Capitalism in Decay

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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

I wish you all a very pleasant Pesach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As R.G. Price put it:

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

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

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

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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

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

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

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

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

(Just for clarification: ancient Sparta was by no means the German Fascists’ only inspiration, as anybody who regularly reads this subcommunity can attest.)

Although admiration of Sparta in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was by no means universal, it is nevertheless possible to trace a significant tradition, originally formulated by Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829), in which the Dorian Greek Stamm (race) — and the Spartans in particular — were seen as the most truly and typically Hellenic people.⁵

This idea was taken up by a number of scholars during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most importantly by Karl Ottfried Müller (1797–1840), who popularised and reinterpreted the concept of the Dorians in accordance with contemporary political views. In his monumental work on the history and antiquities of the Dorian race, Die Dorier (1820), Müller portrayed Sparta as a pattern-state for all Greece: the Dorian polis par excellence.⁶

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this Dorian conception of Sparta was favoured by those with an interest in questions of racialised historiography who wished to propagate theories regarding the Nordic/Aryan nature of the Dorians.⁷ In particular, such ideas appealed to German nationalists, who found them useful in presenting their German forefathers as closely related to the Dorian Greeks.

Theories of Spartan racial superiority stemming from this matrix of ideas also led to the widespread assumption that Sparta’s ‘eugenic’ laws concerning marriage and children were formulated from a conscious desire for racial purity. Ideas of Sparta thus came to form a part of the prevalent early twentieth-century European discourse on racial hygiene and cultural degeneration.⁸

Nevertheless, it was the [German Fascists] who were to bring many of these disparate elements of the German ‘Sparta-theme’ together — as Losemann points out, with the advent of the Third Reich, the Spartan tradition in Germany became ‘radicalised’, and was pushed to hitherto unknown extremes.

During the Third Reich, politicians, academics and amateur scholars in widely-differing fields claimed Sparta as an archetype;⁹ her all-important identification as a Nordic state, which led Spartan blood to be identified with the blood of the German people,¹⁰ became the catalyst for numerous works praising various aspects of Spartan society.¹¹

Hitler himself set Sparta at the head of his hierarchy of Classical inspirations; for him she was the ‘purest racial state in antiquity’, an archaic precursor of the Third Reich.¹² He praised her birth policy explicitly in his so-called Secret Book, written in 1928 (known in German as his Zweites Buch),¹³ and saw her ‘naked power’ as a model for his own projected Eastern European power structure.¹⁴

Preferring to see [Dorian] Greeks as the ultimate forefathers of the German race, he even claimed that a particular affinity between Germans and Spartans could be proved by the resemblance of peasant soup in Schleswig Holstein to Spartan black broth.¹⁵

What, then, of Sparta’s significance in [Fascist] education? It was an educational precept of the Third Reich that all subjects should be recast in the service of [Fascist] ideology and Wehrgeistigkeit (militaristic spirit).

The aim of this ‘new pedagogy’ was to mould children of the right ‘character’, so that they might form a ‘master race’ endowed with all the virtues of a [mindlessly] obedient ‘political soldier’,¹⁶ desirous of war and victory in order to gain Lebensraum (living-space taken from conquered non-Germanic peoples), and entirely committed to all [Fascist] racial and political beliefs and policies.¹⁷

History was particularly subject to reworking under the [German Fascists’] new Geschichtsdogmatik (historical credo) — all epochs were reassessed as programmatic for [Fascism].¹⁸ For example, the syllabuses of the Humanistische Gymnasien (classical grammar schools) were transformed to present Greeks and Romans as ‘Nordic culture-bearing peoples’ closely related to the Germans. All great political and cultural achievements were portrayed as the product of Nordic peoples, and the downfall of civilisations (whether Persian, Greek or Roman) was presented as the result of ‘de-Nordification’ (Entnordung).¹⁹

Sparta, as the Nordic state par excellence, therefore achieved a doubly-heightened significance. Whatever her inclinations, her history would have been rewritten in a manner favourable to [Fascism]. However, since so many of the values of her kosmos seemed to bear an active resemblance to the values of the [Reich’s] leadership, her importance as a legitimising example was widely extolled, and the (supposed) similarities in her political, racial and constitutional outlook were emphasised far beyond the walls of the Gymnasien.

One needed to look no further than ‘the Socialist Warrior State of the Dorian Spartans’ for an ancient precedent for the glorification of war and sacrificial heroism, or for the institutionalisation of tough physical training allied with eugenic racial policies.²⁰

From this perspective, the Spartans could truly be hailed as [German Fascists] avant la lettre.²¹ On at least one occasion, Bernhard Rust, the Reich Minister for Education, completely identified the objectives of his own office with the rearing of young Spartans.²²

Many German classicists also followed this pro-Spartan trend, making a point of discussing Spartan topics in their new, ideologically influenced research: ‘none of the many programmatic pamphlets advocating a specifically National Socialist conception of the ancient world failed to mention Sparta’.²³ According to some scholars, non-German classicists were incapable of studying Spartan history properly.²⁴

In particular, Helmut Berve, the second major contributor to Sparta: Der Lebenskampf, who held the title of ‘Kriegsbeauftragter der deutschen Altertumswissenschaft’ (‘War-representative of German Classical Scholarship’),²⁵ was notorious for his systematic attempts to ‘nazify’ his discipline.²⁶

Berve’s short monograph, Sparta, which was published in 1937 and intended for a general readership, was insistent in its assimilation of Sparta with [the Third Reich].²⁷ So important did Berve consider the Spartan model that he gave lectures on Sparta to numerous soldiers’, teachers’ and working men’s associations, and often wrote on Spartan subjects in the popular press.²⁸

Vacano himself, while enjoying a high reputation as a Classical archaeologist, was sufficiently dedicated to disseminating the [Fascist] view of ancient history to the young that he became first an Erzieher (teacher/educator) of the Adolf Hitler Schools, and later a chief officer of the Adolf Hitler School teacher training academy.²⁹ He was therefore particularly well-placed to produce a textbook whose description of Spartan education would have resonated with the experience of pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools.

Ancient Sparta continues to be a source of inspiration for white neofascists, as it epitomized nearly all of the characteristics that they fetishize: militarism, ableism, adventurous conquest, toxic masculinity, and ‘Europeanity’. (Ancient Sparta’s looser sexual mores are normally unincluded.) Given how many neofascists have military backgrounds, such fetishisation should be unsurprising.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with having a fascination in a premodern civilization, neofascists take this a step further and seriously argue that most or all of a premodern civilization’s worst aspects are worth emulating today. This is analogous to being content seeing a crocodile in the wild versus wanting to bring one home as a pet.

Further reading: Sparta’s German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, 1818–1920, and in Nationalist Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933–1945

Sparta and the Nazis (audio)

Quoting Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, pages 32–33:

Ironically, the [Zionist] Revisionists also had fairly wide-ranging links with the Nazis. The Betar youth movement was active in Berlin and several other German cities. About half a year before the Nazis came to power, the movement’s leadership distributed a memorandum to its members that was both commonsensical and cautious.

The Nazis should be treated politely and with reserve, the memorandum instructed. Whenever Betar members were in public, they should remain quiet and refrain from vocal debates and critical comments. Under no circumstances should anyone say anything that could be interpreted as an insult to the German people, to its institutions, or to its prevailing ideology.⁷⁷

The [Third Reich] allowed Betar to continue its activities—meetings, conventions, summer camps, hikes, sports, sailing, and agricultural training. Members were allowed to wear their uniforms, which included brown shirts, and they were allowed to publish mimeographed pamphlets, including Zionist articles in a nationalistic, para-Fascist tone, in the spirit of the times.

The German Betar pamphlets focused on events in Palestine, and their exuberant nationalism targeted the British, the Arabs, and the Zionist left. They contained no references to the political situation in Germany. With this exception, they were similar to nationalist German youth publications, including those published by the [NSDAP]. Jabotinsky decried the influence Hitlerism was having on the members of Betar.⁷⁸

As the Revisionists pushed for a boycott, they could no longer openly support their youth movement in [the Third Reich]. German Betar thus received a new name, Herzlia. The movements activity in [the Third Reich] required, of course, Gestapo approval; in fact, the movement operated under the Gestapo’s protection.

A group of SS men once attacked a Betar summer camp. The head of the movement complained to the Gestapo, and a few days later the secret police announced that the SS men involved had been disciplined. The Gestapo asked Betar what compensation would be appropriate. The movement asked that a recent prohibition forbidding them to wear their brown shirts be lifted; the request was granted.*⁷⁹

Betar was active in Austria as well. Its members continued to meet even after the Anschluss. This required regular contacts with Gestapo representatives and with Adolf Eichmann. Betar leaders sent the German secret police a memorandum offering to organize the emigration of Austrian Jews.

The assumption was that the [German Fascists] and Betar had common interests, just as the [German Fascists] and the Jewish Agency had. The [Third Reich] allowed Betar to open an emigration office and even helped by supplying the emigrants with foreign currency. Most of these emigrants were meant to enter Palestine illegally on boats chartered by Betar.⁸⁰

(Emphasis added.)

It is rare that I cite Wikipedia for my research, given its notoriously variable quality, but in this case it is only because English sources on this event are in very short supply. The following summary was one of the few that I found. Quoting Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, pages 68–69:

Franz Roeckle had started his career by building a rather beautiful Egyptian–Assyrian style synagogue in Frankfurt in 1908, but by 1933 he was a National Socialist party member who was jailed for his part in a pogrom, known as the Rotter Affair, in his native Liechtenstein.

In 1933 Fritz and Alfred Rotter, two well-known Jewish theatre entrepreneurs in Berlin, had fled Germany to Liechtenstein in part to avoid a bankruptcy scandal which had led to them being castigated in the Hitlerite press, but mostly to escape the [Fascists] — propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was seeking to eliminate what he called Berlin’s ‘Jew-ridden amusement business.’

In Liechtenstein, four [Fascists] including Roeckle tried to kidnap the Rotter brothers in order to take them back to Berlin where, most likely, they would have been jailed if not murdered. The brothers managed to flee their hotel, but in the resulting car chase Alfred Rotter and his wife Gertrude plunged from a cliff to their deaths, while Fritz and his companion were seriously injured.

It is not clear whether Alfred and Gertrude’s deaths were accidental or if they were driven off the road by Roeckle and his associates. The four [Fascists] served only short jail sentences for their involvement in the deaths: indeed, Roeckle and the others were freed early after a 700-signature petition secured their parole (the tiny German-speaking Alpine principality included many enthusiastic [Fascist] supporters).

‘It was a political assassination, perhaps not the only, but the most serious of the small country’, wrote the Liechtensteiner historians Norbert Haas and Hansjörg Quaderer later.⁴ If so, the Frankfurt School’s architect was an anti-Semitic murderer. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it: ‘First he built for Jews, then he drove Jews to their deaths.’⁵

On April 3, the siege of the cave began. The Arbegnoch put up stiff resistance, which was initially successful. The [Fascist] troops were in a difficult position, as the steep rock walls on either side of the cave left them exposed to enemy fire.

The Ascari used machine guns, artillery, grenades and tear gas bullets, but failed to flush out the partisans. The situation had reached a stalemate, even though they even tried to use flamethrowers.

After seven days of siege, the [Fascist] command decided to call up the chemical warfare platoon from the port of Massawa in Eritrea, which arrived with hundreds of artillery shells loaded with arsine and an airplane bomb containing about 212 kg of mustard gas.

On April 9, the chemical platoon, after funneling the mustard gas into 12 containers connected to electric detonators, dropped them in front of the cave entrance and blew them up. Thus began the inferno of Amazegna Washa.

The initial contact with mustard gas is painless, but it penetrates the skin deeply, passing through waterproof clothing, and it causes the progressive inflammation of skin tissues. After a few hours, the skin swells in huge blisters, which later turn into sores that expose the raw flesh to the air. The gas causes severe internal bleeding, attacks the respiratory system and causes blindness.

