The vessels, including one once commanded by Germany's most successful U-boat ace, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines, taken by road and river across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Germany's Baltic port at Kiel to Constanta, the Romanian Black Sea port.
In two years, the fleet sank dozens of ships and lost three of their number to enemy action. But in August 1944, Romania switched sides and declared war on Germany, leaving the three remaining vessels stranded.
With no base and unable to sail home - the Bosporus and Dardanelles were closed to them because of Turkish neutrality - their captains were ordered to scuttle the boats before rowing ashore and trying to make their way back to Germany. However, all three crews were caught and interned by the Turks.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Hitler's lost fleet found in Black Sea
Friday, February 1, 2008
Britney Spears and Adolf Hitler
Sometimes all it takes is one person to ruin a name. Take Adolph.
The name was relatively popular in the 1890s. Not "John" popular, mind you, but always fighting for a spot among America's top 200.
But once Hitler showed up, it was kaput for Adolph.
By 1970, Adolph was no longer among the top 1,000 names in the United States, and it doesn't show any signs of coming back.
Hitler spelled his name "Adolf," but that was a meaningless distinction for parents-to-be.
[...]
The popularity graph for Britney, which can be seen at the terrific Web site www.baby namewizard.com, looks like a shark fin.
The name was almost non-existent in 1980, rose to prominence on the blond-headed shoulders of bubble-gum princess Britney Spears and has deflated into irrelevance right along with her.
She has dragged the alternative spellings – Brittney and Brittany – along for the fall.
Gandhi on the Jews
The Jews of Germany were also supposed to respond with nonviolent resistance when the Nazis began persecuting them. The ideological and moral challenge posed by the Nazis left Gandhi unmoved: If only the Jews would project nonviolence, Mr. Hitler would capitulate, as if this were the Jews' historic destiny. When he saw that this wasn't exactly what was happening, Gandhi tended to blame the Jews themselves, denouncing them for the principle of "an eye for an eye" and citing the murder of Jesus as well. German Jews, he said, are trying to convince the United States to make war on Germany instead of just being loyal German Jews. Some of his admirers protested such statements, and then Gandhi was compelled to admit that he'd erred: I beg your pardon, Germany's Jews did not ask the United States to attack their country.
Even Auschwitz didn't change his mind: In his final days, being a great friend of the Jews, he wanted to explore the possibility of vast Russia absorbing all of them into its territory. This week marked the 60th anniversary of his assassination.
Growing up Nazi
In Hitler's Germany, my Germany, childhood ended at the age of 10, with admission to the Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. Thereafter, we children became the political soldiers of the Third Reich.
In reality, though, the basic training of almost every child began at six, upon entrance to elementary school. For me, that year was 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. It was 50a years ago this week that Hitler came to power, and I have only a child's hazy recollection of the early years of his rule. But I vividly remember the wild enthusiasm of the people when German troops marched through my home town on March 7, 1936, in the process of taking back the Rhineland from the hated French.
Germany on the 75th anniversary of Hitler's chancellorship
Elected politicians from Germany’s far right NPD party have refused to stand and honour the victims of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
The German dictator became Chancellor 75 years ago on Wednesday, and many small ceremonies of remembrance for the millions killed by the Nazis were held across the nation.
But in the parliament building of the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, six members of the NPD, or National Democratic Party, refused to take part in a moment of silence.
The state is home to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. The parliament’s president Sylvia Bretschneider from the left of centre SPD party had called upon politicians from all parties to stand and reflect on the "end of liberty and freedom of opinion in Germany 75 years ago".
"Terror and violence were the end result," she said. "Anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and an assault on democracy."
But the moment was disrupted when the six NPD parliament members remained in their seats, denouncing "tactical games and self-promotion".
Cancelled: Holocaust float and Hitler samba dancer
A Brazilian judge has banned a controversial Carnival float that depicted Holocaust victims and was to be accompanied by a samba dancer dressed as Adolph Hitler.
The creators said the float was a protest against genocide, but judge in Rio de Janeiro backed a complaint from the Jewish community, saying the festival "cannot be used as a tool in the cult of hate or for any form of racism ... or for the banalization of barbaric events."
Comic books about Nazis
Comic books land in German classrooms today to help schoolchildren learn about Hitler and the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Entitled The Search, the cartoons are similar in style to the Tin Tin books, but their subject matter includes Hitler's rise to power and the horror of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
The comic strip has been produced by the Dutch-based Anne Frank Centre, and relies heavily on drawings by the Dutch artist, Eric Heuvel. It will be used during history lessons for pupils aged 13 to 16 in Berlin and the state of North Rhine Westphalia from today, the end of the week that marked the 75th anniversary of the Nazi Party gaining power.
