(This excerpt takes approximately eight minutes to read.)

Maja Abramowitch, born in Daugavpils in 1929, had relatives in Poland and remembers that her family received letters from them after they moved into the Warsaw ghetto, which was established in October 1940. The letters contained messages with ambiguous phrases like “birds are being shot continuously,” implying an ominous fate for ghetto inhabitants.

Abramowitch describes an encounter shortly before [June 17, 1940] with a German Jewish couple who came to her father’s shop in Daugavpils. The couple, refugees from [the Third Reich], told of their plight and sought her father’s help.¹⁰ She writes, “The flood of refugees increased day by day. The whole town was agog with the revelations of those unfortunate people” (2002, 17).

Abramowitch’s family did not flee after the [Axis] attack, though her brothers left to join the Red Army. Adele Honigwill, born in 1912 in Daugavpils, recalls that in spite of having relatives in the Warsaw ghetto, there was not a sense in her home that the family should flee: “We never expected […] what really happened.”¹¹

Decisions about flight were taken in a short window of time in which “the evacuation dilemma compelled people to evaluate both the risks of remaining and the dangers of departure” (Manley 2009, 86). [The Third Reich] attacked the USSR on June 22. The killing of Latvia’s Jews commenced quickly: on 23 June, six Jews were murdered by an Einsatzgruppe A subgroup in the town of Grobiņa near Liepāja (Stranga 2008).

In the following days, there were still limited opportunities for flight. It is challenging to say when the doors to departure closed, as they shut sooner for those around Liepāja, where the [Wehrmacht] moved in first, than they did for those closer to the Russian border or in Riga, which fell on 1 July.

[…]

Irina Golbreich, born in Riga in 1934, remembers that her mother was desperate to evacuate, though her father was “quite optimistic. He comforted Mama, telling her that if the Red Army had been successful fighting against German forces in Poland, they would have no problem defeating them in their own land.”

Golbreich fled with her mother; her father later followed. The family lost her father’s siblings: “They believed that the Germans were not as bad as the Soviets and were resolute about staying. None of them survived.”¹⁵

[…]

Levin writes that, “Solidarity with one’s family was the dominant factor in delaying Jewish attempts to flee,” noting that some younger Jews and heads of family who had the opportunity to leave chose not to abandon older or younger family members or gave in to the pleas of parents to remain (1990a, 124).

Ella Medal’e, born in 1912 in Tukums, wanted to flee with her mother, sister, and husband, but her mother had medical issues and Medal’e did not want to leave her behind.²⁴ Maksim Felton, born in 1925 in Riga, recalls that his multi-generational family did not want to separate. In the end, his father, who “did not believe [that] it could happen,” was among those who chose with his family to stay.²⁵

Sara Munic, born in 1926 in Liepāja, remembers that her father, who had worked on construction for the Latvian Army and later the Soviet Army, had the opportunity to go to Russia because he was employed by the military. He had, however, family that he did not want to leave behind. She adds, “maybe he decided [that] he was scared for nothing,” even though the family was aware of events in [the Third Reich].²⁶

Some Jewish families remained in place because they had lost track of a family member or were waiting for his or her return. In his memoir, Jack Ratz recalls, “My father begged my mother to go on the bus [out of Riga], but she refused. She insisted upon waiting for my older brother to come home and remained with me and my brothers.”

Ratz’s brother did not return, having been conscripted into the Red Army without the family’s knowledge (2004, 20). Bella Bogdanova, born in Liepāja in 1926, remembers that, “My mother wanted to flee, but I insisted not a step be taken without my father,” whom the family had lost track of after [the Axis’s] attack. Bogdanova later learned that he had been murdered.²⁷

Some Jewish families resisted flight because, in addition to leaving family and friends, they feared losing homes and property that had been earned over generations. Max Kaufmann writes, “There were […] many Jews who did not want to part from their possessions, which they had worked so hard to acquire” (2010, 35). The fear of loss and the fear of what awaited them outside of Latvia were powerful motivations to remain.

A mighty army

Soviet authorities were relentless in their message that the Red Army was the guardian of the people, instilling, arguably, a sense that the [Axis] onslaught was not a mortal threat. Levin writes that,

By June 1941, the majority of the Jewish inhabitants in the annexed territories had become full-fledged Soviet citizens who felt relatively safe from the ravages of war which had engulfed almost all of Europe. This feeling was largely grounded in their trust in the might of the Soviet Union, particularly the “great Red Army,” glorified day in, day out as “invincible”. (1990a, 119)

The realization that the Red Army could not [always] protect Latvia’s Jews came quickly, though for many it came too late. Ruvin Fridman remembers that students in his school were taught that the Soviet army was the strongest in the world.

He adds that when the [Axis] attacked, he saw Russian soldiers in retreat, some shoeless, leaving without putting up resistance,²⁸ a picture that is consistent with the testimony of Shmuel Shusan, who remembers that on 27 June 1941, “While the [Soviet] radio was broadcasting victory announcements, we saw the soldiers of the Red Army coming down the street […] they walked without order, their uniforms soiled and in tatters, their heads bowed. They trudged along in dust-covered boots” (cited in Levin 1990a, 116).

Confidence in victory in some cases included the certainty of Allied help: Valentīna Freimane writes, “My father didn’t doubt for a moment — the U.S. and other Allies would join the war and beat Hitler. Until then, we would have to manage and prepare for offenses, humiliations, and repressions. But we would be alright” (2010, 233).

Paradoxically, the belief in the mighty Soviet military may also have encouraged flight, as the duration of one’s absence would not be long if the army could rapidly push back the occupier. Many who left Latvia ahead of [Axis] occupation did so with few provisions. Few expected that expulsion of [Axis] forces would take years. Mavriks Vulfsons, who volunteered for military service, writes that he “believed [that] the military activity would end soon” (1998, 30).

Rejection of Soviet power

While some Jews stayed behind because of their belief in the Red Army, others welcomed the Soviet retreat and hoped that [the Axis] would restore the societal and political order disrupted by Soviet [governance].

In Latvia, middle- and upper class Jewish families, particularly those who were merchants or members of the intellectual or political élite, had suffered under Soviet rule and few lamented the departure of Communist functionaries and military and security forces.

As Gerta Feigin, born in 1928 in Riga, writes, “When the Soviets occupied Latvia, my life, and the lives of my loved ones, were turned upside down.” (2006, 7). Several points underscore the importance of this factor in the choice to remain in Latvia.

First, thousands of Jewish families had experienced the nationalization of their property during Soviet [governance] and had little sympathy for Soviet-style socialism. Arkadius Scheinker writes that,

Many well-to-do Jews could not get over this injustice and adverseness of the laws […] For Jews of German education and upbringing [many of whom were in the merchant class], the thought “of fleeing to the country that had done us so much harm” was absolutely unacceptable.

Scheinker notes that his brother Benno was among those who were compelled to give up their businesses and Benno rejected the idea of flight to Russia. Even the appearance of the […] Wehrmacht, “who were good looking in their uniforms in comparison to the Soviet soldiers,” convinced him of the rightness of his decision. Benno Scheinker was arrested on 3 July 1941 by Latvian auxiliary police and shot (2010, 45–46).

The homes of well-off residents were also, in Feigin’s words, “nationalized.” She writes that, “a Soviet officer settled in our house […] He settled in mom’s living room. Mom was very nervous, because he wore big black boots and walked around on her Persian carpet” (2006, 9). Soviet regulations foresaw limitations on the allocation of living space, so many residents were forced to take in military personnel.

Jews were also affected by the closure of Hebrew-language schools (Lumans 2006). Naum Lifshits, born in 1923 in Krāslava, recalls the closure of schools, as well as the arrest of some teachers after [June 17, 1940]. Lifshits says that the effect of Soviet [activity] on Jewish life was profound: his father was prosecuted for Zionist activities in Betar and deported by Soviet authorities shortly before the [Axis] attack.²⁹

Paradoxically, deported Jews were among the small number who survived the Holocaust, though Lifshits’s father and uncle did not survive the Soviet labor camps. Hana Rayzberg, born in 1927 in Ludza, tells that,

Men were taken to the Gulag to timber cutting, and children and women were exiles. This was terrible, but in the long run, this saved the life of many of them. The intelligentsia or wealthy people would hardly have evacuated during World War II, hoping that the Germans would restitute their property nationalized by the Soviets.³⁰

Lumans notes a source that estimates a “one-third-survival rate” for Jews deported to Russia (2006, 227).

Second, Soviet political culture and social norms were foreign to many of Latvia’s residents. Styles of dress and behavior were regarded as “uncultured,” particularly among the middle- and upper classes. Feigin writes that, “Mom told me that the officers’ wives bought silk nightgowns and wore them as elegant evening gowns. Nobody would say anything, but privately the local population laughed and jeered.” (2006, 9). Zelda-Rivka Heit remembers the story of the nightgowns, adding that Russian officers stole goods like watches from shops.³¹

In the choice between what Margaret Kagan called the “red devil” and the “brown devil,”³² some opted for the latter. Feigin recalls that when the war began, Sirens were blaring and bombs began dropping. We hid in the basement. Some of the relatives said that we had to go to Russia because Hitler would come to Riga. In the end, my whole huge family decided to stay in Riga, figuring that the [Fascists] were at least better than the Communists: “Besser die braune Pest als die rote” (Better the brown plague than the red one). They thought that it would be easier to get by under the [Axis] (2006, 11).

Edward Anders adds,

[The Fascists] had killed some tens of thousands of Poles and Jews in Poland in 1939/40, but we had not heard of these killings from either the local press — which wanted to keep good relations with Germany — or the BBC and the Swiss weekly Weltwoche. […] What we knew was bad enough and should have made us worry, but we were all so sickened by the Soviets’ deceit, hypocrisy, sophistry, coercion, terror, and lies, that the Nazis seemed the lesser evil. (2010, 46)

Third, the deportation of leaders of the secular and religious Jewish communities denied Jews the benefit of a leadership that might have offered guidance in the chaotic days after [the Axis’s] attack. Among the prominent Jewish leaders deported by the Soviets in 1941 were Mordechai Dubin, a leader of Agodus Israel, a former elected member of the Saeima, and an associate of Ulmanis, as well as Rabbi Mordechai Nurock, a leader of Mizrachi and also a former member of the Saeima (Levin 1995).

Some Latvian Jews actively rejected Communism and Soviet power. In addition to this, some were strongly oriented toward German culture and language, a factor that also affected decisions taken in the war’s opening days.

(Some emphasis added.)

It is easy to laugh at the Jewish holdouts who naïvely believed that Axis rule could not be worse than Soviet governance, but I want to kindly remind readers that nobody deserves white supremacy… no, not even capitalists and horseshoe theorists deserve to be victims of white supremacy; nobody should be punished for the wrong reasons.

Not every person of color whom I’ve ever met has been pleasant. In fact, I have met a few who were downright loathsome, to say the least… and yet I’d still warn them if ICE, or any other white supremacist organization, were looking for them, because hate groups do not exist to redress our grievances. Can you guess whose job that is? That’s right, it’s ours, and giving that up to hate groups is giving them a privilege that they do not deserve and cannot be trusted to handle properly.

(Mirrors.)

According to a former student, Höcke, as a teacher, repeatedly praised the work of Psychology of the Masses by Gustave le Bon, and often spoke about charisma, told stories of his grandfather’s meeting with Adolf [Schicklgruber], and described [Schicklgruber’s] ‘incredibly blue eyes’ as a central element of the Führer cult. He was fascinated by Nordic mythology and regularly wore a Mjölnir pendant around his neck.

Two years later, he called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a ‘monument of shame’, invoked the idea of a ‘reversal of history’, demanding that Germany stop its culture of remembrance and ‘reclaim its identity’. In speeches, he refers to a 1,000-year Germany, a phrase that reminds [one] of [the] concept of the 1,000-year Reich, and uses [Fascist] concepts like Lebensraum.

His 2018 book includes passages eerily similar to the works of SS figures:

I am convinced that the Germans’ longing for a historical figure who will one day heal the wounds in the nation, overcome the divisions and put things in order, is deeply rooted in our souls.

In 2019, media reports began revealing that Höcke attended secret far-right meetings where he discussed plans for ‘remigration’, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing used by right-wing extremists. In a 2021 speech, he got fined €13,000 for using a forbidden Sturmabteilung slogan: Alles für Deutschland (‘everything for Germany’). Just last year, he was banned again for chanting the first part, encouraging the audience to reply with the rest.