Many Arbegnoch that found themselves near the entrance of the cave quickly succumbed to the gas, and those hiding inside would suffer the effects of exposure. The refugees and partisans hiding in the cave were at the end of their strength. The gas polluted the internal lake. Thus, on April 11, the procession of partisans, women and children began to leave the cave.

The men, about 800, were immediately shot in groups of 50 on the edge of the ravine, according to Mussolini’s supreme decree, while the women and children were held for a short time near the [Regio Esercito] encampment and then released, dying of gas poisoning.

This is the most plausible reconstruction of the massacre carried out by the Fascist units, which violated the Geneva Convention in every way. Almost 80 years later, the size of this massacre is still shrouded in a cloud of mystery.

Unlike the high-ranking Fascist officers, it is difficult to say whether the [Regio Esercito] knew that inside the cave there were also women, children and the elderly. However, it is plausible to estimate that the dead, inside and outside the cave, numbered between 800 and 1,500.

(Mirror.)

Daniel Pasmanik (1869–1930) […] recalled his irritation upon hearing of the Russian soldiers’ delight when they were informed of Nicholas II’s overthrow. The soldiers expected that they would be able to return home, but as Pasmanik wrote in April 1917, Russia’s redemption required the removal of German militarism.⁴⁶

His view accorded with the Kadet policy to continue the war, a view that Bolshevik “defeatism” attacked. He attended a meeting of the city duma (congress) of Yalta following the February Revolution, where he claimed that no revolution would be realistic in peasant Russia, but attendees at the meeting were opposed to his idea.

After the meeting, he became more convinced that conscientious intellectuals’ lack of “monarchist energy” and “aim and solid will” to defeat demagoguery allowed the devastating situation of Russia.⁴⁷ He also tried to organize officers privately, though their “passivity” prevented him from succeeding.⁴⁸

Pasmanik considered the Bolshevik idea of the proletarian dictatorship to be narrow-minded and concerned only with proletarian interests. Furthermore, as a supporter of unfettered cultural creation, he suspected that the “uncultured” nature of the Bolsheviks would lead to Russia’s moral degeneration.

Though he emphasized that Zionism would not aim to preserve a specific culture and thus was reluctant to discuss Jewish culture per se, in the period after 1917 he often used the terms cultural or uncultured. Although he did not define it, his use of the term cultural suggested something civilized and Westernized. As I will note when I return to this issue later, he held a strong conviction that becoming “cultural” would change a barbaric human nature into a sophisticated one with a broad, statewide perspective.⁴⁹

In his Counterrevolutionary Diary (1923),⁵⁰ Pasmanik wrote about his motivation to serve the White resistance in these terms: “I am a determined opponent of all the revolutions following the war. For each was born not of the joy of creation but of defeat, that is, it was born of statewide attrition and cultural degeneration. […] In every respect, postrevolutionary Russia is losing the wealth that old Russia had.”

He defined the Russian Revolution as “an inevitable catastrophe under existing conditions, under the fully relaxed, obsolete bureaucracy, short-sighted obstinacy of the tsar, exhaustion of the front, feeble intelligentsia, lack of strong individuality, and uncultured masses.” Though seemingly inevitable, he wrote that “the revolt of the slaves will never lay the foundation for progress.”⁵¹

His suspicion of the Bolsheviks’ “anarchist” stance, which he believed would hamper any cultural creation, predated the October Revolution. His articles in Ialtinskii golos, the Kadet daily he edited, depicted the Bolsheviks as belonging to a crime ring and their tactics as demagogic.⁵² Correspondence from Burtsev reveals that he accused Bolshevik activists of having participated in espionage for Germany.⁵³

[…]

In 1920, he began editing the Russian Whites’ daily Obshchee delo with Burtsev in Paris. In September 1919 he had already contributed his first article to the newspaper, entitled “The Jewish Question in Russia.” He admitted that in theory the Bolsheviks should not be involved in pogroms, whereas the White Army led by Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin was antagonistic toward Jews and its victory would trigger pogroms.

But Pasmanik went on to stress that despite a general tendency to avoid violence, the Bolsheviks nevertheless demolished the economic life of the Jewish middle class. Moreover, in actuality, although Bolshevik rule rarely caused pogroms, once it was overthrown unprecedented, brutal pogroms occurred because radical members of the Bolsheviks, such as the commissars, included Jews.

Interestingly enough, Pasmanik noted that his close observation of Denikin’s activity did not find any pogroms in the area under Denikin’s rule. Pasmanik explained this as follows:

The unit of General Denikin entertained the ideal of gosudarstvennost’ [statehood], under which the harmonious unity of the classes, peoples, and religious groups would be achieved. Such a cultural concept of gosudarstvennost’ firmly contradicts anti-Jewish pogroms. Therefore, despite the antisemitic tendency of these and other officers or soldiers, his army as a whole did not allow pogroms, which, at last analysis, cast seeds of dissociation throughout the state.⁶²

In his own understanding, then, Pasmanik was never involved with anti-Jewish personalities and never betrayed his Jewish nationalism.

[…]

Pasmanik further lamented that although Russia was in need of a strong unifying force, how to achieve this was a matter of contention, with émigrés internally divided—the left calling for democracy and the right for reaction.

It was in this context that he expressed his belief in the merits of fascism, for it promised the strong leadership [that] he believed was necessary. Fascism in Italy was a historical necessity, Pasmanik contended, arguing that Mussolini had been successful not only because he enjoyed support from a variety of people but also because he was a cultured figure.

Pasmanik also indicated that because Mussolini was cultured, he never allowed robbery, pogroms, or lawlessness, although recent scholarship has proven that this was not the case with other fascists.⁸⁴

(Emphasis added. See Taro Tsurumi’s citations for examples of this Herzlian’s prominence. Contrary to what Pasmanik wrote, Benito Mussolini did not prevent antisemitic violence, not even when Pasmanik was still alive.)

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 218–220:

The [Fascists] appointed a Judenrat which consisted overwhelmingly of Zionist functionaries or sympathisers, including Chairman Adam Czerniaków.⁹⁰ It represented, in a distorted form, the class interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie. The Bread Tax ‘had the appearance of exactions from the poor to keep alive the destitute.’⁹¹ The community budget was paid for via indirect taxation, which bore heaviest on the Jewish poor.⁹² There was a saying that ‘The Germans are killing us, and the Community [the Judenrat] is torturing us.’⁹³

The Judenrat prioritised setting up a labour battalion for the [Fascists] as a way of preventing them from seizing the richer Jews. The poorest sections of the populace were forced to undertake labour.⁹⁴ Ghetto diarist Chaim Kaplan described the Judenrat as ‘an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw community’.⁹⁵ The population saw no difference between the Judenrat and the [Fascists]. The Judenrat ‘supports itself from the misfortunes of the Jews.’⁹⁶ Czerniaków appointed the hated Józef Szeryński as Police Chief, against the opposition of the Bund.⁹⁷

[…]

Zionist historians have sought to rehabilitate Czerniaków, who committed suicide on 24 July 1942, as the [Third Reich] began the deportations. The verdict of the Bund was harsh:

He had no right to act as he did […] since he was the only person in the Ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish Police.¹⁰⁷

Marek Edelman, the last Commander of ZOB, described how Czerniaków served ‘German rather than Jewish interests.’¹⁰⁸ Zivia Lubetkin, a Zionist and one of only thirty-four fighters to have survived the revolt, said that ‘the Jews who remained alive could not forgive him… why didn’t he warn the Jews of the plans to destroy the Ghetto?’¹⁰⁹

The Warsaw Ghetto resistance first began in opposite camps — the Revisionist Jewish Military Union [ZZW] and the Communists — and spread to the Bund, the Zionist youth groups, and LPZ. Only Agudat Yisrael opposed resistance, although in practice the General Zionists also did.¹¹⁰

The Zionist belief that Jews should forsake involvement in the politics of the countries where they lived, acting instead as a national minority, was disastrous in [Fascist]-occupied Poland, cutting off Jews from non-Jews. That was why the Zionists had to look to the Bund to obtain arms.

Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair commanded the Jewish resistance, possibly because he had served in a pre-military training camp.¹¹¹ Young Zionists fought alongside the Bund and communists. Anielewicz expressed his regret over the ‘wasted time’ undergoing Zionist educational work.¹¹² Yitzhak Zuckerman told the Council of Kibbutz Ha Meuchad in May 1947 that ‘had the fate of the Jews in 1942 lain in the hands only of the political parties [Zionist], the revolt would never have taken place.’¹¹³

It was despite, not because of, their Zionist politics that the young Zionists participated in the resistance. The Zionist youth organisations had previously spent their time training on Polish farms, whose owners had been deported as [neo]slave labour to [the Third Reich].

(Emphasis added.)

Related: Jacob Gens: the Third Reich’s deadliest Zionist collaborator

Documentary on the Stern Gang, Zionism’s pro-Axis faction

[On 7 March 1936, Hitler ordered Wehrmacht] troops to enter the Rhineland, the industrial heartland of Germany on the French border. This seemingly simple act of moving troops into another part of German territory was actually [Berlin’s] then-greatest defiance of the post-First World War international system. The Treaty of Versailles and Locarno Treaties, a series of agreements between Germany and other European states that somewhat normalized relations, had both explicitly forbidden Germany from remilitarizing the Rhineland.

With this decision, [Berlin] took a huge gamble. Because a demilitarized Rhine was so crucial to the Third Republic’s defense plan, many expected France to respond with a preemptive attack on the Third Reich.¹⁸⁸ When no such invasion came, Hitler declared that he would ask the German people what they thought about his decision through a referendum on 29 March. Although it followed one of Hitler’s boldest actions, historians have written the least about the 1936 referendum.

[…]

Hitler returned in 1936 to the strategy that had won him success in 1933: attacking the international system of the Treaty of Versailles. As he had a few years earlier, he demanded that the international community treat Germany as an “equal,” not as a vassal state. Instead of referring directly to Poland, as he had before, he spoke more generally, probably with the great powers as his intended audience.¹⁹⁰ In his “incessant propaganda,” he declared that his régime would no longer accept Germany’s second-class treatment.¹⁹¹

On 29 March, after a tense three-week standoff, the German people gave Hitler his then-biggest diplomatic victory, with about 98.8 percent of voters approving of the remilitarization of the Rhine. Just as he had gambled in remilitarizing the Rhineland, Hitler had gambled in holding another referendum, the last of which had proven too unpredictable to serve the régime. Again, his gamble paid off, as he received the greatest electoral success of his career.

The victory was so overwhelming that many journalists, even though they knew how thoroughly the Third Reich coerced voters, conceded that this referendum had proven the German people’s support for the Third Reich. The editor of The Kansas City Star wrote, “An electorate ridden by incessant propaganda, shut off by propaganda and subjected to a psychology of fear from secret police activities cannot be said in the ordinary sense to cast a significant ballot. On the other hand, there can be no reasonable doubt of the widespread popularity of the Nazi dictatorship and its policies today in Germany.”¹⁹²

By returning to the messaging that had produced victory in 1933, [Berlin] created an even greater success in 1936.

(Emphasis added.)

As with the plesbiscite of 1933, there was some tampering that skewed the results, such as the exclusion of Jews, Roma, and Sinti from voting, but even so one should be careful not to fall into the trap of presuming that an unrigged referendum would have necessarily produced the opposite of an overwhelming victory.

Most of the Third Reich’s white, gentile, anticommunist citizens probably at least accepted if not outright supported Fascist rule, and 1936 is still a little early in the Third Reich’s life cycle; these naïve voters had not seen the worst of things yet. Besides, surely an ordinary voter can see the appeal in getting a new spot to inhabit or visit, and the Wehrmacht earned civilians’ respect with its spectacles and employment opportunities.

Now, do not misunderstand me: none of this is to excuse the Fascists’ imperialism, but underestimating the enemy can be a very dangerous mistake, too. Keeping imperialist successes like these in mind is crucial to understanding why so many European adults accepted or saw appeal in Fascism for as long as they did. It is because of miseducation, white privilege, and the Wehrmacht’s ostensible benefits—all of which are ultimately toxic to the lower classes, however subtly—that the Fascist bourgeoisie could successfully manufacture consent to its imperialist endeavours.

