Capitalism in Decay

Soviet prisoners of war were the first victims of the [Fascist] policy of mass starvation in the east. In August 1941, the [Wehrmacht] set a ration of just 2,200 calories per day for working Soviet prisoners of war. Even this was not enough to sustain life for long, but in practice the POWs received much less than the official ration. Many Soviet prisoners of war received at most a ration of only 700 calories a day.

Within a few weeks the result of this "subsistence" ration, as the [Wehrmacht] termed it, was death by starvation. The POWs were often provided, for example, only special "Russian" bread made from sugar beet husks and straw flour. Suffering from malnutrition and nearing starvation, numerous reports from the late summer and fall of 1941 show that in many camps the desperate POWs tried to ease their hunger by eating grass and leaves.

Epidemics

The [Axis powers] made little provision to shelter most of the prisoners they took from the Soviet military. Eventually the [Axis] established makeshift camps but the lack of proper food, clothing, and shelter took a terrible toll. Often the prisoners had to dig holes in the ground as improvised shelter from the elements.

By the end of 1941, epidemics (especially typhoid and dysentery) emerged as the main cause of death. In October 1941 alone, almost 5,000 Soviet POWs died each day. The onset of winter accelerated the mass death of Soviet POWs, because so many had little or no protection from the cold.

Even in POW camps [under Fascism], Soviet POWs had often been left for months to vegetate in trenches, dugouts or sod houses. In the occupied eastern territories conditions were even worse. In Belorussia only pavilions (structures with roofs but no walls) were available to house Soviet POWs. By the winter of 1941, starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions.

Many Soviet soldiers, including many wounded, died on the way to the prisoner collection centers and transit camps; others died during transit to camps in occupied Poland or the German Reich. Most of the prisoners captured in 1941 had to march to the rear across hundreds of miles and those who were too exhausted to continue were shot to death on the spot.

When Soviet POWs were transported by train, the Armed Forces High Command permitted only open freight cars to be used. Sometimes days went by without the prisoners receiving any rations. This resulted in an enormous loss of life during winter months. According to army reports between 25 percent and 70 percent of the prisoners on these transports from the occupied Baltic countries died en route to Germany.

Mass Shootings

The large number of dead was due not just to irresponsible neglect by [Axis] officers but also to mass shootings. The [Axis] shot severely wounded Soviet soldiers to free the [Wehrmacht] of their care. Time and again [Axis] forces were called upon to take "energetic and ruthless action" and "use their arms" unhesitatingly "to wipe out any trace of resistance" from Soviet POWs. Those attempting to escape were shot without warning.

Moreover, a decree issued on September 8, 1941, stated that the use of arms against Soviet POWs was, "as a rule, to be regarded as legal"—a clear invitation for [Axis] soldiers to kill Soviet POWs with impunity.

In the middle of July 1941, Gen. Hermann Reinecke, who was the officer in charge of prisoner-of-war affairs in the Armed Forces High Command, permitted security forces under the Reich Security Main Office to screen Soviet prisoners of war in the POW camps for "politically and racially intolerable elements" among the Soviet prisoners. These prisoners were transferred to SS jurisdiction and killed.

This contributed to an enormous rise in the number of victims, since not only were "all important state and party functionaries" regarded as "intolerable," but so were "intellectuals," all "fanatic Communists," and "all Jews."

Executions

The executions did not take place in the prisoner-of-war camps or their immediate area. Instead, prisoners were transferred to a secure area and shot. The concentration camps proved an ideal location for executions. In Gross‐Rosen concentration camp, for example, the SS killed more than 65,000 Soviet POWS by feeding them only a thin soup of grass, water, and salt for six months.

In Flossenbürg, SS men burned Soviet POWs alive. In Majdanek, they shot them in trenches. In Mauthausen, Austria, so many POWs were shot that the local population complained that their water supply had been contaminated. The rivers and streams near the camp ran red with blood. Estimates of the numbers of victims of this operation range from at least 140,000 up to 500,000.

Even the Jewish POWs who worked for the Western Allies still fared better than Soviet POWs (be they Jewish or gentile).

The Axis presented millions of Soviet POWs with a lose‐lose situation: they could either serve anticommunism, or slowly die in agony. Most of them chose the latter. Quoting Christopher Simpsons’s Blowback, page 19:

In 1942, however, Vlasov was just the man that the political warfare faction was looking for, and the creation of an army of Soviet defectors under [Axis] control using him as a figurehead became its central preoccupation for the remainder of the war.

“The Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war prisoners,” war correspondent Alexander Werth notes. “[E]ither go into the Vlasov Army or starve.” The overwhelming majority of Soviet POWs refused the offer, and about 2 million POWs who were given the choice of collaboration or starvation between 1942 and 1945 chose death before they would aid the [Axis]. But many thousands of Russians did join the invaders as porters, cooks, concentration camp guards, and informers, and later as fighting troops under [Axis] control.⁷

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for events that happened today (September 8).

1941: Axis forces commenced the Siege of Leningrad.
1943: The Allies proclaimed the Armistice of Cassibile by radio; OB Süd immediately implemented plans to disarm the Italian forces.
1944: For the first time a V‐2 rocket hit London.
1949: Richard Georg Strauss, who briefly (and unhappily) served as Reichsmusikkammer, left the world.
1965: Hermann Staudinger, patron member of the SS, expired.
2003: Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, Reich propagandist, had the decency to finally drop dead.

Mario Stoppani had been a World War I ace before working at the Ansaldo aircraft company. He was subsequently employed by the Cantieri Riuniti Dell’Adriatico (CRDA) aircraft company as a test pilot. In the early 1930s, he gained several long‐distance seaplane distance and altitude records (Bruschina, Mecchia, & Turrini, 2000; Mencarelli, 1971). These included a long‐distance seaplane flight between Monfalcone, Italy, and Mitsiwa, Eritrea, in 1934, and Berbera, Italian Somaliland, in 1935.

These attempts were flown with Enrico Corradin and Casimiro Babbi, respectively (“A Record Seaplane Flight,” 1934, “New Record Flight by Seaplane,” 1935). Enrico Comani, his copilot on the flight to Brazil in 1937, was an expert in flying without external visual clues, relying only on instruments (known today as Instrument Flight Rules or IFR). The 1937 record attempt, achieved using a seaplane imaginatively registered as I‐LAMA, earned both pilots a national medal for valor (“Distance Record Attempt by I‐LAMA: Route Meteorological Conditions,” 1937).

However, the two aviators’ life paths ended in tragedy in the same waters they had crossed. After the successful record attempt, on February 2, 1938, Stoppani, Comani, and three other crew members were en route back to [Fascist] Italy. During a flight segment of the flight between Natal, on the Brazilian coast, and the island of Fernando de Noronha, in the South Atlantic, a double‐engine failure and fire on their three‐engined seaplane led to a successful ditching attempt in stormy waters.

Mario Stoppani was the only survivor (Rossi, 2006): He was rescued by a Lufthansa seaplane (“Record Breakers’ Crash in the Atlantic,” 1938).

As with other long‐distance attempts by [Fascist] aviators in the 1930s, Stoppani and Comani’s feat was celebrated by the régime’s highest echelons. Achille Starace, secretary of the fascist party, forwarded the following telegram to the pilots:

The party gerarchi, meeting at the Palazzo del Littorio, have asked me to extend to the brave pilots Stoppani and Comani, and to their crew, sentiments of admiration and comradely joy for the brilliant victory which they have conquered for fascist aviation [ala fascista]. Achille Starace. (Starace to the Cabinet of the Ministry of Aeronautics, December 30, 1937)

The attainment of the record was couched in ideological terms which pitted fascism’s espousal of speed and power over the “compromises” which had been made by the previous, French recordholders. French pilots had achieved the record barely 2 months earlier, on October 25–26, 1937.

Major Gianni Bordini, writing in Sapere magazine, celebrated the fact that the CANT Z.506 seaplane used by Stoppani and Comani had not been modified (as the French aircraft had been) to gain range at the expense of speed. Rather, the attempt had been flown “on a bomber aircraft which had not been modified, except for the installation of auxiliary fuel tanks” (Bordini, 1938).

Regardless of the fact that the two modifications which the seaplane actually underwent were the construction of an apposite cockpit and, in all probability, the removal of heavy defensive armament (thus increasing range), the flight was contrasted to French use of aircraft heavily modified for record‐breaking purposes.

This contrast implied Italian technological superiority in flying faster, nonmodified aircraft: “This approach, which differs substantially from that espoused by the French, is the cause of recent conquests by Italian aviation. These conquests can be defined by the most important aeronautical concepts: speed, load, range, altitude” (Bordini, 1938).

The speed of the [Fascist] “three‐engined bomber seaplane” was also noted in The Times (“4,375 Miles in a Straight Line,” 1937), which similarly contrasted it to the slower French aircraft. However, in turn, Stoppani’s record attempt was superseded by [Luftwaffe] aviators in March 1938 on a route from Devon, Great Britain, to Caravelas, Brazil (“Devon to Brazil in 43 Hours,” 1938).

[…]

Pedrazzi was also aware of the propaganda potential of depicting flight as a modern activity pitting individuals and machines against nature’s previously insurmountable obstacles. The environment of flight, and the landscapes glimpsed from above, were at times described and couched in a language that evidenced not only a sense of fear of nature but also a sense of distance and elevation from nature’s grasp through technology.

For example, on describing clouds, Pedrazzi stated that “Cloud formations often take the shape of horrific voids and infernal shapes, and sometimes they look like azure, dreamy landscapes” (Pedrazzi to Il Resto del Carlino, December 30, 1939). The aeroplane made possible the witnessing of these cloudscapes and ensured that they could be safely traversed. Furthermore, the potential for a tragic end to the flight was a reminder of the risks inherent in pushing the boundaries of aviation.

As the aeroplane flew over the crash site of I‐ARPA, the journalist and his crew members reported that

We turn our thoughts to our fallen comrades, and salute them in Roman fashion. It seems to us as though the three powerful engines of the Savoia‐Marchetti take on a deeper roar, as if they too were providing a background for this time of sadness. However, flight is victory and we cannot serve the will of those who have fallen if we don’t follow their example. (Pedrazzi to Il Resto del Carlino, n.d.)

At the same time, when crossing paths with an aeroplane returning from Brazil to [Fascist] Italy, salutations were exchanged between the two craft, “with words singing hymns to fascism, and greetings to the Duce from Italian hearts” (Pedrazzi to Il Resto del Carlino, n.d.). The mid‐air encounter was clearly described in propagandistic tones. What is interesting to note, however, is the fact that Pedrazzi chose to highlight the meeting of two [Fascist] craft, on routes which were not devoid of traffic, however scarce.

In what almost feels like a scene out of Starship Troopers, these widely celebrated, record‐breaking flights that emphasized speed, load, range, and altitude were still of little use to science, did not last long on the record books, and cost several lives… I have no further comment.

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Click here for events that happened today (September 7).

1923: Fascist Italy cofounded the International Criminal Police Commission along with over a dozen other anticommunist countries.
1938: Rome ordered all ‘foreign’ Jews to leave Italy within six months.
1940: As the Kingdom of Romania returned Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova, the Luftwaffe began the Blitz, bombing London and other British cities for over fifty consecutive nights.
1942: Axis marines were forced to withdraw during the Battle of Milne Bay.
1943: The German 17th Army began its evacuation of the Kuban bridgehead (Taman Peninsula) in southern Russia and moved across the Strait of Kerch to the Crimea.
1945: Axis forces on Wake Island, which they had held since December 1941, surrendered to U.S. Marines, and around the same time that the Berlin Victory Parade of 1945 was held.

(Mirror.)

History would be nowhere nearly as potent if it had no archaeology to support it. The various fragments left over from a generation ago can collectively tell a story that a document cannot. These researchers did find a few documents (mostly newspaper fragments), but what was primarily of concern to them were the potsherds, cartridges, glass, coke, coal, trinkets, tools, footwear, bones, and other crap left over when the camp’s employés dismantled almost everything in November 1944.

They analysed 10,034 animal bone fragments. That is correct: they examined over ten thousand bones. Since there was a coast nearby, almost all of these bones were piscine, but they also found avian and mammal bones. Unusually, they even found a few canine bones; somebody at the POW camp ate one fox and one dog, presumably as last resorts.

Even though the prisoners of war were Soviet, in this case their diets might not have been vastly worse than those of the Axis employés. Indeed, these prisoners might have even had access to alcohol, if only for special occasions. In many cases, the Axis scheduled Soviet prisoners for previsible extermination, seeing as how the Western Axis wanted their land and other resources. In this instance, however, the Axis kept these Soviets around for exploitation and presumably did not plan to terminate them until after the war, but we should note that the locals often gave the prisoners spare food out of sympathy.

Very unusually, the most well preserved remnant of this POW camp is a Russian oven, and yes, it was in the prisoner section of the camp. The likeliest explanation is that the employés assumed that it was inculpable and thus not worth the time and effort to dismantle like everything else in the camp, but it is possible that somebody spared it out of pity for an inmate. Receiving insufficient exposure to Axis propaganda, somebody might have grown fond of the prisoners, at least in the same condescending way that somebody feels fondness for a dog.

Even prisoners trapped in the most miserable conditions are going to come up with ways to pass the time. The archaeologists found chess sets and other gaming pieces in the ruins, and they found evidence that one of the prisoners likely had an instrument. Of course, there were doubtless cheaper ways to pass the time: singing, joking, spinning yarns, and other ways of socialising, as long as nobody peaked out of a window to tell them to shut up.

As you might have guessed, the Axis employés had more ways to deal with their homesickness and boredom: reading, board games, card games, drinking, cinema, performances, fishing, and of course hunting. The staff also had porcelain ware and other trinkets to create a sense of homeliness. Although it is technically possible that an employé had some innocent and friendly interactions with the prisoners, the class and racial divisions between the prisoners and the staff makes this unlikely.

[Click here for an excerpt.]

The remains of most buildings inside the camp indicate that they were taken down and dismantled in a relatively controlled manner prior to the final withdrawal. One trivial but telling indication relates to the remains of the roof anchors of structure 5 where all the wires for this barrack were systematically cut right above the stone weights and removed. The situation, however, proved to be very different for the second barrack, structure 6.

The excavation of a 5 × 8‐metre trench yielded finds suggestive of a third and final phase of the POW camp, probably associated with the last days or weeks up to the Wehrmacht evacuation of Sværholt between November 11 and 15, 1944 (Gamst 1984, 119). During this time the remaining prisoners were crammed into this lone, remaining camp dwelling where they stayed until the building was set ablaze before the ultimate withdrawal.

Indicative of this final event are the complete stretches of roof‐anchor wire splayed over the barrack area and still secured to large boulders — a telling indication of their sudden collapse (Figure 7). Along the outer walls heaps of broken glass, deformed by fire, mark the location of the windows; inside, pieces of a smashed stove were dispersed across the site alongside burnt wood and other evidence of intensive burning (Grabowski et al. 2014, 11–13, 15–20).

[…]

Two middens or refuse dumps were excavated in the course of our fieldwork. Displaying both the highest phosphate and MS‐levels within the sampled area, the first midden was identified just a few metres outside the northern perimeter of the camp. The soil science mapping combined with excavation and test‐pitting indicate that the dump covers an area of at least 60 m². Two trenches, one measuring 1 × 4 m from 2011 and 2012, the other, 2 × 1 m from 2015, showed that the trash was deposited in pits, up to 0.7 m deep (Figure 10).

Huge amounts of garbage were recovered, including alcohol and medicine bottles, tin cans, pieces of rubber and leather, iron heel and toe plates, cartridges, fishing equipment, textile fragments, buttons, coins, nails, bolts, washers, window glass, potsherds, bits of plastic/bakelite, string/wires, slag, coke and coal, and myriad wood fragments (Figure 11). The midden also contained faunal material.

A total of 3177 bone fragments (weighing 1652 grams) suggests a diet predominantly composed of fish (98%), mostly cod supplemented by haddock and plaice (Figure 12 a, b). The cod was primarily from small to medium sized specimens (shorter than 60 cm), and the many head bones indicate that whole and therefore likely fresh cod were brought to the camp.

There were, however, also crushed bones, which probably represent dried cod and cod‐heads. About 2% of the bones were from mammals and birds — cattle, sheep/goat, fox, pig, and seagulls (Vretemark 2013, 2016). The presence of fox is intriguing, especially since one hipbone had clear traces of butchering, suggesting that even Vulpes vulpes occasionally was consumed.

Another conspicuous feature is the number of alcohol bottles in this midden. Red wine (Bordeaux and Bourgogne types), white wine (Alsace/Mosel/Rhine types), and even several champagne bottles are common alongside beer bottles as well as bottles for schnapps or other hard liqueurs (see Olsen and Witmore 2014, 185–186).

A broken brown glass bottle with a screw cap marked ‘E. Merck Darmstadt’, may be indicative of other stimulants. Merck is a German pharmaceutical company that pioneered the commercial manufacture of methamphetamines, opiates, and cocaine. During WW2 the company was a major supplier of the narcotics used by Wehrmacht personnel and its director was closely associated with the [NSDAP] (Steinkamp 2008; Ohler 2015).

Though the traces of intoxicants may suggest that the guards shared the dump with the prisoners, and thus represent their consumption and possibly the need to get rid of evidence of on‐duty drinking, alcohol bottles, as we have seen, were also found inside the camp (Grabowski et al. 2014, 15–16). While reuse to hold drinking water is possible, alcohol consumption among the POWs is mentioned in local testimonies (Sagen, interview).

[…]

The faunal material, on the other hand, was considerably more abundant compared to the first midden. A total of 13,530 bone fragments (6801 g) were recovered, and, as with the first midden, the overwhelming majority derives from fish (97.5%). The remaining 2.5% are from reindeer, cattle, dog, sheep/goat, and bird (a few bones of seagull, oaks, duck, and ptarmigan) (Vretemark 2020, 2–3).

Among the mammal remains, reindeer is most common with 112 bones (with another 86 undecided cattle/reindeer), followed by cattle, dog and sheep/goat. The latter is hardly represented (one bone only) — as in the first midden, caprine remains are rare. This is intriguing given that sheep were the predominant livestock in this area (and most likely the one present in the material rather than the less common goat).

The presence of reindeer and dog is new compared to the first midden, and it should be noted that some of the dog bones (all likely from a young specimen), have traces of butchering (Vretemark 2020, 4).²

[…]

The material from these middens adds considerable nuance to common assumptions concerning POW diet derived from the available ration lists from WWII [in Europe].

Though these rations varied over time, between areas, and with respect to the prisoners concerned, one gets an impression that the per‐week rations given in 1942 to a Soviet POW classified as ‘normal worker’ (Normalarbeiter) in Norway consisted of: bread (2600 g), meat (250 g), fat (130 g), potatoes (5250 g), ‘nutrition’ (150 g), sugar (110 g), tea (14 g), and vegetables (‘only if available’) (Lundemo 2010, 42–43).

As one can see, the prescribed staple consists of bread and potatoes, while fish, which dominates in the middens, find no mention. Needless to say, neither are intoxicants listed among such rations. Though the remains of tinned food are quite plentiful in the two middens, the faunal remains suggest that local resources, especially fish, constituted a very important addition to the diet.

The surprising presence of fish equipment in the first dump, with numerous hooks and large fragments of a cotton fishnet, along with a needle for net mending found in structure 2, may support oral statements that the inmates were allowed to fish in the hamlet harbour area where they commonly worked (see Figures 11 and 12b). This was also where the hamlet fishermen brought their catch ashore, and there are testimonies of fish changing hands during these frequent encounters (interviews Gunnlaug Sagen and Oddvar Sjøveian).

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:::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (September 6). 1915: Franz Josef Strauss, former Axis soldier and educator, was born.
1917: Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, Wehrmacht Major who conspired to murder the Third Reich’s head of state, was born.
1939: South Africa declared war on the Third Reich (around the same time that friendly fire at the Battle of Barking Creek resulted in the British Royal Air Force suffering its first WWII fighter pilot casualty).
1940: King Carol II of Romania abdicated and was succeeded by his son Michael; General Ion Antonescu became the Conducător of Romania.
1944: The Axis lost the cities of Ypres, Belgium and Tartu, Estonia to Allied forces.
1978: Adolf Dassler, bourgeois Fascist, dropped dead.

Quoting David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen’s The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, introduction then chapter 16:

Eighteen years after the Herero–Nama genocide, Hitler became closely associated with a veteran of the conflict. In 1922 he was recruited into an ultra‐right‐wing militia in Munich that was indirectly under the command of the charismatic General Franz von Epp, who had been a lieutenant during [the Second Reich’s] wars against the Herero and Nama.

As both a young colonial soldier and, later, a leading member of the [NSDAP], von Epp was a fervent believer in the Lebensraum theory, and spent his life propagating the notion that the German people needed to expand their living space at the expense of lower races, whether in Africa or Eastern Europe. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hitler was von Epp’s protégé, but in the chaos of post‐World War I Munich, von Epp, perhaps more than any figure other than Hitler himself, made the [NSDAP] possible.

It was through von Epp, in various convoluted ways, that Hitler met many of the men who were to become the élite of the party: von Epp’s deputy was Ernst Röhm, the founder of the [Third Reich’s] storm troopers. Via the party’s connections to von Epp and other old soldiers of [the Second Reich’s] African colonies, Röhm and Hitler were able to procure a consignment of surplus colonial Schutztruppe uniforms. Designed for warfare on the golden savannah of Africa, the shirts were desert brown in colour: the [Fascist] street thugs who wore them became known as Brown Shirts.

[…]

In Riefenstahl’s films of the vast Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, the [German Fascists] appear in the uniforms and symbols of the Third Reich. In these early party gatherings the men filmed shuffling together for the photographers wear a bewildering array of uniforms, hats, insignia, tunics and medals — the symbols and honours of the Reich that had so recently collapsed. Through this muddle of uniforms, the spectrum of various military and paramilitary subcultures from which the [German Fascists] drew their early support is clearly visible.

Alongside the old Prussian generals with their spiked Pickelhaube helmets and ex‐Freikorps commanders proudly wearing their modern Stalhelm is a uniform that is now almost completely unrecognisable: that of the Schutztruppe officers. The desert‐brown tunic and wide‐brimmed hat of the men who had avenged Germany after the Boxer Rebellion and exterminated the Herero and Nama appears time and again in these films.

In the 1920s the uniform was a potent reminder of the painful loss of [the Second Reich’s] colonies and [its] living space. Today the Stalhelm is an instantly recognisable icon of [Fascist] aggression and the Pickelhaube, although rendered slightly comical by historical distance, is firmly associated with the sabre‐rattling militarism of the old Prussian‐dominated Germany of the Kaisers. The Schutztruppe uniform, in its obscurity, is untarnished by any association with [Fascism].

One feature of the Schutztruppe uniform has a direct association with [Fascism], though that connection has been obscured. The brown shirts of the SA, the first symbol of [German Fascism’s] brutality, were surplus Schutztruppe uniforms. They had been manufactured for von Lettow‐Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe units in German East Africa, but as von Lettow‐Vorbeck and his men had been cut off from [the Second Reich] for the entire duration of the war, the uniforms had become unwanted army surplus.

They were procured for the SA probably by Gerhard Rossbach, another former Freikorps commander and reputedly [a] lover of Ernst Röhm.

(Emphasis added. For one citation, see Heinz Höhne’s Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf — Die Geschichte der SS. Weltbild‐Verlag, 1992, pg. 27.)

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Click here for events that happened today (September 5).

1876: Wilhelm Josef Franz Ritter von Leeb, Axis field marshal and war criminal, stained the world with his life.
1919: Elisabeth Volkenrath, SS officer, arrived to burden humanity.
1937: Llanes fell to the Spanish fascists following a one‐day siege.
1938: Chilean officials executed a group of youths affiliated with the fascist National ‘Socialist’ Movement of Chile after they surrendered during a failed coup.
1941: The Axis absorbed Estonia.
1942: The Empire of Japan’s high command ordered withdrawal at Milne Bay, the Eastern Axis’s first major defeat in land warfare during the Pacific War.
1943: The Axis lost the Lae Nadzab Airport (near Lae in the Salamaua–Lae campaign) to the Western Allies’ 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment.
1953: Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture as well as Chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, expired.

Quoting Katarzyna Jedynak’s German repressions in the Częstochowa area during the Second World War:

The Częstochowa area¹ suffered the first losses already at the onset of the 1939 Defensive War. The Wehrmacht units entering Poland committed numerous crimes, among others setting fire to buildings and executing Polish citizens. Repressive operations of this kind were rarely connected with military action. In the main, they were retaliation on the local populace for the stubborn resistance of regular troops of the Polish Army.

The methods of terror included taking hostages, death threats, brutal treatment, various types of harassment, as well as destruction and robbery of property. The shooting of civilians usually did not follow from any formal procedure, and in many cases even the personal data of the victims were not checked. The majority of executions were conducted ad hoc and spontaneously, but first and foremost arbitrarily, for which reason they may be called war banditry.

The casualties of 1 September 1939 included residents of three villages in the Kłobuck district: Konieczki (three people), Koski (four people), and Przystajń (one person). Next, on the night of 1–2 September, the villages of Parzymiechy and Zimnowoda, both situated in the Częstochowa district, were pacified. The [Fascists] shot 75 and 39 people respectively, and razed both locations to the ground.

