Wednesday, December 26, 2007

News

A Nazi dog has landed on the pages of The Age in Australia:

    ADOLF the Alsatian — trained by his owner to give the Nazi salute to immigrants in Berlin — is looking for a new home in the new year.

    His master, Roland Thein, taught him the canine salute years ago. The former car showroom owner was a rabid Nazi who made Adolf perform that which is outlawed by humans in modern-day Germany.

    For years he turned up outside schools with immigrant children in them, ordering Adolf "to give the salute". The long-suffering hound would sit back on his haunches and raise his front right leg high into the air.

    If Mr Thein had done the salute himself he would have been shipped off to jail on numerous occasions. In fact, he was hauled before the courts many times but always escaped with a fine or a warning because authorities did not want to make a martyr of him.

Andrew Sullivan compares Bush's interrogation techniques to Nazi Germany at TheAtlantic.com:

    In Norway, we actually have a 1948 court case that weighs whether "enhanced interrogation" using the methods approved by president Bush amounted to torture. The proceedings are fascinating, with specific reference to the hypothermia used in Gitmo, and throughout interrogation centers across the field of conflict. The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration.

Sullivan also references this article at TheAtlantic.com from May 2007.

In another piece at The Age, we find a book review of The Years of Extermination, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945.

    SINCE THE PUBLICATION in 1966 of his book Pius XII and the Third Reich, Saul Friedlander has been one of the internationally acknowledged experts on the Holocaust. In The Years of Extermination he has provided us with an up-to-date, authoritative account of the murderous Nazi assault against European Jewry during World War II.

    As was the case with his previous widely acclaimed volume, The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, published in 1997, this is a conventional, non-theoretical work of synthesis aimed at a broad audience. The narrative is linear and the organisation strictly chronological. Each of the 10 chapters is given a title that simply indicates the time period covered, such as "December 1941-July 1942". These 10 chapters are in turn grouped into three major parts: Terror (autumn 1939 to summer 1941); Mass Murder (summer 1941 to summer 1942); and Shoah (summer 1942 to spring 1945).

    Any historian dealing with the Holocaust faces the daunting task of organising a vast amount of information about a complex set of inter-related episodes that unfolded across an entire continent. Friedlander has chosen to use the familiar triad of perpetrators, bystanders and victims to structure his narrative.

Actor Will Smith is in hot water for a comment about Hitler. Dallas Morning News:

    The Anti-Defamation League said Wednesday that it accepts Will Smith 's explanation that he never praised Adolf Hitler in remarks the star says were misinterpreted. A Scottish newspaper recently quoted Mr. Smith as saying: "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.' " The quote was preceded by the writer's observation: "Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good." After Web sites posted articles alleging that Mr. Smith believed Hitler was a good person, the actor issued a statement Monday saying that was an "awful and disgusting lie" and calling Hitler "a vile, heinous vicious killer."

Longtime Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd is the son of a Nuremburg interrogator. Christian Science Monitor:

    When Christopher was just 14 months old, his father left for what was to be a two-week assignment doing the initial interrogations of the 21 Nuremberg defendants. They included Hermann Goering, who was second in command of the Third Reich; Wilhelm Keitel, Adolf Hitler's chief of staff; and Rudolf Hess, Hitler's first deputy of the Nazi Party.

    Thomas Dodd's skill as an interrogator of what he called "the Nazi big boys" and his adept legal mind were quickly recognized by America's No. 1 Nuremberg prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson. As a result, those two weeks stretched to 15 months, and the senior Dodd soon became Justice Jackson's right-hand man.

    When Dodd Sr. rose for the first time to address the international court, "He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with 'the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention,' " Dodd writes in "Letters From Nuremberg," a collection of his father's letters to his mother during the post-World War II trial.

    When the trial ended, President Truman awarded the older Dodd the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Christopher, meanwhile, at home in Lebanon, Conn., was just learning to walk.

A Russian news agency is reporting on what happened to the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun:

    Historians were aware that Russians possessed remains of dead bodies of Adolph Hitler and his wife, however, nothing was known about the method they got rid of said remains. Unclassified documents reveal that bones of German tyrant and his wife were exhumed on April 4, 1970 in Magdeburg. Following day they were cremated, mixed with coal and poured into the nearest river. Protocols do not mention the name of said river, but this region has the Elbe.

In an article about faith v. atheism, The Times of London mentions Hitler and Stalin and some of their motives:

    How should believers respond to this on-slaught? For some, the immediate reaction has been embattled outrage. Donning the shining armour of belief, they have sought to smash down the atheists’ contentions, one by one. Science, they point out correctly, does not have a monopoly on progress, nor religion on backwardness. Were not the two greatest monsters of the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, both driven by what they believed a “scientific” ideology: the purging of “healthy” races from dangerous impurities, in Hitler’s case, or Stalin’s violent attempt to reconstruct society according to a flawed understanding of genetics? Defenders of the faith have also accused the atheists of the same fundamentalism that they impugn to their enemies: a dogmatic refusal to admit that “progress” has often been the achievement of profoundly religious people – including the atheists’ iconic Isaac Newton – who have been pioneers in science, democratic idealism and human rights.