Comparing EU legislation to Nazism
The MEP for South East England was complaining about about a new right granted by the Strasbourg Parliament to its president, Hans-Gert Poettering, to override delaying tactics in the chamber. Mr Hannan told him, "It is only my affection for you... that prevents me from likening this to the Ermaechtigungsgesetz", the Enabling Act of 1933 that gave the German Government special powers.
Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, said: "To call someone a Nazi is tasteless. Nazism was a unique evil in human history. To use it as a term of parliamentary debate demeans the memory of those who suffered."
Graham Watson, leader of the multinational Liberal and Democrat group, said: "By comparing a vote today in the European Parliament with a vote in the Reichstag in 1933, UK Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan is plumbing new depths in UK-EU relations and in the Tories' approach to democracy in the EU."
Last night Mr Hannan said: "I do not compare anyone to the Nazis. That would be completely inappropriate and if I have caused any offence by my remarks, I apologise." He added that it would be "fair enough" if he were expelled from the EPP and called for an "amicable divorce" between the Tories and the group. " It is, as I have always maintained, better for us to be friendly neighbours to the EPP than grudging tenants," he said.
Alleged former Nazi guard in 30 year fight
The Justice Department first brought charges in 1977 seeking to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship and to deport him for falsifying information on his applications when entering the U.S. in 1952 and to become a citizen in 1958.
His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981, restored in 1998 and revoked again in 2002. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and was under a death sentence, until Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that he was not the same man as Ivan.
The current deportation case is based on evidence uncovered by the Justice Department that Demjanjuk was a different guard. That evidence led courts to again strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship on the basis of the original falsified information.
Broadley had argued in briefs filed in July 2007 that Demjanjuk likely would be tortured in Ukraine if sent back there because the U.S. government never sufficiently disavowed its previous claim that Demjanjuk was Ivan. The government contends there is no basis for the argument that Demjanjuk would be tortured.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
News
"So many died. And now, 63 years later, I'm here holding my father's identity card in my hand," Evers told DPA news agency.
The items include an old pocket watch with cracked, yellow glass and its case, a scratched-up lock and key and a photograph with writing on the back that is hard to discern.
The Nazis had kept all the items packed in boxes, which were then confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war.
Last month a U.S. court ruled that the Nazis forced German dealer Max Stern to sell his inventory of art. Officials at Concordia University in Montreal, one of the beneficiaries of Stern's will, believe the ruling will help them recover artworks owned by more than 20 museums or individuals.
Stolz made the remarks in 2006 while representing "historian" Ernst Zündel, who was handed a five-year prison term in Germany last February for repeatedly disputing the Holocaust as a historical fact.
The 44-year-old also signed a motion during Zündel's trial with "Heil Hitler" and shouted that the lay judges deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy" -- leading the court to dismiss her.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has more than doubled its reward for information leading to the capture of Nazi war criminals from $10,000 to $25,000 under its "Operation Last Chance" campaign to bring the perpetrators to justice before they die of old age.
A Saskatchewan court in western Canada upheld Monday a lower court ruling quashing the conviction of a North American Indian leader for hate crimes against Jews.
David Ahenakew, now 74, was convicted in 2005 of willfully promoting hatred for endorsing Adolf Hitler and telling a reporter in December 2002 that Jews bent on global domination were responsible for World War II.
Fascism and socialism
His words, indeed, fit a much larger pattern of fusing socialism with fascism: Mussolini was a leading socialist figure who, during World War I, turned away from internationalism in favor of Italian nationalism and called the blend Fascism. Likewise, Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers Party.
In 1919, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart formed the German Worker's Party (GPW) in Munich. The German Army was worried that it was a left-wing revolutionary group and sent Adolf Hitler, one of its education officers, to spy on the organization. Hitler discovered that the party's political ideas were similar to his own. He approved of Drexler's German nationalism and anti-Semitism but was unimpressed with the way the party was organized. Although there as a spy, Hitler could not restrain himself when a member made a point he disagreed with, and he stood up and made a passionate speech on the subject.
[...]
In April, 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality. However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany after the First World War. This was reflected in the growth in the German Social Democrat Party (SDP), the largest political party in Germany.
