Capitalism in Decay

(Mirror.)

“At this time (1931 at the earliest) I learned of the existence of friendly relations between Privy Councillor Dr. Emil Kirdorf, a leading man in the coal industry in the Ruhr, and the Führer. […] Through Kirdorf and later through Fritz Thyssen, the Führer was introduced to the circles of Rhenish-Westphalian industry, which supported him and the party financially.”⁸⁷

These words come from a statement made by Walter Funk to the Allied investigating authorities after the Second World War. Even before 1933, Funk was an intermediary between the NSDAP leadership and German major industry. Professionally, he was editor-in-chief of the Berliner Börsenzeitung and later also worked as Reich Economics Minister and Reichsbank President.⁸⁸ So these are the words of an insider.

The rôle of the major industrialists Emil Kirdorf and Fritz Thyssen has been greatly downplayed in historiography in order to deny the links between German major industry and Hitler.⁸⁹ The reasons for th[ese] apologetics are beside the point here. In any case, in later works on this subject, Kirdorf was in principle no longer dealt with at all and Thyssen was often assigned the rôle of a loner.⁹⁰

Fundamentally, it should be noted that these positions and accounts of Kirdorf and Thyssen have already been debunked in detail by the author of this essay, both in his dissertation (2012) and in later publications on the subject.⁹¹

As chairman of the supervisory board and major shareholder of Vereinigte Stahlwerke — the largest steel group in Europe at the time — and as a member of the board of the Bergbauverein, Thyssen was without question one of the 19 leading major industrialists of the Weimar Republic and was therefore certainly one of the absolute leaders of major industry in Germany at the time.⁹²

In the case of Emil Kirdorf, it was argued that he was over eighty-years old and in “retirement” when he met Hitler, and despite his fifty years as a leading industrialist and multiple association chairman, he suddenly had no political contacts and of course no political influence whatsoever, as well as no access to the money pots of big industry or the industrial associations. At most he was an old man who could at best be described as a kind of “ghost driver” or loner.⁹³

As already mentioned, the reality was quite different and the only grain of truth in this apologetic is that Kirdorf gave up his position as Chairman of the Board of GBAG — the largest German mining company — in 1926. However, this was not because he wanted to “retire”, but because his old company was suddenly to become the main shareholder of Vereinigte Stahlwerke.

Although Vereinigte Stahlwerke was the largest steel group in Europe, it was impossible for GBAG to become the main owner of this completely indebted group in the midst of the arms crisis. With this new rôle, the banks risked GBAG’s existence in the poker game for Vereinigte Stahlwerke.⁹⁴ This was the company that Kirdorf had built up since 1873 and he was understandably unwilling to accept this new situation. Kirdorf therefore resigned from the board.⁹⁵

In 1927, when Kirdorf met Hitler a year later, he was still deputy chairman of the supervisory board of “Discontogesellschaft” — one of the most important major German banks — and after the merger of this bank with Deutsche Bank in 1929, he moved first to the supervisory board and from 1932 to the main committee of Deutsche Bank.⁹⁶

In addition to Kirdorf, the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank alone included 13 corporate leaders from the coal and steel and heavy industry sectors, many representatives of other branches of industry, such as board members of IG Farben, Siemens-Werke and eight bankers from other banks.⁹⁷

Kirdorf was also a member of the Rhenish-Westphalian Committee of Deutsche Bank, where a “who’s who” of Rhenish entrepreneurship was also to be found. In addition to Kirdorf, the Rhenish-Westphalian committee included group leaders from Klöckner-Eisen-AG, Rheinische Braunkohlen AG, Rheinisches Braunkohlesyndikat, Deutz AG, Hoesch AG and others.⁹⁸

The coal industrialist Karl Wilke, a mine director at GBAG, reported on the extent of Kirdorf’s influence among German industrialists. He wrote in his memoirs that Kirdorf’s villa became a “place of pilgrimage” at the end of the 1920s, where the “Nestor of German heavy industry” — as Kirdorf was called — was revered as a “patriarch”.⁹⁹

That was no exaggeration. On Kirdorf’s birthday alone in 1927 — when he first met Hitler — over 300 industrialists undertook a torchlight procession to Kirdorf’s villa in pouring rain. The list of participants in this torchlight procession included Gustav Knepper, Ernst Tengelmann, Albert Hoppstetter, Karl Ruschen, Hermann Kellermann, Erich Fickler, Ernst Büskül and Gerd Haarmann — in short, the who’s who of leading coal industrialists who sat on the board of the mining association.¹⁰⁰

Arriving at Kirdorf’s villa, Alfred Hugenberg, who was also on the board of the mining association,¹⁰¹ gave a speech where he said the following about Kirdorf:

“Today the torches speak [...] As students, we honored our teachers and leaders with torches. Today, the managers and directors of the Ruhr coal mines honor their teacher and leader Emil Kirdorf.”¹⁰²

Little more needs to be said about Kirdorf’s influence in the economy and his political rôle — except that he had direct access to the Bergbauverein’s funds, as he was a member of the Bergbauverein’s executive committee until the early 1930s, and it was there that decisions were made about the use of the organization’s funds.¹⁰³ On a side note, the association’s correspondence also demonstrates clearly that Kirdorf was involved in the decisions on the use of these funds.¹⁰⁴

Finally, it must be said that the coal industrialists Emil Kirdorf, Fritz Thyssen and Albert Vögler were close friends.¹⁰⁵ All three were among the 19 leading major capitalists of the Weimar Republic.¹⁰⁶ It was precisely because of their close personal relationship that they played a major rôle in opening doors for Hitler and other [Fascist] leaders in the business world, giving them access to the political influence and money of German heavy industry.¹⁰⁷

Over the course of three years the fascist colonial authorities in the […] colony of Cyrenaica emptied an entire region of its people in an effort to quell an anti-colonial rebellion and prepare the colony for settlement and incorporation into Mussolini’s envisioned Fascist empire. In this short time span, fascist authorities forcibly deported the semi-nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica from their homeland in the Jebel region and interned them in concentration camps on the desert coast.

These policies resulted in the deaths of more than half of the semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica, the decimation of their herds, and the near elimination of their way of life. [Fascist] Italy proudly broadcast this episode of colonial conquest to its fellow Western imperial powers who watched a genocide unfold with relative disinterest.

This international neglect provided Fascist Italy with the opportunity to pursue its genocidal policies with minimal consequences or scrutiny, strengthen its geopolitical position in colonial Africa, and elaborate an increasingly radical, violent, and self-assured ideology for […] Fascist colonialism.

[…]

Over a period of four short years the Fascist colonial government forcibly deported an estimated 100,000 “semi-nomadic” people from the colony’s interior and held them in a string of 16 concentration camps on the Mediterranean Coast.

From 1929 to 1934 Cyrenaica’s estimated population dropped from 225,000 to 142,000, indicating that 83,000 people disappeared from the colony in only five years. Of the 83,000 missing, about 60,000–70,000 are believed to have died as a result of the policies of deportation and internment.²

[…]

With the rebellion in Tripolitania crushed and the Benghazi parliament formally suppressed, the fascist regime was free to use whatever means necessary to “pacify” Cyrenaica. The “pacification” of Cyrenaica was by no means the first time that the Italian government employed novel weapons and tactics against its colonial subjects.

The initial invasion of Libya in 1911 saw the first use of aeronautical anti-civilian tactics. The [Regia Aeronautica] would swoop low over Libyan villages and hand-drop explosives on military targets in order to terrorize the civilian population.²³

The Fascists utilized airplanes in Libya again in 1926 when [Fascist] Italy became the first country to intentionally use poisonous gas against civilian populations by dropping canisters of phosgene gas on caravans in the Libyan interior.²⁴

By the end of the 1920s the military situation in Cyrenaica had become untenable for the [Fascists]. Omar al-Mukhtar’s highly mobile guerrilla bands known as duar were able to attack [Fascist] military positions and then quickly disappear back into civilian society making them nearly impossible for a formal army to suppress.

The Governor of Cyrenaica from 1926 to 1929, Attilio Terruzzi, bemoaned that even armies of 5,000 or 10,000 men were insufficient against even a few hundred guerilla fighters who, owing to their semi-nomadic lifestyle, weren’t tied to any specific location and seemed to be able to appear and disappear spontaneously across hundreds of kilometers.²⁵ Terruzzi’s strategy was to use brute force and technological superiority to combat an enemy with better knowledge of the terrain and integration into the local society.

Located around three miles away from Mauthausen concentration camp, the Gusen site had attracted the SS because of its proximity to the Gusen and Kastenhof stone quarries. SS authorities purchased land at the site on May 25, 1938. Managers of the SS-owned firm Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DESt-German Earth and Stone Works), which used concentration camp prisoner labor to extract and finish construction materials at Mauthausen, established next to the “Wiener Graben” stone quarry in 1938, deployed a forced labor detachment from Mauthausen on a daily basis to the Gusen quarries beginning in 1938.

Tiring of marching the prisoner detachment three miles to the Gusen quarries, SS authorities authorized the construction of concentration camp Gusen in late 1939. During the winter of 1939–1940, German, Austrian, and Polish concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen constructed the camp and prisoner barracks.

Although the site counted as an external labor detachment of Mauthausen during its initial construction, the SS opened Gusen as a separate camp on May 25, 1940, identifying the surviving 212 prisoners from the construction detachment by separate Gusen incarceration numbers and removing their names from Mauthausen records. That same day, a transport of approximately 1,084 Polish prisoners arrived in Gusen.

Over the next several weeks, the SS transferred some 8,000 Polish prisoners to Gusen from other concentration camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Gusen retained its autonomous status until early 1944. It had its own numbering system, death registry, SS guard battalion, and postal administration.

During the period of its construction, SS Sergeant Anton Streitwieser commanded the Gusen external detachment site. On July 1, 1940, SS Captain Karl Chmielewski became the camp commandant. In late 1942, SS First Lieutenant Fritz Seidler replaced him. Seidler commanded the camp until liberation.

Prisoners

In addition to German, Austrian, and Polish prisoners, the SS incarcerated in Gusen approximately 4,000 Spanish Republicans (Spanish refugees, who had found refuge from the Franco regime in France in 1939 and whom Vichy French authorities turned over to the Germans in 1940) in 1940 and 4,400 Soviet prisoners of war in 1941. Nearly three-quarters of the Spanish Republicans died in the first year at Gusen. By the beginning of 1943, fewer than 500 Soviet prisoners of war were still alive in the camp.

During the later war years, the arrival of more than 3,000 Yugoslavs, more than 9,000 Soviet civilians and more than 2,400 Frenchmen further diversified Gusen's inmate population. Yet the high mortality rate, caused in particular by Commandant Chmielewski's brutal and sadistic management of the camp, kept the prisoner population to between 6,000 and 7,000 up until 1943. Better rations and less arbitrary mistreatment led to a decrease in the death rate from the summer of 1943 until the autumn of 1944, as the SS sought to maintain its labor force.

The need for labor to construct underground tunnels in 1944, induced the SS to increase the prisoner population to more than 24,000 by the end of 1944, including the arrival of 2,750 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz in June 1944, thousands of Polish Jews from Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Flossenbürg in the late summer and autumn of 1944, 1,000 Polish civilians captured in October 1944 during the Warsaw Home Army uprising, and some 1,500 Italian civilians.

To better understand how the Italian economic connections with [the British Empire] affected those with [the Third Reich] and vice versa, the period analysed in this section is reduced to the months of Italian non-belligerency, from 1 September 1939 to 10 June 1940.

The events of these 9 months in fact show with greater clarity — actually, in some cases, they bring to light — many of the dynamics that were previously hidden. The [A]llied maritime blockade was certainly the element, that added new important and delicate issues to the general relations and particularly to the economic talks that Italy had with Great Britain — that was, de facto, the only manager of the block.

A few days after the beginning of the [Wehrmacht’s] attack on Poland, in fact, the Italian Foreign Minister had urged his London embassy to ask the competent authorities to allow the Italian ships that were in German ports on 1 September to return home without undergoing the controls of British patrols at sea.

