004, Rose published a presentation of his view of the Israeli nuclear arsenal , the function of nuclear deterrence in Israel's foreign policy and the nuclear deployment strategies considered so far in the journal Wissenschaft und Frieden . Rose wanted to draw attention to the threat of a strategy of the use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East with its consequences for world peace. In support of his thesis, he referred, among other things, to statements by Martin van Creveld and Amnon Lipkin-Schachak regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons .

In addition, Rose appeared repeatedly as a speaker at peace demonstrations (e.g. Easter marches ) and on Memorial Day .

Private

Rose has been married since 1982 and lives in Munich - Harthof .

literature

  • Erhard Crome (ed.): Outdated. The Federal Armed Forces, Freedom of Expression and the "Causa Rose" , 2 volumes, Schkeuditzer Buchverlag, Schkeuditz 2016. ISBN 978-3943931006

Fonts (selection)

  • Emergency war of aggression: creating peace with all violence? Ossietzky, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-9808137-2-3 .
  • Jürgen Groß, Jürgen Rose: European security and the future of the Bundeswehr Defense structure reform under new premises From the work of the commission at IFSH. In: HAMBURG CONTRIBUTIONS. On Peace Research and Security Policy, Issue 128, Hamburg, February 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Do not participate anymore! in: taz , September 13, 2007.
  2. ↑ Soldier refuses to use tornado . In: The daily newspaper: taz . March 16, 2007, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 6 ( taz.de [accessed April 4, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Board of the sponsorship group. In: https://www.darmstaedter-signal.de/ . Retrieved January 26, 2019 .
  4. ↑ a b European Security, Volume 41, 1992, p. 148.
  5. ^ A Colonel for the Left , in: taz , December 17, 2010.
  6. ↑ Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, Volume 33, 1995, p. 234.
  7. ^ A b Uta Andresen: A citizen in uniform . In: The daily newspaper: taz . July 28, 1999, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 13 ( taz.de [accessed on April 3, 2018]).
  8. ^ Paul Klein , Jürgen Kuhlmann: Germany and its Armed Forces in Transition . In: Jürgen Kuhlmann, Jean Callaghan (Ed.): Military and society in 21st century Europe. A comparative analysis . Transaction Publishers, Piscataway 2000, ISBN 3-8258-4449-8 , p. 210.
  9. ↑ Charima Reinhardt : Assigned to count socks . In: Frankfurter Rundschau, December 23, 1997, p. 3
  10. ↑ szandar and: COMPLIANCE: pressure from above . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1997 ( online ).
  11. ↑ INGO PREISSLER: Displeasure with Rühe's management style / Prayon: Independent thinkers are not in demand: Ex-Colonel complains of a "climate of mistrust" . In: Berliner Zeitung . ( berliner-zeitung.de [accessed April 4, 2018]).
  12. ↑ European Court of Human Rights - Application no. 51001/07
  13. ↑ http://lehofer.at/pdfs/Beschwerde_Rose_EGMR.pdf
  14. ↑ Small question from the MPs Ulla Jelpke, Sevim Dag˘delen, Wolfgang Gehrcke, Inge Höger, Dr. Norman Paech, Paul Schäfer (Cologne) and the DIE LINKE parliamentary group. (PDF; 77 kB) German Bundestag, printed matter 16/4533.
  15. ↑ http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/047/1604726.pdf
  16. ↑ Helmut Kramer: Basic rights for soldiers? - The muzzle as a challenge , in: FF2007-3.
  17. ↑ a b Decision of September 14, 2010, Rose v. Germany (Appl. No. 51001/07).
  18. ↑ Wilfried von Bredow : Problems of Transformation and the New Image of the Soldier . In: Angelika Dörfler-Dierken , Gerhard Kümmel (ed.): Identity, self-image, job description. Implications of the new operational reality for the Bundeswehr (= series of publications by the Social Science Institute of the Bundeswehr . Volume 10). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17518-8 , p. 122.
  19. ↑ Open letter to the members of the German Bundestag , Darmstädter Signal, February 2009.
  20. ↑ Afghanistan: Bundeswehr soldier refuses "Tornado" operation , Spiegel Online, March 15, 2007.
  21. ↑ Matthias Gillner : For an obedience that considers the ethical limits of one's own conscience. The judgment of the Federal Administrative Court on the soldier's freedom of conscience and its consequences for the Bundeswehr . In: Sabine Jaberg (Hrsg.): Foreign deployments of the Bundeswehr. Social science analyzes, diagnoses and perspectives (= social science writings . H. 47). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-428-13072-6 , p. 212.
  22. ↑ BVerfG, 2 BvE 2/07 of July 3, 2007.
  23. ↑ a b c Afghanistan: First German soldier successfully refuses to deploy a tornado , in: Spiegel Online , March 16, 2007.
  24. ↑ a b c Peter Mühlbauer: Archaic fighters vs. Citizens in uniform , in: Telepolis , July 4, 2008.
  25. ↑ Wolfram Wette: Bundeswehr: The enemy inside . In: fr-online.de . April 1, 2008 ( Lebenshaus-alb.de [accessed October 22, 2016]).
  26. ↑ Ulrike Demmer: Soldiers: Feind inside , in: Der Spiegel , 13/2008.
  27. ↑ Peter Mühlbauer : "Long live holy Germany!" . In: Telepolis , March 27, 2008.
  28. ↑ Bernd Dörries: Mobbing in the Bundeswehr , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 17, 2010.
  29. ↑ https://www.lebenshaus-alb.de/magazin/004966.html
  30. ↑ Disciplinary fine for KSK critics , in: Der Spiegel , 25/2008.
  31. ↑ Jürgen Rose: "Dran, drauf, drüber!" In: Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung , No. Z 94, June 2013.
  32. ↑ Jürgen Rose: The defamation of Innereführung has a long tradition in the Bundeswehr . In: spw - socialist politics and economy , February 15, 2005.
  33. ↑ Jürgen Rose: Risk the break . In: Friday , December 19, 2003.
  34. ↑ Jürgen Rose: Kommando Spezialkiller , in: Friday , July 22, 2005.
  35. ↑ Rose, Jürgen: Democratization of the Bundeswehr as a step on who to peace. Notes on the civilization perspectives of an authoritarian institution. CCS Working Papers No. 14. Editors: Center for Conflict Research at the Philipps University of Marburg, Mathias Bös, Ulrich Wagner, Johannes M. Becker. 2011, Center for Conflict Research ISSN 1862-4596 ( online ), accessed April 30, 2019.
  36. ↑ Jürgen Rose | The "temple weapons" (in 2004-4). In: www.wissenschaft-und-frieden.de. Retrieved October 22, 2016 .
  37. ^ Speech at the peace demonstration in Stuttgart on October 13, 2001 . Network Peace Cooperative , accessed on August 25, 2013.
  38. ↑ Speech on the Easter march on April 7, 2007 at Marienplatz Munich Peace Alliance , accessed on August 25, 2013.
  39. ↑ http://www.darmstaedter-signal.de/aktuell/20101114_Rose_Volkstrauertag_Mannheim.php
  40. ↑ Jürgen Rose: Serious war of aggression - books - Ossietzky - two-week publication for politics / culture / economy. Retrieved April 4, 2018 .
  41. ↑ https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/21348/hb128.pdf
personal data
SURNAME Rose, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rose, Hans-Jürgen (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Worms