Historian Richard J. Evans is a preeminent scholar on Hitler and Nazi Germany, most pointedly through his trilogy on the history of the Third Reich. His most recent work, "The Hitler Conspiracies: The Stab in the Back - The Reichstag Fire - Rudolf Hess - The Escape from the Bunker," takes on the key conspiracy theories generated out of the Hitler era. Aaron J. Leonard recently conducted an interview with him via email to discuss his work, the current invoking of fascism in some quarters, and the contrast between solid historiography and work amplifying and propagating conspiracy theories.

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Why do you think Hitler and his murderous regime which ought to be repellent loom so large in the popular imagination?

They loom so large in the public imagination precisely because they are so repellent. Hitler has come to stand as a kind of substitute for Satan in an increasingly secular world: he is the epitome of evil. When we think of Hitler, we think of dictatorship, war and genocide, of cultural repression, racism and the looting of art on an unprecedented scale. The more the Holocaust has become part of mainstream public memory, the more it has brought Hitler into the center of public attention as its originator.

Your chapter detailing the "Stab in the Back" myth, which claims the German army was sabotaged from victory in World War I by various anti-patriotic left-wing forces, made me think of a Vietnam veteran I encountered a few years back who was adamant that in that war, the US was forced to fight with 'one hand tied behind its back.' It seems one of the features of many of these conspiracy theories or 'alternative histories' is to take a loss or weakness, and turn it into something less. Is that accurate, or is there something else going on?

The idea that a war or an election wasn't really lost, but betrayed by a backstairs conspiracy, is an easy and perennially attractive way (to some people at least) of explaining defeat: defeat, after all, is very difficult and painful to admit. It also disqualifies a whole section of society as not really part of it, whether that's the Jews or the socialists in Germany in 1918, or the Democrats in America in 2020.

In your book Lying About Hitler which recounts the libel suit brought by David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt, a trial in which you testified you literally had to chase down footnotes to show how he manipulated evidence to minimize and deny the Holocaust. Irving is arguably more insidious than some of those you challenge in your current work because he was seen as a scholar, rather than a crackpot and yet, his methodology is not far removed from the crassest of conspiracists. How would you contrast the two methods employed between conspiracy-based ones which are not wholly devoid of evidence versus those based on the method of honest historians?

Conspiracy theorists very frequently imitate the methods of honest historians: You will find their works weighed down with footnotes and crammed with elaborate, solid-looking detail. Only when you subject them to detailed scrutiny does it become clear that the detail isn't solid at all it's full of deliberate errors, falsifications, manipulations, misquotations, mistranslations, calculated omissions and manufactured connections, speculation, innuendo and supposition. Irving's Holocaust denial work was full of mistakes, as the judge in the libel action he brought against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 noted, but they were not honest mistakes, since they all went to support his arguments. Honest mistakes are random in their effect; his were not. Honest historians know they have to abandon their arguments when the evidence turns out to disprove them; dishonest historians and conspiracy theorists bend the evidence to fit the argument.

Quite a few people, particularly on the left, have taken to invoking the word 'fascism' or otherwise draw parallels to the National Socialists of the 1930s & 40s, to describe various current phenomena. What do you see as the limits and benefits if any of such historical analogies?

Fascism is one of those concepts that can seem almost infinitely elastic; it's just too tempting for polemical purposes to accuse any authoritarian politician of being like Hitler, or any populist movement of being fascist. But we have to remember that fascism was a militaristic movement, aiming at war and conflict, territorial expansion and empire. Fascists put every citizen into uniform, drilled the people into uniformity and obedience in training camps, and subordinated private life, business companies, and institutions of all kinds to the state. Fascists were ultimately genocidal, whether it was the Nazis exterminating the Jews, or the Italian Fascists exterminating the Ethiopians (among other things, by using poison gas). Nazism and Fascism also put science at the center of their belief systems, in particular, racial and eugenic 'science', and regarded religion as a leftover from medieval times that would soon disappear. In all these respects it differed from 21st-century populism, which is hostile to the state, anti-scientific, and opposed to militarism both within the country and outside it. The classic fascist mass consisted of endless marching columns of identically uniformed men; today's populist mass, as in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, consist of thousands of informally and in some cases eccentrically attired individuals heaving about in a chaotic heap, violent and aggressive but not organized in any military way. The problem with calling today's right populism 'fascist' is that it's fighting today's battles with the weapons of the 1920s and 1930s. Time has moved on since then.

I am constantly astonished, and not a little frustrated, that so much taken for 'common knowledge' has already been countered by professional historians and yet it seems we live in a world where too often "alternative history" operates as actual history in the popular imagination. How can that ever change, or at least not command such power?

The Internet and social media are largely though not exclusively responsible for undermining belief in truth and objectivity. Society has become increasingly polarized through the rise of 'identity politics' my truth is not the same as your truth (though in fact there can never be two opposing truths; only one of them can ever be the real truth). The spread of hyper-relativism through the dominance in universities of postmodernist culture has also played its part. The mass media, above all television and the movie, have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction. Holding social media companies to account for the lies they allow to be spread is a beginning. But more needs to be done.

This article was originally published at History News Network

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A preeminent scholar on Nazism explains whether it makes sense to refer to Trump-loving populists as fascists - Raw Story

Josh Azouzs play walks a perilous line between dramatic humour and the outright offensive, occasionally stumbling too far across into the wrong territory.

Set in Tunisia in 1943 shortly after the Nazis have taken over from the ruling Vichy government, it is the story of two young couples one Jewish, one Muslim who have been friends for years until the arrival of the invaders alters their social geography.

It opens like Becketts Happy Days, with Victor, a Jew (Pierro Niel-Mee) buried up to his neck in the desert, guarded by his best friend Youssef (Ethan Kai) who has thrown in his lot with the Nazis.

As the play unfolds, revealing the domestic as well as the political tensions, it becomes clear that Azouz is using betrayal and infidelity as an echo chamber for the bigger issues of collaboration and the search for identity and homeland.

If the argument occasionally takes a turn for the arid, it is saved from total desiccation by the performance of Adrian Edmondson as the Nazi commandant, nicknamed Grandma by his men due to his fondness for knitting.

Tottering around with a walking stick owing to a knee injury, Edmondson is both absurd and sinister, a leering psychopath who has designs on Victors spirited wife Loys (Yasmin Paige) and gleefully exploits his fascistic power of life and death for his own lecherous ends.

The set is a kind of Cubist desert made of plywood boxes that open up to reveal beautifully tiled interiors while an electric sun beats down from above.

Skirmishing with Absurdist theatre, the play is not entirely successful there are awkward plot points that make little sense and some lacunae in the dialogue, and Azouz struggles to weld several disparate ideas together.But it's a bold attempt to address a universal problem within the framework of a little known aspect of history.

Flawed but fascinating.

Almeida Theatre until September 18, tickets: 020 7359 440

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Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia REVIEW: A brave attempt to awaken history - Express

The previously undiscovered system of underground corridors is now fuelling speculation that they may contain the lost Amber Room or other wartime treasures. Mamerki museum

Five entrances to a secret network of tunnels have been discovered at the site of Nazi Germanys eastern army headquarters in what is now north-east Poland.

