Vindictive
officials seize homeschool family's assets Despite
court victory over battering-ram wielding authorities, persecution continues by
Bob Unruh, November 22, 2014
More than a year ago, police in Germany obtained court permission to use
“force” and arm themselves with a battering ram to take custody of four homeschooled children, only to see the parents resume homeschooling, and
regain custody later.
But that ultimate defeat for the government apparently isn’t
going to be the end, according to the father in the case, Dirk Wunderlich.
In an online interview from his German residence, he told
WND that a local school board attorney since then has begun issuing “notices of
enforcement” that come with penalties of 1,000 euros, or about $1,350. And
warned that the enforcement “can be repeated basically any number of times up
to … the maximum amount” of 50,000 euros, Wunderlich said.
Michael Donnelly, director of global
outreach for the Home School Legal
Defense Association, has been involved with the
Wunderlich case from the outset, and told WND on Friday that the German
government’s attitude apparently is that more prosecution, more force, more
penalties is how to cause people to submit to the government’s will regarding
the instruction of children.
“The Wunderlich family are currently homeschooling after
having won back custody of their children but there is little doubt that
authorities there will resume criminal and civil prosecution of the family,” he
said.
“Authorities recently seized their bank account and are
threatening the financial well-being of their family as a result of excessive
and, in my view, unlawful costs levied against them in their custody case.
German authorities generally and in this locality in particular remain quite
hostile to home education,” he said.
“There are some who have written in the German press, such
as Professor
Franz Reimer at the University of Giessen, in support of homeschooling.
However, until state legislators change the laws homeschoolers will continue to
be threatened and persecuted unjustly.”
“Situations like the Wunderlich
family in Germany, the Hagen
family in Missouri, and Ayshe King in Europe
demonstrate an alarming disrespect for the basic and fundamental rights of
parents and families to be secure in their homes and in their authority to make
decisions that are best for their children,” he continued.
“Homeschooling is recognized as a legal alternative in
virtually every western and free country. Even in countries like China where
homeschooling is not legal, families are not persecuted as they are in
Germany.”
He said the real solution would be for German policy makers
to take action to respect and protect the right of parents to educate their
children.
Wunderlich noted in his comments to WND several court
decisions that he, and other homeschoolers, consider egregious in his home
country.
A 2007 decision found that homeschooling “may constitute a
misuse of the parental care, which lastingly endangers the welfare of the child
and requires measures to be taken by the family court.”
That ruling also said, “Compulsory schooling does not
infringe on the fundamental human rights of the first party and the children. …
a state primary school serves the legitimate purpose of the implementation of
the state’s educational mandate and is appropriate and necessary for achieving
this goal.”
A later decision, released just a year ago, said, “Due to
compulsory school attendance the parents have to accept that the state, as a
provider of education, take[s] their place in extent of the schooling sphere of
activity. Therefore, the parents’ possibility to influence their children
directly in a pedagogic way is limited to the time when the children are not in
school.”
Wunderlich told WND that the government’s decision to take
his children, on Aug. 29, 2013, appeared to be aimed more at a “reorientation”
for the children while in state custody than anything else.
The children then were sent to public schools for a time,
and although the children were unhappy in the secularized setting, there were
no further issues until last March, when a new lawyer joined the school board.
Shortly thereafter, a “notice of enforcement” arrived for
the family over exactly what classes the children would attend, he said.
The attorney followed with a “demand for prosecution,”
which, Wunderlich said, provided “an additional threat of a sentence for up to
six months in prison.”
The family responded by deregistering the children and
taking them back home for schooling.
In their letter to the school, Wunderlich told WND, “We
compared the ‘Schulzwang’ of Adolf Hitler (No. 12 Reich compulsory education
law) with the current ‘Schulzwang’ in Hessen (No. 68 Hessen Act) and found that
absolutely nothing has changed.” “To our great surprise we got [full] custody back on 08/15/14,” he said.
As
WND reported Aug. 30, 2013, the state took
custody of the children of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich, ages 7-14, from their
Darmstadt, Germany, home by police armed with a battering ram. The parents were
told they wouldn’t see the children again soon because they were violating
federal law by homeschooling them. The paperwork that authorized police
officers and social workers to use force on the children contained no claims of
mistreatment.
But a team of 20 social workers, police and special agents
stormed the family’s home. HSLDA reported Judge Koenig, who is assigned to the
Darmstadt family court, signed an order authorizing the immediate seizure of
the children by force.
“Citing the parents’ failure to cooperate ‘with the
authorities to send the children to school,’ the judge also authorized the use
of force ‘against the children’ … reasoning that such force might be required
because the children had ‘adopted the parents’ opinions’ regarding
homeschooling and that ‘no cooperation could be expected’ from either the
parents or the children,” HSLDA said at the time.
Dirk Wunderlich told the homeschool group: “I looked through
a side window and saw many people, police and special agents, all armed. They
told me they wanted to come in to speak with me. I tried to ask questions, but
within seconds, three police officers brought a battering ram and were about to
break the door in, so I opened it.”
He said police “shoved me into a chair and wouldn’t let me
even make a phone call at first.” “It was chaotic as they told me they had an
order to take the children. At my slightest movement the agents would grab me,
as if I were a terrorist. You would never expect anything like this to happen
in our calm, peaceful village. It was like a scene out of a science-fiction
movie. Our neighbors and children have been traumatized by this invasion.”
Homeschooling
has been banned in Germany since Adolf Hitler was in power. WND has reported over the years on a
German teen who was ordered into a psychiatric ward for being homeschooled and parents who were sentenced
to jail terms for homeschooling their children.
The anti-homeschool law in Germany has a dark origin: It was
Hitler’s idea, and the nation has never changed it. It was in 1937 when Hitler
said that the “youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow.”
“For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of
inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very
early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore
unspoiled,” the dictator said. “This Reich stands, and it is building itself up
for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no
one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own
upbringing.”
A year later, the Nazis adopted a law that eliminated
exemptions that previously provided an open door for homeschoolers under the
nation’s compulsory education laws.
As WND reported, the German government believes public
schooling is critical to socialization, as demonstrated in its response to
parents who objected to police officers picking up their son at home and
delivering him to a public school.
“The minister of education does not share your attitudes
toward so-called homeschooling,” said a government letter. “… You complain
about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible
local police officers. … In order to avoid this in future, the education
authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for
possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with
the unalterable school attendance requirement.”
The
current German government has endorsed Hitler’s view of homeschooling. In 2003, the German Supreme Court handed down the Konrad
decision in which “religiously or philosophically motivated” homeschooling was
banned. Four years later, the German Federal Parliament changed a key provision
of German child protection law, making it easier for children to be taken away
from their parents for supposed “educational neglect.”
Source:http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/vindictive-officials-seize-homeschool-familys-assets/
Comments
We need only to look to Europe to
discover what our own “workers’ paradise” might look like in 10 years. Scotland
is crawling with “the child police”. Germany is still a fascist state. And now, so are we. Common Core will strangle US Homeschooling. “
Papiere bitte’ ?”
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
Leader
Wonder whether it'd be possible for this family to spend some time in the U.S.?
ReplyDelete