Elon Musk’s grandfather is arrested. They find documents sympathetic to the Nazis and other subversive documents inside his house. And he is sent to prison for a few months, then remains on essentially a subversion watch list for the rest of the war here. So, he’s basically regarded as a Nazi sympathizer, a fellow traveler.

A minor source of amusement for us is the fact that the Mount Rushmore National Wonder in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV requires players to first research the Fascism technology before building it. It is unclear if the designers were either aware of Gutzon Borglum’s sordid history or if the two concepts were originally separate and the designers simply paired this wonder with Fascism as a bonus for belligerent players (since both the technology and the wonder’s −25% war weariness effect are very useful for their play style).

In any event, whether Firaxis Games knew it or not, we do have at least one link between Borglum and fascism (if his numerous affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan did not already suffice). Quoting Albert Boime’s The Unveiling of the National Icons, page 157:

Borglum’s penchant for “can-do” leaders and obsession with territorial aggrandizement predisposed him to feel most at home with robber barons like railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington and newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst.

Despite his respect for the two Roosevelts, he always considered a railroad magnate like Huntington to be the greater man. His need for a dominant authority to maintain social order is seen in his 1931 letter to his dear friend Lester B. Barlow, the eccentric inventor and founder of the Nonpartisan League of America, who considered Hoover a “robot.”

Borglum complained that America lacked someone with “guts” who could “take over the Presidency and put the company in order.” He found his model in Europe: “There is only one man in all Europe with vision and courage and who fortunately has the power to carry it out, that’s Mussolini.”⁵¹

[Citation]

[Library of Congress, Manuscript Division], letter from Borglum to Lester Barlow, August 29, 1931. Barlow’s reference to Hoover is in an undated New York Times clipping in the Borglum Papers, “Barlow Looks to Young Business Men for Help.”

The entirety of chapter three in The Unveiling of the National Icons is worth reading for more on Borglum. I could end this little exposé here, but I found even more clues that strongly imply a respect for Fascism. Pages 175–7:

Borglum’s Anglo-Saxon militancy shows up in his racial attitudes, which again throw light on the creative wellsprings of Mount Rushmore. His strident anti-Semitism gave pause even to authors who otherwise admired him.⁹¹ […] A revealing letter of 1923 to his friend D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Northern Realm of the Ku Klux Klan, […] gives us an almost hysterical Borglum, sounding suspiciously like a member of Hitler’s inner circle:

If you cross a thorough-bred with a jackass you get a mule. If you cross a pure bred with a mongrel dog you get a mongrel. So in races. […] If you cross any of the others with each other it is curious that the lowest race in civilization is the strongest physically and breeding (crossed) is always down. A [black] and Jew will produce [black], but Hindu and Jew — Jew; Chinese and Jew, offspring Jew; Italian and Jew, offspring Jew; any European race and Jew, offspring Jew.⁹³

Borglum assumed an isolationist position on the eve of American involvement in World War II, claiming that “we don’t want to get mixed up with Europe, any of us, men nor women nor governments.”⁹⁴ In a letter written to his friend Amy Bassett on September 6, 1939, he wrote that “we will not get into the war” because we are “utterly sick of it and no combination of Jews, Communists, and [John L.] Lewis et al., can force us into it, or drag us into it.”⁹⁵

His hatred of progressive and collective dissent in the 1930s was especially unleashed on the Jews. Borglum fiercely followed the line of the leading anti-Semites of his day, such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin, that there was an international conspiracy of predominantly Jewish bankers. He espoused the doctrine that Jews possessed biological characteristics that predisposed them to venality and antisocial behavior except within their own community.

In an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Jewish Question,” Borglum wrote that “Jews refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community. They do not share or create, but choose instead to clannishly hold onto their ways and with mere money buy and sell the efforts of others.”⁹⁶ We can only imagine the audience for which this paper was written.

Certainly, the stereotype could hardly have held true in his own experience, because he received critical help for his projects from people like Jacob Schiff, of the Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Samuel Colt, founder of the United States Rubber Company; Julius Rosenwald; and Eugene Meyer, who purchased Borglum’s early head of Lincoln and presented it as a gift to the government for permanent display in the Capitol. Yet when Schiff died and a Jewish philanthropic society offered his friend Borglum the commission for his portrait, Borglum praised Schiff, but concluded that “as a Christian I must decline.”⁹⁷

[…]

Borglum also opposed the labor unions, particularly the United Mine Workers of America under the leadership of John L. Lewis, and his sympathies were with management when auto workers struck in 1937.¹⁰¹ Although he had backed some prolabor policies in the past, his earlier reformist position was predicated on his paternalistic and benevolent disposition.

He had no use for militant labor unions, especially as he became an entrepreneur himself. He paid his own nonunionized workers for their high-risk tasks a pitiful fifty cents to a dollar an hour, depending on the skills involved.¹⁰² When Roosevelt backed the unions, Borglum became an outspoken critic of the administration.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

MI6’s post-war relationship with Bandera began while he was exiled in post-war Munich, West Germany in 1948, via Gerhard von Mende. An ethnic German hailing from Riga, Latvia, von Mende has been described as an “enthusiastic Nazi” who headed Berlin’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory, or Ostministerium. Among other connivances, von Mende was charged with recruiting fifth columnists from the USSR’s Central Asian republics, to undermine and attack Communist authorities. He has been credited with influencing subsequent British and American support for Islamic extremism.

Per a declassified CIA biography, after Nazi Germany’s defeat, von Mende was “interned as a ‘guest’” at the Agency’s Camp King, where [Axis] officials and soldiers were interrogated and tortured. In some cases, inmates were unwittingly dosed with LSD under PROJECT BLUEBIRD, a forerunner of the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind control program. Subsequently, von Mende became an asset for West Germany’s Nazi-riddled BND, the CIA, and MI6, continuing to recruit anti-Communist assets in the USSR via a front company.

A modern celebration of Stepan Bandera, Ukraine

Through this position, von Mende was kept abreast of UPA activities and capabilities, and maintained an intimate personal relationship with Bandera. The Ukrainian fascist ideologue’s thuggish West German network was by then hard at work killing hundreds of local citizens suspected by the CIA and MI6 of harboring Communist sympathies. While the OUN-B chief’s “ask” of British intelligence was initially judged too high, that perspective rapidly changed. By 1949, MI6 was helping Bandera airdrop his chaos agents into Ukraine.

For those unaware, the Yenish are a European minority who tend to live nomadically, similarly to the Roma. In fact, some Yenish folk are related to the Roma, and many gadje confuse the Yenish for Roma. Because of this, it is safe to say that the Yenish have been victims of antiziganism, despite not being (fully) Romani themselves.

English information on the Fascists’ persecution of the Yenish folk is in short supply. Not even the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an article on the subject. This paper is written in broken English, but unfortunately it is the best source in the language on this obscure subject.

Yeniche were often sterilised, incarcerated in concentration camps as asocials, in many cases being directly and indirectly murdered there, causing anyone think twice before even talking about their fate or that of relatives after the war.

[…]

• Siegmund A. Wolf was a contemporary authority on the Travelling People, their history, culture and languages, Romany and Yenich. Wolf (1956) was convinced of an intensive persecution of the Yeniche from the [Third Reich]. He believed that the post-World War II Yeniche could not have been the descendant of the Yeniche in the Third Reich because [of] the persecution [that] they suffered during that period. His supposition is definitely wrong. However Wolf, an expert on the travelling people, could very well have had a body of evidence which led him to such a conclusion.

• More definite than Wolf’s supposition is Wim William’s (1997) discovery of a letter from Eva Justin, Ritter’s personal assistant [from] 1936–1945.¹⁵² The letter was dated Nov. 12, 1943 and addressed to the RKPA. According to Willems, Justin wrote about “the kind of people called the Jenischen”: ‘Under strong pressure from the state these people are today integrated into the work-process or were transferred to concentration camps as incorrigible asocials’. [Note: “under strong pressure from the state […] integrated into the work-process” could very well have meant “committed to forced labour” or “sent off to a concentration camp” — author]. Willems found, as well, an article in the periodical Ilustrierte Zeitung from 1943. According to Willems it was reported on page 34 that “the racially pure Gypsies […] and the incorrigible Jenischen” worked “in separate camps”.¹⁵³ Robert Ritter claimed in 1941 that the Jenische were “resocialized” and were subject to “compulsory labor”.¹⁵⁴

• Moreover several authors, Lerch, Strunge and Kassenbrock, Kentick and Puxon, obtained oral information which testifies to the persecution of the Jenische by the [Third Reich].¹⁵⁵

• Another indication for assuming the persecution of the Yeniche in the Third Reich is simply Robert Ritter’s position and professional activities in the Reich Health Department. For example, in December 1941 Ritter was appointed as the director of the newly formed Biological Criminal Institute of the Reich Main security Administration (RSHA) in the Security Police of Reich Criminal Police Department (RKPA) (Kriminalbiologisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei im Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, RKPA) per decree of the [Third Reich]. From his position as head of the institute, Ritter had the privilege of defining inherited asocialness or inherited criminality and identifying those who suffer from it. The institute was a division of the Reich Criminal Police Department (Reichskriminlapolizeiamt, RKPA) which worked hand in hand with all other division of the RKPA as well as the Reich Health Department (Reichsgesundheitsamt, RGA). Ritter could, alone from this position, decide who was to be sterilized for mental deficiency or sent to a concentration camp as an asocial.¹⁵⁶

• As reported above in the introduction, in 2009 Frau Elisabeth Spiss-Grosinger proved the persecution of the Yeniche alongside the Sinti & Roma in Nazi-Austria for the first time.¹⁵⁷ Also reported above in the introduction is the publication 2010 Arno Huth’s Documentation Verfolgung der Sinti, Roma und Jenischen im ländlichen Raum des Kraichgaus, des Neckartales, des Elztales und des Baulandes which confirmed the persecution of both groups of the Travelling People, the Sinti & Roma and the Jenischen in Nazi-Deutschland, in a rural area in the vicinity of Stuttgart.¹⁵⁸

• Compelling is the body of evidence contained in texts of government documents, at times laying below the surface of the text, needing interpretation, and at times in the obvious wordings of the texts themselves. Administrative documents of the Reich Criminal Police Department (RKPA) and other government offices subordinated to the Reich Ministery of Interior (RMdI) articulated measures taken against the Yeniche and all belonging to the Travelling People. The Yeniche in the various administrative offices of the Reich Ministery of Interior (RMdI) fell under the generic term “Gypsy” at times — and other times under the term “those wandering about as Gypsies” (nach Zigeunerart umherziehende Personen). Occasionally the Yeniche were expressly referred to as “Yeniche”. Beyond these three terms encompassing the entire group, many Yeniche (probably the majority, as will be later shown in text below) were classified as “Gypsies of mixed blood” and treated accordingly by government offices.

(Emphasis added.)

It is certain that dozens of Yenish humans, if neither hundreds nor thousands, perished because of the Fascists, but this minimum is so low only because no scholars so far have attempted to formally calculate the number of victims.

[Berlin’s] actions in Czechoslovakia, as well as Lithuania’s 1938 capitulation to Polish military-backed demands for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, had convinced Kaunas that its options were limited and that its own form of appeasement was necessary to maintain friendship with its larger, more powerful neighbors.

In the election of December 1938 the entire Memelland District voted overwhelmingly for the German parties: 82% in Memel city, and between 85–94% in the rest of the district, resulting in 25 of 29 seats in the Memel Landtag going to German parties, and 4 going to Lithuanian parties.¹⁰⁴ Effectively, Lithuanian government ability to dominate in Memel had ended.

Tempting as it may be to presume that this election was fraudulent, Lithuanian rule was very unpopular among Memel’s Teuton majority, especially for the period of martial law from 1926–1938, wherein many citizens suffered rights violations. As Ruth Leiserowitz noted, a great deal of Memel’s citizens were Germanic Fascists as well. Hence, as in the Saar Basin, there was little need—if any—for the Third Reich to manipulate the electoral process to get the overwheming results that it wanted.