The previously undiscovered system of underground corridors is now fuelling speculation that they may contain the lost Amber Room or other wartime treasures.

The find, which was made by staff from the Mamerki museum and a group of volunteer historical searchers, is described as the biggest discovery ever made at the 200-hectare forest headquarters.

Bartomiej Plebaczyk from the museum said: At the moment based on how the entrances are spaced out, it looks like the tunnel is about 50 metres long, but it could be longer.

Mamerki museum

The opening and exploration of the tunnel is planned for the second half of June.Mamerki museum

He added: Some of them have been filled in, perhaps in order to hide them, so we will have to remove a lot of material before we can see what is inside the tunnel.

Plebaczyk suggested that the tunnel could reveal interesting artefacts from World War II that the Germans wanted to hide.

Theories have been put forward that the Amber Room, known before its disappearance as the Eighth Wonder of the World, may have been hidden under the ground in Mamerki.

The piece of art was stolen by the Germans from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg during the war and the 450 kg of amber panels, gems, gold leaf and mirrors that made up the decorations, said to be worth as much as $500 million, were taken to the castle in Knigsberg, todays Kaliningrad.

Bartomiej Plebaczyk from the Mamerki museum said: The tunnel is part of a hitherto unknown system of underground corridors that requires careful penetration. It may be an ideal place to hide treasure.Tomasz Waszczuk/PAP

They have never been seen since.

Many theories about their fate have been put forward, including that they were destroyed when the castle in Knigsberg was bombed by the RAF, or destroyed by Soviet shelling during the siege of the city.

Plebaczyk said: The tunnel is part of a hitherto unknown system of underground corridors that requires careful penetration. It may be an ideal place to hide treasure.

Will it lead to the Amber Chamber? So far nothing can be ruled out.

Tomasz Waszczuk/PAP

Tomasz Waszczuk/PAP

The concrete bunkers in Mamerki cover an area of about 200 hectares. Even though 75 years have passed since the end of the war, Plebaczyk believes there is still much to be found.Tomasz Waszczuk

First we need to prepare the formal legal opinions necessary to carry out this operation and get permission from the local heritage protection office.

The concrete bunkers in Mamerki cover an area of about 200 hectares. Even though 75 years have passed since the end of the war, Plebaczyk believes there is still much to be found.

The museum often carries out archaeological work at the site in the spring before the main tourist season.

This years find is not the first one at the site to fuel speculation that the Amber Room may be hidden underground there.

The Amber Room, known before its disappearance as the Eighth Wonder of the World, was stolen by the Germans from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg during the war.Public domain

Last year, what was thought to be another tunnel entrance was discovered. However, it turned out to lead nowhere.

The complex of bunkers from the time of the Third Reich is the best-preserved site of this type in Poland.

During World War II, Mauerwald was the headquarters of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the Nazi High Command of Land Forces.

Around 1,500 soldiers, including generals and officers, were stationed at the Wehrmacht quarters in Masuria during World War II.

The room was taken to the castle in Knigsberg, todays Kaliningrad and has never been seen since.Public domain

In total, the Mamerki complex consisted of more than 250 military objects of various types, but only the large bunkers have survived to this day. The largest has walls 7 metres thick.

Many of the surviving bunkers and their connecting tunnels are now open to the public and form part of a museum telling the story of the war.

However, very few artefacts of the war have been found at the site. Museum officials are confident that further searches will lead to their discovery.

The opening and exploration of the tunnel is planned for the second half of June.

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Secret network of tunnels found at former Nazi German army HQ raise speculation they could contain legendary Amber Room - The First News

A neo-Nazi group recently gathered in front of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a disgusting and despicable demonstration in Boston while there has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic violence across the country, the Anti-Defamation Leagues regional leader tells the Herald.

Members of the Nationalist Social Club on Sunday stood in front of the New England Holocaust Memorial across from City Hall Plaza. Holding flags, members of the white supremacist group took a photo in front of the memorial, and posted the picture on the social media site Telegram.

This is the kind of thing they like to do. They like to be provocative and want to spread hate, anti-Semitism, and they try to incite people, said Robert Trestan, ADL New Englands regional director.

They purposefully chose to go to the Holocaust Memorial, a place that is sacred for Boston-area Jews, to basically spread a message that the Holocaust didnt happen and to send the message that you dont belong here, Trestan added. Its disgusting and despicable.

The neo-Nazi group also recently posted photos of their members demonstrating in Nashua, N.H., as they held a White Lives Matter sign.

The white supremacists also spray-painted racist graffiti in Nashua, writing, Death to Israel and Keep New England White.

Its pretty concerning that theyre right here, Trestan said. This isnt across the country. This is in our neighborhood. They are trying to send these messages to our neighbors who live here.

Theyre on a little bit of a publicity road trip, he added. At a time right now when were seeing a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic violence against Jews, this is a concern. Its a concern that it might incite or inspire other people to attack Jews or other groups.

There has been a rise in violence against those in the U.S. Jewish community since the Mideast conflict erupted two weeks ago, according to the ADL.

Anti-Semitic incidents reported to ADL have jumped by 63%, according to preliminary data from ADLs Center on Extremism. The week before the conflict between Israel and Hamas started, there were 67 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., compared with 113 reports during the last week.

Also during the recent escalation of violence, there has been a surge in anti-Semitism on social media. ADLs experts found a 348% spike in anti-Semitic language on a prominent 4chan board.

The spike weve witnessed in recent weeks has been among the sharpest in recent memory, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted about the rise in anti-Semitic hate and violence. Itll take all of us to combat it.

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Disgusting and despicable: Neo-Nazi group gathers in front of New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston - Boston Herald

She survived a bout with COVID-19. Piece of cake. Not nearly as harrowing as her wartime North Atlantic crossing, when rough seas and a seasick stomach buried her in her cabin for days.

At 15 years old, she was on her way to be reunited with her family, all of whom she had left in Vienna at 13. That world seems unreal to us today, when it appears through our limited point of view that the pandemic is the worst ordeal.

She has lived a life in the spirit that the past is gone. Her vivacious personality has carried her through. One would think she had seen it all. But last week, the past burst from the mist as the Statue of Liberty did that gray November dawn in 1940 when her escape from the Holocaust tossed her up on our shores.

Perhaps politicians and pundits unsympathetic to those now separated at the Southern border will take note here of what it is like to risk your very family to make it to America. My cousin Wendy heard a podcast by Julian Borger of Manchesters The Guardian recounting the classified ads his paper had run in the late 1930s, placed by Jews desperate to save their children by relocating them from areas in Europe overrun by the Nazis. Wendy contacted Borger, because family lore had it that her mother Lori, beautiful and brilliant wife of my uncle Marty, had been sent to London from Vienna during World War II. We knew little else, beyond that Loris mother had placed an ad, as my aunt would have it, for her blue-eyed girl.

Following a tip from Borger, Wendy found for the first time the actual personal ad from Oct. 14, 1938, reminder of an era before the internet, when even a long-distance call was out of reach. The power of this particular newspaper ad to save a life turned out not to be from The Guardian. In fact, it had been intended for The Times of London. But after the Anschluss, when the Nazis annexed Austria, Loris mother Irma Beller inspected the classifieds at the Times Vienna bureau, and worried that the text was too tiny and the plea for her daughter would get lost.

