Description: A European man’s arm holds up a sword, implicitly likening the Axis to the Crusaders, and behind it are three Baltic flags and two other European ones: the flag of Lithuania, the flag of Latvia, the flag of the Third Reich, a flag of Finland, and the flag of Estonia. In the background is an unarmed Bolshevik skeleton (equating Bolshevism with death) looking at the sword with concern, almost trembling before it.

Quoting Detlev Vagts’s Carl Schmitt’s Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives:

A little more than a year into his rule as [Fascist] Chancellor, Hitler felt threatened from two directions. On the one hand there was restiveness among members of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the brown‐shirted street fighters who had done so much to bring him to power. Some of them took seriously the idea that there was meaning to the words “socialist” and “workers” in the title of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They felt that their contributions had not been recognized or rewarded.

Their head, Ernst Röhm, was a formidable fighter and potential troublemaker. He was intent upon gaining primacy in military matters vis‐à‐vis the army. On the other side, there was unease among the conservatives who had opened the way for Hitler’s appointment. Several of them were planning to meet with President Hindenburg to urge him to curb what they regarded as excesses in Hitler’s policies. Most disturbingly of all, the army leadership was considering forceful means to end the attempt by the SA to gain control over military matters[.]

It seems likely that subjectively Hitler took these threats seriously, though no evidence of any plot to seize power was ever presented. Witnesses describe him as highly excited to the point of foaming at the mouth. He flew to Munich and there confronted leaders of the SA in a resort hotel and had them imprisoned. One of Röhm’s chief deputies was caught in bed with another man, a matter that Hitler stressed in moralistic terms. Röhm was seized and given a chance to commit suicide; when he declined he was shot to death by SS (Schutzstaffel) officers.

Elsewhere in [the Third Reich] murder squads went into action. They killed General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s immediate predecessor as Chancellor, together with his wife and an aide, General Bredow. Also on the list were Edgar Jung, secretary to Chancellor von Papen, who had drafted a critical article about Hitler’s excesses, and Erich Klausener, head of the Catholic Action movement. Schmitt had interacted with von Schleicher in various ways.⁵

Hitler also settled scores with men who had incurred his displeasure along the way: Gregor Strasser, formerly an important Nazi organizer, and Gustav von Kahr, a figure in Bavarian politics in the 1920s. Hitler’s enemies on the left were spared as they were already stowed away in concentration camps.

Some were killed by mistake, confused with a target having a similar name. No list of the assassinated was ever made public and the relevant files were destroyed. Hitler told the Reichstag that the number was 77; subsequent research indicates that the real number was twice or even three times as great.⁶

On July 13 Hitler spoke in the Reichstag to the German people, justifying his actions, and a statute was passed ratifying them. By and large the popular reaction in [the Third Reich] seems to have been favorable. Many regarded the SA as uncouth rowdies that constituted a menace to the public peace and the killings of the rightists were largely ignored, even by their comrades in the army. Only one officer dared to attend von Schleicher’s funeral.

Further reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 213–226

Night of the Long Knives: Forty‐Eight Hours that Changed the History of the World

The Night of the Long Knives: The History and Legacy of Adolf Hitler’s Notorious Purge of the SA

Night of the Long Knives: Hitler's Excision of Rohm's SA Brownshirts, 30 June – 2 July 1934

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 30).

1884: Franz Halder, Axis colonel general, existed.
1931: Arthur Greiser joined the NSDAP’s SS organization.
1934: Admiral Graf Spee launched, and the Oranienburg concentration camp transferred under the jurisdiction of the Reich’s ‘justice’ department.
1935: Werner Mölders completed fighter pilot training at the flying school in Tutow and the Jagdfliegerschule in Schleißheim.
1937: Ferdinand du Chastel and Galeazzo Ciano signed the Economic Union of Belgium and Luxemburg and Italy: Convention regarding Payments together in Rome.
1940: Three Fascist personnel landed on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel by aircraft and demanded surrender from a local policeman; a Fascist reconnaissance aircraft landed on Guernsey in the Channel Islands and unofficially received the surrender of the islanders. Fascist submarine U‐26 sank Estonian ship Merkur (slaughtering four) and Norwegian ship Belmoira (without killing anybody) off of France. Fascist submarines U‐65 and U‐43 attacked Allied convoy SL‐25 300 files west of Brest, France. At 2227 hours, U‐43 sank British ship Avelona Star; somebody died but eighty‐four lived. U‐65 damaged British ship *Clan Ogilvy, which would need to be towed away and kept out of commission until October 1940.

(Mirror.)

In another clip from the Bnei David Yeshiva published by Channel 13, Rabbi Giora Redler can be heard praising [the Third Reich’s] ideology during a lesson about the Holocaust.

“Let’s just start with whether Hitler was right or not,” he told students. “He was the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

Redler goes on to say that pluralism is the “real” genocide being perpetrated against the Jewish people, not Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.

Related: Israeli “Hebrew Gaza” Panel Likes Hitler’s Plans:

“The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.”

The comments drew wide condemnation from opposition lawmakers who called for pulling all state funding to the Eli-based academy over Kashtiel’s and Redler’s remarks.

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Click here for events that happened today (June 29).

1880: Ludwig Beck, ‘moderate’ Fascist, was born.
1895: Hartwig von Ludwiger, Axis major‐general, existed.
1934: Adolf Schicklgruber visited NSDAP camps in Westphalia, and Generalleutnant Ewald von Kleis flew to Berlin to warn General Werner von Fritsch of the impending violence between the NSDAP’s SS and SA organizations. When Fritsch informed Walther von Reichenau at the Defence Ministry the latter simply replied that it was ‘too late now.’
1935: The Third Reich commissioned its first submarine, U‐1, into service under Klaus Ewerth’s command.
1936: Cruiser Köln completed operations off Spain as Nachi completed her first reconstruction at Sasebo Naval Arsenal and the Kriegsmarine laid down the keel of torpedo boat T10 at the F. Schichau yard in Elbing.
1937: Kamoi began a period of maneuvres.
1938: Imperial repair ship Akashi launched.
1939: Berlin suddenly ordered a pause to Soviet–German trade talks for uncertain reasons.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐99 experienced friendly fire again! Upon leaving Wilhelmshaven, Fascist aircraft assaulted her with three bombs. She dove under the surface to avoid them, but sustained minor damage when she hit the sea floor. Fascist submarine U‐47 torpedoed and sank British ship Empire Toucan southwest of Ireland, which broke in half; three died but thirty‐one lived. (Destroyer HMS Hurricane scuttled the aft portion of the ship which remained afloat.) Likewise, Fascist submarine U‐51 sank British decoy ship HMS Edgehill with three torpedoes southwest of Ireland, and U‐26 sank Greek steamer Frangoula B. Goulandris southwest of Ireland, massacring six folk but leaving thirty‐two alive. Chancellor Schicklgruber arrived at his headquarters at Tannenberg in southern Germany.
1941: The Axis conducted a pogrom against Jews in the town of Jassy, exterminating ten thousand… sigh… additionally, the 20.Gebirgsarmee began advancing on Murmansk in northern Russia, and Axis bombers attacked Chongqing, China; among the property damaged were the British Embassy in the city and American gunboat USS Tutuila at Lungmenhao lagoon. Alessandro Malaspina was ordered by her base to patrol a new area in the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, ex‐President Herbert Hoover warned against aiding the Soviet Union. ‘If we go further and join the war and we win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of communism on Russia… [I]f we join the war and Stalin wins, we have aided him to impose more communism on Europe and the world.’
1942: Troops of Wehrmacht’s 16th Infantry Regiment and 65th Infantry Regiment crossed Severnaya Bay north of Sevastopol in one hundred thirty rubber boats, landing behind Soviet defenses at 0100 hours, establishing a bridgehead. Axis submarine U‐67 sank British tanker Empire Mica southwest of Cape St. George, Florida at 0750 hours, leaving thirty‐three dead but fourteen alive. The Axis’s 90th Light Division reached Sidi Abdel Rahman, and Benito Mussolini flew to Libya, with his white horse, coincidentally to prepare for a victory parade through Cairo. Manchukuo transferred destroyer Haiwei to the Empire of Japan. The ship became reclassified as an auxiliary escort and was renamed Kari. Lastly, the Axis’s 4th Panzer Army threatened to surround the Soviet 40th Army as the Axis advanced toward Voronezh in southern Russia.

Pictured: A ‘Special Night Squads’ unit in the late 1939s. British soldiers recruited from the Zionist militias and carried out a ‘dirty war’ against civilians. Some Zionists were even armed with Fascist weapons.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation page 384:

Feivel Polkes, a Haganah intelligence agent, came to Berlin for talks with the SD and Gestapo between 26 February and 2 March 1937.⁵⁷ According to a situation report of October 1937, Polkes offered to become an informant for the Gestapo, sharing Haganah intelligence information, in return for which the Gestapo would pressure the RVt to require emigrating Jews to settle exclusively in Palestine.⁵⁸ Polkes worked with Dr. Franz Reichert, an agent of the SD, who was nominally a correspondent for DNB, the [Third Reich’s] overseas news service in Jerusalem.

Among other things, he would support German foreign policy interests in the Middle East and use his influence to secure sources of oil for the Reich if German foreign currency regulations for Jews emigrating to Palestine were to be relaxed.⁵⁹

Polkes claimed that he was on the General Staff of the Haganah.⁶⁰ SS files show that in return for information from Polkes on [possible] attempts to kill Hitler, ‘pressure will be exerted on the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland to oblige Jews who emigrate from Germany to go exclusively to Palestine, and not to other countries.’⁶¹

Dr. Franz Six, Eichmann’s boss, wrote confirming this.⁶² In a 1957 interview, the former Chairman of the ZVfD, Dr. Hans Friedenthal, revealed that ‘the Gestapo did all it could to promote Jewish emigration to Palestine, thereby rendering considerable assistance to the Zionist cause.’⁶³

Polkes arranged, in his contacts with Eichmann, for arms supplies, Mauser pistols, to be smuggled to [occupied] Palestine in barrels of cement.⁶⁴ In return Polkes supplied the [Fascists] with information on an illegal communist broadcasting station which drove between the German and Luxembourg border.⁶⁵ He also supplied the [Fascists] with information about two pro‐Soviet Arab leaders, Emirs Sheikib Arslan and Adil Arslan, who were at a conference in Berlin.

Polkes later met with Eichmann in Café Groppi in Cairo on 10 and 11 October 1937, after Eichmann had been deported by the British from Palestine.⁶⁶ Here he assured him that the Zionists ‘were favourably disposed to the extreme German policy.’⁶⁷

In 1983 Lenni Brenner met Yoav Gelber of YV, who told him that he was unable to access Polkes file in the Haganah archives in Tel Aviv. In October 1983 Brenner asked archivist Chaim Zamir to see the file. ‘There is no file,’ Zamir responded. When told about his conversation with Gelber, Zamir replied: ‘There is no file because it would be too embarrassing’.⁶⁸ The question is what is it that is so embarrassing that they have to hide it?

Even the Zionist historian Francis R. Nicosia admitted to this transgression (which he evidently considered ‘insignificant’). Quoting his book The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, pages 63–4:

An interesting episode involving the Hagana and [Fascism] during the 1930s emerges from the documents on the Polkes visit to Berlin in 1937. In his conversations with Eichmann, Polkes referred to Mauser pistols that the Hagana had earlier received from [the Third Reich], observing that they had rendered valuable service to the Hagana dining the recent unrest in Palestine.⁷⁰

In a study of Hagana intelligence activities, E. Dekel, a former Hagana officer, revealed that, between 1933 and 1935, some 300 barrels of cement were shipped from a fictitious exporter in Belgium to a fictitious importer in Jaffa, in reality the Hagana.⁷¹ According to Dekel, about half the barrels contained, in addition to cement, 100‐lb. containers filled with Mauser pistols and ammunition.

He did not indicate the exact source of the pistols, although it would seem that they originated in [the Third Reich], as indicated in the Polkes–Eichmann conversations in Berlin early in 1937. The source within [the Third Reich] remains a mystery. The Mauser‐Jagdwaffen GmbH has informed me that, although most of their records were destroyed during the war, the firm did provide the Ministry of the Interior with large quantities of model C96, which appeared in 1932.⁷²

It is known from Dekel's study that Hagana agents were actively seeking arms and ammunition all over Europe during the 1930s and from the SS records on Polkes that Hagana agents were active in [the Third Reich] at that time.⁷³ While it cannot be determined at this point exactly who provided the pistols to the Hagana, it is certain that someone in [the Third Reich] did and that the police authorities were aware of it.

(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more information. Cheers to Bes D. Marx for telling me about this.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 28).

1934: Cruiser Köln completed gunnery drills with pocket battleship Deutschland, and Ernst Röhm’s fellow Fascists relieved him of his position as the leader of the NSDAP’s SA organization. Generalleutnant Ewald von Kleist, the Reichswehrt Commander in the Silesia region, was alarmed to discover from a local SA commander that both SS and SA units were arming for an assault on each other.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐30 sank British ship Llanarth two hundred fifty miles west of Brest, France at 0200 hours, then Fascist Governor‐General of Libya Marshal Italo Balbo returned from a reconnaissance flight after Blenheim bombers raided Tobruk. Fascist antiaircraft crews, still jumpy from that raid, misidentified his aircraft for a British bomber and opened fire, killing Balbo. Given Balbo’s opposition to Fascist Italy’s alliance with the Third Reich, some suspect that this friendly fire incident was actually premeditated murder. Apart from that, the Luftwaffe bombed Guernsey and Jersey, slaughtering thirty‐three and injuring forty.
1941: As Albania officially declared war on the Soviets, the Axis captured Minsk, Byelorussia, encircling twenty‐seven Soviet Army divisions in the process. Joachim von Ribbentrop sent a message to the Japanese embassy in Berlin, asking the Empire of Japan to jointly invade the Soviet Union by tearing up the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact and attacking Vladivostok, Russia. On the other hand, Chen Jie submitted a letter to Berlin, noting the long standing friendly Sino‐German relationship, urging the Third Reich to abandon its wish to recognize the Axis puppet régime in China under Wang Jingwei.
1942: Before dawn, Regia Aeronautica torpedo boats staged a fake landing at Cape Fiolent south of Sevastopol as a diversion from the preparations for a major offensive north of the city! Unternehmen Blau (Case Blue), the Axis summer offensive against the Soviets, commenced; three armies and eleven armored divisions began driving towards the Caucasus Mountains. Additionally, the Axis captured Fuka and Mersa Matruh, Egypt. Gruppe von Weichs of the Wehrmacht attacked on a ninety‐mile front in the Soviet Union with its left south of Orel and its right on Oboyan. Colonel‐General Maximilian von Weichs sent in his own 2nd Army, the 4th Panzerarmee (Colonel‐General Hermann Hoth), and the Hungarian 2nd Army (Colonel‐General Gusztáv Jany), in all twenty‐three divisions, including three Panzer and two motorised. Axis submarine I‐10 sank British merchant ship Queen Victoria in the Mozambique Channel, Axis bombers severely damaged Soviet destroyer leader Tashkent in the Black Sea, and Axis bombers attacked Weston‐super‐Mare in southwestern England, massacring one hundred two and wounding four hundred; Axis intelligence had incorrectly determined that Winston Churchill was at Weston‐super‐Mare this night. Hans‐Joachim Marseille also received Swords for his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross medal from his Chancellor at Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg, East Prussia. He also received Oak Leaves for his Knight’s Cross, an award he had won earlier in this month.

Pictured: Foreign Minister Lászlo Bárdossy (first from right) walks in front of a guard of honor. Visible: Hungarian Ambassador to Berlin Döme Sztójay (first from left) and SS Obergruppenführer Baron von Eberstein (second from left). Dated 1941.

Quoting Deborah S. Cornelius’s Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron, pages 148–152:

Confirming the doubts of Rundstedt, the progress of Army Group South was slower than that of the other two army groups; the Seventeenth Army pushed forward only ten to twelve kilometers on the first day. On June 25, 1941, the chief of staff of Army South repeated his request for the intervention of troops from [the Kingdom of] Hungary. He pointed out that this would be a significant unburdening of the Seventeenth Army’s south wing and help the attack of the Eleventh Army.

The answer came from the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), [the Third Reich’s] High Command of the Army—“the question of Hungarian participation is still open.”⁶ Halder noted in his diary of June 25: “Hungary’s collaboration would be desirable. Hungary, however, wants to be asked officially. The Führer will not do that, for political reasons.”⁷

All this changed on June 26 at a few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon when three unidentified planes dropped bombs on the Hungarian city of Kassa. The bombs struck the post and telegraph office, a settlement and several homes, leaving several dead and a larger number wounded. One bomb failed to explode and was found to be of Russian manufacture. The planes then disappeared toward the southeast, the direction from which they had come.

The local military authorities concluded that Soviet planes were responsible, but to this day the question of responsibility has not been solved. Many Hungarians believed that the [Third Reich] had used the bombing as a trick to bring [the Kingdom of] Hungary into the war, but absolutely no German documents have turned up to support this thesis. The Russians denied responsibility.⁸

When the news reached Budapest, the minister of defense, Károly Bartha, and Chief of the General Staff Henrik Werth rushed to tell the regent what had happened. Horthy’s immediate reaction was indignation—the country had been attacked! His sense of honor required that he act.

On the spot he ordered that appropriate retaliatory measures be initiated, but it is not clear if he was thinking of a declaration of war or only reprisals. Horthy, who was [supposedly] apolitical, was always prone to making quick impulsive decisions, which he could be talked out of later by calmer minds. His respected advisors, Moricz Esterházy or István Bethlen, had been able to talk the regent out of hasty actions in other situations, but both Bartha and Werth were eager for war.⁹

By the time Bárdossy heard of the incident and reached the regent, Horthy had already given the order for retaliatory measures. A career diplomat, Bárdossy had never had close relations with Horthy, and he did not attempt to counter the impulsive decision. He believed that Horthy wanted immediate action—and that this action would be war. He explained that he must first go to the Council of Ministers since only they could make a declaration of a state of war.

Horthy seems to have believed that after council deliberation Bárdossy would return to him with the decision for his approval, but Bárdossy believed he had been ordered to put a decision on war into effect. Therefore there was no need to consult the regent further. Later Horthy charged that Bárdossy had presented him with a fait accompli.¹⁰

One hour and twenty minutes after bombs fell on Kassa, Bárdossy summoned an emergency session of the Council of Ministers, which met so hurriedly that several members were missing. Dezso Laky, minister of public supply, arrived only at the end, and Ferenc Zsindely, secretary of state, was absent, while Antal Ullein‐Reviczky, head of the foreign ministry’s press division, was attending a lunch party and sent a deputy in his stead.

In that short time Bárdossy had made up his mind to a complete reversal of his whole policy. At the council meeting he announced that the Soviets had bombed Kassa, and in his view Hungary should declare that as a consequence she regarded herself as in a state of war.

Opinions were divided. Minister of Defense Bartha condemned the Soviet attack as an uncalled‐for provocation and made vigorous pleas to carry out reprisals. The moderate minister of the interior, Ferenc Keresztes‐Fischer, thought it was too early to declare a state of war, reasoning that the bombing was not that serious an action. He believed the army was not strong enough, and that it was against the country’s interests to start a war against a great power.

Bálint Hóman, the pro‐[Reich] minister of culture, and Reményi‐Schneller, minister of finance, both supported the prime minister, claiming that [the Kingdom of] Hungary should not be the only one left out of the action. [The Kingdoms of] Italy and Romania had joined in the war the day of the [Wehrmacht’s] attack and Slovakia had also joined.¹¹

Bárdossy summed up the opinion of the council, that all were in favor of reprisals, and all, except Keresztes‐Fischer, were in favor of stating that Hungary regarded herself as being in a state of war with Russia, but participation in military action should be as limited as possible. Evidently no vote was taken. The ministers did not seem to have realized that Bárdossy’s summing‐up was equivalent to agreement to a binding resolution.

