Capitalism in Decay

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.”

Coordination between the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine was not always as precise as you might have expected. Quoting Gerhard Koop’s & Klaus‐Peter Schmolke’s German Destroyers of World War II: Warships of the Kriegsmarine:

The flagship […] heard, and then sighted, an aircraft at 19:13. As it flew past the squadron the fifth and sixth destroyers in line—Max Schultz and Leberecht Maass—opened fire on it. At 19:21 it was heard again and the air raid alarm was given. As it flew past the squadron, it dropped bombs which exploded with great fountains of water near the third and fourth destroyers, Erich Koellner and Theodor Riedel, according to crewmen from those two ships.

Between 19:22 and 19:27 an ultra short‐wave conversation ensued involving Friedrich Eckholdt, the lead ship, Erich Koellner and Max Schultz as to whether this was a friendly or an enemy aircraft. The explosions at 19:21 were described as ‘bomb explosions’.

At 19:44 or 19:45 the first explosion occurred aboard Leberecht Maass, forward. This time coincides precisely with that of the first attack made by the Heinkel on a ‘fast‐moving ship’. Similarly, the time of the aircraft’s second attack, 19:58–20:00, is very close to the time when the second explosion occurred aboard Leberecht Maass.

The Committee of Inquiry finally came to the conclusion that the reports about submarine sightings, the wild firing of the anti‐aircraft guns and the general excitement all contributed to the air of uncertainty about times and so forth.

It was determined that there had been four bombing attacks: (i) at 19:21 three bombs fell about 400m abeam of Max Schultz; (ii) at approximately 19:44 Leberecht Maass was bombed and hit forward; (iii) at about 19:56 there was a huge explosion on board Leberecht Maass amidships; and (iv) at 20:04 Max Schultz broke up and sank following a massive explosion.

The contradictory evidence of the aircraft crew was that only two bombing runs were flown, at 19:45, apparently scoring a hit on the forecastle, and between 19:58 and 20:00, apparently resulting in two hits amidships.

The reason for the discrepancy between these accounts remains unresolved, as do many questions about what really happened that night. The Heinkel crew was absolved from all blame. They had not been warned of the destroyer movements, no recognition signal had been fired from below, and they had, accordingly, made the justifiable assumption that the target was hostile.

[…]

It is […] certain that Leberecht Maass was damaged by the bomb at 19:45 but that the second explosion, at 20:00, was a [British] mine. Max Schultz also hit a [British] mine, for she turned with the remaining four destroyers to render assistance to Z1 just outside the swept channel. Altogether 286 crewmen from Leberecht Maass and all aboard Max Schultz—over 320 men—were lost.

The [incident] had far‐reaching consequences: there were no more destroyer operations in the North Sea.

The next mission was ‘Weserübung’, the invasion of Norway in April 1940, when ten more were sunk. Of the 22 name‐bearing destroyers in commission before the outbreak of war, only ten would still be afloat on 13 April to patrol a coastline that stretched for thousands of miles around Norway, and from the Westwall to Estonia—to which would soon be added the coastlines of the Low Countries and France. Three new destroyers entered service in 1940, but it would be the second half of 1943 before the number had risen once more to 22.

(Emphasis added.)

I have no comment.

“I didn’t look at all the names when I was on site, but I did notice “Janis Niedra,” which has already been decided in principle to be removed (it’s a name that can be readily researched and identified as a nazi [sic] collaborator with no ambiguity).”

The name of a Nazi collaborator believed to have participated in the massacre of Latvian Jews was engraved on Ottawa’s Monument to the Victims of Communism. Photo via Flickr.

Janis (John) Niedra was the first president of the Latvian National Federation in Canada, which he led from 1954 until his death in 1969. Niedra is alleged to have participated in the execution of Latvian Jews beginning in 1941, and was the Nazi’s top official in the Latvian city of Daugavpils. He immigrated to Canada in 1951 and quickly fell in with other Latvian collaborators, including former SS-Obersturmführer Oskars Perro (Mike Wallace of television newsmagazine 60 Minutes attempted to interview Perro at his home for a 1997 segment on war criminals living in Canada). In May of 1969 Niedra was photographed handing a medal and scroll to former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, for the latter’s efforts to “liberate” the Latvian people from the Soviet Union.

In case somebody feels inclined to defend this as a little mistake: VOC comes from the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the so-called Captive Nations Lobby, both of which had numerous ties to fascism. That this rancid foundation would commemorate Axis collaborators should be unsurprising.

While West German media incited hostility against migrants, the FRG was stripping the GDR of its economic resources, dismantling industries, and destroying hundreds of thousands of livelihoods. At the same time, the so-called “reappraisal” of the GDR’s history was underway—a process in which neo-fascist actors played a direct role. Former Marxist professors were purged from universities, anti-fascist monuments were demolished, and figures from the Nazi era were rehabilitated, while the GDR’s long-standing anti-fascist culture was banished. Now, 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is crucial to examine how the destruction of these border fortifications paved the way for an unprecedented influx of neo-fascist groups into East Germany.

Even before the opening of the border, West German neo-fascists were smuggling music and propaganda into the GDR, embedding themselves within the skinhead and hooligan scenes. This trend intensified with time, aided in part by the Community of Like-Minded People of the New Front (Gesinnungsgemeinschaften der Neuen Front, GdNF), a network set up by neo-Nazi cadre Michael Kühnen. The organization gathered numerous fascists, including individuals who had previously served prison sentences in the GDR before being redeemed by the FRG—after which they quickly resumed spreading the poison of anti-communism and racism.

In the 1980s, Kühnen’s network developed into a larger umbrella organization with contacts not only in the GDR, but also in other countries. The GdNF had dozens of front structures and held close contacts with numerous parties, while its leadership structures were riddled with informants who invested their generous salaries from the German domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) into far-right political work.

Kühnen himself held strong connections to intelligence services. While the Lower Saxony Verfassungsschutz claimed it had lost all files on such activities, a dossier from the GDR State Security uncovered these connections. GDR’s agencies had been investigating Kühnen since 1970 and documented that after his release from prison in 1982, he was picked up by a vehicle linked to Verfassungsschutz. The conclusion of GDR investigations was that Kühnen’s years in prison were likely used to recruit him as an informant or secure other forms of cooperation.

A few years later, Kühnen authored a strategic document, Workplan East (Arbeitsplan Ost), outlining a blueprint for the network’s expansion into the GDR. This plan guided various neo-fascist organizations and front groups, with the fall of the Berlin Wall serving as their signal to act. Kühnen himself claimed that he was able to cross into the GDR “with the help of local comrades,” setting the stage for an influx of far-right cadres into the region. In the months that followed, dozens of leading figures from Kühnen’s network, as well as members of the New Right, followed his example.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 178–181:

At the Revisionists’ New Zionist Congress in September 1935 Haʻavara was attacked for only giving 39% of German Jews’ capital back. The main beneficiaries were Zionist institutions such as the JNF [Jewish National Fund].

Kaplansky alleged that without Haʻavara it was possible for Jews with £1,000 to emigrate and that ‘the Transfer Agreement not only did not help the Jews of Germany but did a lot of harm.’ Before Haʻavara Jews could take their wealth out in the form of money, losing about two-thirds in taxes. With Haʻavara, Jews were told that their wealth could only be taken out in goods.¹²¹

In a debate between Berl Locker and Baruch Vladeck, the Bundist editor of the Yiddish Forward and Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, Vladeck described how ‘The whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’

Vladeck contended that ‘the main purpose of the Transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine.’ Vladeck termed Palestine ‘the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near-East’.¹²²

Selig Brodetsky, a member of the ZO Executive, argued that Haʻavara wasn’t a breach of the Boycott because there was no foreign exchange transfer. Yet what mattered was not the loss of wealth so much as the need to keep [Fascism’s] economic wheels turning.¹²³

[…]

Today the Zionist justification for Haʻavara is that it was intended to save the lives of German Jews; however, at the time the JA [Jewish Agency] threatened to cut the 22% of Palestine immigration certificates allocated to German Jewry if the ‘quality’ of the immigrants didn’t improve.

The staunchest supporters of the agreement in the Yishuv did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at that time, rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of the Yishuv.¹²⁸

Both Tom Segev and Moshe Zimmerman, stressed ‘the cynical abandonment of German Jewry out of Palestinocentric Zionist considerations’.¹²⁹ The ZE [Zionist Executive] declared that Haʻavara was ‘the sole way of bringing into Palestine the maximum amount of German Jewish capital.’¹³⁰ Zionist activists spoke of ‘saving the wealth’ and ‘rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany.’¹³¹ Hitler boasted that [the German Reich], in contrast to Britain, was aiding Jewish emigration, letting them take the currency required for entry into Palestine.¹³²

Yehuda Bauer conceded:

No one knew then that the holocaust would happen. Nobody knew that a holocaust was even possible… the Germans had not decided on anything like it in the 1930s.¹³³

Abraham Margaliot likewise concluded that ‘none of the individuals who drew up the various proposals perceived the unprecedented danger which lay in store for the Jews under the [Third Reich].’¹³⁴

To suggest therefore that Haʻavara was agreed in order to rescue [the German Reich’s] Jews, when Palestine was not capable of taking them in and when the Zionists themselves did not foresee a future holocaust, is a post hoc rationalisation.