Irma walked over to the Vienna bureau of Londons Jewish Chronicle, then almost a century old. She preferred the size of the type in its classifieds. So she placed the ad: 13-year-old intelligent, pretty, healthy Viennese girl asks for a new home in Jewish family. One solitary letter reached her in response. That familys arms stretched out from England to rescue this child. They corresponded by mail. They never spoke.

In January 1939, Lori embarked on a dicey border crossing by train, then hazarded the English Channel on her own, the number 61 taped to her blouse to identify her to the occupants of that house number, the Steinberg family, who would embrace this companion for their daughter Stella.

Young Lori spoke little English when she arrived, but picked it up quickly. She had to. Nobody spoke German. A kind teacher helped. The family endured the nightly terror of the Blitz, sleeping underground.

Loris father traveled to Shanghai, hoping to transit from there to America. Her brother went to Holland, thinking to ultimately find a new home in Palestine. Her mother made it to New York. One family strewn across four countries and three continents in a world aflame. Lori learned to knit and ride a bicycle, and also endured her first period frightened out of her wits without her mother to explain it. A girl grew to womanhood.

After life in what my university professor Lore Segal described as Other Peoples Houses, my aunt boarded another boat alone, troopship RMS Samaria, bound from Liverpool. To this day, Lori prizes the wire puzzle crafted for her by a sailor who took pity on her loneliness.

In a Bronx apartment, where time and tide finally reunited the family, she found her old bed, shipped from Vienna by her thoughtful mother. Lori slept in a cocoon of two worlds.

Some years ago, my aunt reflected, I look in the mirror and I see my mother. When I asked her about this recently, she pooh-poohed it as just a physical resemblance. Did she wink? They share the same bravery, and I hear in her voice more spirit than most anyone I know. When I inquire what she gleaned from her terrifying and magnificent journey, she remembers the Steinbergs, the good Samarian, other kind folks she encountered along the way. She sums up for me: There are good people everywhere.

My dear aunt, widowed 19 years, survivor of COVID, stroke, wolfpacks of the North Atlantic and an Austria overwhelmed by evil, beams at me. Her mother called her Sunshine.

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.

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Dalton Delan | The Unspin Room: From Nazi occupation to COVID, she's endured it all and survived - Berkshire Eagle

AnIntellectual Takeoutreader posted a commentabout my recent article, Debunking the Myths About WWII, askingwhy I didnt write about the biggest myth of all the myths, the systematic killing of Jews [sic!] while fighting a war on four fronts?

While this readers syntax is convoluted, his question seems to imply that Germany was too busy fighting a war to undertake genocide. I have devoted some attention to this interesting issue in my time, and I believe that at least a summary of my findings is called for.

The 20thcentury witnessed in the conduct of some European nations a departure from the concept of natural morality, which hadrestrained their behavior before the catastrophe of 1914. Before the Bolshevik terror brutalized an already exhausted Europe, it was not mere expediency that prevented states from resorting to mass extermination as a means to an end. The limitations on the behavior of states derived from an underlying consensus thatraison detatentailed continued membership of the community of civilized nations.

Until June 22, 1941, Germany arguably was waging what the historian and philosopherErnst Nolte calledein europischer Normalkrieg, ora traditional European war. This war turned exterminationist (ein Vernichtungskrieg) with the attack on the USSR and the ensuing decision tolaunch theFinal Solution.Against the Russians, whom Germany treated as both ideological and racial enemies, no laws applied: the war in the East aimed at destroying not simply the Soviet government and its ability to resist, but the peopleas suchand the rule of lawas such.

Once the final decision was made at Wannsee in January 1942, the Nazi regime devoted huge resources to the mass murder of Jews in pursuit of their utopian vision of a homogenous national community. This goal was pursued even when the projects completion was clearly detrimental to the conduct of military operations. Thelogistics of the Holocaust were on par with those required by entire armies.The resources thus expendeddid not help Germanys war effort, but rather were a burden on it. As early as mid-1942, train allocation for transporting German and Dutch Jews to the East had to be balanced with trains carrying ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies to the front.

The misuse of resources and the effort invested inOperation Reinhard in 1942, which established three new death campsBelzec, Sobibor, and Treblinkaand focused on the killing of Polish Jews, materially contributed to the 6th Armys defeat at Stalingrad.

Most notably this reversal of priorities happened in the summer of 1944, when hundreds of trainsbadly needed to cope with the twin military crises in the East (Operation Bagration) and in the West (Operation Overlord)were diverted to transport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camps in Poland, along the militarily marginal north-south railway connecting Budapest and Silesia.

For many Nazi leaders, mass murder of Jews was eminently goal-oriented and genocide made sense within their distorted worldview. Far from being too busy fighting the war to kill the Jews, the Nazis were too busy fighting the race war to have any chance of winning the real one.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor ofChronicles, is the author ofThe Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.

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The Nazi Fixation on Jews Cost Them the War - A Magazine of American Culture

Nazis are the absolute worst, and for yet another reminder of that age-old fact, theres Nail Bomber: Manhunt, Netflixs non-fiction revisitation of the 1999 London bombings that left three people dead and nearly 150 injured. Carried out by a neo-Nazi named David Copeland whose motivation was to cause a racial war in this country, the three attacks against Englands Black and gay communities terrorized the country and, for a time, baffled police. While director Daniel Vernons documentary (premiering May 26) doesnt dig deeply enough into its talepreferring instead to reside on the suspenseful surface throughoutit serves as a chilling warning that multicultural societies remain at risk from white-nationalist outfits that view homogeny as the only true path forward, and Hitler as their guiding light.

Nail Bomber: Manhunt is a straightforward chronological retelling of this notorious period in Londons history, employing archival footage and interviews with survivors and investigators to lay out the specifics of its saga. Of particular note is the participation of Arthur, a man who speaks to director Vernon while wearing a hoodie, his face concealed in shadow in order to keep his true identity a secret. As a young anti-fascist, Arthur joined the intelligence-gathering wing of Searchlight, an anti-fascist magazine whose mission was to infiltrate and monitor fascist groups. Going undercover as a hatemonger was a harrowing assignment for Arthuras well as a thrilling one, with the covert operative admitting, I like being a spy. Its a buzz.

Arthurs main target was the British National Party (BNP), a far-right political group led by John Tyndall, who in archival footage is seen spewing anti-immigrant, pro-white ugliness to legions of uniformly Caucasian admirers (as one person puts it, Tyndall was a magnet for misfits, lunatics, and losers). Those followers, Arthur and others explain, were typically working-class intolerant men whod attend BNP meetings held at pubs, where literature about the Nazis and making bombs, as well as hit lists about preferred targets, were freely disseminated. The idea was to rile up the Nazi faithful, get them drunk, and give them ideas about who to strike out againstand strike out they did, often leaving these gatherings and promptly assaulting innocent pedestrians.

It was in this milieu that Copeland found a home, although despite the young man once appearing in a photo alongside Tyndall, police initially had no clue who Copeland was, much less that he was the fiend behind the bombings. When the first device went off in a crowded market street in Brixton, south London, on Saturday, April 17, 1999, it came without warning. It was a miracle that no one was fatally hurt, and Vernons documentary benefits from firsthand accounts of the moments directly before and after the blast. Two men recount how, after finding the bomb, they watched as a drug addict literally removed the explosive from the bag and then ran off with the bagan absurd and unreal sight that, to this day, leaves them astonished.