According to the official record of the meeting signed by Bárdossy, the ministers’ decision to declare the existence of a state of war between [the Kingdom of] Hungary and the USSR was unanimous, although at Bárdossy’s trial in 1945, it was charged that he had falsified the evidence—that four ministers had voted against the decision.¹²

Without consulting the regent, Bárdossy immediately drafted and issued a communiqué describing the attack on Kassa as an act of unprovoked aggression by the USSR and ended by stating that in consequence “Hungary considered herself from this moment on as at war with the U.S.S.R.”

Later, on the advice of Ullein‐Reviczky, he modified the wording to state: “In consequence of the repeated attacks made by Soviet aircraft, contrary to international law, against Hungarian territory, Hungary considers a state of war to have come into being between herself and the USSR.”¹³ That day he did not inform the regent of his communiqué.

The question remains why Bárdossy made the fatal step so precipitously. The Kassa incident was no casus belli; Molotov strongly denied Moscow’s involvement.¹⁴ There was no overt German pressure. Bárdossy said the step was inevitable but in later years historians have blamed him directly for [the Kingdom of] Hungary’s entry into war. Since the fall of State Socialism in 1989, many World War II officers and political figures charged with war crimes have been rehabilitated, but there is still no discussion of clearing Bárdossy’s name.

Bárdossy had been appointed prime minister hastily, immediately following Teleki’s suicide. Although acknowledged to be brilliant, he was often impatient. He could be charming and had been an excellent representative for [the Kingdom of] Hungary in England, and successful in Bucharest in improving Hungarian–Romanian relations, but he was a novice in domestic politics, not familiar with parliamentary rules and conduct.

A proud and sensitive man, he was prone to make quick decisions and to make them on his own. Not patient with those around him who were less bright, he was not good at consulting others nor taking advice. To add to his impatience he had serious stomach problems. It seems that at this point he had come to the decisions on what he believed to be the correct course.¹⁵

The next day, June 27, Bárdossy appeared before Parliament. The standing chairman, Jeno Szinyei Merse, announced with outrage that there had been an air attack by the Soviet Air Force the day before, but there was no mention that the identity of the attackers could be questioned. He then introduced Prime Minister Bárdossy to acclamation by the House (“Hear! Hear!”). Bárdossy repeated the news of the Soviet attack. “Thus the Hungarian Royal Government decided that as a result of the attack a state of war exists between Hungary and the Soviet Union.”¹⁶

The parliamentary record states that his news was greeted by long and lively cheering and clapping from all sides. From the extreme Right came the shouts: “Out with the Social Democrats.” Bárdossy continued, stating that the Hungarian army would take the necessary measures. There was no further parliamentary discussion, the house continued with a long drawn‐out debate on the need to further restrict the activities of the Jews.¹⁷

According to a later report there were at most forty representatives present. The one or two Smallholders and Social Democrat representatives immediately left the chamber and the loud clapping came from the ten to fifteen Arrow Cross representatives. The leader of one opposition party, Rassay, asked as he left the chamber, “Are you happy about this?” The government party representatives were surprised and clapped politely.¹⁸

Bárdossy did not even appear in the upper house which received the same notification read out by the president. His failure to consult the upper house, which was taken as an insult, greatly reduced his esteem in that body.

The declaration of war was not unpopular—none of those in the opposition, neither the liberal parties nor the Social Democrats challenged the declaration. The prominent opposition leader, Bajcsy Zsilinsky, even sent a message to Bárdossy praising him for defending the country’s interests, and the military were especially jubilant.

Hungarians had been permeated with anti‐Bolshevism ever since the catastrophic Soviet Republic of 1919, and the officers, indoctrinated with an anti‐Bolshevik attitude, were infatuated with Germany and its technical advances and rapid victories. A number of the younger officers saw in Hitler’s social reforms a new society. Three military commissions, which had gone to [the Third Reich] in 1940–41, were unanimous in their opinion that no power on the continent could defeat the Wehrmacht.

In light of [Fascism’s] rapid victories everyone thought that it would be a short war. There was no thought that [the Kingdom of] Hungary’s participation might entangle the country in hostilities with the West.

But the simple peasant or worker felt no enthusiasm at the prospect of fighting [Soviets], who meant nothing to him. Closer association with [the Third Reich] was still unpopular among many Hungarians. The regent preserved a curious reticence about the war. It was many days before any Hungarian paper suggested that Horthy had ordered the campaign and he signed no order to the troops. In a speech given on June 29 to unveil a monument to the World War I fallen, he did not include a single reference to the new war.

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 27).

1906: Erich Traub, Axis scientist, was born in Asperglen.
1933: The German National Front (formerly the German National People’s Party, DNVP) voted to dissolve itself before the Chancellery compelled it to do so.
1934: Sepp Dietrich requested the Reichwehr authorities for arms so that the Liebstandarte could carry out what he called ‘a secret and most important mission ordered by the Führer’ (read: the slaughter of dissident elements within the SA).
1939: Aircraft of Imperial Army 2nd Air Brigade attacked the Soviet airfield at Tamsagbulag, Mongolia Area, China. Both sides lost several aircraft.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐47 shelled Norwegian merchant ship Lenda off southwest Ireland at 0400 hours; somebody died but twenty‐seven did not. At 1700 hours, U‐47 shelled Netherlandish tanker Leticia in the same area; twenty‐five of the crew took to lifeboats, while the other three who dove into the water were rescued by U‐47 and brought to the lifeboats; the crew of U‐47 offered the survivors first aid material, sausages, and wine before leaving! Aside from that, the Wehrmacht reached the Franco‐Spanish border, and the Kingdom of Romania unhappily ceded Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union.
1941: The Axis captured Bobruisk in Byelorussia and Przemysl in Poland, and in Kaunas, a group of Lithuanian anticommunists gathered more than fifty Jewish men in a horse stable and beat them violently with iron bars in public view. None of the victims survived the Lietukis Garage Massacre.

Pictured: Axis General von Falkenhorst meeting Finnish General Hjalmar Siilasvuo on June 24, 1941.

Few anticommunists have the audacity to explicitly and unambiguously defend Operation Barbarossa, but Finland’s participation is an important exception. This is when generic anticommunists take a break from repetitively equating us with the Fascists and instead portray them as ‘lesser evils’ whom we forced Finland to choose, otherwise we would have either enslaved or exterminated the entire Finnish population (just because). Whereas presenting facts explaining the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 as anything other than sheer sadism is an offence worse than Shoah denial, justifying Finland’s alliance with the Third Reich is more than welcome.

Quoting Henrik Meinander in Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations, pages 71–4:

The Finnish government and population were […] strategically and mentally prepared for the new war. In fact, the Finnish Army and its related services would from the start mobilize a larger proportion (16 percent) of the country’s population than any other European nation at the time. In the morning of 22 June 1941, Hitler made his famous radio speech, in which he declared war on the Soviet Union and mentioned that “the brave Finnish comrades‐in‐arms” would take part in this huge offensive.

The latter information did not correspond with the Finnish strategy of disguising their participation in the war as a defensive reaction to Soviet attacks. [Berlin’s] authorities thus softened their formulation the same day by describing Finnish involvement as “shouldering a European anti‐communist frontier” together with [the Third Reich] and [the Kingdom of] Romania.³¹

The dilemma was soon solved. The Soviet Air Forces directed strikes against Finnish airports and other military sites used by [Axis] armed forces. Civilian targets were also attacked. This gave the Finnish parliament reason to announce on 25 June 1941 that Finland was again at war with the Soviet Union.

Next day President Ryti gave a radio speech in which he accused the Soviet Union of beginning the war and described the new conflict as Finland’s second defense war. He carefully avoided mentioning the military preparations together with [the Third Reich], but emphasized that the war was now fought together with the “successful German armed forces,” which would guarantee a lucky outcome of the defense war and put a definite end to the eastern threat to Finland.³²

During the first month of war, the [Fascist]–Finnish master strategy worked out according to the original plans, as the [Wehrmacht] had reached the outskirts of Leningrad at rapid speed and the Finnish Army began its own offensive north of Lake Ladoga with success.

Mannerheim was also eager to give bold statements. He had already given the new war a Finnish expression, the Continuation War. On 10 July 1941, he revealed in a famous order of the day—the so‐called “Scabbard Order”—that the aim of the offensive was not only to reconquer the territories lost in the Winter War: “The freedom of Karelia and a great Finland are glimmering in front of us in the enormous avalanche of world historic events.”

The Western Powers required an immediate explanation for Mannerheim’s order from the Finnish government, which answered that his vision did not reflect an official line. This was not a fully honest explanation. Even if [Helsinki] and [Berlin] had not agreed upon any specific future borderlines, they had certainly agreed on a plan, in which the Finnish Army should advance far into Soviet Eastern Karelia and keep its positions there until the war was over.

This was indeed what the Finnish Army did. The Finnish offensive was decisively facilitated by the simultaneous [Wehrmacht] operations, which forced the Red Army to split its forces along its whole western border. In early December 1941, the Finnish Army reached its intended positions in Eastern Karelia and was called to a halt by Mannerheim. The Finnish leadership was not prepared to deliver more than originally promised to its [Fascist] brother‐in‐arms, and this was due to two things.

First, the [Wehrmacht’s] eastward offensive had been a swift Blitzkrieg only during the first two months. In the autumn of 1941, it was increasingly obstructed by both the Russian winter, which arrived early and was even harsher than usual, and the [determined] resistance of the Red Army.

In such a situation the Finnish leadership was cautious not to let the Army bleed more than necessary and rejected repeatedly [Berlin’s] requests for a stronger support for their attacks on Leningrad and the Murmansk Railway. Plus the longer the war continued, the more [that] the Finns had to consider the possibility that the Soviet Union could survive and even beat its enemies. This prospect was also partially behind the second reason for the Finnish resistance to mount further offensive operations.

Despite the outbreak of the war, the Finnish government had maintained diplomatic ties to Great Britain and the United States, which generally speaking stood ideologically much closer to Finland than the [Third Reich]. Regardless of how the war would end, the Finnish leadership was thus strongly motivated to preserve good relations with the West as much as possible.

Throughout the war, Finland rejected an official political alliance with [the Third Reich] and claimed consistently in its westward communication that Finland fought its own defensive war against the Soviet Union. On 11 November 1941, the Finnish government sent a lengthy explanation to Washington DC, in which it was emphasized that Finland fought its own war free of any political bonds to [the Third Reich].³³

The timing for this statement was not a coincidence. The Western Powers had repeatedly demanded a Finnish withdrawal from the war and sharpened their voice in the autumn of 1941, when the Finnish Army began to threaten the railway connection between Murmansk and Central Russia, via which a large proportion of the Western material support to the Soviet Union was delivered. Great Britain had promised its Soviet ally to declare war on Finland if the Finns did not halt their offensive.

In November 1941, it sent this ultimatum to the Finnish government, which however neither for military nor diplomatic reasons could reveal that the request would very shortly be fulfilled. On 7 December, the Finnish Army had reached its most eastern destination and halted its offensive for good.

But this was too late. The day before, on the Finnish Independence Day, the British government declared war on Finland, and from that moment the 3.7 million Finns were officially fighting against not only the mighty Soviet Union but also the whole British Commonwealth. Even if their armed forces never met on the battlefield, the British war declaration undoubtedly complicated the Finnish diplomacy and resulted in Finland having to also sign a peace treaty with Great Britain in Paris in 1947.

As is known, early December 1941 was also a turning point in the war from a global perspective. The same day as the Finnish Army halted its offensive in Soviet Eastern Karelia, [Axis] Air Forces conducted a devastating strike on Pearl Harbor. Within a few days of the outbreak of the Pacific War, [Berlin] had also declared war on the United States, which meant that the conflict had truly escalated into world war.

The Axis Powers still had the initiative, but self‐evidently the American entry into the war had a decisive impact on developments in the longer run. Within a month, the consequences of the Pacific War were also felt at the Finnish–Soviet front.

Stalin had received advance information of the [Axis] attack south‐ and eastward in the Pacific, and in November 1941 he had already ordered the transfer of 20 Soviet divisions from the Far East to the European war scene. This gave the Red Army a momentous boost in the defense of Moscow, and in January 1942, the Red Army also increased its pressure on the Finnish–[Fascist] front sector to secure the threatened Murmansk Railway connection.³⁴

The Finnish High Command naturally followed the development on this larger war scene and had by then become increasingly pessimistic about the possibilities of [an Axis] victory on the Eastern Front. During the winter of 1941–42, Marshal Mannerheim also received alarming reports about how the [Fascists] had gravely missed their chance to win over the population of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union by treating them with horrific brutality.

This not only destroyed the credibility of the anti‐communist arguments in [Axis] propaganda, but also cast a shadow on their Finnish brother‐in‐arms, who had emphasized that they, too, fought a war against communism and for the freedom of the Karelian people.

(Emphasis added. See here for more.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 26).

1933: SS‐Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke became the commandant of Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, replacing Hilmar Wäckerle, and the Fascists commissioned Gorch Fock into service. Similarly, I‐68 launched at the Kure Naval Arsenal.
1936: The Wehrmacht began to exclude Jews from service (though it would never complete this task). Meanwhile, the Focke‐Wulf Fw 61 V1 twin‐rotor helicopter, piloted by Ewald Rohlfs, made its first flight of about half a minute duration. The Fw 61 was the world’s first completely successful helicopter design.
1938: Imperial Special Naval Landing Force troops landed behind Chinese lines at Madang, Jiangxi Province and captured the town.
1939: The Gestapo ordered all Czechs deemed unwilling to work, politically active, or having anti‐German beliefs to be placed in concentration camps.
1940: Berlin suggested that Bucharest give in and satisfy the Soviet demands to territory in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina; the Fascist bourgeoisie was fearful that Romanian resistance might lead to a Soviet occupation of the entire Kingdom of Romania, which would threaten the oil and fodder upon which the Wehrmacht depended. Wolfgang Falck officially became the commanding officer of the Luftwaffe’s nightfighters, Nachtjagdfliegerdienst; after sundown the Luftwaffe bombed the steelworks at Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Fascist submarine U‐29 stopped Greek ship Dimitris with a shot across her bow off Cape Finisterre, Spain at 1530 hours. After the crew abandoned ship, the Greek ship sunk from gunfire.

The policy of extermination was continued into April. On 23rd April, 25 Jews employed by the Ostbahn were killed. The [Axis] perpetrated this massacre after discovering a cell of the Jewish underground organisation operating within the station which intended to carry out acts of sabotage on the trains. In June, bunkers and shelters of Jewish underground organisation members were uncovered in the Small Ghetto. This last discovery hastened the [Axis’s] liquidation operations in the Small Ghetto.

In the first half of June, approximately 50 people were murdered, including a leader of the Ghetto underground movement — a former Polish Army captain, Dr. Adam Wolberg. However, the final tragic act in the ghetto played out during 23rd–26th June 1943. Over that period, cordons of various police formations surrounded the ghetto area.

The action commenced with the liquidation of bunkers belonging to fighters of the Jewish Fighting Organisation (ŻOB). The remaining few thousand ghetto inhabitants were gathered into the parade ground. They stood in the square for six hours waiting for the results of searches which the [Axis] had commenced.

Accompanied by dogs, they penetrated underground the ghetto searching for bunkers. This operation was a major surprise for members of ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) such that they could not manage to camouflage the entrances to the bunkers or to hide themselves in time. Already under the ghetto gate, trucks were waiting. The [Axis] loaded a number of the fighters onto the trucks and into cars which drove off in the direction of the cemetery where they were executed — shot in the back of the head. The trucks made several such trips that day.

This time, the selection was carried differently — victims are not chosen individually, but by columns or rows. Again, the majority are the elderly, women and children. The sick in the hospital are killed where they lie. This “action” finishes in the late afternoon of 25th June. From 8th October 1942 to 25th June 1943, approximately 1,300 Small Ghetto inhabitants are murdered — a[r]ound 3,900 people remain alive.

On 25th June, the remaining prisoners still standing on the parade ground were divided into smaller groups and transported to several factories in the Częstochowa area or in the vicinity: Hasag‐Pelcery, Raków, Częstochowianka, Warta. They were to work there until January 1945 — with the quiet hope of surviving.

The action in the Small Ghetto lasted almost a month. On 27th June, units of the army equipped with howitzers encircled the ghetto. Over many hours, shots are fired into the now empty buildings of the former Small Ghetto. The purpose of this was to scare those from the ruins who had, through some miracle, managed to avoid the fate of the others. On the following day, namely 28th June, [Axis] cars drive into the Ghetto area. Through a megaphone, they announce that those who leave their hiding‐places voluntarily, will receive bread, marmalade and warm soup. They will also be included in an amnesty. The deadline to come forward was set as 30th June.

When the deadline had passed, it turned out that only a few Jews believed the promises of the [Axis]. On 1st July, soldiers enter the ghetto area covered with the ruins of homes. They find around 20 starving people — mainly elderly, women and children. They are then subjected to many hours [of] interrogation, forced to reveal hiding places of other people or of valuables. After the interrogation, they are transported to the cemetery and shot.

Finally, on 20th July, minesweepers and explosives specialists enter the ghetto. Explosive charges are laid beneath houses. After a few hours, the Ghetto in Częstochowa is reduced to piles of rubble.

(Emphasis original.)

YIVO summarizes it thus:

In Częstochowa, a local fighting organization under the command of Mordekhai Zylberberg led an armed uprising on 25 June 1943. Here too most fighters, including the commander, were killed in battle, but a portion managed to leave the ghetto and join the partisans.

The Jewish people might have lost the battle, but they won the war.

See also: H.E.A.R.T. entry on Częstochowa.

Tour of the Częstochowa ghetto’s remains.

Interview with a survivor.

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 25).

1880: Sadly for us, Charles Huntziger, Axis commander‐in‐chief, existed.
1892: Shiro Ishii, Axis scientist and war criminal who eventually came of use to Imperial America, was born.
1902: Prince Yasuhito, Axis major general, came to be.
1934: Reichswehr General Werner von Fritsch put the army on alert based on the intelligence of a possible putsch by the NSDAP’s SA organization.
1940: The Franco‐Fascist Armistice, signed three days earlier, took effect at 0030 hours. After fighting ceased, French losses totaled 92,000 killed, 250,000 wounded, and 1,500,000 captured. British losses: 68,111 killed, wounded, or captured. German losses: 29,640 killed and 133,573 wounded and missing. Italian losses: 631 killed, 4,782 wounded, and 616 missing. France declared a National day of mourning, while Berlin ordered the flying of flags and pealing of bells throughout the Third Reich to celebrate ‘the most glorious victory of all time’. After the Fascists made the French surrender at Compiègne, the site of the Twoth Reich’s surrender in 1918, Berlin ordered the site destroyed, including the rail car used for both 1918 and 1940 surrenders, but they spared the statue of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Philippe Pétain announced a new order for France on Radio Bordeaux Sud‐Ouest. A period of difficulty would arrive but a intellectually and morally rejuvenated France would rise. Meanwhile, Madrid, in collaboration with Berlin, agreed to assist with the Reich’s attempt to detain the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom. The Fascists secretly funded isolationist advertising in the anticommunist newspaper New York Times.
1941: The Fascists supported Finland as the Continuation War against the Soviet Union commenced.
1943: Crematorium III began operation at Auschwitz. The camp now had the capacity of cremating 4,756 bodies daily.
1944: The Battle of Tali‐Ihantala, the largest battle ever fought in the Nordic countries, commenced.

From the perspective of the [Axis] employers this was an economic necessity since the tasks assigned to the units could not have been executed without sufficiently qualified workers—many of whom were Jews. Moreover, these had to accept minimum wages, making their labor unbeatably cheap.

Initially, the Wehrmacht paid no more than 10 Pfennige per hour to male workers; women and adolescents received 7.5 and 5 Pfennige, respectively. Only later on were military employers charged the same amount as private firms, i.e. twice as much, half of it being a rental fee that was demanded by the civil administration which was responsible for ghetto affairs.¹⁹ For the Jews, however, these slave wages—which did not even pretend to provide an essential minimum—were of rather minor importance.

(I feel like noting that by relying on modern capitalism’s criterion for poverty—fewer than two dollars a day—these neoslaves would fail to qualify as impoverished!)