While the National Party leadership maintains a façade of respectability, Höcke is a direct link between AfD politics and hardcore neo[fascist] ideology, and this is very important to understand: fascism is not something that wins or loses during one election. It is the result of a systemic shift over a long period of time.

Almost exactly two years before the attack on Korynevych, I wrote about “a potential rift” in the Azov movement, which until now seemed to have aged poorly. On Biletsky’s initiative, the “Support Azov” charity was established in mid-2022, but later changed its name after the newly upgraded NGU Azov Brigade launched “The One and Only” charity “Azov One” in early 2023. As somebody said recently, “‘Support Azov’ collects millions, and the [NGU] Azov fighters see zero. Has anyone noticed where the cache is disappearing?”

Until last September, the Azovite units shared a patronage service, “Azov’s Angels,” which grew out of the Azov Battalion and partnered with “Azov One.” Last September, the NGU Azov Brigade launched a separate patronage service, blindsiding the “Angels” and the rest of the movement.

Dmytro Kukharchuk, one of Biletsky’s most prominent lieutenants, appeared to be talking about Prokopenko and his entourage when he reacted to this news: “the ambitions of certain individuals cannot be the reason for our oblivion.” Nowadays, Kukharchuk might be the most divisive figure in the Azov movement, who has said that the attack on Korynevych “looks like a provocation of enemy intelligence agencies.”

[…]

As Marta Havryshko commented, “Once upon a time, the Führer was Bandera. Now it’s Biletsky. Just the kind of boys Europe can’t wait to welcome into their living rooms.” Leave it to a historian to notice, “Criminal-style showdowns within the Azov movement are escalating.”

Mr. Dobrowolski was a Ukrainian who reportedly defected from the Red Army to become the [Axis’s] chief informant in the region of Chernihiv.

Ms. Metreweli never met her grandfather as he stayed in [Axis]-occupied Ukraine while his family fled the Red Army liberation of the region in 1943.

The documents held in Freiburg, Germany describe how Mr. Dobrowolski was dubbed ‘Agent 30’ by his [Axis] commanders.

Born to a German-Polish father and a Ukrainian mother in 1906, the Daily Mail reports [that] he hated the Soviet Union when his family’s estate was seized after the 1917 revolution.

He joined the [Axis] in 1941, and was paid a monthly wage of just 81 Reichsmark, around £250 today, for spying.

In letters to his [Axis] officers, he signed off “Heil Hitler” and said he took part in a massacre of Jewish people near Kyiv.

The Daily Mail reported that there are also accounts of him looting the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughing at the sexual assault of female prisoners.

The Soviets put a 50,000-rouble — the equivalent of £200,000 today — bounty on Mr. Dobrowolski and labelled him “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people”.

He remained in [Axis]-occupied Ukraine after his family fled the Soviet advance in 1943. The last record of him is from August 1943, a month before the Red Army took Chernihiv.

After the war, his wife, Barbara, and son, Constantine, arrived in Britain. Barbara remarried and Constantine — Ms. Metreweli’s father — took his stepfather’s name. Neither he nor Ms. Metreweli knew his father.

Ms. Metreweli is a career intelligence officer, having joined the secret intelligence service in 1999, shortly after graduating from Pembroke College, Cambridge. Most of her career has been spent in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesman said: “Blaise Metreweli neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather. Blaise’s ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”

The apple does not fall far from the tree.

November 9, 1938, is a significant date in both German and Turkish history. […] Turks in Berlin were eyewitnesses to violence against German Jews that day, and some of them were targeted by the mob because they “looked Jewish.”

Tarık Emiroğlu, a Turkish student of architecture in Berlin in 1938 and 1939, mentioned in a letter to his grandmother that during the pogrom “a ruckus almost started when Turks dispersed into the street after having gathered at the [Turkish Club of Berlin’s] clubhouse upon hearing of Atatürk’s death. Seeing a lot of dark-skinned people gathering, Germans mistook the Turks for Jews who were planning a counter action and raised an uproar, but the police intervened and resolved the issue.”¹

[…]

Dirik’s account of those years is filled with terrible anxiety about being mistaken for a Jew and uncomfortable interactions with German Jewish women, which he feared would land him in danger. One day in 1936 when Dirik and a couple of Turkish friends found themselves having lunch in Munich in the same restaurant as Adolf Hitler, he reports:

Suddenly looking annoyed, the Führer called his aide and said something pointing to us. The SS officer came over to our table and asked if we knew German. My friends pointed to me. Turning to me, he asked our nationality and what we were doing in the city. When I said we were Turks pursuing higher education, he gave the Hitler salute and left us, and told Hitler the information.

The man’s sullen look immediately changed and he looked straight at us, smiling. Since both of my friends are dark skinned and have slightly crooked noses, Hitler probably thought we were Jews; because in this country the Jewish type looks like this.⁹²

Another time, he speaks of “sweating in fear” at the opera that [the German Fascists] would mistake his “dark-skinned and black-haired” mother for a Jew,⁹³ which ruined his enjoyment of the performance. In 1940 learning that the “dark-skinned” young woman who was his date was Jewish, he was unable to enjoy a dance.

Just as Sedat Alp had spurned the chance to save his Jewish landlady by marrying her, Dirik left this young Jewish woman to her fate—and never seems to have wondered what happened to her when reflecting on that evening decades later.⁹⁴

Turkish men at that time expressed fear and loathing of Jewish women. Their autobiographical accounts stand in stark contrast to the romantic relations portrayed in novels explored in Turkish-German Studies, especially those of Sabahattin Ali, Zafer Şenocak, and Doğan Akhanlı.⁹⁵

In the autobiographical accounts, fear did not transform into sympathy for Jews, whether German or Turkish. What we read instead is Turks substituting “Turks” (Turkish Muslims) for (German) “Jews” as the victims of the [Third Reich]. Tarık Emiroğlu mentions that although Germans had a favorable opinion of Turks, “if there is one thing about Germans that irritates us, it is that whether we are walking on the street or sitting somewhere, they look at us strangely because we are dark skinned.”⁹⁶

His narrative of violence against Jews during the November 9 pogrom immediately switches to depicting Turks as potential victims. Since they wore “Turkish rosettes,” he says, no one had abused or attacked them as Jews so far, but on Kristallnacht in 1938 they were mistaken for Jews seeking revenge.⁹⁷ After they were identified as Turks, however, they were let go unmolested.

During his years in Berlin, Şefik Okday (1909–2002), who studied at the Technische Hochschule from 1930 to 1933 and then earned a degree in engineering in Dresden in 1937, got to know the “ugly side” of [European Fascism], which for him was when Germans attacked Turks, thinking they were Jews.⁹⁸

Okday, too, immediately switches from briefly depicting attacks on Jews to describing at length how Turks were the victims of [Eurofascist] violence. He was in Germany at the time of the [NSDAP’s] rise to power and was sympathetic to the new régime: “To be honest, I also initially had great enthusiasm for the new ideas. One commits an injustice today reproaching Germans by saying, ‘You were with them from the start.’”⁹⁹

However, he notes, “I was soon witness to incidents that foreshadowed a later pogrom directed toward Jewish citizens.”¹⁰⁰ Here he was most likely referring to November 9, 1938. In the very next sentence he starts out by describing Turks as victims of the [German Fascists], deploying Turkish (Muslim) stereotypes about Turkish Jews speaking Turkish poorly. “Two Turkish students,” he related, “because they had dark skin and spoke German poorly, were mistaken for Jews and bludgeoned so badly by SA men that the bruises on their faces remained visible for weeks.”

Okday himself and his female companion were once cursed as “dirty Jews” because they did not show the necessary reverence to a passing torchlight procession. When, shortly after Hitler had become Reich’s chancellor, the Turkish cultural attaché Cevat Bey was severely maltreated “because he had dark skin and an aquiline nose,” it was the last straw for the Turkish ambassador, Kemaleddin Sami Pasha, a decorated World War I general, who donned his military dress uniform and medals, including the highest German World War I honors, and rushed to the Reich Chancellery.

Sami Pasha was “the only ambassador admitted to see Hitler at any time without an appointment,” Okday boasts, because Hitler had great respect for such war heroes.” According to accounts that circulated among Turkish students, their ambassador had “marched up the steps of the Reich Chancellery, shoved the bewildered SA guards out of the way,” and demanded “that dark-skinned Turks be left alone,” and that “SA men, before they bludgeoned a Jew, first examine [his] identification to make sure that they were not mistakenly laying their hands on a Turkish student.”¹⁰¹

Far from insisting that Turkish Jews not be harmed, the ambassador (and the students) assumed that “Turk” equated with Muslim, and expressed no opposition to the persecution of Jews.

In his autobiography, Müstecib Ülküsal, a fascist based in Berlin from 1941 to 1942 working with the [European Fascists] promoting the [capture] of Soviet Crimea, describes the “comic” experience of an Azeri named Hilal Münşi.¹⁰²

After the [German Fascists] came to power, Münşi told him, “they began to take Jews from their homes and the streets and send them to camps. Even though I do not belong to the Semitic race, I probably look sufficiently like a Jew that they seized me on the street and took me to the police station with the aim of deporting me to a camp. I tried to explain as best as I could that I was not a Jew but an Azeri Turk. They then demanded to see my organ, which had the mark of Jewishness. I tried to explain that Muslims also had this mark, which had passed from Judaism to Islam. But they did not believe it. They incarcerated me for several days. I gave them the names of some respected Germans I knew, and owing to their testifying on my account, I escaped from this difficult misfortune and dangerous situation.” Ülküsal comments: “Hilal really does look like a Jew. And he is clever.”

[…]

In a […] 1941 cable from the Turkish ambassador to Berlin, Hüsrev Gerede, to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara reporting the Holocaust as it unfolded speaks of the annihilation of “nearly one million” Jews before proceeding to note another such tragic case of mistaken identity: “According to information obtained from some Azeri Turks, 500 Turks denounced by the Russians as ‘members of the Jewish race’ have been murdered on the front by Germans.”¹⁰⁵

(Emphasis added. It is unclear if by ‘Russians’ Hüsrev Gerede was referring to the Kremlin, why the Kremlin would denounce these particular Turks as ‘Jewish’ if so, or if by ‘Russians’ he was referring to somebody else, perhaps even the White Russians.)

Those of us who have heard about the infamous report of a Sikh being the first victim of Islamomisia after September 11, 2001, or are otherwise familiar with how discriminations (e.g. cissexism) sometimes impact unintended targets, should recognize this phenomenon immediately. It is not restricted to antisemitism, though antisemitism is probably where it is most apparent given the notoriously variable criteria for Jewhood: it is a matter of historical record that Muslims have been victims of both antisemitism and anti-Judaism before.

Antisemitism would be disgusting even if it never affected gentiles, since no innocents should have to suffer, but it is unfortunate that not all of the gentile victims thereof had changes of heart after experiencing its consequences first-hand. This is because the victims of misfires do not always take it as an opportunity to reconsider their misconceptions of the intended targets, and the benefits of oppression still seem to outweigh the disadvantages. When somebody in Florida shot a settler whom he mistook for a Palestinian, the victim dismissed the shooter as a Palestinian himself, which suggests that he still saw privileges to gain from colonizing the rest of Palestine.

Forcing oppressors to suffer the direct consequences of their discrimination can sometimes push them in the right direction, but the surest way to disarm their oppression is to demonstrate how the disadvantages would outweigh the benefits. Presently, we are witnessing settlers in occupied Palestine experiencing a mere fraction of the misery that they inflicted on Palestinians, but it is specifically how living in the occupation is becoming too dangerous that many settlers are fleeing it.

Quoting Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: the life and death of Reinhard Heydrich, page 285:

[Axis] reprisals continued throughout the summer. With the help of local informants, Gestapo agents rounded up most of the surviving members of the Communist resistance and ÚVOD, including its entire Central Committee. The Czech underground was almost completely wiped out and was never to recover from the blows it suffered in the weeks after Heydrich’s death.

In Prague, Alois Eliáš, the former Prime Minister of the Protectorate government, who had been arrested immediately after Heydrich’s arrival in Prague, was executed. Hitler had no more use for him.

More innocent people fell victim in the village of Ležáky, where Gestapo agents found the transmitter of the underground radio team Silver A that had been parachuted into the Protectorate alongside Gabćík and Kubiš. All of the village’s adult inhabitants — thirty-three in total — were shot. The children were handed over to the [Axis] authorities and the village’s buildings reduced to rubble.