Suddenly, amidst a flurry of [Fascist] territorial grabs in March, 1939, a virtual ultimatum was presented to the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, juozas Urbšys that demanded a settlement of the Memel situation, in which there were two possibilities. If Lithuania replied with a peaceful solution friendly relations could be restored and [the Third Reich] would grant Lithuania free access to Memel port.

Alternatively, a rejection would most likely cause uprising in Memel, at which point “Germany could not idly look on. The Führer would act with lightning speed and the situation would slip from the hands of the politicians and be decided by the military.”¹⁰⁷

Urbšys consulted his government, and within two days returned to sign a hurriedly-compiled, relatively short yet open-ended treaty of reunification to the Reich: while the treaty established the transfer of sovereignty it left several economic and legal details to be worked out by later agreements or annexes.¹⁰⁸

Anticipating the signing of this document on March 22, Hitler had made his way to the Baltic and sailed through the night to arrive in Memel by morning to welcome the Memellanders back into the Reich.¹⁰⁹

With the loss of Memel habour, Lithuania lost its only access to the sea.

European governments somewhat expected Memel to be annexed by the Reich at some point. The terminology Europe and the U.S. used in referencing the [Third Reich’s] move on Memel in 1939 is very telling. While certainly referred to as a “seizure,” “cession,” or “surrender,” it was also referred to as “returned” and “reunited.”¹³¹

Furthermore, a New York Times front-page article on March 22, 1939 titled “Lithuania Yields Memel to Hitler,” reported that “the Lithuanian Government has been preparing for the return of Memel to Germany for some time and has even started the construction of a new harbor at Sventojl, at present a fishing village.”¹³²

The same could be said for the Polish government, as “the cession of Memel was not altogether unexpected in Poland …”¹³³ Other evidence shows that the British and the French had previously hoped that Memel would maintain its sovereignty, yet they recognized their inability or unwillingness to stop it if it were to occur.¹³⁴

In December 1938, British Foreign Secretary E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, circulated a draft response to communicate to [Berlin] concerning the unrest of the [pro-Reich] groups in Memel due to the new Landtag elections to be held on the eleventh of that month. In principle, the French accepted the text of a proposal for Memel, dated December 10, 1938, but maintained that in their communication with the [Third Reich’s] government they should merely “mention Memel quite casually amongst other subjects.”¹³⁵

In the subsequent joint note verbale given to the [Third Reich’s] Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding Memel, Britain and France asked the [Reich’s] government to “use their influence with the Memellanders to ensure respect for the status quo.”¹³⁶ The British ambassador to Germany, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes unconfidently admitted that “whatever action we take about Memel I fear we will receive a rebuff.”¹³⁷

[…]

Failure to act on the part fit a pattern which played into Hitler’s hands. His intentional sidelining of the Memel issue from 1938 onwards achieved his ambitions toward Memelland without raising international awareness or ire: he masterfully had not only achieved his designs for Austria and Czechoslovakia, but used them to divert the attentions of the rest of the world from his designs on Memel.

Although seemingly the easiest target and the most justifiable to seize outright, [the Fascist bourgeoisie] had pulled off one of history’s greatest magic tricks: in spending years creating the right conditions Hitler found the most opportune moment when, within the furor of the other major events of March, 1939 that he orchestrated, he made Memel disappear from the view of the world, and of history.

With this annexation, hundreds of Jews (and probably Roma and Sinti as well) were now at the Third Reich’s mercy. See Ruth Leiserowitz’s chapter ‘Memel Territory’ in The Greater German Reich and the Jews : Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935–1945 for details.

Further reading: On a Detail of Political Confrontation in the Territory of Memel in the 1930s (partly in German & Lithuanian)

Episodes of the Klaipeda/Memel Anschluss in March, 1939

(Mirror.)

The Gestapo gaze upon the home front was imbued with suspicion, and this was apparent among leading [Axis] officers as well.³³ This suspicion included the Sami as a potentially threatening folk element, but Sami ethnicity or race, and the Sami as such, appeared not to be a focal point of Gestapo interest. The following were listed by Laqua to Heliara: communist activity in particular, people of foreign extraction and Russians.

The sources comprise almost entirely details of action against suspected communists, and there is one example of reindeer herders from the Norwegian side of the border being arrested and “made to talk” by the Gestapo. Some reindeer herders³⁴ were viewed by the Valpo as “communist-minded”, as well.

The communist-inclined reindeer herder and peasant surfaces one again in the sources, since a planned road between Sør-Varanger and Petsamo was to cross his lands. What was of interest were his political leanings, considered suspicious in spite of his wealth, and the resulting need to produce cover-up stories for the road construction. His ethnicity is not mentioned in the source, but the fact that he was well-to-do is.³⁵

[…]

The Skolt Sami were targeted once again in Spring 1942. As the Wehrmacht were preparing for the Spring campaign, Officer Berger, representing Gestapo³⁸, suggested evacuating the Skolt village of Ylä-luostari, near [an Axis] military airfield. The Skolt Sami had lived in the vicinity of the airfield throughout the war and been able to witness all the airfield activity.

Other [Axis] officers, including the airfield commandant, felt that the Skolt Sami frequenting the Parkkina and Liinahamari population centres had a good chance to spy. A new airplane model was to be brought to the airfield, so all the civilians were to be barred from the area.³⁹

An evacuation was ordered, but a while later, in an indication of the informality of German–Sami relations, some Skolt Sami women had once again been hired for kitchen and laundry duties. The source reports Berger’s complaint that the women would soon haul along their children, husbands and their whole kin.⁴⁰

[…]

To Hillilä’s great frustration a few Skolt Sami were caught by [Axis] troops, but escaped in Russian partisan action. Hillilä feared that this would provoke the commander-in-chief Eduard Dietl and provoke mistrust against the local population, which it did. Dietl demanded more troops from the head of Yhteysesikunta Roi, Colonel Oiva Villamo, in order to secure the rear area and the civilian population.

Hillilä disputed the evacuation once again, his reasons connected to military needs: there was no point in allowing evacuees to spread unrest to the rest of population, and it was time to harvest the hay. In addition, the Soviets would then “achieve their goals” and there would be greater scope for action in the emptied villages. For the moment there were great numbers of troops in Lapland, which could secure the local population.⁵⁰

For Dietl the Sami were, and had now turned out to be, a potentially disloyal threat, but for Hillilä the local population was a part of a defensive system in a totally mobilized territory/province.

[…]

Knut Einar Eriksen and Terje Halvorsen have concluded that the German–Austrian gaze upon the Sami differed from their gaze upon “Untermensch”, the Jews and the Slavs. This is credited to the Sami’s lack of racial positioning in [Fascist] racial hierarchies and the potential for a “touristic” gaze upon this “colourful” and “exotic group”.

There were some exceptions to this notion, however. Reichskommissar Josef Terboven (wished to) exclude(d) Sami women who had children with German fathers from the services of Lebensborn and there were some occupants who thought that the Sami ranked as “Untermensch”.⁷¹

The perception as such is correct, in that the Sami were encountered and treated differently to the other groups mentioned, but I claim that in addition to the good relations, the troops imposed a suspicious gaze upon a security threat, and took a eugenic interest in a racial problem to be administrated.

[Wehrmacht] sources reveal that the Sami were not only an exception. The gaze upon the Sami was equalled in stringency by the German gaze upon the local population in general.⁷² One aspect of the military and [Fascist] mental landscape was imagery of a constant, pitiless threat from the surrounding folks and states, and the violence that the German people lived under and experienced during the war.⁷³

In the world-view of the troops, the Sami occupied culturally and racially low positions, which also implied an inability to organize themselves (raise an armed resistance, practise agriculture, form higher polities), which diminished the perceived risk but did not erase it.

If a situation showed signs of a rupture in the regulated friendship, existing good relations were set aside; the risk of sanction or aggression was always present and the Sami risked a disruptive change from the category of uncertain ally to that of enemy. In this sense, the Sami were treated under the same military preconditions as the Norwegians during the increasing Nazification of Norway.⁷⁴

Amongst others, the reindeer herder “made to talk” by Gestapo and the border pilot sent to Sachsenhausen experienced this — but it was not their Sami-ness that was sanctioned, it was their anti-occupant activity. […] The Sami were not under threat of holocaust. The secretive cooperation between the secret police services was harsher against the Soviet POWs, the communists and potentially, at the level of rhetoric, the Jews.⁷⁵ Norwegian researchers have not found any Sami lists corresponding to those compiled by the NS of Norwegian Jews to be arrested and deported.⁷⁶

(Emphasis added.)

According to a report of the Soviet Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (Extraordinary State Commission or ChGK) from the Gdov district, there is at least one example of a presumably concrete involvement of (Ingrian) Finnish soldiers in [an Axis] mass shooting of Roma in the area of Army Group North.

At the end of February 1942, a “retaliation unit” consisting of “Germans, Finns, and Estonians” searched the village Filippovshchina and recognized twenty-six Roma who were deportees from Luga in 1941 and quartered with Russian peasants as work forces. The next day, these Roma, among them ten children under the age of twelve, were driven out of their houses and shot on a bridge at the entrance to the village.

The entire village community had to assemble nearby and watch the mass execution, which was carried out in an especially sadistic manner, since the perpetrators forced the victims to dance on the bridge prior to their death. The soldiers officially declared that “the Gypsies” had been “in contact with partisans,” although they did not interrogate the victims at all. Instead, the Russian villagers were completely shocked by the brutal murder of “defenseless Gypsies and their children” (ChGK Gdov 1945).

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission was not able to find out the exact units involved. It is possible that members of the Finnish Security Group 187 took part in the operation, but since Estonian soldiers were also present, it seems more likely that it was an Estonian unit under [Reich] command with some Ingrian Finns in their ranks.

Further research might bring to light more examples of war crimes and atrocities committed by the [Axis] occupiers with the immediate help of Ingrian Finnish volunteers. A promising source type would be the NKVD files concerning trials against “traitors of the fatherland,” among them filtered Ingrian Finnish repatriates from Finland, but the Russian FSB archives of St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Pskov are still inaccessible to foreign scholars.

Conclusion
One might argue that the Ingrian example with its Soviet Russian context is a separate case and cannot be added to or compared with the role of the war engagement of Finnish Roma men, other Finns, or Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers from Finland itself. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that the Ingrian matter became an immediate part of Finland’s history when the Ingrian Finns were transferred from the occupied territories to Finland in 1943 and 1944.

From that time on, the ranks of the Finnish army had included soldiers of Soviet Finnish origin, who might have taken part in the [Axis’s] mass murder of Roma, Jews, and other Soviet civilians. At the same time, this incorporation of the Ingrian Finns made them brothers-in-arms with the Finnish Roma.

(Emphasis added in most cases.)

I read a comment from a stranger claiming that

Here in Canada, PM Mackenzie King met with Hitler and asked him to only go eastward, and Canada would stay out of it. As in: "Invade Russia, kill as many Slavs as you want, just don't annex anything else". Hitler didn't hold up his end of that bargain, so Canada joined the allies in 1939.

Seeing as how I deleted all of my Feddit accounts years ago, I have no means of asking for a source, and quite honestly I don’t want to go through the trouble of establishing another one. Whether any of this was what the stranger had in mind, I cannot say, but it remains damning all the same.

First, here is Mackenzie King’s opinion on Slavs. Quoting Erik Goldstein’s ‘Neville Chamberlain, the British Official Mind and the Munich Crisis’ in The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II, page 282:

Nevile Henderson, while ambassador at Berlin, wrote to Halifax: ‘The Teuton and the Slav are irreconcilable — just as are the Briton and the Slav. Mackenzie King told me last year after the Imperial Conference that the Slavs in Canada never assimilated with the people and never became good citizens.’²⁸ Czechoslovakia’s strategic importance might be appreciated by many officials, but there was little or no empathy for the peoples caught up in the maelstrom.