Since the establishment of the [Axis] workshops coincided with the prelude of extermination, a job at a Wehrmacht office was often identical with survival. In particular, the skilled‐worker certificates, the infamous Gelbe Scheine (printed on yellowish paper), would soon become the only chance of avoiding the mass murders of the first five months of occupation.

During the initial phase of the so‐called Aktionen perpetrated by [Axis] SS and police units and their [collaborationist] auxiliaries in the first six weeks of occupation,²⁰ Wehrmacht officers were frequently able to save their workers from falling victim to the executions. This was by and large due to the fact that the civil administration had not yet arrived. The administrative vacuum during these early weeks was filled by the army whose position was thus strengthened in regard to Security Police and SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e. the SS secret service).²¹

[…]

The common element of the above‐mentioned rescue efforts is tightly linked to the ubiquitous question of labor supply. As Jewish lives depended increasingly on their usefulness as (skilled) workers, the rôle of the Wehrmacht, probably the single most important employer in the occupied territories, grew proportionally stronger. Labor shortage was indeed one of the most pressing problems of the [Fascist] war economy.

In the Reich proper, the massive rearmament boom had led from large‐scale unemployment in the early 1930s to an ever‐increasing deficit in available manpower by 1939. Though preparing for war, the [Fascist] economy at the same time lacked the essential prerequisites.⁴⁸ Even before the attack on Poland, General Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s leading armaments expert, therefore stressed the need to boost industrial production, foreign currency reserves, the production of staple commodities—and the number of “men.”⁴⁹

While the former problems could be solved at least partially by sustained internal action, the latter exceeded the capabilities even of an enlarged [Reich]. Indeed, these shortcomings did not only prove to be the precondition but also a major objective of the war to come.⁵⁰

In particular, the growing discrepancy between the available human resources and the various claims on these posed a severe threat to the [Axis] war effort. The recourse to forced labor offered the easiest way out of that dilemma. POWs from Poland as well as from the west, especially from France, were drafted by the thousands and were soon joined by predominantly Polish civilians. By June 1940, 348,000 POWs and 800,000 Polish civilians had been brought to [the Third Reich].

However, recruitment for operations “Sealion” (GB) and “Barbarossa” (SU) caused a further aggravation of the situation at the home front. From May 1939 to May 1941, the German workforce was reduced by six million and would undergo even further strains once fighting had started. In a mere three months the Wehrmacht lost 520,000 men in the east and by the end of February 1942 the one‐million watermark had been passed.

Inevitably, the continual replacements led to a breakdown of the Reich’s labor market. The number of male civilian workers that had peaked at 24.5 million before the Second World War was down to 13.5 million in September 1944.⁵¹

Once more, an extensive forced labor program would have been the easiest solution to [Fascism’s] economic deficiencies. But due to mistaken hopes for a rapid victory over the USSR and the ideologically motivated rejection of bringing both “Bolshevists” and “subhumans” to the Reich, no such plans were made in the early stages of the war. Only in October, when the dream of a swift Soviet defeat obviously clashed with reality, did [Berlin] consent to the recruitment of Red Army POWs and civilians from the eastern territories.⁵²

The above paragraph holds important implications for the present: since Zionism’s economy has been suffering as a consequence of its prolonged warfare, it is probable that the neocolony is in turn intensifying its exploitation of lower‐class Palestinians, especially neoslaves. The only problem with this prediction is that we have surprisingly little evidence to substantiate it (at least for now).

As Christian Streit has shown, this decision came far too late to be of any help in the short term. Anticipating directives from Berlin, the Wehrmacht had deliberately reduced supplies, housing, and medical care to less than a bare minimum causing the death of hundreds of thousands of [Soviet] POWs. Housing literally turned out to be the equivalent of Göring’s notorious “holes in the ground.”

Malnutrition as devised by Herbert Backe was practiced in all camps.⁵³ Thus, Soviet prisoners of war that were to be transferred to Lithuanian camps received a bare 100–200 g of bread and 20–30 g of millet a day while being forced on marches of about 40 kilometers. In Vilnius, the Armee‐Gefangenen‐Stelle 10, a temporary POW camp, supplied nothing but “100 g millet without bread” as the complete daily ration. Predictably, in October the aerodrome in nearby Kaunas reported a death toll of 130 per day and classified a mere 10% of all prisoners as fit to work.⁵⁴

This situation presented the [Axis] decision‐makers with a dilemma since the demand for Red Army prisoners was high, both at home and in the eastern territories where the exploitation of economic resources was now a prime objective of occupational policy. In the Reichskommissariat Ostland this led to a U‐turn in the way the Jewish population was treated.

In contrast to the first months of occupation, when the Wehrmacht economic sections had reduced the numbers of Jewish employees wherever possible, hoping that they could be replaced by the Lithuanian gentile population and POWs, the ailing and dying Soviet soldiers now made way for Jewish workers.⁵⁵

Realizing that all efforts to exploit the conquered territories would prove pointless without a sufficient and adequately trained labor reservoir on which to draw, the Wehrmacht increasingly pressed for significant exemptions of Jewish workers from the extermination process. The only case in which their re‐introduction into Wehrmacht production necessarily failed was Estonia: here, as the Rüstungsinspektion Ostland laconically remarked, there were no Jews left.⁵⁶

However, the fact that the military units fell back on Jewish labor did not indicate a wholehearted, long‐term interest of the Wehrmacht to spare the Jewish population in any of the eastern territories. As there could be no doubt about the general undesirability of Jewish participation in economic life, in the middle run these workers would have to be replaced by local gentiles.

Therefore, the availability of the latter would determine the fate of the former. In some cases, the substitution of Jews by gentiles was rapidly and successfully implemented: in Anykščiai, in the rayon of Utėna, a felt boot factory had lost 40 to 50 Jewish workers in a pogrom in the early days of the war. However, to the satisfaction of the [Axis] armaments office in Kaunas, this had not caused a halt in production. Instead, the immediate employment of Lithuanians had turned the “Jewish dump […] into an important workshop for the […] Wehrmacht.”⁵⁷

Still, this proved to be the exception to the rule. By spring 1942, a general distrust of [the Third Reich’s] labor policy was virulent among the Lithuanian population, which had significant repercussions on the question of Jewish labor. Of all people, it was Fritz Sauckel, the notorious plenipotentiary of labor service and head of the “biggest slave‐labour programme in history,”⁵⁸ who appeared on the scene just in time. His ever‐increasing demands for “volunteers” for the Reichseinsatz delivered the decisive blow to the Lithuanian labor market.

Shortly after his appointment, Sauckel fixed the number of men and women to be deported to [the Third Reich] by October 1942 at 45,000, and by the end of 1943 at 100,000. More than 200 recruiters were sent east, and police and Wehrmacht were asked for support.⁵⁹

The results were nonetheless disastrous. Of [the] 235,000 Lithuanians who had been ordered to muster in spring 1943, no more than 132,000 actually showed up, most of them after the deadline and only due to the threat and exemplary implementation of severe penalties. Up to February 12, 1944, no more than some 33,000 men, women and adolescents were actually deported to [the Third Reich].⁶⁰

Thus bereft of both [Soviet] POWs and a sufficient Lithuanian labor pool, the [Third Reich’s] civil and military sections had to rely on Jewish workers to a high degree. In Vilnius, the local Wehrmacht armaments office consequently justified the increase in the number of Jewish workers which had reached 7,238 by referring to the “general employment situation” in July 1942.

This trend continued in the following months so that in November the job center counted 8,824 employed Jews, of which 4,061 were working for the military forces, 4,319 for the civilian administration, and another 444 in private companies. Six months later a total of 11,560 Jews were reported to be in employer–employee relationships.⁶¹

The liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943 put an abrupt end to the widespread use of Jewish labor. All offices and workshops had to let go of their ghetto workforce, with the above‐mentioned four exceptions. The privileged status of HKP 562, which became the single most important employer of Jewish workers in Vilnius for the rest of the war, resulted by and large from the outstanding importance of its tasks.

[…]

The immense importance of Jewish labor thus provided the background against which Wehrmacht sections could argue for the indispensability of their workers and protect these from the grip of the SS. Moreover, in the summer of 1943, it was possible for Plagge to achieve a special provision and an additional extension of his workforce due to the fact that the problem of labor scarcity and the critical situation of Wehrmacht motorization coincided in the institution of the HKP.

These structural prerequisites notwithstanding, it depended on the individual officers whether, and to what extent and with what intentions, they made use of the potential of economic rationales. Indeed, in the overwhelming majority of cases the struggle for Jewish lives undertaken by Wehrmacht sections was due to strictly utilitarian considerations. Nor did all the protagonists of the present sample draw a sharp line between philanthropic reasons for their actions and practical considerations on how their military tasks could best be fulfilled.

In fact, at least two of the three men did not make such a distinction. Both Plagge and Schönbrunner explicitly intended to further the [Axis] war effort which essentially depended on labor recruitment. Some decades after, in a remarkably self‐conscious analysis, Schönbrunner would call his rescue efforts a “double‐edged affair.”⁶⁴

This is not to say that the rescuers’ actions were less than extraordinary. Among thousands of other Wehrmacht soldiers, officers as well as rank and file, they represented a tiny minority, wholly insignificant in terms of quantity, who developed a sense of responsibility for the Jews left at their command. In Vilnius, Schmid, Schönbrunner, and Plagge were the only ones who made extensive use of their competences and who found the courage to help their workers in times of need. Thus, they were the proverbial exception to the rule.⁶⁵

This thesis also supplies evidence against the myth that the Fascists micromanaged businesses to every last detail:

Schmid, Schönbrunner, and Plagge all benefited from their relative autonomy in their respective fields of action. While the Versprengtensammelstelle was detached from both Schmid’s battalion and his commanding officers in terms of tasks and location, Schönbrunner had not only been the guiding spirit behind the establishment of the tailor‐shop but also remained single‐handedly in charge of it until its dissolution.

Moreover, Schönbrunner was able to count on his commanding officer’s indifference. Zehnpfenning did by no means support Schönbrunner’s efforts when he learned about them, but neither did he take disciplinary action against his subordinate.⁸¹ In the case of HKP 562, Plagge was the quasi‐sovereign head of the repair unit. His work was hardly ever supervised, provided that everything went smoothly.⁸²

The autonomous disposition over available resources was thus a trait common to all three cases. Being removed from control, either in terms of hierarchy or geography or both, meant that the threat of sanction was significantly reduced (although a sword of Damocles it remained). One might also argue that the three protagonists were somewhat less exposed to the influence of obedience and peer group pressure as highlighted in the well‐known experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.⁸³

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 24).

1933: Berlin dissolved the Catholic Christian trade unions (even though the Chancellor was a self‐identified Catholic), and it arrested many Trade Union leaders before taking them to camps and prisons.
1936: Fascist Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg drew up Case Green as a hypothetic campaign against Czechoslovakia, and U‐27 launched at Bremen.
1938: The Imperialists reached Madang, Jiangxi Province, China.
1940: French General Huntziger and Fascist General Badoglio signed the Franco‐Fascist armistice at Villa Olgiata near Rome, but fighting would continue until the following day when the agreement would take effect. Additionally, the Empire of Japan requested Britain to close the Burma Road, a land supply route into China, and submarine U‐47 sank Panamanian ship Cathrine with the deck gun about three hundred miles west of Land’s End in southwestern England. As the entire crew of nineteen escaped to lifeboats, U‐47’s crew gave them food and red wine before they set adrift for their eventual rescue! Aside from that, Robert von Greim received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross medal, and Morosini arrived at Naples at 2130 hours, completing her first war patrol.
1941: Both Kaunas and Vilnius surrendered to the Axis; military interim commandants took over the executive and legislative powers. As well, large demonstrations began in Madrid in support of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union; demonstrations soon spread to other parts of Spain. The Eastern Axis also asserted pressure on France for Indochina, and the Third Reich’s Chancellor arrived at the Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia as the Kingdom of Hungary broke relations with the Soviet Union. The Axis E‐Boat S35 discovered the Soviet submarine S3 (N. A. Kostromityev) off Steinort, Germany and fired several torpedoes which all missed. The Axis then sunk S3 with depth charges and hand grenades. Axis bombers also assaulted Chongqing, China, damaging the British Consulate among other buildings. Finally, Leonardo da Vinci, while searching for survivors of Axis supply ship Alstertor in the Atlantic Ocean, came across a Luftwaffe aircraft; they exchanged recognition signals. At 1248 hours, she came across British carrier HMS Furious escorted by light cruiser HMS Hermione, destroyer HMS Legion, and destroyer HMS Lance; the Axis submarine submerged, but could not get in a good attack position.
1942: Five Ju 88 bombers assaulted Allied shipping at anchor in the Kola Inlet near Murmansk, Russia starting at 0908 hours, sinking British minesweeper HMS Gossamer at 0921 hours (leaving twenty‐three dead and twelve wounded). Additionally, Axis air forces commenced an offensive against Yugoslavian partisans and conducted a raid on Birmingham.
1943: Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein flew the Bf 110 nightfighter for the first time, discovered technical issues, and returned to flying his usual Ju 88 aircraft, in which he shot down four British Lancaster bombers. His victories now stood at thirty‐five.
1944: During the morning, a V‐1 flying bomb, shot down by a fighter, crashed on the Newlands Military Camp at Charing, near Ashford, Kent, England. Forty‐seven men died and twenty‐eight became sorely wounded. As well, Berlin ordered all but one division of LIII Korps, encircled near Vitebsk, Byelorussia, to break out.
1945: Imperial representatives in Moscow requested the Soviet Union to extend the neutrality pact originally signed in 1941 and due to expire in April 1946. Apart from that, an Axis Ar 234 aircraft surrendered—remarkably, over six weeks after the Western Axis had officially done so—to the British at Sola Airfield in Stavanger, Norway. (This aircraft was later flown from Sola for Cherbourg, France, where it would be embarked onto a ship for transport to Imperial America.)

“It stands on the side, looks at the rioting settlers, and begins to be a partner in war crimes,” [Amiram] Levin told the public broadcaster. “It’s 10 times worse than the issue of [military] readiness… and I say honestly, I am not angry at the Palestinians, I am angry at us. We are killing ourselves from the inside.”

[…]

The interviewer asked Levin if he agreed with a May 2016 speech by former Meretz MK Yair Golan, who was IDF deputy chief of staff at the time, in which he said that processes [under Zionism] were similar to some in Europe in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

“We find it difficult to say it, but that’s the truth,” Levin responded. “Look around Hebron, look at streets, streets that Arabs can’t use, only Jews, that’s exactly what happened in countries like that.”

Pressed on whether he saw specific similarities with Nazi Germany, Levin said: “Of course. It hurts, it’s not nice, but that’s the reality. It’s better to deal with it, even if it is hard, than to ignore it.”

Levin also assailed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appointment of “draft dodger” cabinet members such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who was not accepted for mandatory military service by the IDF because of his extremist activities.

The prime minister is being exploited by “a messianic group of criminals, former ‘hilltop youth,’ people who don’t even know what democracy is,” he charged, referring to extremist settler activists.

“They come from areas where there is no democracy, from the West Bank, where for 56 years there hasn’t been democracy there,” said Levin. “There is absolute apartheid.”

[…]

In response to Levin’s radio interview, Likud MK Danny Danon, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, expressed disappointment that people who had contributed to the state in the past would express such sentiments, saying that “their minds get a little confused.”

“Anyone who compares us to Germany or the Nazi régime needs to be examined,” Danon said.

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Click here for events that happened today (June 23).

1933: Hermann Göring issued a police directive to suppress all activities of the Social Democratic Party, including meetings and press, and ordered confiscation of all its property.
1939: Hermann Göring headed up the Reich Defense Council to plan for total mobilization of the country for war. Minister of Economics Walther Funk offered the idea of using future prisoners of war as forced laborers, while SS chief Heinrich Himmler offered his prisoners in concentration camps for the same purpose.
1940: The Third Reich’s Chancellor went on a three‐hour tour of the architecture of Paris with architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker in his only visit to the city. Although Berlin and Paris had already signed an armistice, fighting between Fascist Italy and France continued while French delegates negotiated in Rome; General Huntzinger, who signed the German–French armistice at Compiègne yesterday, was once again the a member of the French delegation.
1942: The Luftwaffe lost its latest fighter aircraft, a Focke‐Wulf Fw 190, when it mistakenly landed at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
1989: Werner Best, first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo, finally dropped dead.

Pictured: An Axis soldier surrendering to the Soviets in December 1941.

Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 69–71:

The Wehrmacht continued to advance, albeit very slowly, and by mid‐November some units found themselves only thirty kilometres from the capital. But the troops were now totally exhausted and running out of supplies. Their commanders knew that it was simply impossible to take Moscow, tantalizingly close as the city may have been, and that even doing so would not bring them victory. On December 3, a number of units abandoned the offensive on their own initiative.

Within days, however, the entire [Wehrmacht] in front of Moscow was simply forced on the defensive. Indeed, on December 5, at three in the morning, in cold and snowy conditions, the Red Army suddenly launched a major, well‐prepared counterattack. The Wehrmacht’s lines were pierced in many places, and the [Western Axis was] thrown back between 100 and 280 kilometres with heavy losses of men and equipment. It was only with great difficulty that a catastrophic encirclement could be avoided.

On December 8, Hitler ordered his army to abandon the offensive and to move into defensive positions. He blamed this setback on the supposedly unexpected early arrival of winter, refused to pull back further to the rear, as some of his generals suggested, and proposed to attack again in the spring.¹⁹

Thus ended Hitler’s blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, the war that, had it been victorious, would have realized the great ambition of his life, the destruction of the Soviet Union. More importantly, such a victory would also have provided [the Third Reich] with sufficient oil and other resources to make it a virtually invulnerable world power. As such, [the Axis] would very likely have been capable of finishing off stubborn Great Britain, even if the U.S. would have rushed to help its Anglo‐Saxon cousin, which, in early December of 1941, was not yet in the cards.

A blitzsieg, that is, a rapid victory against the Soviet Union, then, was supposed to have made [an Axis] defeat impossible, and would in all likelihood have done so. (It is probably fair to say that if [the Axis] had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany would today still be the hegemon of Europe, and possibly of the Middle East and North Africa as well.) However, defeat in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 meant that [the Axis’s] blitzkrieg did not produce the hoped‐for blitzsieg.

In the new “Battle of the Marne” just to the west of Moscow, [the Axis] suffered the defeat that made victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general. It ought to be noted that the United States was not yet involved in the war against [the Axis].

Bearing in mind the lessons of World War I, Hitler and his generals had known from the start that, in order to win the new Great War they had unleashed, [the Axis] had to win fast, lightning‐fast. But on December 5, 1941, it became evident to everyone present in Hitler’s headquarters that a blitzsieg against the Soviet Union would not be forthcoming, and that [the Axis] was doomed to lose the war, if not sooner, then later. According to General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the OKW, Hitler then realized that he could no longer win the war.²⁰

And so it can be argued, as a German historian, an expert on the war against the Soviet Union, has done, that the success of the Red Army in front of Moscow was unquestionably the “major break” (Zäsur) of the entire world war.²¹

In other words, the tide of World War II can be said to have turned on December 5, 1941. However, as real tides turn not suddenly but rather gradually and imperceptibly, the tide of the war turned not on a single day, but over a period of days, weeks, and even months, in the period of approximately three months that elapsed between the (late) summer of 1941 and early December of that same year. The tide of the war in the east turned gradually, but it did not do so imperceptibly.

Already in August 1941, astute observers had started to doubt that [an Axis] victory, not only in the Soviet Union but in the war in general, still belonged to the realm of possibilities. The well‐informed Vatican, for example, initially very enthusiastic about [the Axis’s] “crusade” against the Soviet homeland of “godless” Bolshevism, started to express grave concerns about the situation in the east in late summer 1941; by mid‐October, it came to the conclusion that [the Third Reich] would lose the war.²²

Likewise in mid‐October, the Swiss secret services reported that “the Germans can no longer win the war.”²³ By late November, a defeatism of sorts had started to infect the higher ranks of the Wehrmacht and of the [NSDAP].

Even as they were urging their troops forward toward Moscow, some generals opined that it would be preferable to make peace overtures and wind down the war without achieving the great victory that had seemed so certain at the start of Operation Barbarossa.²⁴

When the Red Army launched its devastating counteroffensive on December 5, Hitler himself realized that he would lose the war. But he was not prepared to let the German public know that.