On the following day (3 September) in the township of Krzepice (Krzepice commune), the invaders gathered the residents in the market square and began shooting. As a result, 30 people perished.

On the same day in the Myszków district, south of Częstochowa, Wehrmacht troops surrounded and set fire to the village of Mysłów (Koziegłowy commune). The soldiers shot at anyone who attempted to escape. Some people suffocated or burned alive in the basements of farm buildings which the [Fascists] had set alight. 22 people died at the time, including 10 children. On 4 September, [the Fascists] shot 104 people in Żarki (Żarki commune) (Rejestr miejsc i faktów, 1986, pp. 54, 64, 71, 99, 101).

The Wehrmacht units marked their advance into Poland with a succession of tragedies, committing crimes against civilians who were not taking part in fighting off the aggressor. The armies of the Third Reich thus violated international treaties on the laws of war, including for instance the Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, appended to the 1907 Hague Convention IV (Kosowska, 2011, p. 63).

By 6 September, the [Fascists] had perpetrated crimes in a dozen or so villages in the vicinity of Częstochowa, all situated along the route of the German Tenth Army, which was commanded by General Walter von Reichenau (including XVI Panzer Corps and XV Light Corps).

The killings included: in Koszęcin commune — Koszęcin (seven people), in Konopiska commune — Hutki, Rększowice, and Łaziec, in Kłobuck commune — Łobodno (13 people), in Poczesna commune — Nierada, in Lipie commune — Napoleon (10 people), in Kruszyna commune — Baby and Jacków (14 people), and Kruszyna (38 people), in Mstów commune — Małusy Wielkie (11 people), in Przyrów commune — Zarębice (25 people), in Dąbrowa Zielona commune — Cielętniki (11 people), Chrząstów (presently a district of Koniecpol; 21 people) and Kajetanowice (72 people).

The [Fascists] also committed numerous crimes against the residents of towns. In Częstochowa, 4 September 1939 was dubbed “Bloody Monday”; according to various estimates, on that day the [Fascists] murdered from 227 to 500 people (Pietrzykowski, 1985, pp. 16–23; Pietrzykowski, 1964, pp. 14–21; Domański, Jankowski, 2011, pp. 25–28).

The first 55 days of the Wehrmacht on Polish soil were marked by the brutality of its soldiers, who often destroyed Polish townships and killed their residents without any [given] reason, just as a pre‐emptive measure. Only some expeditions were military in nature, with their objective being — for instance — a search for weapons (for example in the village of Stany in the Częstochowa district, where three men were killed for hiding Polish Army weapons) (Pietrzykowski, 1985, p. 28).

Civilians were in particular danger near large concentrations of troops, where they would be attacked for largely inexplicable (and oftentimes imaginary) reasons. For instance, if weary, inexperienced and careless soldiers accidentally wounded their comrades at their billets, blame would be placed on the local populace or on alleged “soldiers of the Polish Army”, who purportedly had already resorted to partisan warfare (Böchler, 2009, pp. 22, 84, 87).

In October, Augustyn Gwóźdź, a teacher from Kalety, was arrested on charges of shooting a [Fascist] soldier. He was killed on the way to prison. Six men were murdered in Mokrzesz (Mstów commune). In the same commune, the village of Jaskrów became one of the first mass execution sites. On two separate dates — 9 and 25 November — the [Fascists] brought in some 47 arrestees from Częstochowa and shot them there (Rejestr miejsc i faktów, 1986, p. 41).

Also worth mentioning here are the crimes committed by auxiliary units assigned to the main Wehrmacht forces. These included: deployment units (so‐called Einsatzkommando), operational groups of the Security Police, units of the Order Police, Field Gendarmerie, Secret Field Police, and the self‐protection militia (Selbstschutz), which was composed of members of the local German minority (Durlej, Gmitruk, 2008, p. 10; Pietrzykowski, 1989, p. 135; Pietrzykowski, 1964, pp. 10–11).

Among the numerous crimes which they perpetrated was the shooting of four local farmers in the village of Piasek (Koszęcin commune) in September 1939 (Rejestr miejsc i faktów, 1986, p. 74).

Although this author presents these atrocities as arbitrary, the Fascists slaughtered the civilians in this area for the same reasons that other imperialists in other colonial wars had: looting the dead for any goods, and making room for later settling. The annihilation of the natives also meant that the settlers would have less competition in the struggle for food, wood, and other resources.

Quoting Witold Wojciech Mędykowski’s Macht Arbeit Frei?: German Economic Policy and Forced Labor of Jews in the General Government, 1939–1943, chapter 1:

One [of Fascism’s] objectives […] was economic expansion in […] new territories, which was generally referred to as Lebensraum. However, this concept represented much more than merely territory.

It was, first of all, “living space for the German economy,” bringing with it, apart from territory, a labor force, raw materials, and agricultural production. On May 10, 1939, the chief commander of the armed forces sent a letter to various OKW departments that was signed by Hitler. Attached to the letter were the “Instructions for the conduct of war and the economic security of their own.”¹

Thus, parallel to the preparations for the military, were preparations for sustainability in economic terms. A conference in the Reich’s Chancellery was held on May 23, 1939 to summarize preparations in economic terms. The report from this meeting was called the “Schmundt protocol.”²

During his speech, Hitler recalled again the validity of Lebensraum and said that the war was not really because of Gdańsk and the Corridor, but its objective was extension of living space in the east.³ Also in other occasion, during a meeting with Mussolini in August 1939, Hitler said: “For economic reasons also, Germany needed the foodstuffs and timber from these eastern regions.”⁴

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Click here for other events that happened today (September 4).

1891: Fritz Todt, Axis engineer, was born.
1909: Eduard Wirths, chief SS doctor at Auschwitz, was…born…today.
1939: The Fascists exterminated one thousand Poles near Bydgoszcz, including a number of Boy Scouts. U‐23 completed her first war patrol, and Fritz Todt declared that Organization Todt would function as a fortress construction organization with Xaver Dorsch as his deputy and operational commander. Berlin forbade any further attacks on passenger ships, but it published a War Economy Decree which laid down guidelines for the rapid mobilization of civilian resources and the conversion of the economy to war. Lastly, the Third Reich suffered its first assault from the Royal Air Force.
1941: An Axis submarine assaulted a United States warship, the USS Greer. This was one of the earliest instances of a Fascist empire making a move against its Yankee competitor.
1944: The Axis lost the Belgian city of Antwerp to the British 11th Armoured Division, and Finland exited from the war with the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the Third Reich executed one of its generals, Fritz Erich Fellgiebel, for conspiring against the head of state.
1945: The Western Axis’s last active soldiers finally surrendered to the Allies.

Quoting Arnold A. Offner’s American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933–1938, pages 57–60:

Diplomatic opinion differed on the new Germany. For the American consul general at Stuttgart, Leon Dominian, Germany’s new masters represented something old, “the cynical militarism of their predecessors of pre‐Weimar days,” and, he felt, the United States should deal with them accordingly.

For Douglas Miller, commercial attaché in Berlin, the average [German Fascist] was essentially a “young, ignorant, and romantic” misfit, willing to declare the modern capitalistic world in which he had never known success a failure, voting for a “return to medieval status where the individual does not have to do his own thinking.” [German Fascism’s so‐called] revolution, Miller believed, was the work of a handful of “fanatics and adventurers who had learned how to appeal to the moron majority in a period of depression and discouragement.”¹¹

Miller and many other Americans did not yet believe the [German Fascists] a large threat. The NSDAP represented “almost unanimous” German opinion on such critical questions as disarmament and revision of the Treaty of Versailles. Still, the [supposed] revolution was both an assertion of Germany’s rights against other nations and an effort at adjusting class and occupational problems in Germany.¹²

By the summer of 1933 Miller regarded Hitler and his immediate lieutenants as the moderate forces trying desperately to ward off a second revolution. Withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference hardly disturbed Miller, who remained unconvinced as to any threat of the new German government in international affairs.

Having given Mein Kampf a careful reading, he concluded that Hitler’s advocacy of deception in foreign affairs, his “inflammatory statements regarding foreign policy and Germany’s mission to expand in the East,” were all so much propaganda. There was no reason for concern: “The Nazis’ war talk, superman talk and posing is simply designed to impress their followers and should be discounted.”¹³

Davis, the American disarmament negotiator, had reached much the same conclusions. No one could understand what was happening in [the Third Reich] without being there. Germany, he wrote from Berlin in the early spring of 1933, was in the midst of a “real revolution.” One had to expect “certain excesses,” though the American press probably made too much of them.

He could not determine the course of the [supposed] revolution and its effects on foreign policy. These would depend on Hitler’s ability to withstand radicals in his party and also to shackle the semimilitary forces he had organized for purposes of the [so‐called] revolution. The Hitler government was committed to an early revision of the Treaty of Versailles, although the exact method was unclear.¹⁴

Long‐term objectives of the Hitler government did not appear of immediate concern. American diplomats knew that in 1933 Germany was no threat. Politically isolated, mired in the world‐wide economic collapse which saw more than 6,000,000 Germans unemployed, its army of 100,000 greatly outnumbered and outgunned by the French, the [Third Reich] could not move in any direction without running against the French alliance system.¹⁵

Nonetheless, [the Third Reich] affected American interests, and it was necessary for the government to respond to developments there.

One development, persecution of the Jews, had by no means assumed a pattern in 1933. From the end of January until the March 5 Reichstag elections, the government and NSDAP proceeded cautiously with anti‐Semitic policies, attacking Jews who were opponents of the [NSDAP] by virtue of their being Social Democrats or Communists.

After March 5, commanding a majority in the Reichstag for the first time through support by the Nationalists, the [Fascists] made their attacks more frequent, arbitrary, and bloody. The government apologized, blaming undisciplined NSDAP members acting as party men, not government officials. As attacks abated everyone waited to see what would be the outcome of the government’s official one‐day boycott of all Jewish businesses scheduled for April 1.¹⁶

Ambassador Sackett reported in early March that four American Jews in Berlin had been beaten up and one of them forced to rescind an eviction notice against a [Fascist] tenant who owed a year’s rent. Hull lodged no protest, and when Hitler on the morning of March 11 issued a public appeal to his followers to maintain law and order, Sackett optimistically declared anti‐Jewish demonstrations at an end.¹⁷

Violence intensified. Shortly a delegation representing American Jewish organizations called upon Hull to urge him to protest to the German government. He declined, saying at a press conference next day that the United States was still “endeavoring industriously” to gain information on conditions in [the Third Reich].¹⁸

(Emphasis added. Much of the chapter goes on like this, and I had to stop here so as to avoid testing your patience.)

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Click here for events that happened today (September 3).

1935: The Fascists laid down the keel of submarine Iride at the Odero‐Terni‐Orlando Navy Yard in Muggiani, La Spezia.
1936: Fascist aeroplanes threw back the Republican troops on Majorca, and the Nationalist forces on the mainland captured Talavera de la Reina.
1938: The Kriegsmarine launched U‐56 at Deutsche Werke, Kiel.
1939: The Third Reich’s head of state issued an order to his generals, again stressing that the Wehrmacht must not attack British and French positions, then he departed Berlin for the Eastern Front. Coincidentally, the Fascist submarine U‐30 torpedoed British passenger liner Athenia in the Atlantic Ocean, and Otto Skorzeny returned home from Trost Barracks, Vienna (despite the outbreak of war) due to the lack of instructors to train new recruits. The Fascists exterminated fifty‐five Polish peasants in Truskolasy while Berlin issued orders that executions by members of the SS were to be carried out in concentration camps, to go into effect seventeen days later. Finally, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia declared war on the Third Reich after its invasion of Poland, forming the Allied nations. (The Viceroy of India also declared war, but without consulting the provincial legislatures.) Consequently, the United Kingdom and France began a naval blockade of the Third Reich that lasted until the war’s end. This also marked the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic.
1940: Berlin commenced planning Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain). In the meantime, fifty Do 17 bombers escorted by 80 Bf 110 fighters and 40 Bf 109 fighters flew up the Thames Estuary in southern England, then split up to hit RAF airfields at North Weald, Hornchurch, and Debden. All three airfields were severely damaged, yet remained operational. Biggin Hill also saw two minor raids on this date. The Luftwaffe lost seventeen fighters and eight bombers. During a meeting on this date, Kesselring recommended Göring to cease the bombing of British fighter airfields because there were too many of them; instead, he suggested to bomb London and use the threat of civilian deaths to force large numbers of British fighters to come to battle. Overnight, Fascist bombers attacked Kent, Liverpool, and South Wales.

As well, four Abwehr spies landed from rowing boats on the Kent coast in southern Britain. Poorly trained and without papers, the four—Charles van den Kieboom, Carl Meier, Jose Waldberg, and Sjoerd Pons—were quickly apprehended and handed over to Colonel Robin Stephens of Military Intelligence for interrogation.
1941: The Axis captured the Ukrainian village of Vakarzhany, and Axis bombers damaged British ship Fort Richepanse at noon in the Atlantic Ocean; at 2042 hours, Axis submarine U‐567 caught up with the damaged ship west of Ireland, then sunk her, resulting in forty‐one casualties (but leaving twenty‐two survivors). Lastly, Axis flightcraft sank Chinese vessel Ganlu at Bazhong, Sichuan Province, China.
1942: In response to news of its coming liquidation, Dov Lopatyn lead an uprising in the Axis ghetto of Łachwa (present‐day Belarus).
1943: British and Canadian troops landed on the Italian mainland. On the same day, Walter Bedell Smith and Giuseppe Castellano signed the Armistice of Cassibile, although it went unannounced for another five days.
1944: Axis personnel placed diarist Anne Frank and her family on the last transport train from the Westerbork transit camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving three days later.

Danzig (or Gdańsk) was the last microstate that the Fascists absorbed, after Fiume and the Saar Basin. Many of Danzig’s gentile gadje welcomed the annexation of 1939, and it was soon in close neighbourhood with a concentration camp. Quoting Ruth Schwertfeger’s A Nazi Camp near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof, pages 47–48:

After September 1, 1939, Stutthof/Sztutowo lost forever its former identity as a pleasant village near Danzig and the Baltic beaches, and its namesake camp began to receive first hundreds, then thousands of prisoners.

These “civilian prisoners,” as they were called, were local people from Danzig and Pomerania who were either representatives of the Polish intelligentsia—clerics, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, or Jews from the Danzig community. All of them were arrested because they were seen through the one lens of “Germandom”—any deviation from the ideal meant treatment as an opponent and an enemy of the Third Reich.

Not every prisoner who was arrested in these early September days was sent right away to Stutthof, but it was soon to become central in the camp system of Danzig–West Prussia. For many reasons, but especially its proximity to Danzig, it was ideal. Every publication and pamphlet on Stutthof points out that it had water on all sides—the Baltic to the north, a lagoon (das Frische Haff) to the south and east, as well as canals and marshes, and to the west, the Vistula River.¹

Stutthof was clearly an ideal spot for the purposes of internment. No one could easily escape from Stutthof, surrounded as it was by such forbidding terrain; few attempted in the course of the next five plus years.

Besides, it was extensive enough in acreage to accommodate opponents of the regime beyond Danzig in Pomerania that was soon to be officially annexed to the [Third] Reich as Danzig–West Prussia. From approximately eleven acres, it grew to over 300 acres in size, accommodating initially around 250 prisoners. This is how Waclaw Lewandowski, one of the first to arrive on September 2, 1939, describes his reception:

After getting us off the closed trucks and buses that brought us there, we were again brutally searched, with frequently raining fists and whips […] We were immediately put to digging foundations for huts under construction, felling trees and clearing stumps. The tempo was murderous […] Late in the evening we were issued some 500 grams of very watery, lukewarm turnip soup and about 100 grams of dark bread. Dead tired, we fell to our pallets in the tents without undressing or washing. Even the physically strongest broke down, weeping with pain, exhaustion and humiliation.²

Grabowska‐Chałka describes Stutthof as striking “fear in the hearts of Polish inhabitants of Pomerania and synonymous with bestial cruelty, terror, murder and finally mass extermination.”³ It is a fair summary of what will follow.⁴

In 1979, scientists found and examined dozens of skeleta from a mass grave near the camp. Decades later, other scientists used modern utilities to reexamine them. Quoting Skeletal evidence of the ethnic cleansing actions in the Free City of Danzig (1939-1942) based on the KL Stutthof victims analysis:

The first arrests and deportations to the nearby concentration camp KL Stutthof began as soon as September 2nd 1939, even though Polish defenders fighting in the Westerplatte peninsula were yet to surrender [10]. The first transportation of 150 people to KL Stutthof included, among others, members of the clergy, teachers, political leaders and clerks. Most of them were killed within months of their arrival [5 11].

[…]

Our trauma analysis shows that the prevalent killing method in the KL Stutthof sample was blunt force trauma to the head, as the rib cage trauma had to be excluded from the analysis (it was impossible to associated singular rib with particular skeleton, nor was it possible to determine time of the trauma occurrence on majority of the fractured ribs). The majority of the perimortem lesions were found above the hat brim line (HBL), which is a common indicator of a violent attack in medico‐legal studies [48,49].

Even before 1939, Fascism had substantial support in Danzig, and it was normal for anticommunist gentiles to harass Jews. Quoting one example from Krzysztof Ulanowski’s ‘Record of Violence. The Socio‐Political German–Jewish Relations in Free City of Danzig in the Years 1933–1939’:

1938 was an extremely difficult for the Jewish Community on all possible levels; the political, religious and social. The degradation of the Jews eventually affected the religious sphere as well. This tragic event was reported on August 1938 by both Nowy Dziennik (published in Warsaw) and The New York Times in the article: “Nazis Plunder Synagogue in Danzig.” The report states that on 29 August 1938, about 40 […] SA militants broke into the synagogue, demolished its interior, desecrated and tore the Torah scrolls. The police, summoned by the Jewish community for help, refused to provide assistance.

For a few years, Danzig was of great concern to the international community. Quoting Anita J. Prazmowska’s ‘Poland, the ‘Danzig Question' and the Outbreak of the Second World War’:

At the beginning of August, the Polish government and the Senate were once more in conflict. Since May, Polish customs inspectors had been under constant attack, which made their job impossible. This allowed the [Fascists] to militarize Danzig to the point that it became a fortress.

In August, the Senate informed the Poles that it would no longer recognize Polish customs guards.⁴⁸ This led the Poles to warn the Senate that it was acting outside its jurisdiction. Beck also took an opportunity to attack Burckhardt for supposedly disseminating false information about the city.⁴⁹

[Berlin] intervened only to be informed by [Warsaw] that it had no right to make representations on behalf of the Danzig Senate. When the Poles had decided to confront the Danzig authorities they did not seek British advice, but merely informed the Foreign Office of the crisis after the fact. The Poles threatened to bomb Danzig from the sea and the Senate backed down. The Foreign Office was appalled to hear how close the two had come to a military conflict.

The Danzig issue continued to be a bone of contention between [Warsaw] and [Berlin] with Britain desperately trying to wrestle from the Poles an agreement not to proceed without British approval. While Beck belligerently refused to do so, [London] sought means of ascertaining whether indeed Danzig was merely a pretext for a conflict with Poland or a difficulty that could be resolved with a modicum of good will.

The British Cabinet chose to believe that the latter was the case, whereas the Poles increasingly acted on the assumption that war with [the Third Reich] was likely to break out in the near future. To the Poles the Danzig crisis, like reports of tension on the Polish–German border in Silesia and [Fascist] claims that Poland was mistreating the German minority were seen as signs of a German propaganda campaign, which inevitably preceded an outright attack.

In the end, it was the Poles who were correct. On 23 August the Danzig Senate voted for the city to return to the Reich. The Danzig Gauleiter Albert Forster was appointed Head of the Danzig state. These actions contravened the League charter and in principle should have been a matter for the League. Instead the British and French government spoke of negotiations and used their diplomatic offices to try and persuade Beck to appoint a negotiator or at least to accept the appointment of a suitable person to negotiate between [Warsaw] and [Berlin].

Events nevertheless fast overtook these efforts for on 1 September the [Fascist] battleship Schleswig‐Holstein attacked the Polish fort and ammunition dump of Westerplatte on the tip of the Hel peninsula. Danzig was officially incorporated into Germany on that day. Burckhardt, who was in the city, was instructed to leave immediately. Wholesale attacks on Polish property and citizens completed the picture.

On 1 September 1939 developments taking place in Danzig were of little consequence as on the same day, in the early hours of the morning, [the Fascists] initiated a military attack on Poland. In the end the war did not start because of Danzig, though the city had always been a reliable barometer of relations between the two states.

Further reading:

Comparison of the situation of Freistaat Danzig and Saarland under the auspices of the League of Nations

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Click here for other events that happened today (September 2).

1878: Werner von Blomberg, Reich field marshal, was born. So were the Balkan fascist Milan Nedić and the Axis legislator Nobutaka Shioden.
1919: Adolf Schicklgruber joined the so‐called ‘German Workers’ Party’.
1923: Amid rumors that Koreans had been conducting acts of sabotage in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, lynch mobs of Japanese began massacring thousands of civilians over the course of several weeks, mainly ethnic minorities such as Koreans and Chinese.
1933: Rome and Moscow signed a Pact of ‘Friendship, Non‐Aggression, and Neutrality’, regrettably. (For a commentary on that, see here.)
1939: The Fascists ordered the construction of a concentration camp in Sztutowo (German: Stutthof) with the labor of 65,000 Poles. As well, it appears that Rome continued unsuccessfully to urge peace between the German Reich, United Kingdom, and France.
1940: In the morning, Fascist bombers attacked RAF Eastchurch (destroyed buildings and down to only one runway), RAF Rochford (bombs fell on Gravesend instead of the airfield), RAF North Weald (most bombers forced back), and RAF Biggin Hill (suffered heavy damage) in England. In the afternoon, RAF Hornchurch (most bombs missed), RAF Eastchurch (bomb dump detonated), and the Vickers bomber factory at Brooklands, Weybridge, Surrey, England was attacked. On the other hand, the Fascists lost twenty‐seven fighters and ten bombers, while British antiaircraft fire shot down another fighter and three bombers. Overnight, Fascist bombers assaulted Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield.
1941: Maggiore Baracca departed La Pallice, La Rochelle, France for her sixth war patrol, and the Empire of Japan commissioned Kasuga Maru into service.
1942: Axis training submarine U‐222 sank in the Danzig Bay after colliding with training submarine U‐626, causing forty‐two deaths! Aside from that, the Wehrmacht’s 46th Infantry Division crossed Strait of Kerch and landed on the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia via two dozen landing barges and other small boats. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht’s 17th Army moved toward Novorossiysk. Axis surface vessels intercepted some of the convoys, sinking Soviet gunboats Oktybar and Rostov‐Don. Axis bombers also assaulted Teignmouth, England. The British War Cabinet received the Home Security Situation Report which noted that in the week ending at 0600 hours, Axis bombing massacred ninety‐two British civilians and seriously injured ninety‐one.
1943: After the Gestapo tortured Josef Mahler (an emigré and Jewish communist expelled from the Netherlands) for months, it finally executed him in a Düsseldorf prison. The Gestapo had failed to obtain from him any confession of a conspiratorial nature.
1944: Axis officials declared the V‐2 operational. In Britain, a V‐1 flying bomb landed on RAF Hawkinge destroying a Spitfire fighter of 350 squadron and wounded some airmen. Another fell on the perimeter of RAF Nacton in Ipswich, killing a RAF noncommissioned officer and destroying a house. Records later showed that by this date, the effective end of the V‐1 assault from France, 8,617 bombs had been ground launched against the United Kingdom. Axis Air Force unit III K/G3 had launched about 410, mostly against London, however the Axis still had more to send. On the other hand, Vojtech Tuka resigned as the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, citing poor health, and Axis troops began evacuating the Aegean Islands.
1945: Tōkyō and the major warring powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tōkyō Bay signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, officially ending World War II.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 229–230:

Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, was occupied by [the Axis] on June 24, 1941. It contained about 70,000 Jews, 80% of whom were murdered by the end of the year. The [Axis] appointed a Jewish Council headed by a Revisionist Zionist, Jacob Gens. Twenty one thousand Jews were liquidated immediately before the rest were herded into two ghettos, one of which was also liquidated.

Between September and December a further 27,000 were murdered, mainly in the Pits of Ponary, just outside Vilna.¹⁹⁶ The Jewish police actively participated in these killings and in some cases, actually carried out the “selections.”¹⁹⁷

Like Merin in Sosnowiec, Gens believed that by sacrificing the majority of Jews he could save the rest. In this way the [Axis] used the Judenrat to carry out the deportations until there was no one left. The [Axis] gave Gens absolute power, including the power of capital and corporal punishment.

In Vilna a United Partisans Organisation [FPO] was formed in January 1942, between the Communists and the Zionists. Josef Glazman, a Revisionist who had been deputy police commandant until Gens dismissed him, was deputy commander of the FPO.¹⁹⁸

The FPO was headed by a communist, Yitzhak Wittenberg. After having tortured another communist the Gestapo became aware of his rôle and ordered his arrest. On 16 July 1943, after having been invited to talks by Gens, Wittenberg was seized by the Lithuanian police led by the head of the Jewish police, Revisionist Salek Dessler. However Wittenberg was freed by the Resistance.

