Capitalism in Decay

Beinart (2023) notes a provocative example of their putative coexistence from recently in the United States: “Last November [2022], the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) awarded Donald Trump its highest honor, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion. Nine days later, the former president dined with two of America’s most prominent anti-Semites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes.

Noting the proximity of the two events, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked ZOA president Morton Klein an uncomfortable question: Could Trump be among those ‘people who, for whatever reason, have sympathies with Israel but don’t like Jews?’” Klein dismissed the proposition.

Then Beinart pushes the case further. Trump’s support for Israel, well established during his term of office, and his clearly expressed hostility towards U.S. Jews as a group, are not contradictory but stem from the same impulse: “He admires countries that ensure ethnic, racial, or religious dominance. He likes Israel because its political system upholds Jewish supremacy; he resents American Jews because most of them oppose the white Christian supremacy he’s trying to fortify here.”

Even with a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish-convert daughter, Trump sees no contradiction in supporting Israel more or less unconditionally and calling out American Jews as agents of “globalism” and of plots to encourage unrestricted immigration into the United States. When neo-Nazis at a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “The Jews will not replace us” (representing the idea that Jews are behind the “replacement” of “true” Americans of northwest European heritage with myriad immigrants) the message was as clear as day. Trump nodded and winked in their direction. [The] Prime Minister Netanyahu remained silent (Field, 2017).

[…]

Beyond American shores, and in France, the European country with the largest domestic Jewish and Muslim populations, the tendency in the media and among politicians is to blame anti-Semitic incidents on Muslim antipathy toward Jews rather than the fact that intense anti-Jewish sentiment correlates in the population at large, unlike for most Muslims, with a pro-Israel outlook (e.g., Piser, 2018; Porter and Alderman, 2023). Across Central and Eastern Europe a similar pattern prevails. Long before the Gaza War anti-Semitism was increasing and was accompanied by a growing affiliation with Israel.

As explained by Krastev (2019), this is not just a superficial realpolitik, even though it has that aspect to it, for Israel benefits from “friends” inside the European Union and they from Israel’s status as a dynamic economy with friends in Washington D.C. Rather, populist leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary see in Israel a model for their own future: “Zionism in many respects was the mirror image of the nationalistic—and often anti-Semitic—politics that dominated Central and Eastern Europe between the two world wars. What attracts Eastern European populists to Israel today is their old dream realized: Israel is a democracy but an ethnic democracy; it defines itself as a state for Jews in the same way East Europeans imagine their countries as a state for Poles, Hungarians or Slovaks.”

Now that [many] Jews are nationalists, their historic cosmopolitanism no longer poses a threat. Shorn of their diffuse presence, in [occupied Palestine] they become a rôle model.

Of course, a few neofascist gentiles do cynically exploit anti-Zionism, but even these types would be highly unlikely to oppose a plan to deport all Jews to occupied Palestine. They may feel that having a state is a privilege that Jews do not deserve, but enticing Jews to leave their countries is not one of their objections to the concept.

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

1861: Luigi Facta, Italy’s last prefascist Prime Minister (but later member of the Fascist Senate), existed.
1889: Dietrich Kraiss, Axis general, blighted the world.
1896: Oswald Mosley, English fascist, disgraced life with his existence.
1933: Tōkyō commissioned submarine tender Taigei into service.
1934: Emperor Showa visited the Nakajima aircraft plant at Ota, Gunma Prefecture.
1935: The Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg received the contract for laying down the hull of the future battleship Bismarck, and the order for the construction of Prinz Eugen was awarded to Germaniawerft of Kiel.
1936: Spanish Nationalist Colonel José Varela’s troops had forced a bridgehead over the River Manzanares en route to Madrid, and would capture almost three quarters of the University City in the coming week before being stopped by Spanish Republican militias. In Asia, Tōkyō named Captain Ryozo Fukuda as Nachi’s commanding officer.
1940: In response to the Luftwaffe’s leveling of Coventry two days before, Hamburg suffered another Allied bombing for the twoth day in a row. The Axis scuttled its tanker Phrygia to avoid capture, but Axis submarines U‐65 and U‐137 each sank an Allied ship. The Fascist 9th Army defensive line at Korcë, Albania yielded to the Greek 3rd Army Corps, and Berlin named Heinz Guderian as Panzer Group 2’s commander.
1941: The 11.Armee captured Kerch, and the 3rd Panzer Party established a crossing over the Lama River 70 miles west of Moscow. Axis carrier fleet exercised in the Kurile Islands, and the obsolete battleship Settsu began to sail around the Inland Sea in the Empire of Japan to generate fake radio communication messages at different ports. Crown Prince Yi Un became attached to the training department of the IJA.
1942: The Regia Aeronautica merged its 'Loreto' combat engineers battalion and the 1st Air Force Paratroop Unit to form the 1st Air Force Assault Regiment 'Amedeo d'Aosta' at Marsala, Sicily. As well, the Axis promoted Georg von Bismarck to the rank of Generalleutnant posthumously, and it awarded Oberfeldwebel Karl Lipp of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
1943: The Greek island of Leros surrendered to the Axis again, and the Axis carried out severe reprisals against the Italians who cooperated with the Allies.
1944: The Axis lost the town of Düren to Allied aircraft seeking to assist the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.
1947: Giuseppe Volpi, Fascist Italy’s Minister of Finance, bit the dust.

Although we shall never know for certain, it is plausible that if the Italian Fascists never existed, then the Third Reich probably would have never existed either. While many of us know that Fascist Italy was in many ways a model for the Third Reich, fewer of us know that the Italian Fascists set an inspirational example for the German ultranationalists even before October 1922:

Notably, one of the earliest mentions of Mussolini’s movement in the Bavarian press was published in Münchener Beobachter, a newspaper that later changed its name to Völkischer Beobachter and became the mouthpiece of the NSDAP. On October 8, 1919, the paper included a report—sent from the Italian border—about ‘the white revolution in Italy.’ The article claimed that ‘Mussolino [sic], the leader of the highly patriotic national-irredentists’ was becoming the ‘master of the situation’ (Herr der Lage).⁵⁰

The news referred to the [protofascist] occupation of Fiume, which represented a ‘bitter lesson’ for Germans who, in contrast to Italians, were humiliated by the Entente. However, subsequent news on Italian developments did not provide any information of the bleak fate of Mussolini’s movement after the November 1919 elections. Instead, there were depictions of the ‘Bolshevik’ prerevolutionary climate in Italy.⁵¹

It was not until the end of 1920 that the Bavarian press reported again on the Italian fascist movement and the end of D’Annunzio’s adventure in Fiume. A cultural transfer process from Italian Fascism to the Bavarian space of reception did not start until 1921.

[...]

Hitler continued instilling the fascist ethos into his men. In late October 1921, he advised the SA members to demonstrate an iron discipline and obedience, and to cultivate a good relationship with police. The Völkischer Beobachter wrote about the Italian fascists around this date. Therefore, there can be no doubt that Hitler was not oblivious about the methods and style of fascist violence. Surely cognizant of the fact that Italian fascists had taken advantage of the sympathy and connivance of the army and police, Hitler told his men that policemen harboured an ‘inner sympathy’ towards them, ‘because they also hated the Jews.’⁹⁶

[...]

Shortly after the Italian fascists founded the PNF during a congress in Rome, the Catholic Bayerischer Kurier expressed the thought of many and published an article directly comparing ‘Fascism and National-Socialism.’⁹⁸ In this article, the ‘use of violence’ (Gewaltanwendung) was stressed as something ‘characteristic of fascism.’ What Mussolini and Dino Grandi had demonstrated in Rome was of great interest to Germans; their speeches showed the ‘extraordinary inner affinity’ (ausserordentliche innere Verwandtschaft) that existed between the Italian fascist and German [fascist] movements.

According to the Bayerischer Kurier, both cases were expression of a ‘mass-psychological reaction’ against socialism and the socialist revolution. ‘Fascism’ (Faszismus), a concept understood to embrace both the German and Italian movements, stood out for its ‘instinctive, emotional, irrational’ and ‘activist’ inclination to extremes. It was a ‘rare mix of high idealism, true exaltation and will to sacrifice on the one hand, and brutality, savagery and lack of scruples on the other hand.’

Fascism was also a reaction against internationalism and Parliamentarism. Its fundamental nationalism and the connection between Jewry and revolutionary socialism were the reasons for the anti-Semitic orientation of the movement. Fascism was substantially focused on power-political motives and was militaristic and centralist.

In short, the article offered an interesting and detailed comparative analysis of fascism as a phenomenon that included both German and Italian expressions. In a sense, this was probably the earliest theorization of fascism as a ‘generic’ phenomenon, but the article fatefully overlooked the influence that the Italian example had exerted over the Bavarian völkisch movement.

The Völkischer Beobachter took months to reply to the Bayerischer Kurier comparisons, but when it did, it did not clearly deny them. While praising the fascists’ success against socialism, the [German Fascists] argued that Mussolini’s movement did not fight against the Jews, which was a fundamental difference with them.⁹⁹

Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, pages 18–19:

It is worth considering Hitler’s views of the nascent Fascist government in Italy. A few days after Mussolini’s appointment, Hitler told a German right-wing activist: ‘One calls us German fascists. I do not want to examine to what extent this comparison is right. But we have in common with the fascists the uncompromising love for the fatherland, the will to rip the working class from the claws of the International and the fresh, comradely frontline spirit.’⁴

Hitler here tried to legitimise and publicise [his party] by pointing to the apparent political success of the Italian Fascists, who had been gaining notoriety amongst some and admiration amongst others throughout Europe for their brutal violence against the Italian left.

Hitler’s jumping on the Fascist bandwagon was remarkable, since prejudices against the former enemy from the Great War were common in Germany. There was a widespread view of Italians as unreliable, treacherous and undisciplined. Thus, Hitler avoided any direct association with Italy which may have put off potential [NSDAP] supporters. He implied that [his party], a German ultra-nationalist group, were not mere copycats of the Italian Fascists.

Rather than simply a similar ideology, it was strategic considerations that prompted Hitler to point to the Italian Fascists and liken himself to Mussolini. For Hitler, the cultivation of links to Mussolini’s Italy was a means to legitimise and promote [his party] in Germany, while for Mussolini, contacts with Hitler and [other German anticommunists] were a way to assert his rôle as doyen of European fascism and extend Italy’s power.⁵

On many other occasions, [German Fascism’s] leader articulated his adoration for the Duce. But Hitler was not the only far-right German politician making these references to Mussolini.⁶ After the March on Rome, Bavarian newspapers used the new political terminology introduced by the Italian Fascists. They ran reports on ‘the Bavarian Fascists’ and their leader Hitler, ‘the German Mussolini’.⁷

Significantly, not only the German far right but also British diplomats and newspapers soon saw Hitler as the ‘German Mussolini’. Dismissing such references as superficial misses the point, as they reflected the widespread appeal of Mussolini’s nascent régime for the German right. Here seemed to be an ideal pact between the anti-Communist Fascists and traditional institutions, above all the Italian state and monarchy, a political configuration that would bring order and stability to the purported post-war social and political chaos.

A year after the March on Rome, on 2 October 1923, Adolf Hitler echoed this sentiment in an interview with the conservative Daily Mail. He declared: ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany […] people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’⁸

(Click here for more.)

Bernhard Fulda’s Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic, page 65:

In fact, it was through foreign political developments that the [so-called] National Socialists first moved into the limelight. At the end of October 1922, Mussolini ordered 40,000 of his paramilitary followers, the so-called ‘Blackshirts’, to march on Rome. Faced with this fascist uprising, the Italian king appointed Mussolini prime minister. These events constituted front-page news and received extraordinary coverage in the German press.

After their own experience of a failed right-wing coup in 1920, German editors took a keen interest in these Italian developments. For days, newspapers reported of the progress of the uprising, Mussolini’s arrival in Rome, his meeting with the king, the composition of his government, and the victory parade in early November.¹⁴⁴

The existence of a successful anti-socialist mass movement had an intrinsic news value particularly for nationalist journalists. ‘Fascism—what is it?’ opened a typical article giving background information on the novel movement in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger.¹⁴⁵ Dissatisfaction with the perceived inefficiency of parliamentary democracy in Germany was evident in the way in which the right-wing press treated the emergence of a strong leader in Italy.

The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger devoted a front-page leader to Mussolini’s first government speech, under the headline ‘Dictator and parliament’.¹⁴⁶ There was not the slightest doubt that the correspondent sympathized with Mussolini and that he considered parliamentarism an outdated political system.

Hitler and his movement benefited enormously from the media interest in these Italian events. Certain parallels between fascists [in the Kingdom of Italy] and [the Weimar Republic] were immediately obvious even to the most cursory observer. [NSDAP members] themselves began to recommend a fascist-style march on Berlin, and compared Hitler with Mussolini.¹⁴⁷

In Munich, an increasing number of people were now curious to experience Hitler in action. [German Fascist] rallies in November and December 1922 were overflowing with participants; parallel rallies had to be staged to accommodate the crowds.¹⁴⁸

This sudden popular appeal resulted in a great deal of media interest, which in turn further increased Hitler’s popularity. ‘There are a lot of people who believe him to be the German Mussolini’, noted the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger in its first front-page commentary on Hitler. Even those who have never heard him [speak] get to know so much about him that he has become the subject of conversations in all classes.’¹⁴⁹ The first article about Hitler in the Ullstein tabloid BZ am Mittag made fun of his rabid anti-Semitism, but also carried the suggestive headline ‘Hitler-Mussolini’.¹⁵⁰

Rome also financed the German Fascists, if only modestly or infrequently, prior to 1933 (though not all of the evidence for this is conclusive). Quoting James E. Pool’s & Suzanne Pool’s Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933, pages 298–299:

In 1929 Hitler was accused by a German journalist, Werner Abel, of accepting Italian Fascist money six years earlier. In turn Hitler sued him for libel. During the trial Abel testified that he introduced Hitler in 1923 to Captain Migliorati, who worked with the Italian embassy in Berlin. Abel said that Migliorati admitted to him that he personally transmitted Italian Fascist funds to Hitler for the putsch.²¹

Abel was sentenced to three years’ hard labor on the count of perjury. However, the verdict was no indication of the truth, nor of justice, because by 1932, when the case was decided, the [German Fascists] had many friends in the Munich courts who clearly acted in favor of Hitler throughout the trial.²²

More evidence showing the relation between the Italian Fascists and the [German Fascists] came from the trial in Rome of an Italian official accused of embezzlement. After it was obvious that the missing funds had been intended for Hitler, the trial was finished in secret.²³

Three other top level sources, men who had access to highly classified secret intelligence information, also confirmed that Mussolini gave financial aid to Hitler. Andre Francois-Poncet, who was the French ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, an expert on German foreign policy, and a master of diplomatic intrigue, wrote in his account of prewar diplomacy that the [German Fascists] received financial backing from the Italian Fascists.²⁴

S.S. General Karl Wolff, an intelligence mastermind, who was Himmler’s personal chief of staff and who served as one of the top commanders of the German Army in Italy during World War II, said that he was certain that Mussolini had given money to the [German Fascists] before they came to power.

The fact that Francois-Poncet, a French diplomat, and Wolff, an S.S. general, who represented the opposite poles of the political spectrum, both confirmed the donor-recipient relationship between Mussolini and Hitler greatly adds to its credibility.

There was also confirmation from a high official of the government of the Weimar Republic, Otto Braun, minister president of Prussia, who indicated he had evidence that the [German Fascists] received funds from the [Italian] Fascists even after the 1923 putsch. Braun told Hermann Ullstein of the famous publishing company that Mussolini contributed money which helped Hitler to win his early electoral successes.²⁵

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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Click here for events that happened today (November 15).

1891: Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel, Axis field marshal (who served an important rôle in controlling North Africa), started his life.
1907: Claus von Stauffenberg, Axis officer, existed.
1912: Yi U, Axis colonel, was born.
1936: The German Condor Legion went into action for the first time, supporting further Nationalist operations to capture Madrid.
1938: The Third Reich expelled Jewish children from schools, and less interestingly, there was a lot of reorganization in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
1939: The Fascists commenced deporting Jews living in Reichsgau Wartheland (former Polish territory, annexed into the Third Reich) into the General Government region of former Poland. Anticipating his Chancellor's wishes, Erich Raeder also asked his staff officers to evaluate the possibility of an invasion of Britain.
1940: The Axis sealed the Warsaw ghetto from the rest of the city, enclosing 400,000 Jews inside, and Axis submarine U-65 sank Allied ship Kohinur two hundred miles southwest of Sierra Leone at 1511 hours, leaving seventeen folk dead. There was more reorganization in the IJN again, too.
1941: Panzergruppen 1, 2, and 3, with 2, 4, and 9.Armeen, resumed the attack on Moscow, and the Axis pushed back Soviet 30th Army from the Volga Reservoir and Moscow Sea Reservoir areas 75 miles north of Moscow. Across the Eastern Front, the temperature fell to −20℃, freezing both men and machines; the Axis offensive generally slowed to a yard-by-yard advance henceforth. As well, Axis submarine U-752 attempted to attack Soviet minelayer ZM-93 Jushar southeast of Murmansk at 1700 hours, but escorting minesweeping trawler T-889 forced U-752 to dive. At 1849 hours, U-752 fired a torpedo at T-889, sinking her and slaughtering all forty-three humans aboard. On the other hand, Axis submarine U-583 collided with U-153 and sank ninety miles northeast of Danzig at 2148 hours, killing all forty-five folk aboard the former vessel… no comment.

Luftwaffe III./KG 4 arrived at Pskov (German: Pleskau), and Erich Mußfeldt transferred from Auschwitz to Majdanek as the chief of the crematorium. Axis SM.79 torpedo bombers sank Allied freighter Empire Defender of the Operation Astrologer convoy near the Galite Islands off the Tunisian coast, slaying four folk. Lastly, Egmont Prinz zur Lippe-Weißenfeld became the commanding officer of the 5th Squadron of the Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 wing.
1942: Karl Burk's superiors awarded him the German Cross in Gold, and Oberleutnant zur See Hugo Deiring became the commanding officer of U-56, relieving Günther-Paul Grave.
1943: Repair ship Akashi began repairing light cruiser Agano at Truk, and Shokaku arrived at Yokosuka.
1944: Albert Leo Schlageter, which had struck a mine on the previous day near Rügen and kept afloat by a stern tow by sister ship Horst Wessel, was met by large ships which would tow her to Swinemünde for repairs. Additionally, the Axis dispatched naval pilot Ensign Katsuo Takahashi to Aichi's factory to take delivery of a completed Seiran flightcraft for testing.

The following quotes shall make antisocialists surer than ever before in their already unfalsifiable conviction that Fascism was socialism:

There can be a thousand shades of ideas among us, but upon one important point we are all agreed, and that is in regarding the Socialist manifestation as a bluff, a comedy, a speculation and blackmail.

Also we are all agreed in making a differentiation between the Socialist Party and the mass of the workmen. The Socialist Party has usurped up to yesterday the name of being a pure revolutionary organisation, of being the protector and the exclusive, genuine representative of the working masses.

This is all nonsense and must be cleared up. Referring to statistics, we find that out of forty-two millions of Italians, hardly sixty thousand were enrolled in the Socialist Party in the August of 1919, and the dominating element is a group composed of lower-middle-class people in the most philistine sense of the word.

— Benito Mussolini, 1919

As for the Socialists, the larger part of them are distinguished by physical cowardice. They do not like fighting, they do not wish to fight; fire and steel frighten them.

— Benito Mussolini, 1919

The Socialists themselves, realising what they have seen in Russia, recognise, when you question them, that that which has gone badly in Russia cannot be transplanted into Italy. Only they are wrong in not saying so openly ; they are wrong in playing with equivocations and deceiving the masses. [...] What we oppose is the deceitful action of politicians to the detriment of the working classes; we fight these new priests who promise, in bad faith, a paradise they do not believe in themselves.

— Benito Mussolini, 1920

The Socialists had formed a State within a State. If this new State had been more liberal, more modern, nearer the old type, there would have been nothing against it. But this State, and you know it by direct experience, is more tyrannical, illiberal and overbearing than the old one; and for this reason that which we are causing to-day is a revolution to break up the Bolshevist State, while waiting to settle our accounts with the Liberal State which remains.

[…]

Among other absurd things, there has been that of baptising Socialism as scientific. Now there is nothing scientific in the world. Science explains the “how” of things, but does not explain the “why.”

If, then, there is nothing scientific in what are called the exact sciences, what is more absurd than to try and pass off as scientific a vast, uncertain, underground and dark movement such as Socialism has been, even though it may have had a useful function it first, when it directed the oppressed peoples towards new ways of life, because you will agree with me that there is no turning back?

— Benito Mussolini, 1921

I am not displeased, gentlemen, to make my speech from the benches of the Extreme Right, where formerly no one dared to sit.

I may say at once, with the supreme contempt [that] I have for all nominalism, that I shall adopt a reactionary line throughout my speech, which will be, I do not know how Parliamentary in form but anti-Socialist and anti-Democratic in substance.

— Benito Mussolini, 1921

We shall not even oppose experiments of co‐operation; but I tell you at once that we shall resist with all our strength attempts at State Socialism, Collectivism and the like. We have had enough of State Socialism, and we shall never cease to fight your doctrines as a whole, for we deny their truth and oppose their fatalism.

— Benito Mussolini, 1921

It is necessary, therefore, to consider how to replace this political class which has of late consistently surrendered to that swollen‐headed puppet, Italian Socialism.

— Benito Mussolini, 1922

This was the birthplace of Democracy, which had a period of glory before it became crippled and enfeebled by the influence of Socialism.

— Benito Mussolini, 1922

There was one Socialism, to-day there are four, and there is a tendency towards further divisions. And not only this, but each of these divisions claims to represent the authentic party. It is no wonder that the proletariat scatters, discouraged and disgusted by the attitude of Socialism.

As I have already said, the day of Socialism is not only past as a party, its philosophies and doctrines no longer stand. The Italians and the Western peoples in general must burst with logical criticism the grotesque bubble of international Socialism.

— Benito Mussolini, 1922

The economic policy of the new Italian Government is simple. I consider that the State should renounce its industrial functions, especially of a monopolistic nature, for which it is inadequate. I consider that a Government which means to relieve rapidly peoples from after-war crises should allow free play to private enterprise, should renounce any meddling or restrictive legislation, which may please the Socialist demagogues, but proves, in the end, as experience shows, absolutely ruinous.

— Benito Mussolini, 1923

Well, I tell you that abroad there is a difficult atmosphere for Italian Fascismo. Difficult for the parties of the Right, which, being formed of national elements, cannot feel enthusiasm for a movement that exalts our national qualities; difficult for the parties of the Left, because those elements are our adversaries from the social point of view, knowing that the Fascista movement is clearly anti-Socialist.