The nasty tidings from the front near Moscow were presented to the public as a temporary setback, blamed on the supposedly unexpectedly early arrival of winter or on the incompetence or cowardice of certain commanders. (It was only a good year later, after the catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43, that the German public, and the entire world, would realize that [the Axis] was doomed; which is why even today many historians believe that the tide turned in Stalingrad.)

(Emphasis added.)

Thus, I would like to submit that I made a mistake when I said that Stalingrad was the turning point for the Axis. It was not. It was the Battle of Moscow that was, one could say, the Axis’s Waterloo.

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 22).

1892: Robert Ritter von Greim, commander‐in‐chief of the Luftwaffe, existed.
1933: Berlin issued orders to dissolve the Social Democratic Party.
1934: Ferdinand Porsche agreed to embark on Fascism’s Volkswagen project.
1938: Berlin passed a labor conscription law that guaranteed employment but also removed job freedom. Coincidentally, one thousand private construction companies employing half a million workers were organized into twenty‐two construction brigades by Fritz Todt for the construction of the Westwall.
1940: Paris signed the Second Compiègne armistice with the Third Reich, in the same railroad car in which the Twoth Reich signed the Armistice in 1918. As well, British Foreign Secretary Halifax had his undersecretary Richard Butler contact Swedish Minister in London, Björn Prytz, for possible Anglo‐German negotiations. The Fascists intercepted Prytz’s report back to Stockholm and concluded that the war with Britain was likely to end by the end of the summer.
1941: At about 0300 hours, Benito Mussolini was awaken by an urgent message from Berlin, informing Rome of the invasion of the Soviet Union; though annoyed by not having been notified earlier, Mussolini dutifully declared war on the Soviet Union. Bucharest would also make a declaration of war on the Soviet Union on this date. Apart from that, the Axis branded Jews from the Dorohoi district of the Kingdom of Romania as communists or spies and transported them by cattle cars to concentration camps in Tirgu and Craiova.
1942: Erwin Rommel became Field Marshal after the Axis capture of Tobruk.
1945: The Axis lost the Battle of Okinawa. Consequently, Isamu Chō, Axis officer, suicided. Mitsuru Ushijima, Axis general, did likewise.

Pictured: ‘An Indian ruler reviewing a guard of honour of the army occupying his country.’ — Gerwin Strobl

To quote only a brief selection of examples from Gerwin Strobl’s The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, pages 61–6:

The precise basis of Hitler’s admiration for Britain — the […] ruthlessness and absence of moral scruples — remained hidden through much of the 1930s. To have revealed it to the wider world might have invited unwelcome conclusions about the Third Reich’s own intentions. Mein Kampf contained very little about Britain, and the Second Book with its references to the Anglo‐Saxon ‘genius’ at territorial expansion was never published.¹

Hitler’s public utterances after 1933 were also — deliberately — unenlightening in this regard. The fiction of a peace‐loving government seeking only modest revisions to the terms of Versailles was crucial at first to the régime’s survival. This demanded a degree of circumspection. Yet the leadership’s fascination with the British Empire was no secret. The Empire had been the only British topic regularly touched upon by the party’s intellectuals in their speeches and journalism during the Weimar years.

[…]

The suggested lessons from British history became more explicit as the régime gained in self‐confidence. In the autumn of 1936, for instance, [the Third Reich’s] main illustrated weekly newspaper, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung discussed, at length, the Fashoda crisis of 1898. Memories of past Anglo‐French discord were no doubt part of the attraction (and this particular instance was within living memory). The focus of the article was, however, firmly on Britain’s handling of the crisis.

This culminated in the thought that “when the moment came, Britain seized the opportunity brutally’.⁶ The link — in language alone — with Hitler’s views about Britain is obvious. And the fact that this article appeared in the wake of German armies re‐entering the Rhineland is surely no coincidence either. It suggests that for all the [Fascist] rhetoric about an ‘unprecedented age’, some party members saw the Third Reich following where other imperial powers had led.⁷

This would later become quite explicit: when the rump Czech state was occupied in March 1939, it was not annexed outright. Instead, a so‐called Protectorate was proclaimed: an institution for which there was no real precedent in German history.⁸ Allowing the Czechs all the trappings of independence, from postage stamps to presidential guard, was not just designed to facilitate collaboration.

The fiction of Czech self‐government under the ‘protection’ of the Reich was intended above all for British eyes. For the new dispensation in Prague was a deliberate mirror image of Britain’s own relations with the so‐called Princely States in India. President Hacha, it was implied, would now receive avuncular guidance from Baron Neurath in much the same way that Indian maharajahs were assisted in governing their states by British Residents.⁹

Creating such parallels was an act of conscious malice. Britain, it was hoped, could thus be shamed into silent acquiescence.¹⁰ (When this hope proved elusive, Goebbels promptly charged Britain with ‘hypocrisy’:¹¹ or, as one newspaper put it in Shakespearean tones, ‘hypocrisy, thy name is England’.)¹²

If the allusions to British imperial practice failed to bring the hoped‐for benefits abroad, they were rather more useful domestically. The account in 1936 of the Fashoda crisis is a perfect illustration. The [Fascist] government’s systematic breach of international agreements did not just provoke alarm abroad. It also caused concern at home. The quarrel was with the means rather than the objectives of the regime’s foreign policy.

Few Germans would have questioned their government’s moral right to reoccupy the Rhineland, to recover Danzig and Memel, or to demand self‐determination for the Sudetenland. Risking war in pursuit of such aims was another matter. And joy over the successful resolution of one crisis did not necessarily lessen anxieties at the onset of the next.¹³ It is here that Britain’s imperial record proved useful to [Fascist] propaganda.

British history, the régime suggested to its subjects, had demonstrated time and again that the use of force — or the threat of it — was the surest way of safeguarding national interests. And as Britain’s international standing proved, this approach did not preclude diplomatic respectability. On the contrary, it was essential in securing and maintaining Great Power status. What had worked for Britain would now also work for the Third Reich.

On reflection, it is striking how ingenious the apparently random choice of Fashoda was in 1936. Comparing the crises on the Rhine and the Nile made the Third Reich seem moderate. It had, after all, in the famous phrase, ‘merely invaded its own front garden’. Events at Fashoda, on the other hand, had been an undisguised exercise in imperial expansion. Britain had had neither legal nor substantive moral rights in the Sudan.

And if European claims were to be admitted, French claims on the Nile were no less credible than those of Britain. But British interests were at stake, and all other considerations duly took second place.¹⁴

This is a recognisable echo of Hitler's familiar pseudo‐Darwinist views. Yet the significance of this article lies less in its content than in its ill‐disguised objective: the attempt to influence public opinion in Germany by invoking the real or supposed British example. This was done in a spirit not of envy or resentment, but of frank admiration (even in 1939, amid deteriorating Anglo‐German relations, the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps invited its readership to learn from Britain’s road to worldwide influence).¹⁵ If the Reich was to achieve a status comparable to that of Britain, it would have to equal Britain’s single‐minded pursuit of power.

This intention is even more evident in a second article on imperial history published by the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. This formed part of the same series of articles in the autumn of 1936.

Before the paper turned to events at Fashoda, it had examined the beginnings of British India. Here, too, potential lessons were discovered. And it was, inevitably, the morally questionable exploits of India’s first British rulers that provided the focus of interest. “Men, such as Clive and Hastings’, the paper observed, ‘have often been called adventurers, desperados and murderers’. But this was to miss the point: ‘they should be seen, fundamentally, ‘as great statesmen who in all their actions were mindful only of the interests of their country’.¹⁶

[…]

Germany did not simply move from the arrogance of the Kaiser to the hubris of Hitler. In between lay a period of grave self‐doubt, which all the patriotic bluster of the Weimar right could never quite disguise. As the twenties wore on and the German republic (and most of continental Europe) moved uneasily from crisis to crisis, Britain’s comparative stability stood out. The root of German admiration was therefore simply British power. And the most tangible expression of British power was the British Empire.

Put at its simplest, the Empire epitomised success to many German eyes, in much the same way that the new German republic embodied national failure. Perhaps inevitably, analyses of British policies and institutions — ‘of how the English do things’ in the words of one Weimar‐era book — tended to be undertaken with more than half an eye on Germany itself.¹⁷ The diarist Viktor Klemperer, for instance, records in 1920 a dinner‐party conversation about British ‘colonial methods’; his host, a prominent banker, promptly contrasted British success with German failure.¹⁸

This, Klemperer felt, complemented related observations by the great Anglist Wilhelm Dibelius: the British Empire, it will be remembered, had featured prominently at the Conference of Modern Linguists at Halle that year. What is interesting about this is not so much the topic as the tone. Neither Dibelius nor Klemperer were noticeably unpatriotic (Klemperer at one stage hoped he might still be fit enough to enlist in the coming war of revenge).

The sentiments Klemperer recorded, and his own calm response to them, are therefore noteworthy: there was — less than two years after Versailles — a frank admission of German shortcomings in the former colonies, rather than complaints about their loss through Allied iniquity. ‘The colonial crime of Versailles’, as [Fascist] propaganda would later call it, did not prevent a cool assessment of Britain’s success.¹⁹

Though the practicalities of colonial rule would in due course capture the imagination of the [NSDAP] (and, particularly, that of its leader), the colonies were for a long time purely a side issue. Not even Hitler at first was able to detect the direct relevance of British colonial methods to inter‐war Germany. Instead, the focus of interest lay in the power that had created and now sustained the Empire. It was here that German observers hoped to derive lessons for Germany.

Wilhelm Dibelius, who perhaps more than any other Anglist shaped German perceptions of Britain after the Great War, detected useful lessons. He pointed particularly to the political arena. The British, it seemed to him, possessed as a nation a unique ‘feel’ for politics: a strong ‘political instinct’.²⁰ This he contrasted with the situation in Germany both before and after 1918. Dibelius was influential not just in educational circles.²¹

One catches clear echoes of his sentiments in Hitler’s Second Book: ‘If the Earth today holds a British Empire this is because there currently exists no nation more suited [to rule] by virtue of its general political characteristics and the average political intelligence [of its individual members]’.²²

There is a distinct irony to Hitler’s enthusiasm: Weimar Anglisten also regularly praised British ‘common sense’,²³ ‘self‐mastery’ and personal ‘restraint’.²⁴ Such inconsistencies are to be expected: Hitler, throughout his career, was adept at picking the plums out of any pudding and ignoring (ultimately to his cost) what he found less palatable. In spite of obvious contradictions between the Anglisten and the future Führer therefore, there existed some common ground between them: it lay in the belief that Germany could benefit from the British example.

Hence, quoting Alexander Dallin’s German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, page 7:

Hitler continued, ‘if we speak of new lands, we are bound to think first of Russia and her border states’.²

His favourite analogy in this connection was a comparison of the future German East with British India.³ To him, India provided an object lesson of colonial exploitation and Machiavellian virtuosity; he used it to buttress his conviction that the population of ‘Germany’s India’ — the Soviet Union — was likewise no more than ‘white slaves’ destined to serve the master race.

Characteristic of his landlocked outlook, he proclaimed that Germany’s primary colonies were to be found not overseas but in Russia.⁴ Along with its manpower, the resources of the East were to assure the material well‐being of the German people.

Of course, this is not to say that the Fascists approved of London’s cumbersome pseudodemocracy, and the British Empire’s methods were, at times, too moderate for them. Quoting Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, page 186:

After lunch, Halifax brought up his experiences as viceroy of India, where he had urged a policy of conciliation. Hitler, who had just related how Lives of a Bengal Lancer was his favorite film, and compulsory viewing for the SS to show “how a superior race must behave,” rudely interrupted him.
“Shoot Gandhi!”
A startled Halifax fell silent, as Hitler went into a rant:
“Shoot Gandhi! And if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.”

In spite of these differences, the German Fascists long dreamt of allying with the British Empire at the earliest possible opportunity. Page 325:

To Hitler, Great Britain was Germany’s natural ally and the nation and empire he most admired. He did not covet British colonies. He did not want or seek a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. He did not wish to bring down the British Empire. He was prepared to appease Britain to make her a friend of [the Third Reich]. Where the Kaiser had grudgingly agreed in 1913 to restrict the High Seas Fleet to 60 percent of the Royal Navy, Hitler in 1935 readily agreed to restrict his navy to 35 percent. What Hitler ever sought was an allied, friendly, or at least neutral Britain.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

It was only after London repeatedly rejected his offers that his opinion on the English soured. But the damage had already been done: while Fascist Italy might have served as a better overall model for the Third Reich, the British Empire, together with Imperial America and the previous Reichs, all continued to function as important sources of inspiration for the German Fascists.

The British Empire in particular proved that the ‘white race’ could dominate the globe, and like the late Ottoman Empire, it proved that oppressors could face no more than minimal consequences for their atrocities. If the largest empire in all of history could sprout from this quaint little isle, what was to inhibit the Fascists from repeating this success?

[Trivia]

The Germanic Isle, pg. 19:

A […] whole range of English words entered the German language and it became ‘fashionable’ (itself an addition to the German vocabulary) to pepper one’s conversation with occasional English expressions. Even leading [Fascists] were not immune to this fad. Goebbels, for instance, proves capable of writing in his diaries ‘Nur Mut, old boy’ (‘Chin up, old boy’).⁴⁰

(I know that this anecdote is less important, but I couldn’t resist sharing.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 21).

1934: President Paul von Hindenburg, with Minister of War Werner von Blomberg at his side, met with Adolf Schicklgruber. Hindenburg told Schicklgruber to back down politically, or he would declare martial law, which would remove powers from Schicklgruber, giving them to the military instead.
1935: Walther von Brauchitsch became the commanding officer of the 1st Army Corps.
1940: A Fascist Ar 196 aircraft from battlecruiser Scharnhorst mistook Fascist submarine U‐99 for an enemy submarine and damaged her with a bomb. U‐99 was already en route back to Wilhelmshaven with a sick sailor; she would now require a longer time to complete repairs. Aside from this, Erich Raeder met with Adolf Schicklgruber to discuss the invasion of Britain, then French and Reich representatives met to negotiate peace at the 1918 Armistice site at Compiègne using the very same rail carriage where the WWI armistice, brought from a French museum, for the negotiations. Schicklgruber personally attended the negotiation, but at 1530 hours abruptly left the meeting to show disrespect for the French. At 2007 hours, Fascist submarine U‐47 under command of Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien fired a torpedo at a tanker in the middle of Allied convoy HX‐49 in a position fifty miles south‐southwest of Cape Clear in the southwestern tip of Ireland. At 2030 hours, French General Huntzinger called his government and informed that the Third Reich allowed no room for negotiations and demanded harsh terms; he was told to accept Berlin’s terms. Meanwhile, in southern France, the thirty‐two Fascist divisions deployed on the French border marched through the Little Saint Bernard Pass in the Alps and along the French Riviera; some of the Fascists were met with a heavy snow storm and the latter halted by a very small group of French troops at Menton, which was about five miles from the border. According to the diary of Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini was extremely embarrassed by his troops’ inability to break through the French lines.
1941: Vichy enacted a law to exclude Jews from schools, and in the afternoon, Berlin wrote a message to Rome, informing it of the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. This message would not reach Rome until early in the next day, less than an hour before the operation began. After dark, Axis bombers bombed Southampton, England and dropped many naval mines in surrounding waters. The bombing caused a leak in the King George V Dry Dock, and demolished the down‐line platform of the Southern Railway Central Station, blocking much rail traffic.
1942: The Fascist bourgeoisie reluctantly decided to delay its summer offensive due to the heavy Soviet defense of Sevastopol. As well, fifty Luftwaffe aircraft conducted a raid on Southampton, England.
1943: Berlin ordered the liquidation of all Jewish ghettos in all Soviet territories under the Third Reich’s control. On the same day, the Axis liquidated the Lvov Ghetto in Poland, exterminating ten thousand to twenty thousand Jews… sigh.
1944: Mussolini transformed the Partito Fascista Repubblicano into a military organization.
1945: Operation Kikusui № 10 launched off Okinawa, participated by about thirty Axis Navy and fifteen Axis Army special attack and escorting aircraft.
1955: Michael Kühnen, German neofascist, was born.

Certainly, the [Axis authorities] were well aware of the Rivierenbuurt’s disproportionately large Jewish population from the outset of the Occupation. This awareness took on a greater relevance after February 1941, when a ghetto was imposed in the Jodenhoek (‘Jewish Corner’), the traditional centre of Jewish settlement of Amsterdam.

While this ghetto had been based on the principles of eastern European paradigms, it proved to be untenable because the [Axis authorities] could not seal in its Jewish population, due to the high proportion of [gentiles] living there who needed to continue to interact with the rest of the city.

Thus, by the middle of 1941, the [Axis authorities] alighted upon an alternative approach that could help achieve their aim by harnessing existing local conditions as they pertained specifically to Amsterdam. Henceforth, three discrete Jodenwijken (‘Jewish Districts’), took the place of the ghetto, of which the Rivierenbuurt was by far the largest.

The [Axis] called this model of containment a ‘lockeres Ghetto’ (slack ghetto), an unenclosed district that allowed resident [gentiles], and Jews, to continue to live alongside each other. In consequence, the physical barriers of the ghetto were rendered superfluous, thereby allowing the Rivierenbuurt to remain open and accessible.

Instead, the activities and movements of Jews were controlled by means of an extraordinarily wide range of persecutory measures, of which personal registration, restricted employment, travel permits and the wearing of the ‘Jewish Star’ for identification purposes were but a few.

If the [Axis authorities] did not explicitly recognize the advantages of the spatial conditions that already existed in the Rivierenbuurt before the mass deportations of the Jews began in July 1942, they soon exploited their benefits. Able to round up their Jewish victims in efficient operations with minimal resources, they could send them rapidly to local assembly points and for onward transportation to almost certain death in the extermination camps at Auschwitz‐Birkenau and Sobibór.

This was achieved, in the first instance, by being able to deploy police during razzias (raids for rounding up Jews) along the grand avenues of the Rivierenbuurt, the design of which was clearly derived from authoritarian precedents, as seen in Paris, St. Petersburg or Imperial Rome (see photo below).

Secondly, the boundaries of the Rivierenbuurt delineated by the River Amstel and canals were capable of being cut off from the surrounding city by raising the bridges, as occurred, for example, without warning, in a major dawn razzia on 20 June 1943. [The Axis rounded up 5,550 Jews in Amsterdam for deportation to occupied Poland.]

Thirdly, the regimented grid‐like planning of the secondary side streets created a net during razzias, the mesh of which could be enlarged or reduced in size as required to isolate specific localities where Jews lived.

Rooseveltlaan [south end], Rivierenbuurt. Source: David Kann, 16 September 2016

In other circumstances, inherent flaws in the progressive architectural design would also have been taken for granted by their designers and residents, yet were capable of disclosing further opportunities for the [Axis]. This came about because four and five storey residential blocks with long frontages, designed for sustaining intensive housing densities, extended from one street corner to another.

Each of these contained tightly packed clusters of spacious apartments in which large numbers of people were billeted when the [Axis] forced Jews from all parts of the country to move to the Rivierenbuurt, which, in effect, rendered it a large detention camp in all but name, pending their future deportation to the camps.

Furthermore, awkward and narrow, steep staircases, accessed by open, communal entrance archways, led from the street to upper floors without alternative escape routes. Panicked Jews were trapped and could not escape being caught (see photo below).

Access staircase at Roerstraat 15 and 17, Rivierenbuurt. Source: David Kann, 26 October 2007.

The buildings, streets and waterways of the Rivierenbuurt might have appeared well‐ordered and beneficial for the well‐being of their residents in peacetime. However, despite the local death rate being similar to the rest of the country, it is evident that the existing built environment of the district could be readily subverted by the [Axis authorities] for more efficient means of conducting their persecution of its Jews.

In the end, when the Rivierenbuurt was finally liberated on the last day of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945, almost no Jews survived, apart from the very few that had managed to hide.

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 20).