An intriguing connection between Klaus Barbie and Che Guevara is discussed in the New Zealand Herald. Some are saying that Barbie was instrumental in Guevara's death:

    Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald has raised the intriguing possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the "Butcher of Lyon".

    Guevara was the Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz.

    Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, whose previous films include Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, examines how Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after World War II as a useful tool against communism.

    He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.

A Duluth home with Nazi symbols? Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

    The room's interior design had been preserved by the Prindles since 1905, well before the Nazis appropriated the symbol to represent the Third Reich in the 1930s. The symbols as seen in the Duluth Room have no Third Reich connotations, but rather refer to the ancient symbol.

Blind Spot: Hitler's secretary

I just watched Blind Spot: Hitler's secretary, which is widely available on DVD. Released in 2002, it's an interview with Traudl Junge, who was one of Hitler's secretaries from December 1942 until the end of the Third Reich, in late April 1945. Her experience is also told in movie format, in The Downfall. Both Blind Spot and Downfall are in German with English subtitles. I highly recommend both.

Traudl Junge, 1945


Born Traudl Humps, she's pictured here
after marrying Hans Junge, an aide to Hitler


Junge in 2001 or 2002


Junge's grave marker in Bavaria, Germany

This material is from Blind Spot:

    He was an absolute criminal. He was a criminal -- I just didn't realize it. At some point afterwards I began to wonder if I should have seen that. But then I think I was only 13 years old when he first came on the scene, and I was quite late in developing in lots of ways. And after all, apart from me there were millions who didn't see that. I mean, it's not as though everyone apart from me realized what a criminal he was. And I try to take heart from those thoughts.

    [...]

    And Hitler did somehow embody something monumental, at first, when I was a child. The first time I met him he probably had a kind of paternal, protective attitude towards me, too, and that's something I had longed for. I'd never been able to follow my own inclinations, and I'd never had that feeling of security in a complete family.

    [...]

    Now, I'd only ever seen him in newsreels and public appearances. So I knew his military expression, with his arm outstretched. And then a kindly old gentleman came up to us, speaking in a low voice and giving us a friendly smile. He shook hands with each of us, looked straight into our eyes with that famous gaze of his, asked our names, said a few words to us with a sort of friendly, paternal air. And then he disappeared again. When he went, he just said, "Good evening."

    The experience of meeting him was completely different than I had imagined beforehand. It wasn't at all frightening and there was a harmless, peaceful atmosphere.

    [...]

    (The first meeting with Hitler) was quite exciting. Suddenly there I was, little Traudl Humps, sitting opposite the Fuhrer. And the Fuhrer himself, whatever you thought about him, was a great man in those days. It was such an extraordinary situation, so incredible, such an adventure.

    [...]

    You know, I never had the feeling that (Hitler) was conscious of pursuing criminal aims. For him they were ideals. For him they were great goals. And human life meant nothing to him in comparison. But that only became so apparent to me afterwards. You see, in the inner circle surrounding him, he was shielded from the megalomaniac projects and the barbaric measures. That was the awful thing, that's what gave me such a shock later, when I realized what had been happening.

    When I started working there I thought I was at the source of information, and in fact, I was in a blind spot. In an explosion, there's one place where calmness reigns. And that was the great illusion, the great, not disappointment, but the great lie that I had made myself believe.

    [...]

    That same man who made speeches, when I think back, with that rolling "R", and all that roaring and clipping his words -- I never heard him speak like that in private. He could speak in such a flattering -- such a modulated tone. In his private life he had that gentle Austrian intonation, too, and he used some words that were typically Austrian. For example, "nimmermehr", or "nevermore", isn't used in Bavaria or the rest of Germany. "I heard it nevermore." And things like that did fascinate me, really, the courteous manner he displayed in his private life.

She said some things that go towards answering my Questions 1, 7, & 14 (these are questions I would like answered by this blog):

1. How could the German people follow Hitler? It seems an excellent question, considering he was largely a dictator by consent, as opposed to the likes of Saddam Hussein, who massacred all opposition on a single day, in a single setting, and then only maintained power through terror.

7. What did the average German think of Hitler? I ask this because nearly everyone at the time either said nothing as they went about their daily lives, or they spoke in favor. As we have seen with other dictators, such as Saddam Hussein, a public position in favor of the dictator is often the opposite of the private feelings. Only fear causes the public statements of support.