— Benito Mussolini, 1923

There was the bourgeois who had Socialistic airs, there was the Socialist who had become a bourgeois up to his finger tips. The whole atmosphere was made up of half tones of uncertainty.

Well, Fascismo seizes individuals by their necks and tells them: “You must be what you are. If you are a bourgeois you must remain such. You must be proud of your class, because it has given a type to the activity of the world in the nineteenth century. (Approval.) if you are a Socialist you must remain such, although facing the inevitable risk you run in that profession.” (Laughter.)

— Benito Mussolini, 1923

Mussolini […] praised Japan’s “high level of civilization” and warned young Japanese to turn away from socialism (“modern demagogic materialism”) and to be true to the “millenarian spirit of [their] race.”

— The Fascist Effect

Mussolini […] spoke of the staying power of the free market and ridiculed the Socialist illusion that capitalism was on its last legs. Mouthing still stranger words, the ex‐Socialist denounced “state control” and “paternalism” and praised the proven wisdom of individual “initiative.”¹

— Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America

Fascism is therefore opposed to socialism, to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon.

— Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, 1932

Antisocialists shall be untroubled by all of these quotes because of their redefinition of socialism as ‘state intervention’. That, and Benito Mussolini was an ex-socialist (like Ronald Reagan), which, as everybody knows, is the same thing as being a socialist. What more evidence could you possibly need?

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Click here for events that happened today (November 14).

1935: After lengthy argument Berlin published a supplement to the German Citizenship law, which laid down that Germans with two Jewish grandparents, were Orthodox Jews, were married to Jews, or were the offspring of a marriage with a Jew, were legally ‘Jewish’. (Those who had only one Jewish parent or grandparent remained German citizens…for now.) Thus, those who were either legally or traditionally Jewish lost their voting rights and the right to hold public office, even if they were WWI veterans.
1938: Rome commissioned Artigliere into service.
1939: Around the same time that Tōkyō dismissed Kenkichi Ueda from the Army General Staff, Berlin added the Netherlands back to its invasion plan for Western Europe as the Luftwaffe stressed the importance of having airfields in the Netherlands, and Berlin named Theodor Eicke the commander of all SS Death’s Head units; Richard Glucks was to take over Eicke’s former position as the concentration camps’ inspector. In Vienna, Austrian detachments of the SS‐Verfügungstruppe placed stocks of hand grenades at synagogues to set them on fire.
1940: The Imperialists assigned Kamoi to the 24th Air Flotilla and Axis bombers raided Alexandria, Egypt, sinking Egyptian steamer Zamzam, but as Greek troops began to cross into Albanian borders, the Axis suffered its first land defeat of the war. A massive night time raid on Coventry, England by 437 He 111 bombers, dubbed Operation Moonlight Sonata, massacred 568, injured 863, and destroyed 60,000 buildings (including the city’s 14th Century cathedral) with 450 tons of high explosive bombs, fifty parachute bombs, and 36,000 incendiary bombs; the Axis lost only one bomber.
1941: Axis torpedo damage from yesterday successfully took out HMS Ark Royal, Axis submarine U‐561 sank Panamanian ship Crusader in the North Atlantic, massacring 33 and leaving only one alive. Comandante Cappellini conducted a trial out of La Pallice, and Morosini successfully departed Bordeaux for Le Verdon‐sur‐Mer only after the heavy fog passed. Tatsuta Maru departed Yokohama and Kaga exited the drydocks at Sasebo Naval Shipyard around the same time that Tōkyō relieved Shokaku of her status as the flagship of Carrier Division 5.
1942: Axis submarine facilities at Saint Nazaire suffered a bombing raid, but two transports containing a total of 2,500 Jews from Poland’s Ciechanow ghetti arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp; 633 men and 135 were registered into the camp, and the remaining 1,732 were massacred in gas chambers. On the same day, 1,500 Jews from Bialystok District 2 in Poland arrived at the same camp; 82 men and 379 women were registered into the camp, and the remaining 839 were massacred in gas chambers.

Finally, the SS doctors of Auschwitz Concentration Camp sent 110 prisoners from the Auschwitz I hospital to Birkenau Concentration Camp to be massacred in the gas chambers. In East Asia, the Kinkaseki Prisoners of War Camp opened, and the Taihoku Prisoners of War Camp № 6 near Taihoku (now Taipei) opened; on the same day, British prisoners of war from Singapore arrived on Taiwan via Kirun (now Keelung), destined for this camp.
1943: Destroyer Yukikaze departed Kure, Japan to escort transport Irako to Truk, Caroline Islands; Irako departed Yokosuka, Japan at 1400 hours in convoy № 3115.
1944: Horst Wessel and Albert Leo Schlageter sailed in rough waters near Rügen: Albert Leo Schlageter struck a mine, damaging its starboard bow, so Horst Wessel took Albert Leo Schlageter in a stern tow to prevent Albert Leo Schlageter from sinking. In the Kurile Islands, the Axis lost a small vessel to Allied fire.

In 1950, the process of extraordinary justice gradually came to an end. A 1949 parliamentary inquiry commission examined the role of government under the occupation but decided the part played by high-ranking civil servants who had ‘looked after the country’s affairs’ after the government fled to London, did not really come under its mandate; it did no more than state that ‘some civil servants were insufficiently aware of where to draw the line’.³³

Then, while the extraordinary courts were still sitting, the Government embarked on a policy of pardons. Partly a response to public opinion where vengeful feelings had somewhat subsided (though not towards the Germans), and to pleas for clemency by the churches and authoritative legal scholars, above all the policy of pardons was driven by socio-political and economic considerations. The country was devastated, the population split by memories of the war; rebuilding a stable society and viable economy was impossible without reconciliation and thus reintegration of political delinquents. Enough was enough.

In 1947, discrepancies in sentencing that came to light on appeal to the Extraordinary Supreme Court were resolved by commuting harsh sentences imposed immediately after the war. 1948, Queen Wilhelmina’s jubilee year, saw the first of several mass pardons. The first youthful volunteers were pardoned in 1949, soon followed by the older ones.

In 1950, pardons were issued for all those with ten years still to serve, later followed by a commission to look into cases with 15 years remaining. Then in 1951, lifers began to be pardoned. In the following years, increasing numbers of prisoners were pardoned and freed, among them 67 who had originally received death sentences.³⁴

[…]

[A] substantial part of public opinion as represented in the now legal war-time underground press, the new political parties striving for power and especially ex-members of the resistance saw the policy of releasing so many from detention, the extension of the definition of ‘minor cases’ in 1945–1946, the increasingly lenient sentences and the pardons as unwarranted leniency. ‘…The law must have its course…Those who dispense justice should know that they are subjecting our people to a new crime if they hesitate to punish the guilty…we do not ask for the hangman, but for justice according to honour and conscience.’³⁶

[…]

Twenty five years later, after the publication of what is still the classic study on extraordinary justice,³⁷ ex-resistance fighter (and criminologist) Willem Nagel was unable to hide the anger he had felt at the time. Writing under his pen name, J.B. Charles, he exclaimed: ‘Has it taken until 1978 for us to be shocked by the compassion that poisoned the so-called justice of 1945?’³⁸ […] there was also anger at the support and housing collaborators received while victims struggled to make ends meet amid a general housing shortage.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

The voice of Jewish survivors recently returned from the camps or re-emerging from hiding was barely heard after the war. In so far as they were directly concerned with extraordinary justice, they, or their now dead family members, were simply individual victims. The process had not done justice to the experience of genocide, but this was something they could not articulate. In the prevailing discourse, Jews were no different from anyone else who survived the war, a reflection of a strict government policy of neutrality: no single category of war victims was to be favoured above others.

‘Collective victimisation’,⁴⁴ however, hid the fact that a tragedy had befallen the Jews that was of a different order to what had happened to the Dutch as a nation, even during the horrendous final year of starvation, lack of fuel and an increasingly brutal occupation, during which thousands died. This ‘hunger winter’ also fed the population’s perception of collective victimisation: granted, the Jews were in camps but we ate tulip bulbs or starved.

Jewish survivors felt betrayed — yet again — on returning to the Netherlands,⁴⁵ where they met indifference and sometimes hostility at the borders and in the cities where their own community no longer existed, and struggled to recover confiscated or (mis)appropriated property. In some cases, non-Jewish neighbours refused to return goods entrusted to them for safe-keeping, even expressing open displeasure that the rightful owner had returned alive.⁴⁶

More than anything, there was lack of understanding: the Jews should stop whining, be grateful for what they had and get on with their life. In the midst of what was at best indifference to the particular nature of their experience, traumatised Jewish survivors were unwilling and afraid to manifest themselves as such.

This silence was finally broken after 20 years. […] Jewish survivors now had a voice, raised that same year in public protest against granting pardons to the last remaining — [Axis] — prisoners serving life sentences (the so-called Three of Breda).

Many academics and clergy supported release — and for the same reason: life imprisonment is inhumane. But anti-release groups were vociferous and shared a different sentiment: to release these Germans is to inflict yet more suffering on their victims. Such was the public outcry that, after an emotional parliamentary debate, the pardons were refused.

A year later, when Jewish victim-survivors were specifically compensated (Wet Uitkering Vervolgingsslachtoffers – Law on Support of Victims of Persecution), this was justified as an act of special solidarity on the part of the Dutch population.⁴⁸ The [Axis officials] (now two, one died in prison) were not released until 1989; both died shortly afterwards in Germany.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 13).

1894: Arthur Nebe, SS functionary, disgraced the earth with his existence.
1933: The Reich Chamber of Culture was officially launched under the auspices of Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda. Under former Freikorps fighter and NSDAP member Hans Hinkel’s executive presidency, the chamber assumed responsibility for all cultural activity in the Third Reich.
1934: Fascist Christians held a rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin, during which the NSDAP officially announced what amounted to another fascistization of Christianity.
1938: Failures in communications in the city of Changsha, Hunan Province led to the commencement of a scorched earth operation which was only suppose to take effect when the city was about to fall into Imperial hands. Somebody started fires at pre‐arranged locations around the city, starting the Wenxi Fire that would burn for five days, killing three thousand people and destroying a great number of buildings.
1939: As U‐23 completed her fourth war patrol, Berlin repostponed its invasion of France and issued directive № 9 (which called for German aircraft and submarines to attack British shipping and port facilities), whereas German newspapers falsely reported that the attempted murder of Adolf Schicklgruber which happened yesterday in Munich was the work of British secret service agents. Most oddly of all, somebody awarded Kurt Fricke the Order of the Yugoslav Crown 2nd Class with Star of Yugoslavia.
1940: Schicklgruber, Ribbentrop, and Molotov continued their awkward meeting in Berlin, where they purportedly tried to entice Molotov with geopolitical offers, but he remained disinterested. Meanwhile, the Allied submarine HMS Tigris sank French trawler Charles Edmonde west of Bordeaux, but the Axis submarine U‐137 torpedoed and sank Allied ship Cape St. Andrew northwest of Ireland, massacring fourteen crew and one gunner yet leaving fifty‐three alive.

Axis bombers also damaged British destroyer HMS Decoy at Alexandria, Egypt, massacring eight and wounding three, but by the end of the day, Greece’s troops had successfully pushed most of the Fascists troops in northern Greece back to the Albanian border. On a more peaceful note, Tatsuta Maru arrived at San Francisco.
1941: Axis troops fighting near Moscow were struggling with temperatures as low as −8℉ (−22℃), but as the mud froze the German Fascists prepared for a new offensive amidst increasing casualties (partly) due to weather.

In contrast, Berlin ordered its Navy to restraint from assaulting Yankee ships (but should German warships be fired upon by the Yankees, they were to fire back in defense). Axis Admiral Yamamoto gathered his commanders at Iwakuni air base at Yamaguchi to discuss Pearl Harbor tactics, likely while Comandante Cappellini departed Le Verdon‐sur‐Mer, Aquitaine, France at 0800 hours and arrived at La Pallice, La Rochelle, France at 1700 hours. Axis submarine U‐126 sank Allied merchant vessel Peru at 0042 hours, but all fifty aboard survived.

Similarly, Axis submarine U‐81 sank Allied aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal in the Mediterranean Sea east of Gibraltar at 0437 hours, killing one but leaving 1,487 alive, and while destroyer escorts did counterattack with depth charges, U‐81 successfully escaped them. On the other hand, Axis troops at Tikhvin suffered a Soviet assault.
1942: Berlin promised France that it would leave the French fleet at Toulon alone, and somebody awarded Hauptmann Wilhelm Antrup and Oberleutnant Albert Koller of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Around the time that Axis troops arrived at Munda Point, New Georgia, to construct an airfield, and the Empire of Japan lost its battleship Hiei, Kamikaze arrived at Ominato, Aomori Prefecture for patrols in the Tsugaru Strait area. Axis submarine U‐431 (Wilhelm Dommes) sank Allied destroyer Isaac Sweers in the Mediterranean Sea with two torpedo hits, massacring nearly half of its crew, and U.S. and Axis ships engage in an intense, close‐quarters surface naval engagement during the Guadalcanal Campaign.
1943: Berlin officially upheld Kaiser Wilhelm II's previous decree and bestowed upon Alfried von Bohlen und Halbach the name Krupp, making him the official head of the Krupp family conglomerate Friedrich Krupp AG. Shokaku returned to Truk, Caroline Islands, but an Axis convoy in the Mariana Islands suffered Allied four torpedoes, with the oiler Shiretoko taking a hit.
1944: As the Reich’s forces withdrew from Skopje, Yugoslavia, and the Upper Rhine out of Alsace, France suffered an Allied assault, Attun Palalin, a.k.a. Private Teruo Nakamura of the Imperial Army 4th Takasago Volunteer Unit, was declared dead on Morotai, Dutch East Indies, and the Fugaki Squadron, based in the Philippine Islands, conducted its first tokko mission with five converted Ki‐67‐I Kai To‐Go aircraft, without success. The Axis also lost Type‐B1 submarine I‐38, but landing ship № 115 was complete and transferred to the Imperial Japanese Army.
1954: Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, Axis field marshal, bit the dust.

Another claim is that [Fascism] needed the bank loans from the Swiss banks far too much to risk destroying or destabilizing Switzerland’s economy.²⁷ Sources reveal several occasions where [Fascists] requests for new loans were satisfied completely or at least partially by Bern.

In addition to these factors, after entering the war [Fascist] Italy faced another problem: their currency, the Italian lira, was not accepted by the other neutral states like Sweden, Ireland, Turkey, Romania etc., so the country had no way of trading with them. Therefore, Rome had to find a currency that was still accepted and it found it in the Swiss franc. [Fascist] Italy desperately needed fresh cash as it almost had none in the treasure room of Banca d’Italia, so Switzerland’s readiness to buy their gold was crucial.

[…]

After the Italian Fascist Party came to power in October 1922, the new government had to be recognised by other states in order to establish formal relations with them. In the same year, the Swiss Federal Council officially declared that the state recognised the changes in Italy and considered them legal, looking at them with optimism.⁹⁴

There were several reasons for which Bern released such a statement. First of all, as a neutral country, the political leadership wanted good relations with the neighbouring states. Recognising the Fascist Régime was not an object of intense discussions among the Swiss policy makers, as even the Socialist parties understood that a refusal can only damage the Confederation’s interests.

Second, Giuseppe Motta, who headed the Political Department in Switzerland after 1920, and the rest of the Swiss government at the time were far much more worried about the activities of the socialist movement and other groups with leftist ideas in the country, fearing that their actions might start a Bolshevik revolution in Switzerland, even if as mentioned in the previous chapter, the population did not express support for this ideology.

However, the policy-makers in the Confederation paid permanent attention to such a possibility. The Swiss political leadership in those years rather appreciated Fascism as a firm answer to any such tendencies and admired the [Fascists’] firmness when dealing with such a t[h]reat.⁹⁵ What needs to be kept in consideration when discussing the Swiss political decision making is that one of their core principles was anti-communism.

[…]

During 1930 and the successive years, the two countries had to negotiate on the taxes on aluminium, which was transformed in [Fascist] factories with Swiss participation¹⁴⁶, of auto parts¹⁴⁷ or chemicals for the agriculture.¹⁴⁸ Different sources demonstrate the tight commercial and economic ties between the two states in the years of the Great Depression.¹⁴⁹

For [Fascist] Italy it was of great importance that the effects of the crisis started becoming clear in Switzerland later than compared to the other states. This allowed the country to have at least one partner with a stable economy, at least until 1932. Logically, [Fascist] Italy depended more strongly on collaborating with Swiss markets while the other states were trying to deal with the effects of the crisis.

[…]

Switzerland’s representatives explained that imposing this sanction on [Fascist] Italy would cause the country annual losses of 60 to 70 million Swiss Francs. And since the Confederation had not violate any international law, it should not be punished either, the argument went. In addition, Switzerland protested against the ban of exports to [Fascist] Italy which would cause at least 10,000 Swiss jobs and create considerable social problems for the country.

The Swiss delegation argued also that imposing such strict sanctions on [Fascist] Italy might cause problems in Ticino where the population was mixed and more than 120,000 Italians worked and lived, and this did not even take into account the pro[fascist] groups among the canton’s Swiss population.

The protests of the Swiss representatives continued by claiming that forbidding [Fascist] Italy to earn from trade and export would possibly reduce their ability to purchase armaments, but it could also have several side effects which would ultimately be highly dangerous for security in Europe in general.

The Swiss argument predicted that by potentially destroying the [Fascist] economy to the country’s destabilisation would follow, and could eventually lead to the explosion of mass malcontent pushing the Régime to extreme actions in order to remain in power.¹⁷¹

Considering the fact that [Fascist] Italy was far from self-sufficient, the lack of goods to meet primary need might cause the same, it was added. Finally, Switzerland was also against the proposal for a ban on providing loans to small businesses as they did not consider it crucial to the [Fascist] economy.¹⁷² […] Thus Switzerland presented the situation as highly dangerous to its domestic concerns and refused to take part in the sanctions.

[…]

Switzerland had another reason for maintaining good relations with [Fascist] Italy. At the start of 1937, the politic authorities found out that certain Swiss companies were interested in entering the Ethiopian market and export.¹⁸²

This happened in the same period in which the Swiss ambassador in Rome Wagnière called for recognition of [Fascist] rule of Ethiopia, which would benefit the relations between the two countries, not being in their best state at the moment. He claimed that this would not violate the Swiss neutrality principle or their agreements with the League of Nations.¹⁸³

The Swiss Government considered the fact that any trade in the Ethiopian marked needs to go through obtaining the agreement of the colonial power.¹⁸⁴ The Swiss recognition of the [Fascist] rule of Ethiopia occurred later the same year.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

After 22 sessions, in 1923 an agreement was found upon compromises from both states and the quota schemes were personalised for each kind of import from Switzerland.¹²⁸ The agreements concerned the [Fascist] imports of cheese, chocolate, watches, shoes, some kinds of cars etc. from Switzerland. As [Fascist] and Swiss sources constantly presented different numbers, the amount of trade between the two states in value was difficult to measure until 1926, which was mostly a result of the strong changes in the currency exchange rates.¹²⁹

Still, in comparison to the pre-war era, the positive trade balance with Switzerland makes part of the total negative balance of Italy, so therefore a relative decrease of the effect of the general trend was seen. Trade main flowed in the shape of [Fascist] exports to the Confederation which consisted mostly of foodstuffs and textiles. Switzerland’s importance for the [Fascist] economy increased until the opening of the American markets for [Fascist] Italy in 1927 and started slowly to decline in terms of trade exchange as after that the North American market became the most important one for the country.

In order to decisively stabilize the economics and to get a foothold in the US markets, in the mid-1920s, the Fascist government finally took decisive steps in terms of economic reforms. First, the government managed to stabilize the currency, after which a program of revaluation of the currency was undertaken, and finally it was returned to convertibility in 1927. In this way the speculative pressure on the Italian Lira was interrupted, which created substantial movements of capital, which brought to difficulties in the negotiations with the United States and Great Britain for settling the debts from the wartime years.¹³⁰

However, the problems were soon resolved in cooperation with the USA, which was of fundamental importance for the Fascist state, which was allowed to enter the American trade markets.¹³¹ The importance of this event is explained by the fact that this market was the only one to satisfy the liquidity needs of the Italian industry which would have allowed it to continue its development.

[…]

However, in terms of trade with other European powers, staying in good relations with Switzerland remained of primary importance for Italy. The railway line of San Gotthard, which connects Italy to Northern Europe, continued to be of utmost importance for the Italian economy. During the whole period of the present study, the recently renovated and enlarged Chiasso train station remained the most important entrance point to the country from the North, much more than others like Brennero, Tarvisio or Modave.

In terms of logistics, the train station of Chiasso had the same importance as key seaports as Genova or Naples. During the period of 1927–1928 alone, 5,500 tons of goods entered Italy through the station located just a couple kilometres away from the border or the city of Como.¹³² This amount was not much smaller than the one being passed from any Italian seaport for the same period.

An important aspect of the economic relations between Switzerland and Italy were the foreign investment and financial agreements. Nationalisation of private property was one of the first actions of the new Fascist government after they came to power in 1922, but this made direct foreign investments unlikely as Swiss businessman feared that their property might be nationalised. This decision logically led to problems for the already existing Swiss companies, based mostly in Northern Italy.

Some of the cotton-transforming factories on [Fascist] territory, for example the ones in the Mediterranean area, passed in Italian hands.¹³³ Others ceased to exist, but despite the problems, the majority of the Swiss investors did not leave the market. However, they had to find a solution to the problem and search for another way in which to continue their investments in [Fascist] Italy. Companies emerged with the idea of doing direct investments by creating branches of big corporations based in Switzerland.¹³⁴

Companies such as Nestle in the food sector, Sandoz, Roche, Wander and Ciba in the chemical-pharmaceutical or De Pretto-Escher Wyss in the metal-mechanical sector started creating subsidiaries in [Fascist] Italy. Claiming that those companies were not based in Italy, the Swiss found a way to escape the danger of nationalisation.