The Gestapo gave Gens an ultimatum — hand over Wittenberg or the ghetto would be destroyed.¹⁹⁹ Gens mobilised the ghetto and forced Wittenberg’s surrender.²⁰⁰ Abba Kovner of Hashomer Hatzair urged surrender and Wittenberg gave himself up.²⁰¹

‘Aktion swiftly followed Aktion.’ Between 1 and 5 September a great deportation to Estonia took place. The Jewish police, who were armed by the [Axis], ‘went wild as they smelled blood.’ They forced 5,000 people onto the trains. On September 23 the final Aktion took place.²⁰² Nine days previously Gens himself had been shot by the Gestapo.

Gens destroyed the Resistance knowing that a communist‐led resistance would fight the ghetto’s liquidation.²⁰³ The resistance under Kovner chose not to fight but escape instead to the forests.²⁰⁴ According to Chaim Lazar, Kovner reached an agreement with Gens and Salek Dessler and they were given a safe exit. Kovner ensured that only the underground escaped.²⁰⁵

The main purpose of Kovner’s partisan group was to save themselves. Chaim Lazar alleges that when a group of Jews from Ishishuk came to the forest, having been sheltered by farms until the danger of being discovered became too great, they were refused entry into Kovner’s group even though refusal was tantamount to a death sentence. For many weeks these Jews wandered near the Jewish camp, suffering from cold and starvation. Only after the Soviet partisan camp absorbed some of them did Kovner agree to absorb the rest.²⁰⁶

Soviet partisans, although thin on the ground, ‘offered the most hope to the Jews’ including arming them.²⁰⁷

See also:

Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust

Interview with Jewish partisan Sam Hamburg.

Fania Brantsovskaja: the last living survivor of the Vilna ghetto.

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Click here for other events that happened today (September 1).

1886: Shigeyasu Suzuki, lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army from December 1936 to December 1938, was born.
1895: Engelbert Zaschka, Axis inventor, was born.
1923: The first three combat legions of the Blackshirts were mobilized and sent to Libya.
1932: Kenkichi Ueda attached to the IJA’s General Staff.
1935: Robert von Greim received the rank of Oberstleutnant.
1936: U‐23 became assigned to the 1st Submarine Flotilla and Korvettenkapitän Eberhard Friedrich Clemens Godt became her commanding officer.
1937: The Spanish Nationalists, led by Generals Antonio Aranda and José Solchaga, launched an offensive through the mountains of Leon and along the coast from the east to capture Gijón. Gen. Aranda’s forces, however, were unable to break through the mountain passes until a Navarrese force, under Gen. Solchaga’s command, captured the village of Infiesto one month later, thus outflanking the mountain defences and forcing the Asturians into a retreat. Meanwhile, the IJA’s 5th Division and 11th Mixed Brigade, under Itagaki Seishiro’s command, marched from Beiping toward Chahar and Shanxi Provinces.
1938: Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein met with the Third Reich’s head of state at the Berghof in Berchtesgaden while officials announced in Austria that all religious and other private schools would be closed and education would be taken over by the NSDAP. Coincidentally, the Reich Economics Ministry set up a meeting to discuss the question of credits, possibly guaranteed by the state, for the purchase of ‘Jewish’ property. Citing public safety, Rome officially forbade “foreigners of the Jewish race to establish permanent residence on Italian soil, in Libya, or in Italy’s Aegean possessions”. Gen. Franz Halder became Chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando des Heeres and the first self‐identified Catholic to be assigned this position), succeeding General Ludwig Beck. The Fascists commissioned M1 into service under the command of Oberleutnant zur See Hans Bartels, and Masafumi Arima stepped down as the commanding officer of converted seaplane tender Kamikawa Maru and was made a commanding officer of Sasebo Naval Air Corps in the Empire of Japan.
1939: Berlin officially declared war on Poland, then the Luftwaffe bombed the town of Wielu in Poland, causing 1,200 civilian casualties. Over Warsaw, Oberst Walter Grabmann’s Messerchmitt Bf 110 squadron (I.(Z)/Lg.1) led by Hauptmann Schleit, shot down five Polish PZL P.11 fighters whilst escorting the Heinkel He 111P bombers of II/KG.1. He sustained wounds as one of the P.11 fighters damaged his Bf 110 fighter. Berlin relieved Rome from having to fight in the war against Poland and possibly with the pseudodemocracies in writing, asking only for politico‐economic support.

London and Paris turned to Rome in response to a proposal to revamp the conditions of the Versailles Treaty rather than declaring war on the Third Reich. Meanwhile, Rome declared itself a nonbelligerent nation in this battle. As the ‘Free City’ of Danzig ceased to exist, Gauleiter Albert Forster’s title of State President of the ‘Free City’ of Danzig was abolished. He would soon be named the Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter of Danzig‐West Prussia.

As well, the Third Reich officially placed a curfew on Jews: 9 P.M. in the summer and 8 P.M. in the winter. Berlin likewise authorized Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt to ‘grant merciful deaths’ for the mentally ill and those who were suffering from incurable diseases, thus beginning Action T4. Reinhard Heydrich presided a meeting attended by the heads of Security Police and Commanders of Special Units, during which Berlin ordered the deportation of the remaining 30,000 Roma and Sinti from the German Reich to the nearly conquered territory of Poland.

The Iron Cross awards became established in the Third Reich as an award for those who displayed bravery in combat or in command of military personnel. Four grades were specified: Iron Cross 2nd Class, Iron Cross 1st Class, Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, and the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross.

Lastly, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop warned his Chancellor that the invasion of Poland would compel France to fight. The Chancellor (exceptionally irritable, bitter and sharp with anyone advising caution) replied: ‘I have at last decided to do without the opinions of people who have misinformed me on a dozen occasions [so] I shall rely on my own judgement.’
1940: The coke‐fired two‐retort furnace in the Auschwitz crematorium went into service for the disposal of bodies. Meanwhile, formations of Fascist fighters arrived in Britain in the morning to lure British fighters, but the tactic failed. At 1100, 1330, and 1730 hours, large Fascist raids attacked Debden, Biggin Hill, Hawkinge, Lympne, Kenley, Detling, Eastchurch, Tand Sherburn, as well as the Tilbury Docks in the East End of London. The Luftwaffe lost seventeen fighters and eight bombers. Overnight, Fascist bombers attacked Kent, Bristol Channel, and South Wales. Lastly, the Regia Marina established a frogmen training school at the Naval Academy at Livorno under Lt. Wolk’s command.
1941: Berlin passed a law, to go into effect eighteen days later, whereby all Jews above the age of six in the Third Reich (including its occupied lands) were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David with a word for ‘Jew’ inscribed in black therein. Coincidentally, the 9th Company of German Police Battalion 322 participated in the extermination of more than nine hundred Jews from the Minsk area in Byelorussia. On the same day, the Police Regiment South reported shooting eighty‐eight Jews, and Battalion 320 reported exterminating three hundred eighty. Additionally, Alfons Bentele’s superiors assigned him the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland.
1942: SS‐Obersturmführer Franz Reichleitner became the commandant of Sobibór in occupied Poland, replacing Franz Stangl, and Axis bombers attacked Lydd in southeastern England. After sundown and lasting until the next date, they attacked Doncaster. As well, Axis aircraft sank Soviet torpedo boat Purga on Lake Ladoga near Leningrad, and 1.Panzerarmee established a bridgehead across the Terek River near Mozdok in southern Russia. Hans‐Joachim Marseille flew three sorties and shot down a total of seventeen enemy aircraft between 0826 and 0839 hours while escorting Stuka dive bombers to El Taqua in Libya, seven P‐40 fighters between 1055 and 1103 hours near Alam Halfa, and five Hurricane fighters between 1747 and 1753 hours while escorting bombers toward El Imayid). His score at the day’s end stood at 121.

Martin Gottfried Weiss became Dachau’s commandant, and Kurt Fricke received the Order of Michael the Brave 3rd Class of Romania. Axis submarine U‐759 avoided a ramming attempt by the Allies but would succumb to depth charging by Morden; all forty‐three aboard died in U‐759's sinking. Fifty miles to the east, the Allies damaged U‐91, then fifteen miles east of Cape Coast, Gold Coast, U‐125 sank British ship Ilorin at 2206 hours, massacring thirty‐three but leaving four alive.
1943: Rudolf von Schmettow became the military governor of the Channel Islands for the second time, succeeding Erich Müller. Aside from that, the Empire of Japan’s 21st Air Flotilla at Saipan, Mariana Islands disbanded. Its two air groups, Air Group 253 (fighters) and Air Group 751 (medium bombers) transferred to Rabaul.
1944: U‐23 fired three torpedoes into the harbor of Constanța and reported three detonations at about 0333 hours. Two of them of them damaged berthing facilities, while another struck and sank the already damaged Romanian merchant ship Oituz. U‐23 departed at about 0400 hours and laid one EMS mine in the roads near Tuzla lighthouse about 10 kilometers to the south. Afterwards, several waves of V‐1 flying bombs were launched across the English Channel toward Britain, yet most failed to make their targets.
1981: Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer, General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, Head of Organization Todt, Inspector General of German Roadways, Inspector General for Water and Energy, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, and Reich Minister of Industry and Production, died of a stroke while revisiting London.

There is a short way and a long way to describe this assault. The short way per Richard J. Evans’s The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, pages 699–700:

Acting according to plans arranged some time before by Heydrich, SS men in civilian clothing staged a mock assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, in Upper Silesia. Its staff were replaced by another detachment from the SS. Evidence of the Poles’ supposedly murderous assault was provided by two concentration camp inmates from Sachsenhausen, killed by lethal injections and dumped at the radio station to be photographed by the German media. The orders, approved by Hitler personally, referred to the bodies as ‘canned goods’.

A third man, Franz Honiok, a pro‐Polish German citizen, was arrested on 30 August 1939 as someone who could be plausibly identified as a Polish irregular, and taken out of the police gaol by the SS at Gleiwitz the next day. He was put to sleep with an injection, placed inside the radio station, and, still unconscious, shot dead. To lend further authenticity to the action, the Polish‐speaking SS men shouted anti‐German slogans into the microphone before leaving. Normally the radio station was only used for emergency weather forecasts, so hardly anybody was listening.

Elsewhere, two other border incidents were staged by SS men dressed in Polish army uniforms. As one SS man came out of a German customs house that he had just helped smash to pieces, he stumbled over several dead bodies wearing Polish uniforms. Their heads, he reported later, were shaven, their faces had been beaten to make them unrecognizable, and their bodies were completely rigid.¹⁹³

[Click here for the long way.]

Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 518–520, 594–596:

[A]s the second half of August 1939 began, the [Wehrmacht] chiefs pushed forward with their plans to annihilate Poland and to protect the western Reich just in case the [pseudo]democracies, contrary to all evidence, did intervene. On August 15 the annual Nuremberg Party Rally, which Hitler on April 1 had proclaimed as the “Party Rally of Peace” and which was scheduled to begin the first week in September, was secretly canceled. A quarter of a million men were called up for the armies of the west.

Advance mobilization orders to the railways were given. Plans were made to move Army headquarters to Zossen, east of Berlin. And on the same day, August 15, the Navy reported that the pocket battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland and twenty‐one submarines were ready to sail for their stations in the Atlantic.

On August 17 General Haider made a strange entry in his diary: “Canaris checked with Section I [Operations]. Himmler, Heydrich, Obersalzberg: 150 Polish uniforms with accessories for Upper Silesia.”

What did it mean? It was only after the war that it became clear. It concerned one of the most bizarre incidents ever arranged by the [Fascists]. Just as Hitler and his Army chiefs, it will be remembered, had considered cooking up an “incident,” such as the assassination of the [Reich’s] minister, in order to justify their invading Austria and Czechoslovakia, so now they concerned themselves, as time began to run out, with concocting an incident which would, at least in their opinion, justify before the world the planned aggression against Poland.

The code name was “Operation Himmler” and the idea was quite simple—and crude. The S.S.–Gestapo would stage a faked attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, using condemned concentration camp inmates outfitted in Polish Army uniforms. Thus Poland could be blamed for attacking [the Third Reich]. Early in August Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr Section of OKW, had received an order from Hitler himself to deliver to Himmler and Heydrich 150 Polish uniforms and some Polish small arms.

This struck him as a strange business and on August 17 he asked General Keitel about it. While the spineless OKW Chief declared he did not think much of “actions of this kind,” he nevertheless told the Admiral that “nothing could be done,” since the order had come from the Fuehrer.⁸ Repelled though he was, Canaris obeyed his instructions and turned the uniforms over to Heydrich.

The chief of the S.D. chose as the man to carry out the operation a young S.S. secret‐service veteran by the name of Alfred Helmut Naujocks.

This was not the first of such assignments given this weird individual nor would it be the last. Early in March of 1939, shortly before the [Fascist] occupation of Czechoslovakia, Naujocks, at Heydrich’s instigation, had busied himself running explosives into Slovakia, where they were used, as he later testified, to “create incidents.”

Alfred Naujocks was a typical product of the S.S.–Gestapo, a sort of intellectual gangster. He had studied engineering at Kiel University, where he got his first taste of brawling with anti[fa]; on one occasion he had his nose bashed in by Communists. He had joined the S.S. in 1931 and was attached to the S.D. from its inception in 1934.

Like so many other young men around Heydrich he dabbled in what passed as intellectual pursuits in the S.S.—“history” and “philosophy” especially while rapidly emerging as a tough young man (Skorzeny was another) who could be entrusted with the carrying out of the less savory projects dreamed up by Himmler and Heydrich.*

On October 19, 1944, Naujocks deserted to the Americans and at Nuremberg a year later made a number of sworn affidavits, in one of which he preserved for history the account of the “incident” which Hitler used to justify his attack on Poland.

On or about August 10, 1939, the chief of the S.D., Heydrich, personally ordered me to simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz near the Polish border [Naujocks related in an affidavit signed in Nuremberg November 20, 1945] and to make it appear that the attacking force consisted of Poles. Heydrich said: “Practical proof is needed for these attacks of the Poles for the foreign press as well as for German propaganda.” […]

My instructions were to seize the radio station and to hold it long enough to permit a Polish‐speaking German who would be put at my disposal to broadcast a speech in Polish. Heydrich told me that this speech should state that the time had come for conflict between Germans and Poles […] Heydrich also told me that he expected an attack on Poland by Germany in a few days.

I went to Gleiwitz and waited there fourteen days […] Between the 25th and 31st of August, I went to see Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, who was then nearby at Oppeln. In my presence, Mueller discussed with a man named Mehlhorn* plans for another border incident, in which it should be made to appear that Polish soldiers were attacking German troops […] Mueller stated that he had 12 to 13 condemned criminals who were to be dressed in Polish uniforms and left dead on the ground of the scene of the incident to show they had been killed while attacking. For this purpose they were to be given fatal injections by a doctor employed by Heydrich. Then they were also to be given gunshot wounds. After the incident members of the press and other persons were to be taken to the spot of the incident […]

Mueller told me he had an order from Heydrich to make one of those criminals available to me for the action at Gleiwitz. The code name by which he referred to these criminals was “Canned Goods.”⁹

While Himmler, Heydrich and Mueller, at Hitler’s command, were arranging for the use of “Canned Goods” to fake an excuse for [Fascist] aggression against Poland, the Fuehrer made his first decisive move to deploy his armed forces for a possibly bigger war. On August 19—another fateful day—orders to sail were issued to the [Kriegsmarine].

Twenty‐one submarines were directed to put out for positions north and northwest of the British Isles, the pocket battleship Graf Spee to depart for waters off the Brazilian coast and her sister ship, the Deutschland, to take a position athwart the British sea lanes in the North Atlantic.†

[…]

Having convinced the German people (and of this the writer can testify from personal observation) that the Poles had rejected the Fuehrer’s generous peace offer, there remained only the concocting of a deed which would “prove” that not Germany but Poland had attacked first.

For this last shady business, it will be remembered, the Germans, at Hitler’s direction, had made careful preparation.* For six days Alfred Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on the German radio station there.

The plan had been revised. S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as “casualties”—this last delectable part of the operation had, as we have seen, the expressive code name “Canned Goods.” There were to be several such faked “Polish attacks” but the principal one was to be on the radio station at Gleiwitz.

At noon on August 31 [Naujocks related in his Nuremberg affidavit] I received from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8’o clock that evening. Heydrich said: “In order to carry out this attack report to Mueller for Canned Goods.” I did this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive but completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the gun wounds but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes.

We seized the radio station, as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter,* fired some pistol shots and left.†⁷⁹

Berlin that evening was largely shut off from the outside world, except for outgoing press dispatches and broadcasts which reported the Fuehrer’s “offer” to Poland and the German allegations of Polish “attacks” on German territory.

I tried to get through on the telephone to Warsaw, London and Paris but was told that communications with these capitals were cut. Berlin itself was quite normal in appearance. There had been no evacuation of women and children, as there had been in Paris and London, nor any sandbagging of storefront windows, as was reported from the other capitals.

Toward 4 A.M. on September 1, after my last broadcast, I drove back from Broadcasting House to the Adlon Hotel. There was no traffic. The houses were dark. The people were asleep and perhaps—for all I knew—had gone to bed hoping for the best, for peace.

Hitler himself had been in fine fettle all day. At 6 P.M. on August 31 General Haider noted in his diary, “Fuehrer calm; has slept well […] Decision against evacuation [in the west] shows that he expects France and England will not take action.”*

Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr in OKW and one of the key anti‐Nazi conspirators, was in a different mood. Though [the Fascist bourgeoisie] was carrying Germany into war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedly sworn to prevent by getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy in being now that the moment for it had arrived.

Later in the afternoon Gisevius had been summoned to OKW headquarters by Colonel Oster. This nerve center of Germany’s military might was humming with activity. Canaris drew Gisevius down a dimly lit corridor. In a voice choked with emotion he said:

“This means the end of Germany.”⁸¹

The choice of Gleiwitz (Gliwice) for a staged assault was not aleatory. In particular, Polish nationalists had unintentionally made the Third Reich’s claims easier to believe with some provocative actions earlier that year. Quoting Peter Polak‐Springer’s ‘Jammin’ with Karlik’: The German–Polish ‘Radio War’ and the Gleiwitz ‘Provocation’, 1925–1939:

In an effort to stem the tide of popular defection to [the Third Reich], to counter [its] propaganda’s aims of demoralizing the public on the Polish side of the border, and also to deliver a response to German radio’s irredentist aggression, the PRK [Polish Radio Katowice] promoted its own muscle‐flexing gestures.

While claiming to be reading from a letter sent by a fan in occupied Czechoslovakia during one of his broadcasts, Ligón announced that ‘it was better to fall in battle than to become a part of the Protectorate’, thus dismissing the option of also surrendering to Germany.⁷¹

His broadcasts did much to convey the message that war with the Third Reich was imminent, and that Poland should prepare for this. From informing the public that [the Third Reich’s] propaganda on Danzig is ‘already a war game’, to holding a fund‐raiser for the Polish military forces during August of 1939, ‘Karlik’ made it quite clear that war was to come.⁷²

And he did this in a confident and high‐spirited manner, warning the [German Fascists] to ‘get your behinds ready [for punishment]’, and that ‘they [the Germans] should just come and we will tear out their bloody and crusty claws’.⁷³

He even made gestures in the direction of Poland’s making the first move. Referring to the fortifications the [German Fascists] were building on their side of the border during this time, Ligón commented that this was ‘so that they will be able to hide their behinds when we come’.⁷⁴

When the Germans expressed their annoyance with such statements, Polish officials accused them of not being able to take a joke. According to the Grażyńskiite daily newspaper, Polska Zachodnia, ‘how tense must the nerves of the “fuehrers” [sic] be if they are bothered even by humour and laughs’.⁷⁵

If Ligón could always excuse his statements as mere jokes, the actors of Grażyński’s highhanded militant ceremonies held at the border on the eve of the war certainly could not. Since coming into power, the voivode had been holding rallies of this nature usually several times a year to praise and commemorate both the second and third Polish Silesian insurgencies against Germany after World War I, and proudly display his paramilitary force, the ‘Insurgent Union’ (Związek Powstańców, ZP), largely made up of the veteran fighters of these uprisings.⁷⁶

During the first decade after the partition, the bombastic militant character of these stirred much uproar in the Provinz, and even raised fears among ordinary locals that the Poles were going to invade. Eventually, such rallies became a commonplace ‘tradition’ and hardly drew attention from the German media. This changed in the last year before the war, when the [Reich’s] propaganda bureau was searching for any ‘evidence’ to support its propaganda of Polish aggression.

Surely aware of this, in the summer of 1939, Grażyński, the ZP, local administrators, and units of regular soldiers nevertheless staged several of these official gestures of military aggression and open irredentism. In early June of 1939, the voivode himself presided over the unveiling of a statue of the insurgent in Ruda Śląska (Friedrichsdorf) about 220 yards from the border.

As was common for these statues, a number of which been erected around the border area since the late 1920s, this one pointed to the German side of the border as a public reminder of Poland’s still unfulfilled irredentist mission. During this ceremony, which the PRK broadcast over the airwaves, and at which units of the ZP and also the Polish army surrounded Grażyński, the latter vowed that ‘what the heroes of the third insurgency did not complete will be finished by us’ — in other words, the seizure of western Upper Silesia by military force.⁷⁷

Such statements of the voivode, had been repeated for years and had become quite banal by this time, as were other ‘invented traditions’ that were officially observed that summer, including the unveiling of another statue of the insurgent at the end of June in the border village of Boruszowice, a monument that was 33 feet high and clearly visible from the German side.⁷⁸

In addition, in mid‐August, the ZP staged their annual ‘March to the Oder’, a march from Poland’s border with Germany to that with Czechoslovakia (this time including the Teschen/Zaolzia area that the Polish state had annexed in October of 1938), to commemorate the second insurgency of August 1919 with warmongering militancy.⁷⁹ Indeed, the German media had a field day exposing these rallies under provocative headlines such as ‘the insurgents want to “take back” Silesia — the agitation has made Poland crazy’.⁸⁰

This [Fascist] propaganda on Poland’s intention to capture all of the German eastern provinces up to the Oder River inadvertently gave the well‐known Gleiwitz ‘provocation’ on the last day before the war’s outbreak at least some foundation of logic. The attack on the newly built relay station, with its awe‐aspiring 361‐foot‐high wooden broadcasting tower, had been orchestrated by the SS, which dressed up its agents and Polish‐minority members, who were concentration camp prisoners, in Polish military uniforms.

However, the German media’s account of the event strove to give it credibility by linking it to Grażyńskiite irredentism towards western Upper Silesia. And so, the official accounts reported that ‘bands of the “Insurgent Union”’ accompanied by regular soldiers had performed the deed.⁸¹ Having broadcast official rallies commemorating the Polish Silesian insurgencies of 1919–1921, along with other propaganda that lauded Poland’s taking of all of Upper Silesia by force, the PRK had helped to make a Polish attack on the Provinz at least conceivable.

The heated military muscle‐flexing that both German and Polish radios interactively promoted on the airwaves in the last months before the war likewise provided the [Third Reich] with a suitable atmosphere to stage this final propaganda event to legitimate the invasion of Poland.

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 31).

1923: The Fascists invaded Corfu.
1932: The Fascist cruiser Bolzano was launched at Genoa.
1933: Werner von Blomberg received the rank of Generaloberst.
1935: In an attempt to stay out of the growing tensions concerning the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan, Washington passed the first of its Neutrality Acts.
1936: The Fascist submarine Iride attacked British destroyer HMS Havock off Spain, and HMS Havock responded with depth charges, but neither incurred any damage. On the other hand, the Battle of the Sierra Guadalupe ended in a tactical Nationalist victory, and a Nationalist radio broadcast from Seville announced the executions of sixty‐seven miners at Rio Tinto for supplying Republican forces with munitions. Coincidentally, an explosion at a mine in Bochum killed twenty‐nine workers. The Japanese Navy Kanoya Air Group, based in Taiwan, launched nine Type 96 G3M2 bombers to attack Guangzhou.
1938: Winston Churchill suggested that if United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union collectively asserted pressure on the Third Reich, Berlin might abandon its claims for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, yet he was unable to persuade fellow British politicians! Aside from that, the Fascists commissioned Aviere into service, and Akagi completed her modernization, emerging with the three flight decks removed. In their place was a single flight deck running nearly the length of the ship, and aircraft capacity increased from sixty‐one to ninety‐one.
1939: Berlin made an offer to London: the Third Reich would not risk war if Poland was willing to turn over Danzig and a small section of the Polish Corridor, and Poland was to allow a plebiscite for the remainder of the Polish Corridor in the near future; British Ambassador in Germany Nevile Henderson expressed that the United Kingdom, while desiring peace, could not sacrifice Poland to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, Henderson continued to press Poland to send a delegation to the Third Reich in a last attempt to negotiate peace over Danzig and the Polish Corridor. When Polish Ambassador in Germany Józef Lipski attempted to send Henderson's message to Poland later in the evening, he found that the Fascists had cut telephone and telegraph communications to Poland.