1884: Johannes Heinrich Schultz, Axis eugenicist and heterosexist, was sadly brought into the world.
1942: Although four prisoners escaped from Auschwitz, around one thousand Austrian Jews arrived at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, and they became the first Austrian Jews to arrive at that camp. As well, the Axis launched what would be the final attack on Tobruk, Libya, preceded by a heavy artillery and air bombardment at 0530 hours. At 0700 hours, one hundred Axis tanks rushed through a gap in Tobruk’s southeastern lines. The Axis captured the port facilities by 1900 hours, but British troops destroyed stocks of fuel and supplies to prevent capture. Elsewhere, the Wehrmacht’s 24th Infantry Division attacked Fort Lenin and Fort North (held against Axis attacks for the whole day) near Sevastopol, Russia starting at 0900 hours; while Fort Lenin was captured with minimal resistance, Soviet troops at Fort North held their ground, repulsing Axis attacks all day.
1943: The V‐2 rocket production facilities at the Zeppelin Works experienced an Allied aerial raid.
1944: The Axis shot Jakob Edelstein, the former senior Jewish elder (Judenaeltester) of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and his family in Auschwitz. In the East, the Axis captured Forest Hill near Imphal, India but failed to capture Plum Hill, another nearby objective, and the Axis lost the Battle of the Philippine Sea, too. On the other hand, the experimental MW 18014 V‐2 rocket reached an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first handmade object to reach outer space.
1945: The United States Secretary of State approved the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his team of Axis rocket scientists to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip.

Along with the First Reich, the Second Reich, the British Empire, the late Ottoman Empire, and Imperial America, the Kingdom of Italy influenced the Third Reich’s colonialism. However, Patrick Bernhard takes this a step further: he argues that not only did Fascist Italy’s colonialism influence the Third Reich, but that the Third Reich consciously and directly modelled its colonialism after Italian Fascism’s:

Whatever mistrust or racial prejudice may have existed against the Italians, it did little to dampen German interest in Italian settlement efforts. And this interest went far beyond the borrowing of knowledge in relation to the urban planning of settlements. It involved an intense intellectual dialogue, the importance of which for the [Third Reich] can hardly be overestimated.

[…]

Around the world the settlement programme of the Italian Fascists stirred great interest.⁴⁴ In Great Britain, for instance, it was lauded not only for being carried out ‘on the strictest scientific lines’. As its purpose was social and political rather than ‘purely economic’, it also differed fundamentally from anything that had previously been put ‘into large‐scale operation’, the British agriculturalist and director of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edward John Russell, said in 1939.⁴⁵

The American Ruth Sterling Frost put it more bluntly: what made Fascist Italy’s colonization scheme so unique was its ‘utopian quality’ in terms of reshaping the nation, she wrote in one of the U.S.A.’s most renowned geography journals.⁴⁶ This fascination with the massive state‐run colonization project of Fascist Italy went so far that British crofters, who wanted to improve their economic situation, asked for permission to settle in Libya as colonists.⁴⁷

In Germany, the interest in Italian colonialism was even greater. From its inception the [German Fascist] movement was deeply fascinated by Italian colonial activity in North Africa. In the Weimar Republic the NSDAP dedicated numerous illustrated articles in their publications to Africa italiana, and at party rallies it presented slideshows of Italy’s achievements in Africa.⁴⁸ The [NSDAP] sang much praise for the modern and orderly planning of Italy’s new colonial cities, lauding their geometric street layout, public buildings, and excellent social facilities.⁴⁹

The ideology underlying the Italian settlement effort resonated with [NSDAP] members, who saw it as an example of how their own racial and expansionist aspirations could be realized.⁵⁰ Clearly, Africa italiana served as a prism through which the German [anticommunist]s entertained their own visions of empire.

The German [bourgeoisie] had been dreaming of a new German Reich and Lebensraum in the East since the nineteenth century, but this vision had remained a distant fantasy. The Treaty of Versailles had forced the cession of large swaths of territory in the East, and this loss had been highly traumatic.⁵¹

With their colonial policy the Italians had managed to at least partially achieve that which the German right‐wing had long sought, thus lending new momentum to German irredentism and expansionist ambitions. The drawing of parallels between Italian colonialism and a ‘German East’ was additionally facilitated by the fact that Poland had long been the object of colonial aspirations for the German [bourgeoisie], as new research has shown.⁵²

The [German Fascists] were quick to grasp the propaganda value of Italian colonial settlement. Touting Mussolini’s ‘brilliant’ successes was not only a way to stir up mass anger about an ‘inept’ Weimar Republic that had ‘acquiesced’ to the loss of German colonies under the Treaty of Versailles. The [German Fascists] also believed that Italy’s violent expansion on the African continent had helped to promote the ‘permanent mobilization’ of the Italian population, one of the key features of [Fascism].⁵³

The Völkischer Beobachter stressed in 1927 that Italy had been at war since the 1922 March on Rome.⁵⁴ In establishing dominion over North Africa, the party newspaper concluded, Italy had instilled a ‘warrior spirit’ in its people.⁵⁵

The beginning of Italy’s massive colonization programme in 1938 was keenly watched in [the Third Reich]. The degree of attention devoted to this programme in [the Reich] is particularly notable because it occurred at a time when, according to conventional interpretations, [German Fascism] no longer viewed Italy as a rôle model.⁵⁶ In this connection older studies often cite events in Austria, which was annexed by [Berlin] in 1938. These studies argue that Mussolini was presented with a fait accompli, leading to disputes between the régimes.⁵⁷

But this narrative suffers from two problems: Recent works in diplomatic history show that Mussolini had accepted Austria as a [Reich] satellite as early as 1936, and spoke of the ‘common destiny’ shared by the two régimes, which he said should trump points of dispute.⁵⁸ Furthermore, at the expert level, the primary sources corroborate the view of continued good relations between the régimes.

Not only did numerous newspapers⁵⁹ and books enthusiastically report on [Fascism’s] successes in Libya and Abyssinia; between 1938 and 1941, more than 20 large monographs were published, among them studies by renowned authors such as Louise Diel, a journalist who published extensively on women as well as on Italian Fascism.⁶⁰ More important, German offices and administrators charged with planning policy for the East started collecting and assessing information about Italy’s colonial activities in Africa.

This included Hermann Göring’s Four‐Year Plan organization, Robert Ley’s German Labour Front (DAF), the German Academy for Building Research (a research unit in the Reich Labour Ministry), the Minister of Agriculture Walter Darré, and, most important, the Planning Department in Himmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom.

The Planning Department of the Reich Commissariat — the central [Reich] organization for planning resettlement in the eastern territories — was headed for years by the young agronomist Konrad Meyer, who became the chief architect of the infamous Generalplan Ost. Meyer also published the planning journal Neues Bauerntum, which carried several richly illustrated articles about Italy’s colonization programme when plans for the eastern territories were still in their infancy.⁶¹

Information on Africa italiana was collected in numerous ways, including the systematic analysis of Italian literature; scholarships to study Italian methods of colonization awarded by research‐funding institutions such as the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (of which Meyer was vice president); diplomatic trips; and scientific fieldwork.

To learn more about Italy’s colonial settlement programme, Wolfgang Spakler, the German Labour Attaché to the German Embassy in Rome, accompanied the first 20,000 Italian settlers from Genoa to their new homes in Libya in the autumn of 1938. There, the young diplomat not only paid a visit to some of the new villages, but also had the opportunity to speak to governor Italo Balbo — a flying ace on friendly terms with Göring — about Italy’s colonial plans.

Immediately after his return to Rome, Spakler sent a report about his journey directly to Franz Seldte, the [Reich’s] Minister for Labour. As Seldte explained, he had a ‘special interest’ in the making of the [Fascist] colonial Empire.⁶² Konrad Meyer also sent staff to undertake fieldwork, particularly in Libya.⁶³ Günter Wolff, one of his closest colleagues, travelled in March 1939 with a delegation of more than 20 German scholars, journalists and Party representatives to Tripoli, where they inspected the ‘settlement work achieved last year’.⁶⁴

While in Libya, Günter Wolff came to believe that Italy’s experiment would go down in history as a model for large‐scale colonization.⁶⁵ Finally, colonialism was so important to the Reich Commissariat that it organized special training programmes for its staff; knowledge on Africa was thus spread within Himmler’s planning apparatus.⁶⁶

The available sources show clearly that the information gathered on Africa italiana was used primarily for planning activities in Eastern Europe. In 1940, Hans Thierbach, a settlement expert at the German Institute for Foreign Relations, another [Fascist] think tank,⁶⁷ wrote:

The enormous colonization tasks facing us in the Eastern territories, and perhaps one day in the African colonies, oblige us to observe closely others’ colonization methods and to investigate their successes and failures so we can provide a critical analysis of their potential. Italy’s experiments are of particular interest to us since [its] Fascist state has many features in common with [German Fascism].⁶⁸

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 19).

1903: Bern police arrested Benito Mussolini (at the time a socialist) for advocating a violent general strike.
1906: Walther Rauff, mid‐ranking SS commander and Axis war criminal, was tragically born.
1933: Kenkichi Ueda became the deputy chief of the Japanese Army General Staff.
1935: Xie Jieshi became the Manchukuo ambassador plenipotentiary to the Empire of Japan.
1937: The Spanish Nationalists entered Bilbao, Spain.
1939: The Wehrmacht reported that thus far 168 officers had been infiltrated into Danzig in preparation of action.
1940: In the morning, Fascist submarine Galileo Galilei was laying immobile on the seabed in the Gulf of Aden, hiding from British attackers. Afterwards, troops of Fascism’s 7th Panzer Division under Rommel shelled fortifications defending the port of Cherbourg, France; Cherbourg surrendered at 1700 hours. On the same day, the 5th Panzer Division captured Brest, but found the port facilities destroyed by Allied personnel who had already evacuated. Oberleutnant Joachim von Arnim, of the Luftwaffe Kampfeschwader 4, was reported to have been the first member of the Third Reich’s armed forces to have been captured by British Local Defence Volunteers, forerunners of the Home Guard.
1941: The Wehrmachtbericht bulletin of the Wehrmacht’s headquarters mentioned Egmont Prinz zur Lippe‐Weißenfeld, and the Axis expelled U.S. Consular officials in the Third Reich and the Kingdom of Italy in retaliation to a similar action by Washington three days prior. Vichy troops held Allied troops at Qadim while the Indian 5th Infantry Brigade became surrounded at Mezze, then Leonardo da Vinci encountered fellow Axis submarine Brin in the Atlantic Ocean at 1700 and exchanged recognition signals. 1942: After somebody shot down a staff officer from 23.Panzer Division carrying complete plans for an offensive in the Caucasus, the commander and chief of staff of XL Korps became imprisoned on Berlin’s order. The offensive would be launched with no changes to the plan. Apart from this, Axis troops gave chase to retreating British forces in Libya throughout the day. After sundown, these Axis troops reversed direction and moved westward, intending on striking Tobruk, Libya by surprise on the next day. 1943: The Italian Minister of Transport, Vittorio Cini, openly criticised Benito Mussolini during a Cabinet meeting. Mussolini had seen the red light and had tried to put out peace soundings to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary.
1944: In a report to Gerd von Rundstedt, Erwin Rommel predicted that a further Allied landing could be expected on the English Channel coast of France on both sides of Cap Gris Nez or between the Somme and Le Havre. The landing was to coincide with a general offensive from the Normandy Bridgehead. As well, Axis torpedo boats T8, T10, T30, and T31, carrying Finnish forces, sailed towards Narvi (Nerva) Island in the Gulf of Finland. En route, they engaged a Soviet force consisted of four gunboats, ten submarine chasers, and fourteen torpedo boats. The Axis opened fire first, damaging gunboat MBK‐503, gunboat MBK‐505, and submarine chaser MO‐106.
1945: The Axis lost Okinawa to the Allies.
2014: Oskar‐Hubert Dennhardt, Axis Major, dropped dead.

Going on home leave, the [Fascists] would take along suitcases of Jewish loot (Arad 1987, 162). The non‐German guards, predominately Soviet POWs who had switched allegiances during the war, spent their money on food, alcohol, and even sex in nearby villages, as the influx of cash gave rise to prostitution in exchange for money and valuables.

Otto Horn, the camp’s SS nurse, recalled that the guards “were always foraging in the villages for food and drinks” (Sereny 1974, 196; see also Wiernik 1944, 22; Glazar 1995, 71). According to a Polish source, the guards paid “without even counting the bills” (Arad 1987, 163).

The trade between the guards and Poles in the surrounding rural communities took place only during the short period that the camp was operational, between 1942 and 1943. A much longer period of looting started after the camp was dismantled.

The Jewish–Polish writer Rachela Auerbach, who visited Treblinka in November 1945, was appalled by “all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands [who] were digging and searching and raking and straining the sand” (quoted in Arad 1987, 379). For years, the locals would visit the site of the camp in search of valuables that the victims might have hidden or the Dentists and the [Axis] might have missed.

Auerbach’s report and others like it eventually prompted the Ministry of Public Administration to urge local authorities in December 1945 to stop the plunder, but the digging continued. Some people were arrested for plundering mass graves, but no charges were brought (Woycicka 2013, 235–236). In journalistic and eyewitness accounts from the area, terms like “Eldorado,” “Klondike,” and “gold rush” are often used (Gross and Grudzinska‐Gross 2012, 21; Rusiniak 2006; Woycicka 2013, 236).

As late as 2008, a resident of Wólka Okrąglik, the village closest to Treblinka, told journalists: “My brother‐in‐law found a diamond as big as a half of a big toenail. But he drank it away, didn’t even build a barn. Others have instead built houses and not only that — entire farms.” Another man encouraged the journalists to visit his neighbor: “Ask him how the jewelers came all the way from Warsaw to evaluate the gems in his backyard!” (Głuchowski and Kowalski 2008).

[…]

As can be seen in Table 4, the coefficient on Distance to Treblinka is negative and statistically significant, suggesting that wartime property transfers likely affected voting behavior more than 55 years after the Holocaust. Moving from 5 km to 15 km away from the death camp is associated with a 2.7% decrease in electoral support for the anti‐Semitic [Liga Polskich Rodzin], a substantively meaningful effect given that the party’s overall vote share in 2001 was 8% (see Figure 4).

In the community of Kosów Lacki, where Treblinka is located, LPR won 14% of the vote, whereas in communities 50 km away from the camp LPR support is estimated at 9.5%, i.e. closer to its national‐level result.

At the same time, we find no effect of property transfers on the vote for other right‐wing parties from the Solidarity camp, such as PiS, PO, and AWSP (see Table 5, Models (1)–(4)). This finding suggests that exposure to the Jewish wealth did not result in overall higher support for the right in the Treblinka area. Model (5) in Table 5 shows that even in a political environment infused with debates over Polish participation in the persecution of Jews and potential restitution, communities closer to Treblinka did not exhibit higher turnout (H2B).

The results demonstrate that living near the death camp and benefiting from Jewish property indeed made local Poles more likely to support the xenophobic LPR, but not other right‐wing parties. It is important to note that the results hold even after excluding communities located in Bezirk Bialystok, parts of which (though not the area close to Treblinka) have historically been a hotbed of anti‐Semitism (Bikont 2015; Kopstein and Wittenberg 2011). We believe that acquiring Jewish property was the reason for higher support for the LPR in the area around Treblinka.

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Click here for events that happened today (June 18).

1868: Miklós Horthy, Axis admiral and politician, was unfortunately born.

Quoting Neil Forbes’s Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany, 1931–1939, pages 122–4:

Following the fateful Munich conference in September 1938 Magowan repeated his criticisms of what he now regarded as a discredited policy. He caused, thereby, a minor sensation in Whitehall. As [the Third Reich] was ‘practically at war’ with Britain, he wanted trade relations surveyed afresh in order to give weight to factors other than the purely commercial.⁹⁴

This so perturbed the Department of Overseas Trade that Magowan was temporarily recalled to London.⁹⁵ Undeterred, he carried on his solitary campaign to show how [the German Reich] was able, between 1932 and 1938, to reconstitute imports from Britain.

TABLE 3: ANGLO‐GERMAN TRADE 1929–38 IN £MILLION

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Year British exports to Germany (re‐exports) British imports from Germany Balance to Germany

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1929 60.2 (23.3) 68.8 8.6
1930 44.1 (17.3) 65.5 21.4
1931 32.0 (13.6) 64.2 32.2
1932 25.4 (10.8) 30.5 5.1
1933 24.6 (9.8) 29.8 5.2
1934 22.9 (8.9) 30.6 7.7
1935 28.1 (7.8) 31.8 3.7
1936 27.9 (7.4) 35.3 7.4
1937 31.4 (8.0) 38.8 7.4
1938 28.5 (6.6) 31.9 3.4

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Source: compiled from UK Customs and Excise Dept, Annual Statement of the Trade of the United Kingdom 1932, IV (1934), 1935, IV (1937), 1939, IV (1941).

TABLE 4: GERMAN IMPORTS OF CERTAIN COMMODITIES FROM THE UK IN RM000s

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Commodity Average imports 1932/33 Exchange available in 1937 under Payments Ag. quotas (based on 1932/33 trade returns) Actual Imports 1937

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scrap iron and steel 1,408 1,126 3,900
copper 4,326 3,461 19,876
lead 40 32 1,728
aluminium 932 746 1,959
platinum, palladium and irridium 822 658 5,765
rubber, gutta‐percha and waste 102 81 1,575
glycerine 150 120 1,227

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Source: abstracted from T 160 821/12750/086, memo, by Magowan, 3 Jan. 1939.

How methodologically sound it was to compare the depth of the slump — 1932/33 — to the peak of the moderately strong recovery in 1937 was open to question: the resumption of some kind of predepression trade pattern might have been expected in any case. What was incontrovertible was the evidence of the significance of access to London’s world‐wide market in raw materials.

The Payments Agreement had come to play an important rôle in British trade: in 1938 [the Third Reich] was, after India, the UK’s best customer, taking exports to the value of £20.6m. This just exceeded exports to the USA at £20.5m and Argentina at £19.3m. Clearly, Britain provided not only a margin of free exchange but also the best market in which to spend it.

A large proportion of these ‘gratuitous’ German imports comprised strategic raw materials rather than the consumption goods reflected in the spending pattern of the early 1930s. The [Reich’s] authorities depended upon free sterling, therefore, not only for the successful working of their exchange‐control system, but also for the purposes of rearmament.⁹⁶

Page 161:

In analysing the links between British industry and the Third Reich, a line may be drawn between manufactures connected in some way with the arms trade and companies involved in supplying raw materials; while the former were under the watchful eye of a public ready to condemn any transgression, the latter drew little, if any, criticism for their foreign operations.

In the absence of any particular pressure from popular opinion, government policy continued to concentrate on the need to nurture Britain’s fragile economic recovery: anxieties over the implications of German rearmament were outweighed by fears that the imposition of official controls would damage business. British multinationals were largely left to decide for themselves whether to exercise self‐restraint and forgo commercial opportunities.

Quoting J. Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, pages 70–1:

Britain and [the Third Reich], the two largest economies in Europe, moved perilously close to an all‐out trade war. Such a confrontation would have had incalculable effects on [the German Reich’s] economic recovery. Britain was not only [the Third Reich’s] main export market and hence its main source of hard currency; the British Empire was also the chief source of many of [the Third Reich’s] imported raw materials. To make matters worse, the City of London was the chief provider of short‐term finance for German foreign trade.

Even if German imports were not British in origin, they were, more often than not, financed by British banks. A concerted effort by Britain to punish [the German Reich] for its default would have had a serious impact on [the Fascist bourgeoisie’s] still fragile régime. Certainly, the Reich Minister for Economic Affairs was feeling the strain.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 17).

1888: Heinz Wilhelm Guderian, Axis general, existed.
1900: Martin Ludwig Bormann, head of the NSDAP Chancellery and private secretary to his chancellor, came to life.
1940: The Luftwaffe sunk RMS Lancastria near Saint‐Nazaire, France, and at least 3,000 died in Britain’s worst maritime disaster, but the Axis lost Fort Capuzzo in Libya to the Allies.
1956: Paul Rostock, Axis war criminal, dropped dead.

