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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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