The answer was not only a positive one, but Italian ships were even offered to be escorted by the British fleet across the North Sea. The political meaning of such an offer was not underestimated by Rome, so that Ciano ordered that “the issues of an economic nature that up to now have been dealt directly with the technical departments from today must be exclusively forwarded and managed by this Ministry”.⁶⁹

In early October, then, the Italian competent authorities started to meet the naval attaché at the British embassy in Rome on a weekly base, in order to smooth possible frictions in the controls of the maritime blockade. These meetings turned out to be the starting point for the creation at the end of the month of a permanent Anglo-Italian joint standing committee.⁷⁰

The purpose of the latter would have been not only to deal with all the issues of the blockade, but also to draft a possible commercial agreement, that, given the circumstances, was perceived immediately by both parts as a possible strategical step in the relations between the two countries. Perhaps to give more importance to this — after all — unexpected event, London decided to issue an order according to which the British would have provided assurances to their companies for the payments of Italian buyers.

[Fascist] Italy, in fact, was not only lacking foreign currency reserves to liquidate purchases abroad but had also a significative passive disbalance in the clearing with the United Kingdom.⁷¹ Showing such a trustful position, London hoped to get the negotiations off to a good start.

[…]

Coming to the British, it should be said that the already mentioned division about the position that had to be taken with [Fascist] Italy, together with the eventual unwillingness of Mussolini to send war material to London were ultimately the elements that influenced the negotiations for the commercial agreement, bringing them to a failure.

A memorandum drafted in February 1940 by the Italian Economic War Office outlined the main stages of Anglo-Italian economic relations since the outbreak of the war, and let us know that a preliminary agreement for commercial exchange was signed in November 1939 and that specific negotiations also started for the supply by [Fascist] Italy to Great Britain of other goods for military use.⁸¹

In early January Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of The Rolls and president of the British delegation in the Joint Standing Committee, was sent to Rome as the person in charge of the negotiations, carrying tangible proposals for a radical solution to the issue of control over smuggling.⁸² Before leaving London, Greene attended a meeting at the MEW “to discuss plans for the Italian negotiations”,⁸³ but when he arrived in [Fascist] Italy he immediately understood that the problem of economic agreement with the Italians was to be treated as a political problem.

In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, in fact, he wrote clearly that the consequences of the [A]llied blockade of German coal exports departing from neutral ports (Rotterdam in primis), had gone far beyond the purely economic and commercial domain.

With this measure, the British had effectively forced the Italians to buy a much higher share of coal in Great Britain and this, while Rome’s deficit in clearing continued, inevitably implied a reduction in the amount of other commodities that the fascist government could at that point buy, as well as the danger of German reprisals.

(Emphasis added.)

When people said that the NGU Azov unit “shed any far-right associations,” that included the Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky, who now commands the 3rd Army Corps in the Ground Forces. From 2023 until recently, Biletsky led the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which will continue to exist in the new corps, like the NGU Azov Brigade.

Certain “experts” argued before the war, such as Anton Shekhovtsov in 2020, that “the toxic far-right leadership formally left the [Azov] regiment and founded what would become a far-right party called ‘National Corps.’” The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko refuted this, also in 2020: “the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment.”

Shekhovtsov, a far-right activist turned “far-right expert,” was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by then-Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in which they called for the U.S. government to designate the “Azov Battalion” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

In the spring of 2022, the Soufan Group, led by Rose and Soufan, made a U-turn and published a special report on Ukraine that claimed, “Azov has been largely regularized under the command and control of the Ukrainian armed forces, which has worked to winnow extremists from its midst. […] According to experts on the European far-right like Anton Shekhovtsov, the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago.” Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post that the National Guard “had to purge a lot of those extremist elements.”

Vyacheslav Likhachev is another “expert” cited by the media to downplay the far-right in Ukraine. He has echoed Shekhovtsov’s claim that Biletsky and the National Corps retained no more than a symbolic link with Azov, having tried and failed “to exploit the Azov ‘trademark’ in political life.” To be fair, the NGU Azov unit, wanting U.S. support, has paid lip service to this narrative. In a March 2022 statement to CNN, the Azov Regiment said it “appreciates and respects Andriy Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander, but we have nothing to do with his political activities and the National Corps party.” However, as Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2020,

the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters — a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019.

Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money.” Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps.

The NGU Azov Brigade might have distanced itself from Andriy Biletsky in the past few years, but as deputy commander Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko admitted in 2023, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd Brigade [led by Biletsky].” In addition to the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, which unites the Azovite units and salutes Biletsky as their collective leader, the NGU Azov Brigade has a “standard-bearer school” named after Mykola Stsiborskyi, a fascist OUN ideologue who drafted an explicitly totalitarian constitution for Ukraine on the eve of World War II.

The Azovites have also called this their “Natiocracy School,” named for Stsiborskyi’s concept of nationalist dictatorship. Kuzmenko observed several years ago, this school trains “political-ideological officers” for the NGU Azov unit, and was “tied to the far-right National Corps party” since its establishment in 2017. He called this “another strong link between AR [the Azov Regiment] and the larger Azov movement.”

(Mirrors.)

Despite the brutality and atrocious nature of the crimes carried out at Hadamar, American authorities could not prosecute Hadamar defendants as a violation of international law since it was German nationals mistreating German citizens with disabilities as directed by the German head of state.

However, the [Axis] kept meticulous records, and investigators found [that] Polish and Russian nationals were among the victims. International law agreed upon at the 1907 Hague Convention protected civilians during wartime. This agreement, along with the Geneva Convention and Moscow Declaration, allowed U.S. authorities to prosecute Hadamar defendants for war crimes.

The jurisdiction of the U.S. military commission trying the Hadamar defendants was challenged immediately and throughout, but in the end, the commission relied on the absence of regulation to prove jurisdiction.

All seven Hadamar defendants were found guilty, but only three received death sentences. The remaining four received prison sentences based on their involvement, but in the ensuing years, many of these sentences were reduced. By 1951, not one surviving Hadamar defendant remained in prison.

With eyes on Mariupol in the early days of the war, the western media mostly abandoned any remaining concern and curiosity about neo[fascists] in the Azov Regiment (and other Azovite units). Hundreds of Azov fighters, in addition to other soldiers and civilians, held out for weeks in the city’s massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works. New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, called it “Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.”

In “The Battle for Azovstal,” a podcast episode by the New York Times, Schwirtz claimed that “this group has a very complicated history going back to 2014,” when Andriy Biletsky, an infamous neo[fascist], founded a “battalion of misfits” that welcomed everyone. “Anybody who wanted to could join […] And, very, quickly, the Azov Battalion became associated with a band of far-right nationalists bordering on fascists.” But this was just “a small contingent of people,” and an “association that the Azov Battalion had in its infancy.” Or so they said…

As I’ve said before, the New York Times is a case study in the western media’s whitewashing of the most powerful neo[fascist] movement in Ukraine, and probably the world. Andrew Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for the NYT, appears to have been its first reporter to describe the “Azov group” as anything other than a “pro-Ukrainian paramilitary” force, a “militia fighting in the east,” or “one volunteer unit.” In 2015, Kramer wrote that Azov is “openly neo-Nazi.”

In early 2022, the NGU Azov Regiment was still “far-right,” according to the New York Times. On February 25, the day after Russia attacked Ukraine, the NYT worried that Azov “has drawn far-right fighters from around the world.” Over the next month, the Times said this “far-right military unit” is “known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.” That spring, amidst the Russian siege of Mariupol, the ideology of the Azov Regiment started to become past-tense in the “newspaper of record,” for example: “the Azov Battalion … was founded as a far-right volunteer unit.”

During the second half of April, Azov evolved from “a force that does include far-right soldiers, some of them foreign, including white supremacists and people who have been described as fascists”; to “a highly skilled and controversial unit” that is “filled with far-right fighters”; to “a force that does include nationalist soldiers, which the Kremlin has used to paint the unit as fascist”; and finally, a complicated unit “whose history as a far-right group has helped fuel Russia’s largely false claim that it is fighting fascists in Ukraine.” The Times settled on a phrase about Azov’s “history” that it repeatedly deployed. The far-right “roots” of the unit “lent a veneer of credibility” to Russian propaganda.

In May 2022, one might have read in the New York Times, “Though the Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 out of Ukraine’s ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups, experts say the group has quelled much of its extremist side under pressure from authorities.” Around that time, the NYT conducted a soft-ball interview with Lt. Illia Samoilenko, “an intelligence officer who speaks fluent English, [and] seemed intent on defining the legacy of the Azov Battalion.”

“We know about our past,” he said. He acknowledged the Azov regiment’s “obscure” origins and its past association with far-right extremists — something he said the group had shed when it became part of the national military. Independent military analysts and experts who study the far right support that assertion, saying that Azov’s incorporation into the regular combat forces of the Ukrainian military led to a purging of extremist elements. Lt. Samoilenko said lingering public misperceptions about the battalion could explain why the group did not get as much support as it might have in the run up to the war.

Some so-called experts might “support that [evidence-free] assertion,” but the New York Times must have known this was hardly the consensus among those who study the far-right in Ukraine. The Times did not bother to fact-check Samoilenko, and subsequently began to describe Azov as “a former far-right militia” with ambiguous “connections to far-right movements” and “a hard-core contingent” that has “far-right origins.” The newspaper became a broken record when it mentioned “the Azov regiment, whose roots in far-right movements have offered a veneer of credibility for Mr. Putin’s tenuous claims that Ukraine has been infected with Nazism.”

As for Samoilenko, better known as “Gandalf,” he once told a Czech reporter, “I don’t believe in any Holocaust, it’s just a story.”

I’m just a story, too.

The group needs to reach 1500 verified members before it can apply to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to form an official federal party, which it hopes to do within a year. (The bar for becoming a state party is even lower, at 500 members needed in Victoria.)

The stunt at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on Friday, when neo-Nazis including Jacob Hersant booed in the darkness of an Anzac dawn service, was part of a co-ordinated push to rebrand nationally as “everyday Australians” fed up with so-called “woke” politics and so funnel more recruits into their extreme ideologies.

That plan, which is revealed in online records and Sewell’s videos for followers, could now be in jeopardy, as bipartisan backlash to the shrine stunt and other disruptions by fringe agitators this election campaign threatens to build into a national crackdown on far-right extremism.

But neo[fascist] watchers who track the group online, such as The White Rose Society, call their political ambitions serious and frightening. Even if they don’t ever get a candidate up at the ballot box, the tactic could help the neo[fascist] group gain false legitimacy as they push further into right-wing politics — and evade crackdowns by authorities.

Extremism expert Josh Roose said [that] Australian neo[fascists] had been successful, for their relatively small numbers, in eclipsing other groups in the far right, including in recent stunts during the election. “Now they’re following in the footsteps of Hitler [into politics], though they have zero chance of actually getting elected, but they’ll exploit every loophole they can.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7857520

Around 1,000 activists, many clad in black and wearing masks, marched through the streets of Paris on Saturday to commemorate the 1994 death of an ultra-nationalist student. The event, which was initially banned, took place without major incident, according to police, though 13 arrests were made. A counter rally was not authorised.

Although the Third Reich officially surrendered on May 8, 1945, some bipeds (such as Chris Alexander) have mistaken this for the end of World War II: a risibly Eurocentric conclusion. Yet even if one chooses to overlook the Empire of Japan, there were a few illegal battles in Europe that broke out later that month. The Battle of Poljana is one such example:

Even more worrying to the Yugoslav leadership was the vast host of collaborationist formations, including the Croatian fascist Ustashe, royalist Chetniks, Serbian Volunteer Corps (Serbisches Freiwilligen-Korps, SFK), Slovene Home Guards (Domobranci), and (white) Russian Protective Corps (Russisches Schutzkorps, RSK), which were retreating together with the [Wehrmacht]. Although often at odds with one another, they were all united in their fierce anti-Communism, and a firm intention not to fall into the Partisans’ hands.

With these forces at large, Communist hold of the country would never be entirely secure: it was feared that the Western powers would retain them in their service, and possibly use them to invade the country, either independently, or as a part of a wider foreign intervention.¹⁴

For as long as [Heeresgruppe E’s] front remained intact, the Yugoslavs could not concentrate against the collaborationists; without [Reich] “corsets” on the battlefield and their logistical support, however, the latter could not hold out for long.

All being said, agreeing to German proposals would bring immense practical dividends: it would open the road to southern Austria, enable the tightening of the ring around domestic foes, and secure large quantities of military equipment, all with little cost in blood and time. Once their most dangerous enemy was disarmed, and own troop contingent in Slovenia strengthened, the Yugoslavs would be free to dictate new terms.¹⁵

[…]

The disarming rarely went smoothly, especially where collaborationist units were involved. On 11 May, the Slovene Home Guards, supported by artillery and tanks, attacked a brigade of the 14th [Yugoslav Division] guarding the Drava bridges at Ferlach.

