Corona Investigative Committee, 125th session on November 7th, 2022
V. Fischer, A. Fischer, J. Hoffmann PhD, W . Wodarg MD, R. Cibis
(Original language: German)
[Transcript from Team corona-ausschuss-info.com + Ed]
Transcription of simultaneous translation, in English from German:
Viviane Fischer: [0:00:07]
Well hello and welcome to another session of the Corona Committee entitled “An Inconvenient Truth”, which however has nothing to do with climate change, because it is a well-known wording used by Al Gore at the time to speak about the climate and climate change. It has more to do with political climate and with change. We are showing you a recorded discussion rather than what we usually do. We couldn’t do this live starting now for coordination– we had coordination issues; people wouldn’t have been available now.
But we did simply records a live discussion, so it’s as if it were live. You can see, still see the remnants from the discussion. We just had a discussion with Justus Hoffmann and Antonia Fischer. They established the a Corona Committee together with Reiner Fuellmich and myself. We had Wolfgang Wodarg here. And we wanted to let you know these things that we discussed. Now I think it’s quite enlightening and interesting, so I’ll just give the floor to the team, so they can replay the recorded discussion. And then after that, we will start with the normal session, interviewing more people like we normally do. What we will see now was about two hours long. And I think that a lot of questions will arise, and for next week we will give you the possibility– or over the next few days, we’ll give you the possibility of asking questions concerning all these issues. But I hope that the things that you will see now will also answer a lot of questions that have arisen over the last few weeks.
So I hope that you will be interested in listening to this and that some you will see, get some enlightenment have some a questionable issues.
[BEGINNING OF PRE-RECORDED PROGRAM SEGMENT]
Viviane Fischer: [00:02:48]
Hello and welcome to an internal session of the Committee. Today we are nearly in the old team here. And we want to clarify a couple of things that have been moving around the net and elsewhere. There’s lots of things that need to be clarified, and maybe we have to sketch out a more detailed picture and sketch out the developments to understand what went on.
We had established the Committee in summer 2020,when we were facing the question of what’s going on in Germany and worldwide. Measures were taken that had lots of legal implications, the masks and the vaccine mandates and so on, and many other things. And at the time we came together in order to follow up the question on the danger of the virus and go down into the details of that. And maybe we can comment briefly on how the session, how the Committee was founded. Many may know, but some won’t. So I’ll just tell you about it.
I had started a petition asking for a baseline study, asking for clean corona data. And we wanted to know, I wanted to know what is the risk. What is really spreading throughout Germany here? And from that petition which was signed by many people, for me contacts were established to scientists, lawyers and others. Amongst others to Dr. Wolfganf Wodarg, who’ll be with us later on. And sometime down the line, I got a call from Reiner. Reiner Fuellmich. At the time i didn’t know him. And he had got my contact from Wolfgang because he was looking for lawyers who were willing to stand up against all these measures in Germany and so on.
And he called me, because in May 2020 I think it was when he asked us to do a symposium. And I said, Reiner, this is too much of a topic. It’s nothing that we can do at brief notice. We need an investigative committee for that. And maybe we’ll come back on that in a minute. And then it was clear that we wanted to do this. He, Reiner also contacted me with, through another lawyer whom I’d known, who had informed me that Reiner would be engaged, and I should get to know him.
[0:05:48]
So it was two recommendations, so to say, for contacts. And I thought that could be be interesting. And then we wanted to work together with two more people, Professor Humbug and Professor Hochart, who turned it down for reasons other than Professor Humbug is now presenting. We decided to join up with two more lawyers, which we much more liked– and with that we established the Committee– Antonia Fisher, who has the same name as me but none of my family, and Justus Hoffmann.
And so we came together wondering or questioning about the conditions and the terms [under which]we would do this. And the initial idea was that it would take 10 days or two weeks. And all the extensions that it would take, we couldn’t think of that at the time– the commitment and engagement that it would need, and how to share the work, and how to set up with that. And at the time we said that we want to do it… in this way: that nobody would get money for what they do, at least out of the four of us, nobody. And of course we don’t want to excessively pay any service providers or anybody else involved.
And of course we had to bind the capital of what came in, that it was, this was to be used with the work, for the work exclusively and should not dwindle away with any one of us.
[0:07:37]
That was how we started. And I really have to say, for us or fou me, it was a surprising success. I think we were really on the ball at the time. And because people wanted to have a close and detailed and intensive look into these things, not just a brief YouTube video with a couple of charts, but really questioning and scrutinizing of what was going on.
And we became international quite quickly, looking at Bergamo, finding that the situation was the same. We wondered why was that same picture to be seen everywhere, and the same decisions, and wrong decisions, as we thought at the time. Or a false alarm, as was given by the paper of Stephan Coon at the time. That is how we set sails, so to say. And I think we did good work, content-wise, over the past two years. And I really do think that Reiner deserves a lot of honor for this, because he asked good questions and he communicated very well with the people. And he brought out the findings that we had. And I really think it is very good.
[00:08:58]
The problems that have developed over the recent past, although it may look different from the outside, are not a personal issue at all. There are hard facts which do emerge to be problematic. And maybe I can hand over to you two now.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [00:09:20]
Well how did we get involved? That might be interesting as well, because we were basically recruited by Reiner. I think he called you.
Antonia Fischer:
Yes, I had a client.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
Yes, and you said Viviane Fischer, she has a great idea, a committee etc etc. And we said, okay we’ll we can meet to look at it. So we did meet. And we figured, okay the chemistry between us was all right; we liked each other. We thought that something needs to be done there. And at that point, we couldn’t really expect both how the committee would develop and how we would be homed in on by the state. So this is the way we got together. We have known Reiner since about 2015, and I have to say personally, even if he, as we learned now obviously, always saw it differently, we really had a good business friendship. He was always a good colleague; we were always friendly with each other and we, not only at Transparency International where we were active, but also with other projects that we started, we cooperated very well. We did a lot of things that were very good, I believe.
And I know what kind of accusations we can expect now — that we are on a personal vendetta or something against individuals. I don’t see how you could arrive at that conclusion. There were unfortunate developments, let me put it this way, that could have been avoided. But I think we’ll get back to that later on. You’re always smarter with the benefit of hindsight, and it’s obviously part of the nature of the issues we’re dealing with here. And we could see it with our first Committee meeting.
None of us are media experts, journalists, TV anchors or actors. We’re all lawyers. We can present ourselves very well in court. We can argue. But communicating according to procedural rules in court is different from what we do here. And there were, of course, teething problems at the beginning, and things didn’t work very well, technically speaking. Sometimes we couldn’t get guests on line. We didn’t have a translation at the time, and that wasn’t helpful. And maybe we’d express things awkwardly at times and then all of a sudden we thought, this could be misconstrued now. But that was part of the charm really, at the beginning. That was our thing. It was live, untrained, uncut, live. And it was the
counterpart that we wanted to establish, compared to the others. We didn’t have a political advisor coming in and telling us, you can’t put it this way or giving us a political agenda or something. No, we wanted to give people information, so that can form their own idea. And if people felt like, “What kind of idiots are thrse?”, fine. And if people thought, “Okay that makes sense, what they say”, fine as well.
So we just wanted to say what we thought. We didn’t want to present ourselves in a way to lead people to have a certain perception of us, and we’re better, greater than others, no. And that’s the way we approach this. And I don’t want to denigrate it at this stage, no. On the contrary, that’s our approach, and we still stand by it. And I’m not betraying my former self by saying, “It was all stupid.” No. It was good as it was. It was a very natural thing, and we didn’t have big-time planning of the backgrounds, thinking like, “Oh, we’ll do this, that and the other today, so that people will think certain things about us,” no. We wanted people to understand what we were saying, both those who are favorable, have a favorable attitude towards us, and those who have an unfavorable attitude as well, that they can see, “Okay, that’s what happened here.”
[00:14:33
Now the whole thing developed into a dimension that nobody had anticipated. That’s a different story, though. But I think that’s a very important aspect. And let me address the real elephant in the room: Antonia and I myself are back. The question now is, of course, where have we been? And this question has been asked again and again. We followed this, of course, and that is part of why we are here now, to talk about this, to give our perspective of developments over the last two years, particularly about the developments of the last year, last few weeks, against the background of the topic of the Committee and of what we were trying to achieve, i.e., transparency and truth, these beautiful things that we always said we want to do better than the others, “the others,” in quotation marks. Better than those where we say they’re not playing on a level playing field; they have to fall back on propaganda and other things. This is not right in a state of law this is undignified in a state of law.
And this is … maybe that is why we are here. We want to really ensure that for the Committee as well, because transparency also involves
self-criticism; and truth also means that you have to speak about inconvenient truths as well. And I can speak on behalf of Antonia as well. It doesn’t make sense for me to say everything and then Antonia to follow suit and say the same thing again. We discussed it ahead of time, of course, what we were going to say, what we want to say here, what message we should deliver. And due to this desire for transparency and truth, we found it easy to come here.
[00:16:50]
But we also knew that it was a very important decision to make, a serious decision. I’m saying that right now because, of course, we have to expect all sorts of criticism now, of all sorts of kinds: that we should be here, why we’re here, why we are getting involved at this point. The decision was easy because we know that with our presence in the committee today, with what we’re going to discuss today, we can actually only lose. That’s why it’s a serious decision. What do I mean by this? Well we expose ourselves to people who are willing to attack us. We are walking into the crossfire of people who would like to damage us publicly, who would like to attack us publicly. And we’d like to say here that none of us, neither Antonia nor I myself, Viviane, of course, as well, but I’m only speaking on behalf of the two of us now, who weren’t involved here, have any sinister motive of denigrating anyone, slurring anyone or whatever.
