What is interesting is that Germany's ban on smoking- unlike the spurious arguments for turning the country's highways into racetracks- does actually have a connection to Germany's fascist past, and the smokers and tobacco industry have spared no costs to let this be widely known to all Germans whether they smoke or not. Since the medical evidence has abandoned the smokers' cause- as well as the rest of Europe- German smokers have turned to the great bogeyman of history: Hitler wouldn't let you smoke, either.
Adolf Hitler was a famous vegetarian, minimal drinker of alcohol and a rabid non-smoker. Accordingly, Nazi Germany pursued a cleaner and purer German race. In 1938, the Public Health Service stated that "the nervous disorders of every sort which are being reported in increasing numbers from nearly every part of Germany are for the larger part due to excessive indulgence in tobacco and alcohol." Smoking was prohibited in most of the party's organizations, and especially women were singled out as the Reich's potential carriers of baby Germans that smoking was not a female fashion statement.
Once the war broke out in 1939, the army moved forward to forbid its soldiers from smoking in public places. By 1943, teachers were recruited to kick the habit and set a good example for the young people before they headed off to the eastern front. The restrictions on smoking increased in severity in direct proportion to Germany's failed military campaigns; by 1944, smoking was no longer allowed on any public transportation, in work places or at any government building.
German restaurants and pubs have strongly resisted the bans, not only because of the potential loss of income but partly because of an earlier crackdown on smoking initiated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.
The sensitivity of the issue has prompted the authorities to allow special rooms to be set up purely for smokers.
The Nazi leader believed that traditional black and white photographs best highlighted the sinister nature of his regime, presenting dramatic images which were both powerful and menacing.
Now, however, an altogether more colourful view of the Fuhrer has emerged.
More than 62 years after his death in a Berlin bunker, images from a newly opened Paris archive show him relaxing with children in the Eagle’s Nest, his mountain top chalet in the Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.
(Eva Kor) speaks from an unenviable experience that gives her credence in such matters. When Eva was a kid of 10, her family was sent to Auschwitz by Hitler's loons. Mum and dad were "processed" while Eva and her twin sister came to the attention of the demented Dr Josef Mengele, whose quest for medical knowledge overrode every ethical consideration and fundamental respect for life.
Like sadistic gunfighters, Mengele and his minions blazed away with syringes, injecting Eva and Miriam with all manner of toxic compounds just to see what would happen. The sisters survived, but in 1993, when Miriam died, Eva felt compelled to retrace the lines of fate and found herself in contact with Dr Hans Munch, an SS doctor who has done what he could to help the Jewish guinea pigs and who, in the postwar years had sunk into deep depression and guilt. She decided to forgive him and, consequently, Mengele himself. Other survivors and the families of many who perished questioned her right to morally pardon the unpardonable.
The CBS is reporting on an interesting art exhibition to be held in Jerusalem:
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem plans an exhibit in February of more than 50 drawings and paintings stolen from France by the Germans during the Second World War and never reclaimed.
The exhibit, being organized with the French Ministry of Culture, is part of an effort to trace the owners of the works.
French museums, including the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay, currently hold about 2,000 pieces of Nazi-looted art that were never reclaimed.
No comments:
Post a Comment