Alfréd Bartoš himself, the leader of Silver A, who had repeatedly warned Beneš about the potential repercussions of an attempted Heydrich assassination, was fatally wounded when his hide-out was discovered by the Gestapo.³⁰

Excluding those killed in Lidice and Ležáky, 3,188 Czechs were arrested and 1,327 were sentenced to death during the reprisals that summer, 477 of them for simply approving of the assassination. Up to 4,000 people with relatives among the exiles were rounded up and placed in concentration camps or ordinary prisons.³¹

The memorial to this atrocity has a website available in Czech, English, Esperanto and German. Nonetheless, the English was clearly the work of an amateur translator, which is almost shocking given this atrocity’s severity. That the Czech state could not be bothered to employ a proofreader or a professional translator for this website, even if only to exploit this tragedy for cynical reasons, is utterly baffling.

You are excused if you are disinterested in reading a clunky translation or my attempted correction thereof, but what you need to know is that this was a reprisal that hundreds of Axis officials, along with thirty collaborators, committed against thirty-three lower-class Czechoslovaks as a means of discouraging further antifascism. The Axis looted the village for any valuables before annihilating it. Shortly afterwards, the Axis selected two girls for forced assimilation, and poisoned the eleven others deemed unsuitable for it. Not one of these victims was upper-class.

Quoting Lawrence J. Epstein’s Converts to Judaism: Stories from Biblical Times to Today, pages 2–3:

There are […] a lot of unusual conversion stories. One of the strangest involves Reuel Abraham. His birth name was Karl Heinz Schneider. He spent his teen years organizing [Fascist] youth battalions. At age eighteen, he volunteered for combat service in the Luftwaffe. Dive-bombing was his unit’s specialty.

One day, Schneider was in [Fascist]-occupied Poland, walking through a town. There he witnessed some storm troopers murdering Jews in a synagogue’s courtyard. Schneider particularly noticed that the rabbi died clutching the Torah.

The incident changed Schneider’s life. He started to disobey orders. He dropped bombs on uninhabited areas. He adjusted detonators so that his bombs wouldn’t explode. When World War II ended, Schneider vowed to do penance for twenty years.

He went to work in coal mines, anonymously donating two-thirds of his salary to organizations aiding war orphans and survivors of the concentration camps. He taught himself Hebrew, and, taking a new name, he began to attend synagogue services.

After the twenty years, Schneider sold his farm and moved to [occupied Palestine]. He approached religious authorities about becoming a Jew. The authorities, at first not believing his story, investigated.

When they realized he was telling the truth, they considered his past and what he had done since and accepted his application. Taking the name Reuel Abraham, he became both a Jew and a citizen of [occupied Palestine].

That last bit should be particularly alarming: here is someone who thought that he could atone for his associations with the Axis by trading one ethnostate for another. This is a common theme for the Axis employés or their descendants who settled in occupied Palestine: settling there is supposed to be a ‘happy ending’ for them, though many have insisted that their attraction to Judaism was sincere. Take, for byspel, Rabbi Berel Wein:

“I was born and brought up in Germany. My father was an officer in the élite SS killing squad, the Totenkopf (Deathhead Squad). He served throughout the war and after it was over successfully eluded apprehension. But his crimes were so heinous that years later the West German Republic continued to pursue him. Finally, he was caught and imprisoned for ten years. Later, because he was so old, they reduced his sentence and let him out after four and a half years.

[…]

“I loved Israel so much I just stayed on and applied for citizenship. Also, after about two years of learning about Judaism I decided to study to become a Jew. A few years later I earned my Ph.D. in microbiology and became a Jew. I married and settled in Jerusalem. My wife was a German Lutheran, but she, too, converted. A psychologist might interpret my conversion as sublimating my guilty feelings, but I prefer to think about it as fulfilling my Jewish destiny. Don’t ask me how or why, but here we are — an observant Jewish family. And we are very happy living as Jews.[”]

Reporter Tanya Gold discovered another Waffen-SS member’s son, and even the relative of an Axis dictator, living in the occupation:

I dug further and discovered that a man with a family connection to Hitler does indeed live in Israel as an Orthodox Jew. Virtually unnoticed in the English-speaking world, he was exposed seven years ago in an Israeli tabloid. Then he sank from sight. I went to Israel to meet him — and on the way I was plunged into the strange subculture of the Nazi-descended Jews.

I am walking through the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, to meet Aharon Shear-Yashuv. He is the son of a [Fascist]. And yet he was a senior rabbi in the Israeli armed forces.

He lives in an apartment in the Jewish quarter, near the Western Wall. I walk through a pale gold alley; Orthodox Jewish men in long black coats and round fur hats dart past. He opens the door and looks like every other rabbi I have ever met — a black suit, a beard, a questioning shrug. He takes me into his study, settles into a chair, and says, in a thick German accent: “My father was in the Waffen-SS.”

He was, he explains, born in the Ruhr Valley in 1940. During the war, his father served on the eastern front with Hitler’s élite troops. What did his father do in the Waffen-SS? “I don’t know,” he says calmly. “When I grew up I tried to ask, but there weren’t really answers.”

[…]

Today, he believes [that] Germany is doomed. “People there don’t get married, and if they do they have one child,” he says. “But the Turks and the other foreigners have many children. So it is a question of time that Germany will no longer be German.” Why does he think this has happened? “I think it is a punishment for the Holocaust,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Germany will leave the stage of history, no doubt about it.”

[…]

Later that day, I meet the man who brought me here to Israel, the man who started all this — the so-called Jewish Hitler. […] He is holding two pieces of paper. One is a family tree; the other is a printout of an account of the life of Alois Hitler Junior — Adolf Hitler’s half-brother. […] He begins to tell me what happened to his mother during the war. She worked as a typist for the Wehrmacht in Poland and she saw dead Jews hanging in the town squares.

[…]

And then, to my surprise, he calls his son — his Israeli son — a fascist. “When I hear my own son speak — as I did last weekend — I sat like this,” and he does the Hitler salute. “Two of my sons are chauvinists and one of them is even partially racist. I can’t listen to fascistic discourse. I don’t suffer that.” They talk about the Palestinians with contempt.

Similarly, there is the tale of an HJ member who grew up to become a ger:

Before meeting Patricia, Theo didn’t have any Jewish friends and with disarming honesty admits that he probably wouldn't have wanted any.

“I grew up in an anti-Semitic surrounding, I probably myself had anti-Semitic views but it never ever came to the discussion,” he acknowledges. “So I had nothing to do with Jews.”

All that changed when he was invited to travel to Israel with his wife and a group of Jewish friends.

On their first night in Jerusalem Theo was having trouble sleeping and walked over the window of his hotel room to look out through the curtain.

“It was almost as if I was struck by lightning,” he recalls.

Below him was Jerusalem’s holiest place for Jews, the Western wall. The golden Dome towering above it and glistening in the night sky.

He watched as the sun rose over the dome, sitting there transfixed for six or seven hours as the beautiful stories of the Old Testament he had heard as a young Catholic altar boy in Munich flooded back to him.

The emotional effect was profound and when he returned to the UK he knew exactly what he needed to do.

When Theo approached his local rabbi to tell him he wanted to convert, the holy man simply said: “What took you so long?”

The conversion process took four years, throughout which Theo had to learn Hebrew and study the Torah in depth.

Uriel Heilman wrote in 2015 that at least ‘400 descendants of Nazis have converted to Judaism and moved to Israel, according to filmmakers who made a documentary about the phenomenon several years ago’, presumably referring to the 2011 documentary Hitler’s Children, though I am unsure if anybody has verified this estimate.

Lastly, while not necessarily related to any Axis staff, there is a comparable parallel with Afrikaners settling in occupied Palestine:

Among the first Afrikaner converts to make aliyah were the Taljaards from Randfontein, a gold-mining city near Johannesburg. They came in the mid-1990s and began raising sheep in the settlement of Susya, where they were often involved in violent clashes with Palestinians from nearby villages in the South Hebron Hills. Jacob, the eldest of 14 children in the family, was killed in a tractor accident several years ago. He once famously told an Israeli television reporter that he “loved” the apartheid system and thought it was “the best thing in the world.”

I once read a rumour about an Afrikaner converting to Judaism in the 1990s and settling in the occupation because he couldn’t get enough of apartheid. It sounds like a joke, but I would not dismiss it out of hand either.

(Mirror.)

Last month, the South Central Tennessee Active Club published video footage on the messaging app Telegram showing its members participating in combat training at Shelbyville BJJ Academy, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Shelbyville, Tennessee, that offers classes to students as young as three years old.

The group is part of the wider Active Club network, which consists of dozens of decentralized cells across the U.S. and abroad that use combat sports to lure people into white nationalist and neo[fascist] causes.

While lesser known than other far-right groups like the Proud Boys, experts warn Active Clubs are acutely dangerous because they recruit boys and young men into violent white nationalist circles by using notions of fraternity as a gateway to extremism.

“What makes them unique is the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ approach, which aims at fooling law enforcement into believing Active Clubs are just about sports,” Alexander Ritzmann, a political scientist and senior advisor at the Counter Extremism Project who studies the movement, told the Guardian.

In a 2023 report, Ritzmann warned that the ultimate goal of Active Clubs “is the creation of a stand-by militia of trained and capable [right wing extremists] who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises”.

At one point in the video posted by the Tennessee cell, an Active Club flag featuring a sonnenrad, a symbol of Nazi Germany that has been adopted by neo[fascists] and other [anticommunist] extremists, can be seen hanging on the wall where young children would normally gather.

After it was presented with the video of the Active Club training at its facilities, Shelbyville BJJ Academy told the Guardian “that type of behavior at our gym is a direct violation of our code of ethics and goes against our community offering as a safe place for children and adults.

“The situation has been remedied promptly and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention,” the school continued, in a statement. “We can assure you, this will not be happening again. Ever.”

The academy also rejected the Active Club’s extremist ideology, emphasizing: “We accept and welcome all people. We all belong. No matter background, skin color, creed, nationality, or status.”

As for how the group gained entry, the school said it provides keypad access to members so they can train outside regular class hours. It believes the Active Club entered using this method and said the access code has been changed.

While the South Central Tennessee Active Club blurred the faces of most of its members shown in the video taken at Shelbyville BJJ Academy, the face of one man was left uncensored. His name: William Chase May.

Records on Smoothcomp, a software used to organize and record combat sports events, show [that] he was awarded his blue belt by Shelbyville BJJ Academy in 2023.

The school confirmed that May was a member, though said his attendance was infrequent and that he only showed up from “time to time”.

He was banned after the Guardian brought his identity to its attention and, the academy said, an internal investigation into whether any other members made unauthorized use of the facility is ongoing.

Riztmann told the Guardian that the Active Club’s presence at the Tennessee academy is especially concerning because the movement’s architect, the white supremacist Robert Rundo “laid out the principle recruiting strategy, which includes reaching out to minors at schools”.

The Russian FSB has published new declassified archival documents on the brutal murders of Soviet prisoners of war by Nazi troops in the first months of the Great Patriotic War. The documents are available on the agency's website.

Thus, on October 27, 1941, the head of the Special Department of the NKVD of the Southern Front, Major of State Security Pavel Zelenin, sent a special message to the Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Commissar of State Security of the 3rd rank Viktor Abakumov and the command of the Southern Front, "On the abuse of captured Red Army servicemen by the Germans."

The document, in particular, reported that at the Greigovo station on the railway line between Nikolaev and Krivoy Rog, wounded Red Army soldiers remained who had not been evacuated.

"The Germans mocked them, did not give them food, did not bandage the wounded and did not allow any of the local residents to approach them. According to the stories of the peasants of the same station, the Germans shot 135 people, first mockingly tormenting the commanders and political workers, torturing them - they chopped off their hands, cut off their ears, gouged out their eyes and then shot them," Zelenin reported. Also, according to local residents, at the Lopnino station on August 17, 1941, two prisoners were hacked to death because the Nazis found party cards on them.

During subsequent military operations, security agencies not only recorded the crimes of the Nazis, but also identified the direct perpetrators of abuse and atrocities. These materials served as the basis for conducting a search for Nazi war criminals and their accomplices, the FSB concluded.

Earlier, the FSB declassified documents on medical experiments by Nazi doctors on Soviet prisoners and civilians in Crimea. In particular, a large volume of blood was taken from prisoners at one time, which was then used for transfusions to the Germans.