[00:18:04]
If we had one, it’s life to be easy for us and we just wouldn’t have come. We would have said, “Okay, do your own thing; do what you want. Let’s not get involved here. We want to be at peace.” But we are of course involved, under corporate law, of course. And by co-establishing this community and to showing our faces here we created hopes in people that there will be a counter narrative here, that people would have a voice who are being silenced by other media.
And so we have assumed a certain level of responsibility, And I always try to live up to all the responsibility that I have, as far as I can in my is sphere of influence. And that means that you also stand by inconvenient truths and make yourself a target for whatever attacks come your way, are leveled at you. And that’s why I wanted to say whoever watches this now and listens to things being told about the Committee in other locations they can then listen to us and form their own opinion. But none of us have any reason to be here today, because we can’t gain from it, other than our feeling committed to truth and transparency.
[00:19:43]
What do I mean by this, now, in concrete terms? Well at some stage we learned about the issues here as well. Viviane, for instance, after a long time of not having anything to do with each other, she contacted us giving us her perspective of what had happened, including the financial situation of the Committee, and where what monies went.
Now let me just get back to the association that was created in the summer of 2020. It’s a GmbH [Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung], so a limited company that is an entrepreneurial company that was created with four members: the three of us at the table here, plus Reiner Fuellmich, with a charitable purpose.
So we created this association like you would know it from, you would expect from a sports club. So you just choose this legal form because it is easier to handle, particularly for a project of the scale we’re talking about. It wouldn’t have been advisable to have a different approach. And of course we wanted to have a limitation of our liability, and we needed a vessel where we could pool the donations that we could collect. Because the idea originally was to collect donations only until we could establish a foundation.
We can often hear the accusation that we never planned to establish a foundation, that it’s still a GmbH and that it’s only for profits. Well, you can create a limited company or any corporation for charitable purposes, only for nonprofit purposes. And that has nothing to do, really, with that legal form that you choose. That was the original idea, because we all anticipated that if we sit down and collect donations– because we didn’t want to earn money with it but we also didn’t want to spend many thousands of euro every month for keeping this going– so we were thinking that if at the end of the day we collect as much money as we need to keep the show going for like, what, three or four months that we were anticipating, then we’re happy.
[00:22:37]
So that was initially the idea. That’s what we discussed. That’s why we saw a notary public and signed this agreement. That’s all provable. It’s all on record. and that’s– we didn’t just get together, you know, coming up with a great story. It’s not a big secret that it should be
so. However the important point from my view is that this coroperation had two more associates. which is us two. And we have the same vote, right to vote in the association. So that was the starting situation.
And sometimes they say, okay, it’s a capital corporation. And I have to say that none of us had expected any big sums to be left over at the end of the month, which we could use apart from printing a few leaflets or things like that. We didn’t expect any money to be left over. We expected a couple of thousands of people to watch, and maybe they would give us two, three thousand euros per month, and we could pay the production for that, or possibly rent a room to transmit. And the transmission, we could pay for that. And that was it. Nobody of us expected that it would take such dimensions as it did.
And so that allegation which is being brought up that from the beginning all of us had some idea to make some profit with it is– none of it is fact, because none of us had an idea of this online streaming offer could– which in our point of view only addressing of a very small market– we didn’t expect that it would be such a big matter that we couldn’t make money with that, hypothetically. So that is important for me to make that clear here now to– whether the people want to believe it or not is up to them, because otherwise we wouldn’t have done a nonprofit cooperation in order to transfer the money to a foundation later on. Why should we have done that, if we want to by an island in the Bahamas from that?
Viviane Fischer: [00:25:00]
Well, may I say it all went very fast, too. We just had first discussion with Reiner in May, and then bang, bang, bang. I think we first spoke at the end of May, and then we got started in July. So we kicked into action incredibly fast, really. And against this background anything else would have been very hard to achieve. To do a huge organizational or corporate law things, whatever, within three and a half months. We wanted to get started so other people involved, Professor Humbolt for instance, was planning to get started in October only, when he was still involved. And we really felt that it was important, because we were sailing ahead of the wave. And we anticipated that the anticorona measures would be intensified in the fall, in October.And so we wanted to point this out to people so we were actually sailing close to the wind.
Antonia Fischer: [00:26:13]
Maybe I can say that we assumed this Committee to the active for six to eight weeks, and respectively the plan was to collect the information until autumn and be done with it at the time, in order to take other actions after that. Or use the information collected if the infections or whatever measures were taken that go beyond what the summer time was foreseeable at the time. And that alone was one of the major reasons for our saying, “We’ll do it this summer and have a result after that.”
And I think when we were, wanted to be done, over with, we had that intermediate report. But then we saw that we had to carry on, because more information, more odds came onto the table.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
Yes, well beautifully. I didn’t really have to say so many things. That’s basically the crux of the matter. It all went so incredibly fast that if we’d sat down discussing financing models for anything then we wouldn’t have had the time for that at all. No, whether people believe me or not doesn’t really matter, because that’s the way it was. And I can speak for myself and Antonia, because I know positively that we never saw any of the Committee monies, didn’t want to see them, either. And I have to put an asterisk here: that’s to do with taxes, but we’ll get back to that later.
And we didn’t have power of attorney over any of the funds available to the Committee. That always went through Reiner’s law firm. And that was also only conceived as a provisional solution, because first of all it went to his colleague, to his [bison born]. And then at some stage, because he didn’t want to continue that– and I can’t begrudge that to him, because if you have an account and then there’s a lot of individual payments, then the bank starts asking questions, and you don’t do that if you don’t really have to.
So that’s not an accusation that I’m making. But… so it went primarily through Reiiner, and only towards the very end did Viviane make her account available. But from the get-go it went through Reiner’s account.
Viviane Fischer:
And we have to say at least as far as we know it’s… what money that we were entrusted with. It’s not a mixture or mix of clients’ money or any of the private money. And so it was pure trustee functions that we took over there for the accounts with the money that came in. At least for the account that I have, that is the case. And which I had for a certain time, that was only a trustee account, and no other in- or out-movements happened.
And this is what we thought we’d known, at least for these things that were in Reiner’s power. And only he, until the end of 2021 he did all this accounting and had access to the account. And so for example, an invoice that came in from IT was forwarded so that it was paid from then. And I myself, only shortly after these things turned up, now I’m doing the transfers. But before, it was all done by Reiner’s office, who has an accounting. And we had an accountant who was involved in that, as we’ve just mentioned.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [00:30:47]
Well. this problematic situation that we have now had a pre-history, as it were. You must have heard about the establishment of a company like that. I don’t want to give a lecture on corporate law now, but you have to understand how come that Antonia and I didn’t participate in the Committee any more. And something that I want to anticipate right now. I don’t want to raise accusations against anyone. What happened, happened, and we’ll have to deal with it. So we’ll get back to that. If communication had been smoother, then some misunderstandings could have been avoided.
But I just wanted to say that by way of introduction to, make you understand where we were coming from. We wanted the corporation to be accepted as not-for-profits by the tax authorities. And that wouldn’t have been very problematic. There were a couple of things that would have had to be changed. And there was some communication between the notary public and the tax authorities– no accusation against either the tax authority or the a notary public. The tax authority has other things to do as well. It’s not an accusation against them either. It is as it is. Official processes take their time, and this did take its time. And we started very quickly, of course. And we can’t expect everybody to hang around waiting and say, “Well, what about registration? What about the non-profit status?”
We did have an agreement, actually, at the time, in autumn 2021, we got a letter from the tax office saying that the non-profitability is accepted. And I communicated. I said this in one of the sessions, I think. And it was only small things that– details. For example the temporal publication of our findings. So at the same time when we found things out they were published already. So there was no major changes.
However, briefly after that we got another letter saying that there were problems to accept the non profitability. And I asked why that was the case. And it was said because the book that I published, a summary, is not in agreement with what the government says. And this is why that would be some problem in recognizing the non-profitability.
And– however, that is not completely ruled out yet. So it’s not sure that this is going to be an obstacle.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [00:34:04]
But the not-for-profit status has a tax component, really, only. But that’s where things get started. The corporation hasn’t been registered as not-for-profits to this day, by the way. Normally when you establish such a corporation, the judiciary has come up with a solution that you’re only a corporation until you’re registered. And you’re a private corporation until you are registered. And of course, if you have a good idea to launch a new product to market, and then you say, “Okay, we get started five months from now when the hype is over.” Then that doesn’t make sense, so a corporation can get started as a private corporation where every shareholder or every member of the corporation is personally liable.
But after registration, it can be treated retrospectively as if it had been registered since the start. And the longer you procrastinate this, the more likely it is that the corporation wouldn’t be considered to be a private corporation, independently of what the articles of association state. And if we don’t, are not allowed to take money from it, then we still have a share of the profits that we have to pay income tax on. And then in mid 2020, Antonia and I realized that might be a problem. So we didn’t want to have any money from this corporation, but also we didn’t want to have to be liable to pay tax on the corporate income, particularly for profits, or for monies that we don’t even know what they were.
So that’s a takes to the point where we don’t even know what the financial situation of the Committee, whatever legal format it may have, what the financial situation is, actually, and what we were potentially faced with. Because we didn’t really fancy being estimated by the tax authorities. And I don’t think I’m telling any secrets, that the tax authorities are quite rustic when it comes to estimating people’s income. And then they might say– well, we thought at the time that a few hundred thousand euro might have been collected, so we might have had to pay income tax on a hundred thousand euro each, or something. And that wasn’t a sexy idea. And we didn’t want to argue vis-a-vis the tax authorities that “Sorry, we never saw any of the money. Plus it’s not for profit.” And then we couldn’t even have proven to the tax authorities that there was less money that had been collected, because we didn’t have access to the figures, to the statements.