At the same time, Elektrobank, Indelec, Motor and Italo-Swiss were the four main financial companies in Italy before and during the war and they were founded mostly with the help of Swiss and German capital.¹³⁵ After defeat in the First World War and struggling with its loss of political standing in Europe, further exacerbated by the economic crises the country went through, German investors often had no other choice but to take back their investments from those companies, which in practice put them entirely in Swiss hands.¹³⁶

[…]

After the war in Ethiopia, the importance of the Swiss banks to the [Fascist] economy increased greatly as they took the place of the U.S., British and French ones. The Swiss banks provided mostly short and middle-time credits to [Fascist] banks, private corporations and Istcambi when the institution had to pay the difference through the clearing system.²⁰⁸ For example, Credit Suisse and La Societè des Banques Suisses provided a loan of 260 million Lira in February 1937 in order to cover the difference in the value of the trade exchange.²⁰⁹

In the months before [September 1939], [Fascist] Italy tried to transfer as much capital as possible from French and British banks to the Swiss ones in order not to have funds there while the tension was rising and the risk of war was real. Rome knew that in case of war their foreign assets would be sequestered. Likewise, several large [Fascist] companies like Pirelli transferred their offices from Belgium to Switzerland, looking to take advantage of their already strong positions there.

(Emphasis added.)

The author’s use of ‘nationalisation’ here is very misleading. Nationalization in the Fascist context does not mean that businessmen had to leave their enterprises forever or that they had to take up new jobs as common bureaucrats, devoid of all independence. It simply means that the businesses were given state assistance so as to stay prosperous, which is an uncommon definition of nationalization. Far from limiting or abolishing private property, the Fascists enacted history’s first privatization campaign.

Of course, if you know how free market purists and other utopian capitalists think (or don’t think, as the case may be), you already know that absolutely none of this is going to concern them in the least.

One error in this paper is the author’s repeated assertion that ‘the country survived World War II without ever being militarily attacked.’ I am baffled that this otherwise carefully researched thesis would include such an easily falsifiable claim. While it is true that nobody declared war on it during the twentieth century, it is a matter of public record that the Swiss Confederation suffered damage from both Allied and Axis forces. Unless the author meant to write ‘officially invaded’, I am astonished that somebody of his education would be unaware of these comparatively ‘minor’ yet still serious intrusions.

Otherwise, this thesis remains worth reading. There are unfortunately a few dozen grammatic and orthographic errors, but most of it is comprehensible.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 12).

1881: Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von und zu Weichs an der Glon, Axis field marshal, stained the earth.
1925: Rome made Arturo Riccardi Fascist Italy’s Commander of the Order of the Crown.
1934: Berlin commissioned Admiral Scheer into service, and laid down the keels of F9 and F10 at the Reichsmarinewerft shipyard in Wilhelmshaven.
1936: Berlin laid down the keel of Pinguin at the Deschimag shipyard in Bremen, and Tōkyō named Lieutenant Commander Haruo Ota the commanding officer of destroyer Yuzuki.
1938: As the Hungarian Parliament officially incorporated the newly acquired territory from Czechoslovakia into its borders, Berlin found Jews collectively responsible to pay one billion Reichsmarks for damage done during Kristallnacht, and it enacted laws to completely exclude Jews from jobs in commerce and industry.

Meanwhile, Zhang Zhizhong, upon receiving inaccurate intelligence about approaching Imperial troops, gave the order to set fire to several key buildings in Changsha, Hunan Province to deprive the Imperialists of use should they be captured. The fire grew out of control, causing extensive property damage and killing a number of civilians.
1939: Fascist submarine U‐41 sank British trawler Cresswell by gunfire off the Outer Hebrides, Scotland at 0700 hours, killing six but leaving eight alive and captured. At 1000 hours, U‐41 struck again, sinking Norwegian tanker Arne Kjøde; thirty‐four survived in two lifeboats, but one of them would soon capsize, leaving five dead. Likewise, Westerwald completed supporting Fascist cruiser Deutschland in the Arctic Sea.
1940: Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov arrived in Berlin for discussions about spheres of influence in the Balkan Peninsula and in Finland: Axis Foreign Minister Ribbentrop reassured Molotov that the Reich had no further interest in eastern and southern Europe, and Molotov later met with Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber and relayed Joseph Stalin’s request for the Chancellor to explain the recently formed Axis alliance and the Reich’s recent move into the Kingdom of Romania; before the Chancellor gave a concrete answer, he noted that as the hour was getting late, the risk of British bombing was getting greater, thus the meeting should be broken up.

Having realized that his staff made plans to move Molotov to bomb shelters in case Allied bombers struck Berlin, Schicklgruber also realized that the Reich Chancellery in Berlin had no adequate bunker, and immediately ordered for a plan to be drawn up. Elsewhen, Berlin issued Directive 18 for the capture of Gibraltar, Azores Islands, Madeira, and Portugal, and issued a directive to the Wehrmacht to be prepared in invade Greece so that the Luftwaffe could attack airfield from which the RAF might attack the Kingdom of Romania’s oilfields.

Finally, as a captured Axis airman warned of a planned bombing against the British city of Coventry, Vichy forces in Gabon surrendered to Allied forces at Port Gentil 70 miles south of Libreville. Having successfully negotiated the surrender, Governor Georges Pierre Masson committed suicide shortly after the agreement was reached.
1941: As Charles Huntziger expired and its damaged submarine U‐203 arrived in Brest, the Axis destroyed the Soviet cruiser Chervona Ukraina during the Battle of Sevastopol. On the other hand, the temperature drops in the Moscow region (−12 ℃; 10 ℉) were especially harsh for the Axis invaders, but it hardened the mud and the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies prepared to take advantage of the situation for an offensive. Meanwhile, Finnish vessels laid mines in the Gulf of Finland to disrupt the Soviet attempts to evacuate personnel from Hanko in southern Finland, and Oberleutnant Adalbert Karbe and Hauptmann Heinrich Wittmer of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.
1942: The naval battle between the Axis and the Allies commenced near Guadalcanal. Coincidentally, Axis submarine U-130 sank troopships USS Tasker H. Bliss, USS Hugh L. Scott, and USS Edward Rutledge with torpedoes, slaughtering seventy-four folk.
1943: A combined Axis sea and airborne attack began on the Allied-held Greek island of Leros, and Karl Dönitz complained in his diary that Allied air superiority was severely restricting his ability to conduct campaigns.
1944: In Operation Catechism, Lancaster bombers in Norway assaulted the Axis battleship Tirpitz with Tallboy bombs, scoring three hits and several near misses; Tirpitz capsized, killing 971 out of the about 1,700 aboard.
1948: Tōkyō’s International Military Tribunal for the Far East sentenced seven Axis military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, to death for their rôles in World War II.

[A] small delegation of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) and an even smaller one, consisting of members of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Workers’ Front), were sent to [the Empire of] Japan in late 1940. They traveled by means of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the only remaining connection between [the Third Reich] and [the Empire of] Japan.

The six members of the Hitler Jugend delegation, led by Heinrich Jürgens, head of the Far East Department of the Reichsjugendführung (Head office of the national youth organization), began their tour by visiting the [Axis] puppet state of Manchukuo and Korea, which had been a Japanese colony since 1910.

They were impressed by “the idealism, sense of national identity, commitment, strong will, and courage“ [“dem Idealismus, dem Nationalbewußtsein, der Einsatzfreudigkeit, dem starken Willen und Mut”] of the young Japanese who were trained in Harbin to become farmers and settlers in Manchukuo and they were equally impressed by the achievements of the Japanese [Empire] in Korea.¹

The members of the delegation apparently had no misgivings regarding the legitimacy of [Imperial] Japan’s policy of expansion and settlement in East Asia, an attitude which might be explained by the fact that, on the occasion of their departure for Japan, the periodical of the Hitler Youth published an illustrated report in which Japan’s alleged lack of “living space” (Lebensraum) was used to justify its expansion in East Asia without reservation.²

(Emphasis added. Admittedly, most of the article is actually about spirituality. Click here for more.)

According to the same report, the officials at Eiheiji were primarily interested in religious issues, and they seemed pleased by what they heard from the delegates. In his response to the welcoming speech by Eiheiji’s chief administrative officer, Jürgens expressed the delegation’s gratitude for the invitation, “noting that up until [the visit] they had only been able to read about Zen in books. Now, however, they had a wonderful opportunity to directly experience the spirit of Zen by staying overnight at this training center.”

Later, Jürgens spoke about the religious orientation of the Hitler Jugend and informed the monks that “the people of Germany [were] no longer satisfied with the religion [that] they’ve had up to now”, but then added that “a new religion that could fully satisfy the German people had yet to be born”. Germans who decided to abandon their former religion, however, didn’t have to become atheists “or turn their backs on God”; instead, they continued “to have a very strong religious spirit, identifying themselves as ‘people who believe in God’” while “eagerly awaiting the emergence of a mighty religion with great religious leaders”.

[…]

Other statements made by the delegates may also need to be understood or interpreted in a context different from the one used by the [Imperial] hosts. One example would be the delegates’ gratitude for the “wonderful opportunity to directly experience the spirit of Zen” after they had “only been able to read about Zen in books”.

This statement may have been meant as nothing more than a polite phrase. Zen Buddhism was still little known in Germany in 1940; only one book, written by Daisetz Suzuki, the most influential contemporary Japanese interpreter of Zen Buddhism in the West, had been translated into German at that time.⁷

Although it is possible that the members of the delegation had glanced at the book in preparation for their trip, there is no indication that the delegates in particular or even the Hitler Youth organization in general were particularly interested in Zen Buddhism or Buddhism as such.

[…]

Jürgen’s mention of the visit to Eiheiji consisted of only four short sentences: “We spent two days in the Buddhist temple in Eiheiji. An enormous complex on a hillslope under very old trees with innumerable stairs, hallways, courts, floors. At night we observed meditation exercises and participated in a holy ceremony lasting several hours. Solemn meal together with the abbot and priests”. (“Zwei Tage verbringen wir in dem buddhistischen Tempel in Eiheiji. Gewaltige Anlage am Berghang unter uralten Bäumen mit unzähligen Treppen, Gängen, Höfen, Stockwerken. Wir erleben nachts Meditationsübungen und nehmen an einer mehrstündigen heiligen Zeremonie teil. Gemeinsames feierliches Essen mit Abt und Priestern.”⁹)

The leader of the delegation seems to have been impressed by the buildings of the monastery and the solemnity of the ceremonies he witnessed. Nevertheless, he did not devote one word to having experienced any kind of spirituality, nor did he refer to Buddhism in general or to Zen Buddhism and Dōgen’s teachings in particular. For him, the visit to Eiheiji appears to have been nothing more than one of many visits to [Imperial] institutions where the delegation of the Hitler Youth represented [the Third Reich] and, beyond that, simply observed what was going on.

The diary suggests that the visit impressed him much less than his [Imperial] hosts assumed. Perhaps other members of the delegation were more impressed by the visit to Eiheiji, but none of them are known to have published different views. The [Imperial] assumption that the delegation was especially receptive to spirituality or to Buddhism thus seems to have been false and what Victoria calls the “Zen of Hitler Jugend” pure fantasy.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 11).

1920: Walter Krupinski, Luftwaffe fighter ace, existed.
1923: The authorities arrested Adolf Schicklgruber in Munich for high treason for his rôle in the Beer Hall Putsch.
1926: Tōkyō named Captain Seishichi Yamaguchi as Tenryu’s commanding officer.
1932: Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the NSDAP’s debts were piling up, and the presses for its publications were in danger of being stopped.
1935: AG Weser laid down the U‐27’s keel in Bremen, Germany.
1937: As Chinese troops at Shanxi abandoned Xinkou city and fell back toward Taiyuan, the Imperial Japanese Army began to advance on Nanjing, China.
1938: Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy toured territory newly gained from Czechoslovakia and Berlin issued four gunboats’ construction @ 6,000,000 Reichsmarks each.
1939: The funeral of Czech student Jan Opletal, whom somebody killed earlier during the Czech independence celebrations, turned into a demonstration that the Wehrmacht crushed; the authorities closed Czech universities, sent 1,200 students to camps, and sentenced nine to death. (Coincidentally, Adolf Schicklgruber attended the funeral of those killed in the staged assassination attempt of November 8 in München, Germany.)
1940: The Royal Navy launched the first all‐aircraft ship‐to‐ship naval attack in history during the Battle of Taranto. Meanwhile, the Axis armed merchant cruiser Atlantis stopped Allied ship Automedon with gunfire in the Bay of Bengal, massacring seven crew and one gunner, then captured eighty‐seven of its survivors and their cargo, including top secret Royal Navy documents detailing military deployment in Asia and code schemes which Atlantis soon sent to the Empire of Japan.
1941: Around the same time that Kaga entered the drydocks at Sasebo Naval Shipyard, Japan, and Admiral Mitsumi Shimizu held a briefing at Yokosuka for the Axis Sixth Fleet officers aboard Katori on the Pearl Harbor raid, ten Axis submarines departed from Yokosuka Naval Base for Kwajalein of the Marshall Islands, where they would proceed for US Territory of Hawaii. I‐68 joined the Advance Expeditionary Force for the assault on Pearl Harbor; she departed Saeki, Japan for Kwajalein, Marshall Islands. Meanwhile, Axis submarine U‐580 collided with target ship Angelburg and sank thirty‐three miles west of Klaipeda, Lithuania by accident, killing twelve, but leaving thirty‐two alive. Hudson aircraft of № 53 Squadron RAF damaged Axis submarine U‐203 with four depth charges in the Bay of Biscay, but then Axis submarine U‐561 sank Panamanian ship Meridian, massacring all twenty‐six aboard. Within the Third Reich, report noted there were 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war employed as forced laborers.
1942: Axis forces in Case Anton occupied France’s zone libre, the Axis’s 13.Panzer Division managed to avoid encirclement near Ordshonikidse, and the Axis’s 6.Armee succeeded in reaching the Volga River in Stalingrad, with a 600-yard frontage near the Red October steel factory. Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber announced during a Beer Hall Putsch celebration that Stalingrad was almost in German hands, but he teasingly said that he did not want to keep the city just because of its name.
1943: Liebehenschel became the new commandant of Auschwitz as his predecessor, Höss, became the chief inspector of concentration camps. A report noted that the total number of prisoners in Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camps and all subcamps was 54,673 men and 33,179 women, for the total of 87,852 prisoners. On the other hand, Theresienstadt commandant Anton Burger ordered the 40,000 prisoners of the camp to stand at attention outdoors in freezing weather; about 300 prisoners died from hypothermia.
1944: An Axis V-2 rocket hit Shooters Hill, London at 1830 hours, slaughtering two dozen folk.

Martin Luther was a pioneer of the Protestant Reformation and, hence, a Christian critic of the Catholic Church. During his break with Catholicism, he had mixed feelings about contemporary Jews, and believed that if only Catholics treated them better, then they would give up Judaism and convert to Christianity. As he repeatedly saw his Evangelical efforts come to naught, he became extremely frustrated with Jews and in 1543 he published the now infamous polemic titled On the Jews and Their Lies.

Luther's anti‐Judaism initially had limited impact, but Luther was always a theologist whom other Protestants respected, so antisemites in the Weimar Republic and especially the Third Reich frequently referenced his anti‐Judaism to give their own antisemitism a degree of authority and respectability. The Third Reich's head of state, despite professing Catholicism, repeatedly praised Luther:

In the chapter entitled “The Beginning of My Political Activity” from Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous book, he discussed the “great warriors” in this world, who:

though not understood by the present, are nevertheless prepared to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end […] to them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther.¹⁷

Pictured: Fascist propaganda depicting Martin Luther with the NSDAP’s symbol in the background. It reads, ‘Hitler’s fight and Luther’s teaching are the best defense for the German people.’ Dated 1933.

Luther's polemic also gave recommendations on how gentiles should handle Jews, which the Third Reich implemented, though it is worth mentioning that many of his recommendations (e.g. destroying the Talmud, something that a French monarch ordered in 1242) were not innovative either. His recommendations were as follows:

First, Luther told Christians to “set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.”⁹ This advice was implemented by the [Third Reich] during the anti‐Semitic pogrom known as Kristallnacht, which will be elaborated on later in this paper. Second, he recommended that “their houses also be razed and destroyed.”¹⁰ Third, he advised that “all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.”¹¹

Fifth, he urged that “safe‐conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews.”¹³ Sixth, he wrote that “usury should be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping.”¹⁴ This recommendation directly contradicted one of Luther’s earlier statements defending Jews in his treatise, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, and was also taken by the [German Fascists].

Acting on this advice during the Third Reich, the [Axis] often stole money and valuables from the Jews, especially after they were sent to concentration camps. Seventh, he recommended “putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands […] letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.”¹⁵ The [German Fascists] also took this advice when they implemented concentration camps, where Jews were forced into hard manual labor.

Finally, he wrote that “if we wish to wash our hands of the Jews’ blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country […] like mad dogs.”¹⁶ This also directly contradicted Luther’s earlier statement criticizing the Catholics treatment of the Jews. This advice was taken by the [Fascists] as well, but they took it a step farther when they implemented their “final solution.”

The Fascists consciously popularised a few of Luther's phrases. Quoting Edwin Black's The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, pages 171–172:

In their campaigns to recruit support, Brownshirts spoke the familiar phrasing of Germany’s religious patriarch. From the street comers they constantly reminded that Martin Luther was beckoning Germany to expel the Jews.²⁴

In spring 1933, Hitler reflected the weight of Luther’s words upon his own thought. During a newspaper interview, Hitler asked who was “prepared to harbor […] those who have poisoned the wells of Germany, of the whole Christian world. Gladly we would give each and every one of them a railroad pass and a thousand mark note for pocket money to be rid of them.”²⁵

From Luther’s treatise “On the Jews and Their Lies”: “They have been […] murderers of all Christendom for more than fourteen hundred years […] poisoning water and wells. […] The country and the roads are open to them to proceed to their land whenever they wish. If they did so, we would be glad to present gifts to them on the occasion; it would be good riddance.”²⁶

Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer bannered the Luther slogan in every issue: “Die Juden sind unser Ungluck!”—The Jews Are Our Misfortune!²⁷ And one of Streicher’s anti-Jewish picture books was titled after the Martin Luther adage “Trust no fox in the field and no Jew under his oath.”²⁸ In Germany, preaching Jew hatred was as good as preaching the gospel.

When Streicher was captured by the Allies in 1945, they confiscated his personal copy of “On the Jews and Their Lies.” At the Nuremb[e]rg War Crimes Trials, Streicher, a philosophical descendant of a centuries-long tradition, explained his actions with these words: “Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendant’s dock today if this book had been taken into consideration. […] In the book “[On] The Jews and Their Lies” Dr. Martin Luther writes that […] one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them.”²⁹

Pictured: A Fascist seal bearing Luther's surname.

Martin Luther also helped normalise the thought of killing mentally disabled youths. The archives of the Nuremberg Trials lists a book titled Eugenics and Christianity: Questions of sterilization, northernization, euthanasia, marriage, by Wolfgang Stroothenke. This book was in the possession of Dr. Karl Brandt, the Chancellor’s personal physician. Quote:

Luther also advocated the killing of imbecile children. In his time they were called "Wechselbalg" or "Kielkroof" (both words not translatable). People believed they were exchanged by Satan in the place of robed normal children or were begotten by Satan himself. Luther's standpoint was prompted by a case in Dressau. There he saw a 12 years old "Wechselbalg" which outwardly looked like a normal child. Its life, however, was limited to reception — and elimination — of food. It only laughed and cried incoherently at everything happening around it. Luther expressed his opinion that — if he had to decide — he would have killed the child by drowning. Such creatures were only a lump of human flesh without a real human soul. The Church in these days also acknowledged euthanasia in some individual cases. (Vid. Meltzer: "The Problem of Shortening Worthless Life")

As for Martin Luther’s influence in Fascist Italy, it seems to have been really quite minor, almost certainly because of his unfavourable view of Italians. Quoting Aaron Gillette’s Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, page 11:

Modern German–Roman antagonisms were strongly influenced by the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, on his trip to Rome in 1510, was disgusted by the sloth and corruption that he encountered there. Later, Luther complained that, after the Germans had conquered the Romans, the crafty Romans had built up the Catholic Church and re-enslaved the Germans, fooling and duping them.⁴ Religious differences would henceforth contribute to the cultural division between the Germanic and Romance worlds.

In his polemic On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther even likens Jews’ alleged superiority complex to those of the Italians (‘Similarly, the Italians fancy themselves the only human beings; they imagine that all other people in the world are nonhumans, mere ducks or mice by comparison’). Consequently, Martin Luther had no direct influence on Fascist Italy (that I was able to find).

While Luther’s anti-Judaism was undeniably important to the Germanic Fascists, one should be careful not to overrate his influence either. For instance, Luther’s writings against ‘Turks’ (read: Muslims) and his conception of them as Jews’ partners in crime were matters that the Fascists decided to overlook (probably because they wanted to win over the Turkish government along with other upper-class Muslims), and Luther sometimes allowed the possibility, however slim, that a Jew could still become a Christian, something that the Third Reich also chose to disregard. Hence, the line from Luther to Fascism was hardly a straight one; it would be an exaggeration to blame him completely for Fascist antisemitism.

Further reading: Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany

I shall be upfront and say that I do not have a positive opinion of Martin Luther (in addition to being ableist and xenophobic, he also despised peasant rebels). Even so, it is only fair that I confirm that no Christian is under any obligation to follow Luther’s repugnant views.

The Transfer Agreement, page 170:

Luther’s advice about Jewish persecutions and expulsions was espoused in 1543, after the principles of the Lutheran movement had already been formalized in the Augsburg Confession of 1530.¹⁸ Consequently, the Luther Solution was at first not widely taught in the church schools that Luther had so profound an influence over.

Some Protestants do not beat around the bush. Quoting A Shift in Jewish–Lutheran Relations?, page 162:

As representatives of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession we in no way feel bound to the Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings: they belong to the past. We express a profound sorrow and great regret, if these anti-Jewish statements have inspired hatred and persecution of Jews by Protestants in Poland or anywhere else in the world.

From Hope for the Future: A Study Document for Renewing Jewish–Christian Relations, page 19:

Cooperation with the IJCIC led to meetings of Lutherans and Jews as partners on equal terms in two consultations in Copenhagen, Denmark, (1981) and Stockholm, Sweden, (1983). A significant achievement of this dialogue was the document prepared in Stockholm by both sides in which Lutherans squarely faced the legacy of Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish statements.

In 1984, the LWF formally renounced the anti-Jewish invective of Martin Luther’s writings and repented of its detrimental effects and consequences for the Jewish people. The context for taking up this topic was the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Reformer. The equal status of both parties was expressed by the very structure of the prepared document, in which both Lutherans and Jews had a voice. In part one, Lutherans declare:

We Lutherans take our name and much of our understanding of Christianity from Martin Luther. But we cannot accept or condone the violent verbal attacks that the Reformer made against the Jews. […] Lutherans of today refuse to be bound by all of Luther’s utterances on the Jews. We hope we have learned from the tragedies of the recent past. We are responsible for seeing that we do not now nor in the future leave any doubt about our position on racial and religious prejudice and that we afford to all the human dignity, freedom and friendship that are the right of all the Father’s children.¹²

Surprisingly, there were even a few Protestants in the Weimar Republic who renounced Luther’s anti-Judaism. Quoting Christopher J. Probst’s Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, chapter 1:

Luther’s antisemitic rhetoric was rejected by other German Protestants. Eduard Lamparter, a German Protestant pastor, wrote against antisemitism, including that of Luther, in a church publication five years before Hitler and [his fellow Fascists] came into power.⁶⁴

While some Christians (mostly Evangelicals) today do have a passive-aggressive attitude towards Judaists, and a few Christians even cling to the old libels, many, if not most modern churches have outgrown their anti-Judaism, too. It shall inevitably be difficult for some people to forgive the Church for its past injustices, but that shall not prevent good Christians from aiding and showing generosity to Judaists, either.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 10).