We Germans are not the only ones in the sixth year of war. One may assume that the problems the war’s long duration have given us also affect the other combatant nations. Each warring nation is naturally eager to conceal this from the eyes of the enemy and present a façade that does not accurately reflect the true situation.

The war is having the same effects on all participating nations, but one can see those effects faster and more clearly in one’s own country than in the enemy’s. As we always say, the other side is no better than we are.

The German people loves the truth, indeed is fanatic about it. It therefore finds it hard to understand that in war everyone must play by the same rules to have a chance at success. Recently the U.S. military leadership admitted the loss of a 20,000-ton troop ship two years ago. That would not be possible with us.

The German people would not accept such silence on the part of its leadership. It wants to know exactly how things stand, sometimes forgetting that what is told to it is also told to the enemy. One can argue about which way in the long run is the most successful, but it is clear that our enemy knows how to stay silent better than we do, and that we as a result are inclined to think their situation is better than it in fact is.

As a result we must occasionally consider the war’s broad picture, not forgetting that it is likely that things are concealed from us by the enemy’s greater secretiveness. The fact that the enemy conceals his calamities from us does not mean they do not exist. They exist nonetheless and influence the overall state of the war, even if we do not know it.

The extent of total Soviet losses, which can be estimated at about 15 million, certainly has consequences for the Bolshevist military potential. If the Red Army continues to attack nonetheless, it does not mean that Soviet reserves are inexhaustible, but rather that the Kremlin is using everything it has to defeat us as quickly as possible in the hopes that it can carry out its planned extermination of the German people with what remains of its armed strength.

That is also true to a certain extent of the Western enemy. The resources of the military leadership grow steadily smaller because of the long duration of this gigantic war, and it is probably true that in the end the last regiment will decide the last battle.

The fact that we are still firmly on our feet and show not the least sign of collapse is sufficient proof that our enemies cannot do what they want, that they suffer from internal problems, and that they make such terrible threats only to keep us from noticing that.

In an article published on April 8, 1945, Goebbels once again suggested that the Allies were on the verge of collapse:

The general world crisis we experience is assuming ever more terrible forms, and not only for us, but also for the rest of Europe, and of course for the enemy states. As even English and American newspapers have to admit, well over half of our continent is starving.

Far-reaching political consequences result from that, which seem likely to throw the enemy camp into ever greater confusion. They have to win quickly if they are to win at all. That explains their so often repeated appeals on us to lay down our weapons and give up the battle.

But for us, that is only one more reason to ignore these cynical appeals so that the latent crisis they face, and that seems so dangerous to them, will reach its peak. It is naïve to believe that they can carry on the war as long as they want to, given their material superiority. Like us, they have strained their war potential to the utmost, and exhausted it.

Such a test of strength can only last for a certain while. It depends on who first loses his nerve and gives up. He will lose the war and bear all the fateful consequences.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

“SOF Week 2025” kicked off in Tampa, Florida, “the premier annual event for the international Special Operations Forces (SOF) community.” Featured speakers included U.S. intelligence chiefs and military commanders, foreign leaders and defense ministers, with keynote speeches by Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Defense; Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

“Everything starts and ends with warriors, from training to the battlefield,” said Hegseth. “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. No more pronouns, no more climate change obsession, no more emergency vaccine mandates, no more dudes in dresses.” Straight Arrow News reports, “According to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, SOF will shift from a counterterrorism-centric mission to a broader role in great power competition.”

Andriy Smolensky, a severely wounded Ukrainian veteran who has spent many months undergoing treatment in the United States, met General Fenton at SOF Week, which Smolensky attended as the “U.S. Partnership Officer” of a new US-Ukrainian think tank connected to the Azov movement. About a month earlier at Harvard Business School, under the cover of this recently established organization, which is “dedicated to fortifying the strategic partnership between Ukraine and the United States,” some prominent Azovites probably met Fenton’s Vice Commander of the Special Operations Command. These and other stories about the burgeoning “Azov Lobby” have flown under the radar in recent months.

Nazi Tech Movement

“It’s no secret that all top brigades have their own R&D [research and development],” according to Roman Sudolsky, the editor of an online publication “covering Ukrainian defense tech,” but last month, when the 3rd Assault Brigade (AB3), allegedly the largest of its kind, launched its own “startup accelerator” to support testing new military technology on the battlefield, Sudolsky praised this “next level” step taken by the Azov movement, which is currently forming the 3rd Army Corps. A “Global Macro Investor” based in the San Francisco Bay Area also described the founding of “AB3 Tech” as “next level thinking […] to get the best tech for the frontlines.”

AB3 Tech: “Warfare Driven Solutions”

To hear it from the Azovites, “We combine the expertise of military professionals, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help startups, investors, and defense companies accelerate time-to-market, test products in real combat conditions, and attract funding.” AB3 Tech offers “rapid feedback,” “practical insights,” “brand recognition,” a “competitive edge,” “combat-proven performance data,” “video content of product performance in battlefield conditions,” and official “letters of interest to gain credibility in fundraising.” Their website promises that these neo[fascists] are “trusted by defence industry leaders for real-world validation.”

On May 16-17, the capital of Ukraine hosted “DOU Day,” a two-day annual event which is said to be “one of the largest technical conferences for the Ukrainian IT community.” One of the main speakers was Andriy Biletsky, the leader and founder of the Azov movement, and an infamous neo[fascist], put in charge of the new 3rd Army Corps.

The Azovites called this event their first “IT Dvizh.” As the journalist Leonid Ragozin explains, the Russian word Dvizh is “a slang term widely used by Russian and Ukrainian neo-nazis to designate their [‘NS’ or National Socialist] movement.” Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Ukrainian IT community “DOU” launched a large fundraiser for the 3rd Assault Brigade, just as AB3 Tech got off the ground. DOU even rolled out a special website for the campaign.

Biletsky and AB3 Tech at DOU Day 2025

This seasonal edition of the Azov Lobby Blog almost started with something I missed in my last one (Winter 2025). Taking place alongside the Munich Security Conference in February, the German-based European Defense Tech Hub (EDTH) held a “hackathon” featuring a unique representative of the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade.

Viktoria “Tori” Honcharuk, 25, moved to the United States at 15 years old, started an investment banking career on Wall Street, and got accepted to Harvard University. “I was living the life of my dreams,” she says. Since 2022, Honcharuk returned to Ukraine to become a combat medic, ultimately in the 3rd Assault Brigade, “where her sister serves as an assault rifleman.” This year, she co-founded AB3 Tech and a think tank.

https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=pSrSZSkBBhY

Viktoria Honcharuk seems to be dating Mykola “Makar” Zinkevich, a young neo[fascist] commander from the 3rd Assault Brigade, specifically from its “Dirlewanger” company, which takes inspiration from one of [the Third Reich’s] most horrendous military units. He has some suspicious arm tattoos—a valknut and life rune, “one of the most common neo-Nazi symbols.”

Zinkevich is also affiliated with the Lviv-based neo[fascist] organization “Galician Youth,” which intimidates LGBT people, pays homage to the Galicia Division of the Waffen-SS, and distributed antisemitic fliers in the year before the full-scale war with Russia.

Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s chancellor at the time of the 1961 trial, personally dispatched one secret agent to Israel as part of a sensitive and classified operation to influence Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial and suppress any embarrassment for the West German state.

The agent, working undercover as a journalist, was tasked with monitoring the trial and establishing ties with the prosecution in order to keep the names of other former Nazis, who now had important posts in the German establishment, out of court.

Of particular concern to the German government was the status of Hans Globke, director of the federal chancellery and one of the Mr Adenauer’s closest aides, who, in Hitler’s Reich, had contributed to the infamous and racist Nuremberg Laws that targeted Germany’s Jews.

In documents declassified by the German intelligence services and researched by the news magazine Der Spiegel, a German foreign ministry official wanted to prevent “leading public figures in the Federal Republic” from being incriminated in the trial of the bureaucratic mastermind behind the Holocaust.

He added that Germany had to demonstrate that only a “small group of individuals” had implemented the Holocaust and that those who “were not directly involved could not have had any knowledge of it.”

The documents also disclosed that in July 1961 an aide to a “co-ordination meeting at the Federal Chancellery” noted the government wanted to make it clear “that Eichmann had worked as a henchman of the Himmler-SS machine and not as an agent of the then German Reich.” This, the aide argued, would make it impossible to link West German officials with [Fascist] pasts “to Eichmann’s misdeeds.”

Such was the German desire to limit the influence of the trial the defence minister also threatened to end arms deals with the young and vulnerable state of Israel if the trial reflected badly on Germany.

To the Bonn government the Eichmann trial also had a pressing Cold War dimension with fears that stories of former [Fascists] holding high-ranking posts in West Germany could provide communist East Germany with a propaganda coup, and damage the credibility of the West German state in the eyes of its Western allies.

Evidence of the geopolitical dimension the trial assumed was an offer from an unnamed American general to use his CIA connections to “soften the impact of the trial”.

(Mirror.)

An official who helped the [Third Reich] frame the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws reinvented himself after World War II “as a spymaster, diplomat and kingmaker” and “played a key role” in the development of Israel’s nuclear program, according to a British newspaper report.

Hans Globke was a senior civil servant in the [Fascist]-era interior ministry and was centrally involved in the interpretation and implementation of the Nuremberg race laws, as well as contributing to the “Jewish code” that was enforced in Slovakia, the Times of London said.

When Hitler seized power, Globke “took responsibility for ‘questions of citizenship and race,'” and won praise from his bosses for his “positive attitude” to [Fascism], the Times of London reported. “In 1936, he wrote an infamous legal commentary on the Nuremberg race laws,” and his guidebook “became ubiquitous in Nazi Germany’s courtrooms,” offering “many harsh interpretations of the rules.”

He stipulated, for example, that “sex between Aryans and non-Aryans was a crime even if it took place outside Germany.” He also introduced the statute that “forced Jews to take the middle name Israel, if they were men, or Sara, if they were women, so that they would be easier to identify.”

When World War II began, he traveled through [Fascist]-occupied territories, “from France to Czechoslovakia, issuing further rulings on how to distinguish between Aryans and ‘lesser’ races.”

In 1941, according to the Times, he was involved in drafting “an ordinance that stripped Jews in the conquered nations of their statehood and allowed their possessions to be confiscated, regarded as one of the most important legal bases of the Holocaust.”

Yet, the Times noted, Globke managed to reinvent himself after the war, to the point where he “had a distinguished cast of anti-Nazis lining up to testify under oath that he had been an instrumental figure in the resistance against Hitler.”

In its story published earlier this month, the Times said documents it had discovered also show Globke had connections to the formation of Israel’s nuclear program and to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.

After World War II ended, Globke was seen by the West as more of a functionary in the [Fascist] government than a true loyalist or [Fascist] ideologue, the Times noted. He even appeared as a witness at the post-war Nuremberg trials.

Globke went on to serve as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, between 1953 and 1963, and was responsible for recruitment to the heart of the West German government.

His continued service in the West German government led him, in turn, to a well-connected position within the intelligence community.

This position and his connections were used to ensure Globke’s name did not come up in the 1961–1962 trial of Eichmann in Israel, and, with help from the CIA, to ensure his name was also kept out of documents related to the trial. “The Germans persuaded the White House to get the CIA to expunge all mention of Globke from a serialization of Eichmann’s memoirs in an American magazine,” The Times reported. More than that, Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius, who was also “a West German intelligence asset, cut Globke’s name and others out of his client’s final speech to the court.”

Months before the Eichmann trial, the Times reported, Globke had assisted Adenauer in beginning work on a secret deal to lend Israel today’s equivalent of £4 billion (about $5.5 billion) for a “development project” in the Negev desert.

Documents released to Gaby Weber, a German journalist, show that this money was intended for use in the Dimona nuclear research facility and reactor. Foreign news reports have said the facility is used to make nuclear weapons.

The Times report said a memorandum from the German foreign ministry at the time describes a meeting between German defense minister Franz-Josef Strauss and then-prime minister David Ben Gurion: “Ben Gurion addressed the production of atomic weapons. In the conversation, Ben Gurion explained that the chancellor had promised him Germany would take part in the development of the Negev desert.”

The report said the Germans appeared to have suspended the nuclear-related negotiations during the Eichmann trial. “In no event can we make any undertakings before the conclusion of the Eichmann trial,” a German foreign ministry document said.

The Times report did not say whether the talks were renewed after the trial, and nor did it specify whether the $5.5 billion loan money ended up being sent, though it said Globke “played a key role in Israel’s development of nuclear weapons.”