So the tax authorities have, of caurse, comprehensive rights of information, particularly if monies are collected. So at one stage, we were meeting some colleagues– and that was in August, early August, end of July, early August of ’21,we called Reiner and asked him what the financial status of the Committee was, because it’s still not, was still not registered. So we explained the problems that we saw, and we told him, who do we have to turn to if we need clarity for ourselves?
And on the phone it wasn’t a problem at all. He was friendly and said, “Okay I’m not so sure myself.” And he gave us a figure that actually reflected the latest data we were aware of. I don’t know what it was now any more. At the end of 2020 there was a certain amount in the account, and that was his latest update, basically. And he said he would contact the accountant, and he would forward information to us.
[00:38:55]
And that’s where the problems started. So we contacted his accountant. And he immediately got, went on the a defensive. He said, “No I’m not giving you that information; you’ll have to clarify that with Reiner and Viviane.” And that was, even the brusque way that he rejected us really amazed us.
Because if– does the accounts for the Committee and he knows that the Committee exists, and he knew about this because he was involved in many conferences and by e-mail. Well, not many, but I can remember some cases where he was involved in person, where he participated via Zoom. And he knew that there were more members of the corporation, and he said, “Well, do that or discuss that among yourselves.” And that was a bit amazing. And then a ping-pong game started.
And he said, he asked Reiner, and he said, “Oh, ask Jens.” I’d like to note that I didn’t have that documentation, because it was all done with Reiner’s accountant. And he had the account statements and so on as well.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [00:40:22]
It’s good that you mentioned that. We didn’t know about that at the time. Our information at that point in time was, it all goes via Reiner, his accountant. So these to have to approve that. And then we were a bit annoyed there and confused. So we met in person, and we said at the time, “We won’t participate in the Committee any more as long as this hasn’t been clarified, because something’s fishy here.” And of course, that wasn’t a nice discussion there, a nice meeting, because Reiner was, I wouldn’t say aggressive, but he was quite rejective, shall we say, vis-a-vis our request.
So he suggested that we wanted to access the of Committee’s money. So it’s noteworthy that this suggestion comes from the only person who has access to the money that we want to have something now. And the way it ended, the way we parted, because I tried to make it clear that there might be a huge tax issue coming down the line, and that we should all be interested in clarifying this. And I had the impression that that was something that did get across, because he said himself and realized himself, the fact that his ass is dangling out the window, as he put it. And he was right, because he had control of the monies.
So I really expected the situation to have been clarified that way, but it wasn’t. Because when we inquired again, when we would finally get the information and the documentation for or about the financial situation of the Committee, he simply told us, “I won’t give it to you.” And then we tried by via Zoom and with the support of some people that we know that tried to broker a solution, to get to a solution. And that wasn’t a pleasant situation either, because from my point of view quite out of the blue, there was a lot of shouting and anger and aggro, if I can put it this way. Because I said, yeah we have to– because Reiner said the corporation had to be registered first.
And I said, “Yes, I agree, but as a managing, as a manager of this corporation, that on paper we all were, we–” Well, if you register a company, you have to affirm that there is no under funding of the corporation, i.e., that at least the minimum funds indicated in the articles of association are available. You have to do that in order to pay your bills to your business partners. And if you don’t have that, then a– if a corporation doesn’t have these funds, than they have to be deleted from the register of corporations.
And if you make, if you register a company that doesn’t have these funds, then you actually commit a criminal offense. And that’s why we said, “As long as we don’t have this information, then we will not be involved any more. We really should refrain from being managers, all of us. And I think it’s understandable that if we think– if we’re not sure whether the corporation still has enough funds, in order to raise its funds, its capital stock, it’s nominal capital– Well, I did expect that we had it, but if somebody doesn’t want to give me the information– I won’t go into details of what his explanations and justifications were; they were ever more a fantastic. The last thing, I think, that he said was: our tax consultant’s with the freemasons or whatever, and ever more fantastic, justifications of why it’s impossible. And then to just, well trust me with it. Well then, I have to say I’m enough of a lawyer to say, no, no can do. And so at the end of the day, I was thinking, we’re here to promote truth and transparency. And that is what we stand for, and we can’t say, no no no, nobody ever took anything.
And it wasn’t only Viviane who said that, rightly so. but he also kept harping on about this and that he felt that it was important to communicate that externally, and to communicate that externally, but then internally to put it mildly to be in transparent and… if, I don’t want to go into detail here, when it starts involving threats, not only once but twice, in a way that has actually been, partially been implemented.
And that’s part of the truth too. That, in summary, if we don’t do as he wants, then this, that, the other will happen. And I believe independently of what you think about truth and transparency, that’s not the way to treat people, particularly not if you, if nobody ever gave him a reason to mistrust you. All of a sudden, mistrust skyrockets.
[00:47:19]
And on the other hand, I don’t feel that such forms, such things as threatening each other is conducive to our objective. And we used to have a good relationship in the past. And it came from out of the blue, in a way. And we thought a lot about a possible reason for this. We had an associate meeting where we left saying, “Okay, you’ll get all of that.” And meanwhile, we had an Excel sheet for the 2020 figures without accounts and account statements, pointing out that there’s not necessary to show us, show this to us, and that already had questionable questions paid to people from Reiner’s office.
So, of course that wasn’t clarified, because the relationship worsened more and more. And that was the only thing that we got before. And then we had that associate meeting where we left saying, “You’ll get all of this.” And we are waiting for it until today.
Viviane Fischer: [00:48:42]
Well I think this Excel sheet, that I never– well, I only learned about in the context of this current issue, may have been issued only after the assembly of members. And I wasn’t aware of it and I didn’t have it. And if I take a look at it now, it is actually very… “special”.
Antonia Fischer:
I don’t know if it was before or after it, but I do think the argument at the meeting from Reiner was, you got everything. What else do you want? You got everything, so do your part now. And, well, of course it is a very strange way of putting it, because he had to be aware that– well, in autumn, we were in autumn, 2021. And it’s not really worth much to give us an Excel sheet with whatever figures until the end of 2020.
Viviane Fischer: [00:49:44]
And then this person got involved who I thought of as our tax consultant. And from my perspective, she… well I was relieved, really, that, I expected that it would all be audited now, and that things would be clarified. No, but what happened was, I learned about this initiation of a client relationship, as I perceived it, in the Zoom meeting. And then this tax consultant introduced herself, so that she was actually granted freedom to speak. She wasn’t under a promise to keep confidentiality. And I thought, okay that’s all very reliable. And I would like to get back to this oft-quoted annual accounts, because I have been asked about this. Well, annual accounts is not a heap of invoices
.
And it is a list of these various movements, and you can then tote them up– movements on the account, and you can tote them up.
And no, that isn’t what we got. And I couldn’t see it as a communication that’s… a service that was invoiced as a lawyer’s fee. And I would have complained about it if that had happened. So that I really expected this tax consultant to have been involved in the drafting of the annual accounts. But I had expected her to have audited this. And I asked her then at some stage what her view was on these invoices. She told me that she hadn’t seen anything, that she wasn’t our tax consultant at all. And that was– well, what can I say? That was a very split approach there.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [00:52:06]
Well, it was done to make us feel safe, yes. I think this is what you can say. And you really have to keep in mind that a capital corporation is a business person, and a business person is obliged to do a business accounting according to respective rules. And they are apparently not, they have apparently not been adhered to.
Well however, that’s something we’ll, may get to later on. So we wondered what may be the reason, what may be the reason why there is so much rejection and why one is of the opinion that threats are necessary, and as we found out later, defamations were put out. And I can comment on that, by the way. We are still there; we still work; we’re not bankrupt, just to comment on that. And the only supposed explanation that we could think of was that Reiner, whoever, we don’t know, somehow funded political activities from that money.
We didn’t know. We don’t know. We only had the suspicion. And if that was our best guess. If we had known that gold had been bought… and a little point from me against that statement that I had known of that: no I hadn’t. Nobody talked to me. So what we should have known– from whom? Nobody talked to us at all, anyway. And we didn’t get any information. We were just accused and threatened and shouted at when we wanted the information. So where from should we know things? If we only hear, “No, you have to ask this person or that other person.” Whatever.
So I can’t really say much more in that respect at this point. Truth also includes at this point. And I don’t want to roll this out too much and raise allegations, but to honor the truth. I want to recount this here. We communicated the problem internally, and we said, “Something is wrong here.”
And everybody told us, “Well we can’t think of that, that Reiner would do this kind of thing, and just keep still. Don’t damage this beautiful Committee,” and so on. At the time, that irritated me quite a lot. And because I kind of felt thrown under the bus. People telling me, “Your personal ideas, your tax debt and so on– the Committee is more important than your personal things.”
[00:55:12]
Well first of all, I’m part of the Committee. And we set out to do things better, and not say, “Okay, let’s just kick this person out. It’s about the good thing, for the good of it all.” We wanted to be more “virtuous” in quotes. So this is no allegation to anybody. Nobody saw this coming, and nobody saw the development coming. That you’ve said, “Well, I can’t imagine this kind of thing.” Well, how often have you heard this in your life? The neighbor who all of a sudden sas 20 skeletons in their cupboards. Well, if we had imagined this, if we could imagine everything, there would be no crimes at all.