Two more detonations swiftly followed: on Saturday, April 24, on Brick Lane in Londons East End, and on Friday, April 30, at The Admiral Duncan pub (a prominent gay venue) on Old Compton Street in Soho, central London. In each case, the bomb was designed for maximum carnage, its hundreds of nails intended to maim and kill. Though police were apparently slow to concede that the first two attacks were racially motivatedor that the killer had an interest in slaughtering minoritiesthe investigation soon turned on CCTV footage from the bombings and the surrounding areas, which revealed a young white male in a white baseball cap carrying around suspicious shoulder bags. Flyers and posters were plastered across London and broadcast on the news and in the papers, and once that happened, Nail Bomber: Manhunt turns its attention back to Arthur, who took one look at the photographs and realized that he potentially knew the perpetrator: a man known to him as Dave from Barking.

Arthur is the most fascinating figure in Nail Bomber: Manhunt, confessing that the longer he stayed undercover with his white-nationalist BNP brothers, the more he became indoctrinated by their repugnant ideology, to the point that he doubted the Holocaust happened. Arthurs candidness speaks directly and scarily to the way in which immersion in bubble-like environmentsin person, and onlinecan result in brainwashing, and the selflessness of his sacrifice is hammered home during the films coda. Nonetheless, director Vernon misses an opportunity by not spending more time with Arthura decision undoubtedly guided by the need to protect him from his dangerous Nazi cohorts (who still believe hes one of them) but deprives the proceedings of greater insight into his work.

the longer he stayed undercover with his white-nationalist BNP brothers, the more he became indoctrinated by their repugnant ideology, to the point that he doubted the Holocaust happened.

Nail Bomber: Manhunts superficiality extends to its refusal to both properly ID any of its on-camera speakers, and to tell us anything substantial about Copeland, whose path to terrorist neo-Nazism (and to spread fear, resentment, and hatred) is left wholly unremarked-upon. Even hints about Copelands homosexualitywhich might have compelled him to carry out the Soho attackare consigned to a brief audio clip of him angrily asserting his heterosexuality to the cops. Like the role that author Bernard OMahoney played in tricking Copeland to admit that he was fit to stand trial (through love letters in which OMahoney posed as a doting Aryan woman who admired the bombings), Copelands sexuality and general backstory are two of the many ripe-for-exploration threads that wind up sidelined by director Vernon, who prizes concision and propulsion (the entire affair runs a fleet 72 minutes) over depth.

Images of inner audio-tape mechanisms and kaleidoscopic CT scans are the sole formal flourishes utilized by Nail Bomber: Manhunt, which otherwise tackles its chosen subject with taut efficiency and restraint (aided by Andrew Phillips nerve-wracking score). The lesson it forwards is a familiar one about white-nationalist fury (and its attractiveness to certain segments of the population), and the difficulty of thwarting lone-wolf terrorists. But in an age of increased neo-Nazi hate and minority-targeting crime, its timely resonance is impossible to miss.

Continued here:

He Posed as a Neo-Nazi and Caught the London Nail Bomber - The Daily Beast

There is a remarkable scene toward the end of the new documentary Final Account, a collection of eyewitness testimonies from elderly Germans and Austrians who remember the Nazi regime (and, to various degrees, were part of it).

In the sequence, a former Waffen-SS officer sits down with a group of students in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials met in 1942 to map out the parameters of the Final Solution. The officer, Hans Werk, speaks of the tremendous shame he feels for himself and his country to have orchestrated the genocide of 6 million Jews.

When Werk is challenged by a young German an anonymous right-winger obsessed with protecting the Fatherland and sick of hearing about shame from his elders the former Nazi fires back, recounting Jewish friends and neighbors of his who had assumed they were also part of the Fatherland, until they were marched off to the camps. The true Nazi ideology was not patriotism, he says, but hate.

Do not let yourselves be blinded! he shouts.

The film, which opened in movie theaters on May 21, itself has the same aim in mind.

Final Account is the result of more than a decade of interviews conducted by British documentarian Luke Holland, who discovered his Jewish heritage as a teenager upon learning that his mothers family had been murdered in the Holocaust. Holland died last year at 71, after a long battle with cancer, shortly after completing the film; it now lives as his final account, too.

There is a workmanlike quality to Final Account, which is made up almost entirely of contemporary interviews with former Nazis, in German with English subtitles, conducted mostly in cozy apartments and retirement homes.

Naturally there are many fewer eyewitnesses left alive today than there were four decades ago, when French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann interviewed scores for his landmark 10-hour documentary Shoah.

Lanzmann could talk to high-ranking SS officers, including some who oversaw the death camps. By contrast, Hollands interview subjects were largely children or teenagers at the time.

Many of the anecdotes in Hollands film revolve around the subjects joining the Hitler Youth as kids or watching their parents support the Nazi party. A few worked at the camps, or the train stations that led prisoners to them, but their own accounts seem to conveniently distance themselves from the actual murders. Some continue to deny the genocide ever took place.

These occasional denialists feel more like sideshows to the 90-minute films main goal and they might be committing a crime on camera, since both Germany and Austria have outlawed the practice of Holocaust denial.

By and large, most of the interviews in Final Account focus on the language of culpability: when (or if) ones presence within an evil regime constitutes being a perpetrator of its aims.

We didnt support the party, but we liked the uniform, one subject says, conjuring the comic images of exuberant Nazi children in Jojo Rabbit.

We didnt support the party, but we liked the uniform.

Others remember the odd yet mundane details that allowed them to build an everyday life around the atrocities taking place in their name, like a former nanny who remembers taking her employers kids to their local concentration camp to say hi to their mom at her place of work.

Holland is never seen on camera, but the fluent German speaker occasionally prods his subjects from offscreen to acknowledge their participation in crimes against humanity, much as Joshua Oppenheimer did to architects of the Indonesian genocide in The Act of Killing.

Together, Holland, Oppenheimer and Lanzmann all form an unsettling lineage of Jewish filmmakers who have felt compelled to confront genocide participants face to face on film.

Final Account doesnt have quite the same revelatory feel as its predecessors in this genre the film rarely breaks through the surfaces of its subjects accounts to dig at whatever their emotional truth might be. Maybe there isnt any: One of the overarching messages is that populations can follow hateful ideologies blindly, even blandly, if they feel acceptable enough to the masses.

But there are moments that wrestle with deeper questions.

he Wannsee scene, in which one generation of German seems incapable of passing on his personal and historical shame to the next, invokes not only the past but also the future of Holocaust memory. Their conversation is in anticipation of a world in which we have no more final accounts.

When that does happen, and there are no more eyewitnesses left, how are we to continue the lessons of Never Again? What forms of education and vigilance will keep us from becoming once again blinded to the past?

Its a question that has haunted the last century of Jewish life and, by necessity, must also haunt the next.

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Former Nazis give their 'Final Account' in new documentary J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

A gruesome mass grave of murdered women and children has been unearthed at a former Nazi concentration camp in Russia.

The remains of some 500 victims have been found, many showing gunshot wounds and evidence of torture.