Weizmann was particularly disturbed by the statement of Hilfsverein, the German Jewish aid organisation, criticising Haʻavara and supporting Jewish emigration to South America, South Africa and the Far East. His concern was not saving German Jews but that Palestine might lose them. To Weizmann this was ‘a betrayal of our trust.’¹³⁵

The NYT Berlin correspondent, Frederick Birchall, reported that the World Jewish Economic Conference in Amsterdam passed a resolution warning that the [Fascist] government would proceed from annihilating the Jews economically to annihilating them physically.¹³⁶

Between 1933 and 1939 the Jewish population in Palestine, the Yishuv, increased from 234,967 to 445,457,¹³⁷ of whom 52,600 were from Germany. Only in 1939 did they make up more than half the total immigrants.¹³⁸

The number of Jews who emigrated because of Haʻavara was approximately 20,000, 37% of the total number of German Jewish immigrants.¹³⁹ They entered on A-1 certificates, which enabled unrestricted entry to those bringing in £1,000.¹⁴⁰ Most would have found refuge elsewhere, because they were relatively wealthy.

In 1937 and 1938, as a result of the Arab Revolt, Jewish emigration to Palestine slowed down and Haʻavara was no longer seen as effective.¹⁴¹ After 1937 the USA supplanted Palestine as the main destination for German Jews. 38% of all Germany’s Jewish emigrants gained admission to the USA.¹⁴²

(Emphasis added.)

Links up Musk’s DOGE malarkey with Curtis Yarvin’s playbook.

One prominent example of editors warping the historical record appears in the Wikipedia article ‘Rescue of Jews by Poles During the Holocaust,’ which inflates the number of Polish victims and saviors.²⁷ ‘Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II,’ claims the article, ‘thousands were executed by the Germans solely for saving Jews.’²⁸

Both figures are false. The estimate of 3 million non-Jewish Polish victims of World War II was pulled out of thin air in 1946 by Jakub Berman, head of the Polish security apparatus, in order to establish Polish and Jewish losses on par.²⁹ According to historian Gniazdowski, officials at the time presented ‘an equal proportion of losses among Poles and Jews, although according to the contemporary, and to subsequent estimates, Jewish losses were higher.’ Evidently, he explained, they were ‘fearful of issuing an official estimate which would indicate that Poles were ‘less impacted’ by war than the Jews.’³⁰ It was one of the first examples of a phenomenon which historians today call ‘Holocaust envy.’³¹

In contrast, the 1945 official Polish estimates put the number of Polish victims of World War II at 1.8 million. [Still a very serious number. — Anbol] The most recent estimates put the ethnic Polish losses at closer to 2 million, still well below the Wikipedia claim.³² Moreover, the number of Poles executed by the [Third Reich] solely for helping the Jews was not in the thousands, as the Wikipedia page claims. Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the number of Polish victims killed for aiding Jews was closer to 800.³³ More recently, historians reevaluated these estimates downward still.³⁴

In order to shore up the argument about the alleged thousands of Poles killed for rescuing Jews, the Wikipedia article cites Richard C. Lukas’s 1989 book Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust, a book that has been heavily criticized by experts. Page thirteen of this book estimates that ‘a few thousand to fifty thousand’ Poles were killed by [Fascists] for rescuing Jews. Yet, Out of the Inferno comprises little more than an anthology of short testimonies collected, edited, and introduced by Lukas.

[…]

Wikipedia also downplays the scope and nature of Polish collaboration with the [Third Reich]. The Wikipedia article ‘Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust’ claims that ‘less than one tenth of 1 percent of native Poles collaborated, according to statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission.’ Historians have no way of making such an estimation, which depends on how one defines ‘collaboration.’ Some early work by the Israeli government estimated the number of people directly and institutionally engaged in organized killings, but the number of individuals who contributed indirectly to the Jewish catastrophe remains unknown.³⁶

‘The History of the Jews in Poland’ Wikipedia article similarly states, ‘Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, there was little collaboration with the Nazis by its citizens.’³⁷ This claim has no footnote or truth to it; we know from voluminous research that betrayal of Jews by Poles was common.³⁸

The Wikipedia article ‘Collaboration with the Axis powers’ provides still more errors of this sort. ‘Shortly after the German Invasion of Poland,’ says the article’s section on Poland, ‘the Nazi authorities ordered the mobilization of prewar Polish officials and the Polish police (the Blue Police), who were forced, under penalty of death, to work for the German occupation authorities.’ The [Fascists] did indeed impose severe punishments on those refusing to serve in the new police force, but not the death penalty, and no documented case exists of a Polish officer being executed for such refusal.

‘While many officials and police reluctantly followed German orders,’ continues the article, ‘some acted as agents for the Polish resistance.’ This phrasing suggests Polish collaborators were at most reluctant, never willing; in fact, some police and civil administration officials served the [Third Reich] with zeal and devotion.³⁹ The article claims that

the Polish Underground State’s wartime Underground courts investigated 17,000 Poles who collaborated with the Germans; about 3,500 were sentenced to death. Some of the collaborators—szmalcowniks—blackmailed Jews and their Polish rescuers and assisted the Germans as informers, turning in Jews and Poles who hid them, and reporting on the Polish resistance.

This excerpt implies that the Polish underground was preoccupied with penalizing the blackmailers of Jews. In reality, no more than seven out of thousands of the people involved in this activity were actually sentenced to death and executed, despite desperate pleas made by the Committee to Aid Jews (Żegota) to the underground decision-makers to pay more attention to fighting the szmalcowniks.⁴⁰

[…]

In another case of exaggerating Polish suffering and heroism, the Wikipedia article states,

after the end of the war Poles who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation very often became the victims of repression at the hands of the Communist security apparatus, due to their instinctive devotion to social justice which they saw as being abused by the government.⁵²

This quote is credited to Jan Żaryn, a fervent nationalist, a darling of Polish right-wing populists, and the current chief of the newly established, government-funded Roman Dmowski Institute of National Thought (Dmowski was a prewar Polish politician, an unrepentant antisemite, and a great admirer of Adolf Hitler). Żaryn’s assertion is simply wrong. After the war, Polish rescuers of Jews were not afraid of communist authorities as much as they were afraid of right-wing anticommunist militias for whom rescuing the Jews was tantamount to national treason.

Examples of Polish rescuers killed or threatened by Polish nationalists surface in many Polish and Jewish accounts from the post-1944 period. Perhaps the best known is the case of Antonina Wyrzykowska from the Jedwabne area who managed to rescue a group of several Jews in her house. Soon after the liberation she and her husband were severely beaten by a group of Polish nationalists furious at her for having saved Jews.

In a second case, righteous Jozefa Gibes (who saved a Jewish family of four) died soon after the war. Her body, lying in a coffin in the church, was sprayed with bullets by members of the underground as retribution for her help to the Jews.⁵³ The list goes on of rescuers punished by either the anticommunist and antisemitic underground, or by Polish neighbors. Alfreda and Bolesław Pietraszek from Czekanów, Anna Wasilewska and her family from Zucielec, and the Danieluk family from Solniki, were all intimidated, wounded, or killed by the underground after the end of the war for having sheltered Jews under [Fascism].⁵⁴

A Polish rescuer of a Jewish infant shortly after the war wrote the following to the Central Committee of Polish Jews: ‘Two weeks ago, a band of native fascists broke into my house and smashed everything to pieces. They beat and kicked me and cut my wife’s and daughters’ hair, shouting: “that is for the Jewish child.”’⁵⁵ Similar reports were filed from practically all areas of occupied Poland where significant numbers of Jews survived in hiding.

[…]

The theme of Polish innocence resurfaces in the Wikipedia article on the July 1946 Kielce pogrom. The deadliest pogrom in postwar Europe, this event claimed the lives of 42 Polish Jews, the majority Holocaust survivors, when a Polish mob enraged by tales of ritual murder attacked their neighbors.

Misleadingly, over a fifth of the Wikipedia article comprises a subsection entitled ‘Evidence of Soviet Involvement,’ which suggests that the Kielce pogrom was somehow planned by the Soviets. This theory has been roundly rejected by all serious scholars and today finds an audience only among fringe Polish nationalists and conspiracy theorists wishing to prove that Communist Soviets, not Polish antisemitic masses, bore responsibility for the massacre.

Tellingly, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s Pod Klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego (Under the curse: the social portrait of the Kielce pogrom), winner of the 2019 Yad Vashem International Book Award, the definitive study which put the Soviet involvement thesis to rest, is completely absent from the Wikipedia article. Instead, readers again encounter references to Piotrowski’s Poland’s Holocaust.⁶³

(Emphasis added.)

While this article has a few eyeroll-inducing statements (‘a country brutally occupied by the Soviets’), and I am reluctant to accept the claim that the Polish People’s Republic had a ‘vicious 1968 antisemitic campaign orchestrated by the communist authorities’ at face value, this research is overall too important to overlook.

See also: Antisemitism on Wikipedia: Distorting the History of the Holocaust. Here is one Wikipedian’s response to all of these serious accusations:

Fortunately, nobody cares anymore about this rambling conspiracy theory.

Another scholar who voiced criticism of Israel was John K. Roth, an author of numerous books on the Holocaust. He sparked controversy when he commented in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed that the desire of Israeli right-wingers to expel Palestinians resembled Nazi ambitions. Just as “Kristallnacht happened because a political state decided to be rid of people unwanted within its borders,” he stated, so “Israel would prefer to rid itself of Palestinians if it could do so.” Palestinians “are being forced into a tragic part too much like the one played by the European Jews 50 years ago,” he argued, and asked readers to read the words “Never again” in a universal sense, as “a cry to forestall tragedy wherever people are unwanted.”⁴⁰

The 1990s heralded the start of a more substantial critique of Israel. This decade witnessed the Oslo Accords, which brought temporary hope that the enmity between Palestinians and Israelis was about to end, along with [the] occupation and Palestinians’ violent resistance. The 1990s also ushered in the New Historians, who challenged traditional Zionist narratives of Israel’s founding, especially [its] rôle in the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.