Anyway, it was important for me to make this point here: that this, that we did was right, from our point of view. And then that’s why we said, “We don’t want to get threatened any more, and get pushed into a certain direction.” And we came up with the offer to leave the Committee. And I do firmly assume that this attack will come from some direction. We tried to do a closing contract, which explicitly and understandable and compensable for everyone, was it page two paragraph five, has a clause saying that Antonia and I leave the association, in quotes, “with payment”.
But only to make sure that we know how much money will we have to pay in taxes. And then we announced this to the tax [agents] and say, “This is the money.” They get it. And there was a return clause, a repayment clause included. That means at the point when the nonprofit status is confirmed, the Committee or whatever the legal successor may be will get that money repaid. And the only benefit for us would have been, and it was foreseeable that it would be, hypothetically we could have got a receipt for the donations. And so the only bounced party, in that sense, without wanting to talk about the tax avoidance here, would have been the tax man.
However, so I would have given the money to a non profit company. And there were limits to this. I can’t just as donate all my income for a year. There’s limits to it. And anyway that would have been the only possible benefit that we could have had from this. And of course if from that situation– and I don’t want to allege Viviane here that it turned out. She would have had to agree. In a situation when you have something that, who tells you they want all the money, they’re bankrupt, they will do get on the money. And you get this on your table, of course you think, “Well, that’s something wrong here.” I understand this. However, from the situation, and the prospective at the time, that Viviane had or the people had, this at the time. I can understand that this looked as if we wanted to get our hands on the money, at the time.
I don’t think so. However, you always have to see the situation as the other side sees it. The positions were hardened. And it didn’t help too get closer to each other, and I completely assume responsibility for that. And at the time, it was a certain desperation that drove me to do that, because I did not want to get into that income tax trap — of money which I didn’t know was there, at what amount it was there. And I didn’t know whether I would get it.
[00:59:24]
And that was the situation. Could we have done it differently? Yes, it would have made sense. Well, possibly we could have communicated it in a different way. But this is why we’re here today, as well. And from our behalf as well, it didn’t all go smoothly, as it may have been. But in order to handle this conflict at the time when it might still have been possible.
So as I said, we try to take all the responsibility as we can. That’s the part, as I wrote this down, that is what I’m responsible for. However, everybody who would have made this proposal– it was not seen as a final conclusion and solution– it was our proposal, saying this is what we think, what can we do reach retrospectively.
If you read it from today, you could see that nobody wanted to get their hands on the money. Only we wanted to have an ordinary withdrawal, and I think on the basis of trust that those people, in quotes are “the perfect person”, whoever, who treated as the way they did saying, “Oh do trust that it’s all gonna be fine and that your income tax won’t be a problem.”
On one hand you’re treated so shittily– and I can’t say that in any other word– and on the other hand, you should have had trust that the, that it would have gone all correctly. And that this mistrust that we had at thte time probably was justified is… well, something that we’ll see later on.
Antonia Fischer: [01:01:22]
And, well, trust is not a one-way street. And we really saw ourselves exposed to a tax burden that nobody would have bailed us out from. And while that takes us back to the first principle that we started from with the Committee: we didn’t want to take any money out of the Committee, but certainly we didn’t want to have to pay money into it, either. Particularly not hundreds of thousands, potentially, in taxes.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
Yes, and Viviane it can probably say more about that than we can, because we’ve only got the information which is out now, that Viviane gave to us as well. And what we heard from the “internal communication” in quotes, that went on.
I would like to make this clear this point that the situation that we talked about is undisputed. There’s nothing to be interpreted here. None of the involved people disputes this, that this is the case. The only thing anything that would publicly just point this out would be directly and unmistakably a communication by e-mail, communication, Zoom communication where people who were present could be contradicted.
That’s not the point. The point is only to assess this morally, to assess this legally, definitely. And one point that I’d like to make at this point is, as it is also about sums that are quite substantial for the so-called “external communication” communique of the Committee. Viviana can comment on that as well. And one thing I’d like to mention, which our colleague reminded me of, which I had completely forgotten, I do admit. But when he told me I became aware of it. We, actually the colleague, Reiner Fuellmich, is not the only person whose office with the increasing popularity, was filled up with e-mails. He is definitely not the only person, although he likes to spark that impression that he is the only one, that got all the work and had to do all of this. I don’t want to comment whether it was necessary. That is going to be clarrified at a given point in time.
However, we had, I don’t know when it was, I think it was early 2021… well whether we could hire someone on behalf of the Committee who helps us to answer the e-mails which we get on behalf of the Committee. That must have been around that. Because we got too much, too many e-mails at the time. And he clearly and unmistakably negated this. He said, “No, we don’t do this. We have to do this centrally somehow.”
And again– I don’t want to create the impression that the problem was that he said, “No, we don’t do this. We have no money from the Committee.” Okay fine for me. We’ve got people who helped us voluntarily, without payment. But we have to look for them. If you hire someone, you could have got them immediately. But it is explicitly double moral if on one side, you say it was necessary to have my hired lawyer pay their pay her a lawyer’s fee to answer e-mails–
Antonia Fischer:
when, well, e-mail that arrives at the law firm not at the Committee’s inbox.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
Yes, and that’s actually business of the office and not of the Committee, if the e-mails come in there. And then at the same time tell people from the Committee we don’t do this kind of thing. Well [he said that] well, you– we hired also then. Yeah, we were managers. We could have done it, yes. We don’t know how much money the committee has. We don’t know what the financial situation is. So as management, we are not allowed to create liabilities on behalf of the association and, well, telling us you could have done it anyway.
At times when you’re sitting on the amount of money and probably started already to… share around in your own environment, to answer e-mails, that is quite a notable statement.
Viviane Fischer:
And well, to say that it was the same thing for me and we had of course the news emails that were directed at the entire group– you, me, Wolfgang, Reiner– many people sending e-mails in parallel. We can’t expect said to believe that whatever was, that Reiner claims to have received was directed at him exclusively. And I had spoken about this already when I spoke to him. This must have been e-mails in the context of the class action as well, but it can’t have been all just for the Committee. It didn’t go to him alone. My own inbox also overflowed, and a friend of mine now handles the official Committee inbox. And she did it many nights for a year and a half, voluntarily, for free. Now she does it for less than eight hundred euro a month.
So what’s happening with my own inbox: I only handle it myself, and I never asked for any support. But that doesn’t matter. We could have discussed it in our group, and we could have said, “Okay, we pool this in one point, and anything that has to do with the Committee is forwarded to central inbox and is then centrally handled.” That was a suggestion that was made. We– it was claimed that there was no handling of– that the e-mails arriving in Berlin weren’t handled at all, and that’s not true at all. We could have said that, “Oh, we can handle this in Göttingen. And then of course it could have all been sent there. That would have been possible to consider, of course.
[01:08:44]
And about the terms, well, and the terms of course as well. And we might have tendered it, wondering: is there a group in Berlin who can do it, and on what terms. Of course it doesn’t have to be a lawyer who handles this, at lawyer’s fees. It could have been an existing staff member.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
And only the e-mails that came into his inbox in his office.
Viviane Fischer:
That’s amazing, too.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
That’s why I’m saying it simply has nothing to do with the Committee’s work. If it were, the Committee would have been our emails, your emails, the email account of the Committee, and Reiner. Well, then it would have been centralized there. But at the end of the day, he only, in quotes, “looked at his own stuff and not the Committee stuff”.
And that is why you can’t say, “Well I have done the business for the Committee” if it was only that part of the business that arrived in his own inbox. That is his own business.
Viviane Fischer:
But yes, and one could have said: it was never asked what capacities would be available in Berlin. For instance, these e-mails that were sent to everybody in parallel. We could have agreed to– and maybe it was already handled by the handler in Berlin. And then we have to, we might have had to see, maybe there’s some overlap where I don’t have to work any more. Or I forward it to Berlin, and maybe we need to increase our capacity there.
That’s really amazing. And no coordination with anyone; not with you, with me. And even only now in July did I learn about these things going on. So prior to that, I had no knowledge of them. And I wasn’t asked about any invoices. I never signed anything off. And it’s obvious from the reaction that I sent, when I said, “Oh this is not acceptable at all. How is this possible? We have to clarify this.”
And at the beginning it was claimed that there was legal counsel as well. But the Committee is not a law firm. On the contrary, we said that over and over again. We said, “We won’t go into individual legal counsel. We might make sample letters available. We might give some general advice, but we won’t go into individual counsel. The committee can’t do that; it’s not a law firm. Every single director can say, with my own law firm, people might contact us and say, “Look, you do a good job in the Committee, and I would like to hire you as a… lawyer.” And particularly because there were so few lawyers available to fight for people. And then of course, it might have been possible to retain one of us as a lawyer and pay them accordingly.
But it’s not possible to do something, that you do something pro bono and then I take money without coordination, without agreement. Taking this money from a third party– the Committee in this case would be a third party– and that’s not acceptable at all.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [01:12:21]
And that the Committee … has such a need for consultation on the month base that you calculate this as a, or invoice this as a consultation, I will wonder what issues these were. I think the only issue that we had was that the YouTube channel was blocked. I think that’s about it. And of course the registration and so on. But you have a notary public for that. So for me the point is– and maybe as the final consideration, independent of how to evaluate this, I just want to voice the following idea: that with the biggest self-understanding and obviousness on the planet, that I have done work for the Committee, and you can’t say anything against that, if one assumes that you’re all on the up and up. Everything is fine and going nice, no problem. Why is it not said? Why all the secrecy? Why not publish the documentation? Why threats? If it’s all okay, why should one need secrecy, defamation, threats, insults and so on? “To defend against allegation.” There’s no allegation there; it’s all easy and explainable, if you assume that everything is right.