Hitler, therefore redefined socialism by placing the word 'National' before it. He claimed he was only in favour of equality for those who had "German blood." Jews and other "aliens" would lose their rights of citizenship, and immigration of non-Germans should be brought to an end.
1934 Nazi party rally (Reichsparteitag) at NuremburgThe "25 points" of Nazism were made clear by Hitler in a speech he gave in Munich on Feb. 24, 1920. The following are the points I would consider to be socialist:
13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14. We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
20. The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
21. The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
24. [concludes with] ... common utility precedes individual utility.
Yad Vashem's page on the Nazi party includes the following. Note, the site is oddly constructed, to say the least -- you may have to search for "nazi party" after following the link.
The evolution of organized National Socialism began with the formation of the German Workers’ Party in Munich on January 5, 1919, out of a small right-wing group headed by Anton Drexler that was noted for fanatic antisemitism. On February 24, 1920, it was reconstituted as the National-Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party -the NSDAP-or the Nazi Party for short. Nazi ideology was predicated from the outset on antisemitism, populism, racism, and pan-Germanism. The master-race idea, a virulent anti-Bolshevism and the vision of German conquest of Lebensraum ("living space") in the East were dominant from the very beginning. Adolf Hitler joined the party on September 12, 1919, and, after a brief career as the party propagandist, became its leader in 1921. The 1920 party platform, elaborated by Hitler and Drexler, included clauses concerning the army, the nation, society, the economy, and antisemitism.
Monday, January 14, 2008
News
One recent example is the speech commemorating al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day by former president and current head of the Assembly of Experts, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in October. Rafsanjani said the Nazis' "first objective was to free Europe from the evils of Zionism," and that this was justifiable because "the Zionists, as a powerful faction, used to engage in many subversive activities in Europe, thanks to their large assets and propaganda empire."
So when she got more news last week it was not wonderful, but it was not unexpected. Another Hungarian appellate court in Budapest, ruled in favor of the government. It found that the government had acquired the art through “prescription,” the principle that by possessing the property for long enough it had gained ownership of it. It was the fifth ruling in the case. It left Mrs. Nierenberg and her allies convinced that if she were ever to find justice, it would not come through the Hungarian courts.
A SHOP selling Nazi flags, insignias and other memorabilia at Kew, 30km south of Port Macquarie, has caused outrage within the NSW Jewish community.
A holidaymaker of Jewish heritage spotted the items on the shelves of the BP Legends Café, which is located on the Pacific Hwy.
The regulator concluded that the use of offensive language was justified by the fact that the documentary was a serious investigation into the extremist and racist views among certain people involved in a World War Two enactment.
What did Mike Huckabee do when presented with these vicious statements made by John Hagee about Catholics and the Catholic Church?
Nothing, but Huckabee did make this very equivocal statement: "I can't speak for (Hagee) anymore than he could speak for me. I'm sure that there're things I'll say that he disagrees with… I would certainly never characterize the Catholic Church as being pro-Nazi, never."
The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger… We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity…
Everything in that brief excerpt alone is untrue for the following reasons: 1) The Holocaust was not just Hitler and a few SS “followers”; rather, it involved millions of followers (some of whom were active, some of whom were passive) in a systematic and near successful genocide of an entire people.
Neither Hitler, nor Himmler, nor Goebbels, nor any of the Nazi hierarchy could have wrought what they did without millions of German non-party guards, railroad employees, informants, and clerks and bureaucrats in the industry of death. Tragically this complaisance did not happen over night, but was prepped by years of National Socialist indoctrination that systematically and incrementally whipped up centuries old anti-Semitism by blaming — take note here, Mr. Gandhi — “the Jews” as being the “biggest players” in the world’s violence and problems.
Once everything was in place she turned to me and said, "What you are about to see is awful, are you sure you want to watch it?" I said, "Yes." She turned on the projector, aimed it at a particular wall in her home and the images of a group of women and children of various ages (all girls) appeared. They were walking into a huge pit dug into the earth. Their were probably 150, possibly as many as 300 naked, cold and frightened females being marched into this pit which was more like a football field that was dug out of the ground. As the camera panned over these people it was obvious that they were standing in what appeared to be water. The smallest children were just about submerged, some were being carried, and all were naked. After a few minutes and with the camera angle now some distance from the pit (I do not know what happened between the time that the camera was repositioned), the entire pit erupted in fire! This beautiful little Jewish woman turned to me and said, "That was not water!"