Globke was only one of the many, possibly thousands of Axis war criminals that the Herzlians covered up for military technology.

See also: Mossad intentionally hired Axis war criminal Walter Rauff

(Mirror.)

Homosexual behavior was regarded as inconsistent with [Fascist] population policies on several grounds. Men who engaged in it were unlikely to fulfill their duty to reproduce and were thus “population policy zeros”; such men might pass on to their offspring a “constitutional predisposition to homosexuality”;⁴ and such men were the antithesis of the [Third Reich’s] masculine ideal, which linked manliness to physical and mental strength, heroism, and a capacity for self-sacrifice—an ideal that achieved its apotheosis in the figure of the soldier. Unlike this ideal figure, “homosexual” men were soft, effeminate, and unable to exert the control over physical urges that was necessary to uphold civil society.⁵

[…]

However, while many same-sex-desiring men in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany had developed and articulated a variety of models of subjectivity and identity that survived into the [Fascist] era, the stereotype of the “homosexual” as “effeminate and degenerate,” “depraved,” and “corrupt” became the unifying view of the “homosexual personality” and a focus for homophobic hostility.⁶

So too did another common stereotype, that of the “seducer” and “corrupter” of youth (Jugendverführer and Jugendverderber), a uniquely dangerous figure who lured “normal” young men into depravity and thus spread the “epidemic” of homosexuality.⁷

In addition, after the overthrow of Ernst Röhm and his associates within the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the attendant rise of Heinrich Himmler and the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1934, the rumor that “homosexual cliques” planned to seize power took hold, giving “homosexuals” another identity as “enemies of the state.”⁸

Indeed, as Rüdiger Lautmann, Winfried Grikschat, and Egbert Schmidt have pointed out, in helping to marginalize the sexual within the movement’s masculine fraternal order, homophobia played a key rôle in stabilizing the [Third Reich].⁹

[…]

In their persecution of same-sex-desiring individuals, the [Third Reich] relied upon a tradition of homophobia that was deeply rooted in German society and both preceded and outlived [Fascism].

Homosexual activities between men or women were incompatible with traditional notions of morality and respectability and with the gender ideology of a patriarchal, heteronormative bourgeois society. In its persecution of homosexuality, therefore, the [Third Reich] was able to “depict itself as the bastion of bourgeois respectability.”¹¹

As was the case in the régime’s euthanasia, forced sterilization, and castration programs and in the persecution and murder of Jews, the policies and ideas enacted by the [Third Reich] were a radical extension of measures that had already been proposed prior to 1933.

Unfortunately the article has a hard paywall. Here’s an uploaded podcast interview.

The analysis of the diaries shows how the national reunification of kindred people in the Leningrad area was based on the activists of AKS [Academic Karelia Society] ‘re-making national community’, based mostly on the earlier ‘dreams’ originating from ideology shared in the right-wing association in the interwar period in Finland. This was illustrated in how Jussi wrote about his enthusiasm regarding the saving of kindred people on his way to Ingria: “My heart is thrilled with the idea that I am on my way to Ingria of which liberation we dreamed in the school and student unions.”⁷⁴

In practice, the ‘liberation’ of kindred people was illustrated in the processes of national inclusion and exclusion in which mostly Ingrian Finns, Izhorians, and, in some cases, Votic people were segregated from the residents who were regarded as ethnic Russians. Remaking this national community outside the borders of the Finnish state had already [been] planned in the AKS ideology during the interwar period.

Although the ideology of kindred people was not clearly considered a practice of unifying racially accepted individuals to the ethnically unified nation ‘Volk’, the practices of remaking the national community reflected the idea of setting kindred people free from the enemy state and connecting them to the national body by gathering them together and bringing them back to the ‘fatherland’. Jussi and his co-workers were involved with the ethnic segregation processes in Ingria, which were often blurry⁷⁵ and sometimes hardly based on official agreements with the Germans.

In the Kattila district, there is no one, like Major Sperling, to take care of German affairs. He would have looked after the interests of the Ingrians, even if there were hardly any Finns in Hatsina. Here, the Germans do not know the special regulations concerning the evacuees and the agreements between the states, and it is difficult to get them sympathize with the transfer. The technical performance of the transfer and the agreements between the states are strange to me. I took the necessary papers from the folders and familiarized myself with them. While Sirkiä stayed in Kattila to segregate the Finns from the Russian transports, and I left by car to organize the Finnish and Izhorian transports.⁷⁶
15.11.1943 Komsekina, Konnunkylä

According to Jussi’s report, it seemed [that] the Germans acting at the grassroots level in wartime actions were unfamiliar with the AKS ideology behind the transfer and the ethnic practices regarding the segregation processes. In contrast, Jussi and his Finnish colleagues were unfamiliar with the official transfer protocol; however, they selected Ingrian Finns and Izhorian people from Russians—a practice based on the AKS ideology of kindred people and the Finnish race.

The main mission of the Finnish AKS activists was to gather Finno-Ugric people for the transfer, although they hardly knew about the ‘agreements between the states.’ The Finnish actors are represented as an ethnically uniting force, gathering all the possible [suffering] members of the national community.

Typically, AKS members, such as Jussi, acted like legal authorities in the [Axis]-occupied area, using politically and religiously motivated reasoning to make the local Finno-Ugric people favourable to the transfer. For instance, at the beginning of the transfer, the Finnish AKS activists and individuals near the AKS ideology spread the religious message and the spirit of AKS in the Lutheran confirmation festivities celebrated with Ingrians in the villages.

[Katri] Korhonen and [Albert] Hämäläinen and his wife had come to the confirmation ceremony in the Niemi’s truck, on which we sang hymns and Finnish hymns while driving through Russian villages. I believe that the AKS’s march⁷⁷ and Kytösavun aukeilla mailla ⁷⁸ never echoed in these lands before.⁷⁹
13.6.1943 Hatsina

These writings illustrated how Jussi’s preaching in confirmation ceremonies was intertwined with spreading right-wing nationalist ideology, such as by singing songs that included resistance towards the historical Russian persecutor as well as clearly political messages based on the extreme right-wing ideology and culture related to building Greater Finland with other politically like-minded Finnish people.

In many contexts in different parts of Ingria, the diaries illustrate well how the Lutheran services were utilized to shape the local people’s political opinions and to stimulate their willingness to leave their homes to ‘repatriate’ to Finland. Lutheran churches and other public and private spaces were used to preach the ‘gospel of Greater Finland’ and racial reunification to the local people. The ‘home’ of all Finno-Ugric people in Ingria and Karelia had already been ideologically and politically built and established during the interwar period.

In AKS ideology, suffering Ingrian Finns, Votic, and Izhorian people desired to become members of the national body — the national community that would become racially unified. However, according to the ideology concerning the national body, the members of the body seemed to be hierarchically organised in various ways in different periods.

Before the transfer, [an Axis] authority, Major Jaening, told Jussi that Ingrians were the most civilised, trustworthy, and purest population in the occupied area.⁸⁰ Specifically after his arrival to Ingria, Jussi made enthusiastic notions of some Finnish families based on their positive attitudes and supporting actions towards the Finnish state.

I also visit the agronomist Lohi’s home where they share the strong Finnish national spirit. During the Winter War, many people prayed for Finland and sent us economic support.⁸¹
4.4.1943 Narva

As the sequence from the diary illustrates, the positive writings concerned Finnish Lutheran residents in Ingria who had been politically, economically, and religiously active in supporting Finland during the wars, for instance. Jussi also appreciated Ingrian Finns’ national feelings and expressed interest in Finland.

However, Jussi’s diaries also show how disappointed AKS activists were in the local population in many ways, specifically at the end of the transfer when kindred people were unwilling to leave their homes after the [Axis] had given the evacuation order. Many local people resisted the ‘national reunification’, specifically in the second phase of the transfer, by fleeing to the forests⁸² and pretending they were ethnically Russians.⁸³

Jussi wrote that he continued his ‘preaching’ related to evacuation after the Lutheran ceremonies. His attitude was paternalistic, specifically towards orthodox Izhorian women who often resisted the transfer operation in a variety of ways.

After the [Lutheran] service held in Komsekina a couple of weeks ago, the Lutherans of Komsekina have no longer doubted the evacuation. On the other hand, old Izhorian [Orthodox] women still didn’t really understand their situation and didn’t want to pack their belongings. I had to preach to them for a long time. Men began to understand their own best. But women are hopeless. Even though the evacuation order had already been given, they couldn’t take it seriously.⁸⁴
15.11.1943 Komsekina, Konnunkylä

The diary reveals repeating ethnic and gender differences concerning the local people’s attitudes towards the ‘national reunification’ implemented by the AKS activists. Clearly, many local Finno-Ugric individuals, families, and communities did not understand and support the ideologies that had spread to the Ingrian villages.

Moreover, the enemy of national unity and solidarity⁸⁵ were the Ingrian ways of forming communities like kettles.⁸⁶ Jussi’s diaries condemned Ingrians for their ‘cattle spirit’⁸⁷ and ‘group thinking’⁸⁸. The cattle spirit of Ingrians seemed to be the opposite of the morally accepted national unity and solidarity typical among AKS members.

The Russian and Ingrian nature is hard to understand without considering the strange village communities. People are thinking and acting “according to the cattle spirit”. [– –] Belonging to the village community has forced people to act as villages. However, it has not developed real solidarity but the cattle spirit.⁸⁹
8.4.1943 Jaama

Almost ten years later, 2000 Meters follows a platoon, evidently the “Hydra Group,” in the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade, which is led by Azov veterans. The Hydra unit takes its name and symbol from Marvel Comics’ fictional Nazi terrorist organization. The battalion’s openly neo-Nazi commander is Denis Sokur, or “Var,” the leader of the Azov movement in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. He has a Black Sun tattooed on his elbow, and a vertical wolfsangel (not the Azov kind) on his ribcage. The Sumy branch of the militant Azovite organization “Centuria” formed a local special forces unit and later a company in his battalion, led by neo[fascist] “Legionnaires” who put “1488” in their social media handles.

Twitter/X user Dreznicagoat: “It’s funny how the 3rd assault brigade thought that Hydra logo from Marvel wasn’t Nazi enough and they need to add extra symbols just in case. Just so it’s clear what they represent.”

Chernov accompanied the Hydra platoon with an additional cameraman from the Associated Press, Alex Babenko. His name might sound familiar to some readers, because he came up before on this blog, when the Associated Press whitewashed the story of “Valkyrie” and “Berserk,” a pair of hardcore neo[fascists] from the 3rd Assault Brigade. More than once when making Instagram posts about Azov funerals, Babenko has used the hashtag “wbc,” apparently referring to the “White Boys Club” football hooligans. Last December, Babenko photographed a benefit concert for the 3rd Assault Brigade, which he described as “a unique moment” that “showed a new Ukrainian culture.”

Whereas Mariupol was the second-largest city in the Donetsk region, Andriivka was a tiny village. When the 3rd Assault Brigade finally took what remained of that place, one of its fighters planted an upside down Ukrainian flag on a bombed-out, one-story brick building.

20 Days in Mariupol, produced by Frontline PBS, provided the long-running documentary program its first Academy Award. Apparently they are going for gold again with a documentary that functions as a pro-Nazi propaganda film, which “captures small, poignant character sketches of the Ukrainian men putting their lives on the line to potentially win back one patch of land.” Frontline’s Michelle Mizner reprised her role as a producer and editor for 2000 Meters to Andriivka. The latter’s executive producers are Raney Aronson-Rath, the editor-in-chief of Frontline, and Derl McCrudden, a vice president of the Associated Press and head of global news production.

If and when this Frontline-AP production hits theaters, neo[fascists] from the 3rd Assault Brigade could have the red carpet rolled out for them, or at least another excuse to visit the United States and other countries. According to Darya Zorka, a translator for 20 Days and 2000 Meters, “Everyone from Azov battalion are heroes, no matter was russian propaganda wants you to believe.”

While lesbianism could be found in any of the camps, since women were put in bunkers together, the camp of Ravensbrück was particularly known for its lesbianism. Ravensbrück was the women’s concentration camp, and so many stories have come out after the Holocaust of the same-sex relationships that went on in the camps.

The concentration camps were a very scary and unpredictable place. If women weren’t sent directly to the gas chambers, they were often separated from their families and children. The women relied on friendship with each other for comfort and survival.⁸³

Women were in extremely close quarters to each other, sleeping three or more to a bed, so they were often found cuddling together for warmth and companionship. Some women’s relationships, however, went beyond that of friendship. Emotional and physical relationships formed within the camps.