By the next day, the attack had succeeded in opening the way to Klagenfurt for a large column of about 30 000 members of the Battle Group von Seeler (including the RSK, parts of the SFK, and a host of smaller units) retreating from Ljubljana. The Partisans, who had lost ca. 200 KIA and four tanks, were forced to request the assistance from the British, who eventually let them have the materiel, but not the prisoners.³⁹

[…]

The last clash between the [Wehrmacht] and the Yugoslav Army took place some 12 kilometres southwest of Dravograd on 13 May 1945. On this day, Partisan pickets stopped the head of a large Axis column (of about 12 000 men)⁴¹ as it tried to exit the Meža River Valley at a place called Poljana.

Following their usual practice, the Partisans demanded all of the heavy weapons, at the same time agreeing to leave every tenth man his rifle, and officers their pistols. In this way, the column “would fall like ripe fruit” to another Yugoslav brigade posted some distance behind, at Völkermarkt.

After some deliberation, [Wehrmacht] officers agreed to a twelve point-treaty proposed by the Partisans. At that moment, a senior naval officer appeared at the scene and repudiated the terms, threatening to open the way to the border with force. He had informed the staff of [Heeresgruppe E] of his decision, but whether he acted on their instructions, as claimed by the Yugoslavs, is not certain.

The envoys of both sides were still talking when suddenly shots rang out (who fired first is unclear). The battle was pretty much a one-sided affair: the [anticommunists] were bunched up in the narrow valley, unable to deploy, whereas the Yugoslavs controlled the surrounding heights, and had ample automatic weapons and mortars.

After some 45 minutes, the firing stopped; the sight of dozens of burning vehicles and an estimated several hundred casualties proved too much for the remainder of the column, which surrendered unconditionally.⁴² Two days later, on 15 May 1945, in the same area, the bulk of the [Nezavisna država Hrvatska] forces followed suit, which brought an end to military operations in Yugoslavia.⁴³

Fighting between us and remnants of the Western Axis continued throughout May 1945 and climaxed in the obscure and largely forgotten Battle of Odžak, Europe’s last World War II battle—unless you count the numerous Axis collaborators who fought the Soviets throughout 1945 and the years afterwards.

Further reading: Axis Forces in Yugoslavia 1941–45

Freuding spoke at the Kyiv Security Forum, “Ukraine's Premier International Platform on War, Peace, and Security,” which was dedicated to the Ukrainian version of “Victory Day” and called on the world to “Unite Again to Defeat the Global Aggressor.” The German general said he is proud that “we equaled Russian military power with regard to drones.” Other speakers included Admiral Rob Bauer, the former Chair of the NATO Military Committee (2021-25); CIA veteran Ralph Goff, who was almost appointed its chief of clandestine operations this spring; the famous historian Timothy Snyder; and former CIA director David Petraeus, another fan of Azov’s drone capabilities.

The opening ceremony of the latest Kyiv Security Forum included a video that claimed in World War II, “hundreds of thousands joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA], resisting both Nazi and Soviet forces.” In fact, tens of thousands joined the far-right UPA in 1943-44, and many of them were already [Axis] collaborators and war criminals. The first panel featured Valery Horishny, who[m] I wrote about before on this blog because he made a speech at the United Nations in January. This hardcore neo[fascist] from the Azov unit in Ukraine’s National Guard, who has dedicated poetry to Adolf Hitler, also spoke at last year’s “Kyiv Security Forum for Youth.”

“It now looks like deliberate policy by Western governments to whitewash, support and use open neo-Nazis in Ukraine in proxy war,” the political scientist Ivan Katchanovski commented on the Romanov-Freuding meeting. “There was a similar policy of Western governments to whitewash, support and use open Nazi collaborators from OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] and UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army] in the Cold War.”

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Russia announced a unilateral ceasefire from May 8-10 to coincide with events marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of [the Third Reich]. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that he couldn’t guarantee the safety of foreign officials celebrating in Moscow, and Ukraine launched a large drone attack on the night of May 6-7 that grounded flights in the Russian capital, presumably as some of those officials were arriving. The symbolic drone strikes followed a suspiciously-timed ceremony in Kyiv that saw Zelensky honor the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which is probably the most important neo[fascist] unit in the Ukrainian armed forces.

The President of Ukraine also presented a battle flag to the commander of the Azov movement’s Yevhen Konovalets Military School (YKMS, named after the founder of the fascistic OUN) that has formed the 354th Mechanized Training Regiment in the Ground Forces of Ukraine. Vladyslav Datsky (AKA “Datsyk”) received the “Hero of Ukraine” medal, the highest state award. “Datsyk” has a Slavic swastika, or kolovrat, tattooed on the back of his right leg. He commands the “Decepticons” platoon, which has a Black Sun in its chevron, and co-starred in the Azovite propaganda film “We Were Recruits” that I wrote about in my last post.

Zelensky also awarded the 3rd Assault Brigade “For Courage and Bravery,” which was received by the new commander of the unit, Yaroslav Levenets. Until recently, he was only known publicly as “Bot,” and led the 1st Mechanized Battalion in Andriy Biletsky’s 3rd Assault Brigade. Biletsky, the leader of the Azov movement, will remain in charge as the head of the new 3rd Army Corps. It should include about five brigades, but how many are “Azovite” remains to be seen.

In April 1938, journeyman diplomat Herbert von Dirksen was appointed [as the Third Reich’s] ambassador to London. A committed [Fascist] and rabid antisemite, he also harboured a particularly visceral loathing of Poles, believing them to be subhuman, eagerly supporting Poland’s total erasure. Despite this, due to his English language fluency and aristocratic manners, he charmed British officials and citizens alike, and was widely perceived locally as [the Third Reich’s] respectable face.

Even more vitally though, Dirksen — in common with many powerful elements of the British establishment — was convinced that not only could war be avoided, but London and Berlin would instead forge a global economic, military, and political alliance. His 18 months in Britain before [September 1939] were spent working tirelessly to achieve these goals, by establishing and maintaining communication lines between officials and decisionmakers in the two countries, while attempting to broker deals.

Dirksen published an official memoir in 1950, detailing his lengthy diplomatic career. However, far more revealing insights into the period immediately preceding World War II, and behind-the-scenes efforts to achieve enduring detente between Britain and [the Third Reich], are contained in the virtually unknown Dirksen Papers, a two-volume record released by the Soviet Union’s Foreign Languages Publishing House without his consent. They contain private communications sent to and from Dirksen, diary entries, and memos he wrote for himself, never intended for public consumption.

The contents were sourced from a vast trove of documents found by the Red Army after it seized Gröditzberg, a castle owned by Dirksen where he spent most of World War II. Mainstream historians have markedly made no use of the Dirksen Papers. Whether this is due to their bombshell disclosures posing a variety of dire threats to established Western narratives of World War II, and revealing much the British government wishes to remain forever secret, is a matter of speculation.

Immediately after World War II began, Dirksen “keenly” felt an “obligation” to author a detailed post-mortem on the failure of Britain’s peace overtures to [the Third Reich], and his own. He was particularly compelled to write it as “all important documents” in Berlin’s London embassy had been burned following Britain’s formal declaration of war on September 3rd 1939. Reflecting on his experiences, Dirksen spoke of “the tragic and paramount thing about the rise of the new Anglo-German war”:

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“Germany demanded an equal place with Britain as a world power…Britain was in principle prepared to concede. But, whereas Germany demanded immediate, complete and unequivocal satisfaction of her demands, Britain - although she was ready to renounce her Eastern commitments, and […] allow Germany a predominant position in East and Southeast Europe, and to discuss genuine world political partnership with Germany - wanted this to be done only by way of negotiation and a gradual revision of British policy.”

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‘German Reply’

From London’s perspective, Dirksen lamented, this radical change in the global order “could be effected in a period of months, but not of days or weeks.” Another stumbling block was the British and French making a “guarantee” to defend Poland in the event she was attacked by [the Third Reich], in March 1939. This bellicose stance — along with belligerent speeches from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — was at total odds with simultaneous conciliatory approaches such as Düsseldorf, and the private stances and utterances of British officials to their [Reich] counterparts.

In any event, it appears London instantly regretted its pledge to defend Poland. Dirksen records in his post-mortem how subsequently, senior British officials told him they sought “an Anglo-German entente” that would “render Britain’s guarantee policy nugatory” and “enable Britain to extricate her from her predicament in regard to Poland,” so Warsaw would “be left to face Germany alone”.

(Emphasis original.)

While the British upper classes were probably disinterested in starting another war, much of that disinterest arose merely from wanting to strike a kind of bargain with the Third Reich that they would never dare enter into with the Soviets. Quoting Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Origins of Modern Germany, page 453:

[The Fascists’] successes in foreign policy were due less to German rearmament, the deficiencies and limitations of which were known in competent military circles, than to the tacit alliance of powerful reactionary elements in England and France which, although loathe to see a reassertion of German equality, were still more unwilling to check it by military alliance with Soviet Russia or to run the risk of social revolution [in the Reich] as a result of [Fascism’s] fall.

It is probable that the Third Reich never sincerely wanted conflict with the British Empire at all, and duelled mostly because of the conflicting imperialist interests, more or less similarly to the conflict between the Third Reich and Austria.

Per Gerhard Weinberg’s The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933–36, pages 342–346, British membership was part of Ribbentrop’s original designs for the Anti‐Comintern Pact in October 1935, and when Ribbentrop became ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1936, the Chancellor made clear to him that it was his greatest wish to welcome Britain into the Anti‐Comintern Pact. While Ribbentrop acted sceptical of this ambition, he placed some hope in King Edward VIII, whom Ribbentrop considered friendly to the German Reich. See Zara Steiner’s The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939, pages 262–263.

The Chancellor himself was an Anglomaniac who greatly admired the British Empire, and wanted an official alliance or at least a neutrality with it; only when the British state repeatedly rejected his offer did his opinion on the British sour.

Even when warfare broke out between these two anticommunist states though, Berlin still wanted an Anglo‐German alliance, and despite bombing London the Chancellery nevertheless commanded its armoured units not to advance into the undefended city of Dunkirk, allegedly to ‘spare’ the British forces. This was probably more of a tactical decision than a kind gesture, as they were overextended and at risk of being of cut off, but it suggests that they wanted diplomacy regardless.

And this only the tip of the iceberg. Between the British Empire’s important influence on the Third Reich, its sale of raw materials to the Third Reich, its extension of credits thereto, its eugenic influence thereon, its internment of Jewish refugees, and the plans for Operation Unthinkable, it should be easy for all lower-class people to hate the British ruling class (even more).

From another excellent article by Daniel Hedinger:

Besides Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the preferred destinations for fascist propaganda were in East Asia, especially Shanghai and Tōkyō. The reason for this expansion of efforts was growing Italian interest in this region due to recent geopolitical changes.

In September 1931, [the Imperialists] occupied Manchuria, and the first battle for Shanghai took place early the following year. In February 1933, [the Empire of] Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, breaking with the post-war order for all the world to see. The man who led the [Imperial] delegation out of Geneva’s Palais des Nations was Matsuoka Yōsuke — a notorious [Imperial] fascist.⁴⁴

After his return to [the Empire of] Japan, Matsuoka called for the abolition of all political parties and a fascist revolution, referring to the March on Rome in Italy and the seizure of power (Machtergreifung) in Germany as his model; furthermore, he believed in the supremacy and the global mission of the so-called Yamato race.⁴⁵

This and his bold move in Switzerland made him the most popular man in [the Empire of] Japan, as the Italian ambassador emphasised in a report detailing Matsuoka’s arrival in Tōkyō, where 50,000 people gave him an enthusiastic reception.⁴⁶ The right-wing organisation Matsuoka founded soon had several million members. Rumours were that a ‘March on Tōkyō’ was imminent.⁴⁷

During his stay in Europe, Matsuoka had met with Mussolini and Hitler; eight years later, after the signing of the Tripartite Pact (1940), he would meet them (now as the foreign minister of [the Empire of] Japan) once again.⁴⁸

Many contemporaries read [the Empire of] Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations within the context of the global wave of fascism and the crisis of the liberal-democratic order, and indeed, [the Empire of] Japan’s actions triggered a chain of other withdrawals from Geneva and paved the way for an ‘ultranationalist reformulation’ of the League.⁴⁹

Events taking place in East Asia are therefore essential to any understanding of the history of the internationalisation of fascism during the ideology’s first global moment in the early 1930s.