Mackenzie King did not have a high opinion of Jews, either, as can be seen in a diary entry that he wrote on March 29, 1938. Quoting Professors Irving Abella’s & Harold Troper’s None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, page 17:

The prime minister of Canada was obsessed with the notion that the admission of Jewish refugees might destroy his country. “We must […] seek,” King recorded in his diary, “to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.” Nothing was to be gained, he believed, “by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one.”

Allowing Jewish refugees into Canada, he told his cabinet, might cause riots and would surely exacerbate relations between the federal government and the provinces. In effect, any action permitting an appreciable number of Jews to settle in Canada would, in King's mind, undermine the unity of the nation. This was no time for Canada to act on “humanitarian grounds.” Rather, said the prime minister, Canada must be guided by “realities” and political considerations.³²

Pages 36–7:

And Mackenzie King himself was beyond reach. As far as he was concerned, the admission of refugees perhaps posed a greater menace to Canada in 1938 than did Hitler. If accepting Jewish refugees could threaten Canada’s national cohesion, could there not be merit in Hitler’s fears about Jews in Germany?

“The truth is,” King wrote, “Hitler and Mussolini, while dictators, have really sought to give the masses of the people, some opportunity for enjoyment, taste of art and the like and, in this way, have won them to their side”; and perhaps in a veiled reference to the Jews of Germany, King went on to say that “the dictatorship method may have been necessary to wrest this opportunity from the privileged interests that have previously monopolized it.”⁰¹

[…]

King fondly recalled his meeting with Hitler in Germany [in 1937]. As the American diplomat reported back to Washington, “He described Hitler as being, in his opinion, a very sincere man. He even described him as being ‘sweet’ He said that he [Hitler] had the face, as he studied it, of a good man, although he was clearly a dreamer and gave the impression of having an artistic temperament. During the conversation Hitler had sat with his hands folded and his only gesture was to raise and lower his hands from time to time without unfolding them. He [King] intimated that he had asked Hitler some very frank questions and that he had been satisfied with Hitler’s answers.”⁰²

In September 1938, less than a year before Canada declared war on Germany, King was still mixed in his attitude to Hitler—sorrowful over Hitler’s methods but understanding of his motives. “He might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world,” King wrote. “He had the chance at Nuremberg, but was looking to Force, to Might, and to Violence as means to achieving his ends, which were, I believe, at heart, the well-being of his fellow-man; not all fellow-men, but those of his own race.”⁰³

In a thesis that is a partial response to One is Too Many, Justin Comartin concedes that ‘Prime Minister Mackenzie King shared the general pattern of mild prejudice that prevailed in interwar Canada’ but ‘the evidence will illustrate he was by no means rabidly anti-Semitic, and was genuinely concerned of the plight of European Jewry’ (something that the authors of One is Too Many already noted).

As socialists, we are not impressed with liberal politicians’ generic condemnations of the Third Reich for taking its antisemitism one step too far, nor with their feigned helplessness at their alleged inability to accept myriads of Jewish refugees while allowing who knows how many Axis collaborators and former Axis personnel to stay in the Anglosphere. Whether a head of state was a casual antisemite or an extreme one is of limited importance to us, especially when said state covets the reputation of being a paradise for refugees.

I was unable to find an instance of Mackenzie King explicitly urging the Third Reich to invade the Soviet Union. We have little reason to believe that such an action would have appalled him, however. Quoting H. Blair Neatby’s William Lyon Mackenzie King, Volume III, 1932–1939, pages 223–4:

King […] was now convinced that Chamberlain could be trusted to work for peace and that even German expansion in eastern Europe might not bring Britain into a European conflict.³⁹

Page 273:

The leaders of the Opposition parties co-operated. They were no more eager than King to initiate a debate on Canadian foreign policy because, like King, they were not prepared to take sides for or against German expansion. A forthright stand would imply a commitment to participation or to neutrality if European powers declared war and either alternative was politically unacceptable. It seemed wiser to keep silent.

Page 274:

King’s first reaction to Hitler’s threats had been that war in eastern Europe was inevitable and that Russia would become involved; “the problem,” according to King, “will be whether Britain and France can, in some way, stay out. I wish with all my heart that the French–Russian alliance was at an end.”⁴

Here Mackenzie King seems to be implying that a war against the Soviet Union would be fine as long as France and the British Empire were uninvolved. While he did not put it quite like that, it is difficult to read his message any other way. Certainly it is at least easy for anybody to infer as much.

Roy MacLaren’s Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators is filled with sordid information about this prime minister’s diplomacy, but for brevity’s sake I shall quote only a couple of pages. Page 184:

In a thank-you letter to Göring of 28 July (following the telegram he had sent him from France), King reviewed in detail possible arrangements for him to travel by rail across Canada, including on the Kettle Valley line in the East Kootenay district of the CPR. He enclosed travel pamphlets and brochures, but also included the text of his CBC broadcast, in which [he] had said that if war did come it would be the fault of the international press.³⁷

A fortnight later, King sent Ribbentrop a three-page handwritten letter of warmest thanks, asking him to tell Hitler, Göring, von Neurath, and Hess “how deeply touched I was […] and how deeply gratified I have felt at the visit as a whole.”³⁸

At a small dinner party at Laurier House soon after his return to Ottawa in mid-July, King told the journalist Bruce Hutchinson that he had found Hitler ‘a simple sort of peasant’ and not very bright, who wished only to possess the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. That insignificant prize would satisfy him and the theft of foreign property did not seem to distress King. No, he said, Hitler did not intend to risk war. And to those peaceful motives King undoubtedly felt that he had made his own valuable contribution.³⁹

Page 250:

Although only one week remained before [the Fascist] invasion of Poland, King continued to hope that Hitler would pursue peace, recalling that during his 1937 visit to Berlin, he had “left Hitler not with a curse but with a blessing […] may God’s blessing guide you.”⁶¹ Two days later, he added, accurately, “I never let myself declare […] against Hitler.”⁶²

As an overt royalist, King rejoiced in sharing with Tweedsmuir his conviction that “the King’s visit had helped immensely in uniting Canada […] that last September I would not have had a united Cabinet, that Lapointe, Cardin and Power (I might also have added Rinfret) would probably have resigned and there would have been difficulty besides in fighting for Czecho-Slovakia. Today I had all united on our participation if there were an act of aggression which brought England and France into a war with Germany.”⁶³

King also sent a message to Chamberlain to urge King George VI to appeal directly to Hitler to allow more time for negotiation. He did so because he was convinced, as he recorded in his diary the next day, that Hitler believed “in compassion, pity as the thing to aim at, also ultimate perfection in purity of living […] [He] is a mystic […] a spiritualist […] and thus his life becomes intelligible. It is that which makes this appeal to his good, his spiritual side, important. Hitler will feel compassion for mankind, pity is holding the sword for today […] That I truly believe.”⁶⁴

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Smolnikova, a.k.a. “Rina Reznik,” is the head of the “Care Service” of the NGU Azov Brigade. “If the Western countries are preparing for a big war, they at least need to learn how to do it […] and we have the experience now to share,” she said in Davos. Samolnikova used to serve in the Hospitallers Medical Battalion, which is affiliated with the far-right “Ukrainian Volunteer Army,” a Right Sector splinter group, but now she’s dating Azov Brigade deputy commander Illia Samoilenko, better known as “Gandalf.” Years before he visited Israel and attended the 2023 World Economic Forum, becoming the poster boy of his unit’s fake “depoliticization,” Samoilenko once told a Czech journalist, “I don’t believe in any holocaust, it’s just a story.”

[…]

“Ukrainian Week” coincided with the annual National Prayer Breakfast, followed by a Ukrainian Prayer Breakfast the next morning. According to the New York Times, Ukraine sent “its largest-ever delegation” to this “gathering of politically influential Christian leaders in Washington.” At some point, Ukrainians took the stage, and the Azovites stood next to the podium. With the messages “Pray for Ukraine” and “Peace for Israel” behind them, representatives of the 3rd Assault Brigade held up a flag that is reportedly “associated with a push for a more Christian-minded government” since its adoption by “Stop the Steal” campaigners.

[…]

NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division held an all-day event at its headquarters in Brussels, “Commemorating 3 Years of War in Ukraine.” Vladyslav Shatilo, an Azov veteran whose public Instagram account includes pictures of his friends making Nazi salutes, participated in the Monday event. Shatilo appears to be good friends with Dmitriy Krukovsky, the Hitler-tattooed leader of the Azov movement’s paramilitary “Centuria” organization for neo[fascist] youth. They have matching tattoos on their right thigh. On the third anniversary of Putin launching his “Special Military Operation,” a neo[fascist] from the Azov movement “discussed Ukraine” with the Chair of the NATO Military Committee and Deputy Secretary General of NATO. He arrived to NATO headquarters with a group that sponsors Ukrainian veterans to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

[…]

Representatives of the “Russian Volunteer Corps” (RDK), an openly neo[fascist] military unit linked to the Azov movement, are said to have literally formed the fifth column at a Russian opposition march in the German capital led by Yulia Navalnaya. Only the left-wing Berlin-based newspaper Junge Welt reported on this “Parade with Nazikorps,” and recent NGU Azovite efforts to recruit an “International Battalion.” German police, normally eager to beat up Berliners in the name of combatting “antisemitism,” did nothing to enforce German laws against displaying Nazi symbols (Azov wolfsangel doesn’t count?) and protesters masking their face, which several did, when some of the most dangerous neo[fascists] in the world decided to launch a new phase of their public activities.

Did I mention that Azov visited Antarctica? (Not a joke.)

Related: The Azov lobby’s greatest hits.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of Palestine isn’t exactly the stuff of legends, but when it came to telling the public about Fascist antisemitism during the 1930s… they displayed a remarkable continuity in their lacklustre reporting:

Between 1933 and 1938, [the Third Reich] engaged in the systematic persecution of its Jewish community with acts of increasing intensity. One would, therefore, expect the BBC to have reported extensively on these developments considering its association with hard-nosed journalism and critical news broadcasting.

That this was not the case is in part explicable through the extent to which Broadcasting House, in direct and independent compliance with the diplomatic aims of the Foreign Office, was party to and a partner in the application of the policy of appeasement.

There was a major discrepancy between the BBC’s knowledge of what was happening [under Fascism] and the Corporation’s effort to disseminate that knowledge to any great extent. ‘Negative’ news about [Fascism] was carefully controlled by the BBC during this period in order to ensure that ‘sensitive’ information was not widely distributed for public consumption. This is, however, only a partial explanation.

British social and cultural attitudes towards Jews contributed to an environment in which fuller and more detailed information or comment about the anti-Jewish persecution was not broadcast because it was not a priority to do so. These were not only implicitly exemplified and reinforced by the broadcasting policy of the BBC, but must be seen as the principle reason for the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the realities of the events of the 1930s.

News of anti-Jewish persecution was never considered a broadcast priority by the BBC and the issue of its dissemination was never a source of contention between the BBC and the Foreign Office. Appeasement may have restricted the BBC’s broadcasting boundaries, but it was the socio-cultural phenomenon of latent British anti-Semitism, inherent in the Corporation itself, which unconsciously regulated news output during this period.

A brief chronological survey of ‘major’ and widely-publicized events (in the popular press and elsewhere) [under Fascism] compared to its broadcast coverage on the BBC gives an indication of the editorial policy that largely ignored some fundamental features of the [Third Reich]. From 1933 to 1938, there were at least forty stories dealing generally with Jews or Jewish issues either related or not to [the Third Reich].

Among the more prominent events in pre-war [Fascist] Germany were the April 1 boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, the Nuremberg laws of 15 September 1935 disenfranchising Jews, and the events of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938.

Out of these, the April boycott was discussed in two non-news bulletins but the tone of the discussion preferred to minimize the extent of the boycott. ² The Nuremberg decrees were mentioned in one, brief news bulletin lasting no more than twenty seconds and devoted primarily to the Memel dispute. ³ Kristallnacht was also mentioned in a news bulletin, without commentary and with few details.

[…]

Through a cooperative relationship forged between itself and the Foreign Office, the BBC may be seen as tacit partner in helping the state implement a policy of appeasement towards [Fascism]. This relationship affected the way in which the BBC handled German news and, by extension, information about anti-Jewish persecution [under Fascism]. News deemed ‘negative’, defined as such by the Foreign Office and eventually self-regulated by the BBC, was to be avoided after 1936.