[01:14:05]
You only do this kind of thing if you do assume yourself that you’re doing something wrong. Well that’s my perspective on it. If I am of the opinion that I’ve done everything right, I would say, “Okay, it’s fine. Take it all. This is it. I can show the documents, no problem.” Right from the start I would have said, “This is what I did.” And only the circumstances that it was not communicated at all, that was all said that “I decide this, and I can decide this, and I don’t care what the others want to do want to say.” And then if I’m asked, I don’t give out the information– that, from my take, from my point of view, that’s only done by someone who does things they know they shouldn’t do.
Viviane Fischer:
Well let me add another point concerning the situation last year, with the suggestion that you made. Well my understanding was at the time, that was the way it was communicated to me, that after the discussion with the tax consultant, we do not have a tax issue there. And this is why I expected this to be exaggerated. Well that confirmed my view. We’re not sure yet; it’s not finally decided. But I was clearly told by this lady, “I’m not a tax expert.” That this lady– and I thought that she was involved and looked at this, the documentation etc. and analyzed it, that we don’t have any problem. And as you said, the news was spread consistently that there might be a pecuniary interest on your part.
And I heard from a different quarters that everybody was bankrupt, that the people needed money. And then from my perspective, the impression that I got was that this suggestion– it’s always a question of the perspective. If it had been under different circumstances. But I know that, of course, priming makes a difference. And you look at the, at people under these circumstances, you look at the situation and you think, “Okay, there’s something– And I got the impression, okay you’ll get the documentation. And then everything is off the table, just like the assets of a corporation that are under lock and key now. And that there would be documentation on this, and I expected this to happen. And actually– so at this point, I hadn’t heard about the other things, and it was admitted in a discussion round that we had, trying to find a friendly solution, it was that the invoices had been released, in coordination between the tax consultant and Reiner.
So I didn’t see any fault with that, but I would have liked to see, to have a situation where we didn’t have these questions. And now there are assumptions [floating around]. But things might not have happened the way they did, might not have unfolded the way they did. And finally, when I learned about these things, I actually pulled the emergency brake. And those were things that panned out, unfortunately.
Antonia Fischer: [01:18:01]
Well, we could have joined up the jigsaw together. But that’s what we have to know for that. It can’t work if you are fed with wrong information from one side.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
Yeah, that was the the problem. We had some of the information; you had some of the information. And if that had matched, then we would have had a full picture. But with only your information– and I’m saying that without any accusation– if you read this information the way you did, then it is understandable, because it’s… it looks like we’re only after the money. But from our perspective, it was unclear whether Reiner and you are in a boat and whether we’re faced with a front of two people, or whether he was the sole aggressor. We couldn’t really divide that up either.
So it was a difficult situation for us as well, because we thought that, “We can’t really sort this out,” these threats that were made and then implemented. Then we’re only busy protecting our reputation any more, and that’s why we distanced ourselves. So there’s these two people who pull the strings and who have the support of the public. That I have to say that was… I told myself, “You can only lose this battle. Better refrain from it, retreat from it.”
Viviane Fischer:
What I want to make clear: I didn’t threaten anybody.
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
No no no no.
Viviane Fischer:
I didn’t work in any [context] towards that end. These are things that went on behind my back, or at least not in the way that it was detectable by me. And it is really a very complex [situation]. And I think at this point I don’t know what else we want to say, or how much we want to get into details. I wanted to say that in my statement, I said that we have those problems in front of us. That the money that was in– well we don’t know whether it’s the case it’s in the house, or it’s used to pay back credits or whatever. The sum that should be repayable to the Committee to ensure liquidity has not come back yet. That is the current status. And there is doubt whether this is actually possible from that real estate, because we do know that there is a first mortgage on that estate, which is valuable, and we don’t know if the secondary mortgage, what’s on with that. It’s not very clear how much money is going to be coming out of that. That’s the situation unchanged.
And with respect to the 30,000 euros that were invoiced per month for the communication work, those is– no readyness to go for a discussion is visible. The documentation on that gold which is talked about has been evidently submitted, although not to me. And we have to know what this is about. We have to agree to that, and we have to look at this other ways. it looks like, as if it was done on behalf of the association, and we don’t know what has been going on in that respect. But there is hope that there may be some clarification coming up as necessary, and well…
Justus Hoffmann PhD:
What was, something else. What was it? Who was in the Zoom?
Viviane Fischer:
Yes, I was going to say one more thing. It’s in respect of another topic. One of the other topics was also very important to understand this story. Many accused me of coming out with the declaration out of nothing after we made it, gave a hint in the Committee. Well for us the situation was such that for weeks or months– not months, but for weeks, we tried to find a solution first. I spoke to Reiner directly about the topics, asking for a debt in rem [against property] to be issued, so that we are secured here. Because after things become transparent, we are obliged to recover the monies, of course. We can’t just let it go. There are monies from donations that must be available for further enlightenment work, or if we’d had a project that serves the purposes of this corporation, then we could have made the monies available for that. But I have to look after this. I can’t just let it go and say, “Okay, no harm done.”
Or, you know, we don’t know how real estate prices will develop, et cetera et cetera. So we tried to clarify that with Reiner. Maybe an editorial acknowledgement of debt, debt in rem or whatever. There was not much productive cooperation. On the contrary, well, as Justus just reported, in the argument a year ago. It was rejected very quickly and is the same now. And so I involved the Committee and some people close to it like Wolfgang Wodarg, Ulrike Kammerer etc.
And as a group we tried to, well, create an internal public, as it were, publicity, in order to find a solution. I mean, we could have offered repayment in installments to Reiner, or whatever. We could have found a solution, but unfortunately it didn’t fall on fruitful ground. And the style of dealing with each other was very difficult. And so there was another major, well how can I put it, we don’t have a mediation problem. That was misunderstood by many people, I think. There was no argument about which guests to invite, what’s the orientation of the Committee, how do we deal with each other, etc.
No, there are hard facts at stake, and we need to find solutions. For instance, proof to be delivered or repayments to be made. And that didn’t happen. And then there was a major attempt to find a solution again. And at the invitation of Reiner, Roger Bittel got involved. So it was another group of ten or more people who discussed, were involved in a discussion– the accountant, other people, there were two lawyers from Reiner’s office, and two other people were involved, And there was no– well actually, we were offered a notorial acknowledgment of debt with a submission to execution that we could have used to a execute payments or to recover payments. But it never was actually follow up on. And so we never saw a proof that Reiner is in possession of the second mortgage, so that the premises aren’t subject to additional debt or mortgage.
[01:26:21]
So we never got this. And what’s important is that Roger Bittel was fully informed about the facts, about the fact that we said there are various interpretations of the situation. And I have to say he had Reiner in his show for this first statement. And he actually fully took his side and never asked any critical questions, even though he knew the background of this story.
And that is very difficult thing in terms of journalistic approaches. Well, because it has a feel of objectivity here. Nevertheless, the interviewer knows that there is a diametrically opposed interpretation of the facts. And on top of that the facts are not in question at all, as Justus said. So Reiner doesn’t reject the fact that he, he doesn’t deny the fact that he got these monthly payments. He just says says that he is a safe haven for the money.
Well… if he actually invested it in real estate, then it is the opposite of a liquidity reserve. So the facts were fully known, and I really would have expected an objective journalist to ask a critical question or two. I was invited to Bittel to say something, but I, if I know that everything is different from what Reiner says, that it’s not about guests invited etc., then I can’t just allow someone to keep talking and second what he says. And then I have to ask her critical questions. If you have background knowledge, there’s a code of conduct for a journalist, as well. That’s a question to Mr. Bittel that I have: why did that happen the way it did? Because it was almost a promotion for Reiner, was a platform for his view really.
[01:28:40]
Right. The whole thing didn’t get resolved. And at some point the problem was that we have to take a stand, and we have to distance ourselves from this. And so we chose this concrete approach. We had to create a distancing, and at the same time we had to offer a possibility of finding solution [with] making it all public. And I have to say that Reiner– if something had happened at this point, after this first discreet consultation in the Committee, it would have been possible to say, “Okay, right, we’ll really go the extra mile.” And Reiner goes the extra mile and comes along with the securities, or the money, then that could have ended the whole story.
Nevertheless, it didn’t happen. Nevertheless instead, we were attacked. And that shows that the problem that we had internally that we can’t find a solution here. And I have to say we called this meeting An Inconvenient Truth. So we really started the whole thing to bring truth to the fore. I started my petition at the time because I saw that something is going wrong, was going wrong. And I’m fully grounded in the constitution, like you are as well. And it’s unacceptable that enlightenment about all these problems … that we look at these things critically … when things become apparent, when they have become apparent, should we have looked more closely earlier? Yes, maybe that can be said. But on the other hand, it’s a context where if you have this joint conviction that we have based all of this on– that it’s about truth, transparency, authenticity– then I’m a bit surprised, to be honest, if the situation becomes so different in a backhanded way. Let me put it this way. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, I have to say. And, well, we could have noticed it faster. Or if the communication paths had been different, maybe the whole thing wouldn’t have happened, or other things might have happened.