Just as importantly, this decade brought a shift in Holocaust historiography, as the nascent field of genocide studies began to challenge the idea of the Shoah’s uniqueness. Dirk Moses, a genocide and Holocaust scholar, took such a stand when he asked rhetorically in 1998, “Should the Holocaust be narrated into a Zionist story of Jewish vulnerability in the diaspora?”⁴¹

Increasingly, scholars questioned whether the Holocaust really diverged so radically from other cases of mass killing. By 2008, Dan Stone could comment on an entire “empirical historiography that [argues] that there are important links between colonial genocide and the Holocaust, as well as meaningful conceptual gains to be made by thinking of the Holocaust in terms of comparative genocide.” Gradually, the idea that scholars could “study the Holocaust alongside other cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing” became widespread.⁴²

Scholars who challenged the thesis of Holocaust uniqueness showed more openness to condemn Israel’s actions, just as adherents of Holocaust exceptionalism joined the pro-Israel chorus. Tom Segev, author of a book on Nazi concentration camps, observed in 1993 that “the unique character of the Holocaust […] conforms to the Zionist movement’s fundamental assumption: that only an independent Israel could guarantee the safety of the Jews.” While Segev didn’t explicitly negate this assumption, he did point out the myriad ways Israelis used the Holocaust, including to justify force against the Palestinians.⁴³

Moshe Zuckermann, who has studied Germany and the Holocaust, was more explicit when he argued in 1996 in favour of a “universalist lesson of the Holocaust,” explaining that the particularist alternative served to “justify the occupation and brutal, oppressive Israeli acts” towards Palestinians.⁴⁴ In 2011 Moses echoed Zertal’s findings that “the Israeli state has exploited and manipulated Holocaust memories to serve its partisan ends,” including, in the case of the religious Right, “for the continuing occupation of Palestinian land.”

Moses, like other genocide scholars,⁴⁵ contextualized Israel’s history and policies within a framework of settler colonial violence, recalling Arendt’s earlier observations. “Blind to their own subject position as recent settlers in a country with a massive Palestinian Arab majority,” wrote Moses, “many Zionists ascribed (and many still ascribe) the hostility of the locals to the age-old anti-Semitism experienced in Europe […] rather than recognizing that their very presence and intention to form a rapid demographic majority, and their expulsion of most of the Arabs after 1947, was the source of provocation.”⁴⁶ For Moses, rejecting the Holocaust’s alleged exceptionalism went hand in hand with pointing out Zionism’s imperialist history.

During the 2010s, more and more Holocaust researchers offered ever-focused critical commentary on Israel and Palestine, setting in motion what would become a true rift in the field. These scholars made it a point to connect their work on the Holocaust to the fate of Palestinians. They included Michael Rothberg, for example, a literary scholar whose work brought together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies.

In 2011, he examined claims of equivalence between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto. Rothberg advised against equating the two, stating that “occupation and blockade [are] distinct from industrialized genocide,” but took a clear stand against Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life, especially during the 2008–2009 offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks. Rothberg also critiqued Israel’s misuse of the Holocaust to legitimize oppression of Palestinians. He called this “the morally justified originary position of victim that frequently justifies violence.”⁴⁷

That same year, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, connected the genocide of the Herero in German-colonized Namibia to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The first, he said, was a case in which “colonial domination, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, could spill over into horrific crimes such as mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the face of local revolt.” He saw a worrying parallel in Israel. “The case of the Herrero revolt should serve as a horrific warning sign for us here in Israel,” he said, “which has already known one Nakba in its history.”⁴⁸

A year later Goldberg argued that Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial museum, helped cultivate a “victimized identity” which served as “an extremely powerful and useful diplomatic tool […] in maintaining the occupation in Palestine.”⁴⁹ Moshe Zimmermann, a historian of German Jewry, slammed the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians, and for charging Palestine solidarity activists like Nelson Mandela with antisemitism.⁵⁰

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide, pages 29–30:

In the same lands once conquered by the Teutonic Knights, a similar imperial‐colonial project reappeared in the eighteenth century, under the auspices of Frederick II (‘the Great’), King of Prussia (1740–86).¹⁴ Immediately after ascending to the throne, the new King of Prussia began a series of conquests and annexations in ‘the East’, seizing the province of Silesia from Austria and fighting during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) to retain it.

Following the 1772 partition of Poland (between Austria, Prussia, and Russia), Frederick II gained new lands in East Prussia and Polish (or West) Prussia, recovering territory that had been conquered, settled and lost by the Teutonic Knights. Inspired by the American example, Frederick compared the inhabitants of Polish territories acquired between 1772 and 1795 — the ‘slovenly Polish trash’, he called them — to Iroquois American Indians [read: Haudenosaunee] and named three of his settlements in the acquired territories Florida, Philadelphia and Saratoga.¹⁵

Drawn to the tasks of agricultural improvement and […] colonization, Frederick carried out great reclamation and colonization projects, seeking to ‘plant’ colonists on reclaimed land in ‘the East’, land located in the marshlands of the north German plain. Under his auspices, recruitment stations advertised Prussia as a ‘promised land’ for hardworking immigrants. As part of what has been called Peuplierungspolitik (population policy), peasant settlers and craftsman were solicited from Germany, as well as from German‐speaking Europe.

Frederick’s agents recruited German farmers with the promise of free land, and Frederick himself looked to replace ‘Polish’ nobles with ‘Prussian’ ones. He also sought to gradually ‘get rid’ of all the Poles, and aimed to expel the 25,000 Jews living in West Prussia at the time.¹⁶ In West Prussia, he established 1,500 colonist villages and hamlets, populated by 100,000 settlers from his own kingdom and 250,000 immigrants from other parts of Germany.¹⁷

As the man who had transformed Prussia into a major European power, had gained new Prussian ‘living space’, and had colonized and ‘Germanized’ ‘the East’, Frederick the Great (not surprisingly) was one of Adolf Hitler’s heroes, and the Führer’s study prominently featured a portrait of Frederick on the wall. The [so-called] National Socialist revolution, Hitler and [other anticommunist] propagandists told the German people, meant the restoration of German greatness in the tradition of Frederick the Great.

In a 1938 book on Frederick’s colonization and its ‘legacy’ for Hitler’s Third Reich, the writer Udo Froese praised earlier settlers for their ‘pioneer spirit’ and their willingness to live in ‘the wide open spaces of the German East’.¹⁸ When the [Wehrmacht] defeated Poland in September 1939, Frederician colonization became the model for conquered Poland. For his part, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler often evoked Frederick the Great’s eighteenth-century conquests and colonization as an historical precedent for the SS-led reordering, resettlement, and re-Germanization of the ‘German East’.¹⁹

The German Labour Service, mandating obligatory labour service for German youth, was to begin its work, its members were reminded, ‘where Frederick the Great left off’, continuing ‘the great settlement work, the internal colonization, which Frederick the Great carried out’.²⁰ As [Axis] propaganda chief Josef Goebbels reminded German youth in 1941, ‘The German East is our nostalgia and fulfillment’.²¹

(Emphasis added.)

The Führerbunker had an oil painting of Frederick the II in it, and Berlin commissioned propaganda to imply that there was some kind of continuity between him, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Schicklgruber. Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pg. 90:

In the delirious days of the annual rallies of the [NSDAP] at Nuremberg at the beginning of September, I used to be accosted by a swarm of hawkers selling a picture postcard on which were shown the portraits of Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Hitler.

The Third Reich’s head of state was fond comparing hisself to Frederick II and of quoting him. Pg. 1086:

If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more.

Pictured: Frederick II above portraits of Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Schicklgruber, and Hermann Göring.

As the tide continued turning against the Axis, Frederick II’s history was a source of comfort for the Greater German Reich’s politicians. Pgs. 1108–1109:

One fine evening early in April Goebbels had sat up reading to Hitler from one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books, Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great. The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the Seven Years’ War, when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told his ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison. This portion of history certainly had its appropriateness and no doubt Goebbels read it in his most dramatic fashion.

“Brave King! [Goebbels read on] Wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds and soon will rise upon you.” On February 12 the Czarina died, the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass.

The Fuehrer's eyes, Goebbels told Krosigk, to whose diary we owe this touching scene, “were filled with tears.”⁴

Quoting David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945, pg. 188:

Since the future was uncertain and the present unbearable, Goebbels turned to history for the reassurance he needed to offer, particularly the hagiography of Frederick the Great. As I pointed out in the last chapter, the Prussian King had always been a significant symbol in German history, but it was only towards the second half of the war that this figure came to represent the apotheosis of the indomitable spirit who refused to accept defeat.

In fact, Wilfred von Oven, observing the exceedingly large number of portraits of Frederick the Great scattered throughout Goebbels’s Ministry, remarked sardonically: ‘It would appear that old Fritz is the protector of Goebbels’s intellectual world altogether.’⁹⁰

In 1945, the Fascists transferred Frederick II’s body to a salt mine to hide it from the Allies (which they ended up finding anyway).