At home too, [the Empire of] Japan was experiencing its own fascism boom at home.⁵⁰ ‘No topic is more popularly and more heatedly discussed in Japanese periodicals today than is fascism’, one political commentator observed in early 1932.⁵¹ Intellectuals, now in heated debate on the topic, interpreted this phenomenon in the light of a ‘fascist storm that has now seized the entire world’.⁵²

But they also admitted that ultraright ideologies had found particularly fertile ground in [the Empire of] Japan due to the circumstances surrounding the occupation of Manchuria. Some even went a step further, claiming that what was labelled a ‘Manchurian Incident’ was itself a product of an authentically Japanese form of fascism.⁵³

And indeed, the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in early 1932 provided an environment for fascism to become fashionable at home. The question that then preoccupied intellectuals, politicians and police alike was whether [the Empire of] Japan would turn fascist.

[…]

For Nakatani, the foundation of [the Imperialists’] new Manchurian empire was the initial step towards a ‘federation of the whole of Asia’,⁷¹ and indeed, with Manchukuo, [the Imperialists] had gained an enormous colonial testing ground for fascist industrial, social and labour policies.

Obviously, when it came to imperial expansion, [the Empire of] Japan was far ahead of its future partners. For the rest of the decade, therefore, the Germans and Italians studied the settlement and industrial policy in Manchuria with great interest.⁷²

As early as the 1930s, Italian fascists were very interested in the (geo)political changes taking place in East Asia. One indication is that Mussolini was studying the reports from East Asia, especially those concerning pan-Asianism, very carefully and in person.⁷³

Another indication is that in 1930, the Duce sent Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and the future foreign minister, to Shanghai as consul general. Mussolini’s daughter Edda, who accompanied her husband, not only experienced first-hand the first battle of Shanghai in early 1932, but also went on a propaganda trip to Tōkyō in time for the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome.⁷⁴

Consequently, around 1933, it seemed that two competing internationals, one in Europe and one in Asia, both aiming for a regional-national rebirth, would come into existence.

(Emphasis added.)

Chalk up another argument for setting World War II’s starting date to September 1931.

Ploiești, a Romanian city in Prahova County, is home to the world’s first modern and oldest operating oil refinery. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that this spot is most famous for its oil, which played a very important rôle in both world wars. In a tragic irony, a Romanian Jew named Lazăr Edeleanu was responsible for discovering amphetamine and inventing the modern method for refining crude oil. He designed this method—the Edeleanu process—either in or near this city, both of which were critical to the Axis:

Ploești is rather important because of the degree to which it supplied oil to the [Western Axis’s] war effort. There are conflicting statistics as to the percentage Ploești oil refineries added to the total German oil production. The numbers range from 25% to over 30% of totals mentioned throughout the primary and secondary materials [that] I have reviewed.

Ploești was vital to the Axis’s war effort. In fact, Winston Churchill named it, with only mild exaggeration, ‘the taproot of German might’. The Axis would have been inclined to agree:

How did the [Fascists] react to their oil production situation in relation to their military activities? As early as November 20, 1940 Adolf Hitler wrote in a letter to Mussolini that “If the [Ploești] petrol refineries are destroyed the damage will be irreparable.” In a November 1942 speech, Colonel Alfred Jodl announced to the district leaders of the [NSDAP] that in the Eastern Front, “no success gained by the enemy there can be directly disastrous unless we should lose the Rumanian oil fields.”⁷

The Allies knew that [Fascist] oil producers, before [1939], had been under great pressure to increase their production. In 1936 only 7% of [the Third Reich’s] oil came from its own oil fields and this was supplemented by synthetically produced oil, which amounted to about 30% of national consumption. This meant that in 1936, [the Third Reich] was importing about 60% of its national oil appetite.⁸

The [Fascists] in subsequent years tried to boost their ability to produce more oil at home. However, even with these extraordinary programs, the [Fascists] found themselves with only a two to three months supply of motor and aviation fuel when the war [intensified] in 1939. The amount of stockpiles they had in reserve were only about half of their peacetime production.

It should be noted that these synthetic refineries also produced nitrogen and methanol which are used in the production of explosives and chemicals. The official History of the Fifteenth Air Force quickly came to the conclusion that bombing oil production facilities would reduce both oil and explosives production.⁹

[…]

The [Axis] had reinforced Ploești’s anti-aircraft defenses that made it the third most heavily defended target of the Reich. Only Berlin and Vienna were more heavily protected than the Ploești oil refineries.³⁰ The amount of resources that the [Axis] threw into Ploești is important to analyze. For example, the [Axis] had 225 fighters committed to defend Ploești. These pilots had been reassigned from the Russian front and all of them were well experienced.³¹

The war on the Eastern Front was going poorly for the [Axis] by 1943 and for the [Luftwaffe] to commit such resources to a target must have reaffirmed, for the Allies, the fears of [Axis] war planners about their oil situation. […] Ploești was the single largest location for producing oil in Axis Europe.

Quoting Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pages 308, 310–311:

In October 1940 the Wehrmacht marched into [the Kingdom of] Romania to secure the Ploești oil fields, and behind it followed a second army of technical experts. Advisors from the Reichsbank settled into Bucharest to help manage the national bank, port specialists arrived to improve transportation facilities on the Danube, and legal advisors came to reform [the Kingdom of] Romania’s mining laws and allow for more German investment. Their primary aim: “to have influence over the petroleum economy.”⁴⁴

[…]

Between 1940 and 1942 [Reich] firms gained a majority in nearly half of [the Kingdom of] Romania’s oil companies through the holding company Kontinental Öl GmbH, and joint industrial committees staffed by [Reich] technocrats managed projects for drilling, refining, oil exploration, underground storage, transportation, and antiaircraft defense.⁵⁰

Neubacher drew on this investment presence to pressure Romanian[s] into delivering oil. He had first done this in May 1940, strong-arming [the Kingdom of] Romania’s Defense Minister into signing an oil-for-arms agreement that fixed the exchange rate between petroleum and weapons at a price favorable to [the Third Reich]. In the following years Neubacher institutionalized these oil-for-arms deals, and continued to secure petroleum deliveries to [the Third Reich] at favorable prices.⁵¹

After a disappointing year of delivery in 1942, Neubacher tried to squeeze [the Kingdom of] Romania’s domestic oil consumption in order to increase exports. The country’s abundance of oil and dearth of coal meant that much of its economy ran on petroleum, from rail transportation to household heating.

Neubacher now demanded that [the Kingdom of] Romania transition from oil to coal-burning locomotives and he began a campaign to improve the production of natural gas for use in domestic heating. He accompanied this with pressure on Romanian authorities to ration domestic oil consumption. These efforts succeeded for a time. By 1943 45 percent of all Romanian oil production was going to [the Third Reich].⁵²

Needless to say, the Kingdom of Romania was not the sole offender. Dishonourable mentions include the United Mexican States and, of course, Corporate America for literally fuelling the Axis war machine.

Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 118–119, 121–122:

Mussolini’s brutal and corrupt fascist régime was thoroughly despised by the majority of Italians, and they welcomed his fall in the summer of 1943 with relief and enthusiasm. Their liberators, the Americans and the British, now had an opportunity to help the Italians replace Il Duce’s fascist régime with a[nother] system of govern­ment. (Incidentally, Canadian troops also played an important rôle in the Italian campaign, but Washington and London did not involve Ottawa in the least in the political decision-making process.)

A signifi­cant anti-fascist resistance movement had been politically and militar­ily active in Italy. This movement enjoyed wide support among the population and it claimed a leading rôle in the reconstruction of the country. However, the [Western] Allies refused to cooperate with this anti-fascist front: it was too left-wing for their taste, and not only because the Communists played an important rôle in it. It was obvious that the overwhelming majority of Italian antifascists favoured radical social, political, and economic reforms, including the abolition of the monar­chy.

Churchill, in particular, was allegedly obsessed by the spectre of such radical reforms on the other side of the Alps, reforms that in the eyes of this conservative statesman amounted to the “Bolshevization” of Italy. And so neither the plans and wishes of the Italians themselves nor the merits and aspirations of their anti-fascist resistance movement carried any weight.

Instead, a deal was made with officers and politi­cians who represented the traditional Italian power élite, such as the monarchy, the army, the great landowners, bankers and industrialists, and the Vatican. It did not seem to bother the Allies that it was precise­ly this élite that had made it possible for Mussolini to come to power in 1922 and that had profited enormously from his régime, for which it was despised by the majority of Italians.

The Italian partisans were dis­armed militarily and neutralized politically, except of course behind [Axis] lines in northern Italy, where they were and remained a force to be reckoned with. Marshal Badoglio, a former collaborator of Mussolini’s, who had been responsible for terrible war crimes in Ethiopia,² was allowed to become the first head of government of postfascist Italy. In the liberated part of Italy the new system looked suspiciously like the old one and was therefore dismissed by many as fascismo senza Mussolini, or “fascism minus Mussolini.”³

[…]

The military situation of the Western Allies in Italy in early 1944 was hardly wonderful. The [Axis] put up a very effective resistance, and the long and murderous fighting around Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, could be compared to the terrible battles of the First World War. As it was now obvious that by way of the Italian boot Berlin could never be reached before the Red Army, preparations were accelerated for Operation Overlord, the landings on the French Atlantic coast.

The urgency of this task increased rapidly as the Red Army advanced systematically along the entire length of the Eastern Front and was poised in the spring of 1944 to invade [the Kingdoms of] Hungary and Romania. “When Russian troops began to push the Germans back,” write two American historians, Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, “it became imperative for American and English [sic] strategy to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of Communist hands.”⁸

The Americans and the British also worried about the possibility that [the Third Reich] might suddenly collapse before they could have opened a second front in France. In this case, the Soviets would occupy all of Germany, liberate even Western Europe, and would be able to do there as they pleased, exactly as the British-Americans had done in Italy. “The possibility of a complete Russian victory over Germany before American forces landed on the Continent,” writes the American historian Mark A. Stoler, was “nightmarish” for Washington, and of course also for London, but this scenario had to be envisaged.⁹

Contingency plans were therefore prepared for an emergency landing on the coast of France and the subsequent use of airborne troops com­bined with a rapid overland push by armoured units in order to occu­py as much territory as possible in Western Europe and Germany before the arrival of the Soviets. This operation was code-named Rankin, and troops were kept in a state of preparedness for Rankin until three months after the landings in Normandy.¹⁰

(Emphasis added.)

This explains why the Western Allies bailed out Axis capitalists, failed to prosecute most of the Axis’s war criminals, hesitated to release concentration camp prisoners, did nothing to prosecute the Fascists for their crimes in Africa, reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution, and reused surviving Axis employés for anticommunism, to name only a few disappointments.

It would have been one thing if the Western Allies acted solely for defensive purposes, as the United Kingdom did in 1940, and Imperial America did in December 1941. Nevertheless, because communism was resisting the Axis already, there was a danger that the lower-classes could overthrow their masters and seize the means of production, along with other resources, for theirselves. Thus, the Western Allies invaded Axis territories with the long-term goal of reinforcing the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie; they could not trust the Axis to control the lower classes forever.

A 26-year-old man was convicted […] of first-degree murder, along with a hate crime allegation, for killing a gay former classmate in Foothill Ranch six years ago.

Jurors, who began deliberating Tuesday afternoon, convicted Samuel Lincoln Woodward for the Jan. 3, 2018, stabbing death of Blaze Bernstein, 19.

Woodward’s attorneys conceded during the trial that he killed Bernstein, but denied it was a hate crime or a premeditated act, saying at worst he should be convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

The jury, however, found Woodward guilty of first-degree murder, and also found true allegations that the killing was a hate crime, and that he personally used a deadly weapon —a knife.

Cheers were heard in the courtroom audience as the verdict was read, particularly when the hate crime allegation was found to be true.

There was no visible reaction from Woodward, whose sat facing forward, his face obscured by his long, shaggy hair.

Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 25.

The hate-crime enhancement alleged Woodward killed Bernstein because of the victim’s sexual orientation, not because he was Jewish, though jurors were also given evidence of the defendant’s association with a neo-Nazi group known as the Atomwaffen Division to consider a pattern of bigotry.

Woodward and Bernstein attended the Orange County School of the Arts together for four years. Bernstein graduated after six years at the school and went on to become a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Woodward, meanwhile, transferred to Corona Del Mar High School, from which he graduated. He then attended Cal State Channel Islands before dropping out in his second semester.

Following the verdict, Bernstein’s mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, thanked everyone who has supported the family since Blaze’s death. She also asked the media to give the family time to “process this outcome and to live our lives knowing that this murderer will no longer be able to hurt any other people.