But if you look at how we got started and how dynamic the whole thing was– from my perspective, I can say I have little children, I have pets, I had a tunnel view on, tunnel vision on societal work, and that’s what it was all about, from my point of view. And that this sort of thing should happen was really beyond my field of, perspective.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [01:31:50]
From my point of view, and I think this is something that we really have to face, is that in quotes, in a critical movement there were “misdevelopments”. This happens everywhere. Where society develops in the wrong way, we have this as well. The question is only how to address this. And for me it is very misuseful if we, on one hand, tell the state and certain players and allege to them quite justifiably, saying that they created panic, they worked with defamation and they didn’t work with proper journalism and from the toolkit of fascism. I know I’m going to get criticized for saying this, but if you read the respective literature on that topic, then you will be able to see why I say this, why this massive entanglement between economics and politics, that money is moved into an individual companies, be it pharmaceutical, be it energy corporations, on the cost of the citizen.
It’s always the problem for the, the solution for all the problems that we have is take money from the citizens and give it to individual business players. And that’s always the problem, the solution for all the problems on our planet. As long as I do this, I cannot criticize this quite justifiably, and then by the same way behave in the same way.
And there’s lots of people in the critical movement who did this as well. And this is something that we have to address and face, and say “This is not the right way to do it.” And say, “We have the means, and that’s why we fight against big people, that’s why we are allowed to do that.” That takes us to the same a level that we criticize, and that is no help for anybody.
And that, I think, is very tragic, that this way, the good work which has been done is sort of damaged in retrospect.
Viviane Fischer: [01:34:13]
Well, how to say “damaged”. I think the work on the Committee, the content-wise work is, stands for itself. And we did a good job and I really want to attribute to Reiner: he did a good job in this. You can’t say anything else. Sometimes we have seen him as a bit of a cowboy. He’s got these elements and moving forward fast and where you said, maybe saying things in ways that nobody, that not everybody agrees to ahundred percent. Maybe he himself even.
Anyway we, or he has said things that may be counterproductive. That’s something that we– we are riding in front of the wave here and putting it all live and uncut. I think good work was done there and that speaks for itself. Against this background it is very dear to me that I was in this situation, and how to address this.
Theoretically, at least, for me it’s not understand– not thinkable. But there could have been opportunities. We have these things, and I don’t speak out. And then the situation is quite different than it was with you at the time. Because nothing was clear. There was no– well, the documentation is not available, or not, is not made available.
However, now we have issues that are clear, and if I say I know it, and I am in that truth movement and knowingly I find, I, whatever, compromise legally, I would be very vulnerable. And also at the same time morally, we can’t say that we stand up for the truth and now we have a difficult thing going on, a difficult issue, and I just pushed it under rug to keep everything up and going.
And it’ll blow up in a couple of months, and then people will say, “Well you knew it at the time. You didn’t speak out.” That’s just what we ask the people now in the hospitals and elsewhere that you see people with the babies having problems and so on. You see that the people get trouble, cancer and you see this and you don’t speak out. And it’ll drop onto your own feet.
That’s the same thing that we are asking of the other people. We have to live up to that for ourselves as well.
[01:36:47]
And one more thing I want to say. When all of this came up, Reiner said, “The Committee doesn’t have a financial problem.” It did. At the point when all this came up, we had a liquidity of one thousand euros on the account. How’s that going to work? We have got xxxxx xxxx the staff who works for us, who have to be paid. That’s obvious. And with way one thousand euros, you don’t get anywhere. And if I hadn’t had the liquidity put back in– it wasn’t a credit that I took. It was, as we said, it was designed as a credit, as a liquidity funding, as a reserve to make sure that money is there if we needed it. I hadn’t paid this back, then we would have gone bust weeks ago.
[01:37:42]
And so this is something that’s not true. And of course Reiner, now, with his liquidity reserve, should have put it out and allowed the Committee to carry on working. That is something that we have to make clear here, as well. And that this is especially extreme also with respect to the work here that we can carry on the research work, that we can scrutinize things. And by cutting off the business funds, or the monetary funds, that is obstructed.
So we don’t have only got the situation that money is not accessible, and it’s not gone forever. I’d massively fight for this money to come back. And I’m optimistic that we’ll prevail in that. But at the moment, we can’t access this money in order to carry on the work of the Committee.
So that’s one thing, that money has gone. The other thing is that– the same point– the money is gone temporarily. At the same time, we have the situation that with the Committee, we are facing bankruptcy. That’s a very extreme situation, and involving other activities probably with the money of the Committee can’t be.
Justus Hoffmann PhD: [01:39:00]
Well, without making any assumptions, it is a remarkable consolation to have… interfere with the corporation in a existential way, and to spend essential funds, and to say at the same time, “I’ll start my own show here.” Then you can get the impression that an attempt was made to kill the competition. I’m not saying that this is happening, but there is a temporal correlation here. And that is of course deplorable if such methods are fallen back on, if that is the case. Because there’s no reason why two similar formats shouldn’t exist at the same time.
Viviane Fischer:
Yes, and I would add to this: everybody of us, each of us was free to say, “I’ll leave the Committee. I’ll do my own show. I’ll do Antonia Fischer Show or Viviane Fischer Show or Reiner Fuellmich Show or whatever. That would have been possible any time, and there would not have been any financial issues that need to be raised. Think that you’ve split this up, because there would have been opportunity to discuss whether this also forwards the message of the Committee.
And you could have said, for a example, that is a spinoff, so to say, with a certain sum provided.
[01:40:33]
And… however, you can’t do, in your own power, saying, “All this sum now should go to my own project.” That is absurd. That can’t be done, because for this concrete thing is not what the money has been donated for, especially not to the amount. And as we said, everybody could have left it at any time. There was no obligation to work here. And it could have been used for their own format, but not on the back of the Committee.
[01:41:03]
And now it could have come back now, it could been discussed what to do, how to focus in other areas, no problem. I’m completely free of that, and if Reiner wanted to do something in America where he wants to go now, that could have had a positive effect on it all. We had the idea like this Israel show, to do a subdivision for example in USA due to the wish of Reiner to go to the US. We had alreadye developed a concept, but that was of course, not in a physical dimension, as we see it, as of now. However, I’m optimistic that we will be able to get this money back to where it belongs.
And, well, another comment, a last comment, maybe, on that issue. There have been quite a few statements about my person very personal and defaming and insulting. And I think as Justus just said, a competitive show if we had both of them fair next to each other, that would have been different. But here it was really by discrediting the person, trying to really reduce their credibility to continue work of the committee and other activities, and cause some damage there.
And this, of course, has quite a different dimension to it. This is something that is an absolute no-go in my view. And now we have to look at this. There’s, similar things have been launched against Oval Media, who was an important partner, corporation partner for us all the time. Without Oval Media, we really have to say the Committee wouldn’t be existing and the shape it is. And when we had the idea– as you said, we we’re newbies. We had no idea of how to really present ourselves in the net. And even myself, if I did fashion for a time, I wasn’t fit in transferring and broadcasting live shows. I had no idea how to do that. I just asked Jensk Veneker at the time if he knew somebody, and he proposed Ove Tivis from Oval Media, who were from the documentation area and had their streaming forward with the narrative, and engaged and committed in it.
[01:43:49]
And it is notable that Oval Media is fundamental in contributing to the important information and the important message of Wolfgang, writing a binya of the crisis was broadcast to a larger audience because Robert and Wolfgang by accident met in a train, and discussed the topic and made a very important video. And Oval Media has supported us all the time on their own basis. And we’ll say more about that in a minute. And the point is that I find this very bad, very problematic that if for these statements that are made now, which are all false, that these important partners of the Committee are damaged in their reputation. And so that’s a very bad effect in the public. And it’s the same thing, of asking why can’t you coexist peacefully if the financial issues are sorted out. And then you walk on and work on in peace.
But of course you can’t do that if there’s a misproportion of financial status, which is internally triggered. And well, maybe now I would like to hand over to Wolfgang, whether you can comment a bit. And we have Robert Cibis with us from Oval Media, who can comment as well. Ulrika as well is here. No, she’s not.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD: [01:45:29]
Well hello everybody. I have been following your extensive statements, and you’ve been quite candid. And Justus said lot of things about where you said we could have done this differently. And you also criticized yourself, Viviane, so you were turning your cheek really. And many will have used this and will hit you again. Normally, when you turn the other cheek, then the opponent will react by saying, “Okay, that it.” This usually triggers bite inhibition. It stops the confrontation, so you start talking again.
But we’re in a situation, a controversy situation. We can’t expect this. And that’s why Reiner Fuellmich maybe was strategically better advised, because he never turned the other cheek; he just bit all around him. Technically, that might be the better approach, but yours is more honest, so you have my empathy for it.
[01:46:46]
And as someone who has actively supported the Committee trying to cover the medical aspects, if I only remember all the, think of all the e-mails that were forwarded, that I received but that you also forwarded to me, that I couldn’t unfortunately all answer. I actually put on my website, “Please don’t expect an answer”, because I didn’t want to disappoint people, but I probably did disappoint a lot of people. But in our voluntary capacity we did what we could. And sometimes you try to use the Committee meetings to give answers to all the questions raised via e-mail. You don’t have to answer them all by e-mail. So that’s a deficit that I see with us, as a group of people who try to face the situation and distinguish between the important from the unimportant. I think that’s understandable.
I always found it great that we have these different characters on the Committee. Now, what are these live shows called, where you have a camera trained on a family that is monitored or watched live, 24-7. What do you call it? Reality show. Yeah, yeah. So I thought was a reality show that we had. I really liked it. In this inimical world, we were like a family. And I have to say, I always admired Reiner for shooting left, right and centre. He gave out to people. He used terms and bad language like a Winchester, really.