In the Kingdom of Italy, Galeazzo Ciano sent the United Kingdom and France a secret message noting that Kingdom of Italy would not fight should the Third Reich start a war over Poland, and Fascist official Hermann Göring hosted British Ambassador Nevile Henderson and Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus at his home in Berlin for tea between 1700 and 1900 hours, during which the latter two made a last attempt to broker peace, but Berlin still formally ordered the Fascist invasion of Poland, and made specific instructions for Wehrmacht troops on the western border to avoid conflict with the United Kingdom, France, and the Low Countries. Lastly, the Imperialists lost their 23rd Infantry Division at Nomonhan.
1940: At 0206 hours, Fascist submarine U‐59 sank British ship Bibury, killing the entire crew of thirty‐eight and one gunner. At 0615 hours, Fascist submarine U‐38 sank British ship Har Zion; thirty‐three died but somebody survived (rescued by Polish destroyer Blyskawica on the next day). Northwest of Ireland, Fascist submarine U‐46 sank Belgian passenger ship Ville de Hasselt, but the entire crew survived on four lifeboats. Before noon, two hundred Fascist bombers attacked Essex; № 56 Squadron RAF shot down one bomber but lost four fighters to Fascist escort fighters from III./ZG26 and III./JG26. Debden, North Weald, Eastchurch, Dietling (strafed by fighters), Croydon (bombed by Bf 109 fighter‐bombers of Erprobungsgruppe 210), and Hornchurch were all attacked in the morning. In the afternoon, the Fascists reattacked Hornchurch, destroying two Spitfire fighters on the ground but at the cost of five Bf 109 fighters. At 1800 hours, the Fascists bombed Biggin Hill from low level, destroying two of the three remaining hangars, cutting telephone lines, and destroying the operations room. On this day, the Luftwaffe lost fifty‐six fighters and twenty‐nine bombers. After sundown, the Fascists bombed Liverpool for the fourth consecutive night; other cities received bombs, too.
1941: Axis bombers attacked Alexandria, Egypt, killing two British Royal Navy officers but otherwise doing little to no damage to ships and port facilities, which were the primary targets. The Wehrmacht also lost the Battle of Loznica to Serbian paramilitary forces.
1942: Berlin ordered Wilhelm List to launch a major offensive to gain the Caucasus region in southern Russia, and tanks from the 4th Panzer Army reached the Stalingrad–Morozovsk railway on Stalingrad’s outskirts. Hans‐Joachim Marseille shot down two Hurricane fighters during the morning sortie over El Alamein, Egypt at 1003 and 1004 hours. In the afternoon sortie, he shot down a Spitfire fighter over Alam Halfa, Libya at 1825 hours. His score by the end of the day stood at 104. Axis and British tanks meanwhile engaged in combat near Alam el Halfa, Egypt, reaching no conclusion by nightfall as the British refused to fight in open terrain as the Axis wanted. The Axis broke off the attack at sundown after losing twenty‐two tanks.
1943: Berlin authorized limited withdrawals in Ukraine, and Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein received Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. The Axis submarine U‐703 arrived at Narvik, Norway and dropped off four survivors of the Soviet freighter Dekabrist.
1944: In the early morning hours between 0300 and 0630 hours, German Air Force III K/G3 launched twenty V‐1 flying bombs with Gloucester, England as the target. Only eight got across and over the coast and six of these fell to earth in Suffolk and the other two in Essex. One of the bombs injured seven people in Suffolk near to Harleston. One bomb brought down by a fighter near the coast impacted near Whitstable in Kent seriously injuring four. One of the Heinkel bombers flown by Unteroffizier Lorenz Gruber crashed at Vossenberg in Belgium on the return flight, all the crew perished. This was the final operation of the of the month by the aircraft of III K/G3, they had flown 228 sorties for the loss of three aircraft, a better return from the previous month. As well, the Wehrmacht disarmed two divisions of Slovakian resistance fighters at Presov, Czechoslovakia.
1945: Tatsunosuke Ariizumi suicided aboard submarine I‐401 by taking a pistol to his mouth at 0420 hours. At 0500 hours, this submarine lowered its naval ensign while in Sagami Wan. Nobukiyo Nambu, the submarine’s commanding officer, secretly ordered his signal officer to burn the flag to prevent Allied capture.

(Mirror.)

The passing of the Mental Deficiency Act serves as a direct connection between British eugenics biopower and that of the [Third Reich’s] eugenics program. Whereas British eugenics shifted from class and race to feeblemindedness, the [Third Reich’s] eugenics program, aimed at Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), focused first on those with physical or mental disabilities and then extended to a racialized eugenics that targeted non‐Aryans. While [Fascist] sterilization laws were modeled after the American eugenics program, the language to describe the need for such laws has roots in the British eugenics rhetoric of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.³⁸

Much like British eugenics, such rhetoric predates the formal proposal, or, in the case of the [Third Reich], implementation, of a eugenics program, but nevertheless creates the culture for such a proposal to be made. The defining factors of these groups were couched in a scientific rhetoric that both emulated British eugenics and embodies power/knowledge as biopower.

In the 1920 book that coined the term “life unworthy of living,” Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (The Permission to Destroy life Unworthy of Life), the authors, lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, made claims to scientific authority in their justification of killing those deemed “incurable idiots.” Hoche argues, “the physician has no doubt about the hundred‐percent certainty of correct selection [and] proven scientific criteria” of his actions regarding the killing of “a mentally dead person.”³⁹

The claim to authority is defined by criteria that are created by the very people using this authority, thus perpetuating that authority: couched in claims of certainty, questioning the doctor’s authority on this account would be to question a doctor’s authority as a doctor.

[…]

Claims for national health justified the power of scientific and medical discourse to ensure this health, which allowed for the creation of further knowledge to expand the powers of this very discourse. Thus, classificatory systems derived from biological claims of authority, based largely on what was seen in Britain, became central to the [Third Reich’s] eugenics rhetoric.

The creation of the Nuremberg Laws, for instance, has roots in the same biological classification seen in early British eugenics regarding class distinctions; when situated historically as a response to the economic crisis of the 1930s, these roots are even more pronounced. Moreover, the shift to expand eugenics from those deemed mentally deficient to include Jews (and eventually others) demonstrates the deliberate blurring of biological difference to justify the segregation and extermination of any group deemed unfit by the dominating party.

Again, power (eugenics as policy) is determined by the very knowledge (eugenic claims to a science of difference) that justifies its existence and recreates this knowledge (the expansion of such claims of difference). The Nuremberg Laws, then, continued and expanded the eugenics rhetoric that empowered the medical and legal communities.

The Laws, which controlled the sexual and marital activity of Jews and Germans, prohibiting the mixing of “races,” categorized Jewishness as strictly biological (dismissing conversion or religious activity) and traced back Jewish blood through heritage lines, modeled after Galton’s own work.

Creating such hereditary hierarchies and divisions justified policies and the power to regulate them, which allowed for the creation of further hierarchies — such as the Untermensch, with connections to Galton’s “residuum” — and the perpetuation of this power that continues to create knowledge to justify itself.

Quoting Gerwin Strobl’s The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, page 88:

Other aspects of racial policy provided more promising evidence. In November 1937 the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung acquainted its readership with the life and work of Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics.¹⁰⁸ The article was part of the régime’s wider attempts to ensure at least tacit acceptance of its eugenic measures. But, even so, the mere existence of the article is remarkable. Here was an attempt to popularise a key [Reich] policy by invoking its British roots.

Perhaps just as striking is the fact that the experience of other nations went unmentioned. For in terms of more recent eugenic expertise, the record of other countries was more substantial than that of the United Kingdom. This was particularly true of the United States, which has the dubious distinction of leading the field here in the twenties and early thirties. [Fascist] racial scientists acknowledged their debt to America freely before 1933.¹⁰⁹

Yet it was Britain and Francis Galton that featured in the weekend paper of the German middle classes and not the United States. Invoking American precedent might have been counterproductive (nor would it have been popular with the leadership in the later thirties). Yet, once again, this is surely revealing about German attitudes to Britain — both within the party and outside it.

Hans Günther, the father of [Fascist] Rassenkunde, also concentrated on Britain in his attempt to popularise eugenics. He sought, for instance, to exploit British literature for his purposes. In particular, he attempted to demonstrate that Shakespeare had possessed an instinctive grasp of the issues involved, and pointed eagerly to the first Sonnets (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase […]’).

Only the Elizabethan poet Sir Thomas Overbury had put it more succinctly, he thought: ‘Myself I cannot chose, my wife I may,/ in that choice of her it much doth lye/ to mend myself in my posterity’.¹¹⁰ That was the best explanation, Günther suggested, of the Third Reich’s own aims.

And the fact that there was nothing like this in German literature, with its familiar refrain about the universal brotherhood of men, added to the glow of the British example. The SS newspaper had reached similar conclusions: ‘This happy breed of men’, which Shakespeare had extolled, was the result not of nature but ‘of deliberate breeding’.¹¹¹

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Click here for events that happened today (August 30).

1940: The Second Vienna Award reassigned the territory of Northern Transylvania from the Kingdom of Romania to the Kingdom of Hungary.
1941: The Third Reich and the Kingdom of Romania signed the Tighina Agreement, a treaty regarding administration issues of the Transnistria Governorate.
1942: The Battle of Alam el Halfa commenced.
1945: The Axis occupation of Hong Kong came to an end. (Coincidentally, General Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Air Force Base while the Allied Control Council, governing Germany after World War II, came into being.)
1954: Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, Fascist sympathizer, expired.

In general Gauleiters were subject to the authority of the occupying army. However, in August 1940, [Berlin] issued a decree granting full civil control to Wagner and Bürckel. Therefore, the two administrators of Alsace and Moselle possessed virtually unrestricted civil powers, and essentially were responsible only to Hitler himself. The two administrators held similar positions but their personalities and methods differed significantly (Iung et al., 2012).

Wagner, a WWI veteran, was of the view that the Wehrmacht and the party would be the means by which the local youth would complete their ideological and cultural assimilation. Bürckel, which was considered a “nazification” (Gleichschaltung) expert after being in charge of nazifying the Saar region, believed that assimilation through education was not possible and openly considered deporting part of the population and replacing them with German farmers. The course of the war on the Eastern Front favored Wagner’s approach.

The decision to grant German nationality to the populations of Alsace and Moselle was made on August 9, 1942. This made it possible to introduce military service in Alsace on August 25, 1942, and in Moselle on August 29, 1942. The administrators’ independence gave them broad discretion in implementing the policy. Wagner who felt that assimilation could be accomplished through military service, mobilized 20 cohorts in Alsace (1908–1927), while Bürckel only mobilized 14 in Moselle (1914–1927).⁹

In total 103,000 men from Alsace and 31,000 from Moselle were drafted into the Wehrmacht (MACVG, 1954). The process was otherwise identical in both departments (Iung et al., 2012). According to historians “the responsibility falls entirely on Gauleiter Wagner who did everything in his hand so that a maximum of Alsatians are incorporated in the Wehrmacht” (Riedweg, 1995, p.99), an explanation also put forward by the French National Statistical Institute after the War (INSEE, 1956, p.205).

[…]

In the meanwhile, life in Moselle went slowly back to normal. Street were renamed, all administrative managers were replaced, and public administration was reorganized. An urbanization plan that intended to merge small municipalities into larger ones was introduced and public transport was intensified. Large manifestations were frequent during the period. Measures were introduced to overcome potential shortages such as training days for business managers and incentives to farmers (Sary, 1983).

In parallel, Brückel proceeded to three waves of deportation of inhabitants not belonging to the “German people”, recent movers from other regions of France and inhabitants of French‐speaking municipalities.¹¹ Nonetheless, as summarized in Sary (1983), “during fours years, the occupying authorities worked with determination to earn the sympathy of the population of Moselle. A situation and activity of quasi‐normality was maintained in Metz, with an intense cultural life, several cultural events, and a supply of goods that was sufficient”.

[…]

The radical right resurfaced in the 1984 European parliament election when a list led by Jean‐Marie Le Pen, who claimed that the policies of both left‐ and right‐wing governments “betrayed popular trust”, received 11% of the vote. Up to that point, the radical right‐wing had campaigned with very limited success. In 1965 Jean‐Louis Tixier‐Vignancour received 5% of the votes on a platform to keep Algeria French, while in 1974 Le Pen only received 0.8% of the vote and did not run in 1981.

The success of the radical right was confirmed in the 1988 Presidential election with 14% of the vote. In his campaign, Le Pen wondered out loud “why [mainstream candidates] would do tomorrow what they did not know how to do yesterday”. The radical right has had a presence in every presidential election since.

Electoral participation was systematically lower in Alsace and Moselle than the rest of France until the 1980s. Since then, these regions have been strongholds of the radical right, where its share of the vote is well above the national average in every election. In 1988, Le Pen received 21% of the valid ballots in Alsace and Moselle, 47% more than the national average.

In 1995, Le Pen received the highest share of votes in the annexed departments out of the 101 departments in France (66% more than the average). In the elections from 2002 to 2017, the radical right’s vote share exceeded the national average by between 3 and 8 percentage points (22 to 41% above average).

[…]

Recall that in 1969 there was no radical right‐wing candidate. The results indicate that Wehrmacht draft eligibility is a powerful predictor of abstention in the 1965, 1969, and 1974 elections (Panel B). In later elections (after 1995) an increase in eligibility is associated to an increase in radical right‐wing support (Panel A).

The coefficients for 1995 and 2002 (Columns [4] and [5] of Panel A) are of similar magnitude as the early abstention coefficients. The effects in subsequent elections are positive, but fail to reach any conventional level of significance. The interplay between the effects is also noteworthy. When the coefficient on radical‐right wing support is positive and significant, it is negative for abstention, while when the effect is not statistically significant, it is positive for abstention.

[…]

Since women in Alsace and Moselle were not conscripted, being born in 1908–1913 in Alsace should not make any difference in political preferences. The results, presented in Panels A and B of Table A.4, show that women born during the 1908–1913 period do not differ neither with respect to political trust, nor in their sympathy of the radical right. […] Previous research has demonstrated how beliefs can be transmitted from parents to children and persist in environments that are different than the ones they were developed in Guiso et al. (2006).

To test whether this intergenerational transmission mechanism holds, I construct the likelihood that an individual’s father or grandfather was born during the 1908–1913 and 1914–1927 periods, using the 1962 to 2011 censuses organized by INSEE (and available on IPUMS‐I).²⁹ I then estimate Eq. (11) for the full sample of respondents. A separate coefficient is estimated for individuals affected directly, via their father, or via their grandfather(s).

The results are presented in Column (1) of Table 9. Two findings stand out: Firstly, both individuals whose father was eligible and those whose grandfather(s) was eligible display reduced political trust.

Secondly, transmission from the first to the second generation, as captured by the ratio of the two coefficients, is very strong: The effect for the second generation (−0.6) is statistically indistinguishable of the effect for the first (−0.536), while the effect for the third generation (−0.218) represents 35% of the effect for the second one (𝑝‐value=0.17, not statistically significant). These results point towards slow‐moving attitudes that are inherited from past generations.³⁰

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 29).

1904: Werner Theodor Otto Forßmann, Axis scientist, was born.
1923: Rome delivered a seven‐point ultimatum to Greece demanding satisfaction over the recent murder of Fascist Italy’s General Tellini, with Athens given twenty‐four hours to agree to pay fifty million lire reparations, a full inquiry, execution of the killers, an official apology, and a funeral and military honours for the victims.
1937: Imperial aircraft damaged Chinese gunboat Chuyou at Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, China, and Settsu, which had ferried a battalion of Sasebo 4th Special Naval Landing Force from the Empire of Japan, disembarked the troops onto light cruiser Natori and destroyer Yakaze off Shanghai.
1938: While the Third Reich’s head of state toured the Westwall defenses in western Germany, General Wilhelm Adam warned Berlin that the régime would be unable to defend against an invasion by France for more than three days should the Third Reich deploy most of its forces for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. The head of state grew furious at Adam, who would retire from service at the year’s end. Apart from that, the Imperialists captured Tianjia, Anhui, China.
1939: The Third Reich’s head of state summoned the three leading representatives of the Reich’s armed forces — Walther von Brauchitsch, Hermann Göring, and Erich Raeder together with senior Army commanders — to his mountain villa at Obersalzberg in southern Germany, where he announced the details of the recently signed German–Soviet nonaggression treaty, the plan to isolate and destroy Poland, and the formation of a buffer state in conquered Poland against the Soviets. As well, Berlin expressed through the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus that the German Reich only desired Danzig and a small section of the Polish Corridor, while a plebiscite should be held in the near future to determine the fate of the remainder of the Polish Corridor.
1940: Ribbentrop and Count Ciano met the Romanian and Hungarian Ministers in Vienna. At 1500 hours and 1915 hours, the Fascists launched large groups of fighters in an attempt to draw out British fighters, which were initially successful yet very quickly Air Vice Marshal Keith Park saw through the this attempt and recalled the fighters; only nine fighters were lost on either side. On this day, RAF leadership decided to stop using Defiant turret fighters as daylight interceptors as they were no match for enemy fighters. Overnight, Fascist bombers attacked Portsmouth, Tyneside, Hartlepool, Swansea, Manchester, and Liverpool; decoy fires were lit in the countryside to lure Fascist bombing, which were partially successful.
1941: The Axis captured Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, from the Soviets.
1942: The 4th Panzer Army broke through Soviet lines fifteen miles south of Stalingrad, and the Axis submarine RO‐33 damaged Australian troopship Marita in the Gulf of Papua south of Australian Papua at 1200 hours; Australian destroyer HMAS Arunta counterattacked and sank RO‐33, killing all forty‐two aboard. During the day, the Empire of Japan’s 144th Regiment attacked Australian troops at Isurava along the Kokoda Track in Papua. To the east, 769 Axis Special Naval Landing Force troops landed at Waga Waga on the coast of Milne Bay; the Axis cruiser and nine destroyers that covered the landing bombarded the Australian airfield at Gili Gili before returning to Rabaul, New Britain, causing little damage. Before dawn, Axis bombers attacked the village of Blackhall Colliery in County Durham, England, and the Axis also assaulted Swindon and Brighton. An Axis torpedo boat seriously damaged British destroyer HMS Eridge two miles off the Egyptian coast, slaughtering five folk.
1943: Denmark scuttled most of its navy; the Third Reich dissolved the Danish government.
1944: The Slovak National Uprising took place as 60,000 Slovak troops turn against the Axis.

It is common for Shoah scholars to briefly note that Jehovah’s Witnesses (often known then less precisely as Bible Students) were among the many victims whom the Third Reich targeted for persecution, but it is unusual for anybody to elaborate on the oppression that they suffered. Put simply, Jehovah’s Witnesses have long had (and still have) an aversion to serving any governments directly and see it as incompatible with serving the Almighty. Because of this disloyalty, the Fascists detested them. Quoting Prof. Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, ch. 2:

By far the largest group of religious prisoners in the mid‐1930s was Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, having pledged their allegiance to God, resisted the total claim of [Fascism]. Their persecution had started early in the Third Reich and soon intensified, after they refused to serve in the new German conscript army, continued to proselytize after their religious association was banned, and distributed critical leaflets.

The régime tried to stamp out such defiance, with some paranoid [Fascist] officials picturing the Witnesses as a mass movement in cahoots with Communists (in reality, they only had some twenty‐five thousand members). Several thousand believers were arrested in the mid‐1930s. Most ended up in regular prisons, but others were taken to the KL.

At the height of repression in 1937–38, more than ten percent of all men in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were Jehovah’s Witnesses. So large was this prisoner group that the Camp SS gave them a special insignia: the purple triangle.³⁰⁵

Prisoners with the purple triangle endured great hardship. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the daily targets for every kind of persecution, terror, and brutality,” one of them wrote in 1938, not long after his release. Some abuse was ideologically motivated, with Camp SS men mocking their victims as “heaven clowns” and “paradise birds.” Asked after the war why he had buried one of the prisoners up to the neck, the former report leader in Sachsenhausen replied: “He was a conscientious objector. As such he had no right to life, in my view.”³⁰⁶

What really enraged the SS men, however, was not the prisoners’ religious beliefs but their “obstinate” behavior, as Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to carry out certain orders and even tried to convert other prisoners.³⁰⁷ The leaders of the passive resistance were hit with great venom.

One of them, the miner Johann Ludwig Rachuba, was punished by the Sachsenhausen SS between 1936 and 1938 with more than 120 days strict detention, more than one hundred lashes, four hours hanging from a post, and three months in the punishment company (he later died in the camp).

Such brute tactics rarely worked, however, as many prisoners saw the torture as a test of their faith. Only later in the war did SS officials become shrewder, realizing that many Jehovah’s Witnesses made reliable workers as long as they were not deployed in ways that conflicted directly with their beliefs.³⁰⁸

Pictured: The uniform for a concentration camp inmate who was a Jehovah’s Witness.

The […] prisoner population in Moringen was more diverse. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up a sizable proportion already in 1935, reflecting the high level of female activists, and during 1937 they became the largest prisoner group; by November, around half of the protective custody prisoners were Jehovah’s Witnesses.³³² […] Upon arrival in Lichtenburg, Erna Ludolph—a thirty‐year‐old Jehovah’s Witness from Lübeck—immediately realized that the premises were much bigger than Moringen.

Soon, Ludolph and the others saw further differences, almost all for the worse. As an SS camp, Lichtenburg was run along far more military lines, with roll calls in the corridors and the yard. Leisure time was cut back and forced labor extended by about two hours. The SS also made far greater use of Kapos.

Above all, the women endured harder punishment and occasional violence. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up the largest prisoner group, and conditions were particularly grim for those, like Erna Ludolph, who were isolated as “incorrigible.” One day in 1938, after these women refused to line up to a radio speech by Hitler, the guards attacked them and sprayed them with high‐pressure water hoses.³³⁶

[Click here for more.]

“In the middle of May 1939,” Erna Ludolph recalled after the war, “we Jehovah’s Witnesses, all 400 to 450 of us, were brought by truck with the first mass transports to Ravensbrück.” Expecting the number of female prisoners to grow further, SS officials had decided sometime in 1938 to establish an entirely new camp for women.

After plans to build it near Dachau fell through, attention soon turned to a secluded site by the town of Fürstenberg, some fifty miles or so north of Berlin. Once a small detachment of men from Sachsenhausen had erected the first barracks and buildings in the early months of 1939, the new camp, called Ravensbrück, was ready.³³⁸

The prisoners’ living conditions deteriorated after the move from Lichtenburg, just as they had done after the prior move from Moringen. “Everything escalated to an unbelievable degree,” Erna Ludolph recalled. Roll calls in Ravensbrück were more torturous, forced labor more exhausting, punishment more severe, and life more rigid, with women now wearing identical dresses with blue and gray stripes, as well as an apron and headscarf.³³⁹

Still, terror remained gender‐specific, as the Camp SS continued to reserve its most violent abuse for men. Although flogging was introduced as an official punishment in Ravensbrück, some other excesses, including hanging from a post, were still absent. Instead of brutal assaults, the local SS relied more heavily on guard dogs, because Himmler believed that women would be particularly scared of them.³⁴⁰

Jeohvah’s Witnesses behaved differently from their fellow inmates. Chapter 10:

Many inmates drew strength from religious devotion. Some groups formed close communities of faith, dividing almost everything; in some camps, for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses evenly split all the money and provisions sent by relatives. What is more, religious practices provided a lasting link to their pre‐camp lives. And it helped them to find meaning in their suffering, seeing the camp as the culmination of centuries of persecution, or as a divine test of faith, or as penance for the sins of mankind.⁵⁰

[…]

A hard core among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, remained firm in their refusal to carry out any work related to the [Axis] war effort. The SS fury about their obstinacy, which reached all the way to Himmler, hit these prisoners hard and several lost their lives.²³¹

Of especial interest to me are Jehovah’s Witnesses who were legally ‘Jewish’. From what I can tell, these people were rare. For example, Kim Wünschmann’s Before Auschwitz says on page 208 that of Buchenwald’s 1,963 Jewish prisoners on April 19, 1939, only one (yes, one) was a Bible Student, but I found a few more examples.

As implied in this next quotation, Jehovah’s Witnesses who were legally ‘Jewish’ had to wear a yellow upwards triangle with a purple (or violet) downwards triangle superimposed on it. From Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard’s The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933–1945, pages 211–2:

Rachel Sacksini, a Dutch Witness who was of Jewish extraction, was arrested in the Netherlands. She was first interned in the Dutch concentration camp at Westerbork (where many Jewish prisoners were being herded) and was scheduled to leave in a cattle car, but at the last moment she was put in a convoy to Bergen‐Belsen. Later evacuated to Beendorff and Malmö, Sweden, she returned to the Netherlands after the war, where she converted the wife and three daughters of a [Fascist] serving a prison term.

The authors questioned the Dutch Bethel to learn which type of triangle Jewish Jehovah’s Witnesses were assigned at the camps. After obtaining information from Jehovah’s Witnesses of Jewish origin who were imprisoned for years, he responded, “A Jewish woman I questioned said, ‘I was locked up with the Jews and wore a yellow triangle during my stay in the concentration camp.’ The Germans called her die jüdische Bibelforscherin (the Jewish Bible Student). A Jewish Witness said he wore the violet triangle during his internment at Sachsenhausen camp. On the other hand, he noted that the [Axis was] unaware of his Jewish origins, as he was arrested for being a Jehovah’s Witness.”