Frederick II did put up with Jews some of the time, if only because he valued the financial expertise that some Jewish men had, but he still issued edicts against Jews and he was overall prejudiced against them. Quoting Giles MacDonogh’s Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters, page 347:

We have too many Jews in the towns. They are needed on the Polish border because in these areas Hebrews alone perform trade. As soon as you get away from the frontier, the Jews become a disadvantage, they form cliques, they deal in contraband and get up to all manner of rascally tricks which are detrimental to Christian burghers and merchants. I have never persecuted anyone from this or any other sect; I think, however, it would be prudent to pay attention, so that their numbers do not increase.

Click here for more Fascist references to Frederick II.

Quoting Mein Kampf:

It was right and just that Destiny should be praised for having chosen a scion of that House of which Frederick the Great had in past times given the nation an elevated and resplendent symbol for all time to come.

Such people would raise an outcry, if, for instance, anyone should attempt to set up a dictatorship, even though the man responsible for it were Frederick the Great and even though the politicians for the time being, who constituted the parliamentary majority, were small and incompetent men or maybe even on a lower grade of inferiority; because to such sticklers for abstract principles the law of democracy is more sacred than the welfare of the nation.

To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.

It is clear that the worth and significance of the monarchical principle cannot rest in the person of the monarch alone, unless Heaven decrees that the crown should be set on the head of a brilliant hero like Frederick the Great, or a sagacious person like William I.

(Mirror.)

Peasants were generally reluctant to produce the goods required by the companies, although in the Qobbo Cotton District, technical officers, aided by a strong backing of the local residente (political officer), were able to achieve successful results by securing the cooperation of the chiefs and their subjects.⁴⁵ Otherwise, what the technicians’ reports clearly illustrate is lack of peasant interest in the scheme. Resistance was subtle, local, passive, and constant, similar to peasants' reactions elsewhere in colonial Africa or in American slave plantations.⁴⁶

An official from the Soddo Cotton District complained that the peasants expressed great enthusiasm for each proposition put forward by the company and signed agreements without having the slightest intention of carrying them out. During their inspections, the field officers discovered that only the worst land was allocated to cotton or, where there was no continuous weekly inspection by the company officials, no care was given to cotton fields. The large number of private fields existing in any one block, the need for a continuous presence in collective fields and the variety of tasks to be performed in any one day by the field inspectors, made any attempt at rigorous inspection almost impossible.⁴⁷

Confronted with such difficulties, the companies shifted their emphasis from reliance on private to collective fields. Administratively, the strategy seemed to offer better control of the production of cotton and labor, but to its opponents, this method was only a tool of “lazy” technicians who wanted to sacrifice productivity to administrative expediency, surrendering to the Ethiopians’ demands. Opponents pointed out that the collective fields had unfailingly proved to be unproductive largely because the Ethiopians reserved the best lands for their own food crops.⁴⁸ Yet in practice, the shift from private to collective fields neither eased the administrative problems nor improved production efficiency, but aggravated existing difficulties.

Collective fields seemed to offer more satisfactory use of labor, which was unpaid and easily recruited. But in practice passive resistance left the companies impotent, dependent on the cooperation of the chiefs. Since not all chiefs were willing to collaborate, the companies had to resort to the use of force. Some chiefs were replaced and others fined. In some places, stringent measures were adopted allocating to each chief a labor quota proportional to the number of people under his jurisdiction.

Yet, even willing chiefs found it difficult to persuade their people to work in collective fields; sometimes the labor force they dispatched was far below the requirements of the company. In the case of the Motoarato Camp in Näqämti, the chiefs were able to supply only 460 workers per day against 1,000 agreed. Once in the fields, this same labor proved recalcitrant and used every pretext to avoid work or to disappear and return home.⁴⁹

[…]

As in collective cotton farms, it was largely the financially underprivileged who ended up in the mines while the well-to-do or influential often gained exemption. Earlier the companies were dismayed when they discovered that most of their recruits happened to be, as one official described it, the old, crippled, and half-blind. A medical test was introduced whereby each laborer underwent a relatively rigorous examination. The work force walked to the work-place, and despite strict security, many were lost many during the journey.⁵³ Those who reached the work-place were subjected to an extremely tough régime of control and, as in Somalia, the measures adopted against the dodgers was so brutal as to be “indistinguishable from slavery.”⁵⁴

[…]

The official explanation for the resistance stressed the conventional stereotype of the naturally idle and thriftless Ethiopian peasant, who had a deep-seated uneconomic attitude and resistance to change.⁵⁷ […] But rather than being lazy and apathetic, the peasants were actually hard-working and calculating. When they were searched out in their villages, they were not sitting idle, feasting or drinking, but attending to growing their own food.⁵⁹ The peasantry was acutely aware of the disadvantages associated with cultivating cotton.

[…]

The most tangible effect of this monopolistic situation was a sudden revival of local “black markets” and an outbreak of cotton theft “whereby the farmer harvested cotton at night and hid it in order to sell it in one of the remote markets.”⁶⁸ […] Theft was widely reported, and those caught were subjected to harsh punishment:

Whenever the theft was discovered, it was reported to the residente, who ordered the immediate arrest of the culprit; but it was not possible to imprison so many thousands of the natives. So the general tendency was to bring to trial those involved in serious theft while subjecting those guilty of petty theft only to corporal punishment.⁷⁰

[…]

The expressed intent of the cotton companies was to raise the welfare level of the Ethiopian peasantry without involving any serious disruption of the existing agricultural structure. But in practice it became increasingly clear that the primary purpose of the scheme was forcibly to extract the rural agricultural and labor surplus in order to meet pressing domestic needs in the [Fascist] homeland. The scheme was largely formulated in the interest of the metropolitan textile industry at the expense of the indigenous population. Thus the government's commitment to uplift the standard of living for the Ethiopians had much rhetoric but little substance.

(Emphasis added.)

On September 1, 1939 the United Kingdom and France declared war against [the Third Reich] for its invasion to Poland. […] In May, 1940, [the] battle started on the western front. [The Third Reich] brought under its control Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France in a very short period. Ford Germany had accounted for about one fourth, or the second largest share, of production of army and transport trucks in [the Third Reich]²⁵). It is estimated that of the 350,000 trucks held by the [Wehrmacht] in 1942, about 120,000 were made by Ford Germany²⁶). We will later discuss in detail the company’s war production. First, however, we should have a look at changes in Ford Motor’s European organizations necessitated with the escalation of war.

Ford Belgium (Antwerp) had been under control of Ford Britain with a 60% interest. On May 29, 1940, [Berlin] appointed Ford Germany president Robert H.Schmidt to be Kommisar (trustee) for Ford Belgium²⁷). Also, on June 12 and on June 24 he was appointed to be Verwalter (trustee) for Ford Holland (Amsterdam), which was owned 60% by Ford Britain, and to be Kommisar for Ford France (Paris), which was under control of Ford Motor Co., having a dominating 80% stake, respectively. Likewise, Vitgar, a German Ford director of Danish nationality, was sent to Ford Denmark to serve as a coordinator, and so forth. For each of these, R.H. Schmidt wrote to the American headquarters²⁸).

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door, chapter 1:

At Allied‐run camps reserved for [Axis] prisoners of war, ex‐[Axis] officers watched movies, played soccer, even took college courses. At Jewish [displaced person] camps, meanwhile, the Holocaust survivors fought merely to get extra rations of soggy black bread and coffee to make up for the starvation of the war years.

American officials resisted; they complained that the Jews were getting “preferential” treatment and were using black‐market systems at the camps to violate limits on food rations. The situation became so volatile that German police—with the consent of American officials—staged a raid on black‐market activities in the Stuttgart and Landsberg camps in early 1946; rioting broke out, with police killing one [displaced Jew]. He had survived the Holocaust, but not its aftermath.

With word of the survivors’ conditions filtering back to Washington, President Truman sent a special emissary, Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner who was dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, to inspect the DP camps and assess the plight, in particular, of the Jewish refugees.

The World Jewish Congress and other humanitarian organizations were protesting “conditions of abject misery.” The reports seemed unbelievable. Could these horrific accounts of squalor, desperation, and mistreatment among the survivors—all in the wake of the Allied victory—really be true? Harrison was told to find out.

Harrison’s blistering conclusions cast a pall over America’s postwar euphoria. His findings were an indictment of the United States’ refugee effort in the harshest terms he knew. “As matters now stand,” Harrison wrote to Truman after touring the [displaced person] camps, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” The [Axis’s] victims, the dean found, were being victimized once again—but this time by the Americans.

General George S. Patton, the gruff war hero whose soldiers ran the American DP camps, fumed over Harrison’s findings. Publicly, the general—Old Blood and Guts, as he was famously known—had adopted a posture of shock and revulsion that spring over the Allies’ discovery of the [Axis] death camps, and he urged journalists to see for themselves the horrors inflicted on the victims. Privately, however, General Patton held the surviving Jews in his camps in utter contempt.

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote in his diary after learning of the scathing report to Truman. Laying bare the rabid anti‐Semitism that infected the American refugee effort, Patton complained of how the Jews in one [displaced person] camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts.”

He told of taking General Eisenhower to tour a makeshift synagogue that the Jews in the camp had set up to celebrate the holy day of Yom Kippur. “We entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen.” This was Eisenhower’s first glimpse of the [displaced people], Patton wrote, so it was all new to him. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.”