What is astonishing, however, was just how little information about anti-Jewish persecution was dispensed for broadcast before this time — three years after the introduction of anti-Semitism as official policy in Germany. Even fewer reports about anti-Jewish persecution would be broadcast after 1936.

Why, then, was one of the defining features of pre-war [Fascist] Germany left largely ignored and critically neglected? Why was this issue never a broadcast priority? The evidence suggests that social and cultural perceptions towards Jews, which amounted to a latent anti-Semitism in Britain, is a partial explanation.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Quoting Richard Cocketts’s Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement & the Manipulation of the Press, pages 52–54:

On 28 February Rex Leeper was summoned by Halifax to discuss ‘the steps which might be taken to moderate the tone of the BBC and the Press’. Leeper suggested persevering with the personal touch that had worked so well with Halifax before, urging Halifax to see both the press and John Reith of the BBC to persuade them ‘to avoid provocation against Germany and Italy […] and to have a sense of National responsibility’.

Leeper was resolutely against informing the German government or Sir Nevile Henderson that such approaches had been made, on the ground, as he put it to Halifax, that these were ‘very delicate matters, and to inform the German Government of them would increase the chances of leakage, and therefore of trouble in the House of Commons’.

In private, however, Leeper must have been aware that such an admission to Hitler would only encourage his belief that Britain was now prepared to sacrifice cherished principles as well as territory in order to run after him. But Cadogan ruled that Henderson should be allowed to tell Hitler ‘in confidence of Halifax's interviews with the BBC and the press’.⁶²

Acting on this advice, Halifax first saw Reith, with the result that a series of talks on the German colonial problem was dropped — but the BBC, due to its direct government funding, had, in the view of one historian, already been ‘firmly on the leash since 1936’.⁶³

Halifax saw representatives of the press on 8 March to tell them that although we lived in ‘the happy state of affairs’ of having a ‘free country with a free press’, the fact was that just as this ‘freedom implies freedom to criticize so it also implied responsibility’.

Halifax warned darkly that ‘unguarded criticism of other countries especially […] the Heads of States’ would only make the present European situation ‘worse by needless provocation’.

The text of Halifax’s message was then communicated to Hitler by Henderson, and the Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth were contemporaneously assured that this confidential communication was evidence of the fact that His Majesty’s government ‘had done all in their power and had indeed taken an unusual step, in order to show their sincere desire to improve the atmosphere and to facilitate conversations with the German Government’.⁶⁴

For those opposed to appeasement, this was a distressing step. Leeper now felt, with the robust support of Vansittart and the political protection of Eden gone, that he would have to conform more with Chamberlain’s policy — which meant, in effect, that the information to the diplomatic correspondents from the News Department now began to dry up.

F.A. Voigt noticed this, and wrote gloomily to W.P. Crozier about ‘the “twilight” creeping over the foreign policy and about the silent censorship, the stopping of channels of news’. He warned that the ‘F.O. people indicate that there is going to be a stopper on news, talks with the press …’,⁶⁵ thus curtailing the work of the News Department.

If Leeper’s new attitude of self-restraint was a necessary reaction to the new atmosphere at the Foreign Office, it was soon to be underlined by Chamberlain’s express interference. All this was, of course, grist to Henderson’s mill in Berlin and he was able to report that the cancellation of the BBC talks on the colonial question was taken there as ‘a sign of improvement in the future …’.

He added with scarcely concealed enthusiasm that the London correspondent of the Berliner Teggerblat had hinted that ‘… Mr Voigt has been complaining that sources of information he used to possess are now closed to him …’.⁶⁶

Pages 111–2:

Although nominally independent, the very rare radio programmes where the BBC had an opportunity to touch on politically contentious subjects had been under close government scrutiny since the mid-1930s. The BBC Talks Department was the only department which had a responsibility to deal with political subjects outside the news and that department maintained constant and informal links with the Foreign Office in order to prevent the BBC from in any way compromising the government’s foreign policy.

The BBC’s News Department was similarly straitjacketed by its obsessive concern for political neutrality, which merely led, in the historian W. J. West’s phrase, to a ‘bland neutrality’. Indeed, in a ‘highly controversial report’ written in the wake of the Munich crisis, a Chief News Editor at the BBC complained, ‘I say with a full sense of responsibility, and since I was for over three years Chief News Editor, with a certain authority, that in the past we have not played the part which our duty to the people of this country called upon us to play. We have, in fact, taken part in a conspiracy of silence.’*

The ‘conspiracy of silence’ complained of by the author of the above report, John Coatman, is directly comparable to the ‘silent censorship’ complained of by F. A. Voigt. Indeed, the suspicion has always remained that even Sir John Reith’s evident self-restraint was not good enough for Neville Chamberlain, who personally engineered the removal of the BBC’s first Director-General from the organization in 1938. Reith was appointed head of Imperial Airways and replaced by Frederick W. Ogilvie.

A classic example of the government’s interference with the BBC before Munich is provided by the case of Harold Nicolson’s projected radio talk on the looming Czechoslovak crisis on 5 September 1938. As was customary, the script, which was composed by Nicolson and took a very dim view of the government’s evident reluctance to commit itself to Czechoslovakia, was passed to the Foreign Office for clearance.

Leeper considered the talk excellent, but had to refer it to higher authority; higher authority found it a good deal less than excellent. There thus ensued a long and strenuous afternoon of discussion involving the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson and his BBC Talks producer, George Barnes, the outcome of which was that Nicolson had to forgo giving his original talk and instead broadcast a script which was, in the opinion of Barnes, ‘innocuous’.

Even so, arrangements were made for a certain Mr Lidell, the broadcasting engineer who was on duty, ‘to be ready to fade out Mr. Nicolson’s talk’ if he strayed on to controversial ground — such as Czechoslovakia.⁸³ George Barnes’ full account of this episode is reproduced as an Appendix to this book, because it illustrates that the opinion-controlling methods which the government employed with the BBC were very similar to those it employed with the press.

* Quoted by W. J. West in Truth Betrayed (Duckworth, 1987), pp. 40–1. For a full account of the BBC’s relations with the Foreign Office during the 1930s, see Chapter 2 of Truth Betrayed[.]

Further reading: ‘The British Government and the Media, 1937–1938’

Stephanie Seul’s ‘The Absence of “Kristallnacht” and Its Aftermath in BBC’ in New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison

Credits to Stephanie Seul’s “‘Plain, unvarnished news’? The BBC German Service and Chamberlain’s propaganda campaign directed at Nazi Germany, 1938–1940” for inspiring me to research this topic more.

To be fair to the BBC, its reporting was less pathetic during the 1940s, but…

The Home Service insisted throughout that it limit its coverage to news bulletins, for fear of increasing antisemitism within Britain. This, and much of the general reluctance to emphasis[e] news of the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Final Solution, grew out the belief that it was both wrong and counter-productive to assign any special significance to the plight of the Jews.

The European Service was more flexible and broadcast a great deal of coverage. However its main overseers, the Political Warfare Executive, had a substantial say in what emerged. The political context of information about the Final Solution often made them reluctant to sanction broadcasting about it. Not all that could have been broadcast was.

For comparison, here is a brief summary of how the U.S.S.R. covered antisemitism in the Third Reich. Quoting Jeffrey Koerber’s ‘What Did Soviet Jews Make of Kristallnacht? The Nazi Threat in the Soviet Press’ in New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison, page 149:

On November 11, 1938, the Soviet Yiddish newspaper Oktyabr (Minsk) published a front-page photo of Stalin and the Soviet leadership gathered on the platform atop Lenin’s Tomb. They were there to review the parade on Red Square marking the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Below the photo ran a startling news item: “Jewish Pogroms in Germany.” [Fascist] Stormtroopers had beaten Jews in their homes and in the streets, it reported. Many were killed. Synagogues had been vandalized or destroyed by fire. The story noted the unprecedented scope of these actions.¹

More reports in the following days gave specific details of attacks in Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and other cities, as well as the arrest of tens of thousands of Jewish men and their imprisonment in concentration camps.

News items like these of what later became known as Kristallnacht were readily available in the Soviet press under Stalinism. Indeed, Jewish readers had long been able to follow developments in [the Third Reich]. Whether they interpreted this news as presenting any specific danger to their lives is another matter.

For those of us unaware, the Book of Esther is a Biblical story about a Jewish triumph over xenophobia, and is the basis for the Jewish festival of Purim. Scholars estimate that somebody composed the book in or around 475 B.C.E., and it may be the oldest evidence that we have (even if the tale itself was likely fictional) that Jews were aware of a phenomenon that we now call anti-Judaism: the antagonist, a politician by the name of Haman (not to be confused with the no less loathsome Adolf Hamann or Joachim Hamann), plotted to exterminate all of Persia’s Jews as revenge for the Benjaminite, Mordecai, refusing to bow down to him.

If this sounds familiar to you, you are not the first to notice the similarities. Already in the spring of 1933, Jewish adults were drawing parallels between Haman and the Third Reich’s head of state. Quoting Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s ‘Who Was “Hitler” Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945’, pg. 264:

Around the same time, Jews also drew analogies between Hitler and Haman.⁹² References to “Haman Hitler” and “Hitler, the modern Haman,” appeared already in 1933 in the American Jewish press.⁹³ Jews in Germany made similar comparisons, with the Frankfurt Jewish press declaring that “today, Haman is […] educated, has studied anthropology, and determined that the Jews are a foreign race.”⁹⁴

By the time of Hanukkah in December 1933, Jews compared Hitler to Antiochus, who, according to one rabbi, had tried but failed to “persuade the Hebrews to exchange the […] principles of Judaism for […] idolatry.”⁹⁵ This hopeful sentiment was encapsulated in Philip M. Raskin’s 1933 poem, “A Jew to Hitler,” which included the following stanzas:

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

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

Haman’s plot to annihilate Persia’s Jews was doomed before it began. Queen Esther revealed her Jewish heritage to King Xerxes, who, in turned, had Haman hanged, ironically in the very gallows that Haman had originally intended for Mordecai. This tale (along with other Biblical stories) was a good source of comfort for Jews, sustaining their morale and giving them hope that they’d have the last laugh in the face of an increasingly difficult situation. The Fascists did not fail to take notice of this:

In 1935, Aufbau opined that “today there is once again a Haman who reminds us that we are Jews.” See “Zur Feier am Heinedenkmal,” Aufbau, Feb. 1, 1935. According to The Sentinel, [Fascist] newspapers cited Jewish analogies between Haman and Hitler as evidence that Jews were “planning to murder Hitler in the same way.” See “Two Jews Brutally Murdered in German Provinces,” Sentinel, April 21, 1933.

A famous legend is that the head of state himself implicitly equated himself with Haman in a radio address that he gave in January 1944. Although it is likelier than not that he was indeed aware of the similarities, the radio address does not necessarily substantiate this rumour. In event of an Allied victory, Adolf Schicklgruber anticipated Purim festivals not merely celebrating his death but the ‘death’ of Europe as a hole.

Quoting Jo Carruthers’s ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, pg. 5:

Hitler’s citation of Purim is, in fact, to invoke common understandings of Purim as a triumphal, bloodthirsty carnival that signifies Jewish vindictiveness. As such, his reference to Purim posits Jews as aggressors—anticipating the ‘destruction of Europe’—and as such he performs Haman’s rôle in asserting himself as the protector of civilization.

As I outline below, Hitler is not explicitly placing himself in a binary conflict with the Jews or proclaiming his animosity towards them. Instead, like Haman, he paints the Jews as enemies of the state, destructive and dangerous, and appeals to self‐defence in order to justify attack.

[…]

Hitler explicitly aligns this Russian annihilationist agenda with Jewish objectives: ‘This aim is also the openly admitted intention of international Jewry.’ He then goes on to warn that, ‘Unless Germany is victorious’, the ‘bearer of this culture’ will perish.