The scarcity of legally ‘Jewish’ Jehovah’s Witnesses had a good deal to do with the general infrequency of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Fascist concentration camps: of the approximately twenty thousand German Jehovah’s Witnesses who stayed active during the Fascist era, it may be surprising that only three thousand or so ever suffered imprisonment in the camps, over one thousand of whom perished therein… sigh… and that makes the rest of this entry even harder to write.

You see, there was another reason that many Jews (and supposed ‘Jews’) would have hesitated to become Jehovah’s Witnesses. A great deal of upper‐class Christians continued promoting anti‐Judaism throughout the 1930s, and the JW authorities were unexceptional. Quoting Prof. M. James Penton’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics under Persecution, pages 87–8:

Jehovah’s Witnesses — who are perhaps the most active proselytizers in Christendom — have always shown particular kindness to anyone who is a prospective convert. Only after someone has rejected their message do they become cold to that person. So it is quite possible that there were many instances of kindness to Jews by Jehovah’s Witnesses both outside and inside the concentration camps based on the assumption that they might become converts. Chu herself points out that the main concern of the Witnesses seems to have been to proselytize:

The Witnesses were known for sharing their Bible message with other prisoners. ‘Though gentile prisoners were forbidden to talk to us,’ said a Jewish woman in Lichtenburg, ‘these women never observed this regulation. They prayed for us as if we belonged to their family, and begged us to hold out.’ BBC reporter Bjorn Hallstrom said that in Buchenwald, Witnesses were punished for eight days because they ‘had not avoided the forbidden paths between the Jewish blocks:’ Frustrated by the Witnesses’ persistent resistance, the SS regularly announced in Sachsenhausen that prisoners caught talking to Witnesses would receive 25 strokes. Survivor Max Liebster recalls that the SS there isolated the Witnesses and declared their barracks off limits to other prisoners. In Melk, Polish survivor Joseph Kempler says he saw ‘a camp within a camp’ and was told that the SS kept the ‘purple triangles’ in it, dangerous prisoners because they taught the Bible.⁵⁹

Perhaps the best analysis of this subject was done in the early 1940s by Hebert Stroup,⁶⁰ who carried out his study mainly by associating with ordinary Jehovah’s Witnesses and participating in their activities. He carefully dissected the Witnesses’ thinking on many subjects, including their attitude toward Jews.

He said bluntly: ‘The Jews also are hated by the Witnesses. Although this feeling is common among them, it appears strange at first glance, inasmuch as the movement appeals to many Jews. But all who have joined “the Lord's organization” are precious in the sight of Jehovah and are fellow members of a special human group; thus, converted Jews are made welcome, often with the idea that they are “the chosen people.” The official literature terms the Jews outside the movement “blind” because they do not accept “the truth.”’

Regarding those Jews who did not become Witness converts, however, Stroup remarked: ‘Prevalent among the Witnesses is the notion that all Jews are rich. Even refugees who have escaped to this country from persecution abroad are believed to have brought “scads of money” with them. One Witness told me fantastic tales about the apparent luxury within some of the homes of Jewish refugees that he had visited. The affluence of the refugees, according to this Witness, is hidden from most people because they do not have the opportunity which he and his fellow workers have of visiting all kinds of homes.’

Because the Witnesses’ anti‐Semitism was based more on religious prejudice than racism, Stroup noted: ‘In spite of this generally unfavorable attitude [toward Jews], which is, indeed, sometimes shared by Jewish Witnesses themselves, the movement is able to satisfy its Jewish members, who find in its theology the natural, developed expression of essential Judaism.[’]⁶¹

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Hopefully it goes without saying that none of this justifies the Fascist abuse of thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses, some of whom no doubt still helped Jews (even if only for the wrong reasons), and credit where it is due, J.F. Rutherford backpedalled on his sympathies for the Third Reich in 1934, but his recommendation that German JWs continue working out in the open anyway did nothing to protect them from further oppression.

This has to have been the toughest article for me to write, because I’ll be honest, there are many Jehovah’s Witness practices and beliefs that I despise, and mentioning some of those in the 1930s is almost inevitably going to provoke somebody into accusing me of justifying the many torments and over one thousand deaths that JWs suffered under Fascism, but I did not want to put off the subject forever and I felt like I’d only be misleading you if I gave you an incomplete picture of the JW community’s relationship with Fascism, which was anything but straightforward.

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 28).

1934: Stockholm signed the Agreement concerning Payments in connection with Goods Transactions between the Two Countries, and Protocol, Agreement concerning the Execution of the German Transfer Moratorium in relation to Swedish Creditors, and Agreement concerning the Payment of Interest on Swedish Bonds of the Dawes, Young and Kreuger Loans at Berlin.
1936: Spanish Nationalist aircraft bombed Madrid for the first time.
1943: Reich authorities demanded that Danish authorities crack down on acts of resistance; they imposed martial law imposed on Denmark the next day. Meanwhile, Boris III of Bulgaria dropped dead.
1944: The Axis lost Marseille and Toulon to the Allies.

Quoting Yehuda Bauer’s ‘Sarny and Rokitno in the Holocaust: A Case Study of Two Townships in Wolyn (Volhynia)’ in The Shtetl: New Evaluations, pages 267–9:

The murder of the two communities took place in August 1942, on the twenty‐sixth for Rokitno and on the twenty‐seventh for Sarny. Characteristically, the order of the Generalkommissar of the Bezirk, in Lutzk, to liquidate all Jewish ghettoes within six weeks was issued after the murder in the two townships; it came on August 31, in the wake of a meeting of [Axis] officials in Lutzk on August 29–31. To act first, and confirm the decision to do so later, was a common [Axis] practice.

In Sarny, [Axis] and [collaborationist] policemen were supplemented by some 200 members of the Todt organization, which was charged with building and repairing, but was also used for murder actions against Jews. Prior to the mass murder, rumor spread that [an Axis] police station in the area, in Ostarky, was annihilated by partisans, who were reported to have killed 20 Germans.⁶⁸ If this indeed took place, it may have constituted an additional incentive for the [Axis] to annihilate the area’s ghettos.

In Sarny, a tragic discussion took place on the eve of the mass murder. A resistance group was created apparently at the very last minute. Consisting of former members of Zionist groups, together with refugee strongmen (shlegers), many probably with a criminal background, it included the head of the Jewish Police, Yonah Margalit, a former teacher in the Hebrew school. Together they organized themselves into three groups that were poised to burn the ghetto and enable people to escape to the nearby forests.⁶⁹ They had the blessing of Gershonok.

However, when the [Axis] concentrated forces in Sarny and the Jews became suspicious, the Judenrat’s secretary, Neumann, argued that he had received assurances from the acting Gebietskommissar of Sarny, Krökel, that no harm would befall the Jews. The potential rebels decided that they could not take upon themselves the responsibility of acting, and thereby sentencing the ghetto to death, if there was a reasonable chance that nothing would happen; the rebellion was aborted.⁷⁰

On and after August 24, the [Axis] concentrated all the Jews from the Sarny district in Sarny; some 14,000 Jews and 100 Roma […] were also brought in. Some three days of thirst and starvation followed, as the Jews were guarded by [anticommunists] armed to the teeth.⁷¹ There was a wooden structure in the enclosure, and the [Roma] and some Jews were kept inside.

On August 27, the Jews of Sarny were driven out of their homes and forced to join the others in the enclosure. The first to be taken out to be killed, on that day, were the recently arrived Rokitno Jews. Soon, automatic fire was heard from the nearby forest. Now there was no further doubt about the [Axis’s] intentions, and two members of the Sarny underground, Yosef Gendelman and the smith Tendler, who had managed to smuggle in his wire‐cutter, rushed to the fence and cut it.

At the same time [that] the [Roma] set fire to their barracks—the actions may have been coordinated—and in the ensuing commotion, while some 500–1,000 Jews escaped, about 2,500 were killed on the spot by automatic fire. The rest were then taken out to the forest and killed there. After the massacre, [Axis] and [collaborationist] police and members of the Todt organization searched Sarny and murdered Jews trying to hide. “Almost all the Christian population, Ukrainian as well as Polish, participated in killing the Jews.”⁷²

In Rokitno, there had been two roll calls of all the Jews (on March 12 and March 17, 1942) before the final liquidation, possibly in order to lull any suspicions on the part of the victims.⁷³ When the third roll call was ordered, for August 26, members of the Judenrat calmed the people by saying that after the assembly on a cattle market, near the railway, they would be sent home again.⁷⁴

The [Axis] prepared railway carriages to transport the Rokitno Jews to Sarny and kill them there. All came—contrary to the situation in Sarny, we don’t hear of people hiding. The roll call yielded 1,638 (some survivors say 1,631) present.⁷⁵ The [collaborationist] police, under the command of Oberwachmeister of the Gendarmerie Sokolowski, possibly a Polish Volksdeutscher from Silesia (or Berlin), guarded the assembled Jews, but they left one side of the square open, whether intentionally or not is not clear.⁷⁶

[Collaborative] militiamen from one of the battalions mentioned above then marched into positions near the square. According to a number of testimonies, there was also a Latvian unit.⁷⁷ A Jewish woman, Mindl Eisenberg (known as “Mindl Cossack” because of her physique and courage), saw this and screamed “Jews, they have come to kill us.”⁷⁸

The militia and the [Axis] gendarmes began shooting, and then a disorganized, panicked, mass attempt to escape ensued, in which hundreds managed to run to the adjoining forest—the estimates vary between 400 and 900. Many women with small children were among them, but of these, only a few managed to escape the pursuers.⁷⁹ Families were torn apart, and groups of Jews began wandering through the dense forests. In the shtetl, the rest, variously estimated at between 800 and 1,200, were herded into the cattle wagons.

Between 100 and 300 were killed on the spot. There are no German or Polish accounts, and the survivors could not reconcile their different impressions of the numbers involved.

(Emphasis added. All told, the Axis and its collaborators exterminated approximately fourteen thousand of Sarny’s Jews.)

I feel like I am only stating the obvious here, but I want to remind readers that my intention behind highlighting Christian anti‐Judaism is not to make contemporary Christians feel ashamed or guilty by association (especially if they already respect and cherish Judaism). Rather, historically many gentiles referred to their culturally specific variants of Christianity to justify their exploitation of Jews, theft of their belongings, or elimination of economic competition, thereby helping gentiles either stay in business or keep their jobs. An oppressor professing Christianity should be noted but never overstated.

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Click here for events that happened today (August 27).

1874: Carl Bosch, founder of I.G. Farben, was born.
1923: Somebody stopped a delegation inspecting the disputed border between Greece and Albania by massacring General Enrico Tellini and four of his companions, thereby triggering the Fascist assault on Corfu later that this month.
1939: Berlin responded to Rome’s message from the previous day, noting that it accepted the Kingdom of Italy’s inability to participate in direct fighting should a German–Polish war broke out, but it would very much appreciate political (by means of threatening to entering the war, thus tying down French troops on the French–Italian border) and economic (by offering Italian workers for German industry and agriculture) support. Berlin also responded to the message from French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier from the previous day, noting that the German Reich had no intention of fighting France, so if France was to attack it due to the German–Poland situation, it would be a war initiated by France, and the Reich could not be faulted for such a conflict; additionally, the Chancellery stressed that the Reich had no territorial demands on the German–French border. Meanwhile, Hermann Göring’s friend Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish national, attempted a parallel route to negotiate for peace.

Berlin announced that the annual NSDAP rally in Nürnberg and the upcoming Tannenberg memorial event were both canceled. As well, the government announced the start of food, footwear, textile, and coal rations. On the other hand, Luftwaffe Captain Erich Warsitz successfully took the prototype He 178 jet aircraft out of the Rostock‐Marienehe Airfield into the Baltic Sea coast’s air, thus making it the first aircraft to fly using a turbojet engine. In the East, however, the Imperialists’ 23rd Infantry Division attempted and failed to break out of the encircled village of Nomonhan, Mongolia Area, China.
1942: Admiral Scheer approached Port Dikson in northern Russia at 0105 hours, intending to attack the command center of the Soviet Northern Sea Route with a 180‐man landing party, not knowing the port was well defended with fifty NKVD troops, three hundred militia, two antitank guns, one antiaircraft gun, one 750mm howitzer, and large caliber coastal guns. As Admiral Scheer approached to bombard, Soviet flagship Dezhnev became disabled at 0145 hours (seven died), followed by Soviet ship Revolutionary. To Admiral Scheer’s surprise, 152mm coastal guns opened fire; although the Soviet coastal gun crews could not see through the thick smoke from Dezhnev and Revolutionary and could only fire in Admiral Scheer’s general direction, it was enough to force Admiral Scheer to break off the attack. At the end of the engagement, Port Dikson saw its radio station, oil depot, coal storage, and power station damaged or destroyed.

Apart from that, the Axis registered Polish Catholic priest Roman Sitko, formerly a rector of the theological seminary in Tarnów, Poland, into the Auschwitz concentration camp as prisoner number 61908, and the Axis turned a French tractor factory (previously owned by a Jew named Robert Rothschild) over to the Friedrich Krupp A.G. firm. On the other hand, the 16th Panzer Division, with too little fuel to move further, dug in north of Stalingrad to wait for the Reich’s 6th Army to catch up to reinforce its position. Sixteen miles south of Stalingrad, the 4th Panzer Division made slow progress due to heavy resistance near Lake Sarpa. Axis bombers attacked Leeds, England in the late hours of the day, lasting until the next day.

Axis submarine U‐156 sank British ship Clan MacWhirter north of Madeira island at 0100 hours; twelve died but seventy‐four did not. Axis submarine U‐511 attacked Allied convoy TAW‐15 with two torpedoes east of Haiti at 0629 hours, sinking British tanker San Fabian (26 dead, 33 survivors), Netherlandish tanker Rotterdam (10 dead, 37 survivors), and damaging U.S. tanker Esso Aruba. At 1348 hours, U‐517 sank U.S. passenger ship Chatham off Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada; fourteen died but 548 did not.

Lastly, eight Axis dive bombers escorted by twelve Zero fighters attacked the Gili Gili airfield at Milne Bay, but the Axis caused minimal damage there and it lost one aircraft to Australian Kittyhawk fighters. At 2000 hours, the Axis attacked Australian troops at Gama River on the Milne Bay coast, killing forty‐three and driving the Australians back. In land, along the Kokoda Track, the Axis made advances at Isurava and Australian 2/16th Battalion was dispatched from reserve to reinforce the defenses.
1943: Axis forces evacuated New Georgia Island in the Pacific Theater of Operations while the Luftwaffe in Crete razed the village of Vorizia to the ground.
1944: Georg von Boeselager, nobleman and Wehrmacht officer, died in battle. Oops!

Overall, Antonescu’s Armenian policy was both inconsistent and ambiguous. While the primary focus was upon Jews, the Antonescu régime persecuted Armenians, especially the Nansen Armenians [read: stateless Armenian refugees], primarily through restrictions on employment, real estate ownership, and conduct of business—although to a lesser extent than the Jews.

As an ultranationalist government, which aimed to construct a homogenous nation‐state (and to find a scapegoat for the threats posed by the revisionist neighbours, and for the problems of comparatively low participation of ethnic Romanians in the economy), Romanian official accusations against Armenians resembled some used by Turkish nationalists a few decades earlier, namely that they were disloyal to the state in favour of that dangerous eastern neighbour, the Soviet Union/Russia, that Armenian entrepreneurs took over vital sectors of the local economy, and sabotaged Romanianization by profiting from it and collaborating with the Jews.²⁰

The apparent contradictory nature of the anti‐Armenian accusations—that they belonged to the exploiting bourgeoisie and harboured pro‐Soviet sympathies—was nothing new among [the Axis’s] Romanian leaders (as well as among […] other [Axis] leaders), who did not seemed to be bothered by the contradictions of their antisemitic/racist worldviews.

Romanianization also resembled the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)’s and, later on, the Kemalists’ policy of creating a Muslim/Turkish bourgeoisie through the confiscation of property from Armenians and Greeks and redistribution of assets to deserving Muslim beneficiaries. Thus, CUP and Kemalist leaders tried to address the under‐representation of Muslim/Turkish and over‐representation of Christian minorities among urbanites and middle‐class entrepreneurs.²¹

However, as one of the smallest Christian minorities of [the Kingdom of] Romania—Armenians were mostly affiliated with the Gregorian and Catholic Churches—they were viewed as less threatening than the Jews and were not targeted for deportation and mass murder.²² Nonetheless, they and particularly the Nansen Armenians were swept up in the hostility towards non‐Romanians.

[…]

Antonescu’s main obsession and fear was the threat posed by the Soviet Union and communism, and any suspicion about a group’s sympathy for the USSR triggered his hostility towards that community.

This happened with certain of the Nansen Armenians. The intention of some Nansen Armenians to emigrate to Soviet Armenia—in 1940 and 1941, repatriation applications were submitted to the MAI and the Soviet Legation in Bucharest by 400 individuals (possibly 1,000 families by other sources) and a committee was formed to pursue this issue as a result of a rumour that the government would persecute them like the Jews³⁵—was interpreted by the Antonescu régime as ultimate proof of disloyalty to [the Kingdom of] Romania and of allegiance to the Soviet Union.

Romanian officials failed to understand the desire of some Armenians to escape their uncertain refugee status and live in their own republic, even if this meant relocation to a state with worrying domestic policies. The Soviet Union was nevertheless a state that promised equality to all its citizens and seemed to be the main international protector of Armenians.³⁶

The Antonescu régime ignored the fact that only a tiny minority of Armenian refugees wanted to emigrate to the Soviet Union and that native Armenians and most Nansen Armenians opposed the idea of such ‘repatriation’, publicly criticizing the organization advocating emigration.³⁷ For Antonescu it was important that, just like some Jews, especially from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940, certain Armenians wanted to live under the rule of its most threatening enemy, the Soviet Union.

While in the case of the former, their intention to return to their natal land and families took place during the war—accompanied by mass violence fostered by antisemitism, border changes, and rumours of war and domestic treason³⁸—the Armenians did not emigrate to the Soviet Union during the Antonescu régime.

In fact, as the Soviet troops approached Romania[n] borders (in late 1943 and early 1944), some wealthy Nansen Armenians planned to emigrate from [the Kingdom of] Romania to Egypt (via Turkey) in order to escape a future Soviet occupation and a [people’s republic].³⁹

Nevertheless, the mere discussion of potential emigration to the USSR and the submission of repatriation applications kept Nansen Armenians on Antonescu’s list of suspect groups under close surveillance.⁴⁰

[…]

While the régime spared Armenians from ‘too harsh and inhumane measures’ unlike […] towards the Jews, the hostility of Romanian officials towards Armenian businessmen continued.

During the 4 September 1943 government meeting, which debated various topics including the sugar industry, Ion Antonescu blamed minority tradesmen, including Armenians, for exploiting Romanian customers by selling them cheap sweets and thus making huge profits. According to Ion Antonescu, minority entrepreneurs speculated in the sugar produced from the sugar beet delivered by Romanian peasants, who received little benefit for their hard work.

Marshal I. Antonescu: The peasant cultivated sugar beet and bore all the risks and the sugar manufacturers and speculators are the ones who gain [the money]. Who are these speculators? […] They are not [ethnic] Romanians. In this way, the Romanian nation’s snag had been sucked away by certain foreigners who seized several economic fields, where they encountered little competition. There are a lot of Armenians, [insert slur here], Greeks and stinky [insert slur here] who opened sweet stores where they transform the sugar into dirty and tasteless candies […] That is why I am asking you to put this field under surveillance. All Armenians, all Greeks, the so‐called Macedonians […] are making commerce with sweets.⁵¹

As a highly urbanized and economically dynamic population, with a significant diaspora and international trade connections, Armenians were indeed over‐represented in the economy during that era. According to SSRCI’s data, Armenian entrepreneurs owned almost one per cent of [the Kingdom of] Romania’s industrial and commercial capital, while Armenians represented around 0.2 per cent of the country’s population.⁵² Armenians had an even larger share in specific economic fields, such as the textile industry (4.56 per cent) and the food industry (2.44 per cent).⁵³

[…]

Lacking ‘proper’ ethnicity, citizenship, or international protection, Nansen Armenians struggled not only with business and real estate interdictions, but also with labour restrictions.⁷¹ For instance, Cividian, a Nansen Armenian, managed to work legally only when the post‐Antonescu régime cancelled the xenophobic laws protecting ‘national labour’ even though he earned his college degree from the University of Iași in 1937.

‘I graduated from Iași [University and] in 1937 […] I was unemployed and I could not work. [Because of] the laws for the protection of national labour that functioned at that time […] We had Nansen passports […] not [real] passports, but Nansen identity cards. Therefore, we were foreigners.’⁷²

(Emphasis added in most cases. Click here for more.)

German profiteers also saw Nansen Armenians as a major economic threat to the Romanianization (or Aryanization, as they preferred to think of it) of the economy.

During the 13 February 1942 government meeting, Mihai Antonescu, the deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, agreed with German complaints about the (alleged) privileges enjoyed by their Armenian competitors and urged his subordinates to register them and keep them under surveillance. His position was backed by Titus Dragoș, the head of the main Romanianization agency, the Under‐Secretariat for Romanianization, Colonization, and Inventory (SSRCI).

M. Antonescu: Yes, there are some [businessmen] with Nansen passports. Here, the Germans are right. That means that besides the problem of [insufficient ethnic] Romanian presence in some companies, we face the issue of foreign elements, besides Jews and Germans, who infiltrated these companies […] I asked the heads of MEN [Ministry of National Economy] and SSRCI to study this problem […]

Titus Dragoș: I advised the Marshal about the bearers of Nansen passports and he recommended their expulsion. For the state, this is one of the main issues which should be immediately implemented, because [they] are the only profiteers from our [economic] life.

M. Antonescu: Please, talk to Mr Iurașcu, whom I assigned to study the problem of all Nansen passport holders […] This [Nansen Passports] Commissariat should have not been allowed in Romania […] The MAE in collaboration with Siguranța [the Secret Police] should present us a statistic of all Nansen passport holders in our country. Together with MEN, Mr Dragoș, you should indicate in the table the activity of every such Nansen passport holder.⁴⁷

Antonescu and Dragoș exaggerated the rôle of the Armenian businessmen. The Armenian refugees were not the only or the main profiteers of [the Kingdom of] Romania’s economy in the context of the antisemitic Romanianization process. In reality, as recent studies on Romanianization by Jean Ancel, myself, and Vladimir Solonari have shown, even though some Armenians did profit from Romanianization, ethnic Romanians and Germans were the main beneficiaries of the dispossession of the Jews.⁴⁸

(Emphasis original.)

Somebody might think that the discrimination against Armenian businessmen was evidence of anticapitalism, but that would be a shallow conclusion. The goal of harassing Armenian capitalists was not to reduce capital, the law of value, or generalised commodity production, but to reduce competition, something that capitalists loathe, and thereby secure Romanian businesses.

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 26):

1900: Hellmuth Walter, an engineer for the Axis, was born.
1901: Hans Kammler, Axis SS officer and engineer, burdened the planet with his existence.
1936: Santander fell to the Spanish fascists, dissolving the Republican Interprovincial Council. Meanwhile, Vienna signed in Berlin the Agreement regarding Passport Facilities to be granted in Minor Frontier Traffic, with Annex.
1940: With clear weather, the Fascists launched three major raids. At 1200 hours, 150 aircraft flew over the Strait of Dover from Calais in France; № 616 Squadron’s Spitfire fighters of RAF Kenley and № 264 Squadron’s Defiant fighters were attacked and devastated by escorting Bf 109 fighters; the Fascist bombers split up after reaching Britain and bombed RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Kenley, and various towns in Kent. At 1500 hours, 170 Fascist aircraft flew up the Thames estuary, but most were turned back by British fighters; six Do 17 bombers made it through the fighter defense and bombed RAF Debden, causing heavy damage. At 1600 hours, 55 Fascist bombers of KG55 escorted by about 100 fighters attacked Portsmouth, but the group was repulsed by five № 11 Group and three № 10 Group squadrons. In total, the Luftwaffe lost 22 bombers and 24 fighters. While the machine losses were heavy for both sides, the RAF only lost six airmen, while most of the downed Fascist crews suffered either death or capture.

