what happens If you were to post a "swastika" sign with a crossout mark thru it ?? Would this be in violiation of the german law ?? After all the symbolic representation of such an image would mean "no Swastika" – kinda thing!!

How do the general public and german laws view this type of image ??

Yeah, I was wondering about that before – there are definitely those signs around, I have a gut feeling they're legal but I don't know. E.g. a swastika being thrown into trash:
http://www.southern.com/MMM/photoarchiveimages/anti-nazi.gif

I often check this page (chilling effects) and Germany is often mentionned cause of nazi issues

Tom- but thats the same as "kamikazi" and japan!! Cultures are fused together with goelocations. Thats how humanity works.

Philipp: Would you or your service provider (Host server) be held responsilbe in the event such an image is placed on server ?? In short would the "content provider" or the ISP/SErver company

>How do the general public and german laws view this type of image ??

Some poor German fellow was fined for just that. However, he went to court and won.

http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/0,1518,407112,00.html

I believe I'm fully responsible for this server and everything on it, and after a recent German court decision, that includes all comments here. Also, I'm required to post my full address as responsible person with 1 click away from every page – so on the About page, you can find my address. But as we say in Germany (is that an English proverb too?), water's boiled hotter than you end up eating it. There even is a German law that makes web owners responsible for links to "illegal" sites.

Nice == >"1 click away from every page " . I think that google should have that a developed technology – "Warning – you are one click away from xxx" kinda notice :)- that would really be amazing...!!

Question:

If images with swastikas are illegal, how does one go about educating youth about 1930s-1940s German history? It seems most images and video of historical significance (on a geopolitical scale) contain the icon somewhere. Are the swastikas pixelated or something?

Second, how do you tell people that a cerain symbol is illegal if you can't show it to them in the first place? How would a young person even know what the symbol is?

I'm not an expert in German censorship law, but I believe it's not self-referentially paradoxical. I think there's exceptions for historical use and others. It's basically a matter of intent.

Even though as we can see from the linked article above, sometimes the law backfires and someone showing anti-Nazi symbols goes to court... we are able to see the swastika in some circumstances here. For example, a historical documentation may have it. Then again, it is often missing from historical games even though the intent is nearly the same – representing history, as opposed to glorifying nazidom. There was once a case of a Corel clip-art collection being banned in Germany due to a swastika clip-art. In another case, libraries discussed whether or not they'd allow to hand out original versions of Mein Kampf. Usually, you'll only be able to get the annotated versions of that book (I bet the annotations are really redundant in that context! Yeah, we *know* Hitler was an evil, sadistic dicator)... unless of course you go through the bookshelf of your neighbor's grandpa who might still have it!

Chilling effects has a link
http://www.chillingeffects.org/images/search-comparator/ that lets you compare search results between Google.com and google.de.

I've just used this to compare the results for 'swastika' in Google Images and
both give me about 13,200 hits.

Admittedly I've only looked at the first few, but the only one I can see among them that's omitted from google.de appears on the website of the American National Socialist Movement, at http://www.nsm88.com/merchandise/patches/patch.html , which I suspect is blocked because the content of the site in general, rather than any particular image, may be illegal in Germany.