1890: Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Borgward, Axis engineer, started his life.
1906: Josef Kramer, Axis war criminal, was unfortunately born.
1936: Tōkyō named Captain Kanji Ugaki as Tenryu’s commanding officer.
1937: A document sent from the German Foreign Office to the Chancellor revealed that Berlin should test London’s sentiments toward it by demanding territory concessions. Meanwhile, the Hossbach Memorandum was completed, which outlined the Fascist bourgeoisie’s plans for German autarky and future expansion.
1938: As the Night of Broken Glass ended and the Kingdom of Hungary finished occupying ceded Czechoslovakian territory per the First Vienna Award, Erwin Rommel became the commanding officer of the military academy at Wiener Neustadt, and Georg von Bismarck became the commanding officer of the 7th Infantry Regiment in Gera. Meanwhile at Changsha, Hunan Province, China, the defensive garrison organized special teams around the city, whose task was to set designated buildings ablaze once given the signal, the goal being to deprive the Imperialists of the city’s use should it fall to the imminent Imperial attack.
1940: The Vrancea earthquake struck the Kingdom of Romania, killing possibly one thousand people, injuring approximately four times as many, and destroying sixty‐five thousand homes. It was the deadliest earthquake of the year.
1941: While the Axis’s ‘San Marco’ naval infantry regiment formed a 3rd battalion by drawing three companies from the two existing battalions, Axis General Erich von Manstein launched a major assault against Sevastopol, Russia with 50th Infantry Division, followed by the 132nd Infantry Division on the next day. Around the same times that Walther von Brauchitsch suffered a heart attack or Helsinki promoted Alpo Marttinen to the rank of lieutenant colonel, Allied submarines sunk the Axis ships of Ithaka and Norburg off the Greek island of Milos and north of Crete, respectively.
1942: The Third Reich invaded Vichy France following French Admiral François Darlan’s agreement to an armistice with the Allies in North Africa.
1943: Axis lines near Gomel, Byelorussia failed to contain the Soviets, and Kawanami Kogyo laid down the keel of landing ship № 128.
1944: As Berlin named Friedrich Christiansen the German 25th Army’s commanding officer and Axis troops captured the airfields at Guilin and Liuchow in China (only to find that there were no B‐29 facilities at either location), the head of the pro‐Axis Chinese, Jingwei Wang expired in Nagoya, Japan.
2015: Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt, HJ group leader, Luftwaffe trainer and advisor, and Oberleutnant (all despite his Jewish ancestry), dropped dead.

By the twentieth century, most educated Europeans considered Napoleon Bonaparte to be a worthy adversary at worst, so it should be unsurprising that the Fascists could take inspiration from him. The parallels between him and the leading Fascists are apparent right off the bat: they were adventurer-conquerors, they were autocratic megalomaniacs, they seized most of Europe, they failed to overtake Russia, and eventually their mighty empires crumbled. Although there were also many important differences, the similarities were so obvious that not even the heads of state theirselves could overlook them.

Quoting Jost Dülffer’s Bonapartism, Fascism and National Socialism:

It is not difficult to explain the fact that the Bonapartist model of fascism has been much less intensively discussed in the ‘bourgeois’ or pro-fascist camp, since both the Napoleonic régimes failed, making it easy to draw analogous conclusions for fascist systems, however different they might individually be.

A second factor was that references to the tradition of the ‘hereditary enemy’ (France) were not exactly popular in inter-war Germany, as a result of the Versailles treaty. There were, therefore, only isolated references to France in [the NSDAP’s] publications, and parallels between Napoleon and Hitler were in general studiously avoided.²¹

[…]

With the onset of [Fascist] military expansion from 1939 onwards, the idea of territorial acquisition and the formation of a new Empire gained ground in the ideological self-image of [Germanic Fascism]. Nevertheless, as already mentioned, comparisons with the efforts of Napoleon I were risky.

But precisely because the parallels between the war waged against Russia by Napoleon in 1812 and by Germany in 1941 were so obvious, they were made in the press. In the leading political and cultural weekly, Das Reich, Eugen Mündler on 12.7.41 celebrated the ‘Campaign without Parallel’.²⁹

Anticipating a certain military victory, he considered all the mistakes and weaknesses of Napoleon’s campaign of 1812 as having been overcome, although he gave predominantly military reasons for this. He did not, however, consider either the political system or the personality of the two dictators.

Hitler also made a remark at this time to the effect that not he but Stalin would suffer Napoleon’s fate. After the failure of the [Axis] Blitzkrieg plan outside Moscow in 1941, he found it necessary to emphasize in public speeches the invalidity of any parallel between the historical situations of 1812 and 1942: ‘We have mastered the fate which broke another man 130 years ago.’³⁰

Hitler accepted the parallel with Napoleon I’s personality in so far as it was a question of a ‘unique military genius’, who was in a position to achieve ‘world-historical victories’, but saw the reason for the latter’s failure in the petit-bourgeois tendencies (Spiessertum) of most Frenchmen.

Hitler was probably familiar with the popular psychological level of interpretation through a book by the NSDAP Reichsleiter, Philipp Bouhler, Napoleon — Kometenbahn eines Genies, on which he had shortly beforehand commented favourably.³¹ This work, surprising in its choice of theme for a leading member of the party, was later withdrawn from circulation in order to amid any embarrassing comparisons between the defeats of Napoleon I and Hitler.

Bouhler had sought to understand Napoleon from the point of view of the victories of the present; he endowed him, as well as Hitler, with the halo of genius in accordance with the slogan: ‘All great deeds are the achievement of one individual’, whose greatness manifested itself in a fusion of comprehensive capacities uniting diverse vocations. The differences between the history of the development of the Napoleonic Empire and of the [Third] Reich seemed to him to be rather peripheral.

In the end, he did discover a structural difference between the ‘iron foundation’ of [Fascism] and Napoleon’s régime in the fact that now provision had been made for ‘the unconditional execution of the commands of a leader, for the penetration of his will to the very last cells.’³² This ideological postulate which had little to do with social and political reality became the ultimate criterion.

Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 860 & 868:

Now, Blumentritt remembered, the ghosts of the Grand Army, which had taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of Napoleon’s fate began to haunt the dreams of the [Fascist] conquerors. [Axis] generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.

[…]

And yet some of the generals later reluctantly admitted that Hitler’s iron will in insisting that the armies stand and fight was his greatest accomplishment of the war in that it probably did save his armies from completely disintegrating in the snow. This view is best summed up by General Blumentritt. […] General von Tippelskirch, a corps commander, agreed [with him:]

It was Hitler’s one great achievement. At that critical moment the troops were remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and living under the shadow of it. If they had once begun a retreat, it might have turned into a panic flight.²³

Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, page 225:

German propaganda targeted at Italian readers insisted that, unlike Napoleon in 1812, the Axis would soon win the war against Russia.

Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, page 322:

Hitler had compared the achievements of his armies with those of Frederick the Great, Napoleon and Alexander […]

Thierry Lentz, while doubting that colonial atrocities against Haitians influenced the Third Reich, concedes in Napoleon – Hitler, the improbable comparison:

It is true that, in addition to Bismarck, Hitler admired Napoleon. He paid a short visit to Les Invalides in 1940 and appeared profoundly moved before the emperor’s tomb. And in his diary, Goebbels often compares Hitler to Napoleon… although only to rank him above the French emperor.

In his heart, Hitler believed himself unique and German. Any reference to what he considered to be the decadent ideas of the Enlightenment was to be rejected; France, in his eyes, was the arch enemy of the German nation. The pages of Mein Kampf are littered with such references: the war of 1806 forms the basis for the two countries’ rivalry, the war of 1870 the first taste of revenge.

After his invasion of the Soviet Union, he considered any comparison to the emperor to be entirely inappropriate. It’s not hard to understand why. All the biographies of the Führer underline these aspects of his character; anyone still sceptical should read the section dedicated to this topic in Ian Kershaw’s monumental work on Hitler.¹⁰

Hence, while the Third Reich’s head of state did order on December 15, 1940 that Napoleon II’s ashes be transferred from Vienna to the dome of Les Invalides, Berlin also commissioned in 1945 the war drama Kolberg, a loose reenactment of the Prussian resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces in 1807. The Fascists were, after all, admirers of the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, an opponent of Napoleon, yet not even Clausewitz could deny that his adversary Napoleon was a brilliant strategist.

Benito Mussolini likewise appreciated Napoleon Bonaparte. Quoting Jules Archer’s Twentieth-Century Caesar: Benito Mussolini, chapters 8 & 12

Mussolini […] was vainly confident that he was creating an immortal niche for himself in world history and that statues of himself would stand forever side by side in museums with the Napoleons, the Roman Caesars, even the demigods of ancient Rome.

[…]

Mussolini swept aside his professional generals and admirals and directed the whole Italian war effort himself, although he had never risen higher than the rank of corporal during World War I. “Hitler was a corporal, too,” he declared defiantly. “For that matter, so was Napoleon—the Little Corporal who was the greatest military genius the world has ever known!”

Nicolas Gladstone Virtue’s Fascist Italy and the Barbarization of the Eastern Front, 1941–43, page 84:

The [Fascist] national press termed the war against the USSR a great crusade immediately following Mussolini’s declaration of war. Headlines such as “The Crusade against Bolshevism finds Italy at its Battle Station” and “Europe on the March to Bring Down Bolshevism” were printed in the Corriere della Sera during the week following the [Wehrmacht] invasion.⁵⁵

After explaining how Italians fought for Napoleon during 1812 in Russia, one article proclaimed that “if a hundred and thirty years ago the volunteers of Italy fought for the greatness of a foreign empire, today the soldiers of Mussolini are standard bearers of a European crusade that had in the Fascist Revolution, that is in Italy, its first spark.”⁵⁶

H. James Burgwyn’s Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945: The Failure of a Puppet Regime, page 48:

Mussolini compared himself with Napoleon on the island of Elba, where the emperor held court and received the honors due to his rank but wielded no power.⁵²

A detail that many people forget is that Napoleon Bonaparte was not French, but Italian. (He even spoke French with an Italian accent.) This made it even easier for the Italian Fascists to appreciate him. Hence, Fascist Italy had a museum for him: it was in 1927 that Count Giuseppe Primoli donated the Museo Napoleonico to Rome.

In spite of all this, one should be careful not to overrate Napoleon Bonaparte’s influence on the Fascists. As Thierry Lentz noted, there were important differences, perhaps even more differences than similarities, between Napoleon and an Axis dictator, and Napoleon was only one of many influences, some of whom the Fascists mentioned more frequently, such as Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck (though, in a suspicious coincidence, Napoleon not only admired Frederick the Great as well but even visited his tomb).

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Click here for other events that happened today (November 9).

1877: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, existed.
1894: Dietrich Hugo Hermann von Choltitz, Axis general, blighted the earth.
1904: Viktor Hermann Brack, Axis war criminal and SS member, joined him.
1906: Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph, Axis rocket engineer, did as well.
1923: Ludendorff’s attempt to seize power in München ended ignominiously (but a generation of anticommunists would celebrate the putsch anyway).
1937: To the Empire of Japan’s delight, the Chinese Army withdrew from the Battle of Shanghai.
1938: The Fascists terrorised scores of Jews throughout the Third Reich in a tragedy known as Kristallnach.
1939: Berlin postponed the invasion of France again; the next date for decision was to be November 13, 1939 for a possible invasion date of November 19, 1939. Likewise, Berlin issued directive № 9 which called for Luftwaffe flightcraft and submarines to attack British shipping and port facilities, and German newspapers noted that the attempted assassination on their Chancellor, which took place on the previous day in Munich, was the work of British secret service agents. In actuality, it was a plot by the Chancellor to elevate his own standing.
1940: Sebastiano Visconti Prasca’s superiors relieved him as commander of Fascist operations in Greece for the failures to breakthrough Greek defense lines in northern Greece. They replaced him with General Ubaldo Soddu. As well, the Axis armed merchant cruiser Atlantis, disguised as British auxiliary cruiser HMS Antenor in the darkness before dawn, closed in on Norwegian tanker Teddy in the Bay of Bengal and captured the ship with a boarding party without firing a shot. Atlantis refueled from Teddy’s cargo of 10,000 tons of fuel oil and captured the crew of thirty-two.
1941: Heinrich Müller ordered that all Soviet prisoners of war bound to be executed but unfit to travel to the places of execution be killed at their places of imprisonment instead. This was to avoid allowing civilians the see these malnourished and diseased prisoners as it could damage morale. Additionally, the Axis exterminated seventy-six Jewish men, seventy-seven Jewish women, and eighteen Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 171 people).
1942: Around the same time that the Vichy régime broke off diplomatic relations with Imperial America, Yankee troops continued assaulting the French fort of Kasbah, Morocco, while the French garrison at Oran, Algeria surrendered in the face of overwhelming British naval power and Yankee airborne attack in its rear. (French Admiral Darlan signed an armistice with General Dwight Eisenhower, but fighting would continue for two more days.) This, in addition to the Axis losing Sidi Barrani, Egypt to the Allies, the Allied submarine facilities at Saint Nazaire, and Axis troops under Walter Nehring assaulting Vichy French positions (as Vichy French forces in North Africa were apparently switching to the Allies), probably explain why Berlin informed Rome, via Galeazzo Ciano, that it intended to occupy Vichy France soon.

Checking a few notes that I copied from this book, I was originally only going to post this in our social democracy subcommunity, but doing research on this phenomenon I realised that it was even worse than I thought.

In case somebody is unable to read that page, it says that in 1926, Bavaria adopted a law for fighting Roma, Sinti, vagrants, and the workshy, mandating registration for all Roma along with Sinti, and this law became a model for other German states.

Read that again: the Weimar Republic (because remember that this is 1926!) adopted laws explicitly designed to persecute Roma, Sinti, vagrants and the workshy. The Weimar Republic started those laws. Not the Third Reich. Similarly, in 1929, it was the Weimar Republic's national police commission that established a centre for antiziganism headquartered in Munich. Four years before the Third Reich even existed.

Unlike many of the regulars here, I do not subscribe to the theory that 'social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism' (perhaps that is another topic for another time), but I have to admit that protofascist phenomena like these do not exactly help with my case either.

Now then, quoting Herbert Heuss's German policies of Gypsy persecution 1870–1945 in The Gypsies During the Second World War: From "race science" to the camps, pages 23–25:

In 1886 Chancellor Bismarck sent a letter to all the component states of the empire in order to unify, at least in theory, the various decrees in force against [Roma and Sinti]. He recommended the expulsion of all foreign [Roma] “in order to free the territory of the country completely and permanently from this plague.”⁵

State discrimination: the Gypsy Centre in Munich

[Antiziganism] in [the Second Reich] took an unprecedented turn with the setting up, in March 1899, of an Information Service on Gypsies by the Security Police in the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich. Here, for the first time, the total registration and surveillance of an entire population group was planned and organised.

This Gypsy Centre had all the modern aids at its disposal — a telegraph service, photographs, fingerprint systems, identification cards — the technical developments available at the time were set up in a model way by the police authorities in order to put a comparatively small number of people under the prescribed total supervision.

Alfred Dillmann, an officer of the Munich police, published his Gypsy Book, giving brief details of over 3,500 [Roma or Sinti] and "persons travelling as [them]", in 1905. Even for the conditions of the time the book was contrary to the law. In contained a collection of personal information about members of a particular minority group, many of whom had no criminal convictions.

A similar collection about Catholics in Prussia or Jews in Hessen would have given rise to a strong protest, not only from the group concerned but from a wider public, yet, because the group singled out here were [Roma and Sinti], no public outcry ensued. This taken for granted, silent or overt consent to anti[ziganism] will be met again in the course of German history.

The Gypsy Centre in Munich survived, almost unchanged, the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic — and later to Hitler's Third Reich. In 1925 the Centre already had 14,000 individual and family files on [Roma and Sinti] from all over Germany.

By October 1938, when it was incorporated into the National Criminal Police Office (RKPA) as the National Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace, it held over 18,000 files in which 33,524 people — representing some 80–90% of the [Romani] population at the time — were recorded. Along with these files the personnel of the Munich Centre was, of course, taken over by the Criminal Police Office.

Race science and the persecution of the [Roma and Sinti]

On July 16th 1926 Bavaria hurriedly adopted the Law for the Fight against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy. In the justification of the law, its meaning and purpose were made clear:

“It is expected that the large [insert slur here] population will avoid Bavaria on its journeys and the remainder of the travelling people will be kept under control so that there is no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land.”⁶

The ministerial decision putting the law into operation brought the definition of Gypsy (Zigeuner) "in accordance with the study of race" into the state's repertoire.

“The concept '[insert slur here]' is generally known and needs no further explanation. The study of race will give the information as to who is [one].”⁷

This Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries, for example Czechoslovakia. In 1929 in the state of Hessen the then Minister for the Interior, Wilhelm Leuschner, proposed a Law for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace, the aim of which was to lead to a "unified fight against the [insert slur here] plague".

In the past, “in spite of energetic action, the rooting out of this evil had not been possible”. This aim was incorporated in the instructions for carrying out the law, where the direct words “fighting the [insert slur here]” were used.⁸

The basic premise had changed, from fighting crime, to fighting a people — and the target group was to be determined not on juridical but on racial grounds.

Tracing the development of anti[ziganist] laws in Hessen, we see how general trends in the German state reflected, more and more, that classical liberal justice with its emphasis on punishment of the deed was changing towards a focus on punishment of the doer. As the identity of the doer came to the forefront of decisions about punishment, classification as [Romani] became an important factor in judgement of the deed.

This simultaneously eroded the rôle of lawyers in decision‐making, bringing a new coterie of experts — doctors, anthropologists, race experts — into active involvement in state institutions.

Two opposing interests came together to promote this development. The police authorities were greatly interested in changing classical criminal law which, by preventing the criminalisation of groups, deprived crime prevention of a starting point.

On the other hand, paying attention to the identity of a criminal was also a matter of concern to advanced circles who wanted social background and family circumstances looked at in connection with crime and indeed with the aim of reforming the doer. The study of race, a new, modern science that was just seeking recognition, created common ground for these different interests. The Fight against the Gypsy Menace was the lowest common denominator on which all the powerful parties and institutions could agree.

Massive discrimination against [Roma and Sinti] — who, for the most part, were German citizens — was therefore a reality long before the handover of power to the [Fascists] in January 1933. Indeed, even before 1933, [Roma and Sinti] in Germany had been classified by racial criteria in laws and decrees.

In spite of all this, it must be made clear that the potentiality for destruction which the Third Reich was about to unleash was not, so to speak, traditional discrimination. The potential for destruction required, on the one hand, the possibility of thinking about destruction. This was provided for Germany by […] concepts of race hygiene.

But it also needed a transformation, a remodelling, of the existing legal framework, in order to allow [antiziganism] to be extended into […] outright annihilation. The policy of the Third Reich, therefore, represents not just the sharpening of traditional discrimination but, with the introduction of race science as the foundation of a new order of lawmaking, the beginning of new depths of persecution.

1933: National Socialist persecution

On January 30th 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, thus ushering in the Third Reich. With this there began a policy that built on the authoritarian structures of the Weimar Republic in so far as it continued the Weimar method of government through emergency orders.

(Emphasis added in most cases. I thought about replacing all instances of that antiziganist slur, but it would have looked so clunky and distracting that I only did it inconsistently. I can do it consistently anyway if any Roma or Sinti ask me to do so.)

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

1885: Tomoyuki Yamashita, Axis general and war criminal, existed.
1918: Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial America’s first Japanese POW, started his life.
1923: In Munich, Adolf Schicklgruber lead his fellow Fascists in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
1936: Francoist troops failed to capture Madrid but commenced their three‐year Siege of Madrid afterwards.
1937: The Fascist exhibition Der ewige Jude (‘The Eternal Jew’) opened in Munich.
1939: While celebrating the Beer Hall Putsch’s 16th anniversary in Munich, Adolf Schicklgruber narrowly escaped Georg Elser’s homicide attempt, and the Reich captured two British agents of SIS.
1940: The Fascist invasion of Greece failed as outnumbered Greek units repulsed the Fascists in the Battle of Elaia–Kalamas.
1941: Troops of the Axis's Armeegruppe Nord captured Tikhvin near Leningrad while the IJA and IJN obeyed orders to coordinate their plans for the opening phases of the Pacific War per the Great Army Instruction № 992. At the annual Beer Hall Putsch speech, the Third Reich's head of state claimed that the war with Soviet Union was effectively won, citing 3.6 million prisoners taken, and by conjecture that the Soviet forces must have suffered eight to ten million casualties thus far. In regards to the United States, he noted that the aggressive President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered American ships to deliberately attack any Kriegsmarine submarines they crossed, while Berlin continued to order restraint for its submarine captains; nevertheless, Berlin noted that the submarines would fight back fiercely should they be fired upon.
1942: As Axis defenses in Egypt fell back to Sidi Barrani, Allied forces successfully assaulted the Axis forces at the Algerian ports of Oran and Algiers during Operation Torch; Algiers surrendered at 1800 hours and the Axis lost a Martin 167 bomber over the Mers‐el‐Kébir harbour in Algeria, but two former U.S. Coast Guard cutters renamed HMS Walney and HMS Hartland, each carrying two hundred Yankee infantry, entered Oran, Algeria with the intention of denying the harbour facilities to the Vichyites only to both come under intense crossfire from Axis warships and subsequently sinking.