Other inmates are believed to have died from malnutrition and disease.

Some 64 state investigators and search volunteers are currently working at the macabre and long-suspected site, part of a sinister hell camp system called Dulag-191 in Voronezh region.

Harrowing video footage shows diggers unearthing skulls and body parts in an area occupied by Hitlers forces during the Second World War.

The estimated death toll is about 500 people, said Mikhail Segodin, head of the Don search volunteer squad, referring to this specific mass burial.

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The main contingent of the camp was made up of women and children

Archives suggest that overall some 8,500 people perished at Dulag-191, he said.

The current search for human remains concentrates on 15 pits - mass graves each containing between 30 and 100 remains in the vicinity of Lushnikovo village, Ostrogozhsky district.

"Judging by the remains unearthed so far we see shot wounds, blunt traumas, in other words, broken bones, said Mr Segodin.

"The site is complicated because it was a camp for women and children.

The human remains are in a poor state, he said.

Mr Segodin added: Mostly tubular bones have survived, but often only teeth remain from the skulls.

The only thing that can be said for sure is that almost all of the people who died here were young.

We did not find any valuable things, except perhaps a cigarette case damaged by gun fire."

A Soviet intelligence report dated 2 September 1942 from the Office of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs for Voronezh region stated that "a concentration camp for women and children is located at a brick factory in the suburban village of Lushnikovka.

The camp was described as being in the open air, fenced with four rows of barbed wire and it was guarded by Magyars [Hungarians].

The report alleged: Prisoners are not fed, but children are allowed to gather alms, parcels are also allowed.

There are many ill people there, medical aid is not provided.

There is a high mortality rate."

Intelligence documents also suggested the murder of children and cruelty against prisoners of war.

Local historian Viktor Strelkin talked to eyewitnesses and surviving prisoners.

"I was told that in these pits, right under the feet of people who were still alive, lay the dead.

Sometimes they lay openly, or they were covered with 10 or 15 centimetres of soil, but it sagged and the corpses were visible again.

Segodin said: Search and identification work will continue together with specialists from the (Russian) Investigative Committee.

The concentration camp system Dulag-191 was created in the Voronezh region in 1942.

Inmates from Dulag-191 were forced to construct a railway for the Nazis known as the Berlinka line, built to supply German forces seeking to take Stalingrad.

The burial was found thanks to unclassified secret service documents, and aerial photographs made by a German pilot in 1942.

This established the exact location of the women and childrens camp

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Mass grave of women and children unearthed at ex-Nazi concentration camp - The Mirror

The decision of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to retain a mask mandate for representatives who haven't been vaccinated against COVID-19 is just like the Holocaust, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed in a television appearance Friday. "We can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany," Greene said, "and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."

It's not, and Greene has been widely upbraided for her remarks, including by several fellow Republicans. Many of these condemnations rightly focused on how Greene's words trivialize unthinkable suffering: "Comparing wearing masks to the abuse of the Holocaust is a not-so-subtle diminution of the horrors experienced by millions," said former Virginia Rep. Denver Riggleman (R) in a representative critique.

That's certainly true, but there's another problem with the Nazi analogy, too: Once you analogize your enemy to Adolf Hitler, you have all but invited violence. "There's nowhere to go from Hitler," observes journalist Matt Taibbi in Hate Inc., his book on political media. "It's a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there, you're now absolving your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn't kill Hitler?"

As Taibbi's brief accounting of recent use of this metaphor reiterates, Greene is far from alone in her indefensible jump to the Hitler comparison. In his days as a Fox News pundit in the early 2000s, Glenn Beck was particularly bad about this. Turning his fire leftward, Taibbi argues that, a decade later, the center-left media's "conventional wisdom was that [former President Donald] Trump was Hitler" and all his voters were "racist, white nationalist traitor-Nazis." From either side, the Nazi analogy is a "sweeping, debate-ending dictum," Taibbi concludes, and in "the fight against Hitler, everything is permitted."

I suppose one might fairly analogize a present-day genocide to the Holocaust, but in that case, an analogy hardly seems necessary. In domestic politics, however, the Nazi metaphor should be used with extreme parsimony, if at all. That's particularly true in a time like ours, when our norms against political violence are already under strain.

More stories from theweek.comThe Fog of Trump is liftingBiden says he underestimated Trump's ability to spread 'the big lie'Rand Paul blamed pop star Richard Marx for threatening package. Marx's reply was right there waiting for Stephen Colbert.

The rest is here:

The other problem with Marjorie Taylor Greene's Nazi analogy - Yahoo News

The BBC is reportedly investigating one of its Palestinian journalists for once tweeting that "Hitler was right" while comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

Digital journalist Tala Halawa is a Palestine specialist for the corporations BBC Monitoring service and has reported on the recent deadly hostilities between Israel and Hamas,the Spectator noted.

"Israel is more Nazi than Hitler!" she wrote on hersince-deleted Twitter accountduring previous hostilities in 2014, according to the U.K. publication.

"Oh, #HitlerWasRight IDF go to hell #PrayForGaza," she wrote.

STATE DEPARTMENT ADMITS POSSIBILITY PALESTINIAN AID WILL FUND HAMAS ARSENAL

In other posts, she shared a graphic of a child being burned on a menorah, as well as a meme claiming that a "solution for Israel-Palestine conflict" would be to "relocate Israel into United States," the report said.

The BBC is reportedly investigating Palestinian digital journalist Tala Halawa for once tweeting that "Hitler was right" while comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. (Twitter)

The reporter also wrote that "Zionists cant get enough of our blood" and that "theyre crying the holocaust every single moment but theyre practicing it every single moment as well," the Spectator said.

Halawa worked for 24FM, a Palestinian radio station, at the time of the 2014 tweets, joining the BBC in 2017, according to her since-deleted LinkedIn account.

"These tweets predate the individuals employment with the BBC but we are nevertheless taking this very seriously and are investigating," a spokesperson for the U.K. broadcaster told the Spectator.

The posts come after a similar outrageembroiled CNNover one of its freelance contributors, Adeel Raja, who tweeted that "the world today needs a Hitler."

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It also came days after an official investigation ruled that former BBC journalist Martin Bashirused "deceitful behavior"to land his bombshell 1995 interview withPrincess Dianaabout cheating in her royal marriage.

To read more from the New York Post, click here.

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BBC investigating reporter who tweeted Hitler was right, compared Israel to Nazis - Fox News

On the night of May 18, 1941, the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen steamed out of its base at Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, Poland), followed five hours later by the Kriegsmarine's crown jewel, the battleship Bismarck.

Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were on a mission to wreak havoc on British merchant shipping. German U-boats were already very effective at this, but Grand Adm. Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, hoped to demonstrate to Hitler the value of Germany's surface fleet in order to avoid future budget cuts.

What followed was one of the most intense naval searches in military history, the result of which convinced Hitler that U-boats, not capital ships, were the Kriegsmarine's best weapons.

Britain was in a very desperate situation in May 1941. It had fended off the Luftwaffe's relentless aerial onslaughts in the Battle of Britain but was still isolated and heavily reliant on supplies coming across the Atlantic.

The Kriegsmarine had been trying to block trans-Atlantic shipping routes since the war began, and its capital ships had played an important role in intercepting or sinking Allied shipping.