“This is a great relief that justice was served and this despicable human who murdered our son will no longer be a threat to the public,” she said.

Woodward spent five days testifying during the trial, often taking up to 30 seconds to respond to yes or no questions.

Woodward said he reached out to Bernstein hours after a long text-exchange conversation with his big brother’s best friend, Dylan Gronendyke, on New Year’s Day in 2018. As Woodward complained that he could not establish any meaningful relationships and would even leave the house and go to a parking lot alone just to give his parents the impression he went out with friends, Gronendyke encouraged him to return to college and to not give up trying to make friends.

Nearly a day passed before Bernstein responded to Woodward, and the two agreed to meet up the night of Jan. 2, 2018. Woodward stuffed snacks and drinks and marijuana into a sleeping bag and picked up Bernstein, who directed the two to Borrego Park, where the victim’s mother said he had many lifelong memories, such as playing soccer as a youth.

Woodward testified he took two hits off a heady strain of marijuana and felt he was nodding off until he felt a strange sensation on his legs and immediately thought he had gotten too relaxed and urinated on himself as he had done previously.

When he snapped to, Woodward testified, he realized his pants were undone and the victim had his hand on his groin. Bernstein also appeared to be photographing or video recording the encounter, he testified.

This triggered panic in Woodward, who said he was in “mortal terror” his family, who objected to homosexuality on religious grounds, would find out. He said the “look” on his father’s face alone could be so upsetting he struggled to get the phone away from Bernstein, who, the defendant claimed, was saying words to the effect that he would “out’” Woodward, who had a reputation in high school for homophobia.

When he could not get the phone, Woodward said he snapped and repeatedly stabbed Bernstein and then smashed the phone. Woodward said he dug a shallow grave with his hands and left the body in the park.

When Bernstein failed to show for a dental appointment, which was unusual, and could not be contacted, his worried parents began searching for clues and contacted authorities. The victim’s body was found Jan. 9, 2018, in an area of the park that had been scoured previously, but a recent rain made it easier to see him, Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker said.

Attorney Ken Morrison of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office presented evidence during the trial about Woodward’s diagnosis of autism, saying it was not an effort to excuse the crime, but to help jurors understand his state of mind — and for them to reject the hate-crime allegations and accept a lesser-degree of homicide.

“Samuel Lincoln Woodward should be held accountable for what he did,” Morrison said during his closing argument. “He should not be held accountable for what he did not do. This case was over-charged.”

Morrison characterized his client as someone struggling through life, not understanding until he was 18 that he had autism when it was too late for the usually prescribed interventions. The disorder made it difficult for him to communicate and led to social awkwardness and loneliness, and the late diagnosis made him especially vulnerable to being wooed by a fringe, extremist group like Atomwaffen Division, the defense attorney argued.

The group’s attraction was a sense of belonging, a “brotherhood” of “strong men,” Morrison argued.

Woodward told a defense-hired psychiatric expert, Martha Rogers, that he didn’t pay much attention to the group’s hateful rhetoric and was buoyed by their positive reinforcement, Morrison argued.

Woodward grew disillusioned with the group, he told Rogers, after a two-month excursion in the summer of 2017 to Texas with the man who lured him into the group, when he ran out of money for food and a motel, Morrison said.

Morrison argued that though Woodward and Bernstein did not interact much when they were classmates, there were projects they worked on together and that Woodward considered him a “chill guy.” Morrison said the defendant was surprised to find out Bernstein was gay when they reconnected on a dating app in June 2017, and Woodward grew to admire how the victim was comfortable with his sexual orientation while the defendant struggled with his own.

“Blaze Bernstein was in a lot of ways intimidating because he had qualities [that Woodward] thought he lacked,” Morrison said. “Sam was questioning all these things, looking for strong men, something he aspired to be.’”

Walker argued to jurors that the evidence pointed to Woodward planning to attack Bernstein in a “ceremonial” killing to win the prestige of the neo[fascist] group. She said he wore a sweater with a skull image on it to “strike fear” into the victim, and that it had Bernstein’s blood spattered on it after the attack.

When Bernstein’s panicked parents went through their missing son’s social media looking for clues, they called Woodward, who lied to them about what had happened to their son, according to the prosecutor. Walker said Woodward also began searching for information on DNA and even got a haircut to change his appearance while the search for Bernstein made headlines.

“The abundance of evidence here is overwhelming,” Walker said.

She brushed aside Morrison’s arguments that Bernstein had betrayed Woodward’s requests to keep it quiet that the two matched on a dating app.

Walker said Bernstein was rightly “shocked” to see Woodward seeking males on the dating app and sent a link to his public profile to a few fellow classmates from the school of the arts.

Walker said Bernstein kept his promise not to share the details of their conversations with others.

“Blaze Bernstein is not here to defend himself against these allegations,” Walker said.

(Source.)

This takes approximately six minutes to read.

Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pages 345, 349–352:

[Robert A.] Divine’s own account of the itinerary of the second Neutrality Act clarifies just how the divisions among the isolationists blocked the approval of a law that, while remaining equally rigid in its formal impartiality, would have allowed the president to drastically reduce trade with [Fascist] Italy in the sectors most crucial to the war effort.¹⁴³ That bill had been specifically drafted to meet the demands of the group of isolationist senators headed by Senator Nye, especially including Key Pittman from Nevada.¹⁴⁴

[…]

Joseph C. Green, in charge of the Office of Arms and Munitions Control, enforced the enforcement of the neutrality acts. All the protests, pressures, suggestions, and other mail sent to the U.S. government concerning the war in Ethiopia arrived on his desk. His judgment was quite clear; in one of his long and detailed missives to a colleague, he summarized the course of events:

The reason for the defeat of the bill [presented by Pittman and McReynolds on behalf of the administration] has never been thoroughly understood by the public. I say reason [emphasis in original] advisedly. There was only one. The various criticisms directed against the bill on grounds of law and policy had no real effect. The bill would have passed had it not been for the highly organized and highly effective opposition of the Italian-Americans.

Fascist organizations all over the country had their members write five form letters each — one to the President, one to the Secretary of State, and one to each of their two senators and to their Representative of Congress. I handled over 10,000 such letters during the month of January. These letters were supplemented by the public appearance of Fascist representatives before the Committees and by intensive lobbying in the Senate and House Office buildings.

Senators and Representatives — particularly the latter — from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and California trembled openly in their boots. The Italian-Americans are such a highly organized minority that Representatives facing election in November did not dare to vote for a neutrality bill which met with their displeasure.

Many of them were perfectly frank in their discussions with me in regard the situation with which they were confronted. One man from Connecticut, who was in principle strongly in favor of the bill, asked me how he could possibly vote for it in view of the fact that he had 40,000 Italians in his district.

The crisis came on February 7. McReynolds went to Pittman and told him that he could not proceed with the [administration’s] bill. Pittman and McReynolds came up to the White House and jointly told the President the same thing.

After a conference between the President, the Secretary [of State], Judge Moore [Assistant Secretary at the State Department], Pittman and McReynolds, the bill was dropped and Pittman hastily drafted the substitute which was eventually passed. […] The Administration unsuccessfully attempted to make it clear to the public that it had not changed its attitude, but that Congress had refused to follow its lead. […]

The Italian-Americans gave us a fine object lesson in the use of political pressure by an organized minority.¹⁵⁹

The lesson [that] Green referred to concerned the opportunities offered by the American constitutional and electoral system for minorities to exert political influence. The Italian-Americans were not alone in having access to legally defined spaces from which to influence politics, starting with congressional hearings[.]

The presidential elections, founded on a two-way winner-takes-all electoral college, acted as a multiplier of the votes they mustered, since any changed vote represents the gain (and loss) of two votes between the two major candidates. In the electoral college system, a minority group that can show its organizational strength and that identifies itself as a single-issue interest group can force each candidate to court its vote by taking a clear stand on that issue as an almost irresistible form of political conditioning on elected representatives.

Green did not know, although he intuited, that the Italo-American capacity to promptly mobilize and achieve goals was not spontaneous. The State Department, through an investigation by its chief special agent in New York, made a notable effort to find proof that the propaganda emanating from the Italo-American community was really the fruit of organizing by the consulates.¹⁶⁰

Several similar incidents in previous months had led to the dismissal of the Italian vice-consul in Detroit, and this gave the State Department hope that it might be able to repeat the exposure and the request for expulsion.¹⁶¹

A few cases had been raised before the newly sitting Committee on Un-American Activities in the House of Representatives. The special agent of New York affirmed that the organizers of a meeting he had investigated clearly had close ties with the consulate of New York, though they were American citizens. He was not able to prove that their activity had been directly incited by the consulate.

The investigative officer in Washington could only reassure his superiors that they would continue their efforts to find proof of a tangible relationship between the consulate and the American Friends of Italy, the committee used for antisanction propaganda, in the hope that they would drop their guard and show less caution in protecting the illusion of the New York consul’s noninvolvement.¹⁶² This hope came to naught, since Rosso and his collaborators were evidently aware of the gravity of any proven involvement by [foreign] authorities.

While it is probable, if not certain, that the consulates suggested and helped organize the activities of these prominent Italo-Americans, this was not the decisive aspect of the Italian contribution to the Italo-American campaign anyway. The real link was strictly political and had been decided years earlier. The most important rôle of Italian-Americans was their electoral power, which they used to the fullest extent possible in the American system.

The choice to naturalize, that is to take on American citizenship, was a natural path for immigrants; one might even say it was obligatory. American citizenship was prized because it guaranteed not only stability and permanent residence in the United States and the possibility of bringing over more relatives, but also the promise of upward mobility. As a citizen, the immigrant became part of the nation, participating in American political life and, within limits, organizing collectively and choosing and influencing a party (for most immigrants this was the Democratic Party) and its elected officials.

But [Rome] often acted contrarily to this process, both before and after the Fascist seizure of power. [Fascist] rhetoric about the adventures and suffering of the emigrant, rather than translating into living conditions that might lead him to remain in the mother country in order to spare him those pains, favored activities aimed at maintaining the emigrant’s links to the mother country: Italian schools, support for emigrants’ organizations, Italian language publications, congresses of emigrants’ representatives, legislation that maintained the right to vote in Italy even after taking foreign citizenship, and bank branches to make it convenient to send remittances back to Italy — a source of income the government relied upon for its balance of payments.

This network gave rise to public and private structures dedicated to nurturing the links between the emigrant and his land of origin, which were sometimes counterproductive for the government, and more often for the emigrant. In the specific case of the United States, every impediment introduced in the process of naturalization was not only damaging to the emigrant, but meant that he wielded less political influence that might favor the [Fascist] government.

(Emphasis added.)

As easy as it may be to resent Italo-American adults for supporting Fascist Italy’s war effort, Imperial America’s inadequate support for immigrant communities, coupled with Fascist Italy’s grooming of the Italian diaspora, made supporting Fascist Italy an obvious choice for ordinary Italians. The exceptions came from organized labor. Quoting John P. Diggins’s Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, page 83:

The obbligato of platitudes carried a few discordant notes. The Unione of Pueblo (Colorado), Lavoratore Italiano of Pittsburg (Kansas), and La Follia di New York had harsh words for Mussolini the “renegade and opportunist” and Fascism the “Frankenstein.” By and large, these small and scattered anti-Fascist publications represented the opinion of Italian-American labor.

Perhaps membership in a support network, or ‘family’, made it easier for these Italians to oppose fascism? I am uncertain. In any event, I trust that you yourselves can spot the parallels (or the differences) between this and the ‘State of Israel’s’ exploitation of the Jewish diaspora.

Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, 347–8:

It was true that American Catholics constituted an important base for Ambassador Rosso as he prepared a campaign opposed to intervention against [Fascist] Italy. Precisely because the Protestant churches and their communities, as well as African-American organizations, were the most important militant forces in the anti-Fascist struggle,¹⁴⁸ the Catholic hierarchy with few exceptions (such as the archbishops of Chicago¹⁴⁹ and Baltimore¹⁵⁰) reacted by defending the [Fascist] government.¹⁵¹

The Catholic press was particularly motivated to defend what had been characterized as the silence of Pius XI about the war. Father William B. Smith, in an unpublished thesis for Catholic University of America, summarized the press coverage thus:

It would seem that the majority of writers on the Ethiopian war in American Catholic periodicals stayed away from any consideration of religious motives or justification of the event. If such was suggested, moral principles were usually brought forth to answer opposition to the war.