Bella P. […] was tried three times under Section 129 in her life: during Austro‐Fascism in 1936, [German Fascism] in 1942 and Allied‐occupied Austria in 1949. Section 129 of the Austrian penal code persecuted homosexual men and women between 1852 until 1971. It differed from the equivalent Section 175 in the German code by including women in its definition, something that was distinct from almost all other penal codes in Europe at this time.

There was no anti‐crossdressing penal code in Austria (although technically neither in Germany, with Section 183 levied against cases of ‘crossdressing’ as a form of Unfug, or gross mischief).³⁴ 1920s Austria did not see the proliferation of the Transvestitenschein (a police‐issued certificate for people who ‘cross‐dressed’), contrasted to cities such as Hamburg and Berlin, with requests for the Schein to be implemented in Vienna being denied on the basis that no permission was needed.³⁵

This had ramifications for post‐Anschluss Vienna, since Section 129 was not replaced by Section 175, nor was Section 183 implemented, after Austria was annexed into the Third Reich on 12 March 1938.³⁶ In contrast to other areas of the Third Reich, ‘gender non‐conformity’ was not treated as direct evidence of homosexuality under [German Fascism] in Vienna.

This significantly altered the ways in which P. could interact with the state, namely in manipulating legal loopholes to evade sentencing or harsher conviction where she sometimes conceded to gendered but not sexual transgression.

[…]

Having narrowly evaded imprisonment and successfully reaching the end of her probation period in 1939, P. was in trouble with the law again in 1941. On the evening of 8 March 1941, lieutenant Hans Kühne was off duty and in civilian clothing at Café Excelsior. There he made the acquaintance of two women, one of whom was called Bella — this was P. — and the other Paula. According to Kühne, after drinking with and courting the women, the three of them retired to Bella’s flat, but Paula soon left.

Once Kühne and Bella were alone, Bella began to undress, which Kühne said he found ‘suspicious’ later in the police report. Kühne claimed that it was at this point that he realised that Bella was wearing a wig and women’s clothing to ‘deceive’ him. Reacting in shock, Kühne slapped P. across the face, drawing his pistol and demanding to see her identification. He then went straight to the police station — at 5.30 am — where he deposited the wig and high heels from the flat as evidence.⁴¹

When called for interrogation on 12 March, P. testified that she and Paula had dressed up as a ‘carnival joke’ [Fasching]. P. had borrowed a black dress, leopard coat and silver dancing shoes from Paula, and they made Kühne’s acquaintance at Café Excelsior. According to P., ‘while still in the bar the man said to me, “you are a boy, right?”, to which I answered in the affirmative and lifted my wig a little’.⁴²

After coming back to her flat, P. went to the bathroom and on her return found Kühne lying on the bed having ‘already ejaculated’. She added in her report (drolly, I like to imagine) that he ‘had probably been masturbating’. P. therefore depicted Kühne as the sexual deviant, and herself as the innocent bystander. Her friend Paula corroborated, confirming that Kühne was indeed aware of P.’s ‘identity’ (read: male) prior to entering her home.⁴³

Here, P. yet again played on her ambiguity, emphasising being read as a man in order to deflect blame from herself, as well as any claims to deceit. P.’s actions here chafe all the expectations of a romantic/tragic narrative because she failed to conform to acceptable (trans)femininity. Heroes of the trans past are authentically themselves, whereas P. slipped between identities like quicksilver in order to survive.

By tipping her wig to ensure Kühne knew she was wearing one, P. was enacting what Sontag called ‘Being‐As‐Rôleplaying’: a play, a scheme, a dupe to evade sentencing by securing evidence of Kühne’s ‘same‐sex desire’.⁴⁴ But she equally twisted her own femininity into a false ‘Being‐As‐Rôleplaying’ where she presented her womanhood as simply a farce — a carnival joke.

P. was careful to omit any suggestion of sexual contact on her part (which would have incriminated her) but felt no need to hide her ‘cross‐dressing’, despite comparable cases of ‘effeminacy’ landing ‘men who had sex with men’ in concentration camps in Berlin.⁴⁵

We must remember that one of the reasons P. could play up her gendered differences (which allowed her to flip the script on her masculine sexual partners) was precisely because of the ambiguities in legal interpretations of homosexuality in Austria (even) after the Anschluss, not just her canny (and Camp) behaviour. But this equally speaks to how attuned she was to those ambiguities.

Beyond implicating Kühne as sexually deviant, P. also said he was violent; that he had smashed a glass cabinet in her flat and gouged her face on his way out. She thus layered her implication with further gendered differences: Kühne acted violently, hitting her and breaking her property, while she remained helpless and subject to his aggression.

[…]

Gestapo officers […] requested to see P.’s identification and called her ‘queer’ (warmer, or warmer Brüder, a slang term for homosexual men), prompting P. to flee the bar.

A scuffle ensued in the street, with P. shouting ‘Piefkes’ (a derogatory term used for Germans in Austria at this time), and, most brazenly, that ‘Germany will never win the war’, causing a passing police officer and Wehrmacht soldier to gladly help in roughly dragging P. to the nearest Kripo (Kriminalpolizei, or criminal police) office.⁵² […] P.’s main hearing took place 13 March 1942 and conjoined the criminal proceedings from 1941 and 1942.

The defence lawyer appealed for a lenient sentence so that P. could join the military, ‘in order to bring about an improvement in his [sic] tendency through discipline’, but to no avail.⁵⁶ In light of the Café Ostmark incident, the court found P. guilty of unnatural fornication with Kühne, because of ‘the manner of the accused’s presentation and appearance’.

However, P.’s passing as a woman was also cited as a mitigating factor because ‘no one [at the Café] knew that the alleged Bella was a man’.⁵⁷ This demonstrates that with [Fascist] influence over legal matters and personnel, P.’s treatment by the state differed from pre‐Anschluss times, but not completely.⁵⁸ While P.’s femininity was eventually seen as a factor in her ‘sexual deviancy’, her passing exempted her of being charged with public nuisance and a harsher sentence.

Passing also exculpated not only P., but anyone she touched or had relations with from accusations of homosexuality, because they could be forgiven for having made a ‘mistake’. However, P.’s imprisonment lasted much longer than the sentence of ten months, resulting in internment at Natzweiler concentration camp (located in Alsace) in 1943. She was then transferred to Mittelbau‐Dora and Peenemünde, sub‐camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, respectively, where she stayed until 1945.⁵⁹

P. survived her incarcerations between 1942 and 1945. But she was once again charged with Section 129 in 1948 under Allied Occupation. This final case in P.’s story demonstrates the continued effectiveness of her Camp antics beyond the fall of fascism, but also the societal fragility at stake in shoring up the stability of the sex/gender binary in post‐war Europe.

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 16).

1940: Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain became Vichy’s Chief of State.
1977: Wernher von Braun, Axis rocket scientist, dropped dead.
2008: Mario Rigoni Stern, Axis sergeant, expired.

Together with Standard Oil (SO) of New Jersey, [Royal Dutch Shell] was market leader in Germany for motor fuels, lube oils, asphalt and white oils among others. Because these were vital to the operations of the [Wehrmacht], RDS profited handsomely from the growing [Fascist] armaments expenditure after 1933. As a result, RDS’s subsidiary Rhenania‐Ossag grew greatly in size and profitability during the 1930s.¹⁵

Nonetheless, [capitalist] regulations and control became ever stricter, as the régime attempted to redirect business investments into synthetic fuels production that aimed to substitute the dependence on foreign imports of oil. Rhenania therefore not only dealt with [capitalist] regulations and control but also faced competition from IG. In the 1920s, IG developed technology to synthesise oil products from coal.¹⁶

Under [Fascism] this technology became the favoured instrument of autarky, undermining the position of RDS and other foreign oil companies in [the Third Reich].¹⁷ From the start of World War II, moreover, German custodians controlled Rhenania’s management as well as its parent company in the Netherlands.¹⁸ This seems a clear‐cut case of restricted control and shrinking room for manoeuvre.¹⁹

However, similar to the other Anglo‐Dutch multinational Unilever, it is our impression that RDS and its German subsidiary had a lot to offer to the Third Reich and as a result were treated circumspectly. It is worthwhile to question this from a risk management perspective, because unable to liquidate and withdraw from Germany, Rhenania could do little else but leverage its local reputation, relations to its competitors, technological advantages for the national economy and political connections.

The aim of this article is to take a closer look at how RDS’s subsidiary in [the Third Reich] managed the trilemma of placating [Berlin], maintaining control over the business, and complying with the policies of the parent company. We therefore question to what extent RDS and Rhenania controlled their assets [under Fascism] and what their room for manoeuvre was.

[…]

Although this article is obviously not presenting new evidence to support either of the arguments put forward in the literature, we want to point out that coercion appears not manifest in the initial decision to participate in Pölitz. The Pölitz episode shows that Rhenania’s management retained a certain measure of room for manoeuvre.

Yet, the episode also suggests that state coercion became increasingly probable and steadily reduced the choices available for Rhenania. The ultimate decision, i.e. not to participate in Pölitz altogether, was probably not possible because by 1937 the [Third Reich] had demonstrated not to shy away from coercion. Nonetheless, up until 1937, the company seems to have had considerable leeway in negotiating the Pölitz project and promote its merits with RDS.

Considering the various possible relative advantages of the project, we want to put forward the possibility of Rhenania managers acting as ‘sound businessmen and not politicians’, to put it as Charles Cheape did in 1988. Scherner concluded that, contrary to prevailing assumptions, state coercion was a minor factor in business decision‐making to invest in synthetic fuel projects, which was to a much larger extent based on the commercial viability, the conditions offered by the [Third Reich] and the type of available feedstock.⁸⁰

Such an interpretation allows for some level of agency on the part of the management, which was trying to make the most of an adverse and deteriorating environment in the long‐term interest of the company.

Moreover, stressing coercion obscures an understanding of business decisions in politically risky environments, which makes it particularly pertinent to interpret Rhenania’s course of action from a risk management perspective, i.e. to mitigate the imminent loss of market share and cash and to prevent the company’s exposure to future harassment from the [Third Reich].

What the Pölitz case illustrates first and foremost, is that Rhenania, after RDS’s failed prevention strategy earlier, was left to mitigate the increasing political risks it was facing after 1936. It was quite clear to Rhenania’s management that the [Third Reich] was after its technological know‐how and idle cash reserves.

Investing in Pölitz allowed Rhenania to find a relatively attractive investment opportunity, mitigating the risk of [anticommunist] bureaucrats taking control over the allocation of its cash and know‐how. However, that the Economics Ministry did so anyway in response to Rhenania’s refusal to provide extra capital in the second capital call showed that the mitigation strategy failed to deliver the intended result.

War and the struggle for control

Between 1933 and 1939, the operations of Rhenania became increasingly restricted by the [Third Reich]. Over the course of the Pölitz project RDS had gradually lost effective control over its German subsidiary and at the outbreak of war Rhenania was placed under a German Verwalter (administrator), completely severing the line of command from London and The Hague to Hamburg.⁸¹

That is not to say, however, that Rhenania itself lost complete control. Jonker and Van Zanden stress the importance of state coercion and control, both in the case of the Pölitz plant and pertaining to Rhenania’s room for manoeuvre after the start of the war in 1939.⁸² However, a report produced at the end of the war by the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Treatment of Enemy Property (Reichskommissar für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens), painted a different picture of state control over Rhenania at the start of the war.

Rather than an administrator being forced upon Rhenania’s management, it was general manager Erich Boeder, after having taken over as managing director from Walter Kruspig following his untimely death in 1939, who suggested the appointment of an ‘influential individual’ as administrator to the board of Rhenania on the grounds of Rhenania having considerable British (enemy) influence.⁸³

However, instead of assuming full control of the Rhenania management, Boeder requested the administrator work beside him, while Rhenania’s management was to retain full control of daily operations. Boeder not only suggested the appointment and tasks of an administrator, he also suggested that Secretary of State Ludwig Grauert should be appointed. Grauert was well connected in the [anticommunist] bureaucracy.

As representative of the German steel industry in the 1920s, he had been influential in securing financial support for the NSDAP before the [Fascist]‐takeover. After joining the NSDAP in 1933, Göring personally appointed him as a high‐ranking bureaucrat and subsequently Secretary of State of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.⁸⁴ Grauert, therefore, had a direct link to Göring, the most powerful [Fascist] figure controlling the organisation and distribution of oil and synthetic fuels, among many other things.

[…]

[Capitalist] controls became increasingly stricter, culminating in the assumption of total control after the outbreak of war through the appointment of an administrator. Nominally, this resulted in a complete separation between parent and subsidiary and the loss of control for local management but in practice Rhenania took the initiative and demonstrated a striking ability to set the terms and conditions of the appointment of an administrator, in effect applying a preventive risk management strategy.

By proposing Grauert, the company created a close link to Göring, while successfully negotiating the retention of management powers of attorney. The loss of control was therefore partial and left considerable room for manoeuvre for the local management. Moreover, the appointment of an administrator at the outbreak of war was not simply the enforcement of state control by the Reich Commissioner for the Treatment of Enemy Property over Rhenania, but a reciprocal negotiation over the integrity of RDS in Greater Germany and its integration into the war economy.

We are not arguing that [capitalist] state coercion played only a minor rôle and that RDS and Rhenania had the possibility of declining on Pölitz or not placating the [Third Reich] in general. The risk of coercion was always in the background and sometimes became manifest, either in rhetoric or in a direct threat as in the case of the second capital call for Pölitz.

The economic policies and interventions of the Third Reich presented foreign businesses with a decreasing set of options. All that parent companies and local management teams could do was to retain as much wiggle room as possible. Rhenania proved quite able to retain some room for manoeuvre over the course of time and acted in this respect primarily with the long‐term interest of the company in mind.

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for events that happened today (June 15).

1882: Ion Antonescu, Axis politician, was shamefully born.
1895: Paul Giesler, Axis politician, stained the earth.

In preparation is they dug tunnels from the gate to their area around their headquarters, and when they finished they placed bombs under the gate in the tunnels—so it’s the gate that opens at the front of the ghetto allowing [Fascists] to come in—so I’m a big fan of tunnels! […] So just remember that they ha[d] planted some bombs in tunnels at the gate, so just put that in your mind for now.

Because the concentration camps [under Fascism] were progressively integrated into the local economy (Kaienburg 1996; Sofsky 1997), they promoted indoctrination into the belief system of the Third Reich. We argue that this belief system—with its focus on outgroup hatred—spilled over from the concentration camps to the surrounding communities, incentivizing civilians to reconcile their attitudes with the new reality surrounding them.

Closeness to concentration camps, in other words, triggered cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957), i.e., a mental discomfort that individuals experience when exposed to new information that is in conflict with their preexisting beliefs, and that can lead to attitude change to reduce the discomfort (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2018). This implies that individuals living close to concentration camps were likely to adopt negative attitudes toward out‐groups to conform with the new social environment.

These newly acquired values and beliefs were then transmitted across generations through parental and peer influence—a prominent mechanism for long‐term persistence of attitudes identified in the literature on historical legacies (e.g., Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2016a; Lupu and Peisakhin 2017; Voigtländer and Voth 2012).

To test our argument, we focus on Germany and combine (a) census data and election results from the Weimar Republic with (b) information on the geographic location of concentration camps in the Third Reich, (c) survey responses from the European Values Survey (EVS) and the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), and (d) contemporary election results.

We selected the case of Germany because historical records indicate that the site selection for concentration camps in this country was exogenous to the preexisting sociodemographic characteristics of communities. This was less likely to be the case in the rest of Europe, where the Third Reich often established concentration camps in areas with large Jewish or Romani populations (Megargee 2009).

Consistent with the expectations, we find that current‐day Germans who live closer to [Fascist]‐era concentration camps are more xenophobic, less tolerant of out‐groups—including Jews, Muslims, and immigrants—and more likely to support extreme rightwing parties. The results are robust to a variety of data sources, different measures of out‐group intolerance—both attitudinal and behavioral—and alternative specifications.

Furthermore, we show that the uncovered patterns cannot be explained by either preexisting levels of intolerance or antisemitism, or traditional contemporaneous predictors of out‐group intolerance such as economic insecurity, political ideology, or education.

We also find tentative support for our proposed mechanism that camp‐era cognitive dissonance and intergenerational transmission of beliefs link [Fascist] camps to contemporary attitudes, and rule out potential alternative mechanisms related to geographic sorting, economic conditions, and modern‐day use of the camps. Taken together, the analyses provide sustained support for the argument that present‐day differences in out‐group intolerance partially trace back to the spillover effects produced by [Fascist] camps.

Finally, we provide preliminary evidence that contemporary efforts reminding people about the atrocities conducted in these camps might offer a way to break their detrimental long‐term effects on out‐group intolerance.

Our findings expand the literature on exclusionary attitudes toward out‐groups by introducing a historical explanation for present‐day prejudice. We also advance the literature on the legacies of coercive institutions in at least three crucial ways. First, in contrast to the institutions explored in prior work, [Fascist]‐era camps were relatively short‐lived and followed by reeducation efforts that were explicitly designed to wipe out the legacy effect outlined here.

Yet, the effects of camps on attitudes are still observed, attesting to the strength and generalizability of this line of argument. Second, we provide preliminary support for the causal mechanism that links institutions to attitude change via cognitive dissonance and intergenerational transmission—something that the existing literature has struggled to demonstrate.

Third, although prior work has gone to great length to show that long‐term legacies indeed exist, we take a step further and provide preliminary evidence on how to break detrimental legacy effects. We elaborate on these and other contributions in the conclusion.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Yet, camps can affect individuals only if they are aware of this institution. This was most likely the case because the concentration camps and their purpose were not hidden from the local population; rather, they were prominently and proudly publicized (Gellately 2001). This was particularly true in Germany, where the concentration camps were mostly labor camps rather than extermination or transit camps.¹

The selection of sites for concentration camps [under Fascism] was mostly driven by economic reasons, such as proximity to a quarry, a mine, or some industry (Megargee 2009). Most prisoners worked outside the camps in factories, construction projects, farms, or coal mines, and often had to walk to their workplace or use public transport to get there.² This progressive interconnectedness made the camps and their conditions visible to locals.

For example, Wladimir Ostapenko, a survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp, explained that a local farmer would regularly pick up the ashes from the crematorium to use as fertilizer. There are also photos that show locals going on family walks near the camp grounds.³ Sofsky (1997) refers to the fact that locals were often involved in helping capture escaped prisoners, which further suggests both knowledge and contact.

Furthermore, local papers were used to spread [Fascist] propaganda about the camps (Ast 2013), displaying pictures of “typical” subhumans of other races with deformities, and calling for more camps for “those with hydrocephalus, cross‐eyed, deformed half‐Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types” (Gellately 2001, 65).⁴

[…]

Applying cognitive dissonance theory to exposure to concentration camps suggests that individuals with relatively tolerant views of out‐groups are likely to be confronted with psychological discomfort when living close to a camp. This occurs because the camp provides new information, discordant with the individuals’ prior beliefs, that out‐group members are subhumans and can be mistreated.

Although eliminating the camp is not an option for the individuals, one way in which they can reduce the unpleasant feeling of dissonance in this situation is to change their beliefs about out‐groups. Local Germans had to rationalize the discrimination, enslavement, violence, and other inhumane treatment of people held in these camps, even if some of them had previously been their neighbors. A way to do so was to change individuals’ beliefs about the prisoners in these camps, to accept their status as out‐groups, subhumans, and not worthy of the same rights.

Some of this rationalization was necessary no matter where in the Third Reich an individual lived (Voigtländer and Voth 2015). However, as we argued above, the key difference that we capture in our study is that Germans who resided near concentration camps had to rationalize a more extreme example of intolerance than other Germans.⁵ This enhanced rationalization effort led those living near the camps to maintain higher levels of out‐group intolerance.⁶

[…]

Differences in political tolerance and attitudes toward out‐group members are often explained by contemporary forces. Building on the seminal work on political tolerance by Sullivan et al. (1981), we therefore account for individual‐level political ideology (ten‐point scale), employment status, education level,²³ and district‐level unemployment rate as well as level of urbanity.²⁴

We paid special attention to economic variables because the economic base of the areas surrounding the camps might have relied more heavily on manufacturing jobs than other parts of the country. This could have made these areas more vulnerable to economic depression in recent decades, which in turn might have led to perceptions of out‐group threat (Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch 2016). By accounting for the economic variables with the sequential g‐estimator, we can recover the controlled direct effect of proximity to the camps net of current economic dynamics.