German surface ships also drew Royal Navy warships away from other duties, such as escorting convoys, and supported U-boats, which were then few in number.

Happy with earlier success in Operation Berlin, Raeder planned another commerce raid.

To maximize damage, the raid was to include Germany's four best capital ships: battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which were sister ships, and Bismarck and its sister ship, Tirpitz.

But Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were damaged by constant RAF attacks while being repaired in port in France, keeping them out of action for months. Tirpitz's crew was also still being trained.

Prinz Eugen, not as well armed or armored as a battleship, was the only available ship capable of accompanying Bismarck. Not wanting to delay the operation any longer, German commanders ordered the ships into the Atlantic.

The mission, codenamed Operation Rheinbung, was led by Adm. Gnther Ltjens, the commander of Operation Berlin.

Ltjens was ordered to focus primarily on merchant raiding and to avoid fighting British capital ships if possible. But Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were discovered by the Royal Navy, which attempted to intercept the ships as they sailed through Denmark Strait and into the Atlantic on May 24.

The British force consisted of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Hood, which was widely considered the pride of the Royal Navy.

The British ships were no match for Bismarck, which was newer and better armored. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were able to fire full broadsides at the two British ships.

"When the big guns fired, the entire ship staggered," Heinrich Kuhnt, a sailor on the Bismarck, recalled after the war. "It felt like it was bending. It was pushed sideways in the water. It was amazing."

Minutes into the battle, one of Bismarck's 15-inch shells hit one of Hood's magazines. An enormous column of fire erupted from the battlecruiser, followed by a massive explosion that tore it in two.

"The ship broke into pieces," Otto Schlenzka, a sailor on Prinz Eugen, recalled. "We were sure an explosion of that kind must have killed everybody."

Hood went down with 1,415 sailors, all but three of its crew. Prince of Wales was also heavily damaged and had to withdraw. The Germans suffered no losses.

Shocked by the violent destruction of the Hood, the Royal Navy committed nearly all of its available capital ships in the area to finding and destroying Bismarck.

Though it suffered no casualties in the battle, Bismarck received a number of hits that ruptured a fuel tank and caused flooding.

Ltjens, aware of the Royal Navy's numerical superiority and of the danger of sailing a damaged warship, terminated the operation.

Prinz Eugen was ordered to continue commerce raiding on its own while the Bismarck headed for Nazi-occupied France.

Bismarck briefly evaded its pursuers, but a British reconnaissance aircraft, flown by a US Navy pilot, found it on May 26.

Subsequent torpedo attacks from Swordfish carrier planes disabled Bismarck's rudder, forcing it into a continuous turn.

With the Royal Navy closing in, Ltjens sent a final message to Berlin: "Ship unmaneuverable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Fhrer."

On May 27, two British battleships and two heavy cruisers attacked Bismarck. They fired over 2,800 shells in a little less than two hours, hitting the German battleship some 400 times. Bismarck was left dead in the water.

The Germans detonated scuttling charges to sink the ship, while British heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire fired torpedoes to finish it off. Only 115 of Bismarck's 2,221-man crew survived.

Operation Rheinbung was a complete failure. Not only had the pride of the Kriegsmarine been sunk with nearly all hands, Prinz Eugen was unable to sink any merchant ships, meaning the primary objective was never achieved.

In the following weeks, the Royal Navy set about destroying the network German ships that refueled, resupplied, and rearmed German capital ships in the Atlantic. The result was the Kriegsmarine's almost complete reliance on U-boats during the rest of the Battle of the Atlantic.

In the end, the U-boats were the Kriegsmarine's most effective weapons. From September to December 1939, they sank 110 Allied vessels, while German capital ships only sank about a dozen.

Between July and October 1940, a period known as the "first happy time," by German submariners, U-boats sank nearly 300 ships carrying over a million tons of cargo.

Between January and August 1942, the "second happy time," U-boats sank another 600 ships carrying 3 million tons of cargo.

Hitler never ordered his capital ships into the Atlantic again, sending them to Norway or the Baltic instead. The Germans ramped up production of U-boats, which were easier to build than capital ships, and thousands of Allied ships were sunk before the war's end in 1945.

Originally posted here:

The hunt for Germany's largest warship proved that U-boats were the Nazis' best weapon - Business Insider

A GRUESOME mass grave of hundreds of murdered women and children has been unearthed at a former Nazi concentration camp in Russia.

The remains of some 500 victims have been found at the horror site Dulag-191 in the Voronezh region, where around 8,500 people are thought to have died.

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Many corpses have gunshot wounds and evidence of torture, while other prisoners are believed to have died from malnutrition and disease - exposing the horrors inflicted during the Nazi regime.

Some 64 state investigators and search volunteers are currentlyworking amongst the macabre at the long-suspected Nazi site, a branch of the sinister hell camp system.

Harrowing video footage shows diggers unearthing skulls and body parts in the area occupied by Hitlers forces during the Second World War.

"The estimated death toll is about 500 people," saidMikhail Segodin, head of theDon search volunteer squad, referring to the mass grave.

"The main contingent of the camp was made up of women and children."

Archives suggest that overall some 8,500 people perished at Dulag-191, he said.

11

11

11

The current search for human remains concentrates on 15 pits - mass graves each containing between 30 and 100 remains in the vicinityof Lushnikovo village, Ostrogozhskydistrict.

"Judging by the remains unearthed so far we see shot wounds, blunt traumas, in other words, broken bones," said Segodin.

"The site is complicatedbecause it was a camp for women and children. The human remains are in a poor state," he said.

Mostly tubular bones have survived, but often only teeth remain from the skulls.The only thing that can be said for sure is that almost all of the people who died here were young.

We did not find any valuable things, except perhaps a cigarette case damaged by gun fire."

Segodin added: Search and identification work will continue together with specialists from the (Russian) Investigative Committee.

11

11

11

11

A Soviet intelligence report dated 2 September 1942 from the Office of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs for Voronezh region stated that "a concentration camp for women and children is located at a brick factory in the suburban village of Lushnikovka.

The camp was described as being in the open air, fenced with four rows of barbedwire and it was guarded by Magyars [Hungarians].

The report read: Prisoners are not fed, but children are allowed to gather alms, parcels are also allowed.

There are many ill people there, medical aid is not provided.There is a high mortality rate."

11

11

Intelligence documents also suggested the murder of children and cruelty against prisoners of war.

The burial was found thanks to unclassified secret service documents, and aerial photographs taken by a German pilot in 1942, which helped establish the exact location of the women and childrens camp.

Local historian Viktor Strelkin talked to eyewitnesses and surviving prisoners.

"I was told that in these pits, right under the feet of people who were still alive, lay the dead.

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Sometimes they lay openly, or they were covered with 10 or 15 centimetres of soil, but it sagged and the corpses were visible again.

The hellish concentration camp system Dulag-191 was created in the Voronezh region in 1942.

Inmates from Dulag-191 were forced to construct a railway for the Nazis known as the Berlinka line, built to supply German forces seeking to take Stalingrad.

Visit link:

Mass graves of women & children unearthed at Russian Nazi death camp as skulls with bullet holes reveal... - The US Sun

Luke Hollands film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that its easy to label our enemies as Nazisbut the true search for evil should begin in the mirror.

