Degewo enjoys a kind of immunity and seems to operate outside our rule-based society. Although Degewo has been acted with gross negligence and exposed many tenants to the terrible asbestos hazard, it has so far remained largely unchallenged.
Prosecutors like Stefan Heisig or Public prosecutor Falkenstein remained inactive, Dr Rainer Frank (Degewo Ombudsman) has not yet come forward, while judges have been fooled by the manipulative arguments of overpaid star lawyers. Rent reductions have to be fought for in court. Degewo often behaves badly towards its tenants:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the consequences of impunity in his book "Archipelago Gulag"
"From time immemorial, people's concept of justice has been made up of two halves: Virtue triumphs, vice is punished. We were fortunate enough to experience a time when virtue did not triumph, but was not always hounded with dogs. Virtue, the maltreated, frail thing, is allowed to enter today in its beggar's garb, crouching in a corner, just not rebelling.
But woe betide anyone who says a word about vice. Yes, virtue was trampled underfoot, but vice - was not there! Yes, millions, some, several, were swept into the abyss, but nobody was to blame. And every anxious attempt: "But what about those who..." is met with reproach on all sides, at first still benevolent: "What then, comrade!" Why open up the old wounds?" Later, with a raised mallet: "Kush, you survivors! That's what you get for rehabilitating!"
And then we hear from West Germany that 86,000 Nazi criminals had been sentenced there by 1966 - and we trump it up, we are not stingy with newspaper columns and radio hours, we are eager to rush to a rally after work and demand like a man: "Even 86,000 is too few! Even twenty years is not enough. Carry on!"
But in our country (according to reports from the military panel at the Supreme Court), a THOUSAND were on trial.
We are very concerned about what is happening behind the Oder and the Reihn. But what happens here, behind the green fences near Moscow and Sochi, but what happens here, that the murderers of our men and fathers drive on our roads and we clear the way for them - that doesn't bother us, that doesn't touch us, that is "digging in the past".
However, if the 86,000 from West Germany were to be transferred to our relations, this would result in a FOURTEEN MILLION for our country!
But even after a quarter of a century, we have not found any of them, have not brought any of them to court, are afraid to open their wounds. And as a symbol of them all, the smug, narrow-minded Molotov, soaked from head to toe in our blood, lives at Granowskistraße 3 and walks with a measured stride, still convinced of nothing, to the luxury limousine waiting at the side of the road.
It is a riddle not for us contemporaries to solve: Why is it given to Germany to punish her murderers and not to Russia? What disastrous path lies ahead of us if we are not given the opportunity to cut the poisonous rot from our bodies? What should the world then learn from Russia? Every now and then something wonderful happens in German trials: the accused grabs his head, rejects the defence and won't ask the court for anything more. The series of his crimes, which they have recalled from the past and presented to him anew, fills him with disgust, he says, and that is why he no longer wants to live.
It is the highest that judgement can achieve: when vice is so thoroughly condemned that even the criminal recoils from it. A country that has had vice condemned eighty-six thousand times by its judges (and has finally condemned it in literature and among the youth) is cleansed of it year by year, step by step. And what remains for us? At some point, our descendants will label some of our generation as a generation of wimps. First we allowed ourselves to be maltreated like lambs by the millions, then we nurtured and cared for the murderers into their happy old age.
What to do if the great tradition of Russian penance is incomprehensible and ridiculous to them? What to do when the animal fear of having to suffer even a hundredth of what they have done to others outweighs any inclination towards justice? When they greedily reap the sweet fruits that have risen from the blood of the fallen?
Of course, they who cranked the meat grinder, well, at least in the year 37, are no longer the youngest today, they are between fifty and eighty and have lived their best years carefree, instead of and also comfortably: any equal retribution comes too late, can no longer be carried out on them.
We want to be magnanimous, we won't shoot them, we won't flood them with salt water, we won't sprinkle them with bugs, we won't make them stand sleeplessly at attention for a week, we won't kick them with boots or beat them with truncheons, nor crush their skulls with iron rings, nor pile them into a cell like mailbags, one on top of the other - none of the things they've done!
But we have an obligation to our country and our children to FIND AND JUDGE ALL OF THEM! Not so much to judge them as to judge their crimes. To ensure that every one of them at least says it out loud: "Yes, I was a murderer and an executioner" And if this had only been said a quarter of a million times in our country (in proportion, so as not to lag behind West Germany) - perhaps it would have been enough?
In the 20th century, it is impossible not to distinguish between the bestiality that can be foreboded and that "past" that we "should not stir up".
We must clearly and loudly condemn the very IDEA that justifies the arbitrariness of some against others! By keeping silent about vice and only driving it deeper into the body, so that no corner of it protrudes, we sow it, and tomorrow it will sprout a thousandfold. It is not simply that we guard the vain age of the executioners by not punishing them, not even reprimanding them - we thereby deprive the new generations of any basis of justice.
That is why they have become so "indifferent", not because of "educational weaknesses". The young realise that wickedness on earth is never punished, but always leads to prosperity. And how uncomfortable, how scary it will be to live in such a country!"