And it really, I, it didn’t really impress me. I didn’t like it much, and I criticized him for it. But this is his way of keeping things, keeping people at bay. And then he didn’t have to speak about problems that are being raised now, of course. And what I had to see when the Committee suddenly didn’t have any money any more, and when Viviane told me that there was a reserve for the Committee and there was lot of money that could have kept the Committee going for a long time, that it was parked with Reiner and he won’t let the Committee access it– then I thought, “Oh, this is a conflict. Why did he do this?”
And so I looked, and I wanted to know more. I tried to get information about what amount of money we’re talking about, where exactly it is parked. And then I suddenly saw that there’s a huge conflict of interest arising here. And this conflict of interest that I saw with Reiner now quite clearly. And I demanded, and I really tried to solve it together with Viviane. Because it was dealable. It started at the beginning of August and went until recently. And we tried, Viviane and I tried to find an internal solution, so there wouldn’t be any damage to our joint objective.
[01:50:24]
And I know that with other fighters who we cooperate with, I asked them, “How would you handle the situation?” And some said, “Well, leave the money to him. He does a good job.” No, no can, can’t do. We all did a good job, and we can’t allow this, because if one simply uses, I’d say abuses trust for themselves, then I would call corruption. And what I saw here disappointed me so badly, like I’ve rarely ever been disappointed by anyone. And I wouldn’t have expected Reiner to do this sort of thing. I was really shocked, And in one of these meetings, I don’t know which one it was, I carefully distanced myself, without saying it like that. But I gave him a warning shot, hoping that he would starts doing things.
It was only my talking theoretically about the possibility of class action. So class action isn’t collecting money, but it is collecting power, so that it can be, can lead to a lawsuit that will be successful for the plaintiffs. It’s not possible in Germany yet. I wanted him to realize– and he realized it. He said it was a cowardly, backhanded attack. It was an attack, yes, but it wasn’t backhanded. It was a careful attempt to carefully distance myself from him and to say, “Well, my dear Reiner, not with me.” And I told him at some stage, “Reiner, I don’t want to be named together with you. I don’t want to appear publicly with you. I don’t want to cooperate with you, neither in the party nor in the Committee.” I just don’t trust him any more. And that is something, a personal decision I took, and I have to stand by it. And I do.
It’s a painful thing, but I think this purification process that results from naming things and if you adhere to the laws that still apply to us– at least for us, they still apply, the constitution still applies to me. And I think for everybody present here today. We don’t have any other laws. We only have the law of violence, of corruption, the law of money. And that is no law, and many people don’t have any money, And that’s why we have to act by these laws. And we have to ensure that we remain credible, because we do act by the laws and take them seriously. And we cannot tolerate this sort of thing, then.
Now the legal implications are up for you to decide. I’m not anyone involved in the business aspects of the Committee. I never received a single dime, and that’s why I’m out of this aspect. I also didn’t advertise my consultancy. People who approach me, I sometimes have to tell them, “Look, it’s so much, I can’t handle it. But all I did, I did because I felt that people needed help. And that I have, don’t have this selfish interest because I want to derive any benefits from this. I didn’t want to have this, because then it’s not my– I wouldn’t enjoy this work any more. It wouldn’t be my work any more.
And I really like the fact that we speak about this candidly. By putting the shards on the table here, we can make a new mosaic out of it. So we can do something beautiful with it. So it allows for a new start. We’ll stay clean. We have stayed clean. And if you don’t want to go along there, you’re no longer with us. And then you’ll have to see how you can go on. And I hope that all people who still yearn for Reiner, that they won’t get far with it. That’s my view.
Justus Hoffman PhD: [01:55:24]
Well, one colleague well known to me always said, “Follow the money.”
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
Yeah, you might as well say, “Go to hell!” Same thing.
Viviane Fischer:
Well, I would briefly ask Robert to comment. Maybe, well there’s been lots of allegations made towards you with– thank you, first of all, Wolfgang.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
Yeah, well I think it’s a good thing for you to ask Robert now, because he was really the first– I was, I had my anger. I was really annoyed when I realized that we were being betrayed again. That was my mood when I went from Hamberg to Berlin and I met Robert are on the train. And I spoke about it to him, and I said, “We have to do something about these– listened to it and he said, “Yeah yeah yeah yeah, we have to.”
And then at some stage he contacted me and asked me, “Can’t we do a video? Can you repeat that on camera again?”
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
So we did it in the center of Berlin in the basement there with him. We did this video. He’s a professional, of course. He did it very well, and that was the resource we had access to. And then I asked him, “Can’t you do it for the Committee?” And then Viviane organized it all. She had this beautiful table built, and she designed the setting, as someone who knows about design and fashion, she did this. Viviane is, to me is the mother of the Committee, and she has kept it together. and what I’ve seen over the last few weeks, that was really driven by the concern, she really wanted to keep Reiner on board, all the time, really.
And she said, “Well, Reiner, you can solve this so easily.” And she didn’t want the Committee to be damaged. So this must have been quite nagging this, to do the splits like that. And Reiner insulted her privately. He didn’t answer, and he covered it up with insults. That was really so disappointing. And now, if Oval Media hadn’t been on board, we wouldn’t be here today. Then nobody would have noticed it, probably. And I think the professionalism, the way it’s done that the interpretation was added, that was internationalized. At the beginning, Reiner used to do the translation into English and it became ever more important for the Committee at the time. And then translation was professionalized afterwards. And I think that was very important, because it also led to a situation where we’re much more perceived internationally.
[01:58:30]
So Oval Media did that very well, and we never paid anything. He simply did it. He only collected his footage, because Robert is an untiring footage collector. Whatever he gets to see, he tries to film. And it’s very important historically as well, of what he has collected here, in all those films and stories that have been told, all the stories that have been told by the various guests. That is really an historically important document.
So Robert, that’s good work you did and as important as–
Robert Cibis: [01:59:10]
Still not enough. No, actually I lost a hundred percent of my customers. I don’t get any funding publicly and I didn’t even look at the donations that we got from the Committee. We just looked at this a couple of weeks ago, because we were alleged by Reiner– First of all, i’d like to say that I have nothing to do with these questions, really. Of course I have no connection to the class action or to the association. We just help where we can, and if I can consult and advise, I’m in this. I was in many of the of preparation meetings for the grand jury, for the base camp. And there’s so many cameras in this world and so many professionals who can take films. Nobody does it, because they don’t have the budget. And I thought, “You can’t do that, no go.” And that was the attitude that we had in other projects prior to the corona crisis as well. It’s helpful if something exciting goes on, you have to documented it. And I hardly leave my house without the camera nowadays, because lots of things happen spontaneously. And I can tell you, great for films are going to be made of these materials. Many things are going on.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
Well I begrudge you one thing, though, you know, When the car broke down in Vienna, and we were trying to get to Berlin, the only thing you did– you didn’t help; you just filmed it.
Robert Cibis:
Yeah, it was a great scene, great lighting with our blue flashlights and so on. Maybe the public will know it, and it’s going to be in a big cinema movie, and we’re all going to see it in a big theater. We’re going to celebrate that scene as very thrilling. Because in film, conflicts are good for the film. They bring the story forward. But in real life, it’s different, of course. You want to have calm and simple moves, things going on. And now it’s really the case that the attacks against Oval Media which have nothing to do with the question, the question as I have understood you now is that money is not in the control of the Committee. That’s where it has to come back. That’s the question; everything else is a diversion. And it’s not in the contract. If it weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be an open conflict. Whether what Oval Media is doing, whether I’m stupid, I’m great, has nothing to do with that. That’s a different question.
And as far as others mention in other sections doesn’t matter at all. But it did take an effect. Now we have lots of donatians less after a Reiner, on Bittel TV, told us or said that we get too much donations, or we get even payment from the Committee. And that’s unclear. Maybe they can say this, this payment– we went through the figures and we bought technical equipment, servers, computers. We did the purchase and simply shipped the boxes. And in addition, we transferred the base camp, and there were no donations for that, neither for the Committee nor for Oval Media. And the grand jury was broadcast by us, so we did all of that individually with invoices, but with a dumping price that was only covering our costs and had no margin.
And so it’s not really the case that these activities help us and fund us as a company. That’s been happening since two and a half years mainly, by the donations directly made to us. There are some people who donated substantial sums. That’s a third of the total donations, by two or three people. And then there are donations which are recent, that have a means, and some of them have to do with the corona work.
So SCA for Stiftung Corona Ausschuss or something like this. And if we add these up all together, for the time from July 2020 to May 2022, we get a total sum of around 180,000 euros. Which is a lot of money, but of course for a total of 104 sessions, with a team of six or seven people and expensive equipment, we had a minimum sum that we agreed on. So it was not an agreed sum. It was just a sum that would keep us above water, because we have to pay the external service providers, and that was even higher than that.
So thanks to this sum that we’ve made now, we find that we could invoice another 50,000 euros for the Committee. There would have been 236,000 euros. I could go down to the details; I have it all round to the digits here. May be boring.
Viviane Fischer:
Let me say that when we got started with the stations, at the time we didn’t really know what was going down the line. We had no idea. And I actually know a lot more about it now. We did learn that this kind of broadcast would normally be much more expensive, according to market prices. But we did agree on the freelancers who were involved, professions but also staff members, that they would make their contribution at cost price.
And we woun up with a price of, what, 1000 euro, whatever, per session, to pay their daily fees or whatever. And we said, ok, we didn’t know how much money we would collect, and we didn’t want to have to pay this sum of money ourselves all the time, because we didn’t really know whether we would collect that much money. And as he said rightly, a lot of things were done free of charge. And for instance, this table: I made this free of charge, and the design of the room.