Additionally, the Eastern Axis formally took command of the Davao Penal Colony in southern Philippines, and the Axis transferred many of its Luftflotte 4 units from Stalingrad to North Africa. The Axis also transferred twenty‐five of its Jewish professional watchmakers from Majdanek to Auschwitz.
1943: Oberleutnant zur See Harald Lange assumed command of the Type IXC U-Boat U-505 at Lorient, and Aichi held the first test flight of the submarine-borne attack aircraft M6A1 Seiran over Ise Bay. Lieutenant Commander Tadashi Funada was the chief test pilot. The test was a failure due to an irresponsive horizontal tail stabilizer, but it nevertheless generated much interest with the Eastern Axis's naval leadership.
1944: The Axis forced 25,000 Jews to walk over one hundred miles in rain and snow from Budapest to the Austrian border, followed by a second forced march of 50,000 persons, ending at Mauthausen. Likewise, the second largest cinema in England, the Gaumont State Theatre in Holloway, succumbed to a V-1 flying bomb. The cinema's frontage and restaurant blew out; only the main walls and part of the foyer were left undamaged. Nonetheless, the most serious incident of the day was at Rochester, North Kent, in which a V-1 flying bomb impacted at at 2045 hours on the junction of Grafton Avenue and Gerrard's Avenue, killing eight humans and seriously wounding seventeen.

Aside from that, Luftwaffe ace Major Walter Nowotny claimed his 258th victory as he shot down a B-24 Liberator bomber over Hesepe near Osnabrück. Moments later, his Me 262 jet fighter was hit by an Allied P-51 fighter, possibly the one piloted by 1st Lieutenant Richard Stevens. Nowotny's final words were reported to be 'My g-d, I'm burning!' His subsequent crash and explosion was witnessed by his commanding officer Adolf Galland (who was monitoring the progress of the operation 'Big Blow' from the radio shack at Achmer Airfield) along with other officers, who immediately rushed to the crash site; they failed to find Nowotny's remains, only able to locate broken pieces of the pilot's Knight's Cross medal.

Curiously, for the first (and only) time, the Third Reich's head of state failed to appear at the celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary; instead, he had Himmler read his speech for him.
1945: Anton Ludwig Friedrich August Mackensen, Prussian state councillor and monarchofascist, perished.
1949: Cyriel Verschaeve, Axis collaborator and Flemish ultranationalist, died.
2014: Luigi Gorrini, Axis fighter pilot, expired.

“And now the presidential brigade,” said Dutchak. In fact, the YKMS has been training soldiers from the Presidential Brigade of Ukraine since last year. “We are trying to raise her in the traditions of Azov,” according to Nyzytski, who said that training this unit is like raising “our most difficult child,” but “the best in the plan, we cherish her more than anything.”

There are some signs of far-right infiltration of this brigade, which is tasked with defending the president and his family. For example, the OUN-M, the oldest faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, has a “UVO” platoon in the presidential brigade, named after the pre-OUN terrorist group led by Yevhen Konovalets. “Russians, get ready, everything will be Azov,” Dutchak said to the camera. “One hundred percent gentle Azovization,” Nyzytski said, smiling at Dutchak.

A couple of questionable units from the presidential brigade. The emblem of the 20th battalion uses the red-and-black flag of the far-right “Banderite” movement (OUN-UPA). The emblem of 21st battalion (top-right) has a “bouche shield” in the style of the [...] Waffen-SS (bottom-right).

In December 2023, the state-run National News Agency of Ukraine, or Ukrinform, launched a project on its Youtube channel with the Center for Combating Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. The series consisted of interviews with people from the military. Rostylsav Nyzytskyi was one of the first guests. He predicted with 100% certainty that “we will bring a new order to the European world,” and suggested that Ukraine’s special forces will become NATO’s hired guns in other conflicts around the world.

The question here is whether we will survive, but the moment we do, we will bring a new order. We will be dominant, we will be in demand for everything. There will be war in the future, it will just be on the African continent or something else. It will go there because Russia and China are now dominating there, and for Europe and the United States … it’s economics, it’s prestige, you have to dominate the regions… Make PMC [private military companies] and go to Africa, to Turkey to slaughter Muscovites. I don’t think we will get a specific resource there, it’s just a tool of influence.

Rostyslav Nyzytskyi […]

“Do you have any idea when the war might end?” one of the hosts asked. Rostylsav Nyzytskyi hoped for it to last another two years, because “we need it” to complete the process of transforming Ukraine’s military. That was almost one year ago. Asked how he felt about freezing the conflict, Nyzytskyi said, “It is a defeat. Let there be such a phase, but in my opinion, we at least need a year and a half or two.” In the meantime, 18–20 year olds should join the fight, as he did at that age.

“MacTavish,” one of the top YKMS instructors in the 3rd Assault Brigade, has expressed interest in Dominique Venner (1935–2013), a veteran of the far-right “Secret Army Organization” in France, who founded the white nationalist “Europe-Action” movement. This suggests that the YKMS is still plugged into Azov’s “Reconquista” agenda. About a month ago, “MacTavish” posted something about the challenges of being a military instructor.

This is not an easy job and I will explain why: It’s a huge workload (yes, you won’t be killed at the training ground and you won’t be hunted by FPV [drones]), but in one course of the BZVP [Basic General Military Training], about a thousand recruits will go through your training and you burn out from this monotonous work. You work almost 24/7 because you live the life of a recruit every day, you are with them all the time. You also burn out from the low motivation of people who are now joining the army. You train men who were forcibly taken into the army, guys who tried to cross the Tisza [river], but were caught and sent to the army, you train people who are weak in spirit and body, you see it all the time. And then you send these people to the army and realize that they will go to fight on the frontlines, and you are still waiting for a new batch of recruits to come to the training units.

As Rostylsav Nyzytskyi said last year, “Everything depends on us, whether we can turn [esirs] into janissaries.” Far from being noble protectors of the nation, the Azovites would gladly enslave their “unconscious” compatriots in a totalitarian society, if given the chance.

Last month, the Khorunza service of the 3rd Assault Brigade held a roundtable on military reforms, in particular “cleansing it of the Soviet legacy.” They announced the participation of several military units and directorates, as well as a “NATO country colonel,” and the National Defense University of Ukraine. Several weeks earlier, Vladyslav Dutchak brokered an agreement between the Khorunza Service of the NGU Azov Brigade and the mayor of Kostopil, a small city in western Ukraine, for “strengthening patriotic education for children and young people.”

According to Rostyslav Nyzytskyi’s December 2023 estimate, at least another year of “gentle Azovization” is apparently needed before Ukraine’s most powerful neo-Nazis can fully cash in on a frozen conflict.

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

1937: The Imperial Japanese Army combined the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and the Japanese 10th Army to form the new Central China Area Army.
1938: The Fascists organized the Milizia Artiglieria Contraerea: anti‐aircraft and coastal artillery militia units, and coincidentally the Reich accepted Hans‐Joachim Marseille into flight training and gave him the rank of Flieger. Meanwhile in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan (a French Jew whose parents were recently expelled from Germany into Poland) murdered Fascist consular aide Ernst Vom Rath.
1939: The Belgian and Dutch Crowns stated their neutrality and offered to act as negotiators for peace, which Berlin, Paris, and London rejected. Coincidentally, Berlin postponed the decision for the western invasion (the next date of decision was to be November 9, 1939) while Hermann Göring met with Yankee journalists at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, mocking the quality and quantity of the U.S.‐built aircraft that would soon arrive in Britain. Finally, Blohm und Voss prematurely launched Herbert Norkus in Hamburg to make way for submarine construction around the same time that a double agent in Britain passed Fascist plans for the Western Offensive to the Czechoslovakian government‐in‐exile.
1940: Vichy passed a law concerning how skiing should be taught, signifying the importance of sports in the new French education philosophy.
1941: During or around the time that the Empire of Japan’s Navy conducted a carrier exercise, the Allied merchant ship Nottingham, on her maiden voyage, spotted Axis submarine U‐74 in the North Atlantic and attempted to ram her, but U‐74 counterattacked at 2234 hours and sunk Nottingham. All sixty‐two aboard escaped in lifeboats, but they were never seen again. Close to this time, one hundred sixty RAF bombers assaulted Berlin and shot down twenty bombers, but the Germans reported minimal damage. Lastly, Emden arrived at Gotenhafen (a.k.a. Gdynia), Axis‐occupied Poland and disembarked Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. Lastly, the Axis sunk the Soviet ship Armenia massacring thousands of innocents.
1942: A transport of 465 Jews arrived at Auschwitz from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands. During the selection all of them were said to be unable to work, thus the Axis annihilated all of them. Additionally, Axis General Antoine Béthouart unsuccessfully attempted a coup d'etat in North Africa, thereby alarming defenses.
1943: Alfred Jodl met with NSDAP Gauleiters in Munich; he noted that the Allied terror raids on Axis cities must be stopped, otherwise the morale of the German folk would be overly damaged, and it would be fertile grounds for subversive activities.
1944: Axis captors hung Soviet spy Richard Sorge and thirty‐four of his associates.

As most of us know, another famine struck the Soviet Union in 1932–1933 because of awful weather, plant disease, vermin infestations, limited trading options, and to a certain extent, anticommunist sabotage.

On the other hand, the “famine–genocide” or “Holodomor” is a popular conspiracy theory that this famine was not accidental but some sort of Sadistic plot to massacre Ukrainians, Ukrainian patriots, the petty bourgeoisie, anticommunists, or some combination thereof. It is quite popular among neofascists along with other anticommunists so as to demonize us, Russian people, and sometimes Jewish people as well (though I am sure that generic anticommunists would dismiss the conspiracy theory’s perpetual popularity among antisemites as an unimportant coincidence).

Recently Philip Colley, the grand nephew of Gareth Jones (somebody whom anticommunists cite to death), gave a devastating critique of this conspiracy theory:

Gareth Jones […] pointed to excessive grain appropriations and the “export of foodstuffs” by Soviet authorities as a cause but that it was “not so much the Soviet Government as the world crisis, which is to blame.”

Gareth wrote how he had “visited villages in the Moscow district, in the Black Earth district, and in North Ukraine, parts, which are far from being the most badly hit in Russia” and how “even twenty miles away from Moscow there was no bread.”

He described how he had “collected evidence from peasants and foreign observers and residents concerning the Ukraine, Crimea, North Caucasia, Nijni-Novgorod district, West Siberia, Kazakhstan, Tashkent area, the German Volga and Ukrain[e] colonists, and all the evidence proves that there is a general famine.”

In ‘Mr. Jones’, a film part-funded by émigré Ukrainian nationalists, the eponymous Welsh reporter only witnesses famine affecting Ukrainians in Ukraine. The real Mr. Jones reported on famine in all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, affecting multiple ethnicities.

Listening to the Senedd Members (MSs) that day one might think they had based their knowledge not on Jones’ extensive writings but instead on a 90 minute, highly fictionalised film. They appeared to have drunk the ‘Mr. Jones’ Kool Aid.

Misuse of Jones’s legacy has regularly featured in the flurry of ‘Holodomor as genocide’ resolutions in Europe since Russia’s invasion. His quotes have even been doctored in Parliament to remove references to non-Ukrainian areas.

Questions also need to be asked about Alun Davies’ opening statement. It is almost word for word the same as that delivered by Conservative MP Pauline Latham in a similar Westminster debate on 7th March 2023. Did they share the same researcher or were they simply reading out, without scrutiny, what had been presented to them by Ukrainian lobbyists?

Mr. Davies opens the debate by stating:

“The Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that means to inflict death by hunger. Today, we use it to mean the entire Stalinist campaign to eliminate the Ukrainian nation, which culminated in the forced famine of 1932 and 1933... it’s estimated that 7 million, and may be as many as 10 million, people died in Ukraine, with many more deaths in the neighbouring Soviet states.”

The shared provenance of what both said is deeply concerning but so too is its accuracy. That between 7–10 million Ukrainians died in the famine has long been discredited by independent scholars as politically inflated.

The true figure is now accepted to be between 2.6–3.9 million, a still horrific number, but one with academic credibility. The figure presented in the Senedd was arrived at in the 1980s by ultra-nationalist activists keen to present the famine as more devastating than the Holocaust.

Why ‘Holodomor’ activists would want to compete so is complex. It relates to the rôle of Stepan Bandera’s fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) who collaborated with the [Axis] to eliminate most of Ukraine’s Jews during the War.

The OUN-B has been accused of instrumentalising the ‘Holodomor’ to deflect from that involvement. Politicians allowing themselves to be unquestioning mouthpieces for foreign lobbyists should be a matter of concern.

The charge of genocide is a serious one. On whether the famine in Soviet Ukraine was genocide the jury remains out. Leading famine scholars Robert Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft, Lynne Viola, Michel Ellman, Mark Tauger, and even ‘Harvest of Sorrow’ author Robert Conquest, reject the genocide thesis.

Conquest is clear, “it wasn’t a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people... there are guilty people, but they aren’t the Russian nation.” Wheatcroft, co-author of “the Years of Hunger” wrote, “...nothing is gained by exaggerating the levels of deaths, by claiming that this was genocide, or that it was inflicted on Ukraine deliberately.”

[…]

Mick Antoniw […] leans heavily on the words of the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the person who originally coined the term ‘genocide’. In 1953, Lemkin stated that the famine was a ‘classic example of Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation’.

This is a powerful statement, much relied upon by ‘Holodomor as genocide’ advocates, and coming from such a towering figure in the world of genocide legislation it commands attention. But, unlike Jones, Lemkin was not a witness and was speaking at a time when no academic research had yet been undertaken on the famine. In fact, respected Ukrainian historian Professor John-Paul Himka disputes the very impartiality of Lemkin’s position.

Himka wrote, “The invention of the concept of genocide did not automatically give Lemkin the historical knowledge necessary to determine whether any particular case fit his definition or not... His thinking about Ukraine came later in the Cold War... at which time Lemkin was both marginalized and impoverished. He was, in fact, at that time dependent on the Baltic and Ukrainian communities for material support... Lemkin did not himself study the Ukrainian situation independently, but relied on information he obtained directly from émigré nationalists.”

Mick Antoniw is himself the descendant of an émigré ultra-nationalist. His father, Mychajlo Pavlovich, was a member of the fascist OUN-B in Zolochiv, scene of the notorious OUN-B and [Axis]-orchestrated Zolochiv pogrom, one of the first acts of the Holocaust in July 1941. Due to that association his father was unable to return home after the war and arrived in the UK at the same time that thousands of Ukrainians who had collaborated with the [Axis] were seeking sanctuary in the West to escape Soviet retribution.

Mick Antoniw has never publicly elaborated on his father’s precise role in the war, as far as I am aware, but himself has been pictured holding the red and black ‘blood and soil’ flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This is not an innocent flag. It belonged to the notorious armed wing of the OUN-B, an outfit heavily implicated in the Holocaust and the mass murder of as many as 100,000 Poles in Volhynia. According to Marvin Rotrand, national director of the League for Human Rights at Bʻnai Brith Canada, “the flag is consistently recognized as a fascist emblem and a hate symbol throughout the international community.”

The rest is indubitably worth reading, but I am going to end the excerpt here because I want to keep the length manageable. As somebody who respects Jewish people, I also want to take this opportunity to explain to you why equating this famine with an actual extermination campaign is wrong. Click here if you have time to read.

For decades, anticommunists have been clumsily attempting to equate the famine with the Shoah even though many Jewish adults do not want that. One example:

Jewish leaders say [that] it is unfair to link the Holodomor and the Holocaust, which Yuschenko reportedly plans to do by introducing a bill in the Ukrainian parliament that would recognize both the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust and the suffering of the Ukrainian nation in the Holodomor.

“We regret the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, but Yuschenko can’t equate the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holodomor in Ukraine,” said Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis.

(Needless to say, the rabbi’s response made many neofascists unhappy.)

We know that the Third Reich intended to commit the Shoah because we have proof of intent. Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, page 149:

Eichmann was told by Heydrich in late summer 1941 that ‘I have just come from the Reichsführer: the Führer has now ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.’ Radio reports from the field of operations contained exact numerical reports of executions.¹⁵⁸ On 16 December 1941 Hans Frank told leaders of the GG of the need to ‘exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.’¹⁵⁹

Almost certainly there was no written order to destroy European Jewry.¹⁶⁰ There didn’t need to be. The word of the Führer had the force of law: Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft.¹⁶¹ When one judge, Lothar Kreyssig, complained to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner about the immunity of the SD and Gestapo he was told that ‘the will of the Führer is the source of law’.¹⁶²

Hitler had always been open about what would happen in the event of war.¹⁶³ In talks with István Csáky, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, on 16 January 1939, Hitler ‘was sure of only one thing, the Jews would have to disappear from Germany to the last man.’¹⁶⁴ On 30 January 1939 Hitler made his ‘prophecy speech’ to the Reichstag:

Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race throughout Europe.¹⁶⁵

Those are only a handful of examples. In contrast, there was no Soviet equivalent to the Wannsee conference, let alone any of these statements. In fact, many famine–genocide conspiracy theorists theirselves will tell us that the Soviet famine of 1932–33 differs from the Shoah in that plans for the famine were ‘secret’, which is a tacit admission that their accusation is based on guesswork rather than evidence. Otherwise, the best that they can do is point to a Soviet plan to liquidate the kulaki (as a class), as if that alone self-evidently necessitates a famine and all of the collateral damage that would come along with it.

Throughout history, famines have commonly happened for natural reasons: drought, plant disease, vermin infestations, and more. It is true that oppressors have also used food deprivation as a killing method, as in colonial America, the Shoah, and the Nakba today, but in all of those examples, many other killing methods accompanied food deprivation. The Axis and its collaborators exterminated five to six million Jews (and people who were legally ‘Jewish’) through bullets, explosives, hangings, fire, willful negligence (leading to dehydration, hypothermia, emaciation, illnesses, and suicides), involuntary experiments, and hand‐to‐hand combat, in addition to poisoning. Uncommon methods included drowning, vivisepulture, dog attacks, and running vehicles over victims.

While Soviet officials undoubtedly shot some of the petty bourgeoisie, emaciation and the diseases resulting therefrom were by far the commonest ways that millions died. If the Soviets wanted to annihilate as many innocents as possible, they surely would have exhausted all means at their disposal like many oppressors have historically. Not only is that not what the Soviets did, but we cannot even accuse the Soviets of criminal negligence: read № 144. Decree of Politburo of the CC VCP(b) or R.W. Davies’s & Stephen G. Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger for evidence that the Soviets supplied food aid to Ukrainians and others.

There are plenty more differences that I could point out between the famine, a tragedy restricted to the Soviet Union and lasted only about one year, and the Shoah, an extermination campaign that affected most of Europe along with a few parts of Afrasia for several years (and undoubtedly would have extended further and lasted longer had the Axis been more successful), but I do not want to continue testing your patience.

It should be unsurprising that we have evidence indicating that the famine–genocide allegation originated from antisemites. Grzegorz Rossoliński‐Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist says on page 205 that the Ukrainian anticommunists ‘believed that the Jews ruled the Soviet Union and were responsible for the famine in 1932‒1933’. Curiously, he did not mention that in his citation, and I was unable to access the sources given. There is no need to doubt his assertion, however. Quoting Wendy Lower’s Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, page 236:

They claimed that “as Jews” Kieper and Kogan were to blame for the famine and deaths of 8 million Ukrainians. See Ereignismeldung of 19 Aug. 1941, in Arad, Krawkow-ski, and Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 96–97. Statement of J. A. Bauer, 2 Aug. 1965, Callsen Trial, BAL, 207 AR-Z 419/62.

Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust, page 159:

As the [Western Axis powers] entered the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 one of their propaganda themes was Jewish responsibility for the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. As Stephen Wheatcroft has discovered, an illustration appears in the pages of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer showing the famous Jewish Bolshevik, Karl Radek, leering in the background while infants starve.

(I spent almost one hour looking for a good scan of that illustration, but to no avail.)

Returning to Rossoliński‐Liebe’s work, pages 434–435:

In the early 1980s the Ukrainian diaspora, in particular the Ukrainian communities that commemorated Bandera as their Providnyk, or the state proclamation of 30 June 1941 as an anti-German act, developed another essential nationalist narrative, namely of the artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine of 1932–1933, which they called the “Famine Holocaust” or the “Ukrainian Holocaust.” They thus drew a parallel with the destruction of European Jews during the Second World War, known since the late 1970s as the Holocaust.

The term “Holodomor” became popular in Ukraine and among the diaspora especially in the late 1980s. The phonetic similarity of Holodomor to Holocaust was not a coincidence. The immediate trigger for the nationalists’ famine discourse was the popular miniseries Holocaust, which was broadcast in 1978 by NBC and was watched by millions of North Americans. Presenting the story of one Jewish family from Berlin since the coming of the [German Fascists] to power in 1933 until the end of the Second World War, the miniseries drew the attention of many North Americans to the destruction of European Jews.

The miniseries presented Ukrainians as [Axis] collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. Holocaust thereby clashed with the ideological Bandera symbolism and the way that the Ukrainian diaspora dealt with its past, particularly as to the denial of Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust and collaboration with [the Third Reich].⁹⁷

At that time and into the 1980s, relatively little demographic research had been conducted on the subject of the famine; this made it easier to exaggerate the number of victims. The approximate number of 2.5 to 3.9 million Ukrainian victims of the famine became known only in the early 1990s.

The nationalist elements of the diaspora claimed that during the “Holodomor” more Ukrainians were killed than Jews were during the Holocaust. In articles, leaflets, books and on monuments, they inflated the numbers to five, seven, eight, or 10 million Ukrainian victims of the famine.⁹⁸ They sometimes counted Ukrainian victims between 1921 and 1956 generally, and claimed 15 million victims, which figure they presented in contrast to the 6 million Jewish victims.⁹⁹

Roman Serbyn, Professor of East European history at the University of Montreal, at which Dontsov was teaching after the Second World War, wrote: “Much has been written in recent years about the man-made famine that ravaged Ukraine in 1932–1933 and caused the deaths of seven to ten million people.”¹⁰⁰ In an academic volume published in 1986, Marco Carynnyk compared the Ukrainian victims of the famine to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.¹⁰¹

The participants of the Holodomor discourse instrumentalized the suffering of the famine victims for various reasons, the most important of which were to draw attention to the Soviet [narrative] of the famine and to the political situation in Soviet Ukraine, and to respond to the accusations concerning Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust.¹⁰²

That antisemites would invent this allegation, then demand that it receive at least as much recognition and respect as the Shoah—it’s just a slap in the face.

spoiler [Footnote] Quoting Douglas Tottle’s infamous Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, page 23:

Simultaneous with Hearst’s 1935 famine–genocide campaign, the [Fascist] press in Germany and similar papers elsewhere in Europe issued materials on the same theme. The [Third Reich] had been flogging the issue as early as 1933, complete with fraudulently mis-dated photos.¹ The official [NSDAP] organ Voelkischer Beobachter, publicized and lauded Hearst’s campaign in its article “William Hearst ueber Die Sowjetrussische Hungerkatastrophe” (William Hearst on the Soviet Russian Hunger Catastrophe).² The [Fascist] contributions to the campaign did not go unnoticed.