[…]

We argued that the patterns observed above likely result from processes of cognitive dissonance triggered by proximity to the camps during the Third Reich. This argument implies that the pre‐existing attitudes among individuals living close to the camps were not systematically different from those living elsewhere, and that it was the mental discomfort produced by this new social environment that led them to update their beliefs.

While plausible, this mechanism is hard to demonstrate because a direct test of it would require a careful microlevel analysis of individuals who witnessed this period. Such data are not available, which is why prior work on historical legacies has generally not tested the mechanism at all. We aspire to do more, and offer an alternative strategy to assess the plausibility of this segment of our argument.

If cognitive dissonance is responsible for the relationship uncovered, individuals living in areas that were more supportive of the [NSDAP] before the creation of the camps should experience less cognitive dissonance. For these individuals, there should be less of a need to reconcile their pre‐existing beliefs with the new social environment. Consequently, the effects of proximity to camps should be smaller. We test this implication by interacting our key predictor in the main analysis (distance to camp) with support for the [NSDAP] in 1933.

The plots in Figure 2 present the marginal effects of distance to camp on out‐group intolerance (left panel), immigrant resentment (central panel), and support for far‐right parties (right panel), conditional on the vote share obtained by the [NSDAP] in the last contested election of the Weimar Republic.³⁶ In line with our expectations, the camp proximity effects are large and statistically significant in regions that previously had low levels of [Fascist] support.

However, for all three outcome variables this effect decreases as [Fascist] support increases, and is no longer distinguishable from zero in districts with 50% or more support for the [NSDAP]. These results are consistent with the argument that cognitive dissonance links [Fascist] camps to contemporary intolerance, although they do not represent direct evidence for the mechanism proposed. Therefore, the findings should be interpreted as suggestive.³⁷

ETA: I should have mentioned that some researchers dispute these findings. Here is the debate:

Modeling Spatial Heterogeneity and Historical Persistence: Nazi Concentration Camps and Contemporary Intolerance

Fixed Effects and Post-Treatment Bias in Legacy Studies

Causation and History in Legacy Studies: A Reply to Homola, Pereira, and Tavits

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Click here for events that happened today (June 14).

1940: The Fascist occupation of Paris commenced, and seven hundred and twenty‐eight Polish political prisoners from Tarnów became the Auschwitz concentration camp’s first inmates. Similarly, the Theresienstadt concentration camp’s first inmates in Czechoslovakia arrived.
2007: Kurt Josef Waldheim, Axis intelligence officer and latter Secretary‐General of the United Nations, finally dropped dead.

Pictured: The left map of Denmark shows spots where the Axis committed atrocities, and the right map divides Danish municipalities by the percentage of ‘no’ votes on joining the European Economic Community. Comparing the two maps shows a noticeable overlap.

Quoting Lasse Aaskoven’s Foreign Occupation and Support for International Cooperation: Evidence from Denmark:

This article specifically studies the rôle played by the experience of foreign‐inflicted violence and oppression on support for participation in supranational cooperative entities with former oppressor countries by studying the effect of violence during the [Fascist] occupation of Denmark 1940–1945 on support for entering the European Economic Community (EEC, the forerunner for the EU) in the Danish referendum of 1972.

The EEC was framed by the opponents of Danish membership as a German‐dominated entity, and in the campaign against Danish membership, the opponents specifically utilized anti‐German rhetoric to argue against Danish membership of the EEC. This article argues that this campaign would have resonated better with communities where the [Axis] occupation forces inflicted more violence on the civilian population during the [Axis] occupation of Denmark.

In accordance with this argument, analyses of new and detailed data on [Fascist]‐inflicted violence and property destruction against civilians (the so‐called “German Terror”) in Danish municipalities during the [Axis] occupation do indeed suggest that municipalities which experienced more German Terror had lower levels of support for entering the EEC in the 1972 referendum.

One mechanism behind the effect of previous experiences of German Terror on the lack of support for the EEC seems to have been higher electoral support for far‐left parties in areas which saw more violence. The Danish far‐left parties, the Danish Communist Party and its socialist successor parties, were both the main political opponents of Danish EEC membership and were closely associated with the Danish resistance movement during the [Axis] occupation.

A factor which was utilized in the 1972 campaign against Danish EEC membership. The results are robust to controlling for communist electoral support before the [Axis] occupation of Denmark, which suggest that the effects are not merely a function of the German Terror targeting areas with more far‐left supporters before the Terror.

Usually, political legacy studies are not able to track the relative persistence of effects over substantial time periods using the same type of dependent variable.^8^

However, the frequent Danish EEC/EU referenda after 1972 actually allow for this. An investigation of these EEC/EU referenda after 1972 suggests that the effect of the German Terror on opposition to the EEC/EU was persistent but declined substantially over time, as Danish left‐wing parties changed their organizations and policy stances and became increasingly unable and/or unwilling to use anti‐German rhetoric and allusions to [the Third Reich] and the [Axis] occupation in their agitation against the EU.

These results suggest that the experience of foreign‐inflicted violence can be a substantial brake on public support for international political entities and cooperation with former oppressor countries but also that political parties play a pivotal rôle in translating historical grievances into resistance towards international cooperation. Furthermore, the results show that the effect of occupation violence on opposition to international collaboration with former occupiers can change substantially within just one generation.

Consequently, this article expands the existing literature on the legacies of war, violence and oppression by adding the focus on outcomes directly related to international cooperation and institutions which have so far received less attention in this literature. It also expands this literature by providing more precise estimates of whether and how the political effects of violence and oppression might persist and partly decline over time.

Additionally, the article find[s] evidence, in line with findings from some previous studies on historical grievances and conflicts,^9^ that political parties play an important rôle in activating historical grievances and might benefit from them in the longer run. The insights from this article thus hold implications for future studies of the legacies of violence, historical grievances and skepticism towards international political integration.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more information.)

On April 9th 1940, Denmark was invaded and occupied by [the Third Reich]. The Danish government initially choose to cooperate with the [Fascist] occupation forces and a coalition government with the support of most Danish parties managed civilian affairs, including policing, in the first three years of the occupation.^10^

During this period, there were substantial economic relations between Denmark and [the Third Reich],^11^ and the Danish government even allowed, after the [Axis] invasion of the Soviet Union, for the recruitment of Danish nationals into the Waffen SS.

However, in August 1943, the collaboration between the Danish political system and the [Axis] occupation forces broke down, and [Wehrmacht] and security forces, including the […] Gestapo and the SD (the SS’s intelligence organization), which had previously had a very limited presence in Denmark, now took control of Denmark.

The breakdown of collaboration between the Danish political system and the German occupation forces also caused an intensification of the armed resistance to [Axis] rule and increased the membership and political breadth of the Danish resistance movement^12^ which had previously been dominated by Danish communists and non‐mainstream nationalist political actors.

The increased resistance towards the [Axis] occupation forces, which included the use of sabotage and the killing of Danish collaborators, eventually made the [Axis] forces intensify their repression of Denmark. Beginning in early 1944, [Axis] security forces with the aid of Danish collaborators began murdering Danish civilians and carrying out sabotage of Danish civilian facilities in retaliation of the resistance movement’s activities.

The majority of these killings and sabotage were carried out by a hit squad with both German and Danish members, which was nick‐named ”Petergruppen”,^13^ and which was under the command of the leader of the [Axis] security forces in Denmark, Otto Bovensiepen.^14^

In general, the [Axis] security forces and their Danish collaborators seem to have targeted respected citizens and pillars of local communities, such as doctors, lawyers and local employers but also to some extent ordinary citizens,^15^ and carried out sabotage against facilities and institutions such as local businesses, newspapers, public places of entertainment^16^ and even private homes,^17^ in a process which became known in Denmark as the ”German Terror”.^18^

In total, over Danish 100 civilians were murdered or otherwise killed by [Axis] authorities and Danish collaborators in the German Terror during the occupation, at least 19 people were the subject of attempted murder, while at least 64 people were wounded in bombings and other types of sabotage which also destroyed property amounting to over 84 million current Danish Kroner and caused significant damages to notable local buildings and entertainment facilities, some of which were never rebuilt.^19^

These figures do not include Danish soldiers killed by [Axis] forces, the execution or deportation of members of the Danish resistance movement or the Danish police officers and the other Danish security personnel who were deported to [Axis] concentration camps in 1944, since these actors cannot reasonable be counted as civilian casualties.^20^

These terror figures thus only consist of one‐sided [Axis] violence and property destruction carried out against the Danish civilian population during the occupation. In figure 1, the geographical distribution of [Axis]‐inflicted terror incidents can be seen.

[…]

While the [Axis] atrocities against civilians in Denmark were relatively light compared to both the Western and Eastern European countries and territories under [Axis] rule during the war, the Terror nonetheless became one of the defining aspects of the collective memory of the [Axis] occupation in Denmark. A memory which was very much kept alive after the war.^27^ However, as can be seen in figure 1, the Terror was very unevenly distributed across and within Danish regions.

Whereas some localities, and consequently the people living there, experienced terror incidents on a fairly regular basis in the last years of the occupation, other localities were not touched by the German Terror at all. The question then naturally arises of whether this difference between localities with regards the level of violence experienced during the [Axis] occupation had any political implications after the war.

[…]

[F]or Denmark to join the EEC a referendum on ”yes” or ”no” to Danish EEC membership was held in October 1972. Consequently, during most of the year of 1972, Denmark was the object of a lively debate and campaign both for and against Danish membership by various political actors. Denmark eventually voted in favor of joining the EEC with 63.3 percent for ”yes”. However, there was substantial geographical variation in the share of ”no” votes in the referendum, see figure 2.

[…]

Most of the main Danish parties both on the center‐left and the center‐right were in favor of EEC membership in 1972 or held smaller marginalized sceptics fractions. Consequently, the unconditional opposition to Danish EEC membership came primarily from the parties and organizations of the far‐left, including the Danish Communist Party and its two ”successor” parties the Socialist People’s Party and the Left Socialists.^30^ The Socialist People’s Party having split from the Communist Party in 1958, while the Left Socialists was formed as a splinter from the Socialist People’s Party in 1967.

However, smaller organizations on the nationalist right also opposed EEC membership, including the Danish nationalist organization (and then inactive party) Dansk Samling. Both the Communist Party, and to some degree its successor parties, as well as the nationalist Dansk Samling had members which had been very active in the Danish armed resistance to the [Axis] occupation, which was an important part of these parties’ identities.^31^

Ignoring their political differences, both the far‐left Communist Party, the Socialist People’s Party and the nationalist Dansk Samling became founding members of the inter‐party anti‐EEC organization, the People’s Movement against the EEC in the spring of 1972.

In the campaign against Danish membership of EEC, anti‐German rhetoric featured prominently in the agitation of the parties of the far‐left and the People’s Movement against the EEC. Among the opponents of EEC membership, especially on the far‐left, the EEC was seen as dominated by Germany,^32^ the EEC likened to the [Fascist] vision of “Neuropa”, and the threat of German dominance and control of Denmark after Danish entry into the EEC was part of the campaign against Danish membership both before and during 1972^33^.

However, it has to be stated that these were not the main themes in the 1972 campaign which centered around economic issues. [Nevertheless], opinion research does show that issues related to national sovereignty and even cultural–ethnic issues, which included anti‐German attitudes, were non‐trivial stated arguments against the EEC stated by Danish opponents of EEC membership.^34^

Parts of this campaign more or less explicitly utilized anti‐German sentiments and invoked images of [Fascism] and the [Axis] occupation of Denmark 1940–1945.^35^ A prime example is an anti‐EEC propaganda poster from the Danish Communist Party which showed a black eagle with a swastika in its eye coming to swallow a helpless small Danish bird,^36^ see figure 3a.

Other examples include a poster from the People’s Movement against the EEC which showed a caricature of a thinly moustached man (clearly German) with an EEC lapel pin (in lieu of a swastika) coming from the South to grab Denmark, see figure 3b. In a similar tone, a widely read Danish leftwing tabloid ran a headline stating that “The Germans will sell Denmark in one day using informatics” less than one week before the referendum.^37^

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Click here for events that happened today (June 13).

1918: Helmut Lent, Axis night‐fighter ace, existed.
1944: Axis tank ace Michael Wittmann ambushed elements of the British 7th Armoured Division, destroying up to fourteen tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two antitank guns in a Tiger I tank. Additionally, Axis combat elements, reinforced by the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, launched a counterattack on Yankee forces near Carentan, and the Axis launched the first V1 Flying Bomb attack on England. Only four of the eleven bombs struck their targets.
1972: Reich spy and ‘honourary Aryan’, Stephanie von Hohenlohe, ceased to live.

(Mirror.)

Although I intentionally wrote this for World Day Against Child Labour, as I was researching I learnt that it was 80 years ago today that the Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed Heuaktion: the kidnapping and transporting of 40,000 Poles between the ages of 10 and 14 to the Third Reich as neoslaves. This dating is, as far as I can tell, purely coincidental. (Confusingly, some sources set the order’s date to June 14th. It seems that Rosenberg merely wrote the order on the 12th but hadn’t ratified it until the 14th, I’m guessing.)

In any case, I want to tell you about child labor under Fascism:

After [the Third Reich and the Slovak Republic] invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Polish territory under [Fascist] control was divided into two zones. Whereas about 40% was incorporated into the German Reich, the rest was transformed into the General Government. Policies towards the inhabitants of these zones at first differed significantly, but with time practices converged. In the annexed territories, policies were targeted at Germanisation and discrimination against, or deportation of, undesired inhabitants.²

On 1 April 1940, a compulsory service regulation (Dienstpflichtverordenung) obliged everybody over the age of 12 to work.³ After a measure issued on 26 October 1939 had prescribed the employment of Polish citizens aged between 18 and 60 in the General Government, the minimum age threshold was lowered to 14 years on 14 December.⁴

The problem caused by these violations of the German Youth Protection Act (Jugendschutzgesetz) prohibiting labour for persons under the age of 18 was solved by a decree on 1 September 1941 calling the provisions inapplicable to Polish children.⁵ Practices went beyond the legal framework, as children aged between 13 and 15 in a weak state of health were also considered eligible, and children deported with family members could work from the age of 10 upwards.⁶

Unemployed Polish citizens in the annexed territories and in the General Government needed to register at the employment‐exchange service (Arbeitsamt) and could be called up for work.⁷ Later, the police also organised razzias in streets, at public gatherings and in schools⁸ and sent recruits to transit camps (Umsiedlerlager), also called Poles’ camps (Polenlager).⁹ After a race examination, children were divided into those entitled for Germanisation and those to be sent off for forced labour.¹⁰

In the spring of 1942, these policy measures resulted in the 10 to 14 year age cohort being massively recruited. East Prussian farmers complained that two 10‐year‐olds were not ‘a proper equivalent’ of one male adult.¹¹ Their complaint touches upon an important aspect of child forced labour.

Until the age of 12, children were entitled to limited schooling, but after that age no legal measure foresaw differences in the workload for children and adults.¹² The amount of work children needed to perform was arbitrarily set in an undocumented negotiation between trustees and employers.

Like their adult counterparts, Polish child workers needed to obey a long list of police orders. They had to wear a ‘P’ sign knitted on their clothes, could not leave their lodgings after the curfew, had limited access to public transportation, only received holiday in exceptional cases and suchlike.¹³ Disobedience was punished and could lead to being sent to a work re‐education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager) for children under the age of 16, or a concentration camp for teenagers.¹⁴

Whereas Zofia Bigorajska claims that 35% of the authors of autobiographies about forced labour, including adults and children, report having been sent to such camps, Feichtlbauer estimates it happened to one out of 20 workers.¹⁵ This discrepancy may indicate that those who were sent to camps later felt a stronger need to write down their experiences than other forced labourers.

Estimates about the number of Polish child forced labourers are necessarily imprecise. Herbert Ulrich states that 5.7 million foreign workers were active in [the Third Reich] in August 1944, of which 1,659,764 were Poles.¹⁶ In a more recent work, Mark Spoerer estimates that, out of a total of 13.5 million foreign workers, there were 1.6 million Polish Prisoners of War, forced labourers and concentration‐camp prisoners, and 1.5 million Soviet and Polish child forced labourers.¹⁷

Two‐thirds of the approximately 1.6 million Polish forced labourers were employed on farms, with the others working mainly in industry.¹⁹ Among the German provinces, Brandenburg was the most popular destination, with 162,391 Polish forced labourers on 30 September 1944. It was closely followed by Eastern Prussia, with 144,511, including about 20,000 children.²⁰

Decree (Anordnung) Nr. 51 from 1 October 1940 anticipated the employment of Polish women between the ages of 16 and 20 with some knowledge of German and an ‘acceptable racial appearance’.²¹ The age category was widened, with the result that in mid‐1944 9,519 Polish female domestic servants between the ages of 14 and 35 were officially registered.²² Whereas some domestic workers came to be treated as family members, practices we would nowadays labelled trafficking were also evident.²³

[…]

Polish former child forced labourers narrate their leaving of home for an often unknown destination as a painful rupture of their life path causing them to grow up in a world with unfamiliar social rules.⁵⁷

Czesław Łuszczyński, for example, was transported from his village Modlin in Mazovia to the transit camp in Działdowo. He recalls how he awaited his race examination in a dorm: ‘The night was just a frightening blur. Why did my mother ever give birth to me? How could someone as stupid as me be working for a German? I saw my whole life flash before my eyes.’⁵⁸

After children had been selected for labour, most were exhibited at a local market. Many narrate in detail the experience of being offered for sale like cattle, as this exemplified the humiliation that was to accompany their later labour experiences.⁵⁹

(Emphasis added.)

…wow.

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 12).

1908: Sadly for us, Otto Skorzeny, SS officer, was born.
1935: Bolivia and Paraguay officially ended the Chaco War by agreeing on a ceasefire. By the way, Emden arrived at Wilhelmshaven.
1937: Reinhard Heydrich of the SS secretly ordered Jewish convicted criminals to be placed into protective custody after completion of their sentence from the justice department.
1938: The Empire of Japan’s 11th Army captured the airfield outside of Anqing, Anhui, China.
1940: London and Bangkok signed the Treaty of Non‐Aggression between His Majesty in Respect of the United Kingdom and the King of Thailand, then Bangkok and Tōkyō signed the Treaty between Thailand and Japan Concerning the Continuance of Friendly Relations and the Mutual Respect of Each Other’s Territorial Integrity. As well, Fascist tanks under Guderian crossed the Marne River at Chalons‐sur‐Marne, eighty miles east of Paris, and 154 Imperial aircraft attacked Chongqing, China at 1200 hours, the same time (kind of) when Fascist submarine U‐101 sank British ship Earlspark off Cape Finisterre, Spain, slaughtering seven and sinking seven and a half thousand tons of coal. Also off Cape Finisterre, U‐46 sank another Allied vessel at 1938 hours, massacring thirty‐two and sinking seven thousand two hundred tons of iron ore, and then sinking Willowbank at 1946 hours.
1941: A three‐day conference of SS‐Gruppenführer men began at the SS castle of Schloß Wewelsburg in Büren. Aside from that, Axis submarine U‐371 sank Allied ship Silverpalm in the North Atlantic, massacring the entire crew of sixty‐eight.
1942: During the morning roll call at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, somebody called out sixty Polish prisoners, then the Axis shot them at the Death Wall in the courtyard of Block 11 in retaliation for the clandestine resistance organizations in the Silesia region. The victims transferred to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1942 from Sosnowiec, Katowice, and Krakow. Likewise, the Axis pushed Allied troops back toward Tobruk, Libya, destroying many tanks, and Hans‐Joachim Marseille flew a mission to that country to provide support for ground troops.
1943: The Axis liquidated the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). It lead around 1,180 Jews to the city’s old Jewish graveyard and exterminated them… I have no words.
1944: Carl G. E. Mannerheim appealed for Wehrmacht reinforcement to fight against the recent Soviet offensive. Apart from that, General Erich Marcks, commander of the LXXXIV Korps in Normandie, France, died from his injuries when an Allied fighter‐bomber assaulted the staff car in which he was travelling to organize a counterattack to regain Carentan.