This is not to say that Catholics in America favored the war. Many did not, and said so, but most said nothing. There was still a certain feeling of identification with the Italians because of the number of Catholics in Italy, and also, no doubt, because the Pope was not considered to have spoken so definitively as to allow for no doubt on the question. […] [S]ome did defend the silence of the Holy Father, while others denied it, and a few proposed justification for Italy’s invasion.¹⁵²

In truth, Smith’s conclusions, which carry the imprimatur of Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, diverged in part from some of the very documentation he provided.¹⁵³

From his evidence, one can see that only the Catholic Worker, linked to the Catholic union movement, took an editorial stance of total condemnation of Fascist aggression,¹⁵⁴ whereas other periodicals more representative of the Church in the United States (such as America, a Jesuit publication; Commonweal; and The Catholic World) and the great majority of diocesan papers were committed to offering justifications for Mussolini’s war and above all to strenuously defending the papal position.

Such rhetoric offered Rosso ample room for action among American Catholics, even without resorting to such extremists as Father Coughlin, Roosevelt’s fearsome adversary and supporter of American abstention in the matter of the Ethiopian dispute, who could have further provoked the administration.¹⁵⁵

Rosso clearly grasped that the sympathies of American Catholics were due, apart from to the attitude of Pius XI and other exponents of the Italian Church hierarchy, to the ethnic makeup of their own church. It was mostly composed of the Irish, easily led to favor a policy that was presented above all as anti-English, as indicated by Rosso’s telegram to Mussolini. In this context, Rosso deemed it of great importance to develop influence in the Irish community by expanding his contacts among Irish publications such as the Gaelic American and the Irish Times, which published an article titled “Mr. Hull Has Declared War on Italy.”

(Emphasis added.)

Although a Catholic reader shall no doubt cringe at this history, that is not my goal in sharing this. In fact, this is, above all, a topic intended for Jewish readers.

As you can tell, ordinary Catholics had a great respect for the Kingdom of Italy since its founding. Having always been an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and having Vatican City in its midst, the Kingdom of Italy was practically sacred even to Catholics who were not Italian at all. This made many Catholics, especially upper-class ones, willing to overlook Rome’s atrocities.

The fact that many Irish Catholics shrugged at the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia is also worth emphasizing. At first I thought that it was a moot point, and obnoxious to bring up when so many Irelanders today are busy demonstrating against the war on Gazans. When I thought about it, though, mentioning it makes perfect sense: the Irish, theirselves victims of colonization, should have been the last to tolerate the invasion of Ethiopia… yet many did anyway.

As we should all know, the Fascist colonization of Ethiopia ultimately failed, and I suspect that very few Catholics today would still endorse it if someone educated them on the event.

Need I specify the parallels?

Imperial […] subjects began to smuggle opium in China as early as the 1890s. What is more, activities changed decisively in nature and in scale during the 1930s and 1940s. In decades, the zaibatsu became involved and the imperial government itself began to and sell hard narcotics—not just opium—in contempt of international treaties domestic Chinese law.

Related to this last point, a sea change in normative attitudes toward the use of opium and drugs derived from opium had taken place by the early twentieth century. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, moderate consumption of opium viewed in many quarters—Western and Chinese alike—as little different from that of alcohol.

Régimes of various sorts—from the worldwide British Empire to local Chinese warlords—embraced opium as a legitimate source of revenue. But with the later manufacture of far more potent narcotics such as morphine and heroin, consumption perforce rose beyond moderation, and by the 1910s and 1920s, individuals and régimes that relied on such addictive drugs to gain revenue did so in the face of mounting moral censure.

Imperial […] opium operations sprang from three motives. Above all was the need to finance collaborator states such as the Manchu, Mengjiang, East Hebei, North China Provisional, Reformed, and Wang Jingwei régimes. According to the restored Manchu emperor, Puyi, for example, the Manchu empire garnered 300 million yuan, or about one-sixth of its total revenues, from opium.³

Second, opium funded undercover operations that facilitated [Imperial] aggression. Third, opium profits went to rightwing societies in Japan, and there is even some evidence to link laundered wartime opium monies with early postwar conservative parties.⁴ Wartime GMD propaganda averred that [I]mperial Japan used drugs to poison China into submission, and some [Axis] war criminals detained in the PRC testified to that effect in the 1950s.⁵

But it is probably more correct to say that opium raised sorely needed revenue for [Imperial] aggressors—just as it continued to do so for Chinese warlords, criminal elements, the GMD, and [purportedly] even the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Twentieth-century Japan lacked the wherewithal to be an imperial power, so its leaders latched on to opium as a poor man’s fiscal panacea.⁶ Yet Tokugawa and Meiji Japan had virtually no drug problem at home and had never relied on opium as a form of government revenue. Only the will to empire created this fiscal need.

Opium operations took place in three overlapping stages. Stage one lasted from the 1890s through the Manchurian Incident which ended with the Tanggu Truce in May 1933. Stage two began in June 1933 with the creation of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in east Hebei as stipulated by those Accords, and ended with the establishment of the Kô-Ain (Asia Development Board) in December 1938. Stage three began in December 1938 and ended in August 1945.

In stage one imperial subjects smuggled drugs in Chinese treaty ports under the protection of extraterritoriality. These riff-raff carpetbaggers or tairiku rônin enjoyed support from consular authorities in treaty port concessions and from imperial armed forces in colonial areas such as the Guandong Leased Territories. For instance, Consul (and postwar Prime Minister) Yoshida Shigeru described the situation in Tianjin in December 1922 as follows:

Of the 5000 Japanese residents in Tianjin, seventy percent deal in morphine or other illegal substances. Almost all businesses traffic in these goods, even eateries and general stores, not just medicinal firms. […] Police crackdowns here are not as strict as in Dalian, and the Consulate’s policy is to arraign only the most flagrant violators. We prosecute only those caught by [Chinese] customs authorities or those uncovered in other crimes. We don’t arrest criminals or investigate crimes on our own. If we did so thoroughly, no Japanese would be left in Tianjin.⁷

In stage two, trafficking by carpetbaggers continued with connivance from consular officials. However, it also expanded south of the Wall in the eastern Hebei DMZ created by the 1933 truce. Under the terms of that truce, only Chinese units were actually forced to leave the DMZ whereas [Imperial] forces could enter at will. This DMZ fell under the control of Yin Rugeng’s “Regime for East Hebei Autonomy and the Containment of Communism” set up at Tongzhou in November 1935, and imperial subjects sold opium with impunity in this area.

Furthermore, zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi shôji and Mitsui bussan liberally interpreted provisions in the Accords to extend the DMZ out to sea and smuggle Iranian opium into north China under formal Foreign Ministry supervision.⁸ Thus imperial […] trafficking in stage two was no longer confined to individuals in Guandong or the treaty ports; the zaibatsu now operated in China proper with government backing.

Finally, stage three lasted from late-1938 to August of 1945. In December 1938 [the Imperialists] created the Kô-Ain—headed by the prime minister plus his army, navy, foreign, and finance ministers—a body that later became the Greater East Asia Ministry. It ran opium operations through a Kalgan branch office that worked hand-in-glove with the Mengjiang régime, created in 1939, which also was headquartered in Kalgan.

Historian Eguchi Keiichi shows that [Imperial] officials controlling this collaborator régime encouraged local consumption of the drug and taxed profits from it. They set up an opium monopoly, got farmers to grow poppies on a large scale, bought up the harvests, processed these into raw opium, refined that into heroin and morphine, and exported these narcotics to other parts of China and to Southeast Asia (see chart).

To sum up, then, in stage one, individual imperial subjects trafficked in [Imperial] treaty port concessions and colonies under the protection of extraterritoriality. In stage two, zaibatsu under Foreign Ministry direction extended smuggling south of the Wall by exploiting provisions of the Tanggu Truce. In stage three, the imperial […] government manufactured and exported narcotics from Mengjiang.

Further reading: Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952

The Opium Empire: Japanese Imperialism and Drug Trafficking in Asia, 1895–1945

Quoting Frank Joseph’s The Axis Air Forces: Flying in Support of the German Luftwaffe, pages 7–9:

Perhaps most surprising of all, several USAAF personnel, mostly prisoners-of-war, volunteered to fight for [the Axis], but 2nd Lieutenant Martin James Monti was the only American to actually defect with an aircraft. Hundreds of other Allied aircrews went AWOL during the European conflict by fleeing to neutral countries, such as Portugal, Turkey, or Sweden.

In Switzerland alone, 186 Liberator and Flying Fortress heavy-bombers, together with additional numbers of other USAAF warplanes, sought refuge. By contrast, just a single Italian fighter pilot fled to Switzerland.⁴

But on October 29, 1943—the 21st anniversary of Mussolini’s ascent to power—Monti flew a Lockheed Lightning from the 354th Air Service Squadron, stationed at Pomigliano Airfield, north of Naples, to Milan, capital of the Duce’s new Fascist state, the [so-called] Italian Social Republic. He tended both his warplane and personal services to the “Axis war against Communist Russia.”⁵

But [Axis] authorities took more interest in the F-5A, an up-graded reconnaissance version of the P-38G, in which Monti arrived, sending it to Germany’s Rechlin test center for evaluation.

When his application to join the Luftwaffe was turned down, he enlisted in the SS Standarte Kurt Eggers, a propaganda arm of the Waffen-SS in Berlin, rising to the rank of Untersturmführer, as a propagandist. A fellow American in the same unit was Louisiana-born Peter Delaney, an SS-Haupsturmführer, who later enlisted in the Légion des Volontaires Français—composed of SS volunteers from France—because he spoke fluent French.

Another U.S. comrade was New Yorker Roy Rickmers, awarded the Knight’s Cross on March 26, 1943, for outstanding heroism while serving with the 320. Infanterie-Division, which had been cut off at Liman, southeast of Kharkov, by a Soviet advance; Rickmers was the only American to receive this high Wehrmacht award.

German documents show that five U.S. citizens were enlisted in the Waffen-SS by May 1940, and at least eight more fell in action by war’s end, although the total number of American volunteers has never been ascertained.

During April 1945, Martin Monti was still wearing his SS uniform when arrested in northern Italy by Communist partisans. They turned him over to American military authorities, who thereafter sentenced their former 2nd Lieutenant to 15 years imprisonment for desertion but granted him a pardon several months later on the condition that he join the U.S. Army. Following promotion to sergeant, he was arrested again, condemned this time to 25 years incarceration on charges of treason but paroled in 1960. He died 40 later in his Missouri home.

Another USAAF officer—an unidentified Major and former POW—was known to have participated in the Deutsche Volkssturm Wehrmacht (the German People’s National Militia) during the final defense of Berlin, where he was reported missing in action shortly before the capital fell. Dr. Josef Goebbels was diligent in destroying all records of individuals who volunteered from the United States or England to protect them from personal postwar consequences.

According to the British Fascist John Amery, who broadcast for the Third Reich throughout the war, “Three Royal Air Force airplanes have come over to us so far with their arms and equipment.”⁶ But none of the English POWs—some from the RAF—who joined the [Axis], served in the Luftwaffe; all enlisted in the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS to fight invading Soviets near the west bank of the Oder River, in January 1945.

(Some emphasis added.)

Further reading: Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen

In 1943 the German guidebook publisher Baedeker brought out a guide to [Axis]-occupied Poland. The book, which provides a comprehensive view of conditions in the area, is intended for the use of German residents and visitors. Its principal interest derives, however, not from what it describes, but from what it fails to describe.

It was researched and published at a time when the few surviving Jewish communities were concentrated in ghettoes. The mass extermination programme was under way, and must have been known to the Generalgouvernement officials who were among the sources for the guidebook, especially those who were concerned with the railway system.

There is no trace of these events, no reference to living Jews, and only the barest of references to a Jewish past, which is treated as an indeterminate period of time that has now come to an end.

[…]

Baedeker’s reference to Jews in the entry for Kazimierz nad Wisla, is the most direct in the guidebook: ‘German merchants left the town after it had been twice destroyed by the Swedes, in 1656 and 1657, and were replaced by Jews, with the permission of John III Sobieski in 1677 […] In 1939 the Jews were moved out.’

The verb used here is ‘aussiedeln’, which means ‘to move out without any indication of a destination’. The euphemism for deportation to the camps which was in use in 1942–3 was the related and slightly more positive word ‘umsiedeln’, which means ‘to resettle’.

This reference is the only one relating to near-contemporary Jews that actually uses a verb. Other similar references use the adjective ‘judenfrei’, free of Jews. In addition to Cracow, the term appears in Baedeker’s description of Lublin.

