German tourist sued for complaints about hotel's Nazi portraits
Visitor posted on Booking.com and Tripadvisor about disgust at pictures in Austria
www.theguardian.com
@Cockney Mackem
“A German man is being sued by the owners of a four-star hotel in Austria after posting online reviews in which he criticised them for decorating their lobby with a portrait of a “Nazi grandpa” in a uniform adorned with a swastika.
The owners of the hotel contacted both sites and asked for the reviews to be removed on the grounds that the description “Nazi grandpa” was libellous and defamatory because the people in the pictures – one a grandfather, the other an uncle of one of the owners – had only been members of the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945.
The fact that the Wehrmacht had been an instrument of the National Socialist regime, the owners argued, did not mean that soldiers conscripted into service could be defamed as Nazis.
After researching the identity of the two men in the photographs at the German National Archives in Berlin, K was able to prove that both of the men had in fact joined the Nazi party, in 1941 and 1943 respectively.”