[…]

The propagandistic extension of the by-then non-existent famine was further embellished by the appearance in 1935 of a German-language book, Muss Russland Hungern? by Dr. Ewald Ammende.⁴ Its 1936 English-language edition, Human Life in Russia, has had a lasting influence on those who propagate the famine–genocide myth. The significance of Ammende’s book can be appreciated by the fact that it was republished in 1984 (after a 50-year lapse) concurrent with the Reagan-era Cold War.⁵

Human Life in Russia makes little pretence of objectivity. Ammende not only credits the accounts by Hearst press characters like Andrew Smith and Harry Lang, but brings in press accounts from [the Third Reich], [Fascist] Italy, and the émigré Nationalist press.⁶

Page 109:

A particularly vile example of Nazi-like hate literature appeared in the January 1935 issue of Klich (The Call), published by Anthony Hlynka, a Social Credit member of parliament from Vegreville, Alberta. It blamed the Jews for the famine:

This is the descendant of blood suckers who exploited Ukraine.
His ancestors robbed our fathers of the last strip of land.
His ancestors held the keys to our temples.
His ancestors were the informers against us.
His race barred the path to formation of our state.
His race murdered the leader of the Ukrainian Republic.
His race besmirched before the world the name of our great Chmelnitsky.
His race is responsible for the unprecedented terror in the Ukraine.
His race murdered by exiles, tortures and famine not only millions of our brothers and sisters but also millions of innocent children of the Ukraine.
His race has abused, debauched, polluted, corrupted and defiled the majesty of the Ukraine.³⁰

Additionally:

Two Ukrainian quislings of Moscow, D. Shumsky and M. Khvylovyj, who believed that Moscow as working for a better communist Ukraine but eventually realised that she was only expanding her empire, committed suicide. They were replaced by L. Kahanovych as Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and I. Shelehess, A. Shlihter, Y. Rahkis, among others, as assistant secretaries. All of them were Jews. The following Jews held positions in the Ministry of Police — V. Balicky, Karlsom, M. Latsis, F. Koch, C. Fuchs. […]

L. Kahanovych realised [that] he would have a monumental task in bringing the Ukrainian villagers to heel. They were hard-working farmers, fiercely proud of their livelihood and land and would defend these to the death. Moscow’s plan was to take all the land and reduce the villagers to virtual serfdom under the guise of collectivisation.

To achieve this, Kahanovych and the politburo organized a man-made famine in which 7 million Ukrainians died.¹⁵

Citation:

¹⁵ See Jurij Chumatskij, Why Is One Holocaust Worth More Than Others? Baulkam Hills, NSW, Australia: Busnessl Press Printing Pty, 1986, 31. The title page informs us that it is “Published by Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.” In today’s Ukraine, dominated by pro-[Axis] “nationalist” ideology, this group (often called by its Ukrainian initials UPA, for Ukrains'ka Povstans'ka Armiia) is praised as “fighters for independence.”

Of course, anticommunists shall be quick to dismiss both Douglas Tottle and Grover Furr saying that they aren’t real historians, as if that somehow invalidates their citations, so I have decided to restrict these observations to a footnote.

Although Fascist newspapers reported on the famine in 1933, it is unclear to me if they already went so far as to accuse the Soviets of malice (rather than incompetence) with regards thereto. It would be perfectly in character for the Fascists to hastily make that accusation, but I have no quote from their 1933 papers to give as an example.

See also: Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine :::

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Click here for events that happened today (November 6).

1936: As Francisco Franco suspended the executions of Basque priests considered supporters of the Republic, a small air corps and the Condor Legion, comprising 92 planes and 3,900 men, arrived from the Third Reich in Spain, coincidentally at about the same time that the Republican government fled from Madrid to Valencia. Apart from that, London signed the Agreement regarding Commercial Exchanges and Payments and the Commercial Agreement, with Annex at Rome.
1937: Rome joined Berlin and Tōkyō in the Anti‐Comintern Pact, around the same time that Mussolini, Ciano, and Ribbentrop held a meeting to discuss the Spanish Civil War.
1939: Per Sonderaktion Krakau, the Fascists arrested 183 professors of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, sending 168 of them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
1940: British, Sudanese and Indian troops counterattacked the Axis garrisons at Gallabat and Metemma.
1941: As the Empire of Japan’s military mobilized for war, Axis authorities took thousands of Jews to the Sosenki Forest outside of Rovno, and would massacre at least 15,000 (probably 17,500) over the next two days… be it any compensation, the Wehrmacht now showed signs of frostbite, and the Soviets inhibited the Finnish advance into Russia. Less importantly, the Reich commissioned submarine U‐595.
1942: The Axis officially lost the Battle of Madagascar, but its submarine U‐68 torpedoed and sunk the British passenger ship City of Cairo south of Saint Helena, massacring 104 of the 311 people on board.
1943: The Axis lost Kyiv to the Soviets (specifically the 1st Ukrainian Front).
1944: As the Axis garrison at Middelburg surrendered to the Allies, the Kingdom of Italy announced the formation of a private army about six divisions strong, to fight for the Allies, and the provisional government of France struck down all of its antisemitic laws.

From 1935 onward, a reformed cartel, known as the German Cigarette Manufacturers Association (Interessengemeinschaft deutscher Zigarettenhersteller), coordinated manufacturers that combined made up over 96% of the market (Lindner, 2008, p. 148). Firms became unable to increase profits by boosting sales or pushing up their prices.

However, let us keep in mind, the cartel was oriented towards sales, not the purchasing of raw material. A firm could still increase its profits by pushing down production costs, in which the price of tobacco factored decisively. Among German cigarette manufacturers, Reemtsma was the only one with enough resources to consider the establishment of multiple buying offices in southeastern Europe.

[…]

As far as the logistics of sourcing raw material are concerned, the strategy of simply supervising the commercial chain allowed Reemtsma to operate without much sunk capital. The firm retained enough flexibility to quickly adapt its buying campaigns, depending on the conditions on the different Greek, Bulgarian, and Turkish supply markets.⁸

The small landholders that produced most Oriental tobacco could no longer resort to collective action and refuse to sell to Reemtsma’s agents to push the sale price up. Taking advantage of the telegraph and the capacity to deploy agents in multiple locations at the same time, the firm could simply decide to decrease its purchases in one place and increase them elsewhere.⁹

[…]

Reemtsma’s size allowed it to overcome some of the bureaucratic hurdles that often bogged down other companies whenever they engaged in trade through the clearing system of payments. One of the system’s disadvantages was that it was ‘cumbersome and frequently ineffective in matching buyers and sellers. The byzantine regulations imposed serious costs and created massive impediments in the flow of information’ (Gross, 2015, p. 198).

This meant that firms with the capacity to mobilise large bureaucratic resources, or could at least use those of a bank willing to collaborate, were at an advantage over their smaller competitors. Reemtsma was the only cigarette company able to operate with amounts of tobacco that could make up for high-value shipments of German manufactures. Clearing agreements were mutually beneficial as long as the value of the goods traded in one direction remained similar to that of the goods traded in the opposite one. For that reason, a transaction that was paired with another compensating transaction was more likely to be acceptable to both the German and the Greek governments.

Reemtsma did not produce any goods that could be sold in Greece. However, whenever the firm wanted to buy a large shipment of tobacco, a German bank would find a German exporter willing to sell its goods in Greece, and have a Greek bank find a buyer. Reemtsma would then easily import the raw material that it needed.¹¹

Sometimes it was the bank working with a German exporter that would approach Reemtsma in the hope of matching the export transaction with one of Reemtsma’s tobacco purchases.¹² The presence of the company’s top manager Philipp F. Reemtsma in the board of directors of Deutsche Bank in the mid-1930s was probably conducive to the documented instances of collaboration between the bank and the cigarette manufacturer (Compass, 1935, p. 1376).

(Emphasis added.)

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

1886: Sadae Inoue, Axis general who commanded the Imperial forces at the Battles of Peleliu and Angaur, was born.
1895: Walter Wilhelm Gieseking, Axis composer, started his life.
1930: Luigi Facta, Italy’s last prefascist Prime Minister (but later member of the Fascist Senate), expired.
1934: Carl Friedrich Goerdeler became the Third Reich’s Price Commissioner in response to complaints of price gouging.
1935: Heavy rains halted the Fascist offensive in northern Abyssinia for two days.
1936: The Third Reich's head of state told his top lieutenants that the German aim in the Spanish Civil War was not entirely to aid the Spanish Nationalists, but rather, to prolong the conflict to occupy the attention of the United Kingdom and France, and to continue to widen the chasm between the United Kingdom and Fascist Italy. Berlin published a new penal code introducing heavy penalties for slandering Adolf Schicklgruber or the memories of the late Paul von Hindenburg, Horst Wessel and Albert Leo Schlageter. This code also subtracted duelling from the list of offenses. Finally, Columbia-Haus Concentration Camp in Berlin closed.
1937: As thirty thousand Imperialists landed practically unopposed at Hangzhou Bay, and Berlin and Warsaw signed a joint declaration on minorities, guaranteeing proper reciprocal treatment and protection of the Polish minority in the Reich and the German minority in Poland, Schicklgruber announced his plan at a secret meeting in the Chancellery in Berlin for an expansionist foreign policy to secure Lebensraum by force.
1940: The Axis pocket battleship Admiral Scheer sunk the British armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay.
1941: At a conference with Emperor Showa, Imperial leaders decided to go to war with the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands in early December should diplomatic relations with the U.S. did not improve by December 1st.
1942: Berlin ordered that all Jews in concentration camps within the Third Reich to be deported to the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps. Coincidentally, the Axis forces on Madagascar surrendered. Axis intelligence also reported that a large Allied fleet had departed Gibraltar.
1943: An unidentified flightcraft dropped five bombs (only four would detonate) on Vatican City; Benito Mussolini claimed that this was an attack by U.S. flightcraft, while Allied headquarters disclaimed any knowledge of the unwarranted attack. It would not be until 2010 that we discovered that Axis politician Roberto Farinacci was behind the attack.
1944: An Axis V-2 rocket hit Collier Row in Essex County near London (now a part of London) at 0035 hours. Another rocket hit Penhurst, Kent, southern England at 0130 hours. At 0745, a third rocket hit Tooting Bec Common in southwest London. A fourth rocket hit an iron bridge in Southwark Park Road, Bermundsey, London at 1045 hours, damaging 250 feet of railway. At 1713 hours, yet another rocket hit Grovedale Road, Islington, London, killing 31 and seriously injuring 84, but it was another disastrous night for the Luftwaffe when five Heinkel bombers launching V-1 flying bombs lost. Seventeen crews from the Luftwaffe 11/KG53 airborne that night had instructions to carry out attacks on Portsmouth in southern Britain, yet none of the bombs hit the town. Lastly, the Axis's 4.Armee recaptured Goldap, East Prussia.
1990: Rabbi Meir Kahane, Hebrew neofascist, succumbed to homicide.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 110–111:

An example of the Zionist endorsement of the [Fascist] goal of racial separation was the editorial in Judische Rundschau, eight years before it was made compulsory, endorsing the Yellow Star.⁵²

In Poland the Yellow Star was introduced almost immediately after the [Fascist] occupation.⁵³ Whereas most Jews bitterly resented Governor-General Frank’s edict as a return to the Middle Ages, the Orthodox Zionist Chaim Kaplan relished it. ‘The conqueror is turning us into Jews… I shall wear my badge with satisfaction.’⁵⁴

Everywhere the wearing of the Yellow Star was a prelude to deportation and extermination. In Berlin 1,767 Jews refused to wear the badge. They ‘realized, perhaps for the first time, that the orders the functionaries were obligated to implement were to their detriment.’⁵⁵

Not only this, but it seems that Herzlians suggested wearing these stigmata even before any Fascist gentiles proposed officially reintroducing the practice:

The first reference to a Jewish badge during the [Fascist] era was made by the German Zionist leader, Robert Weltsch. During the [Third Reich’s] declared boycott upon Jewish stores on April 1, 1933, yellow Stars of David were painted on windows. In reaction to this, Weltsch wrote an article entitled "Tragt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben Fleck" ("Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride") which was published on April 4, 1933. At this time, Jewish badges had yet even to be discussed among the top [Fascists].

As I have shown in our article discussing premodern anti-Judaism's influence on Fascist antisemitism, the reintroduction of 'Jewish badges' was a conscious borrowing from the Middle Ages, not a matter of historical chance. The European Fascists probably reintroduced them independently of whatever the Herzlians thought, though there were undoubtedly some who were aware of this premodern practice as well.

One could quibble that since these 1933 badges were painted on windows rather than worn on one's clothing, Weltsch technically was not recommending that fellow Jews wear badges on their clothes again, but we really have no good reason to believe that he would have opposed that custom either. The Herzlians had the fewest objections to the Nuremberg laws, and their preference for segregating Jews from gentiles (especially those of colour) persists to this day, so this technicality is irrelevant.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 4).

1921: The Saalschutz Abteilung (hall defense detachment) of the NSDAP is renamed the Sturmabteilung (storm detachment) after a large riot in Munich.
1942: Disobeying a direct order by Adolf Schicklgruber, General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel retreated with his forces after a costly defeat during the Second Battle of El Alamein. The retreat lasted five months.
1944: The Axis lost Bitola to the 7th Macedonian Liberation Brigade, and Operation Pheasant, an Allied offensive to liberate North Brabant in the Netherlands, ended successfully.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2579139

November 3 is the anniversary of The Greensboro Massacre in 197[9] North Carolina. On this day, peaceful protesters were murdered by neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

When The Communist Worker's Party (CWP) planned the parade, their parade license was only granted on the condition that they not bring weapons. Despite the questionable legality of the request, they agreed to the condition in order to push the paperwork through. They then posted flyers and advertisements for the parade calling for the expulsion of the Klan. Meanwhile, the Nazis and the KKK prepared for action with the aid of police informants.

On the day of the parade, the police were told to arrive at the rally point at 11:30. The [neo]fascists arrived shortly before, and immediately started shooting at the assembling protest. A few CWP members had sneaked handguns with them, and returned fire. The gunfight lasted less than 2 minutes, but it left 5 anti-fascists dead, and another 9 wounded. 2 reporters were wounded, and only 1 [neo]fascist was wounded.

The police arrived shortly after. Of the 10 cars in the [neo]fascist convoy, they stopped only one, which was carrying a dozen men. Then of course, they started arresting CWP members.

Of course, this story ends like most. The [neo]fascists were charged, then acquitted by all white juries. The police were found to be colluding with the [neo]fascists on the day of the incident, as well as before.

In 2004, they had a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" re-evaluate the event. They decided that "both sides" contributed to the violence, the CWP by saying things like "Death to the Klan", and they "Should be physically beaten and chased out of town", and the [neo]fascists by being forced to shoot at them in return. They noted that the police knew about it, and were notably absent.

In 2009, the city issued a "statement of regret".

In 2015, they installed a marker acknowledging the massacre happened. Two council members opposed it.

In 2020, 41 years later they finally apologised. Two council members still opposed it.

Somebody recorded the violence on video, which you can find online.

See also: Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul

Interview with two survivors of the assault, Reverend Nelson Johnson and Joyce Hobson Johnson.

Interview with Dr. Marty Nathan, the widow of Dr. Mike Nathan, whom a neofascist murdered in the assault.

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Click here for other events that happened today (November 3).

1900: Adolf Dassler, bourgeois Fascist, existed.
1929: To the Imperialists’ annoyance, the Gwangju Student Independence Movement, protesting the Imperial occupation of Korea, commenced.
1930: The Fascist sympathizer Getúlio Vargas officially became Head of the Provisional Government in Brazil.
1936: Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg replaced three Heimwehr members in his cabinet with other anticommunists who were presumably more sympathetic to the Third Reich.
1937: Police in the so‐called Free City of Danzig seized Jewish bank deposits.
1938: Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe addressed his empire, announcing a ‘New Order in East Asia’ to be based, he claimed, on cooperation between Japan, China and Manchukuo.
1939: The Third Reich’s American freighter City of Flint entered port in Haugesund despite being ordered by its Norwegian escort, the minelayer Olav Tryggvason, not to do so.
1940: The Axis lost Samarina to the Greeks, and it spared London for one night after bombing it for fifty‐seven consecutive nights.
1941: The Axis captured Kursk, commissioned submarine U‐755, and its submarine U‐202 sunk the British merchant ship Flynderborg off Newfoundland.
1942: The Koli Point action commenced during the Guadalcanal Campaign and completed on November 12.
1943: Five hundred aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastated the Axis’s Wilhelmshaven harbor.
1944: Axis forces captured, tortured and later executed two supreme commanders of the Slovak National Uprising, Generals Ján Golian and Rudolf Viest.
1996: Abdullah Çatlı, the leader of the neofascist Grey Wolves, died in the Susurluk car crash, leading to the Interior Minister Mehmet Ağar’s resignation.

(Mirror.)

Within the camp, first barrack foundation is located next to the entrance. The foundation consists of c. 20 cm high and 1 meter wide bank of fine sand (Figure 6) and is the size of prefabricated barracks that the Finnish woodcraft enterprises sold [to Axis] troops in great quantities […] (Figure 7) (Westerlund 2008b, 133; Kallatsa 2009, 21).

A concrete slab that served as a base for a stove is identifiable within this foundation. Remains of some more lightweight structure were documented opposite to the barrack. Deeper into the camp, a kitchen and mess hall (with cooking area reinforced with concrete), and an animal shelter with a turf foundation (and a manure pile behind it) stood on the riverside terrace. A rubbish pit filled with German tins was documented between the barrack foundation and the kitchen (S1; see Seitsonen and Herva 2011, Figure 10.7) in 2006 and excavated in 2009.

One of our informants had visited the mess hall as a young boy on a cloudberry-picking trip, possibly in 1943, and his recollections indicated that there had been structures in the camp that have not left any visible traces on the ground. He reminisced, for instance, that near the kitchen and the animal shelter had stood lightly built tent-like structures, some of which had been covered with turf for insulation, including a sauna for delousing the soldiers.

These lightweight structures were probably ‘yurt’-shaped cardboard and plywood tents, an important wartime product of the Finnish woodcraft industry (Figure 7). There are several vague stone and concrete features that may derive from the foundations of stoves used in lightweight tents.

[…]

Artefacts related to everyday economic and household activities form over two-thirds of the catalogued finds, as might be expected in a base inhabited for nearly four years (Table 1). Sherds of porcelain and glass, cutlery and empty ration tins were most common in this category. The food economy seems to have relied largely on [Wehrmacht]-issued canned meat and fish, some produced in the occupied Denmark and Norway (Figure 10(i)–(j)).

Many of the tins and tin tops have indented manufacturer stamps on them, but as far as we know, there are no guides at the moment for decoding the canning plant identities; descriptions of the tins’ contents were marked on the storing cardboard boxes or crates (Nash n.d.).

Nearly 500 sherds of porcelain were catalogued and show an interesting variety: at least one-third are of a Finnish origin, mostly products of the Arabia factories with various flowery and gilded designs, whereas the rest comprise [Wehrmacht]-issued ware. Two sherds of the latter are products of Johann Haviland, Bavaria and one sherd has the stamp ‘Fl.U.V., 1942, Bohemia’ (Flieger Unterkunft Verwaltung, Flight Barracks Administration; Figure 10(d)–(g)).

Some of the Arabia sherds have manufacturing dates on them which show that they were made in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Some could also be refitted and turned out to be from an Arabia Pääsky jug (Figure 10(b)). The presence of Finnish wares is interesting in the view that there was a large German supply depot in Kaamanen, some 20 km away from Peltojoki, where large quantities of military-issued porcelain was stored: when it was exploded in 1944, the surroundings were sprinkled with porcelain sherds. Why, then, such a prominent presence of Finnish civilian wares in a [Wehrmacht] camp?

Also one piece of cutlery found at Peltojoki, a small spoon with flower ornamentation, is a civilian item, whereas another spoon is a Finnish military issue, with the stamps Puolustuslaitos, Sorsakoski (Finnish Defence Forces, Finnish manufacturer), and the Finnish swastika emblem (the symbol of the Finnish Defence Forces since 1918, and unrelated to the [Fascist] swastika).

The rest of the cutlery finds are standard [Wehrmacht] issue, all stamped Fl.U.V. (Figure 10(j), (s)–(t)). Pieces of bottle glass were found primarily in the glass dump on the upper terrace (S31) and indicate that alcohol was abundantly available. A couple of bottle tops shows that at least French Delbeck wine or cognac and products of Swedish state-owned Aktiebolaget Vin & Spritcentralen were consumed at Peltojoki (Figure 10(v)–(w)).

[…]

Documentary sources and memoirs show that the [Wehrmacht], including the battle-hardened élite Gebirgsjäger, were poorly prepared to, and overwhelmed by the unfamiliar Arctic environment, which effectively stalled their advance so quickly in 1941 (Pipping [1947] 2008, 10; Jokisipilä 2005). […] The [Wehrmacht's] performance improved over time, however, as manuals were prepared (e.g. Halter 1942; Wehrmacht [1943] 2006; Merkblatt 18a, 17 1943; Merkblatt 18a, 26 1944) and active training programs assisted by Finnish specialists implemented (Alftan 2005, 189; Airio 2014, 238–240).

[…]

A tabulation of the recovered finds by the origin illustrates the place of Peltojoki in a wider network of [Axis] military logistics and movements of things (Table 2, Figure 11). For instance, canned food was imported from Denmark and Norway, and alcohol from Sweden and Central Europe, whereas porcelain finds included Central European as well as Finnish products; as an extreme example, at a nearby WWII site fish tins originating from Brazil were uncovered in a German dump.

The presence of products from numerous countries and factories echoes also the commercial importance of war efforts for diverse entrepreneurs in the occupied countries, as well as in [the Third Reich], Finland and even the ostensibly neutral Sweden. The [Axis] presence instigated a major economic boost in Lapland (e.g. Björklund 1981; Westerlund 2008a), which was not without ethical implications, given that PoWs were quite liberally used as a cheap workforce by various companies in different countries (e.g. Westerlund 2008a, 2008b; Suhonen 2011).

(Emphasis added.)

Some anticommunists may not see what the 'big deal' is with Fascists benefitting an economy, but that is only because somebody conditioned them to believe that 'economic prosperity' should trump everything else… including war crimes. I once had a conversation with an anticommunist who explicitly defended the phenomenon of overproduction because it was necessary to 'keep inflation down'. The obvious wastefulness of the process was irrelevant to him!

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Click here for events that happened today (November 2).