According to this version, the city had been in decline since the eighteenth century, after a fire in 1710 and the immigration of Jews who made Lublin their centre, and held annual synods until 1764. Jews had a Talmud school with the largest Talmudic library in Europe. In 1862 the city was 57 per cent Jewish; now it is ‘judenfrei’. The use of a verb to describe the process of making the city ‘judenfrei’ is avoided.

The text of Baedeker’s Lublin entry is unusual in that it actually describes elements of Jewish life, about which Hachette is silent. Elsewhere in Baedeker the language used of Jews in the historical sketches of several towns is almost formulaic. Both Tarnopol and Rzeszow are described as ‘formerly dominated by numerous Jews’.

Other towns (Sandomir, Przemysl, Czestochowa) were deserted by their German populations following the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, and were re-populated by the immigration (‘Zuwanderung’) of numerous Jews, which led to the towns’ decline (‘Niedergang’). Almost every reference uses the word ‘numerous’ (‘zahlreich’).

The impression is clearly given that Jews arrived (from no specific place) after the early German residents left, and no earlier than the seventeenth century. Jews had, of course, been living in Poland in quite large numbers for hundreds of years previously, alongside German and Slav townspeople.¹³

The fate of Poland’s Jews is best illustrated by one small town whose synagogue is mentioned in Hachette. In Kamionka Strumilowa (Kamenka Bugskaya), on the far eastern edge of the Generalgouvernement, Hachette in 1939 describes a wooden synagogue from 1627, decorated with frescoes. Neither the building nor the Jewish population is mentioned in Baedeker, which refers only to a town of growing importance to the timber industry.

The Jews of the town had, in fact, been deported to their deaths in Bełżec in September and October 1942, while Oskar Steinheil was gathering his data. The only surviving Jewish presence in the area was a forced labour camp, liquidated a year later.

The disappearance of the Jews was not confined to the living: it also encompassed the dead. The Jewish cemetery in Lvov, clearly visible in Hachette’s city map, is a blank space in Baedeker (although curiously the two streets bordering it, with the Jewish names of Meiselsa and Rappoporta, are still shown). The main cemetery in Warsaw, which survived the war, is also a blank space in Baedeker, bordered by Catholic and Protestant cemeteries.

(Emphasis added.)

Concerning tourism itself in Poland under Fascism, this next description comes from Kristin Semmens’s Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich, page 171:

The process of touristification continued first in Poland. That Germans were travelling to the territory is noted in a gruesome observation by Victor Klemperer, who recorded in his diary that ‘vacationers back from Poland reported with disgust that “hundreds” were being shot each day’.⁷⁸

Yet such horrific events appeared to have little effect on tourist travel to some areas of Poland. Posen, the capital of the newly established Gau Wartheland, proved extremely popular as a destination for Germans from the Altreich.⁷⁹

Quoting Emily O. Goldman’s ‘Receptivity to Revolution’ in The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, page 295:

While Italy had no plans to build an aircraft carrier [during the 1920s or 1930s], [the Third Reich] had plans to build two by 1941 and two more by 1947. Funds for the Graf Zeppelin were authorized in 1936; the carrier was launched in December 1938, and it was 85 percent complete when [the Third Reich and the Slovak Republic] went to war [against Poland] in September 1939.

Originally designed to displace 19,250 tons and carry fifty aircraft, its displacement rose to 34,000 tons and its final aircraft complement was to be twelve fighters and twenty-eight bombers, suggesting a shift in mission from reconnaissance and escort to attack.¹¹²

The [Third Reich], however, never developed the doctrine for using the carrier against the Royal Navy or Britain's merchant fleet. In Corum and Muller’s estimation, “the lack of a naval air doctrine was the weakest aspect of German airpower thinking.”¹¹³

This was not for lack of appreciation for naval air power developments abroad. Suchenwirth describes how as early as 1923, the Navy Command set up agencies to keep the aviation idea alive, supervise air training, and examine the tactical employment of naval aircraft. A monthly magazine, Marine-Flotten-Rundschau [Navy Fleet Review] “printed the best foreign articles on naval air forces, accompanied by very fine photographs, sketches and news articles, […] to keep Navy personnel up to date with respect to technological advances in the field of naval aviation and warfare.”¹¹⁴

When designing the Graf Zeppelin, the [Fascists] consulted open-source literature including Weyer’s Taschen der Kreigsflotten and Jane’s Fighting Ships, along with other foreign aircraft journals.¹¹⁵

In 1935, as part of their exchange agreements with [the Empire of] Japan, they were given access to the 26,900-ton carrier Akagi and received nearly one hundred detailed blueprints of the ship’s flight deck apparatus,¹¹⁶ although they adopted the British design of the 22,500-ton carrier Courageous.

The [Fascists] were also aware that the U.S. Navy was successfully developing dive-bombing and torpedo aircraft that could operate from carriers, and that carrier construction was underway in the United States, Britain, Japan, and France.¹¹⁷ Nonetheless, naval airpower was viewed primarily as an auxiliary weapon for coastal patrol and strategic reconnaissance.

Douglas C. Dildy’s and Ryan K. Noppen’s German and Italian Aircraft Carriers of World War II provides more details:

The designers had made a thorough study of the HMS Courageous — at that time considered the state of the art in carrier development — and toured HMS Furious during “Navy Week” at Portsmouth in 1935. Additionally, a three-man K-Amt team visited the Imperial Japanese Navy carrier Akagi — a vessel very similar to the two Royal Navy carriers in origin and configuration — that autumn.

The [Imperial] Japanese provided about 100 plans and diagrams, including blueprints, regarding the flight system — catapults, arresting gear, and elevators — and motivated Hadeler’s team to add the third elevator amidships. Overall, these visits provided little new or additional information but they at least confirmed the direction upon which Hadeler and his staff of naval architects were embarking.

[…]

Adopting the Imperial Japanese Navy practice, the carrier’s warplanes were to be fueled and armed on the hangar decks and brought up to the flight deck for launching, so the flight deck was fitted with three center-line elevators, forward, amidships, and aft. These had “clipped corners,” resulting in a roughly octagonal shape, measuring 46ft (14m) wide by 42.7ft (13m) long. The Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Reich Air Ministry or RLM) was required to design aircraft which would, of course, fit within these dimensions.

Some have speculated that this bird farm could have turned the tide of the war, but Dr. Alex Clarke published a (1.37-hr.) critique in which he explained how the Graf Zeppelin could not possibly have secured an Axis victory, and probably would not have even delayed the Axis’s inevitable demise either. Simply put: the Graf Zeppelin is a classic case of overengineering. Highlight:

You can build an absolutely amazing carrier… or you can build what will suit your situation and suit the realities of your situation… or you can build an absolute mess which attempts to compromise being an amazing feat of engineering with all the most innovative and perfect engineering solutions and will fit your situation… and when you’ve got a committee system which will not compromise, where everyone has to get […] the best solution for the problem [that] they are dealing with or aspect [that] they are dealing with of the design, you end up with the Graf Zeppelin.

Since this bucket of bolts was never ready for combat, it is invariably filed under the label of ‘historical curiosities’. Aside from serving as a timber warehouse for our enemies and later as a little target practice for us in 1947, it was basically a waste of resources. That is certainly a valid point of view, but we can derive other, I think more valuable, lessons from it.

The first is that this project made somebody a lot of money despite never being finished. This may seem like the most obvious point, but it is one that hardly anybody mentions either. It cost 92,700,000 ℛℳ, and German and Italian Aircraft Carriers of World War II tells us who profited:

On November 16, 1936, Deutsche Werke Kiel AG shipyard was awarded the contract to build the ship and on December 28, less than three weeks after the brand-new 11in battlecruiser Gneisenau was launched from Slipway 1, the keel of hull “K-252” was laid in its place.

That capitalists have always profited from war is no news to us, but something less frequently mentioned is that even the unfinished or unused crap makes money for somebody anyway. Capitalism constantly rewards wastefulness, including in an ancient and unnecessary phenomenon that is itself extremely wasteful.

The twoth point is a generic lesson about the importance of cooperation and coordination. Plans for Graf Zeppelin were fraught with infighting, as Grand Admiral Dr. Erich Raeder of the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Reich Marshal Hermann Göring had trouble coming to agreements regarding a vehicle that pertained to both of their fields. One brief example:

Admiral Raeder proposed halting work on the carrier, arguing that even if commissioned by the year’s end, fitting its guns—whose original fire-control system had been sold to the Soviet Union—would delay operational readiness by another ten months.

This want of coordination probably explains why the Luftwaffe once misidentified two Fascist warships as hostile and sunk them, massacring hundreds. Long-time readers should know by now that factionalism was always phenomenal in the Third Reich, and this is a great example.

Lastly, Graf Zeppelin’s early development shows how dictatorships of the bourgeoisie support each other. I know that you could easily deduce this one on your own, but most commentators gloss over the Third Reich’s friendly relations with the British Empire and even the Empire of Japan in 1935 as if they were insignificant or trivial. On the contrary, they should be alarming! This is what inspired me to research this topic more and it is what inspired the title.

There can be no doubt that all of the Axis’s unfinished projects, the Graf Zeppelin most definitely included, gave many labourers and other thinkers experience that would come in handy later. This is one reason why I think that they deserve more attention than they get, but this particular example had even more consequences than that, consequences that casual viewers barely notice if at all. Offer to tell your friends about them the next time that they fire up World of Tanks or play a WWII-themed grand strategy game.

Looking into the subject, I noticed that there is a scarcity of English works likening the Hebrews’ captivity in Egypt to the Jewish captivity in Axis-occupied territories. This surprised me: although there were important differences between the Exodus tale and Jewish life during WWII, the Axis’s Jewish neoslaves, of all people, surely could not have failed to see the striking parallels between their plight and that of their ancient predecessors under Egyptian rule. Some Axis employés and collaborators even deployed whips to castigate or intimidate neoslaves. That hardly any works would comment on these obvious similarities is utterly baffling.

Nevertheless, I managed to find a few. Much like the Book of Esther, the Book of Exodus served as a source of comfort and sustained the morale of many Jews stuck under Axis domination. It is worth mentioning that Jews and goyim were drawing parallels between Pharaoh (the antagonist in Exodus) and Adolf Schicklgruber as early as 1933. Quoting Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s ‘Who Was “Hitler” Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945’, pgs. 263–265:

Jewish observers continued a longstanding tradition of typologically interpreting present-day persecutions in light of biblical precedents.⁸⁹ Jewish commentators identified a range of ancient enemies as models for Hitler. The most commonly invoked were the Egyptian pharaoh at the time of the Exodus, the Persian courtier, Haman, from the Book of Esther, and the Seleucid King, Antiochus IV. These figures were typically mentioned around the time of the holidays that chronicled their anti-Jewish deeds: Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah.

In keeping with longstanding Jewish practice, the Jews’ biblical oppressors were described as malevolent, but ultimately failed, tormentors. At the time of the [Third Reich’s] economic boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, for example, Jewish rabbis and writers described Hitler as a “perfect disciple” and “modern-day revival” of Pharaoh.⁹⁰

But when Passover arrived one week later, journalists issued the hopeful declaration that, whereas “Pharaoh was the first” of his kind, Hitler would “probably [be] the last,” for just as “Pharaoh and his Egypt are no more,” so, too, will “Hitler and his kind of Germany […] soon be no more. And the Jew will live on.”⁹¹

[…]

Philip M. Raskin’s 1933 poem, “A Jew to Hitler,” which included the following stanzas:

Hitler, we shall outlive you
As we outlived the Hamans before you;
Hordes of slaves may crown you chief
Throngs of fools—adore you …

Hitler, we shall outlive you
However our flesh you harrow;
Our wondrous epic shall only add
The tale of Another Pharaoh.⁹⁶

[…]

Christian commentators often echoed these analogies, though for different reasons. Some did so in order to show empathy for the Jews’ plight. In 1935 in Scotland, Reverend J. Peltz called Pharaoh the “first Hitler” and said that “what is taking place today in Germany and Poland is simply an experience that is duplicated in Jewish life.” He added, however, that “the pogroms of the past were as nothing compared with the cultural persecution in Germany to-day.”⁹⁷ In 1936, the African American press compared Hitler to the “Pharaoh of Moses’s time” for threatening Jews with “still harsher plagues of […] persecution.”⁹⁸

Marc Saperstein’s Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder, 1933–1945 is opulent with Rabbis casting the Third Reich’s head of state as a latter-day Pharaoh. Yet paradoxically, as the years went on and the Fascists’ oppression of Jews only intensified, some Rabbis began questioning this analogy because Adolf Schicklgruber was making Pharaoh look gentle by comparison! Pages 60–1:

Pesach of 1933, coming a few weeks after the first mass protest rally in the United States, presented a fine opportunity for making connections with the past. On April 11, 1933, the first day of Pesach, Israel Levinthal of Brooklyn, New York, preached on the topic, “The Old Pharaoh in Modern Garb,” a theme that continues throughout the sermon:

Not for many years has the story we read in the Passover Haggadah, as we sit at our Seder table, had the reality for us that it has in our day. What new meaning do we find in the words, “For not one alone arose to destroy us, but in every generation some rise up against us to destroy us!”