Many of the prisoners told stories of these relationships. One prisoner recalls that, “As they lay crammed together in their beds, they could not avoid seeing and hearing the lovemaking, ‘sometimes shameless and unrestrained.’ On occasion, if one got up at night to use the toilet, one had to wait because the ‘little couples’ (Pärchen) were in the small compartment with the doors locked.”⁸⁴

This was a common story among many prisoners. Others recalled finding couples together, embracing, kissing, having sex, not only in bed at night but behind the blocks too. In other memoirs, prisoners describe having crushes on other prisoners, and thinking of fantasies between them. These fantasies would sustain the women and make them happy. Sometimes, the fantasies even became reality, and for a brief time, the women would have love and joy in their lives.⁸⁵

Not all of the women in relationships or engaging in same-sex sexual relations identified as bisexual or lesbian, but they engaged in this behavior to ease the loneliness and tension of the camps. However, it was documented that some prisoners had “firmly established identities as lesbians or bisexuals before ever arriving at Ravensbrück.”⁸⁶

This behavior within the camps was not punished by the guards. The [Fascists] just let this behavior happen since these women could not be producing children anyway, and it was not thought of as making them “weak”, as was the case with male homosexuality. The women could still do the work they were assigned even with these little “pet” relationships, as they were seen.

No comment.

(Mirror.)

In its early history, part of what first piqued the interest of authorities was the Base’s courting of military veterans who could help drill its foot soldiers in a series of training camps across the U.S. Eventually implicated in an assassination plot, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, the Base went so far as to have a fortified compound and cell in Michigan, led by a U.S. army dropout.

Online evidence from its various accounts, several of which live on Russian servers to avoid censorship on American sites, shows the Base has real plans for a national gathering this summer where members intend to train in paramilitary drills as in years past.

“The Base in [the] USA is preparing for an upcoming national training event,” reads one of its recent posts soliciting crypto donations. “This one might be our most attended training event in [the] USA in a while. We could really use some financial support to help our members with travel expenses.”

The post continued: “When you donate money to the Base, you’re investing in a White Defense Force that’s aiming to protect white people from political persecution and physical destruction.”

The Base then published a new photo of armed members claiming to be in the midwest, which follows a trend in 2025 of the group bragging about its unafraid American presence. As a sort of taunt to its enemies, on the day of Trump’s inauguration the Base released a photo of four members somewhere in Appalachia, in what was the largest number of American members in one photo in over a year.

“The upcoming national training event indicates that the group is seeking to grow and is willing to take the risk of advertising it publicly in advance,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst of far-right terrorism who has been following the Base’s movements for close to a decade. “The Base appears to be actively seeking to grow in the US.”

Fisher-Birch notes that even if the gathering involves “fewer than 20 people”, it is by no means “low profile” and suggests the group sees momentum is on its side.

“An event entails planning, coordination, travel and face-to-face meetings between different regional groups, indicating that they operate in an environment where they view the potential amount of risk as acceptable,” he said. “The group has previously stated multiple times that being a member or training with them is a risky endeavor; however, planning a meetup, which they will inevitably use for propaganda purposes, is a different approach than even a year ago, when the group advertised regional activities.”

In response to queries about the Base’s latest movements, the FBI told the Guardian that it only investigates people who have or are planning to commit a federal crime and pose “a threat to national security”.

“Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity,” said a spokesperson for the FBI. “Membership in groups is not illegal in and of itself and is protected by the first amendment.”

But in Michigan and in Georgia, members of the Base were charged with their criminal associations to the group.

The Trump administration’s security posture on the far right is to downplay its significance. Yet experts unanimously agree: it is the top domestic terrorism threat facing the country. Instead, Patel, the FBI’s director, has gone about removing agents from pursuing the far right, while one of Trump’s first actions in his second term was to provide unconditional pardons, en masse, to all of the January 6 insurrectionists.

Fisher-Birch also pointed out that the Base had taken itself more seriously and upped its activities in Ukraine to the tune of calling for the murder of government officials and acts of sabotage — with the clearly stated goal of forming a white ethnostate in the west of the country. Already, the Ukrainian cell has uploaded geolocated videos of some of these attacks, one showing the burning of a military vehicle and what looks like a government electrical box.

In a video released on a Russian video-sharing site in mid-May, Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder and leader of the Base, who is living in St Petersburg, released a video describing the importance of new training videos proving to potential recruits that his group is not just online, but in the real world.

“It’s propaganda through actions, not just words,” he said.

It isn’t clear where the paramilitary training will take place, but Nazzaro is known to have purchased land in the Pacific north-west that he intended to use as a headquarters for the Base and its activities.

The repeated mentions of Russia stink of Cold War sensationalism, and make me suspicious that this reporter wants to mislead readers into believing that Yankee neofascism is essentially a foreign import. That being said, I do not want to dismiss this entire report out of hand either; I would feel too uncomfortable overlooking it.

Quoting Russ Bellant’s Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and U.S. Cold War Politics, pages xvii–xviii:

It’s May 17, 1985: President Reagan has been back in the nation’s capital less than two weeks from his much-criticized trip to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Now, floodlights and television cameras that are part of a President’s entourage are waiting at the Shoreham Hotel, as are 400 luncheon guests.

Ronald Reagan had recently characterized the Nazi Waffen SS as "victims." It seemed a rewrite of the history of World War II rather than a recommitment to its painful lessons. Reagan’s comments held special meaning for some of his afternoon luncheon guests. Although it was a Republican Party affair, it was not the usual GOP set, but a special ethnic outreach unit, the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council (NRHG{N}C). The Republican Heritage Groups Council is an umbrella for various ethnic Republican clubs and operates under the auspices of the Republican National Committee.

If President Reagan needed a boost after the Bitburg fiasco, this was the crowd to supply it. To the assembled media, Reagan’s visit that afternoon appeared as a routine stop, perhaps paying a re-election debt. The Republican Heritage Groups Council did, in fact, help elect Reagan. And they gave him a long standing ovation that afternoon at the Shoreham. To some of those attending the 1985 Council meeting, Reagan’s rehabilitation of the Waffen SS must have offered a sense of personal and historic vindication.

The Republican Heritage Groups Council has a special type of outreach. It appears to have consciously recruited some of its members—and some of its leaders—from an Eastern European émigré network which includes anti­-Semites, racists, authoritarians, and fascists, including sympathizers and collaborators of [the] Third Reich, former [Axis personnel], and even possible war criminals. The persons in this network represent only a radical right fraction of the ethnic communities [that] they claim to represent.

These antidemocratic and racialist components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council use anticommunist sentiments as a cover for their views while they operate as a de facto émigré fascist network within the Republican Party. Some of these less savory antidemocratic personalities were part of the 1987 Republican Heritage Groups Council meeting as well as that 1985 luncheon audience; and some would later join the 1988 election campaign of George [H.W.] Bush.

Ronald Reagan said that it wasn’t what it looked like when he saluted those dead Axis soldiers, but as I am about to show you, we have plenty of reasons to suspect that he was lying about that, such as how he endorsed the so‐called ‘Captive Nations’, which was littered with neofascists and antisemites:

[I]n 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his successful presidential campaign at a Labor Day “ethnic festival” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. According to Jersey City’s Ukrainian Weekly newspaper, “The majority of the more than 20 ethnic groups taking part in the festival were affiliated with the Captive Nations Committee of New York.” Ivan Dochev died in 2005, but on paper he remains an honorary president of the Captive Nations Committee of New York, which the AF–ABN established in the 1950s.

With a friend of the “captive nations” finally in the White House, the 25th annual Captive Nations Week was dedicated to the fake 40th anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko got an invitation to Washington where he shook hands with President Reagan and Vice President Bush. According to Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant, the BNF-affiliated VOC trustee, Radi Slavoff, arranged Ivan Dochev’s 1984 visit to the White House as executive director of the Republican Heritage Groups Council, the GOP’s “special ethnic outreach unit.”

There was possibly some significant overlap between the Republican Heritage Groups Council and the now defunct World Anti-Communist League, of which Ronald Reagan was undeniably a member:

Members of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) — a right wing international cartel of sorts — include[d] such luminaries as Ferdinand Marcos, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Adolfo Calero, commander in chief of the armed forces of the FDN contras. The WACL’s roots [went] back to 1954 with the establishment of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. [In the 1980s,] the WACL [grew] to six regional organizations with affiliates in more than 90 countries.

One of the most important people in the WACL [was] retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub. Singlaub began his military and intelligence career as an OSS member during World War II. In 1976, he became Chief of Staff of both the United Nations and U.S. Army Forces in South Korea. He was removed in 1977 after he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s withdrawal of troops from Korea.

Singlaub joined WACL in 1980 and formed an American chapter called the United States Council for World Freedom. Singlaub was elected president. Singlaub [gave] the WACL credibility in several ways:

• President Reagan began calling the contras “freedom fighters” in 1983, a term the WACL and others on the far right have used for years.

• When U.S. Congress temporarily cut off Nicaraguan contra funding in 1984, a group of various American conservative leaders raised $25 million in private “contributions.” Singlaub and the WACL were at the center of the campaign.

• Several WACL members [had] been appointed as ambassadors to the Bahamas, Costa Rica, and Guatemala by Reagan.

Then, at the 17th Annual WACL Conference, held in San Diego, California, Singlaub read a letter which said in part, “The World Anti-Communist League has long played a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day. Nancy and I send our best wishes for every future success.” The letter was signed by Ronald Reagan.

The WACL [was] so extreme — according to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson who wrote INSIDE THE LEAGUE, an exposé of the WACL — that the John Birch Society […] shunned it and advise[d] its members to do likewise.

Geoffry Stewart-Smith, a staunch British anti-communist, left the WACL because it is “largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international […] the very existence of this organization is a total disgrace to the free world.”

Reagan knew what he meant when he said that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought on the ‘wrong side’ in the Spanish Civil War. While he might have been demented as early as the 1980s, it is absurdly unlikely that anybody would willingly associate with these types all by mistake.

Aside from these and a former HJ member whom he very briefly employed before firing for unrelated reasons, some of Reagan’s other associates included

J. Peter Grace — A scion of the Grace fortunes, he [was] head of Reagan’s commission to study domestic economic cuts.[56] For 30 years his company employed Otto Ambrose, [an Axis] war criminal from the German drug cartel I.G. Farben. Ambrose, a chemist, developed “Zyklon B,” the actual gas used in the chambers to kill the Jews and others deemed “inferior.”[57] The German steel group, Flick, which has extensive [Axis] ties in the past and whose scandals [were] rocking German politics [in the 1980s], hold a controlling stock interest in the Grace company.[58]

The Grace family is intimately involved with the formation of the anti-Communist American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD).[59] AIFLD played a key rôle in the Kissinger plan to overthrow Allende in Chile, and insert the ruling [para]fascist Pinochet.[60] After the coup, which involved American Green Berets,[61] Kissinger sent a Mr. Rauff from the State Department to advise the newly formed Chilean secret police (DINA). Rauff had been in charge of the “mobile ovens” used to kill [Roma] and Jews, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe for the [Third Reich].[62] These same forces were later involved in the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.[63]

Helene von Damm — Personal White House appointment secretary long-time personal secretary to Ronald Reagan, she stands to be appointed Ambassador to Vienna, and controls all cabinet level appointments in the Reagan administration.[64] She came to the United States in the 1950s in the company of Albrecht Otto von Bolschwing, and worked for him as a translator.[65] Von Bolschwing gave the direct orders to Adolph Eichmann in the dread[ed] Eisenstatz, group, the SS killers.[66] Helene’s husband, Christian von Damm, ran the Bank of America in La Paz, Bolivia, which defaulted on a huge U.S. loan.[67]

The Reagan régime had no interest in pursuing Axis war criminals. Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, chapter 12:

Ignored for decades, [Axis officials] in America had suddenly become a political flash point by the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House, with anger fomenting on all sides. The vigilantes leaving bombs on the doorsteps of ex-Nazis were only part of the firestorm.

Many conservative Cold Warriors were furious, too, but for very different reasons. While the Jewish militants were angry that the American justice system hadn’t gone far enough to track down ex-Nazis, the conservatives were upset that it had gone too far, playing right into the hands of the Communists, they charged. Inside the gates of the White House, the conservative critics found a fierce ally in President Reagan’s own firebrand advisor, Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge-obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished, and from his prominent perch in Washington—as a top aide to Reagan at the White House, in his nationally syndicated newspaper columns, and in his frequent cable-TV appearances—he launched what amounted to a one-man PR assault through the 1980s. The Justice Department had better things to do than “running down seventy-year-old camp guards,” Buchanan wrote, or “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime.”