Then comes his famous reference to Purim: ‘Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim festival.’ Purim is therefore a celebration of destruction, and it is cited as proof of Jewish aggressive intention.

[…]

Hitler’s reference to Purim demands that it be read in the light of Esther 3:8: Haman’s strategy of misrepresenting the Jews to the king as a ‘certain people’ whose laws are ‘diverse from those of every people’ and counter to those of the empire.

It is with reference to Purim, then, that Hitler not only inhabits the rôle of accuser, but does so by disquietingly replicating Haman’s iconic rôle as enemy of the Jews.

In any event, whether he anticipated it or not, Jews celebrated Purim by taking their anger out on effigies of Adolf Schicklgruber and actors impersonating him, rôles that were traditionally reserved for Haman. Quoting Jo Carruthers’s ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, pgs. 2–3:

Towards the end of the war, the Jews of Casablanca instituted ‘Purim Hitler’ (a ‘Little Purim’ or Purim Katan in Jewish tradition, a local festival that imitates Purim in its celebration of a specific and local reprieve from threat or slaughter).

Purim Hitler was celebrated on the second day of Kislev to commemorate the Allied forces landing on that date in Morocco in 1943, saving the Jewish community. They celebrate by reading Megillat Hitler (now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.), a scroll modelled on Esther that functions as a palimpsest, the biblical story overwritten with new historical significance as the story of threat and reprieve becomes specific to the Casablanca experience of celebration.

[…]

Toby Blum‐Dobkin describes a celebration of Purim at the Displaced Persons Centre in Landsberg, Germany, in [1946]. Having collected the testimonies of survivors, including her father Boris Blum (inmate 114520, Mojdanek), Blum‐Dobkin explains that the inmates at the camp organized traditional celebrations: a reading of the Megillah (scroll of Esther), school performances, banquets, literary parodies, and a carnival.

Her father explains that ‘I saw in my imagination a Jewish carnival for the defeat of Hitler: the hanging of Hitler instead of Haman’ (Blum‐Dobkin 1979: 53). The camp is filled with images of hanging Hitlers and, in the tradition of dressing‐up common to Purim, one inmate dressed as Hitler himself.

Yehuda Fogel adds this:

And […] it all culminated with a public burning of Mein Kampf. The Lansberger Lager-Cajtung exuberantly reported:

At seven o’clock in the evening, at the sports field, there took place the public symbolic burning of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The flames, which licked at the black night sky, carried far, far, over mountains and seas, this tiding: Am Yisrael Chai! Jews live on, will live! Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out, has lost his “kampf,” his battle, and we Jews, although we have paid dearly, have won the battle. So Haman ended, so Hitler ended, so will end all the enemies of the Jews.

(It may strike some as a little hypocritical that Jews would burn the books of somebody who endorsed burning ‘enemy’ literature, but keep in mind that the German Fascists were privileged oppressors who burned books in an ambitious attempt to erase cultures and ideas from existence. Some Jews burned a Fascist book as a crude means of coping with their trauma, knowing full well that it would not be the beginning of the end for antisemitism.)

For many Jews, Haman is not merely an individual, but a symbol for anti-Judaism and antisemitism. His probable ahistoricity is trivial; he personifies phenomena that their victims would physically destroy, were it that easy. Hence, the substitution of Haman with Schicklgruber was a logical one.

Of course, there were also important differences between Haman and Schicklgruber, and as Jo Carruthers showed, a few Jewish writers even discouraged the equivalences, if only because they were too misleading: Haman was far less successful in his plot to massacre Jews. Nevertheless, the similarities were irresistibly noticeable and they helped give the Book of Esther a modern-day relevance.

As seen in my excerpt, Haman was not the only Biblical antagonist in whom Jews saw protofascist tendencies: they also likened Schicklgruber to Pharaoh (from the Book of Exodus) and Antiochus, who were both less exterminatory than Haman but still very troublesome for Jews. Still, other Jews turned to scripture to cope with the situation in general or its aftermath. The Book of Job, for example, would not necessarily answer their suffering, but it gave them much to think about over the decades.

May your Purim this week be joyous.

Today’s excerpt is a bit lengthy and takes approximately ten minutes to read. Simply put: while there appears to be no evidence of the Regio Esercito directly killing anybody on the Eastern Front for being Jewish, it was nevertheless committed to handing Jews over to the Wehrmacht so that it could do the dirty work of annihilating them.

The Regio Esercito also benefitted from antisemitism as many of its troops extorted Jews for goods, or purchased Jewish goods that ‘somehow’ ended up on the market. Many Fascist Italians were also aware that their allies were massacring Jews, but precious few of these Italians felt enough pity to help Jews avoid violence.

Now, here is where I learned all of this. Quoting Raffaello Pannacci in Operation Barbarossa and its Aftermath: New Approaches to a Complex Campaign, pages 36–41:

Italian soldiers who went to the Eastern Front in 1941 and, most of all, who joined their comrades in 1942 were aware of fascist policies toward the Jews back home and were not new to persecutions, though they had not yet witnessed [the Third Reich’s] methods in Eastern Europe.⁸⁰

Politico-military propaganda repeatedly told them that the Soviet Union was a Jewish creation, that Jews were in control in that country, starved people, had better houses, and formed part of the notorious communist police. Soldiers had to distrust Jews, all of whom were communists and many of whom were possible spies and saboteurs.⁸¹

[Fascist Italy’s] commands managed to instill fear and hate into the soldiers’ minds before operations on Soviet soil started. Troops were forbidden “any purchase in Jewish shops”⁸² in Romania, and the Csir’s commander ordered that all soldiers be aware of the danger Jews represented as possible saboteurs: “No one must frequent Jews.”⁸³

In a carbon copy of a German order issued on 6 July, he affirmed that all acts of sabotage the Csir suffered in the first weeks of war were due to “individual communist elements, above all Jews.”⁸⁴ The commander of the Italian logistics corps defined Bolsheviks as “people dominated by Jews who would love to drown Christian civilization in blood and gold and crucify Jesus once again.”⁸⁵

The Carabinieri under the Csir, too, ascribed hostile actions to Jews, also due to the fact that they paid attention to widespread popular antisemitic sentiments.⁸⁶ Furthermore [these Axis] troops were joined by many army chaplains, namely relentless anticommunist Catholic priests who mixed religion and politics in their sermons and often had an antisemitic background.

Some of them, even in postwar memoirs, affirmed that the Holocaust was a punishment for denying Jesus and defined Ukrainian communists a “small rabble generally made of degenerate bastards of Jewish extraction.”⁸⁷ Such messages achieved their goal, at least with some of the troops.

In July 1941 a report on the soldiers’ morale made known that they looked “fairly suspiciously” on the Jewish population living in eastern Romania.⁸⁸ A sergeant of the Pasubio Division wrote: “The town was run by a Jew, as well as Jews were all the leaders and dealers. […] They were Jews and, as such, capitalists and loan sharks.”⁸⁹

A Blackshirt referred to Beltsy stating “This town housed Jews, horror and deceitfulness.”⁹⁰ Another soldier affirmed: “There’s so much misery. Bolshevism is a régime that’s only good for Jews, who had any kind of privilege; everyone else was treated as a slave and was ordered around at gunpoint.”⁹¹ Letters and diaries show contrasting sentiments. Aged people, women, and children being “shot[,] most of whom for the sole crime of being Jews,” arose a soldier’s pity, but this did not alter his belief: “The current war aims to beat down Jewry.”⁹²

An officer saw Jews being used as mine removers and thought that was too harsh, though “the Jewish race he said has its own sins to pay for.”⁹³ A soldier noted that some officers faced with the “Jewish tragedy” went so far as to show “despicable pietism toward a loathsome race who gave rise to the war.”⁹⁴

[The Regio Esercito] soon witnessed mass murders and noticed that the massacre of “Russian Jews” included people who probably could not harm the occupying powers, such as “women and children […] killed in the most horrifying manner.”⁹⁵ A fascist reporter heard a soldier saying “They made us sign a statement binding us not to tell a thing about German atrocities on the Russian front.”⁹⁶

Troops’ and commands’ reactions, however, ranged from open disapproval to indifference and also included “approval for the [German] ally’s measures, especially when it came to the troops’ safety or the preservation of public order behind the front.”⁹⁷

Many Italians saw “mass shootings of Jews” and felt that they were witnessing a prearranged massacre.⁹⁸ Faced with such a sight—the Sim noted—soldiers only had “some pitiful sentiments toward the Jews being killed in hundreds by the Germans.”⁹⁹ On the contrary, according to their letters, they had a “severe reaction” when they saw that “Jews would have a franc-tireurs assignment.”¹⁰⁰

In sum, they seemed to passively accept the nature of the conflict on the Eastern Front, which immediately appeared as a war of extermination comparable to nothing [these Axis] troops had experienced so far.¹⁰¹

The soldiers’ sentiments are not surprising if we consider that [the Kingdom of] Italy housed few Jews and that they generally were neighborly with Italians. Antisemitism, at least among common people, often dealt with competition in business, especially after the war worsened everyone’s daily life.

On the contrary, Ukraine housed large Jewish communities often living beside the locals, which had kept some traditions and Semitic traits that [Axis] anti-Jewish propaganda referred to. Italians perceived Soviet Jews in a different manner, not to mention the fact that they were seen as spies and saboteurs.

Nonetheless the Regio Esercito had a partly independent policy toward “harmless” Jews. Italian commands were ordered to take a periodical census of the population and to report alleged partisans and Jews inhabiting their territories so that [the Wehrmacht] could have hostages to kill in case of a reprisal. [The Regio Esercito], also thanks to local collaborationists, made lists of Jews and communists and also guarded and jailed them, if necessary. Units normally assigned to list, guard and jail suspects, communists, and Jews were the Carabinieri, as we saw above.¹⁰²

Similarly, political commissars of the Red Army and partisans captured alive by [the Regio Esercito] had to be handed over to the [Wehrmacht, which] shot or hanged most of them. Inevitably, [the Regio Esercito] handed over to [Wehrmacht] units a certain number of Soviet Jews especially in 1941, but it is difficult to ascertain if/when they handed them over as such.

Still, in a clearly antisemitic atmosphere, [Fascist] Italians found it more important to assess if suspects were dangerous or belonged to partisan “bands,” after which they shot them or handed them over to the [Wehrmacht]. A Jew was found near an Italian communication cable, and locals advised to arrest him as a spy; Italians found more conclusive that he was a Polish refugee and did not look like he was causing damage, so they sent him to upper commands for further investigation.¹⁰³

Italians used to hire civilian workers and paid them in currency according to age, skill, and working hours. Soviet Jews could be hired, too, but they had no right to be paid and received “only board.” Such orders were issued at the beginning of the war and were confirmed later, when Italian commands ran their own territories.¹⁰⁴

There is almost no evidence on how these orders took shape, but testimonies of civilians inhabiting Italian-run territories attest that Italians paid Jewish workers neither in currency nor in kind.¹⁰⁵ An Italian captain in Balta hired two Jewish carpenters and daily remunerated them with four loaves, but his superior harshly reproved him for such a waste of bread.¹⁰⁶

A medical officer wrote in his diary that Field Hospital 235 had two Jewish workers. They were “assigned the most menial and exhausting tasks” such as cleaning latrines, and one of them fed “on waste, cigar ends and contumelies”: “Malicious and shameless soldiers taught them to present themselves saying ‘Good morning, I’m a …’ and then a latrine-tasty word.”¹⁰⁷

Furthermore it was not rare that Jews in the Regio Esercito’s territories were handed over to the [Wehrmacht], especially when the latter started sensing danger. In Horlivka, during April 1942, [Fascist] units handed over a group of sixty to one hundred Jews to the local branch of Sonderkommando 4b.¹⁰⁸ The aforementioned Lieutenant Villata, whose personal files are empty or tell nothing about his activity in the Soviet Union,¹⁰⁹ had a rôle in the anti-Jewish persecution, too.