[02:06:05]
But of course that was this– there are limits. We can’t commit to financing everything and nobody would have had the money available to pay all sorts of people and to expend five or ten thousand euro a month or whatever. So at some stage, enough is enough. So if we are committed ourselves, we can’t be expected to also make a monetary contribution every day.
So we said, ok, we will make a dual a call for donations: for ourselves, and for the technical the end of things. And if we don’t take in enough money, then we will top it up. So if 500euro, whatever, are missing, we would top it up. That was the idea. And we did it for a good while. And my information was always that it just covered– or at least it’s not a multiple that we take in. So we never went into detail, because you said, “Oh, it’s ok.”
[02:07:17]
And then donations are coming and it’s got more expensive, we had to double-stream. From the beginning, the middle of last year, it’s in English as well; You need extra people. Not much, I think another 400 euro, whatever. It’s still at cost price, but now we just went to direct payments, because it’s no longer covered by the donations. Now it turns out that it’s actually not even covering your costs. We’ll have to see how we handle this.
But certainly what happened isn’t like Reiner implied, that millions worth of donations were collected for Oval Media, that were diverted,
misappropriated. And to simply claim this on the basis of nothing — because we don’t have any figures.
Robert Cibis:
I couldn’t have even named it in figures, because like you, I just was committed to the matter, issue. And I just thought, can I pay the salaries this month? Ok, I can, so let’s move on. Whether it’s a bit more or less per session is something that I didn’t really work with, because I was focused on the project of the Committee and the other projects that we do. And Reiner had no idea about our finances, and still hasn’t today. He still says we have financial issues and has suggested a bankruptcy, and says that we took the money from the Committee which was not directed to us. He– it’s freely admitted. I didn’t even know about that.
Justus Hoffman PhD:
Well, to enrich yourself illegally and go bankrupt the same time is impossible. anyway.
Robert Cibis:
Yes. I was, allegedly bought expensive cameras and stuff. You have to be creative to that. That’s not my stuff. I’m a very normal filmmaker. Anyway, I don’t know if I have to go into more detail. I feel I take a lawyer to go up against this, and I think this is also libel. And we have a problem. I see this, and the money coming in. I see this getting horrible e-mails, people accusing me, “How can I do this thing? How can you take the money?” These allegations that are monstrous and for anybody, especially for us, because everybody who works in the team are really pro the thing and work for the issue. Everybody who works for Oval Media, and it’s many people who– anybody who’s employed and they earn less than they could elsewhere, and they say, “It’s ok, I just want to live on it, and I want to focus on the matter at hand.” That’s our attitude, that’s my attitude as well.
[02:10:35]
If the audience knew how much money I live with because, well, I earn less than our, my employees do. And I think it’s right. We’re in a high-risk time. As an employer, I can only take the money that I need for myself and my children, full stop. And that’s the attitude, and it has to be the attitude altogether. So we, well, I don’t have to tell you that we are not an advertising agency. We don’t work for money; we work for the matter at hand. We were like that prior to the corona crisis. And if we do a documentary air and produces– that’s your attitude anyway. It’s not a profession to make money with per hour. You do these things for other motives. And I can’t say anything of else about this.
Well, it’s done and it’s outside of the question and that’s it.
Viviane Fischer:
Well Wolfgang, we can hear you.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
Well I think this reality show has been very fruitful this time, and the many questions people ask. Also the angry e-mails and I got as well. And so the relationship that has suddenly changed, because something always sticks if you’re badmouthed publicly. I’m used to that. I’ve been used to it for a while now. But luckily if you sling mud, you’ll be the one who has mud on his face at the end of the day. That’s the way it is. So it will be good to simply stand our ground, to continue to be committed to the cause, and that’s, and to show people by good work that we want to help them. Simply keep up the good work. And there’s a lot of people who help us. There have been a lot of people who have supported us. There will be a lot of people support us.
And we’ll never have anyone coming into this Committee trying to sell something. We’ve had these situations, and it always angered me. If people are willing to pass the truth on, as best we know it, if we do it, tell people to take the fear away from them above all, for them to understand, for them to use their own brains, so they can critically question what they see on other media. Here we can get people to engage brain, to ask questions. and I’ve perceived in the media, I haven’t really read it, but suddenly questions seem to be popping up left, right and center. And even the members of the Ethics Commission seem to be at loggerheads all of a sudden. Isn’t that great? Because they used to be all of one mind.
And also in the health services, the fact that the elderly are supposed to wear masks now. What kind of nonsense, what kind of torture is this? There’s so much nonsense going on. And by the way, I participated in a mask symposium organized by the association that Dr. Bakdi, on whose board Dr. Bakdi is. And I said something about sense, the nonsense of masks from the point of view of a hospital hygiene expert, the way I learned and used to teach it. I.e., how you have to learn it if you have responsibility in a hospital. I simply implemented it, transposed it to what we are experiencing now. And I want this presentation to be spread. I don’t do it because it’s a great show, but because what needs to be said has been said in a very focused way there. And everybody working in a hospital any one in a position of responsibility in a clinic or in a nursing home should really watch this. And it will be great if we can maybe show it in the Committee here as well. I’ve made it available, I make it available on my website as well. It’s unbelievable what they want to impose again on people. And civil disobedience is the only possible action we can take.
Viviane Fischer: [02:15:33]
Well, Wolfgang, that’s summarizing as well the work of the Committee and the questioning voice, the voice of the dissidents, is more important now than ever. Because lots of things, as you say, are starting, that many, many people are questioning, are wondering, of cause. The show is not convincing any more. And the events are becoming more clear,
Against this background, it’s absolutely necessary that we don’t give up our work in the face of the difficult economic situation. And as we have to get the money back first. We will not let go of this to carry on with the work. And we will not let ourselves get dragged under. We will take everything possible.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD:
We’ll continue, and if we have to do it with our mobiles, we’ll keep it up.
Justus Hoffman PhD:
Well I don’t think we’ll get that far.
Robert Cibis:
I think the value of these sessions is created by the know-how of the guests. And I think that was the situation in the past, and is– will be the situation in the future. Asking questions is the catalyst but you can’t judge people by the past, by saying, “Oh, he did this, that and the other.” No. The team of the Committee that is modifying now, changing now, that’s just the way it is.
Wolfgang Wodarg MD: [02:17:13]
That’s quite right, and I’m very happy that we have companions, also people who live from this but still speak up if we go down the wrong path. If we try to turn wrong, they say, “Stop.” Do you really think that is– we have critical people in the team, I don’t know if we– I don’t think we can mention the names, but still more I think of them. We’ve got very good people who help us in the coordination, who help us to invite the guests, who have their preliminary talks and who do very good work. And I think there’s a lot of gratefulness that we owe them. They do great work.
Robert Cibis:
And as someone outside of the Committee, I observed how the Committee stood together in this crisis with Reiner, and how this is a trusting team. And that the people who consulted, who are interviewed regularly on the Committee, not only Viviane, who have supported not only Viviane but also Wolfgang. It was great to observe. This Committee was only reinforced by this crisis.
Viviane Fischer:
That’s quite right. And one more point I’d like to make here, which is about the book. Reiner said that I can’t have it printed because I don’t have the money for that. That’s absolutely not right. It doesn’t cost, printing a book doesn’t cost 75,000 euros or whatever, because you can– depends on the volume. And there are smaller issues as well with fewer copies and fewer editions, small editions.
So that’s flexible. And one thing for me: the situation was that I put a lot of work into this book, and it is an interview situation between Reiner and me, added by talks that we had prior to the discussions of the shows and pointing out how we see certain things. At least that Reiner whom I assume that he saw them as we do now. Well, if there are differences, I can’t evaluate that now. However, that is true as it is there historically. And I think many of the things that are in the book are interesting, exciting to read.
But now, due to the situation that has emerged, it was impossible for me to simply published a book at that point in time, when it was planned, just as kind of uncommented in a positive self image or whatever of the values that we stand for. Because if these things that are contrary to that currently appear, at least that way. And that is why I refrain from doing it, at least for the time being. And I think it’s understandable if you read the book.
And I think it was very important that if you have this, are doing added comments to it, which is not in the book itself, I said. We have agreement that the book will be published the way it is now and as it exists. And I’m not going to put other things in it that Reiner has said if he didn’t say so. But there is an amendment to it that relates to the things that happened after this. And in that context, I thought, if it makes sense, I thought to leave it at all as a whole. But I think as the good work that we’ve done in the Committee as well, and good contributions Reiner made, the book is authentical, and it’s real, and it has to be published. It would be very strange that many of these things that would allow people to understand the history and that this shouldn’t be really stopped. And just like the importance that it has, none of that has been lost. But as we are doing now, speaking out on inconvenient truth, this has to be added to the book, from my point of view. And Reiner can add a another amendment, so to say, where he publishes his take.
I think it could be a developing story altogether. I’d be happy with that. But I think from my point of view, that is part of it. The book will be delivered in short time, and I thank everybody for their patience. It has nothing to do with any shortcomings that it was published so far. It has a moral or factual reason, editorial reasons. if you want to say so. So I thank everybody for their patience. It’ll be out, and everybody can read it and to come to their own conclusions, and still agree with the original parts, because not everything that we’ve seen from Reiner– I do really think there is a side where it’s all clear and right and truthful, as it was before. And now there is a different side to it. I have a problem in joining up the two. But people are multiple. And in that sense, I think we come to the end of our session and our debate so far, and we can take leave. Thank you, good bye.
Justus Hoffman PhD: [02:23:16]
Bye bye.