(Emphasis added in most cases.)

Reagan’s last fifteen minutes of shame came out in 2019, when Timothy J. Naftali published a telephone conversation that Governor Reagan had with President Richard Nixon, in which Gov. Reagan ridiculed Africans. (Reagan supported presidential candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960s, and ex-president Nixon would return the favor in the 1980s.) A less well known example was when Gov. Reagan dismissed three Jewish chaplains, understandingly provoking accusations of antisemitism:

Governor Ronald Reagan’s dismissal of three Jewish chaplains, the entire complement ministering on a full time basis to patients of that faith in California’s 14 mental hospitals, is a “blatant act of anti-Semitism.” That was the statement today of Percy Moore, executive director of Oakland’s anti-poverty program and the president of the California Community Action Program Directors Association, a state-wide organization composed of anti-poverty leaders.

Moore, who is black, said that the elimination of all three Jewish chaplains, effective July 1, while some 33 Catholic and Protestant chaplains are retained for full-time work in the mental hospitals, is “nothing more than a blatant act of anti-Semitism that is right in line with other recent acts of the Governor that discriminate against the poor and the sick, and with special impact of those of the minority groups.”

Rabbi Harry Hyman agreed. Of course, given Reagan’s tokenization of Jews, and more importantly, his support for the occupation of Palestine, too many people were willing to forgive or forget this episode. Nevertheless, Reagan’s support was not for Jews in general, but Herzlians like the Hebrew fascist Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom he admired:

“Few are the leaders who in their own lifetime have become a legend. Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky to whom you pay tribute was such a leader. He was a soldier, statesman and poet who believed in the sanctity of the individual. He was a visionary who dreamt of a free Israel in its historic homeland, a society based on justice and the spirit of the ancient prophets. I extend to you may very best wishes for the success of this historic event.”

Needless to say, this topic merely exposes Ronald Reagan’s associations with fascists and neofascists. A definitive iconoclasm would take hours to read, even though it would help explain why neofascists like the Daily Stormer admire Reagan, as did fascists like Léon Degrelle, who wrote in 1992 that

Enrichment follows investment, not the other way around. Since Hitler, only Ronald Reagan has seemed to understand this. As President, he realized that to restore prosperity in the United States meant boldly stimulating the economy with credits and a drastic reduction in taxes, instead of waiting for the country to emerge from economic stagnation on its own.

‘Prosperity’ indeed. Between further impoverishing the lower classes, wasting money on anticommunist terrorism, embracing apartheid, neglecting the AIDS crisis by demonizing homosexuals, and impoverishing scores of millions of Easterners, it is easy to understand why antisocialists consecrate this white supremacist.

Quoting Gabriella Romano’s The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy: The Case of ‘G’, page 29:

Virility, [George L.] Mosse argued, became a national symbol during the régime, embodied by the dictator’s himself, his physique, his behaviour and way of addressing the crowds, his gestures; dandyism, weakness, effeminacy were perceived as anything that stood in the way, anything that was anti-Mussolini and his ideology.

Furthermore, as the régime concentrated on demographic campaigns, homosexuality came to be perceived as sterile and therefore essentially anti-fascist and selfish, against what was good for the nation. The New Italian Man’s actions were to be inspired by his love for the country: private life was considered a responsible act towards the nation, sexuality had to be aimed at procreation.

(This story takes approximately ten minutes to read. Aside from the subjects of misogyny and white supremacy, it also mentions domestic abuse and menstruation, which a few readers may find too discomforting to read.)

Margot Liu née Holzmann had a talent for survival. A Jewish lesbian living in Berlin, she had endured [Fascism] in the 1930s. Yet, in September 1941 she found herself compelled to wear the Star of David. Rather than submit to its indignity and to the prospect of deportation to a concentration camp and eventual extermination, Margot found a way out.

At a birthday party that month hosted by her landlady Frau A., she met Chi Lang Liu, a Chinese waiter who had moved to [the Weimar Republic] in 1932. Margot knew that marrying this man would provide her with Chinese citizenship, thus shielding her from the [Third Reich’s] genocidal laws.⁶⁶

As her girlfriend Martha Halusa averred after the war, in an application to the committee on the ‘Victims of Fascism’ with the Berlin Magistrate, ‘my girlfriend (Freundin) Frau Liu married a Chinese man to save herself from evacuation.’⁶⁷

On 11 October, while celebrating Chi’s birthday, he and Margot had sex for the first time, at which point they decided to become engaged. Eight days later, Chi would claim, ‘Holzmann told me that she had not had her period and that I had to marry her then and there.’⁶⁸

When questioned about the episode some months later, Margot would swear to the police that her periods were highly irregular due to an unspecified ‘affliction of the womb (Unterleibsleiden).’ Unsure if her period was simply late or if Chi had indeed impregnated her, Margot averred, ‘I told Chi that I had not yet had my period without any specific purpose, whereupon he told his entire circle of friends, that I was bearing a little Chinese.’⁶⁹

She was not, as it turned out, pregnant. Margot married Chi on 13 November, securing Chinese citizenship. She was thereby ‘released from wearing the Star of David and protected from evacuation,’ as the Kripo would compulsively mention in their reports on the relationship months later.⁷⁰

Chi claimed that he slept alone on their wedding night, abandoned by his new bride for Martha’s bed in her apartment in the house of the S. family. When he arrived at Martha’s apartment two days later to see Margot, she finally allowed him to spend the night in the bed she shared with Martha. Only in December did Margot and Chi move together into a furnished room let by a Frau Kr. Martha took a room in the same building soon thereafter.⁷¹

Martha had met Margot 12 years earlier when they danced together at the Hamburg cabaret Alkazar. As Margot had lost friends and family to the inexorable progress of [Fascist] antisemitism — her mother died and her father ‘was evacuated,’ that is, sent to a concentration camp and likely exterminated — she relied on Martha more and more.

She would protest to the police investigating her for lesbianism, ‘it is understandable that I would confide in Halusa, who[m] I have been friends with for so long, and draw closer to her.’⁷² In Martha’s postwar application, in which she calls Margot her ‘partner’ and her ‘girlfriend,’ we have surer proof that they were indeed in a romantic relationship.⁷³ But while under interrogation by the Kripo, each woman did their best to deny lesbian proclivities.

Chi eventually noticed that Margot was carrying on an affair with Martha — ‘it became clear to me then that Halusa and my wife practiced lesbian love.’ This in turn had led to numerous arguments and fights between him and his wife. Margot eventually disappeared on 15 May 1942, whereupon Chi again moved and later filed for divorce.

That fall, the criminal police Streife West — not the KJ.M.II.2 division to which M. belonged — received an anonymous tip.⁷⁴ It is entirely likely [that] Chi himself sent it; Martha claimed after the war that Chi ‘denounced us several times.’⁷⁵ The tip claimed that Margot and Martha were lesbians and also engaged in [sex work].⁷⁶

The charge is not an unusual one, for, as noted above, lesbian women often engaged in [sex work].⁷⁷ Moreover, though [sex work] was not technically illegal, [sex workers] faced increasingly draconian regulations and persecution as the war progressed.⁷⁸

The tip prompted a detective K. to open an investigation and to invite Chi to provide information regarding his relationship with Margot. So perturbing did he evidently find Chi’s story, that three days later he visited Margot’s new residence in the apartment of a Frau St.

To his consternation, Frau St.’s 12-year-old daughter answered the door. He questioned her about Margot, and the girl affirmed that although she technically slept on the sofa of her mother’s apartment, Margot frequently bedded with Martha in a separate room. K.’s report concluded:

Through marriage the full-blooded Jewess Liu has now become a Chinese citizen. Both [she and Martha] practice lesbian love and the public is shocked, that lesbian love would be entertained between an Aryan and a Jewess, moreover there are children in the household who are thereby morally endangered.⁷⁹

It is curious that the race of each party constituted such a strong point of interest. While the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had banned marriage and sex between Aryans and Jews out of the deep-seated [Fascist] fear of miscegenation, there was no danger of ‘mixed-race’ children resulting from Margot and Martha’s fornication.⁸⁰ Of course, the inspector could have believed [that] Martha and Margot had violated the laws that forbade Jews from socializing with Aryans; in either event, the report referred to no statute.

More important, the passage makes clear that Margot and Martha’s alleged crimes consisted not so much in loving each other, as in causing a public disturbance and exposing children to what K. considered morally deleterious behavior. What his report counter-intuitively brings to light, however, is that none of the individuals either women came into contact with seemed the slightest bit distraught by their alleged lesbianism.

The detective noted no perturbation on the part of Frau St.’s daughter, nor from the landlady herself (it seems [that] he did not even speak to her). That is, despite claiming ‘the public is shocked’ by Margot and Martha’s behavior, K. did not take down a single expression of surprise, anger, or shock in his report. This is peculiar, particularly because he would soon thereafter forward the account to division KJ.M.II.2, where it would be used as evidence to build a case against Margot and Martha.

Even stranger, no report in the entire file from either division notes the slightest irritation or amazement on the part of any of the numerous landladies with whom the pair lived during the months encompassed in the file. Nor were any of them asked to give evidence.

The next day, inspector K. transferred the file to M. at KJ.M.II.2 ‘for jurisdictional reasons.’⁸¹ Several weeks thereafter, on 15 October, M. brought in Margot and Martha. The two women had a very different story to tell. Margot contested having ever been in a same-sex relationship with Martha, asserting instead, ‘before the promulgation of the Nürnberg laws [of 1935], I was intimately friendly with the German-blooded Hans S. for six years.’

Moreover, she characterized Chi as a Janus-faced ruffian, telling the police that, ‘before the marriage, my husband had only shown himself in the best light. On the day of our marriage my husband was as though changed. He treated me like his maid and hit me numerous times thereafter.’⁸² Chi apparently told her, in the presence of their landlady, that he would connive to put her in jail. He further threatened that if this did not work, he would stab her to death.⁸³

At this stage, Margot’s statement took a bizarre turn. Though unsuccessful in convincing the police of her heterosexuality, she had effectively denied the allegation of prostitution, proving to the inspector that she had recently found employment.⁸⁴

The police left the question of whether she had previously prostituted herself unanswered. But Margot used the question of employment to attack her husband, underscoring that he only appeared to work.

While she had kept the household together by selling over 2000 Reichsmark (RM) worth of clothing, her husband called in sick from work and frittered his time and savings away gambling.⁸⁵ When they first married, he had described his predilection to her ‘as a harmless social game. It has to do with playing ‘Ma Jong’ and various other games of chance.’⁸⁶

Shortly before Easter 1943, however, Chi disappeared. He called Margot three days later, demanding that she bring him something to eat on Dresdener Straße. She described the scene that confronted her thus:

I saw around thirty people at the table and standing around the playing table. Massive sums of money lay on the table. When I entered, everyone became agitated and my husband sprang up from the playing table, and shoved me through the door.⁸⁷

Margot had caught the barest glimpse of a gambling ring. She later reported to M. that, according to Chi’s friends, he had won around 15,000 RM at these games, which brought Chinese men ‘from all cities in Germany and also from Vienna, who had come to Berlin only for the purpose of the game.’⁸⁸

If Margot is to be believed — and it is possible that she simply possessed an overactive imagination — then dozens of Chinese citizens traveled from all corners of the Reich to take part in an underground racket. This is doubly curious as Germany’s 1939 census showed a mere 1,138 Chinese living in the Greater Reich. After the onset of hostilities between China and [the Third Reich] on 9 December, 1941, the régime began interning some Chinese citizens in concentration camps and deporting others.⁸⁹

When Martha came to the police station, she gave a short statement in support of Margot. She contested at the outset, ‘I am normally sexually inclined and have never had intimate relations with Margot.’ While Martha did admit to practicing [sex work], she insisted [that] she regularly visited a doctor to check for venereal diseases, a routine practice in [the German Reich] for regulating and monitoring [sex workers].⁹⁰

At the end of her statement she made a ham-handed attempt to discredit Chi, indicating that he had called Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of independent China, his Führer and that ‘he said, that Chiang Kai-shek is good and [that] Hitler is bad.’⁹¹

For Margot, the investigation seems to have turned out well on balance. On one hand, M. did not believe either woman’s avowals of heterosexuality. He noted in particular, ‘that the prostitutes in Berlin’s West say of Halusa and Liu that they entertain an intimate relationship.’⁹²

He further indicated — just as in the cases above — because Margot and Martha ‘were not previously registered as lesbians with us (sind als Lesbierinnen hier karteimäßig bisher nicht bekannt geworden),’ that ‘registration cards have been provided for (Karteikarten wurden angelegt).’⁹³ Again, the purpose and significance of the registration remains unclear.