14. Who is the real Hitler? This may be the most interesting question for me. Hitler's public image, one that was carefully designed for public consumption, seems to be at odds with the private Hitler. Most people believe Hitler a lunatic, which is the version we see in Nazi propaganda films, but a wealth of information has been coming out for the last thirty years which suggests a very sane Hitler (with the understanding that one who commits mass murder and lusts for world domination is insane by any measure of the concept).

Here's from Junge's obituary in The Guardian, February 2002:

    With masterly ambiguity, the documentary, by the multi-talented André Heller, was called Blind Spot - a title that did justice both to Junge's claims to have been kept in the dark and the belief of many historians that she and others close to the Führer suffered from an entirely self-induced amnesia.

    Junge insisted that Hitler and other Nazi leaders "practically never mentioned the word Jew" in her presence, even though it was while she was working for the Führer that his regime killed most of the 6m Jews who died in the Holocaust. She said she only found out about the Holocaust after the war, and then felt wracked with guilt for having liked "the greatest criminal who ever lived".

    Among those who scorned her claims were staff at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. After Heller's film was screened in Berlin, Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre's office in Israel, said: "Her story reflects the blind loyalty of far too many Germans whose allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi party enabled the implementation of the final solution."

Links
Blind Spot at IMDB
The Downfall at IMDB
Traudl Junge's memoirs at Amazon
Traudl Junge's obituary in The Guardian
Review of The Downfall in the San Francisco Chronicle

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Hitler as Time magazine Man of the Year 1938

Time's naming of Vladimir Putin Person of the Year for 2007 (announced yesterday) has sparked dozens of news stories about others who received the same treatment. Hitler is squarely at the top of the lists. U.S. News & World Report:

    To be sure, Time did not always name those admired by its founder, Henry Luce, a liberal Republican and interventionist in the run-up to World War II. For 1942, it named Joseph Stalin for the Soviets' successful resistance to the Nazi invasion that began in 1941, but it had also, justifiably, named Stalin as the man of the year in 1939, because the Hitler-Stalin pact agreed to in August 1939 enabled Adolf Hitler to invade Poland without serious opposition. Indeed, Time also named Hitler man of the year for 1938, when he got Britain and France to appease him by destroying the power of Czechoslovakia to resist conquest.

Hitler's appearances on the cover of Time

Hitler was named Time's Man of the Year for 1938:

Caption: MAN OF 1938, From the Unholy Organist, a Hymn of Hate

The Man of the Year story begins:

    Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler.

The Dec. 21, 1931 cover:

I believe Time obtained their image from a Nazi film -- the same from which the following three images originate. These kinds of publications, especially during and shortly after WWII, gave rise to the popular notion that Adolf Hitler was insane. People seem unwilling to distinguish between the stage Hitler and the private man. He may have been insane, as it's an easy argument to make that a man who destroys millions of people with death camps and warfare qualifies as insane -- but the enraged Hitler who gave fiery speeches, with wild hand gestures and flying spittle, was a carefully created public image, one that seems to have only rarely appeared in private.




The 1931 cover story begins:

    Fighting every inch of the way, three men stood out against the advance of Fascism in Germany last week: pale, bespectacled Chancellor Heinrich Bruning; white-haired Paul von Hindenburg; and their faithful lieutenant, Minister of the Interior and of War Wilhelm Groener. Each morning foreign correspondents in Berlin expected the Bruning Government to fall and Fascist Adolf Hitler, who only fortnight ago pounded a platform and shouted in his best Mussolini manner "Right goes hand in hand with Might!", to seize the Government. Municipal elections were held in Stuttgart. Hitlerites nearly doubled their previous vote. The provincial diets of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Hesse were all Hitler-controlled. Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State. In Leipzig a congress of pharmacists and physicians turned into a typical Fascist rally. Hitlerite orators, drunk with the sound of their own voices, shouted their program to maintain the superiority of "the Nordic race, the finest flower on the tree of humanity." They mentioned the hanging of Marxists, abolition of trade unions, compulsory sterilization of Jews.

The Apr. 14, 1941 cover:


The 1941 cover story begins:

    The crucial spring of his career came last week to Adolf Hitler. He could see it in sheltered, sun-struck places around the Berghof where lilies of the valley, violets, Alpine roses, blue gentians, and wild azaleas bloomed, and in the green showing through the white on the Untersberg's slopes across the way. But he could feel it even more strongly in his bones: spring, when armies march.

The May 7, 1945 cover:


The 1945 cover story begins:

    Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan (see below). Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Whether or not he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (as reported from Stockholm), or had "fallen in his command post at the Reich chancellery" (as reported by the Hamburg radio, which said that he had been succeeded as Führer by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz), or was a prisoner of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler as a political force had been expunged. If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.

    If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler's eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1,000 years, sank to embers as the flames fused over its gutted cities. The historic crash of what had been Europe's most formidable state was audible in the shrieks of dying men and the point-blank artillery fire against its buckling buildings.