Aside from that, Fascist torpedo bombers attacked two British ships east of Kinnaird Head, Fascist submarine Dandolo sank British steamer Ilvington Court in the Atlantic Ocean, slaughtering eight, and Berlin ordered the transfer of ten infantry divisions together with two armored divisions from France to Poland. (To avoid Soviet suspicion, it made plans to make this transfer appear as if these fresher troops were coming in to relieve older men who were going to be released back into the work force.) Lastly, Fascist armed merchant cruiser Pinguin’s seaplane attacked Norwegian tanker Filefjell off Madagascar at 1748 hours. Pinguin soon arrived to capture the ship which was carrying 10,000 tons of gasoline and 500 tons of oil.
1941: Axis submarine U‐571 seriously damaged Soviet submarine supply ship Marija Uljanova with two torpedoes north of Teriberskij lighthouse in northern Russia in the Barents Sea at 0459 hours, then the Armeegruppe Nord surrounded and destroyed Soviet forces in Velikije Luki as Adolf Schicklgruber and Benito Mussolini inspected Axis troops at Uman, Ukraine. Additionally, the Hungarian Army rounded up eighteen thousand Jews at Kamenets‐Podolsk, Ukraine.
1942: At Chortkiv, the collaborationist police and the Schutzpolizei deported two thousand Jews to Bełżec extermination camp, and the Axis massacred five hundred of the sick and children on the spot. This continued until the next day. Likewise, the Axis arrested 7,000 Jews arrested in Vichy, and Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops that had landed at Waga Waga late on the previous day began making contact with positions held by troops of Australian 25th Infantry Militia Battalion and 61st Infantry Militia Battalion. Behind them, Allied aircraft discovered the Waga Waga landing site and destroyed landing barges and other equipment. Axis warships entered Milne Bay for support. Inland, 2,500 Axis troops marched onto the Kokoda Track from Buna, along with a mountain gun and several mortars.
1943: Albert Speer called a meeting with Hans Kammler, Walter Dornberger, Gerhard Degenkolb, and Karl Otto Saur to negotiate the move of V‐2 (A‐4) rocket main production from Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic Sea coast to an underground factory in the Harz mountains deeper inland.
1944: Berlin ordered its troops to withdraw from Greece, and an Axis air raid on Paris, France destroyed several residential neighborhoods. Apart from that, Axis forces led by Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel attacked Bucharest.
1945: Vice Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada was named the commanding officer of the Japanese Navy 3rd Air Fleet, with Captain Chihaya Takahashi as his chief of staff. Meanwhile, I‐400 and I‐401 both dumped all of their ammunition and Seiran aircraft overboard according to orders.
1974: Junio Valerio Borghese, Axis commander, in Cádiz, Spain.

[T]hen on the 23rd of April 1945, Himmler met with Count Bernadotte in Lübeck and he claimed he was the provisional leader of Germany. In this meeting, Himmler was acting as Hitler’s successor and he said that Hitler would be dead within days and he hoped that the British and Americans would fight against the Soviets and the remaining parts of the Wehrmacht. Himmler then asked Bernadotte to tell Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, that Germany wanted to surrender with the Western Allies, but did not want to surrender to the Soviet Union.

Himmler even put this into writing, but days later the BBC broadcast Himmler’s attempted peace negotiations which had leaked, and Hitler was furious. Hitler had been betrayed by the very man who[m] he referred to as a loyal Heinrich, only second to Goebbels in loyalty and devotion to Hitler. The dictator ordered Himmler’s arrest and he flew into a mad rage, ordering the execution of Himmler’s representative inside the Führerbunker: his own brother‐in‐law Hermann Fegelein.

Himmler would, though, go on a power grab as a new government was forming in Flensburg and he believed [that] he was entitled to a position, but the new president, Dönitz, rejected Himmler’s proposals. He then went on the run, and this resulted in the Reichsführer‐SS being captured inside of British custody, where he consumed cyanide and then died. He wasn’t necessarily a man who was trusted to have been a successor by the Führer, but Himmler believed [that] he was entitled to power and a significant and powerful position.

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Click here for events that happened today (August 25).

1916: Saburō Sakai, Axis naval aviator, was born.
1933: Berlin agreed to the Final act of the Conference of Wheat Exporting and Importing Countries, and the Jewish Agency together with the German Ministry of the Economy signed the Haʻavara Agreement.
1940: Berlin (barely) survived its first bombing by the British Royal Air Force.
1942: Second day of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons; an Axis naval transport convoy headed towards Guadalcanal was turned back by an Allied air attack. On the other hand, Axis marines assaulted Allied airfields Milne Bay, New Guinea (thereby initiating the Battle of Milne Bay).
1944: The Axis lost Paris to the Allies.
1945: The August Revolution ended as Axis Emperor Bảo Đại abdicated, ending the Nguyễn dynasty. (Coincidentally, ten days after the Empire of Japan announced its surrender, armed supporters of the Chinese Communist Party killed U.S. intelligence officer John Birch, regarded by some antisocialists as the Cold War’s first victim.)
1967: A former member of the American Nazi Party murdered its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell.

Freedland’s suggestion that Kasztner’s appeal was upheld by the Supreme Court (by which time he was dead, assassinated by agents of Shin Bet in 1957), because

they accepted that Kasztner had in good faith believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than the few

is the precise opposite of what happened. The Supreme Court found no such thing. Haim Cohen, [Zionism’s] attorney‐general, conducted the appeal. He argued that:

If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions […] that was his duty… It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine […] Are we to be called traitors?

Judge Cheshin summed up the viewpoint of the majority of the Supreme Court when he ruled that:

A person sees that an entire community is doomed, is he allowed to make efforts to save the minority, although some of the efforts consist in hiding the truth from the majority or must he reveal the truth to all.

The decision of [Zionism’s] Supreme Court was primarily political not legal. Cheshin voiced the fears of [the] Zionist Establishment that:

if we rule that Kasztner collaborated with the enemy because he failed to inform those who boarded the trains in [Kasztner's hometown] Kluj that they were heading for extermination, then it is necessary to bring to court today […] many other leaders and half‐leaders who also kept silent in times of crisis, who didn’t inform others about what they knew.

Being a modest man, Freedland begins the book with "Praise for The Escape Artist" and there are 39 examples which demonstrate not so much the brilliance of his book as the ignorance of his admirers.

Adjectives such as "riveting," "thrilling" and "fascinating" abound. To Jamie Susskind Freedland’s book is "not just one of the best books I’ve read about the Holocaust, it is one of the most important books I’ve ever read."

To Zionist historian Simon Schama, the book is "immersive, shattering and ultimately redemptive." To Tom Holland The Escape Artist ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Primo Levy.

All I can say to these "experts" is that they should read Vrba’s book I Cannot Forgive. There is nothing of importance in The Escape Artist that isn’t in Vrba’s book. It is Vrba’s book, not Freedland’s cheap imitation thriller that ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Is This a Man.

According to the Financial Times, "Vrba died almost forgotten." Melissa Fay Green told how "I didn’t know Vrba’s name previously." For C.J. Carey it was a "little‐known story."

The real question is why Vrba was unknown. The Holocaust has produced thousands of books and articles. Why then was it that the names of the first Jewish escapees from Auschwitz (leaving aside Siegfried Lederer who was taken out by an SS man) were almost entirely missing from the history of the Holocaust and Auschwitz?

The simple answer is that a conscious decision was taken by the Zionist Holocaust historians, led by Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman, to erase all mention of Vrba and Wetzler. Freedland justifies this and Zionism’s distortion of history because of the need to preserve Zionism’s monopoly when it comes to Holocaust history.

[…]

Freedland’s book is part of the process of manipulating and changing the historical record to accord with a false narrative of Zionist heroism. Freedland pretends that Vrba was a supporter of Israel "and rooted for it" believing that its existence "was a good thing for Jews."

The idea that Vrba was some kind of Zionist is absurd. Freedland provides no evidence for his assertion. On the contrary when he first met Ruth Linn, a Haifa University professor of education, he told her that he had no interest in “your state of the Judenrats and Kastners.”

(Emphasis added.)

While I am unfamiliar with Jonathan Freedland’s other writings, it is probably an overreaction to accuse him of being a neofascist. I cannot, however, allow another overrated historiaster to whitewash Zionism’s profascist history again. That is what makes him relevant to capitalism in decay.

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

1903: Karl Hanke, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, was sadly born.
1937: The Basque Army surrendered to the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie following the Santoña Agreement. Meanwhile, the Sovereign Council of Asturias and León was proclaimed in Gijón.
1938: The Third Reich’s head of state asked his generals to evaluate the possibility of the conquest and occupation of Belgium and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the Imperialists captured Ruichang, Jiangxi, China, and an Imperial warplane shot down the Kweilin, a Chinese civilian airliner, killing fourteen people. It was the first recorded instance of somebody shooting down a civilian airliner.
1939: In Berlin, journalist William Shirer noted in his diary that ‘it looks like war’ based on his observations throughout the day, and coincidentally the warship Deutschland departed the Reich for a raiding mission against British shipping. M1 also ferried 230 naval infantry troops of the Marinestosstruppkompanie to the battleship Schleswig‐Holstein during the preparations for the invasion of Poland, and U‐23 began her first war patrol.
1940: Before dawn, the London Blitz began as a misguided group of Fascist bombers from KG1 unloaded their bombs London’s Thames Haven oil terminal, which also damaged the church of St. Gile in East End; Göring demanded to know the crews that did this so to punish them. Clear weather allowed the Fascist attacks to restart in size, and Fascist bombers arrived in waves against RAF Hornchurch, RAF North Weald, and RAF Manston in southern England; the Fascists lost twenty‐two fighters and eighteen bombers, while the British lost twenty fighters. At 1600 hours, fifty Fascist aircraft bombed Portsmouth in southern England, slaughtering one hundred civilians and wounding a further three hundred while damaging HMS Acheron (killing two and wounding three) and HMS Bulldog (killing the commanding officer) in the harbor. Overnight, deliberate bombing of London began, hitting north, east, and west of the city. Hans‐Joachim Marseille scored his first kill, a British Hurricane Mk I fighter, over Kent, England. While he was congratulated by his commanding officer, he was also reprimanded because he achieved the kill after abandoning his wingman to pursue the target. Later that evening, in his diary, he noted great sadness when he thought about the enemy pilot’s mother never being able to see his son again.
1941: The Third Reich’s Chancellery ordered the cessation of its systematic T4 euthanasia programme of the mentally ill and the handicapped due to protests, but killings continue for the remainder of the war. As well, Vichy passed ‘antiterrorist’ laws, punishable with death sentences, to deal with the resistance movement, and Oberleutnant Hans Philipp became the 33rd member recipient of the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. On the other hand, the Axis suffered heavy losses during the Soviet counterattack near Odessa, Ukraine.
1942: The Axis aircraft carrier Ryūjō sunk during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, with the loss of seven officers and 113 crewmen (but the Yankee carrier USS Enterprise was still heavily damaged).
1944: The Allies began their assault on Axis‐occupied Paris.
1949: The treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization went into effect.
1979: Hanna Reitsch, Axis aviator and test pilot, expired.

It is ironic that the antisocialists designated this day ‘European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’, because August 23rd in the years 1941–1945 demonstrates evidence that does not fit nicely with their repetitive attempts to equate socialism in one country with Fascism. The anticommunist invasion of Stalingrad is another good example that they prefer to ignore (because otherwise they’ll slip into exonerating the Axis):

At noon on the twenty‐third of August, Panzers of the Sixth Army rolled towards Stalingrad. Above them roared the might of Airfleet Four, saluting the soldiers with their sirens. They were on route to Stalingrad to unleash the heaviest bombing campaign yet seen on the Eastern Front. When the air raid sirens sounded, many people assumed [that] it was a test. Only when the sky became dark with planes and antiaircraft batteries open fire did people rush to the shelters.

Bombs rained down on the city. Approximately 80% of buildings were destroyed in the first day of bombing. Most of Stalingrad’s suburbs were built of wood. Inside the city itself, there were oil storage facilities and timberyards. The city was parched by the August sun. [Axis] incendiary bombs caused the whole city to flare up like gunpowder. Rivers of burning oil and petrol flowed towards the Volga. First the surface of the water and then the ships caught fire.

[Luftflotte] 4, commanded by General [Wolfram Freiherr] von Richthofen, flew fifteen hundred missions on the twenty‐third of August. Its aircraft dropped a thousand tonnes of bombs and lost only three [vehicles]. On that single day, an estimated forty thousand people died in Stalingrad. Most of the survivors fled the city, but some chose to stay and share the city’s fate.

At about four P.M., [Colonel General Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst] Paulus’s tanks reached the Volga. Approaching Stalingrad from the north, all [that] the [Axis soldiers] could see through their binoculars was fire and smoke. It seemed [that] nothing could prevent the [Axis] from entering the burning city, and yet [its] attempt to take Stalingrad in one swift assault was bloodily repulsed.

Many historians mark the Battle of Stalingrad as the beginning of the end for the Axis. I respectfully disagree, but I cannot dispute that the Axis only dug its hole deeper throughout its failed attempt to capture the city.

One of the quibbles that I have with this otherwise worthwhile documentary—an issue that I have with commentators on WWII in general, to be fair—is its tendency to refer to the Axis forces mostly as ‘the Germans, the Germans, the Germans’. I never liked this tendency, not only because it implies that Germans who abhor what their countrymen did somehow had something to do with this, but also because it distracts us from the other Axis nationalities (e.g. Austrians) that contributed. A reminder from Dmitry Degtev’s Battle of Stalingrad: The Beginning of the End for Hitler in the East, pg. 53:

On the morning of 24 August, in the battle for the Izbushensky farm (near the village of Ust‐Khoperskaya), the Savoia Cavalry Regiment (3rd Rgt ‘Savoia Cavalleria’) from the 3rd Mobile Division ‘Amadeo Duke D’Acosta’ defeated the 812th Rifle Regiment of the 304th Rifle Division. This battle went down in history as ‘the last horse sabre attack at the gallop’.

The 812th Regiment was defeated, 150 men were killed, and the remaining 900 surrendered. However, due to the disorganisation of the Italian [Fascist]s, 300 men later simply fled, and only 600 were captured as a result. The trophies of the ‘macaronis’ were four regimental guns, 10 mortars and 40 machine guns and light machine guns. They themselves lost 40 killed, 79 wounded and 108 horses.

In fairness, the documentary does mention the other Axis powers several times, but repeatedly emphasizing somebody’s nationality still leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Terms such as ‘Fascists’ (if you want to kick it old school like me), ‘Axis’ (if the context is either September 27, 1940 or later), ‘German(ic) Fascists’ (to avoid any possible confusion), ‘Nazis’ (if you want to sound generic and don’t mind reusing a misnomer), or ‘(German) anticommunists’ (just to annoy contemporary anticommunists) would all work better than the overly broad and misleading ‘Germans’, but now I’m just rambling.

Anyway, the Battle of Stalingrad, aside from showing us more of the Axis’s atrocities, gives us an important lesson that the Zionists have chosen to ignore:

[Vasily] Chuikov’s task was to hold the city and its industrial centres, but the city was consuming his men at a terrifying rate. Those who survived for any length of time learned new tactics for this ruined urban landscape. Ironically, it was the [Axis] by bombing the city to rubble that had done most to undermine [its] own tactics. Tanks, the [Axis’s] shock weapon, quickly got stuck in the mountains of broken bricks, while from around every corner, they were pelted with Molotov cocktails.

[Axis] bomb‐aimers were finding it more and more difficult to spot targets in the city. From the air, it was almost impossible to distinguish between [friend] and [foe], nor were the Heinkels very accurate, scattering their bombs over a path of several hundred metres.

To further negate [Axis] air superiority, Chuikov ordered his [soldiers] to advance as close as possible to the enemy lines. The distance between Red Army and [Axis] positions was reduced to as little as ten metres. This made it impossible for Heinkels to bomb the enemy without also hitting their own troops.

This next lesson is less important, but, well… just read it yourselves:

The […] 48th Panzer Corps tried to launch a counterattack. They met the attacking Soviet forces head‐on near the village of Ust‐Medveditsky. An enormous tank battle raged for more than a day. At its end, the […] Panzer Corps lay crushed. Ones of its divisions had been hindered by an unlikely foe. While the division had been in reserve with its vehicles standing idle, field mice had got inside the vehicles and gnawed through the electrical wiring. This humble ally of the Red Army had put dozens of tanks out of action.

We all know what that means.

(Forgive me, I couldn’t resist.)

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 23).

1923: Two Fascists in Argenta murdered an antifascist priest, Giovanni Minzoni, fracturing his skull and beating him to death with clubs (probably on Italo Balbo’s orders).
1939: Berlin and Moscow agreed to a nonaggression treaty. Apart from that, Rome sent a message to Berlin noting that when the two empires negotiated the Pact of Steel, article 3 obliged one to join any war in which the other was engaged, yet the two had the understanding that Fascist Italy would be unready for war until 1943. As well, Berlin appointed Albert Forster as the State President of the Free City of Danzig, and it also promoted Erwin Rommel to the rank of major general, posting him to the Staff of the Chancellor’s headquarters to be responsible again for the Chancellor’s safety. Lastly, U‐27 departed Wilhelmshaven for her only war patrol.
1940: Rain and clouds prevented the Fascists from mounting large raids against Britain, giving British airmen a chance to rest and crews a chance to repair airfields. Single‐aircraft raids were, however, mounted against southern and central England, as were raids against shipping; two merchant ships sunk and one became damaged by He 115 torpedo bombers. Coincidentally, Fascist propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels launched a new campaign that stressed the British fighting spirit in an attempt to rally Germans behind the war effort. Overnight, Fascist bombers raided British cities. Aside from this, Fascist submarine U‐37 torpedoed Norwegian ship Keret in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland at 0222 hours, killing thirteen but leaving seven alive. In the general area, at 1250 hours, U‐37 sank British ship Severn Leigh, slaughtering one gunner and thirty‐two of the rest of the crew, but leaving ten survivors.
1941: The Third Reich’s head of state rejected Heinz Guderian’s advice to attack Moscow. Berlin moved troops to the south instead. At 2347 hours, Axis submarine U‐143 (Oberleutnant zur See Harald Gelhaus) torpedoed the 1,409‐ton Norwegian merchant steamer Inger twice as it was heading towards Loch Ewe, Scotland, and Comandante Cappellini took orders to move to a new patrol area in the Atlantic Ocean at 0000 hours.
1942: In what amounted to little more than a publicity stunt, the 1.Gebirgsjäger Division soldiers hoisted the Reichskriegsfahne flag on Mount Elbrus, which was the highest point in the Caucasus Mountains. As well, Hans‐Joachim Marseille returned to his unit at Sanyet El Qutaifiya, Egypt, and Axis submarine U‐506 sank British ship Hamla southwest of Freetown, West Africa at 2337 hours, slaughtering all forty aboard. Additionally, Axis and Allied aircraft engaged in combat over Darwin, Australia between 1200 and 1245 hours; the Axis lost seven bombers and eight Zero fighters to P‐40 Warhawk fighters of the U.S. 49th Fighter Group, and this became to be the last Axis attempt to raid Darwin.
1943: The Axis lost Kharkiv to the Red Army after the Battle of Kursk.
1944: The Axis lost Marseille to the Allies. Meanwhile, King Michael of Romania dismissed the Axis government of Marshal Antonescu, who was later arrested; Romania switched sides from the Axis to the Allies.
1945: The Axis resistance in the Manchuria region of northeastern China was effectively over, and the Axis garrison at Paramushiro surrendered to the Soviets. On the other hand, He Yingqin ordered Axis generals in northern and eastern China to continue to maintain peace until Nationalist forces would arrive to relieve them. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur ordered the release of all Filipinos—most of whom were Axis collaborators—interned by the U.S. Army. He claimed that their fates would be tried by the Filipino government rather than the U.S. military. Lastly, the Axis news agency Do Trzei announced the death of Subhash Chandra Bose.

As odd as it may seem, I had been unaware of these terrors until I watched somebody play the WWII video game Secret Weapons Over Normandy, where they appear as an unexpected enemy. I nearly cringed at the sight of the Axis powers having one glaring technologic superiority over us (we can grant them that), but it is apparent that even these monstrosities could not turn the tide of the war. What happened?

A brief history, first. Jet fighters had been a theoretic possibility since at least the 1920s, and the Fascists commenced experimenting with jet propulsion in the late 1930s. The experiments with jet fighters in particular became successful in the summer of 1942, and the Me 262 was officially ready for deployment in April 1944. The Eastern Axis even constructed one prototype in 1945 largely based on it: the Nakajima Kikka. So far so good, but while the Third Reich had over one thousand two hundred of these jets in storage (making them WWII’s commonest jet by far), only several dozen of them were actually ready to fight at any given time, and perhaps only four hundred in total ever saw any action.

This was not all. Although it is hardly deniable that the Me 262 was a remarkable work of engineering, it had its weaknesses and limitations as well. Because the jets sucked up so much fuel, they could only stay in the air for approximately one hour, whereas an ordinary Allied warplane could stay in the air several times longer than that. Like some of the Axis’s other innovations, the Me 262 proved to be somewhat gimmicky.

The jet’s strengths and weaknesses were almost like those of a cheetah. The cheetah is famous for being the world’s fastest animal, but what is less known about cheetahs is that they can only sprint so far before becoming exhausted. Gazelles, in contrast, are slower, but they can sustain their modest speed for a longer period of time (which is why cheetahs have yet to extinguish them).

Berlin’s order to construct versions that could bomb, a function never intended for the Me 262, complicated its production, and another important problem was that the pilots found jets troublesome to fly, even after they received training for them. The pilots simply weren’t used to this new technology; transitioning from traditional warplanes to jet fighters proved awkward. Quoting Walter Schuck:

In an Me 109 plane, one could just switch off the engine and drift down slowly […] but in this plane it wasn’t possible at all. I was traveling at a speed of 500 mph and couldn’t reduce it. The plane just wouldn’t descend. I had to fly in circles until I reached an altitude where I could ask for permission to land. Once I finally landed, I was completely soaked in sweat…

Dan Snow notes another problem:

The cockpit itself was cramped, basic, and clumsy. With the [Axis] essentially relying on a decentralised network of labour camps to create parts for the aircraft, the instrument panels inside would vary from jet to jet.

Very sadly, the Axis sacrificed dozens of thousands of neoslaves for many of these jets, and they ended lives more directly by destroying hundreds of Allied vehicles. It was not only uncomfortable but very difficult for Allied pilots to face them head‐on since they had never dealt with rapid machines like these before. Even so, the Allies managed to take out around one hundred of them. How?

The trick was to intercept them while they were either taking off, landing, or stationary. In fact, this was the standard method for dealing with them; successful dogfights against them were uncommon, but since the jets were incapable of making sharp turns, it was still possible to destroy them as they were in the middle of flight, too.

Pictured: An Me 262 on an Axis airfield.

I should mention that technically the Allies did deploy some jets of their own for combat. The problem was that the Gloster Meteor was slower, less heavily armed, rarer, and saw less action than the Messerschmitt Me 262. When the Allies officially deployed it in 1944, its only purpose was to intercept Axis rockets targeting the United Kingdom, and even after London approved it for continental use, its purpose remained primarily defensive rather than offensive. It probably never got into any (conventional) dogfights with the Axis either, as the Western Allies feared the possibility of the Axis or the Eastern Allies recovering a copy. So the Gloster Meteor could not really compete with the Axis’s jets despite being the best candidate for the job.

Finally, arguably the Me 262’s greatest weakness (like its extremely rare Eastern counterpart the Nakajima Kikka) was the want of resources, including time. They officially appeared late in the war, only a few hundred ever saw any action, and the Allies’ successful seizures and destructions of Axis resources, most notably oil, made the jets too costly to manufacture and deploy in larger numbers. With all of these factors taken into account, the Me 262 was less terrifying than it could have been, and few other Axis jets even made it past the conceptual stages.

Pictured: Miniature model of the Messerschmitt P.1111, a proposed Axis jet that never saw the light of day.

Many remember the Me 262 for being history’s first successful jet fighter and for its long‐term influence on many later flightcraft, but we can derive another lesson from it: as our oppressors taught the Yugoslavs in the 1990s, and are teaching the Palestinians now, the Me 262 can serve as another reminder that technology isn’t everything.

Pictured: A ruined Me 262.

Further reading:

Me 262: Hitler’s jet plane

The race for Hitler’s X‐planes: Britain’s 1945 mission to capture secret Luftwaffe technology

Fighting Hitler’s jets: the extraordinary story of the American airmen who beat the Luftwaffe and defeated Nazi Germany

…and much, much more.

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Click here for events that happened today (August 22).

1895: László Almásy, Axis aviator and explorer, was born.
1938: Prinz Eugen launched at the Germaniawerft yard in Kiel.
1939: Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Reich’s delegation departed Berlin aboard two Condor aircraft for Königsberg, East Prussia. With a nonaggression pact nearly secured with Moscow, Berlin ordered the reinvasion of Poland to commence four days later. The top military commanders received orders to be brutal and show no compassion in the upcoming conflict, but the Chancellor said that even though he was important for Germany, anybody could murder him at any time. Less importantly, Georg von Küchler became the commanding officer of 3rd Army and Westerwald began supporting cruiser Deutschland in the Arctic Sea.
1940: Adolf Galland became Geschwaderkommodore JG 26 ‘Schlageter’, and Fascist bombers raided British cities, including Aberdeen, Bristol, and Hull, but the Fascists lost several vehicles at sea and elsewhere.
1941: The Axis began the Siege of Leningrad.
1942: The 16th Panzer Division began to cross the Don River toward Stalingrad, and the Fascist bourgeoisie increased the work week for foreign workers in the Third Reich to fifty‐four hours. On the other hand, Axis torpedo boat Generale Antonio Cantore struck a mine five miles west of Tobruk and sank. Axis submarine I‐30 departed Lorient, France with fifty T‐Enigma coding machines (which would enable communications between the IJN and the Kriegsmarine), blueprint of air‐defense radar, five G7a torpedoes, three G7e electric torpedoes, and other technologies on board.
1943: Axis troops in Kharkov, Ukraine began evacuating after sundown.
1944: Axis forces on Crete committed populicide against the inhabitants of Amari Valley, and Berlin ordered the destruction of Paris, starting tomorrow. As well, the Wehrmachtbericht mentioned Léon Degrelle, and the Luftwaffe’s 111/KG3 launched twenty‐one sorties during the early hours from their new base at Venlo in the south east of the Netherlands. All Heinkel bombers returned safely after launching their V‐1 flying bombs. One of these impacted on just half a mile down Oak Lane, where the railway bridge had just been repaired. Another clipped some elm trees near some cottages and span into on of them killing two adults and orphaning the two children who were dug out of the wreckage unhurt.
1945: Axis forces in the Manchuria region of northeastern China surrendered. In the two‐week campaign, eighty thousand Axis personnel suffered either death or injury and fifty‐four became prisoners, including one hundred forty‐three generals. Additionally, the Axis began to withdraw from larger towns in Malaya. Since British colonial administration had not yet returned, this resulted in Malay–Chinese ethnic violence escalating in some of these towns. Likewise, Axis troops at Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong arrested and executed civilians Lam Tsah and Lam Kuan in retaliation of an attack on the Axis on August 19, 1945. Company commander Yasuo Kishi personally executed Lam Kuan.
1946: Döme Sztójay, Axis head of state, dropped dead.