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Hitler, the anti-smoking Nazi
People have been using the name "Hitler" in a debate about a smoking ban in Kansas. The ban resulted in a number of voicemails to a newspaper, TheKansan.com. A columnist wrote a piece based on the voicemails:On the other hand, Adolph Hitler did not smoke, and did not permit smoking in his presence. So I suppose, he is the first “anti-smoking Nazi.”
The story prompted a Kansan to submit a comment:
I read Mark Schnabel’s column (Nov. 29) and, after much thought, decided to comment to it. I understand world history is not taught like it was in the ‘40s and ‘50s, therefore Mark did not put much time in studying World War II.
Adolph Hitler was not a smoker, but the comparisons were not about smoking. Before Hitler took power, he wrote a book, “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925 (vol. 1) and 1927 (vol. 2) and translated into English in 1933. In it he outlined how he would take over the world, and he came close.
His way was simple: First, infiltrate. Second, remove all rights and guns. Third, divide the people. Fourth, take over. The Fuhrer took Poland, France and Norway almost without a shot fired.
And now the comparisons. Before the county and city commissioners did what they did, 75 percent or better of Newton businesses were already non-smoking and had a smoking policy in place. The Free Air Coalition — check it out on Google, 80-plus pages, makes one wonder is it a coalition or a front? — entered the city of Newton, found their Quislings and now the smoking ban.
Using Hitler to support creationism
From the St. Petersburg Times:
Darwin's theory of evolution helped fuel the rise of Hitler and contributed to the school-shooting massacre at Columbine, a former St. Petersburg City Council member wrote in a letter urging the Pinellas County School Board to expose students to alternative theories.
"Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak," Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. "This is a slippery slope."
[...]
"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said the group's late founder, D. James Kennedy.
Foster echoed those words in his letter: "Adolf Hitler duped an entire generation using Darwin's evolution," he wrote. "He sought to preserve the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."
That notion is a selective reading of science and history, said Florida State University professor Michael Ruse, an authority on the history and philosophy of science.
Ruse said Nazi ideologues were motivated by many factors, including "social Darwinism," a movement that tried to apply natural concepts like "survival of the fittest" to human society. But the Nazis later distanced themselves from Darwin because rather than promoting racial superiority, evolution showed "Aryans and Jews and Gypsies and Slavs were all one stem," he said.
Friday, January 11, 2008
News
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.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
News
A federal appellate court will hear arguments March 3 in the case of a Sharon man stripped of his citizenship because he was a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Anton Geiser, 83, of 411 Cedar Ave., has appealed U.S. District Court Judge David S. Cercone’s Sept. 29, 2006, order that revoked Geiser’s citizenship; vacated the March 27, 1962, order of Mercer County Common Pleas Court granting him citizenship; canceled his naturalization certificate; and ordered that his naturalization certificate, passports and other citizenship papers be surrendered.
Oscar Wilde went to prison in 1895 for flaunting his homosexuality. Ezra Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 for broadcasting on behalf of the Italian fascists in the Second World War. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 after proclaiming that he had just downed 18 straight whiskeys and wondering if it were a record.
I mention them to emphasize that not all poets are whispering pixies. Some are maniacs, some are drunks and some are general hell-raisers. Which brings us to Charles Bukowski, who was probably all of the above. Although those who knew him might agree that he was a raving, brawling alcoholic, the question has arisen: Was he a Jew-hating Nazi sympathizer? I knew you'd wonder.
The speed of Germany's recuperation after World War II brought its own kind of curse. It allowed the generation of Nazis and their sympathizers to turn their back on the past; what they had done became, literally, unspeakable.
But as we all know, repressed memories don't just go away. It was left to the following generations to make sense -- or, since that was impossible, to make art -- of atrocity. Among the most eloquent of those artists is Bernhard Schlink (born 1944), whose quietly troubling 1995 novel ``The Reader'' became an international best-seller and even an Oprah's Book Club selection.
A MILLION fallen German soldiers are being reburied more than 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich. And, more controversially, the skeletal remains of thousands of Waffen SS Nazis recruited from other European countries are also being reburied.
The operation is taking place across Eastern Europe, where more than 15 million civilians were killed by the German war machine. Resentment against the reburial program is running high in many countries.
A group of German scientists, many of them former Nazi Party members, guided Huntsville, Ala. into its position as a high-tech hub.
Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
News
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.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
News
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.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Former SS member outed at trial
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.