Hitler also made Time's list of The Most Important People of the Century. Their profile of him begins with: "The avatar of fascism posed the century's greatest threat to democracy and redefined the meaning of evil forever." From the profile:

    Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers Mussolini and Franco were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss.

    At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed.

Churchill and FDR also made this list.

News


A Hitler painting of a Vienna cathedral has sold at auction for $40k. News-Antique.com:

    In a recent auction held by Manion’s International Auction House, a leader in the sale of historic collectibles, an original 1911 dated watercolor of Vienna’s Votivkirche, painted by failed German dictator Adolf Hitler, brought the sum of $40,000.00.

    “I’ve seen a few of his paintings over the years and they always amaze me,” said Manion’s representative John Conway. “It’s just one of those aspects of WWII history that you hear about, but almost don’t really believe it could be true.”

    It is a known fact that the failed German dictator had aspired to be an artist, prior to the megalomaniacal activity for which he will always be remembered, but his paintings do portray an idiosyncratic side of evil.

A 54-year-old American was attacked by a man in Germany who yelled, "Heil Hitler!" Associated Press:

    The attacker confronted the 54-year-old American for speaking in English with a woman at a McDonald's restaurant in Gelsenkirchen, in the industrial Ruhr region, police said.

    The man demanded to know why the two were not speaking German. The woman said her friend did not speak German well, and the American asked, "What's your problem?"

    Police said the assailant then said: "We are in Germany. German is spoken here," before shouting "Heil Hitler" and raising his right arm. The Hitler salute is illegal in Germany.

This reminds me of an experience I had in Munich several years ago. I was with a friend, a fellow American, and we spoke less than 10 German words between us. We were at a restaurant with outdoor seating on the side of one of the many platz's in Munich. Not able to read the menu, we asked the waiter if he spoke English. He nodded and said, "Yes." My friend pointed to a menu item and asked, "What is this?" The waiter's reply: "Not for Americans."

Like everywhere, the locals in Germany prefer that travelers speak the local language. Like many, and perhaps most, people in Europe, the locals speak English, at least enough to converse with tourists. In my experience in Germany, I found that producing an American Express card dramatically improves the English skills of most Germans.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Nazis versus Socialists in Europe

Glyn Ford, "member of the European Parliament, Labour member for the South West of England, and treasurer of the Anti-Nazi League", has written an interesting piece for the Japan Times. Ford leaves the impression that Europe is a battleground between Nazis and Socialists.

What has sparked Ford's concern is the Oxford Union Debating Society's invitation to Nick Griffin (BNP chief) and David Irving to speak. Ford referred to Irving as a Holocaust denier. Yesterday an AFP story published by the European Jewish Press called Irving "a historian who has written over 20 books."

Ford:

    What is most alarming about the invitation to Griffin and Irving to partake in the Free Speech Debate was that it was an invitation to fascists to step into the political mainstream. In the 21st century, as the memory of how the blight of fascism and its devastating effect on Europe during World War II receding, a new political racism is reviving in Europe.

    [...]

    It is not all bad news for progressives. The October 2007 elections in Poland saw the LPR lose its seats, as the Poles grew tired of heavy-handed Catholicism, homophobia and extreme nationalism.

He closes with:

    Unfortunately, we cannot rely on the mere political incompetence of these parties and their members. We need mainstream politicians to stop pandering to racists and make sure the EU puts more pressure on individual countries to enforce their laws against racism, xenophobia and homophobia more robustly. Only then will progressive politics beat the fascists back into the history books and ensure that renowned institutions like the Oxford Union do not promote free speech for those who place no value on it.

I wonder what Ford would have said about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia University? Ahmadinejad is a Nazi in everything but name -- totalitarian with a secret police force, homophobe, anti-Semite, preaches the destruction of neighboring countries with ideological justification.

Links
Ford in Japan Times
Anti-Nazi League
Oxford Union
British National Party (BNP)
Daving Irving

Auschwitz survivor publishes memoir

Shlomo Venezia, a slave laborer at Auschwitz in 1944, survived the horror and went on to make a life for himself in Rome. His memoirs, Sonderkommando Auschwitz, have just been published. Here are a few excerpts from a Bloomberg interview with Venezia:

    For eight months in 1944, he loaded the corpses of his fellow Jews into the Nazi ovens -- 12 hours a day, seven days a week, cadaver after cadaver until it became a mechanical task, like feeding a heating furnace with cords of wood.

    ``Men are animals,'' Venezia says, recalling in a conversation in his Rome clothing shop how he hardened himself. ``They resist things you can't ever imagine.''

    [...]