M.’s report mentioned that Chi’s lawyer had promised [that] Margot would keep her Chinese citizenship if she assumed fault for the marriage’s dissolution. While he referred Chi’s case of gambling to the state police for further investigation, the shield of foreign citizenship apparently continued to protect Margot.⁹⁴

Given that the government had begun taking Chinese into custody after China declared war, it is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship.

Not only did the police detectives persistently insist that Margot’s Chinese citizenship safeguarded her from deportation to a concentration camp, they also demonstrated remarkably little interest in finding a way around this seemingly legalistic hurdle.

As in each of the cases above, M. sent the case file to the state’s attorney at the district court in Berlin. There is no record, however, of what, if any, conclusion [that] the state’s attorney or court reached on the matter, and here the criminal police record drops off.⁹⁵

But Martha’s 1945 application provides a sketch of what happened to the couple. Of the denunciations by Chi she claimed that the two of them escaped unscathed, ‘because we made his behavior out to be an act of revenge.’⁹⁶ She indicated that they began printing anti-fascist flyers in 1943 and that they stayed hidden for the rest of the war, living on Swinemünder Straße.⁹⁷

Walking her dog one evening, Martha claimed [that] she ran into the owner of a nearby store and her boyfriend. In February 1945, this pair invited Martha and Margot, who[m] they knew were a couple, to a birthday celebration, where ‘anti-Nazi conversations took place.’⁹⁸

Unfortunately, they were Gestapo agents and the party was a trap. Margot and Martha were arrested and taken to the SS prison on Oranienburgerstraße. If they had escaped the Kripo without much trouble, their interrogations at the hands of the Gestapo were heinous:

The questioning was terrible; but my girlfriend Frau Liu had it the hardest, because she was dealt with in the most inhuman way not only for political reasons, but also because she is a Jew. After one interrogation she was so battered that I could hardly recognize her. The Gestapo inspector Heinz let out his entire rage on my girlfriend. The Gestapo bureaucrats told us that we were candidates for execution (Todeskandidaten).⁹⁹

Martha was charged with treason and other political crimes. With Margot she was transferred to a Gestapo prison. In April, as the [Soviets] advanced on Berlin and the régime was frantically destroying files, the couple was summoned to a hearing. The soldier escorting them ‘whispered, be brave, the Russians are in Bernau, files are all destroyed, lie to get yourselves out of here (lügt euch raus).’¹⁰⁰

That is precisely what they did. Martha and Margot told the Gestapo official that they were in prison merely for having made statements against the régime while intoxicated. Margot remained mute about her Jewishness. They were instructed to take themselves to the Oranienburgerstraße Gestapo offices, which they did not do. As soon as Margot and Martha were set free, ‘we hid ourselves for four more days until the Russians came. Then finally we were saved and the Hitler-régime was destroyed.’¹⁰¹

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 267–269:

Rudolf Vrba […] wrote that:

I am a Jew. In spite of that — indeed because of that I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. Kasztner. […] I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’²⁶

When Professor Jacob Talmon criticised Hannah Arendt for referring to this, Vrba asked:

Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders — for example Dr. R. Kasztner — bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.²⁷

These letters are not found in Hebrew history text books.²⁸ The [Auschwitz] Protocols were erased from Zionism’s holocaust historiography because they did not accord with its narrative.²⁹ That was why Vrba described Israel as a ‘state of the Judenrats and Kastners’.³⁰ For Fatran, Vrba could never be considered as credible as Zionist members of the Judenrat or Vaada.

It was not until 1997 that Vrba appeared in Bauer’s writings as a reliable eyewitness and it was not until 1999, a year after Vrba’s memoirs were published in Hebrew, that an account of his escape from Auschwitz was mentioned in Gutman’s Hebrew writings for school students.³¹

Bauer had been forced to accept that the [Auschwitz] Protocols could be credited with making three major breakthroughs: changing the Allies’ belief that Auschwitz was a huge labour camp, mainly for Poles; that it was the first detailed and reliable report of the extermination and thirdly ‘it jolted the Swiss into undertaking wide publication of the German mass killing at Auschwitz.’³²

Linn, an Education Professor at Haifa University, first became aware of Vrba via his interview in Lanzmann’s Shoah. Linn met Vrba by chance at the University of British Columbia.³³ Despite having been taught about the Holocaust, she had not heard of him. When Linn conducted a survey of her own students 98% were ignorant of the fact that any Jews had escaped from Auschwitz. Neither the escape nor the [Auschwitz] Protocols had formed part of Israeli schools’ Holocaust curriculum.

Linn’s explanation was that ‘Vrba’s escape contradict[ed] Bauer’s thesis that the Jews didn’t know, and that if they were aware, then they didn’t really grasp the situation.’ The Jewish leaders however ‘did know and did grasp what was happening, because they saved themselves.’ Linn reserved her main ire for Gutman whose The Holocaust and its meaning, a basic text taught in Israeli schools did not mention Vrba and Wetzler’s escape from Auschwitz.³⁴

Official Israeli holocaust history has erased the record of anti-Zionist Jewish resistance to the [Fascists]. This was not only because of the fiction that only Zionists represented the Jews of Europe but because some of the most prominent Jewish collaborators with the [Fascists] were Zionists.³⁵ In its place Israel’s holocaust historians have substituted the heroic myth of Zionist resistance.³⁶

Vrba was first given academic legitimacy by a German journal. In 1996, he gave his views of the role of the Jewish Councils, in Vierteljahrsheft fuer Zeitgeschichte. Bauer responded, agreeing that the Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were ignorant of their impending fate.³⁷

It was only after a dogged campaign by Linn that the [Auschwitz] Protocols and Vrba’s memoirs were printed in Hebrew in 1998 and that Vrba received an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.³⁸ Linn asked whether a narrative of escape or resistance by a non-Zionist Jew could ever be made to harmonise with the national myths dominating Israel.³⁹

In 1963 Vrba published his memoirs, I Escaped from Auschwitz. They were published in virtually every language bar one — Hebrew. Publishers, including YV [Yad Vashem], weren’t interested.⁴⁰ Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights, first published in 1945, suffered a similar fate, only being translated into Hebrew in 2001.

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be moulded along with the political order of that time… extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’⁴¹

After the war Edelman insisted on living in Poland and refused to accept the Zionist claim to ownership of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.⁴²

Vrba and Wetzler were rendered anonymous. Oskar Neumann referred to ‘two young Jewish chaps…’ in his 1956 memoirs.⁴³ Oskar Krasniansky refers to ‘two young people’⁴⁴ and Rothkirchen to ‘two young men’.⁴⁵ In Bauer’s The Holocaust — Some Historical Aspects they are referred to as ‘two Slovak Jews’⁴⁶ Dina Porat wrote about ‘two young Slovak Jews…’⁴⁷ Porat cited Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies as her source, yet Gilbert named both.⁴⁸

In the 1990 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Wetzler and Vrba are mentioned by name.⁴⁹ But in the 2001 edition they are referred to as ‘two Jewish prisoners.’ The USHMM and the Hebrew inscription of the Auschwitz escape in YV refers to ‘two young Slovak Jews.’⁵⁰

Erich Kulka interviewed Vrba and Wetzler in Czechoslovakia, giving them full recognition.⁵¹ After he joined YV, Vrba was referred to as ‘Rosenberg-Vrba’.⁵²

Whilst admitting that the [Auschwitz] Protocols had saved about 200,000 Jews from deportation he complained that Vrba had ‘attacked and humiliated’ former members of UZ [Ústredňa Židov; the Slovakian Jewish Council or Judenrat].⁵³

In YV the Hungarian version of the Protocols can only be found in a file dealing with the Kasztner case, minus its authors’ names!⁵⁴ Nor is there an English or Hebrew version.⁵⁵ The escapees are referred to as ‘two young Slovak Jews.’ As John Conway noted: ‘energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew’.⁵⁶

The silencing of Vrba and Wetzler was exploited by [Shoah] deniers such as Arthur Butz, author of Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz argued that if the content of the Protocols were true, Israeli historians would certainly know their names and publicise their report.’⁵⁷ Butz alleged that the Protocols were invented by the [War Refugee Board]. Another holocaust denier who adopted this line of argument was Robert Faurisson.⁵⁸

The five Jewish escapees from Auschwitz were airbrushed out of Zionist history. When Otto Kulka asked why Vrba and Wexler’s part in informing the UZ was missing from Rothkirchen’s presentation at a 1968 YV conference on Jewish Resistance, she replied, ‘I was speaking of the organised escapes. The escapes from Auschwitz were acts of individual heroism.’ This was both untrue and irrelevant. The Zionists played no part in the camp’s resistance.⁵⁹

As Porat conceded, ‘one notion remained unchanged in the Yishuv’, that the Jewish Resistance was primarily Zionist.’⁶⁰ The problem was that neither Edelman nor Vrba had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’⁶¹

In 1994, at a conference at the USHMM, Vrba asked who was the better historian, those who had direct experience of the [Fascists] or those who wrote about them?⁶² Vrba’s crime was that he was neither a Zionist nor a historian.⁶³

A useful summary of how the experiences of those who were present during the Holocaust was marginalised is given by Conway.⁶⁴ Fatran described his allegations that the UZ concealed information about the Holocaust from Slovakian Jewry as being ‘blatantly contrary to the historical truth’⁶⁵ despite the fact that she had justified such concealment.⁶⁶

(Emphasis added.)

For as violent and horrific as the Libyan campaign was, the entire 10 years coincidentally occurred in the first decade of Fascist rule. Historians have noted that there is a difference between the first and second decades of Fascist control, with the second decade signifying a turning point to where the régime embraces all of its violent characteristics.

R.J. Bosworth agrees with this assessment in his book Mussolini and the Eclipse of Fascism and indicates that by 1932 there was no universal meaning for Fascism and that Mussolini still had not yet demonstrated that totalitarianism was synonymous with evil.²⁹

Yet, in 1932 when Mussolini published the definition of Fascism he opened the definition by writing Fascism “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”³⁰

Here it becomes clear that Fascism looks to embrace war as central to its dogma and thus indicates a turning point where Fascism would utilize war to carry out its ideas.

[…]

In Rome on October 2nd of 1935, Mussolini would declare war on Ethiopia. In this declaration of war Mussolini would go on to say “Never before, as at this historical hour, have the people of Italy revealed the quality of its spirit and such force of character, and it is against this people to which mankind owes its greatest conquests, this people of heroes, of poets, of saints, of navigators, of colonizers, that the world dares threaten sanctions.”³⁴

This excerpt, though mostly aimed at dispelling the possibilities of sanctions from Britain and France, also shows Mussolini praising Italy’s past and complementing his people for being united in wanting war with Ethiopia. After seven months of fighting, [the Regio Esercito] would enter Addis Ababa and claim victory.

On May 5th of 1936, Mussolini would give a speech about the end of the war saying “it is our peace, Roman peace, which is expressed in this simple, irrevocable, definite phrase: Ethiopia is Italian! It is Italian in fact because it is occupied by our victorious armies. It is Italian in law because of the law of Rome and civilization which triumphs over barbarities.”³⁵

The reference to Rome here in the case of Ethiopia is new but not surprising, as Mussolini seemingly evokes Rome whenever he gets a victory reaffirming how vital Romanità is to his Fascism. Four days after this speech, Mussolini would give another speech proclaiming the Italian Empire.

In the speech Mussolini goes on to say “Italy has at last got her Empire, the Fascist Empire, which bears the indestructible signs of the determination and the power of the Roman Littorio, because this is the goal towards which, for fourteen years, the overflowing and disciplined energies of the young, sturdy generations of Italy were encouraged. It is an Empire of peace, because Italy wants peace for herself and for all, and decides upon warfare only when compelled to do so by imperious, uncontrollable necessities of life.”³⁶

This speech does a lot in that Mussolini claims [that] Italy only wants peace even though he defined Fascism as strictly opposing peace.

‘I have never met anyone who wasn’t against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.’ — David Low, 1946