Sadly, Patton’s contempt for the Jews—from the man responsible for overseeing the survivors of the biggest [extermination] in world history—was not that unusual among Washington’s élite. The Jews “do not desire to work, but expect to be cared for,” one Senate lawyer wrote in seeking to limit the number allowed into the country after the war. “It is very doubtful that any country would desire these people as immigrants.”

President Truman’s wife, Bess, did not welcome Jews in her home, and the president himself was known privately to deride “[insert slur here]” and “Jew boys.” Still, with Britain blocking Jews from going to Palestine and the United States closing its own doors for the most part, Truman agonized over the situation in the [displaced person] camps. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has somewhere to go back to,” Truman said, “but the Jews have no place to go.”

(Emphasis added.)

(Mirror.)

It was a widespread belief at the beginning of the 1930s that competition between firms was one of the causes of the slow recovery of the economy, in that it kept wages and prices down, discouraged optimistic business expectations, and consequently reduced investment, demand, and employment. Hence a common action undertaken by most industrialized countries at the time was the implementation of cartelization policies to fight deflation.¹⁷

[Fascist] Italy was no exception. The powerful Confindustria (Confederation of Italian Industry), in fact, fought for a price-raising and wage-cutting policy in order to increase industrialists’ profits and to avoid a further drop in production, as can be seen from documents preserved in the Confederation’s historical archives.¹⁸ The Fascist régime strongly supported this view and favored the creation of obligatory cartels (consorzi obbligatori) by passing a first procollusion law on 16th June 1932.¹⁹ These cartels were considered an emergency measure.²⁰

However, as such, they could only be created if requested by a high percentage of firms of a particular sector and if deemed to be “necessary” by the government. Alongside these obligatory cartels, voluntary ones (consorzi volontari) were also highly encouraged by the same law.

The former cartels were necessarily extended to the remaining firms of the sector, whereas the voluntary cartels only included the firms which willingly adhered to them. Confindustria was against a generalized policy of obligatory cartels, but favored the voluntary ones [Confederazione Generale Fascista dell’Industria Italiana (1933, p. 463)].

Therefore, apart from three obligatory cartels in the cotton, rice, and sulfur industries,²¹ which actually were a result of specific legislation and not of the general law of 1932, all other cartels were created on a voluntary basis. Another noteworthy law was that of 12 January 1933, № 141, which required a mandatory government authorization to be able to enlarge existing industrial plants or to create new ones.

This law was an obvious extension of the previous one: after having successfully eliminated all competition in a given sector, it was natural to attempt to block its return with the creation of new firms. This second law therefore helped guarantee the integrity, and the effectiveness, of the existing cartels.²²

The advantages adduced in Confindustria’s documents for introducing cartel legislation were the following: (a) cartels adjust production to consumption and to the absorbing capacity of the market, thereby guaranteeing the correct quota of work force to each firm, eliminating stockpiles, and stabilizing prices and sales; (b) they centralize the purchase of raw materials and the sale of the goods produced, lowering costs and simplifying the two processes; (c) they ensure that the risk in production is shared between all the firms; (d) they organize exports more efficiently; (e) the higher prices that cartels guarantee to the producers allow firms to have greater revenues and to be able to invest in new technologies.

Just as the flourishing of cartels in the United States was a direct consequence of the NIRA, the [Fascist] consorzi too significantly increased in number after the enactment of the corresponding legislation, as Table 2 clearly shows. Nearly half of these cartels operated at the national level. Initially, the consorzi were created in order to reduce competition and to fight deflation, but after the war in Ethiopia in 1935 they were used to help tackle the problems of building up stocks of provisions, of distributing raw materials imported from abroad, and of rationalizing domestic inputs, hence changing their function.

However, most of the 498 cartels existing in 1942 had been created specifically to raise prices and to reduce competition: “… with regards to the cartels’ functions, it must be underlined that most of the cartels created disciplined the market and production […] Not only was there a higher number of cartels with these functions, but they were formed before the others. We can thus conclude that cartels [under Fascism] were mostly stimulated by the necessity of reducing competition rather than by the desire to improve production” (Confindustria document, 1942, p. 3, translation from Italian).²³

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Another crucial set of legislation passed by the Fascist régime concerned Italy’s labor markets. Since the Patto di Palazzo Vidoni of 1925, strongly supported by the then head of Confindustria, Antonio Stefano Benni, only one workers’ trade union was allowed to negotiate workers’ contracts with the industrialists’ union (Confindustria).

Workers could in principle decide not to join the union, but this was a highly unrealistic possibility, in that they were forced to pay fees to the union and to adhere to its rules and decisions in any case. The union leaders were not democratically elected, and often came from the upper classes of society, close to the Fascist régime. The right to strike was abolished and punished with imprisonment after 1925.³²

Finally, the Fascist contracts further eradicated the possibility of creating a national workers’ movement by fixing different salaries across regions and across industries.³³

The original feature of Italy’s labor market was its direct and coercive control by the Fascist régime, which set wages exogenously. In particular, the 1930s labor policies aimed at keeping wages, deflated by consumer prices, constant at a subsistence level corresponding to around 15 lire (1938 prices) [Zamagni (1976, p. 337)].

Therefore, initially as a consequence of the massive deflation due to the return to the gold standard, the government enacted a series of wage cuts in order to maintain this target, but also to accommodate the industrialists’ requests to keep their profits unvaried, notwithstanding the fall in prices.

When the Great Depression then broke out, the new reason for introducing these measures was that, to keep employment levels constant, the workers’ purchasing power had to be sacrificed. In the industrial sector, the first cut, introduced by law, was by 20% in 1927 with further cuts undertaken in 1930 (8%), 1933, and 1934 (cumulatively, another 10%). Table 7 presents data on hourly average wages for different industries, in which the effect of the enforced wage cuts can be seen in all sectors.³⁴

The Fascists’ money supply grew when they prepared for war:

A further cause of the slow recovery could be the tight monetary policy [that the Fascists] pursued. The money supply did fall in those years, a fact which could justify, in a Friedman and Schwartz (1963) framework, the concurrent fall in output. However, from 1935, the money supply began to grow once more [under Fascism] in order to finance the war in Ethiopia.

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

1863: Werner Sombart, ex‐socialist turned fascist economist, existed.
1883: Hermann Abendroth, the Third Reich’s Kapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, was created.
1932: Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Schicklgruber travelled to Munich, Germany together; en route, Goebbels attempted to convince Adolf Schicklgruber to run for the office of the President of Germany.
1939: The Fascists launched T10 at the F. Schichau yard in Elbing, Germany (now Elblag, Poland).
1940: Fascist submarine U‐9 torpedoed and sank Swedish(!) merchant ship Patricia, massacring nineteen folk but leaving four alive. Fascist submarine U‐55 sank Norwegian vessel Telnes off the Orkney Islands, Scotland, slaughtering eighteen folk, and submarine U‐59 torpedoed and sank French steamer Quiberon off Great Yarmouth, England, exterminating the crew. Fascist submarine U‐44 began tracking Greek steamer Ekatontarchos Dracoulis in the Bay of Biscay. Around midnight, U‐44 fired a torpedo at the Greek ship, but the torpedo detonated prematurely before reaching the target.
1941: Benito Mussolini visited Adolf Schicklgruber at Berchtesgaden, accepting Reich assistance in North Africa, but not Albania. The Chancellor noted that he would launch an invasion of Greece if British troops there began to threaten the oil refineries at Ploiesti, Romania. The Axis lost the railway junction at Kassala, Sudan, on the border with Axis‐occupied Eritrea to the Allies, and it lost its submarine Neghelli along with its entire crew to Allied depth charges. Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers assaulted Valletta Harbour, Malta for the fourth consecutive day, damaging a couple Allied ships but losing an aircraft in the process. Lastly, Luftwaffe aircraft bombed RAF Feltwell in England.
1942: The Axis commenced its conquest of Burma; it captured the airfield at Tavoy (now Dawei). Axis troops landed at Sandakan, British North Borneo unopposed and an Axis air raid took out the headquarters of the Indian 45th Brigade in Malaya. Tōkyō named Rensuke Isogai Hong Kong’s new Governor‐General.
1943: Axis troops landed at Wewak, New Guinea, but the Empire of Japan lost a cargo ship off Honshu to Allied torpedoes.
1944: Although the Wehrmacht managed to avoid being encircled at Novgorod, the Axis had to cancel a motor torpedo boat raid on Allied‐held Naples. The Axis likewise lost the Usines Ratier airscrew works, in southwestern France; the resistance wrecked it so thoroughly that it never resumed production in wartime. The charges with 30‐minute fuses, laid while Axis guards patrolled the yards outside, detonated with such force that one 30‐ton press was sent twenty‐five feet into the air.
1945: Adolf Schicklgruber ordered that any attacks or retreats by divisions or larger units must be approved by him beforehand. The Reich commenced evacuating settlers from Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) as the Axis lost the Łódź ghetto to the Soviets. Of the ghetto’s more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, fewer than 900 had survived the Axis occupation. Later, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit Town Quay, Barking, London.
1979: Moritz Jahn, Fascist principal, died.
1983: The authorities arrest Axis war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.

During the interview, Shields wore a hooded sweatshirt depicting Anne Frank in a keffiyeh with the caption “Free Palestine.” Shields likely purchased the shirt from an online store which offers Holocaust denial merchandise and which is owned by a Neo-Nazi named Cyan Cruz.

(Hopefully this goes without saying, but the intention in this context is to be provocative, not supportive.)

Shields began the interview by asking Stein if he’s Jewish. Stein responded that his paternal grandfather was but that he himself was raised Christian, and jokingly called himself a “Jew for Jesus.” Stein then lamented that they can’t make fun of Jews because of political correctness.