    He recalls, for example, the day he met his father's emaciated cousin in an undressing room at the gas chambers. Venezia offered him the only solace possible, he writes -- some sardines and a lie that the Zyklon B would kill him quickly.

    ``It was just terrible to have to lie, but there was no way around it,'' Venezia explains. ``I tried in some way to make the horrible situation easier.''

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Daving Irving rattles Spanish authorities

The controversial David Irving, author and historian, has just made headlines after delivering a speech in Barcelona. European Jewish Press:

    During his speech at a Barcelona bookstore, Irving, a historian who has written over 20 books, said "there is no proof" dictator Adolf Hitler was aware of what was happening in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, the Europa Press news agency reported.

    But he said "there was no doubt" that the Nazis killed two or three million Jews.

David Irving is an interesting character. I've read his Hitler's War and The Path to War, and while I felt there were perhaps tones of sympathy for Hitler, I also found them fascinating and scholarly. I recommend them to everyone, just as countless, respected historians and book reviewers have. He does, however, say things publicly that are counter to conventional thinking about the Nazis and the Holocaust - things that have resulted in his imprisonment.

It is interesting that in free societies, as Western European countries claim to be, merely stating an opinion about history can be illegal and punishable. The other side of the coin is that the Holocaust and WWII were so horrible that European laws about denying the Holocaust stand as worthy exceptions in genuinely free societies.

I am two generations removed from anyone who witnessed WWII, and being from Middle America -- as opposed to Europe -- am quite removed from the carnage. Therefore I won't be too critical of laws that seem counter to freedom.

I'll state again that I'm not a Nazi sympathizer, and I do not deny the Holocaust. That said, the link to David Irving's website will remain on my sidebar and I will continue to read his books.

Former SS member outed at trial

A court action over honor and a baby has revealed a former SS guard's involvement with the Warsaw ghetto. Story published today by The Guardian:

    A former member of Hitler's SS has gone to court claiming his reputation has been ruined by a book - not because it exposed his part in the Holocaust but because it accused him of abandoning a woman he had an affair with when she became pregnant.

    [...]

    In trying to preserve his reputation as an 'honourable serviceman' 'Eick' outed himself as the bodyguard of Juergen Stroop, tasked by Hitler with destroying the ghetto after the Jews rose up in January 1943. Over four months, 13,000 people were shot or burned to death and the remaining 50,000 sent to death camps.

    Steidtmann was exonerated in a postwar trial as having 'minimal involvement' in crushing the uprising, but the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel is now pressing for him to be retried, claiming the trial did not know of his closeness to Stroop.

Hermann Goring suicide details

Goring in death

Years earlier: Goring reviews a map of the Russian front

Try this interesting article from Time magazine, dated 1946. It involves the suicide of the flamboyant and excessive leader of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring, and examines the negligence that allowed its occurrence.

    It happened because the Army had placed in charge of the prison a pompous, unimaginative, and thoroughly likable officer who wasn't up to his job. Colonel Burton C. Andrus loved that job. Every morning his plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon, moved majestically into the court, impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet. His bow to the judges as they entered was one of the sights of Nürnberg. He loved to pen little notes: "The American Colonel invites the distinguished French prosecutor and his staff to accompany him to a baseball game."

    He had spent long hours with his staff planning every last detail of the prisoners' life. He arranged anti-suicide cells in which even the tables were designed to collapse under a man's weight. He posted 24-hour guards before each cell and insisted that the prisoners sleep with hands outside the blankets. He required prisoners to take exercise periods during which their cells were searched. He had designed interview booths in which prisoners and visitors could converse with one another without being able to touch hands. All seemed well, but Andrus forgot that a pattern had been set, and with men like Göring, just to see the pattern was to see ways to break it.

Here's what David Irving says, on his website, about Goring's suicide:

    ...The glass ampoule containing the amber liquid and its brass "cartridge case" container were standard Nazi issue, and the remnants were found.

    An exhaustive US Army investigation of the Göring suicide filled 200 pages, complete with photographs of the ampoule used. (I wonder why the British Army never did a similar investigation of Heinrich Himmler's "suicide".)

    I obtained access to this (it was in the safe file of the Berlin Document Center, with his last letters, marked Never to be Published) and I revealed the details in my Göring biography many, many years ago. For a while my friend the late Ben Swearingen had the actual brass ampoule container involved.

And from a 1951 Time magazine article:

    At the Nürnberg trials in January 1946, SS General and longtime Nazi Party Member Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski gave damaging testimony about his former bosses' plans to exterminate 30 million Slavs. Listening in the defendants' box, Hermann Göring was incensed. "Dirty dog! Damned traitor!" he shouted. Later, Prosecution Witness Bach-Zelewski left Nörnberg a free man; on Oct. 15, 1946, Göring mysteriously thwarted the hangman by taking cyanide of potassium in his execution cell.