The two major Axis powers in both the East and the West had their own atomic weapons programmes and they were maybe more advanced in nuclear technology than we previously suspected; it is possible that Axis scientists even achieved a few nuclear detonations somewhere in the Greater German Reich, though some analysts doubt this.

That being said, it is clear that the Axis still made nowhere nearly enough progress to compete with the Allies, for reasons which are mostly identical in both the East and the West. The first problem was that for at least one year, an Axis victory seemed plausible. This made the Axis’s atomic weapons projects seem exceedingly risky investments that would have taken away valuable resources from more immediate concerns. Consequently, they had much lower budgets than the Manhattan Project.

The next most important reason was the want of materials, notably uranium (some of which Jewish neoslaves might have mined). There was indeed a modest expansion in uranium mining during the Fascist era, and the Third Reich had enough uranium to make one bomb. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that they had enough in 1945 for a bomb ready for deployment in the battlefield instead of testing. Quoting John H. Gill in The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II, chapter 7:

Activity at the KAT virtually ceased and, at the end of the month, the Eighth Air Force inflicted another significant loss on the German program by devastating Diebner’s key uranium processing facility at Oranienburg. […] The June bombing raids had cut off the supply of processed uranium, disrupted the plutonium manufacturing process and killed or injured dozens of critical workers. A new DEGUSSA uranium refinery was under construction south of Berlin, but the Oranienburg plant was a near‐total loss and it would take months to repair the KAT.

Due to Allied intervention, the Axis lost a good deal of nuclear materials, at sea and elsewhere. See Thomas Gallagher’s Assault in Norway: Sabotaging The Nazi Nuclear Program for more examples.

Apart from Allied submarines disrupting exports from Malaya, the Eastern Axis’s nuclear programmes did not suffer such a loss of materials, but only because the Eastern Axis had less uranium, and what little that it did have was of low quality. To make matters worse, Allied warfare directly impacted the Eastern Axis’s research, sending many of its institutes up in flames. The surviving scientists consoled theirselves by unintentionally underestimating the time when the Allies’ nuclear weapons would be officially ready for deployment.

In the Third Reich’s case, the white supremacist laws caused many physicists and other researchers (e.g. Nikolaus Riehl) to flee to the future Allied powers. Research on the military potential of atomic energy started off slow because the Fascists were suspicious of quantum mechanics as a ‘Jewish’ science. This xenophobia was only one of the reasons why few scientists were involved in the projects.

Lastly, there was a want of confidence in the scientists theirselves concerning the probability of nuclear weapons; morale was low. The Eastern Axis’s most senior physicist, Hantarō Nagaoka, was the most critical on the very project on which he worked, and he published an article titled ‘A Critique of the Application of Nuclear Fission to Weapons’. For the Western Axis, the situation was little better:

Another problem was the mistrust among supporters and opponents of the [Third Reich]. Some members of the Uranium Club—for example, Schumann, Diebner, and Erich Bagge—were members or followers of the [NSDAP]; others—among them, Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg, Gerlach, and Karl Wirtz—were not. Everyone who chose not to openly support the régime had to find a way to deal with its factual power.

Heisenberg decided against open opposition, because that would deprive him of any possibility to act and mitigate the consequences of the […] régime ([16], pp. 208–210). After a year‐long investigation ordered by SS leader Himmler with several interrogations at the SS Headquarters in Berlin in 1937, he had no illusions about the criminal character of the régime [27]. And he had to be careful not to cast doubt again on his alleged loyalty to the party line.

As a result of the different individual attitudes, there was, as Wirtz said, no atmosphere of confidence among the participating groups and no trust between the scientists and the political institutions ([28], p. 57).

Some Axis scientists might have even sabotaged the project deliberately, as the Farm Hall tapes suggest. The scarcity of time, money, and other resources sealed the projects’ fates.

Nevertheless, the work continued after 1945: the Zionists probably acquired their nuclear technology from surviving Axis personnel.

See also:

Hitler's nuclear pile — WWII uranium cube reactor & the Alsos mission: Atomkeller Haigerloch

Secret Nazi nuclear facility found during excavation; Secret Nazi nuclear weapons testing bunker unearthed in Austria

The Uranium Club: Unearthing the Lost Relics of the Nazi Nuclear Program

Uranprojekt: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s Nuclear Weapons Program during World War II

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

1934: Benito Mussolini met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in Florence. Meanwhile, an international Jewish conference in Geneva declared that the boycotting of the Third Reich would be redoubled until the rights of German Jews were fully restored.
1936: Fascist Italy accepted a French proposal to pursue a policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War. Britain announced a similar policy to the Third Reich’s, warning that any attempt to interfere with British shipping in Spanish waters would be met with stern measures.
1937: The Spanish Nationalists captured Villacarriedo. Meanwhile, patrolling Imperial E8N floatplanes intercepted six Chinese Gamma 2E light bombers over the suburbs of Shanghai. The Imperialists succeeded in forcing the Chinese to abandon the planned attack on the Kunda Texile Factory, yet failed to shoot down any flightcraft (although the Imperialists claimed two victories anyway). Lt. Yue Yiqin of the 22nd Pursuit Squadron of the Chinese 4th Pursuit Group, flying a Hawk III biplane fighter, shot down the Imperial floatplane flown by Petty Officer First Class Shigeru Yano, who survived the downing. Yano attempted to ram a Chinese aircraft as he went down; he failed to make contact as none of the Chinese fighters reported being rammed, yet Yano believed that he did.
1938: The Third Reich’s head of state visited the sailing ship Horst Wessel, and the Imperial 10th Division captured Luoshan, Hubei Province and Xinzi, Jiangxi Province in China.
1940: Johann Schalk received the Ehrenpokal der Luftwaffe, while the ‘tree of liberty’, planted in Saverne after Alsace was restored to France at the end of World War I, was chopped down by members of the Hitler Youth.
1941: As the Axis captured the Ukrainian port city of Kherson and the Bila Tserkva massacre took place in Ukraine, Berlin ordered Army Group North to encircle Leningrad, believing that the loss of the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution would deal a crushing blow to Soviet morale. Coincidentally, the Axis officially opened the Drancy internment camp in France and also commissioned the submarines U‐376 and U‐584. But less happily for the Fascist bourgeoisie, the communist activist Pierre Georges murdered Axis naval cadet Alfons Moser at the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris by shooting him in the back.
1942: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.
1943: The Axis lost both Kiska and Wewak.
1944: Canadian and Polish units captured the strategically important town of Falaise, Calvados, France, from the Axis. (Coincidentally, Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, began.)
1945: The first major Imperial Japanese surrender ceremony in China took place at the Zhijiang Airport in Hunan Province.

Even though some Fascist politicians were self‐identified Catholics, colonizing Poland took precedence over any Christian solidarity, so Polish churches had to vanish:

The nature of repression differed between the annexed territories, intended as a Lebensraum for Germans, and the General Government, which served as a reservoir of Polish laborers. In the former, all traces of Polish identity would have to disappear. This was accomplished through the arrests and executions of Catholic priests, the closure of churches, and restrictions on Catholic practices. Moreover, schools that served Catholic and Jewish populations were closed.

The Catholic Church was the main target because it was considered a bastion of Polish identity. As early as July 1939, the Army High Command declared the Catholic clergy as “primarily responsible for nationalistic rabble‐rousing” (Huener 2021, 53). The image of the “agitator‐priest” (Hetzkaplan) as an enemy of Germandom drew on a legacy of Prussian animosity toward Catholicism during the partitions of Poland (Huener 2021).

The Warthegau, which had the largest Polish population within the annexed zones, experienced the brunt of these policies (Epstein 2010, 2). Hitler wished the Gau “to become flourishing German land in ten years” (Epstein 2010, 5), and he found a willing executioner in Greiser, an “anti‐Polish Nazi zealot” from the formerly Prussian province of Posen.

Greiser succeeded in decimating the Polish clergy in the Warthegau: of the 2,100 secular and religious clergy, 133 (6%) were killed in the Gau territory, 1,523 (73%) were arrested, and 1,092 (52%) were sent to concentration camps, where two thirds died (Huener 2021, 208).

As a result, entire districts had no priests to serve parishioners during the war (Huener 2021, 167). Charitable and educational institutions previously maintained by the Catholic Church were abolished. Some 97% of all church buildings and shrines were closed, desecrated, or destroyed (Huener 2021, 2). [Fascist] authorities also restricted the times of worship, prohibited public displays of faith, and tried to prevent individuals from travelling outside of their parish to attend services elsewhere.

Greiser closed Polish schools, although this policy was applied less consistently than repression against the Church. Instead of going to school, Poles aged 14 and above were forced to work. Poles were strictly segregated from Germans and faced restricted hours for using public baths and entering shops and markets. Public spaces and cafes were designated “for Germans only.”³

Greiser also began deportations into the General Government in order to create space for German settlers. However, these slowed as [the Fascists] realized that they needed Polish laborers and farmers. From mid‐1940 onward, thousands of Poles were put to work in the Warthegau or in the Altreich.

On the other hand, while the General Government also experienced large‐scale violence and roundups for forced labor, de‐Polonization was limited. There was “an unresolved conflict in [Axis] minds” over whether this region should become a pure German colony (Lukas 2012, 32). For the time being, [the Axis] administration sought to control rather than eradicate Polish culture. As Gąsiorowski (2010, 72) states, “despite the difficult food and material situation and the growing terror in the General Government, [one] was still allowed to be a Pole.”

Allowing religion was viewed as important for preventing unrest. It is estimated that 95% of the clergy in the General Government remained in the same parish during the war (Lukas 2012, 15), a marked contrast to the Warthegau. Religious life continued uninterrupted [in the General Government]; there were no mass closings of churches or restrictions on religious services [there], although training new priests was prohibited (Kłoczowski, Müllerowa and Skarbek 1986, 354–355).⁴

[…]

The arrest and execution of clergy, along with the closure of churches, especially on the scale witnessed in the Warthegau, significantly diminishes the supply of religious services. We know that vacancies created by [Fascist] arrests and executions typically remained unfilled until the war’s end.⁵

While the "orphaned" parishes were occasionally visited by the surviving priests from elsewhere, who secretly baptized children and officiated marriages, and some religious rites were perfomed by lay Catholics, an average repressed community experienced a disruption in religious practices (Huener 2021, 243).

For example, the deportation of Father Ignacy Bronszewski from his parish of Białotarsk (Włocławek diocese) to the General Government in March 1941 resulted in the interruption of worship until February 1945. As a result, most parishioners stopped attending church altogether (Huener 2021, 234). Even in parishes where the priests avoided persecution, the availability and quality of religious services were reduced.

As noted above, the [Fascist] government restricted days of the week and hours of the day when the churches could operate. Eventually, most churches were closed, vandalized, or destroyed. In addition, overwhelmed with the demand from outside their parish, some priests asked their parishioners to attend services less frequently and to keep their confessions brief (Huener 2021, 244).

Supply shifts can have important consequences on future religious behavior (Finke and Iannaccone 1993). In our context, due to habit formation, those who were unable to attend religious services during the war may not have returned to their old customs. Intergenerational religious preference transmission and peer effects (Patacchini and Zenou 2016) can lead to changes in the religious practices of future generations. Hence, this channel predicts a drop in religious observance, which can persist for decades.

[…]

Figure 7 shows a clear discontinuity in average mass attendance across four survey years (1991, 1995, 2001, and 2015). The results in Table A.6 show an effect of −6.9 percentage points, or 0.45 standard deviations, on average attendance. The estimate is largely driven by the first two years of our sample (see Figure A.1). In particular, we estimate an effect of −11.3 percentage points for the first year for which systematic data exist, which represents more than 0.5 standard deviations.

The estimates for all survey years are negative, albeit they gradually diminish in magnitude and significance. Hence, the persecution of clergy appears to have weakened the norm of church attendance, with effects lasting into the early years of the post‐transition period. […] As shown in Table 2, municipalities with high rates of priest victimization had lower church attendance [after 1989].

This relationship holds for the average across our sample period and for 1991 and 1995 in particular, the years for which we observe more sizable treatment effects in the geographic RD framework. The result is consistent with the religious supply channel detailed in Section 3.

We should note that in 44% of municipalities, all priests were removed, i.e. there is limited variation in the proportion of victimized priests, our main explanatory variable. This proxy for reduced supply of religious services also neglects the interruption of supply following the destruction or closure of church buildings, which was almost universal in the Warthegau.

Furthermore, even though mass attendance is a significant predictor of PiS [Law and Justice] and LPR [League of Polish Families] vote shares, we find higher support for these parties in municipalities with higher rates of priest victimization (Table 2). The estimate is significant at a 10% level for the 2005 election, but not for other years. We interpret this pattern as suggestive evidence for the martyrdom channel.

This research also inadvertently complicates equations between socialism in one country and Fascism.

Once the party strengthened its grip on power, however, the Church holdings were confiscated and Catholic education was restricted. Yet even during the Stalinist period, religious practices were tolerated, even among party members (Grzymala‐Busse 2015, 155). Instead of restricting church attendance, the Communist government sought to harness religiosity to its advantage.

In 1949–56, it enlisted priests sympathetic to the Communist cause to disseminate communist ideology from the pulpit. Survivors of Gestapo arrests and concentration camps were particularly desirable recruits, as the authorities believed they would be more supportive of communist policies. At the height of the infiltration campaign, approximately 10% of all priests in Poland were the so‐called “patriot” priests (księża patrioci) (Nalepa and Pop‐Eleches 2022).

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Click here for events that happened today (August 20).

1940: Hermann Göring sent peace proposals to Britain via Netherlandish and Turkish foreign ministries! Nevertheless, the British ignored them. Aside from that, the Eighth Route Army launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive, a successful campaign to disrupt Axis war infrastructure and logistics in occupied northern China. (Coincidentally, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the fourth of his famous wartime speeches, containing the line ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’.)
1942: István Horthy de Nagybánya, Axis Deputy Regent, died in a flight accident.
1943: The Axis submarine U‐197 was sunk in the Indian Ocean by a PBY Catalina of № 265 Squadron RAF; on the same day, the Axis submarine U‐670 sank in the Bay of Danzig after a collision with the target ship Bulkoburg. Meanwhile, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Thailand signed a peace treaty, in which four provinces of Axis‐occupied British Malaya (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu) were to be made part of Thailand. Thai administration would begin on October 18. Finally, Soviet Major General P. V. Bogdanov, who had collaborated with the enemy after being captured by the Wehrmacht, was recaptured and turned over to the Soviet counterintelligence service, SMERSH. Moscow would execute Bogdanov, along with five other former Red Army generals, on April 19, 1950.
1944: One hundred sixty‐eight captured Allied airmen, including Phil Lamason, accused by the Gestapo of being ‘terror fliers’, arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Battle of Romania began with a major Soviet Union offensive.
1985: Wilhelm Meendsen‐Bohlken, Axis fleet commander, expired.

(Mirror.)

Polish capitulation in September 1939 brought for people in Łódź significant changes. On 9 November 1939, the city was annexed into the new Greater German Reich. […] Businesses and buildings of Polish and Jewish owners were expropriated with the aim of providing them to companies under [Fascist] management.²¹ The city was meant to become an industrial base for the war economy.

One of the first administrative decisions of the [Fascist] occupation administration was the introduction of labor conscription for all Polish nationals, initially from ages 16 to 60, then from age 14 and lastly from age 10. Several important [Fascist] companies — among these Krupp, BMW, Askania, and Telefunken — took advantage of this opportunity and located their production plants in Łódź.²²

[…]

In 1941 Telefunken relocated part of its production lines to Łódź. The city was chosen for several reasons: the distance from areas exposed to aerial bombardment and short lines of product delivery to military units at the eastern front. However, one of the most important reasons was the availability of an appropriate workforce.²⁴ In Łódź, the company intended to produce vacuum tubes used in military communication.

For this kind of production, precision and sleight of hand were of great importance; therefore, mostly young workers, especially girls were preferred. Already in 1942, Telefunken employed more than 2,000 workers in its two production plants in Łódź. Whereas the management and engineer positions in the plants were occupied by Germans, the foremen and office positions were staffed by ethnic Germans (“Volksdeutsche”) from Łódź.

However, the majority of the production workers were girls of ages 12 to 16. They were recruited for work partly under coercion, but partly, due to the labor conscription, to “volunteer” to work for Telefunken. This allowed them to remain at home and be exempted from forced relocation for work in [the Third Reich].

[…]

The first transports of the workers from Łódź arrived in late summer 1944. It was planned that the new Telefunken plant will be located in the fortress Wilhelmsburg, which was supposed to provide protection from aerial attacks. Because at the moment of arrival of first transports with girls from Łódź the industrial park of the factory had not yet been completed, the girls were delegated for work for the local farmers.

One of the female workers recalls the moments, when the farmers chose “suitable” personnel: “Because the factory was not finished yet, we had to work for the local farmers. […] At one day, all Polish girls were forced to the city square. Interested farmers taxed them very carefully. Some even assessed their teeth! Every [farmer] tried to choose the strongest women. Nobody asked about agreement. They took us like a livestock to their farms.”²⁹ With the completion of production facilities in November 1944, the girls re‐commenced work for Telefunken.

Living and work conditions

The living conditions in Ulm were characterized by unsuitable accommodation in the camps, scarcity of food, harassment, and punishment. From the point of view of the company management, the full productivity of the plant was in the foreground. “Human material,” as the management reports and documents repeatedly state, could be “used for consumption”.³⁰ As the heads of Telefunken were under the greatest production pressure, they ensured only a minimum of living conditions that guaranteed survival.

Telefunken‐laborers in Ulm were accommodated in two main locations.³¹ First was the fortress of Wilhelmsburg, directly at the production site. In the southern part of the fortress were sleeping quarters for 600 to 800 workers as well administration offices, kitchen, canteen, and storage facilities. Production areas were underground in the basement.

The northern part of the fortress still housed barracks for the [Wehrmacht], which posed an additional risk for the forced laborers of becoming an object of unintentional bombardment. Another 600 girls from Łódź were located in the “Kepler‐Mittelschule”, a school building located in the northern part of the city.

Both quarters were unsuitable for accommodation of a larger number of persons. From the beginning of the war, the city administration in Ulm grappled with the problem of providing living places for the increasing number of forced laborers. The sudden transfer of more than a thousand additional persons in the final phase of the war only aggravated these difficulties. Therefore, both the Wilhelmsburg and the Kepler‐School had only a provisional character and lacked basic sanitary facilities. They were dark, cold, and leaky. Lack of water was especially severe.

This situation is vivid in the recollection of former forced laborers: “Rooms were cold. There was no electricity. It was dark, even during the day, because the windows had no glass, just paper. There was no water. Toilets were closed. The lack of water was very difficult. For the first time we understood what real thirst means. […] We couldn’t even wash our hands. The administration didn’t care that there were no toilets. We had to go to the attic.”³²

Due to the lack of living spaces, the girls had to live in cramped small rooms. For sleeping, only military bunk beds were provided. The rooms were scarcely equipped — a few double beds, a table, several stools, and closets. There were no stoves or other heating. Beds were equipped with sacks filled with sawdust. To cover themselves during sleep, each girl received two blankets.

The living conditions considerably deteriorated in the winter. On 17 December 1944, Ulm was the target of the severest aerial attack during the war. A number of city buildings were destroyed, among others the Kepler‐School.

Although no girls from Łódź lost their lives in the resulting fire, they had to be relocated to the Wilhelmsburg. It meant that the quarters had to be even more densely populated and girls had to share beds: “The beds were the same as the beds in the concentration camps. Bunk beds. We had to sleep in a bed in pairs. Beddings and blankets were always dirty.”³³

It also led to the further deterioration of sanitation in the camp: “The worst were hygiene conditions. We couldn’t wash properly. It just wasn’t possible in a room where there were a lot of people and only a small bowl of water. And so many women.”³⁴

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

In order to discipline the girls and motivate them for work, a system of daily terror was introduced. The camp’s superintendent, Captain Thalhofer, was particularly brutal in his treatment. He punished the girls indiscriminately, often abused them, and beat them or let his subordinates hit the victims.³⁵ Other guards followed this example.

Especially contacts between male and female workers provided opportunities for physical abuse: “Three girls visited us in our [male] barracks. They did not even sit down, when suddenly German female supervisor came in and started shouting. She was accompanied by two armed guards. She had a pistol in her hand. She started to curse in German. She used the wors[t] words to describe the girls. […] And with the hand with the pistol, she started to beat the girls in the head and face. She was spiting on them, she pulled their hair, she was kicking the girls. After few minutes, she sent the girls with guards back to their barracks. And she told us that next time, we will be also beaten by the guards.”³⁶

Severe living conditions were aggravated by a lack of appropriate food. The laborers were provided only minimal rations for survival and effective work. The daily diet consisted of products with insufficient nutritional value for physical work and retaining health.

Memories of the surviving girls still retain the always accompanying hunger: “And this disgusting food. […] In the morning 2 slices of bread, at noon cabbage soup. Cabbage turnip and potatoes — we mostly ate that. […] In the evening we got black cereal coffee and boiled potatoes with some margarine. That’s all.”³⁷ Recollections of other forced laborers support this testimony: “The diet: beets, jam from red beets, soup from snails, porridge with worms. So just hunger and no hope of improvement.”³⁸

The workers received no milk or other dairy products, also no fresh fruits or vegetables. Meat was a seldom addition to the meals. Mostly, girls supplemented their diet with products that they stole from the storages and surrounding fields or received from the guards or Ulm citizens. These were prepared in secret and shared among co‐workers living in the same room.

[…]

The municipal medical officer, Dr. Eduard Schefold (1880–1958), who was responsible for the provision of medical care in the camp, lacked empathy for the fate of the girls and did not try to improve the conditions in which they lived.⁴³ Among his greatest concerns were unwelcomed pregnancies among the girls. He denied Polish girls the right to reproduction and complained that, due to lack of space, abortions among Polish workers could not be conducted, which led to a situation women unrestrainedly having babies.⁴⁴

If it was no longer possible to prevent childbirth, pregnant women were sent to so‐called “maternity hospitals.” In Ulm, such an institution was also used as an abortion facility. In the “maternity hospital,” Polish toddlers were deliberately exposed to such catastrophic living conditions that the majority of them died within the first few months of their lives.⁴⁵

Sick girls were rarely admitted to hospitals. In most cases, they had to stay in the barracks for the duration of their illness. There were no isolated barracks for the sick, and even the simplest medication or wound dressing was difficult to find. This led in some cases to fatal consequences: “My roommate, who had a cold, later developed tuberculosis. She was with us from December to April […] but no doctor was there. When the Americans arrived, we took her to the hospital. Afterwards we wanted to visit her, but she has already died.”⁴⁶

[…]

The investigation of the fate of Polish female forced laborers from Łódź working for Telefunken in Ulm shows a system that aimed at the total exploitation of the workers towards ever increasing efficiency and lowering costs of production. Such exploitation was symptomatic for the last years of the war, during which the life and health of the foreign workforce was systematically ignored. Atrocious living and working conditions contributed to deteriorating health, outbreak of epidemics, and deaths.

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

1923: Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, one of Benito Mussolini’s educators, perished.
1934: The German referendum that year approved Adolf Schicklgruber’s appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.
1941: As Joseph Goebbels met with his Chancellor, the Axis captured Gomel and Kherson. Likewise, the Third Reich and the Kingdom of Romania signed the Tiraspol Agreement, rendering the region of Transnistria under control of the latter.
1942: The Axis successfully repelled Operation Jubilee: the amphibious Allied assault on Dieppe, France. Additionally, the Axis exterminated scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Menzhinskoe by machine gun fire, and it liquidated a workers’ ghetto in Kovel. Axis police teams also conducted house‐to‐house searches in the Kaunas ghetto.
1943: Axis defenses along the Mius River succumbed to a breach near Stalino (now Donetsk), Ukraine, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Oberstgeneral Hans Jeschonnek suicided. Less importantly, the Wehrmachtbericht daily radio report mentioned Paul von Kleist.
1944: Paris, France rose against Axis occupation with the help of Allied troops. Axis troops in the Falaise pocket in France received orders to break out, and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge committed suicide by taking cyanide near Metz, France after being relieved of his command and recalled to Berlin.
1945: Tōkyō told its troops that surrendering under the terms of a ceasefire would not be considered a loss of honour under the bushidō, which demanded fighting to the death. Thousands resultingly began laying down their arms as the Soviets landed on Maoka to deal with more Axis holdouts. (Coincidentally, the Kuomintang lost against the Communists in the Battle of Yongjiazhen as the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, took power in Hanoi, Vietnam.) On the other hand, Malayan nationalist leader and Axis collaborator Ibrahim Yaacob (who, despite his name, seems to have been a gentile) and his family escaped Malaya for Java. Hiroshi Nemoto also became the commanding officer of the Axis’s North China Area Army while still retaining his command over the Japanese Mongolian Garrison Army. At Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong, Axis commander Lieutenant Chozaburo Matsumoto ordered several civilians nearby to be tied to stakes and beaten in retaliation for a Chinese assault. When company commander Lieutenant Yasuo Kishi returned to duty later that day, he ordered the arrest and beheading of village elders Tsang Sau and Lam Fook. Later in the evening, Matsumoto ordered further arrests.

