What a colourful cast of nasties the Third Reich bequeathed to history: the nerdy Heinrich Himmler, director of the infamous death squads; rat-faced anti-Semite Joseph Goebbels; and the great Charlie Chaplin impersonator himself, Adolf Hitler.
The usual fourth in the quartet of nasty Nazis was Hermann Goering, the fat-faced, barrel-bellied chap often seen walking two paces behind the Fuehrer in contemporary footage, usually carrying a bejewelled rod.
June 8, 1942: On the first day she was forced to wear the yellow star to distinguish Jews: "My God, I didn't know this would be so hard. I was very brave all day. I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eyes they turned away. But it's hard ... This morning, I went out with Mother. Two kids in the street pointed at us saying 'Hey? You see? Jewish.'"
Oct. 10, 1943: On the reason she recounts her daily life: "I have a duty to accomplish by writing because people must know. Each hour of the day the painful experience is repeated, that of noticing that others don't know, that they don't even imagine the suffering of others and the evil that some inflict on others."
Prosecutors said Thursday they have formally overturned the conviction of a Dutch communist who was executed after the Nazis accused him of torching the Reichstag parliament building in 1933.
Marinus van der Lubbe, a bricklayer, was convicted of arson and high treason in December 1933 and executed on Jan. 10, 1934.
President George W. Bush emerged from a tour of Israel's official Holocaust memorial Friday calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted and praising victims for not losing their faith.
The Yad Vashem memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.
“After the Nazis arrived they moved us south to near Warsaw,” he recalls. “We stayed there for six months and moved around some more, but in 1941 we realised things were looking bleak in Poland and decided to take our chances in Russia. We were exiled to the far north. Guards dropped us off in a forest and said ‘build a home or die’.
“When it is so cold, the body needs to eat more. It was -40 in winter, and what little food we could glean was rock hard. In such circumstances, people who are not young stand no chance.
“We were so far north that in the summer there was no darkness, and in the winter, no light. When do you pray Mincha when there is no sunset? When do you pray Shacharit when there is no sunrise? I wish that had been our only problem.
“When I buried my father, I cut off my peyot [sidecurls] and removed my kippah. I had lost my religious faith before his death. To survive, you must look forward in hope, never back.”
He was repatriated to Poland after the war and made his way to Palestine but was arrested by the British and imprisoned in Cyprus.
He eventually settled in Petach Tikvah and married Aliza Nisan, an Iraqi immigrant. They had three children: Avram, and two younger daughters, Ruti and Shoshi. Aliza died in 1997, and he later remarried.
Here's an eye-catching headline : Hitler popular in New Zealand.
Wellington residents using the city council's libraries are reluctant to return books about Hitler, a newspaper reported on Friday.
In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg puts it in one of his chapter titles.
[...]
To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.
Originally being a fascist meant you were a right-wing socialist, and the problem is that we've incorporated these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist. In the American context fascists get called right-wingers even though there is almost no prominent fascist leader -- starting with Mussolini and Hitler -- who if you actually went about and looked at their economic programs, or to a certain extent their social program, where you wouldn't locate most if not all of those ideas on the ideological left in the American context.
President Bush calls Iran a "threat to peace" and promises there "will be serious consequences if they attack our ships." If they attack? Whatever happened to the military doctrine of pre-emption?
Sometimes big wars can start with little events, such as when Adolf Hitler tested Europe's resolve by ordering his horse-drawn infantry into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936.
The equally mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative ordering of Iranian swift boats to engage in a simulated attack on U.S. warships may have been a similar test of how far he can go.
World events today are scarcely like they were in the 1930s and 1940s, despite some writers' attempts to use the name most often associated with pure evil to fit a contemporary cause. Today there is one superpower, and whenever that superpower gets angry enough to apply its military to a problem, the world gets the jitters.
Bush, with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay and war in Iraq, is not just like Hitler, and the enemies of America, with their genocidal tendencies and anti-Semitism, are not quite like Hitler, either. Though I cannot claim to be an expert on Hitler or WWII, I am supremely confident in saying that few of these writers who wheel out the ghost of Adolf Hitler know anything of the man, his motives, or the problems he caused.
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