    Last week the 52-year-old general, a Prussian army veteran, marched into the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Department office in Nürnberg to make a paradoxical confession. It was he who had given the face-saving poison to the man whom he had accused.

Many people have claimed, over the long years, to have helped Goring commit suicide. These claims have been discredited, as Irving notes:

    Every now and then they come out of the woodwork, these befuddled elderly gentlemen who believe they were "there".

    [...]

    The brass casing was found clutched in Göring's hand. Was the US army private so dim that he did not realise what was in it?

    Why do the newspapers contact second-raters for their views, when they know full well that my own Hermann Göring biography was the first to investigate the death in full on the basis of secret reports, including his last handwritten letters, which I published exclusively in 1987 -- letters which the Allied Control Commission had ruled in 1946 should never be allowed to see the light of day.

I can answer the "why" of it: the stories sell.

An Allied dog of war

Here's something from the Cleveland Plain Dealer about an heroic dog named Chips:

    In World War II, a mixed-shepherd-collie named Chips was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart for single-handedly attacking an enemy machine-gun nest in Sicily and, despite a bullet wound, forced the six-man crew to surrender. The Army later revoked the awards, calling it demeaning to service members to give medals to animals.

I hope the website, uswardogs.org, and the apparent owner of the photograph, Mary Ann Whitley, will forgive me for borrowing the photo.

News

Latest stories...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has launched Operation Last Chance to step up the hunt for aging Nazis still in hiding. Best of luck to them. It would be good to have the last remaining ones rounded up and brought to justice. Newsday:

    Most of them would be in their 90s now, men who have kept their identities hidden for decades to escape punishment for their Nazi pasts.

    Concerns that they might succeed - and die without being held accountable - have led officials at the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center to announce one final drive to locate elderly war criminals hiding in South America: Operation Last Chance.

    [...]

    The Wiesenthal Center's Nazi hunters have brought hundreds of war criminals to justice since World War II, and South America has been fertile ground. Permissive immigration standards after the war allowed many Nazis to create new identities in South America.

    Some of the Third Reich's most infamous names ended up in Argentina, where the government of Juan Perón aided war criminals fleeing the Nuremberg trials. In 1999, an Argentine government panel reported that at least 180 Nazis facing criminal charges in Europe had relocated there. That number, which other research groups have said seems low, does not include rank-and-file Nazis not charged individually. No estimates are available for the number of Nazis who fled to other South American countries.

The Le Pen trial has begun. Telegraph:

    French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has gone on trial for claiming that the Nazi occupation of France was "not particularly inhumane," but the Front National founder was not present.

    Mr Le Pen, 79, was charged with conspiring to justify war crimes and to deny Nazi crimes against humanity, both violations of France’s Holocaust denial legislation.

    He faces a maximum one-year prison term, a £32,000 fine and a possible ban from holding elected office.

Peace is undoubtedly beyond reach for many Holocaust survivors, even in their senior years. Fortunately several groups are working to keep them out of nursing homes, and in the comfort of their own homes. Sun-Sentinel:

    The memories, long moved to another part of the mind, are coming back to Holocaust survivors, and they are brutal. This twist on aging is unbearable for many who survived so many years ago in the face of impossible odds.

    The Jewish community wants to keep these survivors home in the twilight of their lives. Jewish Family Service agencies in Palm Beach and Broward counties want to give Holocaust survivors in-home nursing care, housekeeping help and anything else they need to stay in their houses or apartments. The goal is to keep them out of nursing homes, where care by uniformed strangers could trigger horrific memories.

A scientist who worked on Hitler's atomic weapons program speaks to the Sunday Mail:

    In the dying days of the Second World War, the Nazis fought a desperate battle to develop the atomic bomb before the Allies.

    More than 60 years later, a scientist has revealed how he hid the secret of creating the catastrophic weapon from Adolf Hitler.

    Erwin Klinge had been hired by the dictator to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. But the German-born pastor - who has lived in Scotland for 20 years - and his team buried the plans to stop the Nazis aquiring the bomb.

Here's a story from last month: The globe Hitler used at the Burghoff was auctioned for $100,000. It's eerie to think that this globe may have helped Hitler plot the demise of millions of people. Fox News:

    A globe that once belonged to Adolf Hitler has sold at auction for $100,000 -- more than five times the expected amount.

    American soldier John Barsamian found the globe in the ruins of Hitler's Eagle's Nest retreat in the Bavarian Alps in May 1945.

    Barsamian, now 91, of Oakland, recently decided to sell it while he is alive so he can personally tell the story behind it, said his son, Barry Barsamian. Both Barsamians watched the bidding Tuesday at Greg Martin Auctions.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler's son

Did Adolf Hitler have a son? The Times of London published an interesting story today about Unity Mitford, who may have been mother to Hitler's child. This is extremely doubtful. Mitford, interestingly enough, was a cousin of Winston Churchill, and went to Germany in the early 1930s, according to the article, and found herself in Hitler's inner circle. The Times is referencing an article in the New Statesman.