“It just sucks that we live in this politically correct world where we can’t even — we can make fun of Haitians, Venezuelans, you can make fun of any — but if you make fun of Jewish people you’re an antisemite, and you deserve to be debanked, deplatformed, de-everything,” Stein complained.

(Apparently Stein has never listened to a Lewis Black skit, or a Bad Hasbara episode, or has any familiarity with the phenomenon of Jewish self-deprecating humor.)

Stein also railed against vaccines, particularly the COVID-19 vaccine, which he insisted was ineffective. Stein, whose teeth were stained by methylene blue, said that “the most evil part of the [COVID-19] vaccine” was that it was approved for emergency usage on the grounds that no other remedies were available.

Proponents of using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have often claimed that alternative treatments to COVID-19 were suppressed because the vaccine received emergency use authorization. However this is false.

Stein accused the “medical community” of “hid[ing] medicine that could help us in order to give us a free vaccine,” which he called “just disgusting.” But he added that there “was some good stuff” about the pandemic, namely that it’s “more socially acceptable to be questioning the, you know, efficacy of vaccines.”

Shields replied that this applies to “all vaccines,” and that he personally knows people who are refusing to get their children vaccinated now. “I’m still doing research on it because I don’t wanna jump to conclusions but I’m very skeptical of all of them,” he added.

Stein also recounted the time a chihuahua bit him after he picked it up, which prompted Shields to joke about chihuahuas being “demons” and the “Jews of dogs.” Stein then compared racial groups to different dog breeds based on their behavior, and likened Black people to pit bulls.

“Chihuahuas are Mexican because ‘Yo quiero Taco Bell,'” Stein explained. “And then Golden Retrievers are white people because they’re the best behaved. And then pit bulls are Black people because pit bulls are 14% of the dog population but they commit 70% of the dog assaults.”

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

1868: Kantarō Suzuki, Axis admiral and politican, was created.
1880: Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1892: Paul Rostock, Axis physician, official and university professor, was unfortunately allowed to exist.
1945: The Axis lost Kraków to the Red Army, but the Axis still transferred 66,000 prisoners from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp into Germany, and executed the last of the Jewish forced laborers at Chelmno Concentration Camp in occupied Poland; 15‐year‐old Simon Srebnik was the only survivor. Axis forces launched an offensive from around Lake Balaton, aimed at relieving the Budapest encirclement in Hungary, but they lost the Budapest ghetto thanks to the Red Army.
1969: Hans Freyer, Fascist sympathizer and the German Institute for Culture in Budapest’s head, expired.
1995: Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt, Axis biochemist, died.
2012: Georg Lassen, Axis U‐boat commander, left the world.

New evidence of Nazi crimes during World War II has been released by the Public Relations Center (PRC) of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Thus, on January 16, the testimony of Wehrmacht executioner Martin Feuerbach was published.

In August 1935, Feuerbach joined a regiment of storm troopers in Vienna, at that time the Austrian National Socialist Party was operating illegally in the country. In 1937 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for organizing a meeting of Austrian Nazis in his shoemaker's shop, but he was released from prison as early as March 1938, after Austria was incorporated into Germany, and continued to serve in the storm troop of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

He was captured by the Soviets in March 1944 during the fighting for the liberation of Kerch. At the interrogation in the intelligence department of the seaside army headquarters, Feuerbach tried to pass himself off as a member of the Austrian Communist Party repressed by the German authorities, but his captured fellow soldiers told other information about him.

During interrogations, it turned out that the military man personally hanged 120 people, beheaded 80 people, executed 10 of them by cutting off limbs, and nailed two of them by their hands and feet.

"At home I have a pocket calendar where I used to write down the number of people I executed. These records I used to reread every evening, whether in the company or at home. Thanks to this I was able to memorize most of the numbers," the executioner said.

The investigation established Feuerbach's involvement in crimes in Austria, where he killed anti-fascists, in Poland, Yugoslavia and the USSR.

"In 1939, the most characteristic cases were: the case that took place in July in Brader, where up to 200 communists were executed in total, of whom people 20 were not executed at once, but first the right hand was cut off, then the left hand, then the left hand, the left leg, the right leg and finally the head. <...> I personally cut off the limbs of seven Communists," the document cites a fragment of a Wehrmacht military interrogation report.

Earlier, on December 10 last year, the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) declassified documents with evidence of massacres of civilians by the Nazis on the territory of Donbass in the period from 1941 to 1943. At that time, the occupiers established punitive bodies on the territory of Donbas, which were engaged in the extermination of communists, Soviet activists, partisans and civilians.

Schaffer and the hosts were playing a game in which an image or word would appear — like watermelon, Popeyes fried chicken, slavery, etc. — and Schaffer had to say who enjoys it more, white people or Black people. One of the images that appeared was that of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“Oh, Planned Parenthood,” Schaffer said. “You know what’s weird is that it’s the only place where there’s no planning of parenthood there. It’s a — I believe firmly that if you get an abortion, you should be put to death.” Co-host Jonathan Shelley, of the militantly anti-LGBTQ Stedfast Baptist Church, agreed, saying, “That sounds great.”

Schaffer told the hosts that there is a “real question to be asked about the evilness in a woman’s heart that these women are killing their kids, particularly in the Black community.” However, he said that “one could argue that there’s a good side” to “just keeping that population from, you know, causing more crime and stuff.”

He added that he wasn’t “arguing that myself,” but simply repeating “what people argue.”

Schaffer then jokingly called on the show’s viewers to bomb Planned Parenthood facilities. “And, you know, while I’m not gonna tell everyone to go blow up the Planned Parenthood Center, I’m gonna say it,” he said. “Go blow up the Planned Parenthood Center in a video game, in Minecraft. Don’t do that. I’m kidding.”

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

1857: Wilhelm Kienzl, fascist composer, existed.
1871: Nicolae Iorga, antisemitic fascist, was sadly born.
1937: With the arrival in Spain of the Fascist volunteers the Spanish Nationalists now felt confident to mount an offensive on the southern provinces of Republican Spain. Three Nationalist columns converged on Málaga; the Army of the South (General Gonzalo) advanced from the west, whilst from Grenada, to the north of the city, advanced Colonel Antonio Muñoz Jiménez. The third column, attacking from the north, consisted of General Mario Roatta’s soldiers.
1941: Vichy forces inflicted a decisive defeat over the Royal Thai Navy.
1942: Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau, Generalfeldmarschall, died.
1945: The Axis lost Warsaw and had to abandon Auschwitz because of the Red Army.
2012: Julius Meimberg, Luftwaffe advisor and ace, expired.

(This is another examination that I had saved on my hard drive for a few months. Although I try to keep these excerpts at manageable lengths, I have to admit that I still might have gone too far with this one.)

Quoting Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth‐Century Spain, pages 471–472:

That Franco had no inclination to magnamity and saw the repression as a long‐term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti‐Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’¹ The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end‐of‐year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti‐Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth‐century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the [Third Reich] the way:

Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self‐interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.

Quoting Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo‐Bolshevism, pages 93–96:

The […] end of the monarchy had energized separatist movements in Catalonia and the Basque region that threatened the historical unity of Spain; the Catholic Church feared a wave of secularization; plans for land reform threatened the power of wealthy landowners; monarchists hated the Republican government on princi­ple; and all feared the power of a united Republican Popu­lar Front, which had won a huge electoral victory earlier in 1936.

But across the anti-­Republican, or nationalist, co­ali­tion, one belief was common: the civil war that soon consumed the entire country was a “crusade” against a “Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist” conspiracy. For all parties in the nationalist coali­tion, the idea of the Jewish Bolshevik threat crystallized long-­held antipathies to liberalism and republicanism into a clearly “vis­i­ble” ­enemy. General Miguel Cabanellas, president of the military junta, denounced “freemasons, Jews, and similar parasites.”

Falangists told the readers of their party newspaper that they “had the obligation to persecute and destroy Judaism, Masonry, Marxism, and separatism.” And in his first statement after the civil war began, Cardinal Isidro Gomá, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, asserted that “Jews and masons had poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines.”¹⁹

The ubiquity of Judeo-­Bolshevism talk among Spanish nationalists is remarkable, since ­there ­were only perhaps 6,000 Jews living in Spain in the 1930s. The number of Jews in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco was somewhat larger, about 13,000.²⁰

In addition, some German Jews found their way to Spain after the [German Fascists] seized power. And when the danger to the Republican government became an international cause, antifascists from around the world came to fight for it. Some, like the photographer Robert Capa, who produced some of the most enduring images of the conflict, came from Jewish families; ­others, like writer George Orwell, did not.²¹ All in all, however, the number of Jews in Spain in the years before and during the Spanish Civil War was tiny indeed.

None of that mattered. For nationalists, the specter of a Judeo-Masonic-­Bolshevik conspiracy was so power­ful precisely because it effectively demonized both their internal and their external enemies. Republican and Catalan leaders alike ­were portrayed in the pages of the nationalist press as Jews.

Nationalists also saw Jewish Bolsheviks as controlling the Soviet Union, which was supplying the Republic with arms and military advisers. Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador to the Republic, was a popu­lar target, frequently derided as the “real dictator of Spain.” Fi­nally, nationalists denounced France as a country controlled by Jews, after a Popu­lar Front government led by the socialist Léon Blum came to power there in 1936.