(Mirror.)

He wanted to fight the British in order to gain independence. Stern, in his utter naïveté, believed [that] he could form an alliance with Hitler against the British. […] Haganah, and the mainstream Zionists, and even Irgun realized [that] you had to wait for the defeat of the [Axis] before you could then take on the British. It was a question of tactics; it wasn’t a question of principle.

So the idea that you negotiate with the [European Fascists], of course, was acceptable. Nineteen thirty‐three, they negotiated Haʻavara, the transfer agreement, a trade agreement with the [Third Reich] that broke the Jewish boycott of [it]. So, again, there was no difference in principle, but tactically you could see that Stern was, again, impatient. He couldn’t wait, he couldn’t see that sometimes you can’t do everything at once.

[…]

Stern totally disregarded the anti‐Jewish side of Fascism. He was so focussed on trying to build an alliance against the British that he was only thinking about this maxim: ‘The enemy of my enemy’s my friend.’ So, in 1940, he tries to, first of all, to meet the Fascists from Italy.

They made a kind of agreement, which [was] called the Jerusalem Agreement, made by the Stern Group, which said that he’s gonna be one side, and Ital[y] will be the other side.

He agreed to recognise the Italian Fascists as the sovereign power in most of the region while the Italian Fascists would recognize Stern […] and the Lehi as the sole sovereign power in historic Palestine, but one of the most interesting parts of the agreement was that it required the Italian Fascists to use their military power to dissolve what they referred to as the Jewish diaspora, meaning that Stern wanted the Fascist military to forcibly remove Jews who were not in Palestine, and make them go to Palestine.

The problem was that, unbeknownst to Stern, these messages had been intercepted by his rivals at the Irgun, and for a while he was actually communicating—unbeknownst to him—with the Irgun rather than with the Italian Fascists.

Cheers to Tony Greenstein for showing me this.

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

1890: Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, was unfortunately born.
1912: Otto Ernst Remer, Axis general, burdened humanity with his existence.
1916: Neagu Bunea Djuvara, Romanian fascist, arrived to worsen the world.
1933: The Volksempfänger was first presented to the German public at a radio exhibition; the presiding Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, delivered an accompanying speech heralding the radio as the ‘eighth great power’.
1937: Imperial Japanese Army General Masakazu Kawabe entered Beiping, China and proclaimed himself the city’s military governor.
1938: Colonel‐General Ludwig Beck’s fellow Fascists forced him to resign as Chief of the Army General Staff because of his consistent opposition to Berlin’s decision to attack Czechoslovakia. Apart from that, the Imperialists lost one bomber.
1939: Bucharest placed an additional order to purchase six more He 112 fighters, and Berlin ordered the construction of Havelland. Additionally, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop pushed for his visit to Moscow, offering Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov favorable terms in terms of spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. (Coincidentally, Soviet negotiations with the Western régimes stalled again as Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck continued to resist allowing Soviet entry into Polish territory even in the face of a Fascist invasion!)
1940: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, took place. At that point, it was the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides (especially for the Fascists). Elsewhen, perhaps after Rudolf Betzendahl became Togo’s commanding officer, Alessandro Malaspina sighted armed merchant cruiser HMS Circassia in the Atlantic Ocean at 1620 hours. At 1700 hours and at eight hundred metres, Circassia suddenly steered toward the submarine, and the Fascists dove deeper to avoid being rammed (it was unclear whether Circassia was intending to ram or if she was merely zigzagging). At the distance of a couple hundred metres, Circassia fired three rounds at the submarine’s periscope followed by three depth charges, causing some damage with instruments within the conning tower from the vibration. Alessandro Malaspina remained submerged for half an hour before extending her periscope again, by which time Circassia had already left the area.
1941: In southern Ukraine, the Axis established a bridgehead across the Dnieper River at Zaporizhia. Further southwest along the river, the Axis began an assault on Kherson city, which was situated on the western bank of the river. The port facilities of Odessa, Ukraine was struck by He 111 bombers of the Luftwaffe KG 27; the pilots reported overwhelming success in terms of Soviet shipping destroyed. Out at sea, two Axis torpedo boats, NMS Viscolul and NMS Vijelia, damaged a Soviet destroyer south of Odessa.
1942: Berlin issued the Commando Order: all Allied commandos encountered by the Reich’s forces in Eurafrica now had to die immediately, even if in uniform or if they attempted to surrender. As well, the Axis assaulted Novorossiysk and Tuapse on the Black Sea coast in southern Russia, and one hundred kilometers to the northeast, the 1st Panzer Army captured Krasnodar. The Axis submarine U‐553 attacked Allied convoy TAW‐13 close to the coast of southeastern Cuba, then Axis submarine wolfpack Blücher, which consisted of U‐214, U‐333, U‐406, U‐566, U‐590, U‐594, and U‐653, attacked Allied convoy SL‐118 west of Portugal. Two Axis transports arrived at Buna and disembarked reinforcements, and six Axis destroyers delivered 916 troops to Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands; about four hundred were of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Japanese Infantry Regiment who landed at Taivu Point, while the other about five hundred were of the Yokosuka 5th Special Naval Landing Force who landed at Kokumbona; this was the first Axis reinforcement of Guadalcanal by warships.
1943: Otto Skorzeny conducted an aerial reconnaissance mission over La Maddalena, Italy, but his He 111 aircraft was shot down by Allied fighters. Although Skorzeny survived the crash, he suffered three broken ribs. Apart from that, General Hans Jeschinnek, Chief of the Luftwaffe’s staff since 1939, having already lost faith with Hermann Göring, committed suicide at the Luftwaffe Lager Robinson headquarters in Goldap, Ostpreußen (East Prussia) following his controversial order to the air defence units in Berlin to fire on Luftwaffe fighters which had landed there in error during the RAF’s raid on Peenemünde.
1944: The Greater German Reich’s Seventh Army retreated across Orne River in France, leaving 18,000 men behind to be captured. In southern France, Germans began evacuating from areas of Spanish border and Bay of Biscay. On the other hand, a V‐1 bomb blew up and destroyed the railway bridge over Oak Lane in Newington, Kent, England. This happened as an express train was approaching. The locomotive and the tender jumped the gap, but the first two carriages crashed onto the road. Seven passengers and a railway worker who had run to the bridge for shelter died.
1945: Some of the Axis’s last remaining troops prepared theirselves as Soviet forces landed at Takeda Beach on Shumshu Island and launched the Battle of Shumshu; the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Axis’s Kuril Islands commenced. (Coincidentally, Sukarno took office as Indonesia’s first president, following the country's declaration of independence the previous day.) On the other hand, nearly four thousand Axis troops surrendered along the Hailar River in Liaobei Province, China, effectively ending organised resistance.

Jewish representatives that had been removed had to be appeased, so they do not turn to the public, with the payment of severance fees and the [Fascist] assurance to Swedish authorities that Aryanising their foreign representation is “perfectly within the right” of [Fascist] companies and that strict procedures will be followed.

We can already observe during this period first instances of our first theoretical framework in action, such as in the case of Ludwig Klaar when the GES argues in favour of him despite his half‐Jewishness, citing his economic achievements for his German employer. Our second theoretical framework is also apparent in how his case was treated.

The GES referred to him, being a foreign representative of a [Fascist] company abroad, as a Mischling instead of a Hellenic codename, reinforcing the notion that the two nomenclatures are effectively two sides of the same coin. The superficial differences and the artificiality of this system that could bear vast consequences become visible in how after 1940, if deals had to be signed quickly, a non‐Aryan representative could be used, but he had to categorised non‐Jewish after the fact. One’s stamp on a file made all the difference.

Furthermore, we are presented with an interesting paradox connected to [Fascist] companies’ private investigations into racial matters and their prohibition from doing so. We can trace Bjerre’s argument that [Fascist] companies’ own investigations were no longer accepted from Summer 1940 back to the aide‐mémoire from the 9th of February 1939 where [Fascist] companies were first told to refrain from contacting Swedish companies directly about their racial composition. Despite this, they continued doing so well into the 1940s, leading to direct complaints from the Swedish embassy.

We can see from Van Scherpenberg’s response, in line with [Fascist] pre‐war caution that such infractions were something they sought to avoid, yet turned to seemingly tolerate out of practical necessity by the early 1940s, certainly after the expansion of foreign trade Aryanisation’s scope. In Denmark for instance, Bjerre demonstrates several examples of Danish companies also still being interrogated on their racial composition after 1940.¹²⁶

[…]

Swedish companies that were to be aryanised were often asked to fire for example Jewish employees, board members and get rid of Jewish share capital. This happened within the framework of discrimination between smaller and larger companies described previously, and in line with our first theoretical framework in that leniency towards economically significant exporters to [the Third Reich] or important buyers of [Fascist] goods became increasingly apparent, especially within the GCCS.

By June 1941, AB Turitz for instance was subjected to Aryanisation, yet only in the top management circles.¹⁹⁸ However, as part of this and the latter takeover by Upplands Enskilda Banken, the Jewish leadership only went into “hiding”, still exercising control over the company. Smaller companies, such as A. Wiklund A.B.A.W., were asked more explicitly, often with the usage of semantic and stylistic writing techniques to exert pressure, to relinquish their Jewish contingent:

Dear Mr. Consul, […] we learned that Mr. Hohenacker had a longer conversation about the increasingly acute staff questions at the company Wiklund, which concern all German businesses equally. […] That it is impossible for any German firm to continue working with the company Wiklund, if the misters Hirsch, Nachmansson senior and junior are not eliminated from the board of directors corresponds entirely to our assessment. […] You know, dear Mr. Consul that the Adlerwerke have, during the long‐lasting friendly cooperation with the house Wiklund, always avoided to intervene in internal affairs. […] In this case we have no other choice if we want to achieve the goal of continuing our existing trade relationship.¹⁹⁹

Some [Fascist] representatives in Sweden, like Ernst Seidel working for Simons und Frowein AG even hoped that the suspension of [Fascist] deliveries to Swedish–Jewish companies will lead to a self‐reduction of Jewish influence in Swedish companies.

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

1911: Martin Sandberger, SS functionary and Shoah perpetrator, was unfortunately born.
1942: German Army Group A established bridgeheads across the Kuban River while the Reserve Police Battalion 101 massacred 1,700 Jews in the Polish village of Łomazy. (Coincidentally, U.S. Marines raided the Axis‐held Pacific island of Makin while the USAAF made its first air raid on occupied Europe, bombing railroad marshaling yards at Sotteville‐lès‐Rouen. These were somewhere around the same time that the Second Moscow Conference ended.)
1943: The Axis took down sixty bombers from the U.S. Eighth Air Force during the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission, but it lost Sicily to the Allies as the U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrived in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Somewhere around the same time that the first Québec Conference of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and William Lyon Mackenzie King began, the Royal Air Force commenced Operation Hydra: the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against the Third Reich’s V‐weapon program.
1945: At Talitzou by the Sino‐Korean border, Puyi, then the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo, formally renounced the imperial throne, dissolving the state, and ceding its territory to the Republic of China. (Coincidentally, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, igniting the Indonesian National Revolution against the Dutch Empire.) Meanwhile, the Third Reich’s last submarine, U‐977, surrendered to the Allies.
1971: Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List, Axis field marshal, dropped dead.
1987: Rudolf Walter Richard Heß, leading members of the NSDAP, hung hisself in prison… I have no comment.

Do you remember when antifeminists would cite the SCUM Manifesto, or a few strangers online writing ‘kill all men’ as an obvious joke or overreaction, as evidence in support of antifeminism? What about conservatives citing a violent kidnapper shouting ‘black lives matter’, or a stranger publicly saying mean things about whites, as evidence against the Black Lives Matter movement (or even against Afro‐Americans in general)?

Well, this tactic was exactly what the Axis deployed: find an obscure ideologue proposing an extreme solution, then magnify his importance to such a ridiculous extent that it justifies one’s own actions. Theodore N. Kaufman, a petty bourgeois Jew without any political power, would have been quickly forgotten by history if only the Axis overlooked him, but he unwittingly made Axis propagandists’ job a little easier by writing a polemic titled Germany Must Perish!, and you better believe that they were going to milk that cow for all that she was worth:

A month after the [re]invasion [of Soviet Eurasia] came one of the most peculiar propaganda elements of the war: Theodore N. Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish! Kaufman was a 31‐year‐old American Jew who owned a theater ticket agency in New Jersey. In March 1941, he self‐published a 100‐page book that called for the sterilization of the entire German population (excepting only Jews and those no longer fertile).

It would be inhumane, he wrote, to kill the Germans, but sterilization would eliminate them within two generations. He also included a map proposing the partition of German territory among neighboring nations. As he wrote in the introduction, Germany had been a source of misery for the rest of the world from its beginning:

This time Germany has forced a TOTAL WAR upon the world.
As a result, she must be prepared to pay a TOTAL PENALTY.
And there is one, and only one, such Total Penalty:
Germany must perish forever!
In fact—not in fancy!¹⁹

Kaufman had earlier presented himself as the president (and perhaps sole member) of the American Federation of Peace, which in 1939 had urged Congress either to stay out of Europe’s war, or to sterilize all Americans to keep their children from becoming homicidal monsters.

He did have a gift for public relations. Before reviewers received his book, a small black coffin came in the mail announcing that his book would arrive the next day.²⁰ Kaufman’s effort got limited attention in the United States, generally negative, though he, in the fashion of film publicists, found several passages that could be made to sound positive to include in his second printing.²¹

That would have been the end of it, but copies made their way to [the Third Reich]. Although the United States was not yet a combatant, the [Axis] immediately presented Kaufman’s book as the official American plan to deal with Germany. On July 23, 1941, a month after the [re]invasion of [Soviet Eurasia], a Berlin press conference revealed Kaufman’s plan. The next day, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a story that covered most of the front page: “The Product of Criminal Jewish Sadism: Roosevelt Demands the Sterilization of the German People.”

The article stated that “Theodor Kaufmann [sic]”²² had “a monstrous plan for the extermination of the German people and the total fragmentation of Germany,” noting that he was president of the American Federation of Peace and

one of the closest advisers to the New York Jew Samuel Roseman [sic], who as is well known provides advice and assistance in speechwriting to the current president of the United States, Roosevelt. […] Given the close relationship of the writer to the White House, this monstrous war program can be seen as a synthesis of genuine Talmudic hatred and Roosevelt’s views on foreign policy.²³

The story received prime coverage in other German newspapers as well. Many articles followed in the German press, all of which claimed that Kaufman’s proposal was incontrovertible proof of international Jewry’s intent physically to destroy Germany and its people.²⁴ Das Reich avoided commentary, simply carrying particularly startling passages from Kaufman’s book.²⁵

Significant parts were read over national radio. It is important to remember that from July to September 1941, Third Reich bureaucracies were engaged in energetic and explicit internal discussions on killing the Jews, discussions reflected in more general terms in public discourse.²⁶

But that was only the beginning. Joseph Goebbels read Kaufman’s book early in August. In his diary, he expressed outrage, then wrote:

This Jew did a real service for the enemy [German] side. Had he written this book for us, he could not have made it any better. I will have this published in an edition of millions for Germany and above all for the front, and will write the forward and afterward myself.²⁷

Goebbels realized that Kaufman’s diatribe had little significance in the United States, but that did not prevent him from recognizing its propaganda value.²⁸ Goebbels discussed Kaufman’s book with Hitler a few weeks later, who was also outraged.

Notably, Hanover’s mayor cited Kaufman’s polemic as an excuse to evict the city’s Jews:

Hundreds of Jews in Hanover received notices Monday to evacuate their homes within 24 hours.

They were permitted to take only “the most necessary objects and furniture” and advised [that] the remainder of their property would be sold, the proceeds to be turned over to them “at a given time.” [Read: never.]

One reason cited for the action was said to have been a book written by “the Jew Kaufmann [sic] in New York.” The book, it was alleged, demands sterilization of all Germans and employment of German soldiers as coolies in foreign lands.

[…]

Theodore N. Kaufman, whose book “Germany Must Perish!” was cited by the mayor of Hanover […] in his eviction notice to Jews of that city, said Monday, “This is just a flimsy pretext for another of the innate cruelties of the German people.”

The author said, “I don’t think [that] it was my book that prompted this barbarity. They employed every possible German cruelty against the Jews long before my book was published.”

Silly prejudice aside, Kaufman raised one valid point here: he cannot be blamed for the eviction of Hanover’s Jews, or for any of the Axis’s other atrocities, for that matter. Some anticommunists might think that that is a great idea, but anybody who can apply materialist analysis knows that the causes behind atrocities run far deeper than an irrelevant stranger saying mean things about a kind of people. Freeing up room for gentiles is one example.

In many ways, Kaufman’s importance parallels Haj Amin al‐Husayni’s. Even though the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an unpopular, Zionist‐appointed politician who failed to prevent thousands of Palestinians from serving the Allies, and failed to organize any efficient Waffen‐SS divisions, he remains the only link that Zionists have between Palestinians and the Shoah, so they inflate his importance to astronomic proportions.

Click here for examples.

Hajj Amin‐al‐Husseini was highly influential and extremely popular throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.¹⁷ The Husseini family of Jerusalem was one of the most powerful and respected clans in Palestinian Arab society for centuries. The Husseinis claim to be descendants of Hussein, the son of the Caliph Ali and his wife Fatima, daughter of Muhammad.¹⁸ For centuries, the Husseinis had held important positions in Palestine, including Mufti of Jerusalem.¹⁹ Under the British Mandate in Palestine, due in part to the power and prestige of his family, Hajj Amin al‐Husseini served as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Thus, he was the most powerful Arab official in British Palestine and controlled a large budget and a network of patronage that included imams of mosques, judges in the Islamic courts, Islamic schools, and Islamic endowments (waqf).²⁰ By virtue of these two offices, Husseini “became the most influential Arab in Palestine.”²¹

Source.

On the contrary, René Wildangel documented that, among other facts, ‘Filastin, like the other traditional Christian paper, al‐Karmil, edited by Najib Nassar, was generally closer to the biggest opposition bloc (al‐muʻarada) against Amin al‐Husayni, and was dominated by the Nashashibi family. Al‐Sirat al‐Mustaqim, edited by ʻAbdullah al‐Qalqili, supported the same faction’ and ‘Arab Palestinian support for the old political élite disintegrated, and the dissatisfaction with the mufti, which had been growing for quite some time, fed the growing factionalism in Palestinian politics.⁴⁷’

No matter: Benjamin Netanyahu had to blame him for the Shoah, and ordinary Zionists shoehorn mentions of him wherever they please. For example:

If one insists on invoking the Holocaust, it should also not be forgotten that the Palestinians actively collaborated with Hitler. Their leader, Haj Amin al‐Husseini, met with Hitler to collaborate on plans to eliminate the Jews. So Palestinians are not innocent of Holocaust guilt.

You get the picture.

True, Kaufman was no war criminal (not even a minor one like the Mufti), but that is irrelevant: Walter Rauff caused far more damage than one Mufti ever did, yet he is of far less concern to Zionists. So criminality is not the issue here. Kaufman became important because the Axis decided that he should be, then the Zionists bestowed the Grand Mufti with the same importance, not so much because of something intrinsic to his misbehavior, but because of his value to propagandists.

The propagandists would have completed their jobs all the same; these two blokes only made them a little easier.

That being said, in at least one of these cases the professional liars still had some trouble reprogramming ordinaries despite the unwitting aid and their exhaustive efforts:

The […] German response to [Fascism’s] anti‐Semitic argument was more indifference than internalization. Despite the steady anti‐Semitic propaganda [that] we have surveyed, [Fascist] internal communication consistently worried about the lack of passionate anti‐Semitism on the part of the German population.⁸⁹

Anti‐Semitism increased gradually as the war went on. For the first two years, most Germans did not pay much heed to the alleged Jewish threat, since there seemed little chance the Jews would be able to do anything to Germany. Propaganda emphasized Germany’s other enemies, and the [Axis was] winning the war. The Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) of the SS provided confidential reports on public morale until 1943, when Goebbels had them eliminated because they too accurately reflected public doubts about the war.⁹⁰

A July 1941 SD report, written after the first appearance of the Kaufman story, noted that people read newspaper accounts with interest, but without any particular concern. “Frequently, there were characteristic expressions of popular humor: ‘Sure, they would if they could.”’ It did seem to strengthen anti‐Semitic attitudes, but others saw it as propagandistic preparation for the expected entrance of the United States into the war.⁹¹

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

1904: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator, was born.
1919: Karl‐Heinz Euling, Waffen‐SS captain, was unleashed on the earth.
1933: Pro‐Reich Canadians provoked a riot at Christie Pits.
1934: Rome ordered the 48,000 troops rushed to the Austro‐Italian border during the July Putsch to return to their regular bases. Meanwhile, Schicklgruber’s amnesty announcement went into effect, releasing the prisoners in time to vote in Sunday’s referendum.
1935: Representatives of France, Great Britain and Fascist Italy met in Paris to negotiate a solution to the Abyssinia Crisis. Haile Selassie offered new economic concessions to Italy, stressing that he would not accept a military occupation but would grant facilities for mining, road construction and railway operations.
1942: As the Soviets evacuated Maykop and Axis positions in Egypt were bombed by Yankee aeroplanes for the first time, the Kriegsmarine began Operation Wunderland with the objective of entering the Kara Sea and destroying as many Soviet vessels as possible. Meanwhile in Bilbao, Spain, a mass was held at the Basilica of Begoña to commemorate members of the Begoña Regiment who died in the Civil War. After the service there was some shouting between the Carlist and Falangist factions, and during the ensuing scuffle a Falangist threw two hand grenades and wounded thirty people.
1944: First flight of a jet with forward‐swept wings, the Junkers Ju 287.
1945: Takijirō Ōnishi, Axis admiral, took his own life.

Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, page 46:

Attempts to organise resistance in the Białystok ghetto were not very successful. This was partly owing to a tactical miscalculation by the resistance leadership, which tried both to fight in the ghetto and also to strengthen the rural partisans, but had too few resources to achieve both tasks properly.

They were also undermined by the collaboration of the Zionist‐led Judenrat with the [Axis]. “The policy of the Białystok Judenrat was all the more convincing because its chief champion and executor was Ephraim Barasz, an engineer by profession and a liberal Zionist in his political beliefs.” Barasz had previously had the reputation of being an “honest man”, which enabled him more effectively to lull the ghetto’s inhabitants into a false sense of security.

In February 1943, the [Axis] demanded the surrender of 6,300 Białystok Jews for extermination. The Judenrat complied by preparing lists of people whose sin was that they were poor or had fled to Białystok from the annihilated provincial ghettoes. The deal was arranged in absolute secrecy, without any warning or hint from Barasz or other Judenrat members to the ghetto population of what was in store for it.

However, the resistance United Anti‐Fascist Bloc prevented most people on the lists from reporting for transportation to their deaths, and the ghetto inhabitants fought back when the [Axis] came to collect them. On 15 August 1943 the [Axis] informed Barasz they intended to liquidate the ghetto. “Barasz returned to the ghetto and did not warn anybody that only a few hours were left to the 40,000‐odd Jews” still in there, nor did he encourage them to revolt.

The Anti‐Fasci[s]t Bloc nevertheless managed to arm 300 combatants with firearms and grenades and a further 200 with Molotov cocktails, home‐made bombs, knives and axes. These weapons, many of them smuggled into the ghetto in most daring ways, were grossly inadequate for a large‐scale revolt, but the resistance nevertheless lasted until 26 August and the [Axis] had to use artillery and aircraft to subdue it. About 100 [Fascists] were killed.⁵⁷

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Click here for other events that happened today (August 15).

1939: Twenty‐six Ju87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel met unexpected ground fog during a dive‐bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crashed and burned.
1940: A Fascist submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Fascist provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco‐Italian War in October.
1941: Hungary’s leaders officially ended their large‐scale deportations because the Axis occupying forces in East Galicia did not want to handle more deportees. Elsewhen, an Allied firing squad executed Corporal Josef Jakobs at the Tower of London for his espionage on the Axis’s behalf.
1943: Superior Axis forces surrounded Cretan partisans during the Battle of Trahili, who managed to escape against all odds.
1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasted his declaration of surrender following the Axis’s defeat in World War II; Korea gained independence from the Empire of Japan. Shortly before or after the broadcast, Korechika Anami, the Axis’s last remaining War Minister, committed suicide.
1953: Ludwig Prandtl, Axis physicist and aerospace scientist, expired.
1989: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator who helped plan the assault on Pearl Harbor, died.