Excerpts from the Times:

    She first went to Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were on the rise, and the young woman was so overwhelmed by a visit to the Nuremberg rallies that she became determined to meet Hitler. This she managed in spectacular style, ingratiating herself to the point where he described her to friends as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood”.

    [...]

    The makers of a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary, Hitler’s British Girl, examined theories surrounding Mitford’s notorious life and concluded that there was very little evidence that she was pregnant or ever had a sexual relationship with Hitler.

    Whereas some might consider the idea of her giving birth to the Führer’s only offspring to be a harmless and intriguing tale, Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, thinks differently. “Unity Mitford’s relationship with Hitler was basically political,” he said. “She was a hard-line Nazi and a rabid racist and antiSemite, and I’m worried that gossip about her personal life might take attention away from these facts.”

And from the New Statesman:

    At this point I decided to return to the National Archives, where I discovered a file on Unity that had been sealed under the "100-year rule" - reserved for only the highest classification of top-secret files. An official told me that it was possible to have the classification of such files reviewed and I applied to have the file opened. To my great surprise, the Home Office agreed. Inside was a startling new piece of information: it wasn't quite the birth certificate of a child, but here was hard evidence that Unity might not have been quite the invalid it was supposed.

After all these years, this is still fascinating stuff.

Holland under the Nazis

One doesn't often think of Holland under the Nazis, but the history is very interesting and worth examination. Like most countries that fell to the Third Reich, its story is one of armed conflict, suffering, and resistance. For an interesting look at Holland in WWII, see this ancient website (1996).

    It was assumed by German military leaders that since the invasion of Holland had been necessitated by strategic military reasons, the administration of the occupied country would left in the hands of the military. This is what had been done with Denmark. But Hitler had other ideas; he decided that Holland would be placed under a civilian administration with a fanatical Austrian Nazi (Arthur Seyss-Inquart) as its head.

    [...]

    In the period following first the Capitulation the Dutch were in a state of collective shock. Eventually the Dutch would arouse themselves out of this shock. Slowly but surely resistance began to grow against the German occupiers. At first, the resistance was manifested in relatively minor ways. I mentioned about how many Dutch would boo during the course of German newsreels. With the Nazis in full control of the media, and the radio now dominated by Nazi propaganda, many Dutch began to turn on the radio to listen broadcasts from London--either to the BBC or to the Dutch government in exile. Such listening was in itself an illegal act and a form of resistance. Dutch newspapers also, as stated earlier, were firmly in the hands of the Germans and their Dutch sympathizers. As a means of disseminating out the truth, several Dutch individuals took it upon themselves to produce and distribute underground papers. This was highly illegal, and many Dutch people were to lose their lives for such activity.

The Third Reich

The Nazis used the term "Third Reich" to mean, literally, the third empire of the Germans. The First Reich, according to Nazis, was in the Middle Ages. Hitler often referenced the Teutonic heritage of the Germans in speeches and in private. The Second Reich was the German Empire from 1871 to Germany's defeat in WWI, in 1918.

Encyclopedia Britannica:

    Official Nazi designation for the regime in Germany (q.v.) from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor of the medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire of 800 to 1806 (the First Reich) and the German Empire from 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich).

Reich etymology according to Wikipedia:

    Reich is the German word used most for "empire", "realm", or "nation" cognate with Scandinavian rike/rige, Dutch: rijk, Sanskrit: raj and English: -ric as found in bishopric. It is the word traditionally used for a variety of sovereign entities, including Germany in many periods of its history. It is also found in the compound Königreich, "kingdom", and in the country names Frankreich (France, literally the "Realm of the Franks"), Österreich (Austria, the "Eastern Realm") and Sverige (Sweden, the "Realm of the Suiones"). The German version of the Lord's Prayer uses the words Dein Reich komme for "ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου" (usually translated as "thy kingdom come" in English), and the Lord's Prayer in Scandinavian also uses the cognate word.

    Used adjectivally, reich is the German word for "rich". Like its Latin counterpart, imperium, Reich does not necessarily connote a monarchy; the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany continued to use the name Deutsches Reich.

Hitler speaks

Voice has been given to home movies of Hitler. This is a fascinating trick accomplished with impressive software called ALR, or automated lip reading. It helps us separate the stage-managed image Hitler portrayed to the public, and the real man. This documentary was made for British TV and The History Channel, and runs 46 minutes.



Compare the home movies with the public speech below. Running time 55 seconds:

Why the Third Reich?