Although right-­wing opposition forced Blum’s government to maintain a noninterventionist stance, this fact did not prevent Spanish nationalists from accusing the Blum government of funneling arms to Republicans. In the words of one: “The national uprising [i.e., the anti-Republican war] is bound to be a ruthless war, a heroic crusade against what is ­going on in France ­under Mr. Léon Blum.” Facing an array of enemies both within and without, Spanish nationalists saw themselves as fighting a holy war to preserve the true nature of Spain as a Catholic monarchy.²²

The idea of Judeo-­Bolshevism that circulated among the dif­fer­ent parties to the nationalist co­ali­tion in Spain was not identical to the image of the Jewish Bolshevik demonized in [Germanic Fascism]. ­There ­were impor­tant points of comparison. German veterans of the postwar paramilitary vio­lence on the Baltic borderlands had come to identify Jews with the revolutionary dangers they had fought against during the war and ­ after. The [Third Reich’s] fusion of anti-­Communism, antisemitism, and colonialism in Eastern Eu­rope had an obvious appeal for them.²³

Similarly, accounts of Jewish conspiracy circulated especially widely among military officers, most notably among the so-­called Africanistas who manned the garrisons in Spanish Morocco, who believed in Spain’s colonial mission in North Africa and who played a central role in Franco’s coup d’état in 1936.²⁴ But the Jewish Bolshevik menace perceived by Spanish nationalists was profoundly ­ shaped by Catholic traditions of anti-­Jewish thought that fused Latin Christian ideas about monarchy, nationalism, and the state with Catholic traditions of anti-­Freemasonry, antisecularism, and antisemitism.²⁵

For this reason, Spanish nationalists invariably described Communism as a Jewish-­Marxist-­Masonic plot with an emphasis on all three parts of an unholy trinity that would have sounded strange in the German context, even if [other fascist] ideologues did also vilify Freemasonry.²⁶

And Spanish anti-­Communists invested the Judeo-­Bolshevik ­enemy with meaning by embedding it in a distinctly Spanish narrative of national history. Many Spanish nationalists believed that the Popu­lar Front and the Republican government that preceded it ­were a conspiracy to punish Spain for expelling the Jews and defeating the Moors in 1492, and then upholding a traditional Catholic monarchy in the centuries that followed.

As General Emilio Mola, a chief plotter of the 1936 coup, had written as early as 1922, Jews hated Spain “­because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world.”²⁷ Vanquished in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, this age-old ­enemy of all Spaniards had returned […] in the guise of Communism. Needless to say, this account held no significance at all for Hitler and his colleagues in [the Third Reich].

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

Quoting Isabelle Rohr's The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:

Even though there was no systemic persecution of this dwindling Jewish community, aggressive acts occasionally took place. In Seville, General Queipo declared in one of his nightly radio broadcasts that ‘Jews of the whole world are subject to a supreme council known as the Kahal […] Since time immemorial, for forty centuries, every Jew had given 10 per cent of all his earnings’ to this organization. Altogether Queipo declared the Kahal had received over 4 trillion pesetas.⁴³ The supposed existence of the Kahal was used as an excuse to fine the Jewish community of Seville the sum of 138,000 pesetas.⁴⁴

In Saragossa the Nationalists closed a department store that had been founded by Jewish refugees. The firm’s entire property was confiscated.⁴⁵ In Barcelona, where there remained about 800 Jews, agents of the Gestapo broke into the synagogue shortly after the Nationalist troops entered the city in January 1939. They committed a number of desecrations, destroying the vestments used in worship and carrying off the silver vessels. A delegation of the Jewish community, which presented itself at police headquarters to make a formal complaint, was refused a hearing and told that the police were already aware of the matter.⁴⁶ At the same time several German Jews living in Barcelona were arrested on the orders of the German consulate.⁴⁷

The situation in Morocco

The situation in Spanish Morocco was quite different from that in the Peninsula. This was not only because the Nationalists had established control over the protectorate at the onset of the rebellion but also because there was a larger Jewish community of about 13,000 people. One factor that affected these Moroccan Jews was the Nationalists’ reliance on Regulares, Moroccan mercenaries, to fight the Republicans.

To recruit indigenous units the Nationalists used a combination of bribery and propaganda. They tried to get the backing of the Berber tribesmen by offering large subsidies of silver and grain to their chieftains. The attractions of food, money and fighting appealed to the Moroccans and 50,000 of them enlisted in the Nationalist army. The Nationalists also obtained the support of the rural Moroccan nationalists by making vague promises of future autonomy and granting some concessions, such as freedom of the press, the Arabization of indigenous education and a limitation on the land that non-Moroccans could purchase. At the same time, the Spanish insurgents tried to channel Moroccan nationalism against the common enemy, France.⁴⁸

The Nationalist efforts to enlist the support of the Muslim population had an adverse effect on the Jews living in the protectorate. In the spring of 1937 the Spanish authorities promulgated a law that forced the Jews of the zone to lower the rents on their properties by 35 per cent. Although the decree’s aim was to gain the sympathy of the Muslims, it had, in fact, the opposite effect. The houses belonging to the Arabs or the Spaniards stood empty whereas the Jewish properties, being much cheaper, were let [alone].⁴⁹

In the same vein, on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Korban, the Jewish community of Tetuán was forced to give 50,000 pesetas to purchase sheep for the enlisted Moroccans.⁵⁰

[…]

Axis propaganda inflamed the antisemitism of the Falangists and Carlists who resented the Jews’ privileged economic position in the protectorate. When the rebellion broke out, these fascist youths victimized the Jews by boycotting their businesses and confiscating their properties on the grounds that they were sympathetic to the Republican government.57 In Tetuán the Falangists decided on their own authority to establish their headquarters in the house of a Jewish notable.⁵⁸

In Xauen, Larache and Melilla they extorted money from members of the Jewish communities by forcing them to swallow castor oil. These excesses prompted the British consul of Tangier, Edward Keeling, to complain to the High Commissioner of Morocco, General Luis Orgaz, who harangued the Falange.

The reprimand, however, proved ineffective and the abuse continued. By 1937 the situation of the Jews living in the protectorate was precarious. Rumours abounded that definite action against them was being prepared.⁵⁹

On the evening of 1 April, two Moroccan mercenaries entered the Jewish club, the Circulo Israelita. They began insulting and threatening those present, with cries of ‘Down with the Jews’, ‘Death to the Jews’, ‘We will burn the club down’. The two Regulares destroyed the Portuguese passport of a Jewish man.⁶⁰ In June, the victory of the Franco forces in Bilbao gave rise to anti-Jewish and anti-French demonstrations in Tetuán.⁶¹

In August, twenty-three Jews—principally women and children—were wounded during a riot of Moroccan soldiers in El Ksar. The Nationalist authorities fined the city’s Jewish community 1,800 pesetas a month for ‘having failed to avoid trouble’.⁶²

In September, the Falange gave instructions that all Jews working for Spaniards be dismissed and replaced by Spaniards and Moroccan Arabs. The High Commissioner rescinded the order.⁶³

Worse treatment was reserved for the Jews affiliated to the Republican organizations or to Freemasonry. As the incarnation of the ‘Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik’ conspiracy, they were tortured and forced to kiss the cross before being shot. About twenty of them were killed in the cities of Melilla and Ceuta.⁶⁴ In October, Albert Saguès, the director of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tangier, wrote the following:

The Jews residing in the Spanish zone live in a climate of definite insecurity and terror. The fact that those who have been able to leave the zone to take refuge in Tangier never mention the incidents that they might have observed is itself very significant. They remain terrified despite the distance.⁶⁵

While trying to restrain the Falangists’ and Carlists’ excesses, the military authorities, needing to finance the war effort but reluctant to raise taxes, also fined the Jews large sums. In August 1936 the Tetuán Jews had to pay 500,000 pesetas as ‘voluntary contributions’ to the rebels’ treasury. In May 1937 they were again compelled to give 60,000 pesetas to the Nationalist cause.⁶⁶ The Jews were also forced to hand over their merchandise, especially foodstuffs, but also their jewellery and gold. Those who refused to do so were subject to arbitrary arrests, forced to drink castor oil or had their estates confiscated.

[…]

Meanwhile the Civil War was ruining the Jews of Morocco. In Arzila, two-thirds of them lived on charity.⁶⁹ They found themselves in a vicious circle, for those who wanted to leave the protectorate faced a number of impediments. Not only did they have to ask for special permission, but the Falangists also confiscated the property of those who did not come back within an allotted time.⁷⁰

Although a wave of antisemitism was sweeping through the protectorate, the Moroccan Jews realized that it was not comparable to that occurring [under German Fascism]. They kept a low profile and hoped that the hostility would disappear with the end of the Civil War.⁷¹

While there was a spike of obvious antisemitism during World War II (1931–1945), in other instances the Spanish parafascists toned it down for opportunistic purposes. Now, do not misunderstand me: the point here is certainly not that any benevolence somehow cancels out the damage, or that there were 'good and bad parts' about Spanish parafascism for everybody involved, as if it were a 'mixed bag' overall, but rather that it was a complex phenomenon where its harmfulness was in some respects far from obvious. This is not trivia: it is important to recognise the strengths and harmless aspects of our enemies in order to continue identifying them and how they succeed with others.

Quoting Isabelle Rohr's The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:

Franco’s […] régime contributed to the rescue of European Jews during the Holocaust by allowing about 40,000 of them to transit through Spain, granting various forms of diplomatic protection to 3,235 others and repatriating 800 Jews from France and the Balkans who were Spanish citizens.⁷⁴

Although the Franco régime did not discriminate against [all] the Jews who found shelter in Spain, it did not allow them to settle in the country. The Jews who reached Spain illegally during the first years of the war, and those whose transit arrangements failed, were imprisoned in the concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro or even turned back to the frontier.