We thought that now, at least, in this glorious twentieth century, we had passed this stage of history — that Pharaohs were a thing of the past — when, lo and behold, another Pharaoh rises before our very eyes. “In every generation it is incumbent on every Israelite to look upon himself as if he had actually gone forth from Egypt,” the Haggadah says. Alas, in this generation, it has become necessary for every Israelite in certain lands of Europe to look upon himself as if he were actually living in Egypt once again.”

On the same day across the ocean, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz turned to a rather unfamiliar rabbinic tradition in making the connection between “Ancient Egypt and Present-Day Germany”:

Rabbinic legend tells us that Pharaoh did not share the fate of his horsemen at the Red Sea. He alone escaped drowning; nay more, he escaped death. He stands forever at the gates of Hell; and as, in the course of the centuries, oppressor after oppressor enters, he greets them with the words, “Why have ye not profited by my example?” […]

I shall not labour the Egyptian analogy. But one need be neither Rabbi nor even religionist to see that the world is built somehow on moral foundations, and that no nation which chooses anti-Semitism, i.e., the will to hate, as the basis of its national life, can have a future.

And here is Marcus Ehrenpreis on the same day in Stockholm, Sweden: “A comparison between the memory of Egypt and the events of today inevitably obtrudes, at once disheartening and consoling. It proves that despite several thousand years of civilization, we have failed to gain any appreciable ground in terms of our humanity.”

A year later, Israel Goldstein in New York would also emphasize in his Pesach sermon the similarities between antiquity and the present: “The four-fold condition suffered by our ancestors in Egypt is duplicated in the tragic story of the Jew in Nazified Europe since 1933. Physical atrocities have been perpetrated upon thousands of Jews with a brutality reminiscent of the Egyptian Pharaoh.”

But nine years later, in the spring of 1942, Hertz would emphasize the differences: “The tidal wave of ghastly carnage passing over Russian and Polish Jewry is infinitely worse than anything that Pharaoh of old ever was guilty of. The murderers will have the same end.”

There were indeed some traditionalist preachers who delivered Pesach sermons in the ghettos without any reference to the present, as if the insistence on refusal to recognize the [Fascists] and the world they had created was a kind of internal triumph.¹⁰⁸ But for most, the connection with antiquity was too natural to ignore.

Saperstein shared so many instances of these that I cannot possibly hope to share all of them without testing your patience. To end this topic on a lighter note, though, I have a relevant selection that would be especially appealing to Palestinians. It isn’t about them specifically, but I never tire of reminding everyone that Jews are their siblings.

From Avinoam J. Patt’s ‘Ghetto in Flames: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Early Postwar Jewish Literature’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, pg. 74:

Leivick’s Der Nes in Geto (The Miracle of the Ghetto) opened in October 1944 and played for 20 weeks in NYC before going on tour in early 1945. In the play, a diverse group of Jewish characters represent a cross-section of Jewish society—a Zionist, a Bundist, a Hassidic Rabbi (Reb Itzik), a fighter from the Land of Israel named Joseph, the daughter of a convert, and others—unite to become the backbone of the struggle against the [Third Reich].²²

The first act opens on Passover eve, as the remaining Jews, trapped in the ghetto, prepare for the holiday while waiting for the arrival of weapons. The first scene is set in a basement synagogue, where two young Jews, Yudel and Leibush, stand, immersed in prayer, as if in a dream. The stage directions indicate that above the Holy Ark a large banner proclaims: “Gevald Yidn, Zayt Zikh Nisht Meya’esh!” [Woe Jews, Do Not Despair!]²³

One character named Isaac compares their imprisonment to slavery in Egypt: “Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we let ourselves be led like calves into the gas chambers. But on this Passover night we will not let that happen. We will shoot. With what will we shoot, ha? With what? Now this is a kashya [a question].”²⁴

The play charts the transformation of Jews traditionally unprepared for combat, into a realization that the only path is armed struggle. Israel, initially passive, eventually embraces armed resistance after his girlfriend Rachel dies on an underground mission to obtain arms, after the Polish Underground fails to deliver them.

In the third act, Israel returns to the ghetto with dynamite, which he uses to blow up [an Axis] tank, declaring to the other Jewish fighters, “I know that even in your fear you are wonder Jews […] And I know now, that with one grenade it is possible to destroy a whole tank…” (Leivick, 318).

Before exploding himself along with the tank, Israel proclaims to those assembled around him, “The wicked one may be stronger than us, but not his wickedness. Tanks will continue to come — let them come. We will confront them. For what do we need dynamite? With our hearts will we destroy the tanks. A Jew is stronger than tanks.”²⁵

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

One last bit of trivia: when I first heard the famous motto ‘let my people go’ (from Sam & Max Save the World, of all things), I correctly associated it with Jewish culture but mistakenly assumed that it only dated back to WWII. It actually comes from Exodus, but anybody familiar with Victor Gollancz’s 1942 pamphlet would have forgiven me for having that mistaken assumption!

I wish you all a very pleasant Pesach.

I feel condescending for saying it, and in general I believe that we should preferably not try to control how other victims respond to their oppression. That being said, in spite of films like Downfall and The Zone of Interest refuting the notion, sometimes I still see someone inviting us to see the fascists and neofascists as inhuman, and I disagree with that invitation. Bear with me, because the conclusion that I derive from all this is not necessarily what you may have in mind.

The temptation to see militant anticommunists as monsters is easy to understand, for obvious reasons, but the uncomfortable truth is that we’ll never fully comprehend and recognize our enemies if we focus solely on their horribility. No honest and reasonable being would deny that all of the Axis powers committed horrific atrocities, but in between those—when they weren’t committing them—Axis officials frequently came across as well adjusted, almost normal people, too.

Like the abusive antagonist in The Stepfather, or like abusive husbands in general, many Axis employés performed a balancing act where they knew when to abuse and when to charm. No wonder, then, that the psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley had trouble looking for signs of criminal insanity in one Axis official:

Kelley found Goering’s results surprising, given the wartime propaganda that the [Axis] leaders had to be madmen. Goering’s responses to the Rorschach images demonstrated “normal basic personality,” Kelley wrote, although they also revealed “marked egocentricity and powerful emotional drives.” They showed nothing seriously wrong with Goering’s mind.

Nevertheless, Kelley considered the test results a good first step toward gaining insight into Goering’s thinking. He used intelligence testing to assign Goering an IQ of 138, third highest among the incarcerated [Reich employés]. (This score delighted the vain Goering.)

Kelley further noted that the prisoner was “cynical and filled with a mystic fatalism,” which explained why he would not take responsibility for such wartime conduct as his murder of political opponents and complicity in genocide.

In his initial neurological and psychiatric report on Goering (a record hidden among Kelley’s personal papers for the past 65 years), the psychiatrist observed Goe­ring’s emotional volatility and narcissistic fixation on what the prisoner perceived as the beauty and strength of his body. Kelley, concerned about the health of Goering’s heart, took advantage of this latter obsession to convince Goering to trim down. “When I pointed out that he would make a better appearance in court should he lose some weight, he agreed and ate abstemiously,” Kelley wrote.

More forbiddingly, Kelley learned that Goering displayed a terrible flip side to the charm and eloquence he showed on first impression. This man who, as Reich Forestry and Hunting Master, had repeatedly condemned cruelty to animals and drafted humane laws to preserve wildlife, also ordered the 1940 bombing of the defenseless city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands that flattened the city center and left 85,000 people homeless.

After Goering matter-of-factly recounted the murder of a close associate that he had once set into motion, Kelley asked how he could bring himself to demand his old friend be killed. “Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright,” Kelley recalled. “Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: ‘But he was in my way…’”

And Kelley’s conclusions from all this? For the international war crimes tribunal, he pronounced the [Fascist] legally sane, free of psychosis and fit for trial. As part of his private study of Goering’s personality, Kelley declared, “He was undoubtedly the most ruthless human being that I have ever experienced.”

True, IQ tests and Rorschach tests need to be taken with a grain of salt (most medical professionals did not know better), but in any event you can see that Goering did not come across as a rabid pitbull as he might have on a battlefield. Hypothetically, he might have tried to consciously manipulate the psychiatrist, but under these circumstances he would have had very little to gain from that.

Whatever the case, even the most sadistic antisocialists can seem harmless in ordinary situations, for the simple reason that they have nothing to gain by constantly expressing their abuse everywhere. As John Stockwell recounted in 1987 about how the CIA trained torturers:

And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years — tortured in Brazil for 2 years — she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, ‘The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people…

Likewise, Adolf Schicklgruber could, oftentimes, come across as harmless, especially as a child. He had bouts of anger, but he also wept when his mother died, he laughed and joked on occasion, he charmed his lover in home videos, he was close friends with a legally ‘Jewish’ girl, and he was so distressed in the April of 1945 that he killed his favourite dog, Blondi, before suiciding with his wife.

Likewise, Axis troops were people who had hopes, dreams, desires, loved ones at home, moments of innocent playfulness, appreciation for animals (some of the time), and—with few exceptions—most of them sincerely believed that they were doing the ‘right’ thing, just like their leadership believed. Many saw their actions as ‘right’ because these actions let petty bourgeois goyim survive longer, to name only one of their goals, and wanting to survive is a perfectly normal behaviour.

As R.G. Price put it:

Who were the Nazis and what did they really want? They didn’t want to destroy civilization or freedom, they wanted to build what they viewed was a better society. That’s important to understand because the Nazis were not motivated by evil or the desire to destroy; they were motivated by their desire to create. The same is true for the Americans who supported the fascists, such as Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Mellon.

This is important to understand because you cannot judge a person’s actions by his or her intentions. Someone can have good intentions and still do things that are harmful to many people. A person’s belief that they are right can blind them to the consequences of the actions.

I believe that Hitler believed that what he was doing was right, and that he was going to make the world a better place. It’s all a matter of perception. Anyone who genuinely believes that white people are superior to others and that a highly structured society is the height of human civilization would probably to agree with Hitler’s ideas, as many Americans and British did prior to Hitler’s launch of full-scale war.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Yet for as much as the Axis demonized its enemies, it could not prevent countless soldiers from suffering guilt after they massacred innocents, which was why so many soldiers liked to get drunk after they did it, and was one of the reasons why the Third Reich preferred poisoning crowds of people when it was convenient to do so; it felt less personal than killing them up close. Even IOF soldiers, despite being conditioned to see all Palestinians as ‘animals’ or ‘terrorists’, are frequently suffering psychological distress because of their rôles in the Nakba.

Now, I need to explain to you my main purpose for writing this topic. This is typically when we would roll our eyes, because when antisocialists remind us of the Axis’s humanity, they usually do it with the intention of compelling us to take pity on Axis war criminals, or worse, with the intention of portraying the Axis as a force for good.

The reality is that you need to remember that even the Axis’s worst war criminals were still human, not to take pity on them, but because it is necessary to identify them. If you go around somewhere looking for ‘monsters’, you’ll find nothing. Such dehumanization may be useful in a boot camp that wants to train killing machines, but not here. Accurately summarizing our adversaries is not as easy as that. To keep it simple: ‘evil’—for the lack of a better word—is a complex phenomenon.

I once said that I feel the same way about the Fascists as I do about angry bears. It may seem like I am defeating my own argument by mentioning that, but if you pause to think about it, it may not be entirely inappropriate either. When you are lost in the woods in the middle of the night, you don’t really have time to dwell on the likelihood that the bear that you are about to shoot has a family to feed and is only threatening you because she herself feels threatened.

On the other hand, the angry bear does not care about your worries either. She is fighting for her survival, but so are you. There is no hatred involved; you simply have an obstacle on your hands. This is, I would argue, a better way of seeing our enemies: not as inhuman, but as people whose survival goals only conflict with ours.