Short answer

"Why" is an excellent question, one I asked myself several times before launching this endeavor. The short answer is that after watching WWII movies and reading many non-fiction books about Hitler and the European Theater, I slowly gained an interest in the Third Reich, Hitler and his top people (the perpetrators of the largest mass murder in history), and Nazis. There, I said it: I'm interested in Nazis.

Also, I wanted to create a site about the Third Reich that contained a wealth of plainly stated information. I've viewed hundreds of sites, many of them very good, in addition to countless trips to the public library, to gain my present knowledge. Instead of adding these links to my bookmarks and thinking about what I had learned, why not include everything here?

Long answer

Q: Am I a Nazi sympathizer, a neo-Nazi, a Holocaust denier, or an anti-Semite?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Do I want to learn everything I can about Nazi ideology, Hitler, and World War II?

A: Yes.

Q: Do I find it interesting that there is a big gap between the world's perception of Adolf Hitler and the actual man?

A: Yes.

Some questions I want answered

1. How could the German people follow Hitler? It seems an excellent question, considering he was largely a dictator by consent, as opposed to the likes of Saddam Hussein, who massacred all opposition on a single day, in a single setting, and then only maintained power through terror.

2. Did pre-war anti-Semitism in Europe (not just in Germany) play a role in Hitler's rise to power? If so, did these sentiments affect the appeasement policies of the Western Powers that allowed Hitler to gain so much economic and military strength? As a follow-on, was Hitler's anger at the Jews and communists in any way justified? I'm asking about his anger, not whether the Holocaust was justified, as it certainly was not. Hitler blamed Jews for the loss of WWI, and the resultant loss of German territory, economic capabilities, and even an overall downcast feeling throughout the country.

3. Why isn't all WWII documentation gathered in a central location?

4. Were the Nuremburg trials (IMT) fair?

5. Why didn't Hitler have his "superweapons" at his disposal earlier than 1944? These include, but are not limited to, ballistic missiles (V2, etc.), jet aircraft, atomics, all-electric and super-range subs.

6. Were there really 17 assassination plots against Hitler while he was in power, and if so, why were all but one abandoned?

7. What did the average German think of Hitler? I ask this because nearly everyone at the time either said nothing as they went about their daily lives, or they spoke in favor. As we have seen with other dictators, such as Saddam Hussein, a public position in favor of the dictator is often the opposite of the private feelings. Only fear causes the public statements of support.

8. How active was the German underground? See also No.'s 6 and 7.

9. Why did Britain and France allow Poland to be crushed under the Nazi hammer? Was it fear of the USSR, a supreme desire to keep themselves out of armed conflict, or was it something else, or perhaps a combination?

10. How successful were the "ratlines" that provided a means of escape to Nazi war criminals after Germany's surrender? How effective have Jewish groups been in bringing these creatures to justice (aside from the successful Adolf Eichmann case)?

11. Did Hitler really know about the extermination of the Jews, as well as gypsies and others? Prevalent thought is that he knew and ordered it, but there seems to be scant evidence backing up this view. Yet, how could he not have known?

12. Is there any basis to the opinion that if Hitler's plans for Germany hadn't included a racial element (Aryan supremacy and hatred of Jews) and an almost overpowering desire to blood the Wehrmacht, Nazism could have been good for Germany? This is not my view, but it is certainly floating around, and not just in skinhead circles.

13. How strong a lure is National Socialism today? I'm not talking about neo-Nazis and skinheads. These groups, in my opinion, are not to be taken seriously. They are mostly disaffected youth who are walking a very bad path. Rather, I mean, are any otherwise respected people, worldwide, secretly harboring a favorable opinion? There is some evidence for this, and I intend to gather together what I can.

Today if we ask anyone (or almost anyone) in Germany or Austria about Nazi ideology, there will be utterances of complete disgust. The anti-Nazi feelings are warranted, of course, but they are almost as automatic as the pro-Nazi feelings in Hitler's time. This is interesting and should be examined.

I got to know a German woman a few years ago, who was in the United States for a year on an internship. I asked her, matter of factly, what she thought about Germany's Nazi past. Her face darkened. "We don't talk about that," she said. "We are ashamed." I suggested that it happened so long ago that Germans should move forward, without forgetting the past, of course. She had a one-word reply: "No." I pressed one more time: "Was there anything good that came from that era?" She didn't think so. When I said that Rommel earned a certain amount of Western respect, she said: "No, it's all bad."

I got the distinct feeling that this is an automatic reaction. There must be more to it.

14. Who is the real Hitler? This may be the most interesting question for me. Hitler's public image, one that was carefully designed for public consumption, seems to be at odds with the private Hitler. Most people believe Hitler a lunatic, which is the version we see in Nazi propaganda films, but a wealth of information has been coming out for the last thirty years which suggests a very sane Hitler (with the understanding that one who commits mass murder and lusts for world domination is insane by any measure of the concept).

To be continued...