Eric Calderwood’s Moroccan Jews and the Spanish colonial imaginary, 1903–1951:

The survival of Philo-Sephardism is paradoxical, since it persisted in the face of the Franco régime’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.¹⁹ […] Yet the spectre of the ‘Judeo-Masonic’ enemy did not prevent people closely aligned with the Franco régime from pursuing a Philo-Sephardic programme in Spain and Morocco, especially in the academic institutions created under Francoism. As in the case of Pulido’s Philo-Sephardic campaign, the Francoist brand of academic Philo-Sephardism garnered the support of many Moroccan Jews.

[…]

In January of 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, a group of Jewish leaders in Tetouan sent a letter to Juan Beigbeder, the High Commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, in the name of the ‘Israelite Community of Tetouan.’²² The letter expresses support for a proposal to establish a centre for Talmudic studies in Tetouan, justifying the proposed centre by casting Tetouan and its Jewish inhabitants as the heirs to the cultural splendour of Sepharad. […] Franco’s régime received early and significant support from [some] Moroccan Jewish leaders, and this support was often framed as a manifestation of the Moroccan Jewish community’s historical links to Sepharad.

Whether this attempt to appeal to the Spanish parafascists was itself a form of opportunism, or these Jews sincerely appreciated parafascism, I leave that up to you. We must not deny, though, that many Jewish adults have willingly supported wrongful causes before.

Whatever the case may be, it is worth noting that Moroccan Jews were in a Spanish colony rather than in Spain proper, and there does not seem to have been an especially aggressive campaign to settle Spaniards in Morocco. Because of this separation, I can imagine that many Iberian antisemites found these Jews easier to tolerate than the Jews in Iberia. Hence:

On November 24, 1939, a few months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco created the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), which still serves today as Spain’s primary national research organisation. The CSIC was organised into various schools and institutes, one of which was the School for Hebraic Studies.²⁴ The school published Spain’s first academic journal of Hebrew studies, Sefarad. […] The prologue then describes the new journal’s aims and scope, which include the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew philology, archaeology, and (crucially) Sephardic culture. On this last topic, the editors say:

Another goal of the activities of the School of Hebraic Studies is the study of Hebraic-Spanish culture. Hispanic Judaism, throughout its trajectory, moved, in general, in a spiritualist environment […] We must keep in mind that Spanish Judaism offered the highest values in religious poetry, Biblical exegesis, Hebrew philology, philosophy, and pure and experimental sciences.

[…]

Bensabat notes that members of Tangier’s Jewish community have accused the Maimonides Institute ‘“of being a Hispanophile propagandist,” as if this were a crime, when it makes us proud to be considered that way’ (1951, 2). The comment, made in passing, highlights Bensabat’s complicity with Spain’s colonial mission in Morocco. More broadly, the case of the Maimonides Institute and its director Bensabat illustrates the migration of the Philo-Sephardic programme from early-twentieth-century liberal circles in Spain to Francoist academic culture and also to some elite Jewish intellectuals and professionals in the Spanish Protectorate zone.

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

1908: Günther Prien, Axis U‐boat commander, came into existence.
1941: Eighty Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers attacked Valletta Harbor, Malta, trying to finish off damaged Allied aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. HMS Illustrious, destroyer HMS Decoy, and cruiser HMAS Perth, and ship Essex took damage, but none sank, and the Axis lost ten flightcraft.

Additionally, Axis submarine U-96 sank Allied troopship Oropesa with three torpedoes 150 miles northwest of Ireland at 0616 hours, causing 106 deaths. Survivors drifted in six lifeboats, but only five lifeboats, containing 143, were found and rescued. Coincidentally, Axis submarine Luigi Torelli attacked an Allied convoy 350 miles west of Ireland, sinking Greek ship Nicolas Filinis and causing three deaths.

Lastly, Hans-Joachim Marseille began a period of rest at home in Berlin.
1942: The Axis commenced deporting Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp… on a less tragic note, Ernst Scheller, Fascist politician and captain, died.
1945: The Third Reich’s head of state moved into his underground bunker, the so‐called Führerbunker.
1988: Andrija Artuković, Ustaše Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of Justice who contributed to the Samudaripen, did what he should have done long ago and dropped dead.
2014: Hiroo Onoda, Imperial intelligence office who fought for the Axis until March 1974 (seriously), and was therefore easily one of the longest serving Axis soldiers (second only to Teruo Nakamura), finally left the world.

Keenan also claimed that the Altadena fire was likely started by homeless people. “So until we see Gavin Newsom actually, like, rescind those laws, the sanctuary city laws, and frankly cracking down on the homeless, because as we know, 80% of the fires in SoCal are arson, and a lot of that is the homeless camps all up and down these hills,” Keenan told MacIntyre.

She added that she’s “pretty sure that when they investigate the Altadena fire,” it will be traced back to a “homeless camp in the Eaton Canyon,” and that “these schizophrenic, these drug addicts” “think it’s fun to light something on fire.”

The cause of the fires is under investigation, and there is currently no evidence that arson was involved. Investigators are looking into the Eaton Canyon electrical tower as a possible source of the Altadena fire, however. Of the 20 most destructive California wildfires, 8 — including 2018’s Camp Fire — had power-related causes according to the New York Times.

Admittedly, the two events are more different than they are similar, but I could not help but remember the time when the Fascists blamed the Reichstag fire on us.

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

1885: Lorenz Böhler, Fascist physician, was born.
1890: Michiaki Kamada, Axis vice‐admiral, came into existence.
1919: The protofascist Freikorps killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, dealing a massive blow to the Spartacist uprising and paving the way for Fascism.
1933: Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein became a group leader (Kameradschaftsführer) in the HJ.
1937: As the Nationalists and Republicans both withdrew after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road, Hermann Göring met Benito Mussolini; when Göring brought up the topic of Berlin’s wish to annex Austria, Mussolini showed disapproval.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐44 sank Norwegian steamer Fagerheim in the Bay of Biscay at the early hours of the day, massacring fifteen but leaving five alive. Later, U‐44 fired shots at Netherlandish merchant freighter Arendskerk; realizing his ship could not out run the Fascists, Arendskerk’s captain gave the abandon ship order, but the Fascists sank it. Nevertheless, all sixty‐five of the crew lived; the Italian streamer Fedora rescued them. Meanwhile, Kapitän zur See Ernst Kretzenberg took command of cruiser Köln and U‐23 completed her sixth war patrol.
1941: Axis merchant raider Pinguin captured Norwegian whalers Star XIX and Star XXIV in the South Atlantic north of the Azores, and the Axis submarine Luigi Torelli assaulted an Allied convoy west of Ireland, sinking Norwegian ship Brask and Greek ship Nemea.
1942: In Poland, Axis authorities commenced deporting Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chelmno Concentration Camp. In Asia, Axis troops crossed the Gemencheh Bridge over the Kelamah River in British Malaya to assault Australian‐held positions at Gemas; although the initial attack failed with the loss of six tanks, subsequent attacks and flanking maneuvers forced the Allies to fall back to the Gemas River. Elsewhere, the 4th and 5th Imperial Guard Regiments wiped out forward positions held by elements of the Indian 45th Brigade north of the Muar River, and the Axis’s Armeegruppe Mitte began to fall back from the Kaluga area, forming a new defensive lines twenty miles to the west.
1943: Axis aircraft raided Telepte Airfield in Tunisia three times and Youks‐les‐Bains Airfield in Algeria once, but lost a total of fifteen aircraft during these assaults. Elsewhere, two companies of ‘Loreto’ combat engineers battalion of the Italian Air Force transferred by ship from Sicily to Tunis, Tunisia; the remaining two companies of the 1st Air Force Assault Regiment ‘Amedeo d’Aosta’ would remain in Sicily to repair airfields.
1944: The XIV Panzer Corps abandoned Monte Trocchio, Italy and fell back across the Rapido River; the Axis subsequently lost both Monte Trocchio and Monte Santa Croce to the Allies.
1945: A report noted that the total number of prisoners in concentration camps was 714,211; there were about 40,000 guards at the camps. The Greater German Reich’s head of state departed the Adlerhorst headquarters in Wetterau, returning to Berlin, which ordered Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland to move from East Prussia, Germany to Poland to counter the Soviet Vistula‐Oder Offensive. An Axis V‐2 rocket hit Rainham, London, massacring fourteen folk and seriously injuring four, but Axis shipping in Hong Kong and rail facilities at Freiburg both suffered Allied assaults.
1950: Axis commanding officer turned Allied traitor, Petre Dumitrescu, expired. He captured 15,565 Soviet prisoners of war at the cost of 10,541 casualties, but when Bucharest surrendered to the Allies in 1944 he helped capture of 6,000 Wehrmacht members. Make of that what you will.
1951: The Allies found Ilse Koch guilty of incitement to murder, incitement to attempted murder, and incitement to the crime of committing grievous bodily harm. They gave her life imprisonment and forfeiture of civil rights. On the other hand, the Western Allies released Axis war criminal Hellmuth Felmy early.
1965: Winston Churchill suffered a stroke, which caused a severe cerebral thrombosis… okay, I know that this event’s relevance to fascism is arguable, but I’m including it here anyway because it’s too funny.