On 5 May 1942, in Novoorlivka or maybe Shevchenko, Villata asked the Torino Division’s command to send a company “in the local ghetto with public order assignments due to the necessity to evacuate Jews”; “the company—it was said—will probably stay out all night.” Two days later, in Novoorlivka, soldiers of the same division arrested “three Jews trying to reach the enemy territory,”¹¹⁰ and during the next few days at least another five “suspects” were arrested in the same area by subunits.¹¹¹ Not by chance, on 5–6 May a Lancia 3/Ro truck under the Torino Division made a “transport [of] Jews.”¹¹²

In spring-summer 1942 the zone around Rykovo and Stalino, where Italians proved themselves “lenient,” became a “quiet oasis for all the Jews and communists who also poured in from all around.” The [Third Reich was] forced to ask [Fascist] Italian authorities to hand over hundreds of alleged partisans and Jews (including women and children), who were shot right after [the Regio Esercito] followed the [Third Reich’s] request.¹¹³ In such cases Italians took no action against Jews/communists because they were almost sure that [another Axis power] would, so they preferred to let their allies use violence, probably also in order to prevent partisan retaliation, as an Italian officer admitted.¹¹⁴

Furthermore, between May and June, [Fascist Italy’s] local units were involved in the deportation of the Jewish families of Krasny Gorodok (outskirts of Rykovo). According to locals’ testimonies, [the Regio Esercito] first isolated the Jewish families in expressly prepared barracks, then put them on trucks and transferred them to Horlivka, where the Jews finally vanished. Documents talk about five hundred persons deported and clearly refer to Villata and the Italian “gendarmerie.”¹¹⁵

Besides official operations, [these Axis] soldiers were aware that Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had no rights, could appeal no law, and could die sooner or later, so they tried to get money and goods from people belonging to the “Jewish race” either through theft or the promise of help. Such an instrumental use of the anti-Jewish persecution was not infrequent at the time.

Both in Stalino and Sinelnikove some [Fascist] Italians made abusive searches in Jewish houses in order to take away food and goods, also cooperating with [Axis] comrades and [collaborative] policemen.¹¹⁶ Collaborationist police in Rykovo, under Lieutenant Villata’s orders, sequestered 5,000 rubles belonging to a Jew, with Villata seizing half the money for alleged undercover operations.¹¹⁷

In Lviv, in September 1942, a group [from the Regio Esercito] made a Jewish family believe [that] they would help them escape to Hungary in order to avoid German persecutions. The Jews gave them jewels, raw gold, and a sum equivalent to more than €50,000. After being paid, the soldiers handed over the Jews to a […] Sonderkommando that immediately shot them.¹¹⁸

A reporter of the Fascist Political Police made known the case of an Italian lieutenant working in a liaison office in Lviv who was said to be selling secondhand radiotransmitters, clothes, and other goods coming from “shot Jews.”¹¹⁹

Italians were often aware of the origin of some goods circulating in the rear. An airman “who had a passion for music” was presented a piano by [Axis] comrades: “He asked where they found it, and they replied it was Jewish stuff coming from expropriations.”¹²⁰

In conclusion, in France or in the Balkans, for instance, Italy treated Jews better than Germany, and sometimes protected them, also refusing to hand them over to the [Wehrmacht]. This was often overstressed by the Italian military after the war in order to keep its distance from the [Axis]. Moral grounds must not be overlooked, but such policy was also due to [Fascist] Italy’s will to limit [foreign] interference in [its] territories forming part of mixed occupation areas.¹²¹

On the contrary, there could be no doubt about “who was effectively in control” on the Eastern Front, so Italians did not offer as much resistance as elsewhere, as they had no means to contradict Nazi policies in a [Reich]-led conflict.¹²²

Ascertained cases of Italians saving Jews on the Eastern Front are absolutely negligible,¹²³ whereas some Jewish women were taken aboard [Fascist] trains going to the front and sexually exploited in exchange for food and safety.¹²⁴ Postwar memoirs affirm that Jewish forced laborers in Polish and Ukrainian stations were offered food, as they aroused [the Regio Esercito’s] pity due to their living conditions.¹²⁵

Soldiers, however, also exchanged food for gold, jewels, and other goods the Jews had to give away in order to survive. An Alpino recalled how he and his comrades arrived at Piniug’s prison camp in possession of hidden “gold, rings, necklaces, watches” that they had previously gotten from Jews in exchange for bread.¹²⁶

In sum, for most of the soldiers, a yellow badge “was nothing but an oddity at the time and was worth at best a picture or a few words in a diary,” while after 1945 it became “the symbol of one of the worst crimes against humanity.”¹²⁷

[…]

There is no evidence [to our knowledge] that Italians personally killed Soviet Jews as such, but they persecuted them as suspects, undesirable elements, spies, and saboteurs and handed hundreds of them over to the [Wehrmacht]. In this case, too, Italian institutions and people preferred to forget actual (though limited) indications of Italian participation in the Holocaust.

(Emphasis added.)

The report — funded by the Scottish Government and which had not yet been made public — was leaked by Scottish Traveller campaigner and academic Doctor Lynne Tammi-Connelly who became concerned that the Scottish Government were delaying the publication of the report and were attempting to ‘sanitize’ it and remove the most shocking content.

“I take no pleasure in leaking this report but given the fact that the government has been sitting on it for months and their many attempts to have a lot of content removed, I felt I had no choice,” Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly wrote in a Facebook post alongside a link to the report.

The report — researched and written by Scotland’s top academics — details how the Scottish state and religious institutions — such as the Quarriers and Barnardo’s — used ‘cruelty men’ to seize children from families and put them into workhouses in an effort to “erase” Scottish Gypsy Traveller culture.

Some of the children were also then sent abroad to the colonies to work, and almost all were never seen by their families again.

The researchers state in the report that they are clear that what happened was an act of “cultural genocide,” where the Scottish state and the religious institutions sought to ‘detinkerise’ children, ‘abolish tinkerdom’, and ‘end the gypsy race.’

Another tool that the Scottish state used to eradicate Scottish Gypsy Travellers/Nawken was the setting up of what were effectively small-scale concentration camps which families were forced to live on until they were able to be assimilated into the wider population, which were collectively known as the ‘Tinker Experiments’.

These abuses continued until the 1970s, say the researchers, and has since been followed by a policy of assimilation that continues to this day.

The report also reveals that in […] 1938 […] the Scottish Government allowed Wolfgang Abel, a top German eugenicist (a discredited science of inferior and superiors human ‘races’) to visit Scottish Gypsy Travellers and study them for his [Fascist] masters back in Berlin.

It used to be common for the Ukrainian régime’s apologists to trivialize the prominence of neofascists by distracting us with Russian neofascists, the implication being that Russian neofascists hate all things Ukrainian. No doubt some do, but long-time readers of this subcommunity should know by now that many neofascists are not at all shy about transnational collaboration. Russian neofascists are no exception, even when it comes to Ukraine:

A group led by Mikhail Oreshnikov, a Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi, soon highlighted NS/WP for its militant resistance against the Russian war effort. Oreshnikov and his “Coalition” are loosely connected to the Post-Russia Forum. Although the Banderites refused to cooperate with Russians during the Cold War, now they might find themselves playing second-fiddle to Russian neo-Nazis, who have prominent roles in the Azov movement and the Ukraine-backed “Russian resistance.”

Before he went to Ukraine, Oreshnikov belonged to a group led by Russia’s most infamous neo-Nazi (Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich). Later Oreshnikov participated in the “Revolution of Dignity,” joined the Azov Battalion, and became a citizen of Ukraine.

Oleh Dunda, the member of parliament from Zelensky’s party, met with Oreshnikov in the spring of 2023, just days before this Russian neo[fascist] co-founded the “Alliance of Indigenous Peoples,” which ostensibly united more than a dozen groups to destroy the “Evil Empire” from within. The Alliance also formed a Military Council, at least on paper, that included a couple units from Ukraine’s military intelligence service: the far-right “Bratstvo” (Brotherhood) and Chechen “Sheikh Mansur” battalions.

Mikhail Oreshnikov and Oleh Dunda, 2023

Since 2023, Oreshnikov has led a “Chuvash-Volga-Bulgarian Diplomatic Council,” which supposedly represents the indigenous people in Russia’s Chuvash Republic. Almost a year later, he merged his Alliance of Indigenous Peoples with a few other groups to form the Coalition.

Although this organization does not openly work with the new ABN, it is reminiscent of the historic ABN, which claimed to be coordinating potent resistance movements in the communist Evil Empire—but in this case Russian neo[fascists] have replaced the Banderites.

October 2023 press conference: “Permanent Genocide as a State Policy of Russia.” Seated left to right: Servant of the People MP Oleh Dunda, “Cardinal” from the neo[fascist] Russian Volunteer Corps, and Mikhail Oreshnikov. “Cardinal” even argued that "the Kremlin authorities are carrying out a genocide of the Russian people," by transforming them into "a multinational people, an exact copy of the Soviet man." A year later, the Russian newspaper Izvestia revealed that this alleged ideologist of the Russian Volunteer Corps is the son of Zelensky’s friend who directed his former TV show, “Servant of the People.”

The Alliance of Indigenous Peoples co-founded the Coalition in the spring of 2024 with the “Assembly of National Resistance,” the Georgian-Ukrainian “Caucasian Union” military committee, and the Pan-Finnish “Suur-Suomen Sotilaat” (SSS, Soldiers of Greater Finland). According to the SSS, it “cooperates with right-wing radical movements in Finland and Estonia.”

For example, a white nationalist “Active Club” in Oulu, Sweden reported in October 2023 that SSS members participated in one of their martial arts training sessions. A year earlier, SSS representative Artur Ankkalainen told the third Post-Russia Forum in Gdansk, Poland, “The question that our organization raises is the question of the relevance of blood and our blood family.”

Dmitry Kuznetsov, the head of “Stop the Occupation of Karelia,” also spoke at the third Post-Russia Forum, which produced the “Gdansk Manifesto: a Plan for the Reconstruction of Post-Russia States.” This document called on EU and NATO states “to refuse support and any form of assistance to the imperial ‘Russian opposition’” and instead liberate various Russian cities and territories — for example, the Republic of Karelia, which borders Finland, although there are relatively few ethnic Karelians left (~25,000 or ~5.5% of the population).

Less than two years later, Kuznetsov broke with the “Karelian National Movement” affiliated with the neo[fascist] “Karelian National Battalion (‘Nord’)” which joined the Coalition and fights alongside the Azovite “Russian Volunteer Corps” for Ukraine’s military intelligence service. The “movement,” which is closely linked to the SSS—in fact, they appear to have merged—says that it “unites ethnoactivists fighting for Karelia’s independence,” against “neo-Bolshevism.”

The Karelian “Nord” unit

“I’m tired of the fake accusations of the Russian Nazis who collaborated with the Russian special services and called themselves the KND [Karelian National Movement],” Kuznetsov said in January 2024, who decided to speak out “so that every nationalist representative of indigenous peoples from other republics could learn how Russian Nazis replaced nationalism in Karelia.”

As for Mikhail Oreshnikov’s Chuvash resistance movement, that includes “Nukhrat Palkhar” (Silver Bulgaria), named for a medieval state in present-day Chuvashia and Tatarstan, which also joined the Coalition. Nukhrat Palkhar has shared neo[fascist] content on its Telegram channel, and last year announced its cooperation with “Shanyrak,” a neo[fascist] youth group in Kazakhstan that recently dissolved.

Images from “Shanyrak,” on the right announcing cooperation with Coalition member “Nukhrat Palkhar.”

The Coalition formed a “National Security Council” in October 2024. Members include Nukhrat Palkhar, the Karelian “Nord” unit, a Russian partisan group “Skrepach” (Violinist) that posted antisemitic fliers in the city of Krasnodar, and the Russian Cossack group “Ezikovy Ertaul” (“Ѣзиковъй Ѣртаул”). The last group spearheaded a small “Free Cossack” detachment in Ukraine’s openly neo[fascist] “Russian Volunteer Corps.”

Paul Goble, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation (who raised the idea of a new ABN years ago), has said that Ezikovy Ertaul “presents perhaps the most cogent argument yet on why Cossackia must gain independence and why the West should support that goal.”