Final Account is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Director Luke Holland, whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust and who himself died of cancer in 2020 after the films completion, but before its premiere, goes on to prove Levis thesis.

Holland began production in 2008, and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project. His bare-bones, oral history approach works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.

Hollands subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one a member of Hitlers elite bodyguards, the Leibstandarte.

Their recollections regarding the Holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip, but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admit the egregiousness of the crime, but doubt its scale. And one, the former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.

He says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should have been deported and not exterminated. Hes so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because then I would dirty myself. His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasnt a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.

Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.

Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.

None of these revelations is met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter-of-factness.

The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.

The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the site of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.

After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems theyre resistant because they think hes lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear theyre actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German, and having fought for Germany.

This scene is compelling because its the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to dont let yourself be blinded.

Werks warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it the not-see disease is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. Not seeing the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.

The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York targeting Jews, blacks viciously assaulting Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighurs being held in Chinese concentration camps.

This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment-approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate America.

This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions which populate the Nazi nightmare of Final Account.

Final Account is not a great film. It is somewhat derivative in style, as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps. But it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.

It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in Final Account will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Read the rest here:

New Nazi documentary Final Account is a powerful & prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age - RT

A South Australian man linked to a national neo-Nazi group has fronted court accused of trying to make a bomb.

The court heard police will need at least seven months to prepare their case against the northern suburbs man who has links to a controversial neo-nazi group that promotes hatred and white supremacy.

The accused bomb maker Patrick Patmore, who has been living in suburban Salisbury east in Adelaides north, was arrested in April.

The 32-year-old is accused of possessing a homemade bomb, having instructions on how to manufacture explosive devices and possessing prohibited weapons.

He wasnt keen to elaborate on the allegations on Wednesday, driving quickly away after his first but brief court appearance.

The accuseds bail conditions require him to report to Elizabeth police station twice a week.

A second man, arrested for possessing extremist material, will front court next month.

It follows a series of raids across the northern suburbs of Adelaide.

The case will return to court in December which is how long prosecutors said it will take to gather all the forensic evidence.

At the time of the arrests, the leader of the neo-nazi party, called the National Socialist Network, Thomas Sewell defended the actions of its alleged members.

A harassment campaign against us and our members, theyre not going to shake our morale - this only strengthens us, Sowell said in a video.

Hes since been arrested by Victorian counter-terrorism police on suspicion of armed robbery.

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SA man with links to national neo-Nazi group accused of trying to make bomb - 7NEWS.com.au

Germany's occupation of Greece from 1941 to 1945, and the issue of reparations forcrimes committed during this time, still burden German-Greek relations 75 years after the end of World War II. And while many Germans are well aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere, little is known about the crimes committed in Greece.

That's why, between now and February 2021, an outdoor exhibition has been set up on the railings surrounding the Villa ten Hompel memorial museum in the western Germancity of Mnster, which commemorates crimes committed by the police and the administrative authorities during the Nazi era.

"Contrary to what the majority of Greeks believe, very few people in Germany and Europe know anything about Greece's martyred villages and towns," said Babis C. Karpouchtsis, a political scientist and Ph.D student at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He told DW that the massacres of villagers, the mass shootings of innocent people and the deportation and murder of Greek Jews was still largely unknown in Germany.

The idea for an exhibition came about in September 2018 during a delegation exchange visit organized by the Working Group of Nazi Memorial Museums and Memorial Sites in North Rhine-Westphalia. The visit was planned by Villa ten Hompel director Christoph Spieker, working group director Alfons Kenkmann and Peter Rmer, the working group's executive assistant. Together, they came up with the concept of the "Gallery Walk," consisting of intense and very emotional impressions of Greek memorial sites.

"The working group has always sought contact with international partners," said Rmer, adding that trips in recent years have focused on Poland and Israel, which most Germans associate with the Holocaust. "But we are also conscious of the fact that we are living in a migration society. In North Rhine-Westphalia, in particular, there are a lot of people with Greek roots. And so Greece became a focus, because Germans committed a great many crimes there."

In the space of a week, the German delegation traveled all over Greece, learning about the whole dreadful spectrum of recent history: from the village of Kandanos on Crete that was burned to the ground during the battle for the island in 1941, to the mass shootings in Kaisariani and Kalavryta and the extermination of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki.

"I found it truly shameful how little was paid in reparations in the 1950s," said Kenkmann, a professor at the University of Leipzig. "When you've been to the Holocaust sites, and in the villages where the civilian population were murdered, or where mass shootings took place I am very ashamed of the hubris of the Germans of the 1950s."

The return visit of their Greek counterparts was originally planned for this year, but has been postponed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Kenkmann, though, the most important thing is that initial contact has been made and that "through this, the Greeks will see that there may indeed be people in civil society in North Rhine-Westphalia who could represent their interests."

A memorial to the 500 people murdered in the Nazi massacre at Kalavryta

With this initiative, Kenkmann is aiming to create a new channel of communication between Germany and Greece. He is particularly keen to promote exchange projects dealing with the notorious Pavlos Melas concentration camp in the northern city of Thessaloniki, drawing on the link between Thessaloniki and its sister city, Leipzig.

Karpouchtsis believes exchange projects like these are important for the joint academic study of Germany's wartime occupation of Greece. "Open dialogue with civil society and visits by research groups and academics promote our historical understanding and knowledge and in doing so, they also strengthen democracy at local, national and European levels," he said.

This article has been translated from German.

See the original post:

New memorial highlights Nazis' overlooked crimes in Greece - DW (English)

It was 1943 and Wowa Zev Gdud, a Jewish teenager who had already escaped execution three times, had a chance to avenge loved ones killed in the Holocaust. He ordered two Lithuanian policemen to kneel at gunpoint in a desolate swamp.

The policemen were from the same unit that had, two years earlier, gunned down his mother and brother. But as Gdud raised his pistol his hand began to tremble. He had already seen too much death, he would explain years later, and he couldnt add to it. He lowered the gun and walked away.

Gdud would survive the war, study medicine in Italy and eventually emigrate to the U.S., where he changed his named to William Z. Good. He never forgot that day in the swamp when, by choosing humanity over revenge, he took the first steps on a path that would end up touching tens of thousands of lives.

Good, who died in an Azusa senior care community Friday at 96 of complications from COVID-19, ran a quiet medical practice in La Puente, a blue-collar melting pot of cultures where the doctors knowledge of 11 languages was invaluable. So was his altruism. For more than five decades everyone received the same treatment whether they could pay or not, and many couldnt.

I often worked in the office on holidays and summers and witnessed his kindness and generosity with both his time and financially with his patients, said Donna Daniel, whose mother, Tommie Allen, worked as one of Goods nurses for 45 years. Everyone got his full attention.

His son Michael, who runs his own medical practice in Connecticut, said his father made house calls, assisted in the operating room and delivered more than 2,000 babies.

He was such an extraordinarily kind person, remembered Richard Pace, who, as an accident-prone child growing up in West Covina, was a frequent visitor to the doctors office. He also had a wonderful sense of humor.