Stable autocratic régimes generally try to hide excessive repression from the broader population, limiting the number of witnesses of state atrocities. If acts of state violence are visible to the public, autocrats carefully rationalize and legitimize their behavior through the régime’s ideology.

In the chaotic final days of autocratic régimes, however, dictators commonly lack the capacity to conceal or justify violence. Moreover, facing imminent existential threats, they may also prioritize the intended coercion effects of state violence over potential public backlash effects. These dynamics turn large numbers of ordinary citizens into witnesses of state crimes. How does witnessing régime atrocities influence the political attitudes of bystanders?

We argue that individuals who directly observed state crimes during régime breakdown are likely to distance themselves from the old régime’s ideology and its proponents. Insights from social psychology on the effects of morally reprehensible events suggest that witnessing atrocities among bystanders may trigger profound thought processes and challenge long‐held beliefs.

Particularly for those neutral or even sympathetic to the régime, the wide discrepancy between previous beliefs about the régime and the state crimes observed can trigger feelings of shame, guilt, and the fear of being judged. Such feelings may manifest in avoidance and mistrust, which eventually lead to the desire to distance oneself from the régime and its horrors. We therefore expect that support for the ideology of the old régime will be significantly lower in places where ordinary citizens have witnessed state atrocities than in other places.

To empirically test our hypothesis, we investigate bystander effects around the collapse of the Third Reich. In the final months of World War II, the [Fascists] dissolved concentration and prison camps and moved inmates away from the front lines, to cover up their crimes while hoping to further profit from forced labor. The prisoners on these marches belonged to various groups that the [Fascists] had denounced as enemies of the German people—including communists, dissidents, homosexuals, Roma, and Jews.

In contrast to the industrial extermination inside the concentration camps, the [Axis] death marches directly confronted countless ordinary German citizens with the régime’s horrific nature. Over 200,000 people died on the marches. Some from sheer exhaustion, while many others were killed by accompanying SS guards in one of the numerous massacres committed along the way. As a result, the local population of various towns was directly confronted with the régime’s excessive violence against defenseless victims.

Many of the [Axis] death marches crossed the state of Bavaria. Drawing on archival sources, we identify the exact routes of all death marches through the Southern German state as well as the number of victims at each location. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of the political consequences of the [Axis] death marches.

[…]

Our empirical results show how state atrocities during the [Third Reich’s] breakdown changed the political attitudes of bystanders. We find that, in municipalities with higher victim numbers, people voted significantly less for right‐wing nationalist parties after World War II.

In line with our proposed mechanism, we show that this bystander effect is 1) most pronounced for the most severe forms of atrocities, i.e. particularly high numbers of killings in individual municipalities, 2) strongest in elections where [Axis] crimes were politically salient in the post‐war public discourse, and 3) that witnessing [Axis] atrocities was associated with individuals’ rejection of Hitler twenty years later.

Together, our results reveal a robust political distancing behavior. Bystanders withdraw political support from groups affiliated with or in support of the fallen régime.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more information.)

At the beginning, most of the “evacuations” of concentration camps were carried out by train, which limited civilians’ direct contact to prisoners. This changed in early 1945 when the large camps in Bavaria were abandoned and more and more transports took place by foot. As a result, hundreds, sometimes thousands of starving men and women were forced through small, rural towns, where then entire village communities would witness the marches (Winter 2018). Emphasizing this overt character of the atrocities, Distel (2004) established the term of “public dying.”

In some cases, the local population witnessed only the transit of marches. As one local witness recalls: “Then a march came, rows of six, rows of eight, in these striped suits, skeletons, so horrible […]! it’s a horrible memory! I’ll never forget the sight!” (Bigalski 2007, 10). In other cases, marches halted in villages for several days.

The local population saw and heard the suffering of the prisoners: “We heard the prisoners yelling all night. We could not sleep” (Winter 2018, 42). Another witness remembers: “Each of these figures struck me as death incarnate. Again and again, I heard despairing, begging calls for bread and water […]” (Scharrer 1995, 13).

Initially, guards were careful to keep killings out of sight of the local population—massacring prisoners in forests or quarries (Winter 2018). However, even in these instances, many executions were noticed. One local civilian recalls: “I discovered men in the ditch in prisoner clothing, skeletally emaciated, who had been shot and in some cases mutilated” (Klitta 1970, 164).

Another recounts: “We kept hearing shots. Later we discovered the bodies of prisoners who had been shot” (Scharrer 1995, 13). In other instances, executions took place in plain sight, often in the streets, observed by crowds of local villagers (Winter 2018, 156). In some cases, civilians even followed the marches, collecting and burying the victims as ordered by the SS guards.

The reactions of the population to the death marches varied. The SS commanders and guards relied on local institutions for support. Mayors organized accommodation and food, members of the police, Volkssturm, or Hitler Youth helped guarding prisoners, chasing escapees, and sometimes actively participated in executions (Blatman 2011, 419). The behavior of ordinary civilians was more ambiguous.

In some instances, local inhabitants tried to help the prisoners (Winter 2018). In other cases, people helped facilitating and covering up the atrocities (Greiser 2008). Most people, however, remained passive when they observed atrocities (Winter 2015).

[…]

The death marches continued to play an important rôle in public debates of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Exhumations and re‐burials extended to 1949. In the late 1940s, formal trials began against [some] perpetrators of the Holocaust, including around 50 actors involved in the marches.

In parallel, controversies emerged around the local remembrance of the marches. Many villages refused to care for graveyards or to establish memorials that would remind villagers of the atrocities that occurred in their midst. In the cynical words of a local mayor: “[I]n the interest of a common future and thus in the interest of the surviving victims, both sides must sometimes forget” (Winter 2018, 433).

According to Winter (2018), a survey carried out in the 1950s revealed that many graveyards and memorials of the death marches were in bad conditions. In some communities they were not maintained properly, in others they were purposefully damaged or destroyed. In the mid‐1950s, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior decided to reopen graves and to relocate bodies to central graveyards and memorials. This process reduced the number of graveyards from around 500 to 75, thereby contributing to the fading local memories of the marches.

[…]

Model 1 presents the simple bivariate correlation between death march violence and the vote share of right‐wing nationalist parties in post‐war Bavaria. Models 2–4 stepwise add county and year fixed effects as well as the full set of covariates and march fixed effects. Model 5 replaces the categorical violence exposure measurement with a continuous, population‐normalized variable. Model 6 drops all municipalities without violence comparing only municipalities with low and high victim numbers, where the former serves as the reference category.

In all models, a high victim number (or measured as the number of victims normalized by population size) has a negative, statistically significant effect on the vote share of nationalist parties across the five elections between 1946 and 1954. Together, the results suggest that the witnessing of atrocities led to a distancing from [Fascism] and its proponents.

Substantively, a community’s exposure to atrocities during the death marches reduced the vote share of right‐wing nationalist parties by 2.4 percentage points (based on Model 4). Given that the vote share of the nationalist block ranged from 7% to 16% in the elections included in the analysis, this is a sizable effect.

We find no comparable effect in communities where fewer people died on the marches. The coefficient for Low Victims is considerably smaller and statistically insignificant, except for the bivariate correlation in Model 1. Smaller scale atrocities, specifically since they occurred at the end of the World War, might not have been sufficiently shocking to bystanders allowing them to rationalize the régime’s crimes.

In Section SI.4.3, we show the results of three additional tests to demonstrate the robustness of the empirical findings. First, leave‐one‐out‐tests confirm that our results are not driven by individual counties. Second, our results also hold if we control for the number of expellees (Heimatvertriebene) settling in Bavarian municipalities, which might confound the relationship between atrocities and right‐wing nationalist vote shares as expellees were core constituencies of many of the post‐WWII right‐wing parties.

Third, we demonstrate that our results hold when consecutively leaving out one of the parties that jointly constitute our dependent variable. Our results are not driven by one particular party.

Witnesses realize that the atrocious events they observed were not isolated cases but part of a widespread practice of repression. This implies that the distancing effect should be most pronounced around truth and reconciliation efforts, such as during trials against the henchmen of the old régime or when facts on the crimes are unearthed by state attorneys or journalists.

Figure 9, Panel A, demonstrates that the distancing effect is strongest for the elections in 1950 and 1953. As can be seen from Panel B, these elections took place during the peak of the trials against former [Axis] perpetrators when the memory to the régime began to fade.¹³

Once judicial attention to [Axis] crimes receded, the distancing effect in federal and Bavarian state elections disappeared. Interestingly, in years in which right‐extremist voting was most prevalent in post‐WWII Bavaria (see Figure 4), local communities in municipalities directly exposed to the horrific crimes of the [Third Reich] were less receptive to right‐wing ideology.

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Click here for events that happened today (June 11).

1938: Imperial troops began to march for Wuhan, Hubei, China, thereby triggering the Battle of Wuhan.
1940: A series of Fascist air raids triggered the Siege of Malta.
1942: Adolf Eichmann met with representatives from France, Belgium, and Holland to coordinate the deportation of Jews.
1964: Walter Seifert, Axis sergeant, committed a school shooting in the suburb of Volkhoven in Cologne. He died of self‐induced poisoning that evening.
1974: Julius Evola, superfascist philosophist and disgusting misogynist white supremacist, finally mustered up the decency to drop dead.

A few weeks ago I watched a Bad Hasbara episode where a guest repeated the summary of Fascism as ‘colonialism and imperialism turned inward’, and more recently I saw somebody paraphrase Aimé Césaire as saying ‘Nazism was nothing but colonialism turned back against the people of Europe.’

For the record, I believe that this summary is well intentioned: it invites us, as whites, to look at the European colonization of the Americas, Oceania, and Afrasia, and interpret it as a protofascist endeavor. (Indeed, the Fascists consciously took inspiration from at least some of this colonization.) Likewise, we can hardly be blamed for perpetuating this conclusion since education under capitalism is so lackluster.

With all of that being said, when we say something like ‘Fascism was just colonialism directed at other whites’, in effect we accidentally end up contributing to Eurocentrism, because Fascism affected Afrasians as well. This is not even getting into how it affected Europeans of color (e.g. Roma) or the argument over whether or not Japanese Imperialism was fascist. Various parts of Afrasia fell under Fascist occupation: Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Vichy West Africa, Syria, and Lebanon, to name only the least arguable examples. Even if we choose to focus exclusively on German Fascism, the Third Reich’s influence in Afrasia was significant:

It is often overlooked that the North African campaign was fought by fascist régimes united not just by a violent vision of racially pure new societies; moreover, a stated wartime objective of Fascist Italy in the African theatre was the conquest of spazio vitale, or “living space”.

The capture of British‐controlled Egypt, Sudan, and Somaliland in the Horn of Africa was intended to complement the existing portions of [Fascist] overseas territory in Libya and Ethiopia and to round them out into a new contiguous fascist empire in which the “New Man” of fascism would emerge, steeled in permanent battle with the desert and the “natives”.¹⁴

The idea was to make Africa a breeding ground for the “white race” and to reverse the declining birthrate that Europe had been experiencing since the late nineteenth century. [Rome’s] vision thus had a major rôle to play in the rejuvenation and racial renewal of the Old Continent, which was supposedly in decline. The Desert War was thus inextricably linked to the imperial expansion of the Axis powers and their murderous biopolitics.

Adopting such a chronologically and geographically expanded perspective forces us to rethink the very definition of the Holocaust. In fact, my research is based on a widened understanding of the phenomenon. For a long time, parts of the research community and a broader public equated the Holocaust with the systematic mass murder of Jewish people that began in 1941. In recent years, however, Jewish historians such as Saul Friedländer and Dan Michman in particular have criticised this view.¹⁵

They argue that the social exclusion, deprivation, and persecution of Jews between 1933 and the beginning of the war have been pushed into the background, although they marked essential steps on the way to extermination.¹⁶

Ultimately, the [Germanic Fascists] were concerned with the complete eradication of Jewry, the people as well as their culture. Cultural, social, and physical extermination are thus to be understood as a unity. Even in the case of North Africa, where there were no mass murders but extensive antisemitic measures, one should therefore speak of the Holocaust, according to Michman.¹⁷

It would indeed be too shortsighted to understand the Holocaust in North Africa solely from its fatal result. Rather, it must be understood as a cumulative process that began with the persecution of Jewish people by the Italian and French states in the late 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, I argue that the exclusion, persecution, and partial murder of the 450,000 Jewish people living in North Africa was strongly influenced by colonial traditions of violence against Arabs and Berbers.

Per Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill:

Thousands of Jews of North African origin who were domiciled in Europe during the war were sent to the extermination camps and murdered alongside European Jews. This is confirmed, for example, by recent researchers who examined the ‘dog tags’ of various Sobibór victims, and matched hundreds of them to Jewish persons of North‐African origin.¹⁰⁶

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

These thousands of Jews were but a few of the hundreds of thousands of Afrasians that the Fascists sacrificed on the altar of capital.

Even the colonization and superexploitation of other whites cannot be credited as a Fascist innovation. Click here for examples.

Irishmen could not own land, sue in the king’s courts, hold office in central or local government, or be admitted to any ecclesiastical benefice in the territories under English control. In addition, the killing of an Irish man or woman was not a felony in English law; at most, the killer might owe compensation to the dead person’s lord.

This last provision did not, as is sometimes assumed, imply murderous intent. The point was that Irishmen, as aliens rather than subjects, were outside the protection of the law. But the implications of that principle, where settler and native shared the same territory, were far reaching.

(Source.)

Capitalist colonialism within Europe was phenomenal years before the Fascist era. A byspel of this was World War I:

In 1918 Germany annexed huge tracts of territory from the Russian Empire, taking direct control of almost all its coal mines, three‐quarters of its iron ore, half its industry, and a third of its rail system. An increasingly anti‐Slavic ideology added a racial dimension to this imperial expansion.

Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff wanted not only to control the resources of Eastern Europe, but also to subdue the region’s Slavic nationalities, settle Germans there, and create a “frontier wall of ‘physically and mentally healthy human beings.’” First in Poland then later further east, the German army commandeered forced labor, deported thousands of Slavic workers, and monitored the local population through registration and identity cards.⁴⁶

(Source and see Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I for more.)

White capitalists superexploiting their fellow white citizens is likewise a prefascist phenomenon:

Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working‐day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night‐labour, irregular meal‐times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.

(Source.)

It is both laudable and accurate to invite others to interpret premodern European colonialism as the prototype for Fascism, but implying that it only affected Europeans is misleading at best. The Fascists were adventurer‐conquerors with high ambitions: they wanted empires that could successfully compete with liberal ones such as the British Empire, which extended beyond Europe, hence the presence of Fascism in Afrasia. For the Fascists, conquering Europe was merely the minimum, not the limit.

Further reading: Africa and World War II

The Axis’s massacre at Oradour‐sur‐Glane is well known in France, but less so in the remainder of the world. Hundreds of civilians of all ages and genders, as well as a minority of foreign nationalities (Italian, Polish, & Spanish), perished in this atrocity. Only a handful of civilians survived. Many have suggested that this massacre was simply another one of the Axis’s reprisals, but the real motive might have been finding gold. Whatever the case, none of the perpetrators paid the full price for what they had done, but their victims shall not be forgotten.

Quoting Robert Hébras’s Oradour‐Sur‐Glane: the tragedy, hour by hour, pages 20–1:

As the minutes ticked by, we fell prey to an increasing apprehension. A search of the whole village would certainly take a long time, I thought. I suppose we all thought the same thing, but nobody said a word.

[…]

Suddenly, I heard an explosion, probably a grenade.

On this signal, the men behind the machine guns settled into position, and fired. In a deafening din and the smell of gunpowder, every man fell, one on top of the other. The cries of pain, the heat, the smell of blood mingled with that of hay, dust and powder, turned the barn into a Hell on Earth. I didn’t understand what was happening.

Everything happened so quickly, and, when the guns fell silent, wails and groans and cries arose from the heap of shattered bodies. I was underneath several others. I was thirsty. I didn’t even know if I was wounded. I felt something hot and sticky trickle down my hand. I lay absolutely motionless, as if dead. I heard footsteps. They were those of soldiers clambering over our bodies to finish off the survivors.

I felt a foot on my back, I did not flinch. Some jerked in death when they were given the coup de grâce. How long it was all taking! When would it be my turn? One of the football players was lying with his head on my leg. He was given the coup de grâce and the bullet wounded me slightly. I felt the pain, but as afar off. I was frightened and very thirsty, my wounds were beginning to hurt, and what were they saying, these brutal voices I could hear? They covered us with hay and firewood, and set fire to it. Was I the sole survivor?

Amid the crackling of the flames, which were now spreading rapidly, a voice rang out, full of pain and despair:

‘Ah, the bastards! They’ve cut my other leg off!’

I recognised at once the voice of Monsieur Brissaud, who had lost a leg during the 14–18 war. Other voices were then heard, crying out in pain and shock. And then, what was that music I could hear? In spite of my perilous situation, I tried to find where it was coming from. How macabre! Executions to a musical accompaniment! The fire was spreading rapidly. I stood it for as long as I could, sheltering under the bodies of those who had already breathed their last. I didn’t hear the [Axis] leave.

When the flames reached me, I struggled to get out, fully expecting to be shot down at once. I was greatly surprised to find I was still alive. I went towards a little door at the back of the barn, and opened it. It gave onto a small yard, with no way out. I turned back and, skirting the fire which was by then widespread, went to another door opposite. It opened into a gloomy stable. I saw a shadow in front of me.

Frightened, I closed the door and went into another yard, for I did not know whether the shadow I had glimpsed was German or French. I heard voices. I stopped to listen. They were French, with a Limousin accent. Even so, I went forward cautiously, and then saw four of my friends: Marcel Darthout, Yvon Roby, Clément Broussaudier and Matthieu Borie. Three out of the five of us were wounded. Where could we go?

(Emphasis added.)

Further reading: Massacre at Oradour

Massacre at Oradour, France, 1944: coming to grips with terror

Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour‐sur‐Glane

L’aura des ruines d’Oradour

Le dernier témoin d’Oradour‐sur‐Glane: Un témoignage pour les générations futures

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Click here for other events that happened today (June 10).

1924: Several Fascists kidnapped and killed Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in Rome. (Matteotti had just accused the Fascists of fraud ten days earlier.)
1935: Someone called a truce between Bolivia and Paraguay (who had been fighting since 1932), thus ending the Chaco War.
1940: Fascist Italy declared war on France and the United Kingdom, beginning an invasion of southern France, and the Norwegian military’s resistance to the Fascists ended; Norway surrendered to Fascism. Additionally, the Gestapo took control of the small fortress in Terezín (or Theresienstadt) in occupied Czechoslovakia for use as a prison, and Erwin Rommel’s troops continued to march down the French coast, now west of Paris.
1941: Desperate for sources of raw materials, Tōkyō was infuriated when Imperial America won the contract to purchase all the Tungsten mined in Bolivia over the next three years. Apart from this, Lord Simon met with Rudolf Heß for 2.5 hours, during which Hess asked Lord Simon to work with London to negotiate peace with the Third Reich.
1942: The Axis perpetrated the Lidice massacre as a reprisal for the murder of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.
1944: The Axis exterminated 218 people (of all ages and genders) in Distomo, Boeotia.
1945: In the East China Sea about forty miles northwest of Okinawa at 0815 hours, an Axis D3A dive bomber dropped out of the clouds above destroyer USS William D. Porter. Making a sharp turn, the destroyer avoided impact and the plane hit the nearby sea. Somehow the dive bomber ended up under Porter’s keel and exploded, lifting the ship out of the water. She lost all power and the steam lines fractured. A number of fires broke out and after three hours they realised that the ship could not be saved. Somebody gave the abandon ship order and the destroyer rolled over and sank, but nobody recorded any fatalities.
2024: Washington unbanned exporting weapons to the Azov Brigade, and the neofascist group 1143 and its accomplices in the Portuguese police assaulted antifascists at Lisbon.