1893: Battista Farina, Axis businessman, existed.
1933: Home rule in Malta (at the time a British colony) was suspended after the Nationalist Party continued to advocate Italian as an official language to be used in schools and court proceedings, in order to strengthen ties to Fascist Italy.
1935: Czechoslovakian police arrested twenty‐eight people accused of spying for the Third Reich. Coincidentally, the Fascist cruiser Nürnberg was commissioned in Kiel in Julius Streicher’s presence.
1936: The Spanish Nationalists captured Brunete.
1938: Per the Vienna Award, an Italo‐German arbitration commission gave the Kingdom of Hungary a large piece of Czechoslovakian territory consisting of 5,000 square miles of land and one million people. Coincidentally, a Spanish Nationalist cruiser sunk the cargo ship SS Cantabria.
1940: First day of Battle of Elaia–Kalamas between the Greeks and the Fascists, which notably involved Greek Air Force pilot Marinos Mitralexis, after running out of ammunition, ramming a Fascist bomber. Meanwhile, the Axis commissioned submarine U‐69, the first Type VIIC U‐boat of the Third Reich’s Kriegsmarine which became its most numerous class.
1941: The Finnish conquest of East Karelia completed when the Soviets withdrew from Kondopoga, and the Luftwaffe bombed the Soviet cruiser Voroshilov in harbour at Novorossiysk, putting it out of action until February next year. On the other hand, British cruisers captured a Vichy convoy of freighters and passenger ships north of Madagascar.
1942: The Axis commissioned submarine U‐306, but lost the village of Kokoda and the accompanying airfield to the Allies.
1943: The Battle of Empress Augusta Bay commenced as the Imperial Japanese Navy responded to the surprise invasion of Bougainville Island. Meanwhile, the Allies commenced their bombing of Axis‐occupied Rabaul, and Allied warships along with flightcraft damaged Axis submarine U‐340 off Punta Almina, Morocco.
1944: The Axis lost Nompatelize to the U.S. Seventh Army without a fight, and Moscow requested permission for Soviet troops to enter Bulgarian territory, but the Axis sent fifty thousand of Budapest’s Jews on a forced march to Austria, with ten thousand dying over the course of six days on the way there. Meanwhile, the Axis submarine U‐181 torpedoed and sunk the Allied tanker Fort Lee in the Indian Ocean.
1945: The Allies indicted forty‐two staff members of the Dachau concentration camp at Nuremberg.
2012: Giuseppe Umberto ‘Pino’ Rauti, Fascist politician, dropped dead.

There is a myth that ‘democracy’ elected Adolf Schicklgruber into power. While it is correct that the so-called ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ became the Weimar Republic’s largest party in 1932 (despite lacking a majority), which is probably how this misconception originated, Adolf Schicklgruber himself was unappointed by the common voter. Instead, the bourgeoisie’s representatives appointed him:

For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees, the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor.

Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the [NSDAP] 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany. The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result, more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.

When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his opponents among President Hindenburg's advisers forced him to resign. His successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the ensuing elections in November 1932, the [NSDAP] lost ground, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists, however, gained votes, winning 16.9 percent.

As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to believe, by the end of 1932, that the [NSDAP] was Germany's only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. [Fascist] negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy.

Within two years, however, Hitler and the [Fascists] outmaneuvered Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical [anticommunist] dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

I have to admit that at first I forgot why I wrote this draft when I went back to review it (I had written nothing other than two URLs, both of which had little to do with November). It quickly dawned on me that presently it is election season here in Imperial America, and for months now centrists, social democrats, neoclassical liberals, and other (white) moderates have been pressuring everybody to vote, frequently under the pretension that it is necessary to ‘stop fascism’.

I have been studying fascism for seven years now and I can confidently say that engaging in a hopelessly broken process like a U.S. election is not an antifascist method. The most that voting may do is measure how little opposition that the ruling class can expect from the general public when the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie inevitably appoints its own representatives to the government. That is it. U.S. elections are effectively nothing more than glorified public opinion polls, just like the Third Reich's plebiscites.

My best advice is to boycott the election as a means of protesting an illegitimate process. Your time would be much better spent on supporting the proletariat (especially strikers) through direct action. If you absolutely must recommend voting, though, you could at least familiarize yourselves with the gross corruption that is part of the process, then constantly demand election integrity. I personally don't consider that the best action to take, but I can promise you that that would be more effective than scorning adults who feel alienated from voting.

In any case, the point here is that stopping fascism is not so easy that you can do it at a ballot box (something that thousands of voters in the Saar Basin learned the hard way in 1935). Rather, (neo)fascism is the inevitable consequence of capitalism's contradictions and inadequacies. Only when the lower classes finally overthrow capitalism will neofascism lose its purpose. Don't blame me; I didn't invent reality.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 1).

1921: Harald Quandt, Luftwaffe lieutenant, existed.
1933: The Dachau concentration camp commander, Theodor Eicke, put its regulations into effect and it became a blueprint for other camps. Under Article 12, people who refused to work, or shouted while on the job, were to be shot immediately.
1935: Somebody attempted to murder future Axis politician Wang Jingwei and three other officials shortly before he died himself.
1937: The Defense of Sihang Warehouse ended in an Imperial victory while Imperial troops advanced deeper into Shanghai by crossing Suzhou Creek.
1939: Chinese forces launched the Winter Offensive on multiple fronts against the Imperial Japanese Army while a royal decree in the Netherlands established martial law in key regions mostly along the German–Dutch border.
1940: Fascist forces reached the Thyamis River. Coincidentally, Instanbul declared neutrality in the Greco‐Italian War.
1941: Berlin claimed that the United States ‘attacked Germany’ and that its head of state had been placed before the ‘tribunal’ for world judgment; Berlin disputed the Allied account of the sinking of the Reuben James and claimed that an Axis submarine only attacked after Allied destroyers attacked Axis submarines first. Meanwhile, as the Reich commissioned the submarine U‐214, the Axis occupied Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, and Jews in Slovakia were required to travel in separate train compartments and send and receive letters marked with the Star of David.
1942: The Matanikau Offensive commenced during the Guadalcanal Campaign and finished three days later with an Allied victory. Meanwhile, the Axis’s Army Group A captured Alagir, four Axis sailors escaped from an internment camp at Fort Stanton, the Soviets formed a committee for the investigation of war crimes committed by the Axis, and strikes broke out in Haute‐Savoie in protest of the Vichy government’s forced recruitment of labour for the Third Reich.
1943: The 3rd Marine Division landed on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and secured a beachhead, leading that night to a naval clash at the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay.
1944: As Allied units landed at Walcheren, the Axis submarine U‐483 torpedoed Whitaker and rendered a constructive total loss, an Axis kamikaze sunk Abner Read, the Axis lost three ships in the Kvarner Gulf, an F‐13 Superfortress conducted a reconnaissance sortie over Imperial Japan, and the Western Allies commenced Operation Infatuate.

Doing a little research on horror films from the Third Reich, it appears that only a handful of titles originated from it: Der Dämon des Himalaya, Der Student von Prag, Fährmann Maria, Der Hund von Baskerville, and (technically) Spuk im Schloß. (A few sources call Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse and Der Schimmelreiter horrors, but that is quite arguable, and Fascist Italy’s horror films were even fewer: Maciste all’inferno and possibly the lost film Il caso Haller.) From what I can tell, this very particular subject has attracted little more than a passing interest from Anglophone academics, and going by first impressions, none of those films looks especially political either.

Nevertheless, I know how to improvise, so I am inviting you to read about a film that is instead somewhere in the same neighbourhood as horror: propaganda that demonises us. It lacks the supernatural elements of an ordinary horror film, so you may be disappointed that it does not depict us as unfigurative monsters. That said, it does feature an early example of what I like to call “anticommunists’ ignorant view of how communists talk”, so let us not look this gift horse in the mouth, shall we?

Quoting David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, pages 214–217:

Goebbels was returning to his original mission of safeguarding Europe from the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy’. Reflecting this shift was Karl Ritter’s virulently anti‐Bolshevik film G.P.U. (1942). Interviewed by Filmwelt while making the film, Ritter outlined the basic propaganda message that was to be disseminated: ‘That the German Armed Forces had destroyed the terror organization of the G.P.U. which had been established by Jewish‐Bolshevik “criminals” intent on planting the vile seeds of Bolshevik revolution throughout the world.’³¹

G.P.U. came from an original idea by the actor Andrews Engelmann, who starred in the film and wrote the script together with Ritter and Felix Lutzkendorf. Production was started in December 1941, and it had its première in Berlin on 14 August 1942. The following synopsis is taken from the Allied Commission’s Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature Films:

Olga, a White Russian refugee from Bolshevik terror, has joined the Bolshevik G.P.U. Secret Police in order to find the man who killed her parents. After many years she at last meets him in Riga and then in Kowno in the summer of 1939. He is Bokscha, one of the chief agents of the G.P.U. in Europe, instigator of numerous assassinations, uprisings, acts of sabotage, etc. Bokscha falls in love with her, she goes with him to many countries. At last in France she feels the time is ripe, denounces him to Moscow as a traitor and he is liquidated.

She goes to Moscow, refuses the decoration offered to her, discloses her real reasons for joining the G.P.U., and she too is liquidated. Interwoven is the story of a young Baltic couple whom Olga befriends; in Rotterdam they are arrested by the G.P.U. and imprisoned in the cellar of the Commercial Attaché of the UDSSR, and the film ends with the victorious advance of the German Army into Holland in May 1940 when the two young people are at last released.³²

The film is intended to reveal the Jewish influence behind Bolshevism and the brutality of the G.P.U. In the prologue to the film, G.P.U. is translated as: Grauen (horror), Panik (panic), Untergang (destruction). So as not to leave the audience in any doubt, the Programm von Heute, which accompanied the film, stressed the insidious nature of the G.P.U. in a language reminiscent of that used to describe Jews: ‘It is mid‐1939. Like the threads of a spider’s web the G.P.U. spreads out beyond the Soviet “paradise” to engulf many unsuspecting lands.’³³

In fact the term ‘G.P.U.’ was no longer employed in the USSR; it had been replaced in 1934 by NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Domestic Affairs). But of course this did not affect Goebbels’s anti‐Bolshevik propaganda. The G.P.U. was so firmly embedded in the minds of [anticommunist] Germans as the symbol of Russian barbarism that it had to be perpetuated regardless of whether it existed or not.

Moreover, the Russian Secret Police are presented as a Jewish‐directed Communist organization. This is established in the first scene where Olga Feodorovna is giving a violin recital for the International Women’s League in Riga. Introducing Olga, the Chairwoman maintains that the organization was established to further international cooperation and is ‘totally unpolitical’.

But an old man interrupts and claims that they are in fact organized and financed by Jewish interests in Moscow. He maintains that he has proof that they had sent greetings telegrams to the Jewish politician Litvinov‐Finkelstein.³⁴

The Chairwoman repeats that the organization is concerned only with promoting peace and freedom for all people. But the old man will not be interrupted:

OLD MAN. Don’t interrupt! I said, financed by Moscow! The conclusive evidence is the presence of this gentleman, who calls himself a Soviet diplomat. Do you know who this Consular Attaché Smirnov is? He is the murderer Bokscha, G.P.U. agent … yes, G.P.U. agent! The blood of hundreds of thousands of poor people clings to his hands. Yes, I have evidence. I also have evidence that he murdered my son … [struggle] … You will not keep me quiet! Not you! Look at him, this representative of peace and freedom! He should be caught…

The fact that the old man was seen to be violently removed from the hall by G.P.U. agents and subsequently murdered tended to substantiate his allegations. Other scenes served to highlight Jewish participation in the G.P.U. and the manner in which the Russian Secret Police carried out their subversive activities in other countries. Invariably, Bolshevik meetings would take place deep underground, where they would dispassionately plot sabotage and murder beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

In Moscow, Bokscha is shown plotting the downfall of foreign politicians and the sabotage of allied shipments from Sweden. Action is needed in Finland; we are told that Molatov is waiting for a chance to give an ultimatum and then invade the country. Bokscha is sent to Helsinki, where G.P.U. agents are conspiring with Jews to find an appropriate excuse for a Russian invasion. Once again, the meetings take place in cellars where the Bolsheviks can seek refuge in the shadows:

BOKSCHA. I have a very amusing plan; an assassination attempt on Soviet employers and Soviet citizens in Helsinki. This would precipitate an ultimatum and then an invasion.
JEW. And who will carry out these assassinations?
BOKSCHA. Funny question! We will, of course, our people.
ANOTHER MAN. So you mean we should kill our comrades?
BOKSCHA. Yes!
JEW. Do they know about it up there?
BOKSCHA. Of course not, they would report to Moscow in noble indignation.
JEW. [laughing] Yes, that’s certainly very funny.
[They all start laughing and Bokscha closes the meeting. As they leave, one turns to the Jew…]
ANOTHER MAN. That’s a wonderful plan!
JEW. [throws his hands in the air] Oh, wonderful, wonderful!

The Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy is invoked by the fact that Bokscha is prepared to engage Jewish agents in his subversive activities. Such scenes are intended to reveal the alien beliefs and behaviour of the G.P.U., who are prepared even to murder their own comrades. The moral appears to be that the ends justify the means — a philosophy that could be equally applied to [anticommunism].

It is interesting to note in comparing these two different political systems that at no time in [the Third Reich’s] film propaganda is Bolshevism discussed in terms of Marxist‐Leninism, although ideological comparisons are implicit throughout. Rather, Bolshevism is equated with certain brutal types that recur in [anticommunist] cinema under different guises, ranging from the barbaric Chernov in Friesennot to the cynical murderer Bokscha in G.P.U.

If the [Fascists] were not prepared to enter into an ideological debate then they had to specify a target for hatred. The stereotype employed in G.P.U. is, of course, Nikolai Bokscha. Yet he is not an amalgam of either the Untermensch line or the deeply committed Communist; he is neither a racially inferior Slav nor a misguided Party member.

Instead, he symbolizes the opportunism of Bolshevism and its alienation from Western civilization. He is referred to in the film as ‘one who has made a career for himself without being either a Jew or a proletarian’. Olga summed up his value to Moscow as a ‘good executioner who is worth a great deal to the Central Bureau’. In another scene with Olga in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki a portrait of Lenin is drawn to his attention, and he replies: ‘Oh yes! It was the era of proletarian revolution. A dark age! Fortunately one forgets!’

In G.P.U., Asiatic features have largely disappeared from the stereotype image of the Bolshevik enemy. He is now portrayed in collusion with conspiratorial Jews. In fact, in Nikolai Bokscha we have the archetypal bourgeois, albeit a brutal and cynical one. Filmwoche referred to him as ‘the bourgeois after his acre of land, and a manipulator of chaos for his own enrichment’.³⁵

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from maybe the antisemitism being too obvious, it does not sound like there is much in this film that a committed antisocialist would find objectionable: the antiutopian pretensions, a hypocritical upper‐class communist, assertions that we murder hundreds of thousands of innocents (just ’cause), assertions that we’re cannibal‐like savages who enjoy killing each other, and of course, blatant anachronisms (antisocialists are nothing if not inept at managing time). All of these are well trod tropes for those of us who made the mistake of either trying to reason with antisocialists or subjecting ourselves to their mindnumbingly brainless content.

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Click here for events that happened today (October 31).

1881: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, was born.
1922: Benito Mussolini became the Kingdom of Italy’s Prime Minister.
1924: Members of the Association at the 1st International Savings Bank Congress (World Society of Savings Banks) announced World Savings Day in Milan, Fascist Italy.
1934: The Third Reich’s ‘People’s Court’ announced that ‘several persons were tried for high treason and sentenced to death recently’, but did not reveal any names.
1937: As the Sihang Warehouse’s top floors burst into flames due to Imperial shelling, Rome’s governor Piero Colonna officially inaugurated the stolen obelisk of Auxum.
1938: Poland noted to the Third Reich that Danzig was to remain independent, and that Warsaw was disinterested in signing the Anti‐Comintern Pact.
1939: Benito Mussolini dismissed three military chiefs (Alberto Pariani, Giuseppe Valle and Luigi Russo) and two cabinet ministers (Achille Starace and Dino Alfieri), replacing Starace with Ettore Muti as Fascist Party Secretary and Alfieri with Alessandro Pavolini as Popular Culture Minister.
1940: The Battle of Britain finished, causing Berlin to abandon Operation Sea Lion.
1941: An Axis U‐boat torpedoed the destroyer USS Reuben James near Iceland, killing more than one hundred U.S. Navy sailors.

The trope that we are sensitive to criticism while our problems only continue to fester is an all too common one in the capitalist media. Unfortunately for anticommunists, if they think that they are a viable alternative, then they have another think coming. Case in point:

Smart also quoted an anonymous Ukrainian official who said that Pugliese is an “activist” known in Kyiv for “his public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric,” which “coincides with Russian propagandist narratives.” This individual reportedly said that “Ukraine would consider him to be, writing in all capital letters,” an “UNDESIRABLE PERSON.”

My guess is that this official came from the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, which a few months later accused Pugliese of promoting “anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and narratives aimed at demonizing the Ukrainian military,” not least of all with social media posts in which the Ottawa Citizen journalist “repeatedly spoke about the so-called problem of nazism in Ukraine, particularly related to the supposed nazi regiment ‘Azov’. Such rhetoric about the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ clearly echoes the Russian narrative, which Putin used as an excuse for his invasion of Ukraine.”

[...]

In early 2014, Chris Alexander “committed to work with” the nationalist Ukrainian Canadian Congress “to take immediate and concrete action condemning Russia’s continued economic and political coercion of Ukraine.” That summer, he had an awkward moment at the annual Ukrainian festival in Toronto. A neo-Nazi from “Right Sector Canada” set up a table to raise money for “anything.” When the CBC interviewed Chris Alexander at the festival, and asked him what he thought about this, the Minister fumbled as Right Sector flags waved in the background.

“You’re telling me something second-hand that is a rumor that I have no ability to comment on in a responsible way,” Alexander said, standing in front of a booth for the largest Ukrainian-Canadian financial institution, which is also an OUN-B front, and has supported the Banderites’ book publishing operation in Ukraine.

For the first anniversary of the February 2014 coup d’etat in Kyiv, an important far-right Ukrainian politician, Andriy Parubiy, took a trip to Canada. Parubiy, a former neo[fascist] paramilitary leader, commanded the “Maidan Self Defense Force” that provided the muscle for the “Euromaidan” protests that started in late 2013. A few months later, he was secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, and by 2015 served as the first deputy chairman of Ukrainian parliament. In this capacity, Parubiy took several meetings in Ottawa, and addressed the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) in Toronto.

“I thank the Ukrainian community,” said Parubiy, “which to a large degree displays the [pro-western, nationalist] position of Ukraine, and obviously the [Canadian] government orientates itself on the position of the community.” At the UCC event, he appeared alongside Chris Alexander, who donned a handkerchief from the far-right-led Maidan Self Defense, and made a warmongering speech to Toronto’s nationalistic Ukrainian community.

We know, as you know, that Vladimir Putin is only going to face his comeuppance and his whole mad nightmare is only going to come apart at the seams, when the whole world is standing against him, with every option on the table […] This is the biggest issue facing the world today, in my view […] What is happening in eastern Ukraine has roots that go as far back as […] the Second World War, but it really has to do with the incomplete process of ending the existence of the Soviet Union for good — ending the oppression and the Faustian bargain that had been made in the Second World War with Stalin’s Soviet Union, for good.

[…]

We must speak out against this dangerous ideology [of Russian revanchism] which is present in our own city of Toronto, which is present across Canada, which comes to use through state-sponsored Russian channels that are preaching absolute poison! For Vladimir Putin’s media handlers to be calling the government of Ukraine, calling us Ukraine supporters, [and] to be calling the whole western world “Nazis” is nothing less than reprehensible, and we must be taking the lead, not only in fighting, and supporting those who are fighting, not only in making sure that Ukraine gets all the support that it needs, but in denouncing one of the greatest perversions of history that I have seen in my lifetime […] Ladies and gentlemen, let’s join that fight as well.

There are ideas as stake here, there is ideology at stake here, there is history at stake here, and all of our democracies! All of our democracies depend on the outcome of this struggle. It is going to be a great struggle. We are just at the beginning of this struggle, and I think when I see groups like this assembled, when I see determination on the level that is plain from all of your faces, I know that the future of Ukraine is still bright. I know the ties that bind Canada to Ukraine have never been stronger, and I know that Canada’s leadership in the world on this issue, as on others, has never been more important. […] Slava Ukraini!

Left to right in Toronto, 2015: Paul Grod (UCC president), Ted Opitz (Conservative MP), Andriy Parubiy, Chris Alexander, and Markian Shwec (UCC-Toronto)

Before moving on, let’s take a moment to digest Alexander’s comments about the “perversions of history.” It almost goes without saying that according to him, “Hitler was an ally of Stalin, Putin’s idol,” and “Putin has resurrected this red-brown alliance.” This politician and former diplomat helped to initiate the project to establish an extremely problematic “Victims of Communism” monument in Ottawa.

As David Pugliese recently reported, “The Department of Canadian Heritage is being told that more than half of the 550 names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism should be removed because of potential links to the Nazis or questions about affiliations with fascist groups, according to government records.”

His numerous stories about this controversial project are another reason for Alexander to have an axe to grind with the award-winning journalist. Pugliese, who specializes in writing about military issues, apparently also embarrassed Alexander back when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence.

In the spring of 2022, Chris Alexander told his ~130,000 Twitter followers that Russia is “committing the same war crimes as Nazi invaders.” A couple months later, he said, “There is no substantive difference between the threat to world peace represented by revanchist Nazi Germany in 1939 & that of genocidal, irredentist & fascist Russia in 2022.” Last year, Alexander shared an article about the “Jewish Question” from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, just to compare “Hitler’s determination to ‘remove the Jews’” with “Putin’s obsession with ‘removing Ukraine.’”

Even before Putin launched his so-called “special military operation,” Alexander said that “Germans should understand” they don’t deserve all the blame for “the horrors of the Second World War,” which the Kremlin started. “Germany has overcome its Nazi past. It now needs to face down, with equal vigour, Russia’s dark Stalinist legacy.”

I actually agree with him that Germans should understand that they do not deserve all of the blame for the horrors of the Second World War. Certainly, the Imperial bourgeoisie deserves a great deal of blame for starting it by invading Manchuria in 1931, and anticommunists from the Anglosphere, Austria, the Balkans, the Baltics, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iberia, Italy, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Turkey, and elsewhere deserve blame for only aggravating the violence, but contemporary anticommunists do not want to talk about any of that, do they?

Likewise, modern Germany is most certainly not a model for the Russian Federation if it seeks to face down its “dark Stalinist legacy” (don’t laugh!). Between the surviving architecture, the abundance of neofascists, and the mistreatment of anticolonial Jews, only Italy or Japan would be a worse model.