Good was born in Minsk, Belarus, but grew up outside Vilna, Poland, a city that would be claimed by three countries during World War II. Shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Good was captured and taken to the notorious Ponary killing ground, where the bullet meant for him just missed. He survived by falling into a pit and feigning death among the corpses.

There would be other close calls during the war, much of it spent hiding in the forest with his father, occasionally joining the resistance in sabotaging Nazi rail lines and surviving thanks to the bravery of local families. Goods wartime experiences were largely unknown to his former patients until he was profiled in The Times in September.

Good never killed anyone, something he said shamed him during the war but later, when he had children of his own, became a point of pride.

We did not kill. They killed our children, so we have nothing to hide, he said in an interview.

Ill tell you, he continued, most people are very angry Look what they did to us. And so they dont go on with their lives. They are bitter. [But] if I am angry at you, its eating me. You dont even know that Im angry at you.

So I decided that thats a dead emotion, and I better get rid of that. And I did that early in life.

After the war, Good made it to Italy, where he studied medicine and, with two other medical students, founded a hostel for Jewish war refugees. That was where he met Perela Esterowicz, a doctoral student in chemistry who survived the Holocaust in a work camp in Vilna; she later took the name Pearl and became his wife of 67 years.

Their story is told by their son Michael in The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, which recounts the couples 1999 return to Vilna to learn more about Karl Plagge, a mysterious German officer who ran the Vilna camp but helped save hundreds of Jews. Pearl Good would later unveil his name when it was added to the Wall of the Righteous at the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem.

Good is survived by Pearl, 91; three children, all of whom are doctors; six grandchildren, one a doctor; and three great-grandchildren. Funeral services will be in private. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Temple Ami Shalom (templeamishalom.org) or The American Joint Distribution Committee (www.jdc.org)

See the article here:

Dr. William Good, who battled Nazis in Poland, dies of COVID-19 - Los Angeles Times

One of Hitlers biggest lies was that Germany was not beaten in World War I. Hitlers Minister of Propaganda said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

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When it comes to the truth, are we different than Nazi Germany? - Wyoming Tribune

SAN ANTONIO (KXAN) The graves of two Nazi prisoners of war who died in Texas during World War II are now gone from Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio after years of controversy.

The headstones of German prisoners Alfred P. Kafka and Georg Forst were removed without prior notice at 8:15 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 23, according to San Antonio Express-News.

The Jewish War Veterans of the United of States of America, called the removal the last gasp of the Third Reich, while Michael L. Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation also praised the decision, calling the presence of the headstones, not merely an eyesore, it was an assault on everything that is decent and moral and ethical.

The foundation began its campaign for the removal last May, but the Department of Veterans Affairs declined, saying it had a responsibility to protect historic resources, even ones that are divisive.

The two headstones showed a modified Iron Cross, which had a swastika in the center of a cross they also contained a German inscription reading, He died far from his home for the Fhrer, people and fatherland.

The headstones, which have been at Fort Same since 1947, have courted calls for removal for several years. Southern Poverty Law Center fellow, Eric Ward, said back in May: The VAs defense of the swastika the preeminent symbol of antisemitism only gives oxygen to the white nationalist movement.

Many Texan members of Congress supported the removal, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Reps. Will Hurd and Kay Granger.

In June, the VA announced all imagery related to Nazism and Adolf Hitler would be removed from the Fort Sam and Fort Douglas Post Cemetery in Utah, where theres one other swastika-bearing headstone.

Im glad that the headstones have been replaced, Rep. Joaquin Castro, according to NBC News. Its jarring to think that symbols of the Third Reich and the Nazi regime would stand in an American military cemetery.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, of Laredo, compared the debate over the headstone removal to that of debates over images of the Confederacy while noting a key difference, in his opinion.

Theyre both offensive, but this one is foreign country, foreign symbol foreign symbol for a regime that killed so many of our soldiers and caused misery to a lot of families that lost soldiers during World War II, said Cuellar.

The VA explained the unannounced removal was to prevent it from becoming a media event, and out of respect for the cemetery. The department reports there are 133 German POWs buried at the site.

Its not yet known if the headstone in Utah has been removed.

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Headstones with swastikas removed from Nazi POW graves in Texas - BRProud.com

A neo-Nazi propagandist who called for gay people and Jews to be exterminated has been jailed for four years.

Luke Hunter, of Newcastle, was sentenced to four years behind bars at Leeds Crown Court last Wednesday (23 December) after he admitted seven charges of encouraging terrorism and disseminating terrorist publications.

The 23-year-0ld was a key figure in the online neo-Nazi movement, tied with the now-banned terrorist organisation Feuerkrieg Division (FKD).

According to the UKs Counter Terrorism Policing Network, Hunter was persistent and prolific in his efforts to promote right-wing terrorism, utilising a variety of platforms and accounts to spread his hateful ideology and encourage others to do the same.

The neo-Nazi established his own website through which to disseminate his vile white supremacist, anti-Semitic and homophobic views, police say, noting that his workhad a significant online reach, particularly among young people.

His Telegram channel, where he shared designs glorifying Admiral Duncan bomber David Copeland, Jo Coxs murderer Thomas Mair and white supremacist mass murder Dylann Roof, attracted more than 1,200 subscribers.

Anti-extremist group Hope Not Hate, which tracks online extremism, reports that Hunter produced hundreds of hours of podcasts, multitudes of graphic designs, and dozens of stylised fascist videos which were promoted across his websites, numerous Twitter accounts, YouTube, Instagram, and the messaging apps Telegram and Discord.

He was arrested last October after an investigation into right-wing terrorism. Searches of Hunters home yielded Nazi memorabilia, white supremacist texts, military training manuals and guides on guerrilla warfare.

Detective chief superintendent Martin Snowden, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said: Hunter invested a lot of effort in maintaining his website, his online presence and his status among like-minded individuals. He saw himself as an influencer and even sought to widen his following by speaking at a right wing conference in the UK.

These actions are not simply the result of a young person simply seeking to explore and express their social or political views. Hunter promoted neo-Nazism to the widest possible audience and was reckless about the consequences.

Through his pleas, Hunter accepts he was responsible for the hateful posts on his accounts, posts which glorified terrorism, promoted killing techniques and encouraged the killing of Jews, non-white races and homosexuals.

Luke Hunter represents a threat to our society, not simply because of his mindset, but because of the considerable lengths he was prepared to go to in order to recruit and enable others in support of his cause.

Hope Not Hate warned: The milieu to which Hunter belonged regards mass murder as a means to revolution and retribution, but also as a form of entertainment. Talk in the media of lone wolf far-right terrorists can, when used incorrectly, give the impression that an individual has radicalised in complete isolation.

However, while some terrorists do plan and carry out their attacks alone, they near-universally emerge from an ecosystem of sorts. Hunter, and others like him, intended to foster such an ecosystem.

The hate that motivates modern far-right terrorists may be old, but they have found new ways to operate and organise. Telegram continues to fail to take appropriate action against the dangerous hate operating through its software.

Hunters channel remains available on the platform, and his violent propaganda continues to be circulated by other channels. All tech companies have a responsibility to deal with the use of their platforms for nefarious purposes, and Telegram must be held to account.

PinkNews has contacted Telegram for comment.

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Hateful Neo-Nazi propagandist who called for extermination of Jews and gay people jailed for four years - PinkNews