Whatever you may think about the Russian Federation, hopefully we can at least come to an agreement that it is not the greatest threat to world peace today.

And Chris Alexander is undoubtedly the worst historian in Canada:

In the coming months, before Ukraine’s unsuccessful counter-offensive, Chris Alexander insisted, “The war will only end with fascist Russia’s defeat, as the Second World War ended with Nazi Germany’s defeat.”

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

1882: Günther Adolf Ferdinand von Kluge, Axis field marshal, existed.
1893: Roland Freisler, State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, was unfortunately born.
1906: Hans Otto Georg Hermann Fegelein, Waffen‐SS commander, made life less tolerable with his presence.
1933: Dozens of SA men marched to the Turkish embassy to hold a guard of honor for the Turkish Republic and stood there the whole day. Later that day, Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, and the rest of the core SA leadership came to congratulate the ambassador and to walk past the honor guard with him—many of this honor guard had served in the Ottoman Empire. Finally, Rome signed the ‘Agreement modifying the Agreement of March 10, 1924, concerning the Issue of the 7 % Tobacco Loan’ at Warsaw.
1941: The Axis sent fifteen hundred Jews from Pidhaytsi to Bełżec extermination camp.
1942: Lt. Tony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier drowned while taking code books from the sinking Axis submarine U‐559.
1944: Axis personnel deported Anne and Margot Frank from Auschwitz to the Bergen‐Belsen concentration camp, where they died from disease the following year, shortly before WWII’s end.

For those of us unaware, Mountain Jews are Jewish people who have lived in the North Caucasus for several centuries. They are a unique demographic, identifying neither as Ashkenazic nor Sephardic (though some have had Ashkenazic neighbors), and there are undoubtedly aspects of their culture that many of their Jewish siblings elsewhere would find odd.

When the anticommunists reinvaded Soviet Eurasia in 1941 and later made it to the North Caucasus, some of their victims were Mountain Jews:

[T]he [Axis’s] first encounter with Mountain Jews ended with the latter’s murder. This first massacre of Mountain Jews took place outside the borders of the North Caucasus, in the Shaumian Kolkhoz in the Crimea, most of whose members, it would seem, were Mountain Jews.⁴⁶

In March 1942 one of the Gentile neighbors informed the [Axis] authorities about the “Jewish presence” in the area. In response, Einsatzgruppe D—in cooperation with the military gendarmerie (Feldgendarmerie) and local collaborators—rounded up and murdered all 114 Mountain Jews there.⁴⁷ This was carried out in full cognizance of the fact that these were Mountain Jews, i.e., not Ashkenazi.⁴⁸

The Mountain Jews had been settled in the Crimea under the aegis of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, whose aid the Soviet government accepted as part of a program to resettle Jews “on the land”; the [Axis powers] were aware of this, and it may have inclined Einsatzgruppe D to view the Mountain Jews there as participants in the same “world Jewish conspiracy” and therefore to kill them along with the Ashkenazi Jews.⁴⁹

It should be noted that the annihilation of Mountain Jews was mentioned only in a local military report,⁵⁰ but not in the more official Ereignismeldung (Situation Report) that Einsatzgruppe D sent to Berlin. Thus it may be that the Einsatzgruppe considered its decision to murder the Mountain Jews in the Crimea a local matter, and that they thought they did not need to obtain authorization from Berlin for such actions—either before or after.

[...]

The first communities of Mountain Jews captured by the [Axis] in the Caucasus, at the end of August 1942, were two kolkhozes in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe (Kursk Raion, Stavropol Krai), in which the Mountain Jews constituted a significant portion of the entire Jewish membership.⁵⁷ Meanwhile, spontaneous incidents of looting Jewish property, brutalization of Jews, and murder multiplied rapidly.

There is no evidence that the [Axis] even considered treating the Mountain Jews here differently from their Ashkenazi co-religionists: perhaps the fact that they lived together caused the [Axis] to view them as a single entity. Scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe were murdered by machine gun fire on September 20 and August 19, 1942, respectively,⁵⁸ a total of about 850 victims.⁵⁹

We do not know with certainty which [Axis] forces were responsible for exterminating the Jews in these two places. In theory, the kolkhozes were situated in the operative domain of Einsatzkommando (EK) 12. However, Soviet findings claim that a large Wehrmacht unit camped in Bogdanovka⁶⁰ and murdered the Jews there; this points to the possibility of the direct involvement of the [Wehrmacht]. This would increase the likelihood that the [Axis powers] (at least in Bogdanovka) were unaware of the Mountain Jews’ uniqueness.

Hence,

86. Both Altshuler and Arad estimate that about 1,000 Mountain Jews perished during the Holocaust. Altshuler, Yehudei mizrah Kavkaz, 151; Arad, History of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 2004, 535. However, this estimate does not take into account up to 1,400 Mountain Jews murdered in the village of Ganshtakovka (see n. 56). With this the death total reaches between 2,000 and 2,500, some forty to fifty percent of the original number in the region occupied by the [Axis].

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

If 2,500 seems like a ‘low’ number, your suspicion is justified by numerous factors, namely the Axis’s limited reach as well as its relatively brief presence where Mountain Jews lived:

The [Axis] advance had brought under occupation large sections of the North Caucasus, including Orzhonikidze (after liberation changed to Stavropol) and Krasnodar territories (krai, pl. kraia), the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and a large part of the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic, homes to a large portion of the Mountain Jew population. These found themselves under [Axis] occupation for varying periods of up to five months.

However, most of the large groups of Mountain Jews were in fact not overrun. Out of a Mountain Jewish population of 35,000 in the USSR on the eve of the Second World War,⁸ the only major centers that would be occupied were Nal’chik (capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, occupied for only two months) and Mozdok (in Ordzhonikidze Krai, occupied for four and a half months). In addition, Mountain Jews were a significant component of the local population in some small rural settlements.

Fastidious racial theories:

The [Axis] did not conclude decisively whether the groups were of Jewish origin. Two variants contradicted the possibility of common ancestry with European Jews: (a) the Mountain Jews originated in Persia after mixing with the Persians;³⁸ or (b) they derived from a mixture of several “Eastern races.”³⁹ [...] The [Axis powers] were [...] inclined to the opinion that these were not Jews at all because physically they did not have a Jewish “appearance,” and because they practiced polygamy.⁸⁰

Along with Soviet and partisan recruitment:

A factor reducing the number of Mountain Jews falling under [Axis] occupation was the induction of males between the ages of eighteen and forty (and in many cases older than that) into the Red Army and (to a much lesser extent) the partisan movement. Many testimonies¹⁰ document the enlistment of the men, since at this point—about a year into the war—the Soviet Union was maximizing the exploitation of its human resources to fight the war.¹¹

We can reasonably assume that a large percentage of the men of the community had been drafted before the [Axis] arrived.¹² Regarding participation in the partisan movement, we have only isolated examples and incomplete information allowing no basis for estimating the percentage of Jews who adopted this course.¹³

Taken together, these reasons explain why the Axis’s violence against Mountain Jews was surprisingly less awful than it could have been; the majority of Mountain Jews who had come under occupation survived thanks to the Axis’s uncertainty and hesitation. Even so, for some of us this is going to feel like an inadequate compensation; two thousand deaths is still deeply upsetting.

Further reading: Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus. I leave you with a quote from page 196:

Ashurova recalled how the Ifraimov family of Mountain Jews paid with their lives for an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a family of Ashkenazi Jews: “Our Mountain Jews hid two sisters who were physicians… [The Axis] executed both sisters with the Mountain Jews who were hiding them. Twelve souls [were killed] instantly.”⁴²

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Click here for events that happened today (October 29).

1879: Franz von Papen, conservative who was instrumental to the Fascists’ ascension to power in Berlin, existed.
1897: Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, blighted the world.
1941: In the Kaunas Ghetto, the Axis shot over ten thousand Jews at the Ninth Fort, a massacre known as the ‘Great Action’.
1942: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews.
1944: The Axis lost the Dutch city of Breda to the 1st Polish Armoured Division, and its loss of Hungary was imminent as the Red Army entered it.
1955: Something, most likely an Axis mine, sunk the Soviet battleship Novorossiysk.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, middle-class liberals condemned general strikes as unpatriotic, economically disruptive, and politically divisive acts that threatened the potential for industrial recovery and national unity in Italy.

Though there was disagreement among the liberal middle classes about the merits of the workers’ reasons for striking, they were unanimous in their criticism of workers’ demonstrations as harmful to the Italian patria (fatherland).

With the 1920 factory occupations and the concurrent emergence of workers’ self-defense groups, the liberal middle classes began associating workers’ demonstrations with physical and ideological violence.

Finally, during the biennio nero, middle-class liberals blamed workers’ demonstrations for the continuing armament of the fasci and the increasingly popular appeal of fascism. Some even expressed explicitly philofascist sympathies, citing the fascists’ successful suppression of disruptive and divisive workers’ demonstrations.

The persistency of general strikes, factory occupations, and workers’ self-defense groups over the 1919–1922 thus turned Italian middle-class liberals increasingly sympathetic to fascism.

Though the liberal middle classes were not unanimous in their philofascist sentiments in the months just before Mussolini’s March on Rome, the writer Renato Simoni was accurate in the declaration he made in his summer 1922 column for the newspaper L’Illustrazione italiana: “the [workers’ demonstration], which was supposed to be a large protest against fascism, has enabled fascism to demonstrate its merits.”¹⁵

Not all middle-class liberals were convinced by these merits—that is, by the way fascists violently challenged the radical labor activity and ceaseless workers’ demonstrations of the biennio rosso—but some certainly were.

[…]

La Stampa emphasized the combativeness of some of the workers who were present; for example, the royal guards had no choice but to arrest “the most quarrelsome and hotheaded” of the demonstrators.⁷²

Additionally, while describing instances of violence involving “a young man struck with a blow to the head falling to the ground” or “a manual laborer struck and [with] his hands on his bloody head,” the newspaper employed the passive voice and thus obscured the direct agency of the policemen and fascist squadristi in the events. It even characterized such incidents as “scuffles” and “skirmishes” rather than as obvious acts of police and fascist violence against demonstrating workers.⁷³

In this way, La Stampa underlined that violence was present at yet another workers’ demonstration while absolving the perpetrating policemen and fascists of their responsibility in that violence. As it had done in its coverage of worker demonstrations in prior years, it presented the outbreak of violence as inherent to the strike rather than the direct consequence of the state and fasci’s violence toward workers.

[…]

La Stampa also held the arditi del popolo at least partially responsible for the fascists’ refusal to immediately disarm. The newspaper asserted that “that which is boiling up, the formation of antifascist forces that took place in Rome a few days ago, and the simultaneous debut of the « Arditi del Popolo », have offered fascism a motive to cry provocation and interrupt their attempts” at peace and disarmament.”

The public exercises of the arditi del popolo in Rome had thus frustrated and angered the fasci into continued armament, which they might have considered stopping had it not been for the 6 July demonstration.⁷⁷

[…]

According to Tasca, despite the fundamentally liberal rhetoric used by the secret action committee in their proclamation of the strikes, the fascists received support from liberal newspapers, many of which had originally “blamed the fascists for contributing towards socialist participation by their excesses.”

However, at this point in what had become a de facto civil war, “the conservative and ‘liberal’ press,” along with the Italian bourgeoisie more generally, “congratulated the fascists who were containing and extending, in the name of the state, the work of destruction” and suppression of workers’ strikes.⁸⁴

[…]

L’Illustrazione, however, went beyond criticizing the striking workers and condemning the economic disruptiveness and violence of the strike, using that criticism as justification for its praise of the actions taken by fascists against the strikes. Explaining how the “the fascist reaction [to the general strike in Milan] produced a broad and immediate consensus in public opinion” that was sympathetic to the fascists, the issue included an entire page favorably depicting “blackshirts [replacing] workers on train platforms and other public services.”⁸⁶

The publication thus not only offered an account of increasing public advocacy for the fascist response to the general strike but itself expressed support for the fascists. It also provided an analysis of the Italian public’s philofascist turn to the Right, declaring that “fascism has protected our right to feel Italian” and that, while “we, the masses, we, the tranquil population […] are threatened with thirst and hunger by the activity of the red organizations […] the fascists focus only on responding to those who cause it.”

Thus, in L’Illustrazione’s conception, with the proclamation of the general strike on the evening of July 31st, “the public [was] called to judge [between] the two disagreeing parties […] the fascists and the socialists”; since “there [was] no government” left to resolve the people’s problems, the public ended up siding with the fascists, who emerged as the ones “who [helped] us, [defended] us” from the industrial sabotage perpetrated by the working-class movement.⁸⁷

The workers’ demonstration, which in the summer of 1921 was perpetuating fascist violence by merely giving existing fascists further reason to be violent, was in August 1922 turning middle-class liberals into explicit supporters of fascism.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Read the paragraphs below and then remind yourselves that somebody wrote these over one hundred years ago:

The strike would have “damaging effects […] on the national economy” and “would be a disaster for all […] bourgeois and proletarian alike.” Furthermore, it would divide the Italian working class along ideological lines: the “Italian populace [was] made up of innumerable proletarians who [were] not socialists,” so the strikers could not truthfully present themselves as a “universal proletarian force.”

[…]

By criticizing the actual tactic of the general strike, it also showed how divisive acts like worker demonstrations could undermine that potential for agreement; besides, there was no need for a strike when “parliamentary political pressure alone could easily” change the policies of the Italian government—for example, its official position on foreign socialist states.²⁹

[…]

According to L’Illustrazione, just as “little boys [played] shopkeeper, grocer, salesman, [and] sailor” to feel what it was like to be an adult, Italian workers were childishly taking over factories in order to feel what it was like to be a production manager. For this reason, the revolutionary aspirations of the maximalist working-class movement represented nothing more than the “infancy of a [naive] new society [that mimicked] the toils of grown-up society.”

In L’Illustrazione’s view, and as alluded to by La Stampa, the occupying workers simply lacked the technical knowledge and intelligence necessary to efficiently run factories on their own.⁶⁰ The factory occupations were an inconvenient nuisance to Italian society but were too “childlike” and uncoordinated to pose an existential threat to it.

[…]

In the same issue, weekly column writer Renato Simoni further captured middle-class liberals’ growing sense of class insecurity: “we pass from danger to danger! Oh how tragic is the life of the poor bourgeois in Italy!”⁶²

Seven days later, he criticized the occupying workers for being “unsatiated and insatiable” in their emands to their employers and accused them of “wanting the industrialists, after having licked off all the salt, to eat the plate too”: the workers “were not content with [mere] control of the factories [but demanded] the factories and the industrialists [themselves].”⁶³

In the newspaper’s view, the occupiers did not merely want to secure a stronger position in wage negotiations or increased workers’ participation in management decisions. Rather, their motivating ideology was allegedly a violent one that sought to devour their employers and endangered the “poor bourgeois.”

[…]

The publication castigated workers for their decision to go on strike, yet again detailing the costs that society incurred as a result of the workers’ demonstration: according to L’Illustrazione, “the tyranny of the reds” temporarily shut down public services, wasted public funds, and destroyed the national credit.

Yet the weekly also mocked the strikers for their inability to significantly disrupt everyday life in Milan, describing the ways in which the city’s trains, telegraphs, and postal system remained functioning throughout most of the strike despite what it claims were the striking workers’ best efforts: “the strike is dying in front of a laughing public.”⁸⁵

In this way, the magazine condemned the disruption that the strike caused in Milan while simultaneously making fun of its inability to paralyze life in the city, a pair of remarks whose inconsistency is indicative of the newspaper’s continued disgruntlement with and hostility toward the working-class movement.

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Click here for events that happened today (October 28).

1897: Hans Speidel, Axis and then NATO general, existed.
1922: The Fascists marched on Rome and, with the monarachy’s permission, became part of the Italian government.
1940: Athens rejected Fascist Italy’s ultimatum; Fascist Italy consequently invaded Greece through Albania a few hours later.
1941: The Axis and its Lithuanian collaborators commenced massacring thousands of Jews from the Kaunas ghetto.
1944: The Axis lost Ukraine to the Soviets.
1945: Kesago Nakajima, Axis lieutenant general who oversaw the Nanking Massacre, dropped dead.

Understanding how fascism was often informed by the politics of imperialism and colonialism is of particular importance for historians of fascism and the far right in the former settler colonies of North America, southern Africa and Australasia. Scholars, such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, have described settler colonialism as an invasive process involving the violent dispossession of the indigenous population, which shares an affinity with fascism’s need for violent expansion and the ‘cleansing’ of populations for the desired nation.¹⁸

Robin D.G. Kelley and Cedric Robinson remind us that many Black activists in the interwar period saw ‘fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism’.¹⁹ While staunchly anti-fascist, the Communist Party of South Africa noted in the early years of the Second World War that non-Europeans in the Union were not wholly convinced that fascism was much different to the racial hierarchy that existed in South Africa at the time.²⁰

[...]

In its strongest formulations, the idea of ‘decoloniality’ might actually lead one to question the very distinction between fascism and colonialism in the Southern African context. Decolonial thought would stress the undoubted reality that in the colonial era, subjects of all southern African régimes, whether settler-controlled or metropolitan-centred, led lives constrained by racial structures and ideologies and the accompanying denial of democratic rights, high levels of state violence and extremely coercive labour practices (and that this history has long-lasting legacies).

This emphasis would point to the conclusion that there was no significant difference between overtly fascist colonial governments (such as Portugal in Angola and Mozambique) and those which claimed to align with democratic values (Britain in Northern Rhodesia for instance). In both cases the experience of the colonised was, it could be argued from this perspective, much the same.

In South Africa, such a view actually has a precedent in the Second World War politics of an important Black leftist group, the Non-European Unity Movement. The NEUM opposed the pro-British war effort of the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, arguing that his régime was itself fascist.

They adopted a rhetoric which portrayed themselves as analogous to the European resistance, for instance referring to Black participants in state structures as ‘Quislings’. Black people, in this view, had nothing to gain from an Allied victory, as South African segregationists were indistinguishable from [German Fascists].

However, there is also a strong Black intellectual history in the region, in which opposition to fascism is a significant theme. Within South Africa, at the same time as the NEUM was emerging, the leadership of the main African nationalist organisation, the ANC, supported the war effort, using the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.

It is true that they thus hoped to bring leverage to bear on the Allies to impose a liberalisation of racial policies on Smuts. But ANC leaders like Dr A.B. Xuma believed that their ends would best served by an Allied triumph than by the success of Hitler and his local allies in the radical wing of Afrikaner nationalism. The distinction between fascism and other forms of rule was seen by them as being a weighty one.

Moreover, during the era of guerilla war against the [anticommunists] in Mozambique and Angola, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia and the South African apartheid order, both the insurgent movements and their allies abroad were often anxious to portray their opponents as ‘fascist’. This was rhetorically useful, as a tactic of delegitimisation, but also (although often inconsistently) used as a point of departure for political analysis.

There is thus a serious history of southern African Black intellectual engagement with the topic of fascism, and a closer look at that might be one useful way in which thinking about fascism from a decolonial perspective could be useful.

But, there are broader issues to which the decolonial approach might also usefully point us. One potential application is to insist that the experience of southern Africa needs to be given greater weight in Europe-focused studies of fascism. There is considerable debate on whether the [...] Estado Novo (1934–1974) was ‘technically’ fascist, but it is indisputable that it belonged to the family of prewar European [anticommunist dictatorships].

Its (NATO-backed) colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique from 1960 to 1974 were major military and political struggles. Yet this enormous conflict has not sufficiently registered in the mainstream of European historiography. A decolonial perspective might suggest that this marginalisation reflects a reluctance to integrate the colonial world into historical thought about fascism.

Similarly, [Fascist] overseas operations in the ‘global South’ have seldom been taken seriously as part of the main story of German Fascism. During the 1930s [the Third Reich] ran a vast international organisational operation. This included powerful [Fascist] movements amongst the wealthy German community in South African-ruled Namibia and support to small but vociferous fascist movements in South Africa.

During the Second World War, a mass Afrikaner fascist movement, the Ossewa Brandwag, emerged in South Africa, which had strong clandestine links to [Fascist] intelligence and carried out sabotage operations. Without exaggerating their significance, a lot more could be done to relate these developments to events within the Reich and in the course of the Second World War.

The question of whether they were more significant in the history of [German Fascism] and the world conflict than has generally been allowed, might at least be a useful one to ask.²³

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Some of the Anglophile far right, such as the League of Rights groups that spread from Australia to Britain, Canada and New Zealand or the National Front inspired groups in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, emphasised the previous network of white Dominions across the British Empire. The ‘white man’s world’ of the British Empire was venerated by the far right as the traditional international order that had been undermined in the postwar period.

These groups called for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia to be brought into a renewed British Commonwealth of the white Dominions, with these states under white minority rule championed as bulwarks against communism and multi-racial democracy.

Fascist Italy practised apartheid in East Africa, and it seems that Apartheid South Africa was a source of inspiration for the Fascists, so this perception should be easy to understand.

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

1842: Prefascist member of the Chamber of Deputies, Giovanni Giolitti, existed.
1858: Saitō Makoto, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan, was born.
1884: Shirō Takasu, Axis career naval officer, was delivered to the world.
1890: Toshinari Shōji, Axis major general, started his life.
1894: Ernst Friedrich Christoph ‘Fritz’ Sauckel, burdened the earth.
1937: The Opera Nazionale Balilla and all the various Fascist youth organizations became reunited in the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, headed by the PNF secretary Achille Starace, and coincidentally other Fascists released the propaganda film Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal in Italy. Meanwhile, Tōkyō announced the capture of Pingding in Shanxi Province after a three‐day battle and rejected a proposed conference in Brussels to settle the war in China.
1938: The Third Reich began arresting Jews with Polish citizenship with the intention of deporting them to Poland. Coincidentally, the Battle of Wuhan ended in a Pyhrric Imperial victory.
2018: A neofascist opened fire on a Pittsburgh synagogue, massacring eleven humans and injuring six (including four police officers).

Dimitrije Ljotić’s Yugoslav Nationalist Movement, also known as Zbor (Rally) [...] was a pro-fascistic yet highly conservative political association, which received steady financial and political support from [the Third Reich] dating back its foundation in 1935, and which espoused an extreme anti-Communist, anti-liberal and anti-individualist ideological programme. Zbor was a marginal political phenomenon in the interwar years, and did not succeed in receiving more than 1 per cent of electoral support throughout the 1930s.³⁶

However, Ljotić and his close political associates were to become the decisive political factor during the subsequent [Axis] occupation of Serbia, and assumed important positions in the collaborationist government. Zbor advocated a return to the archaic cultural and religious traditions of the Yugoslav nation, and heavily criticized the political course and influence of Western democracies; unsurprisingly, this ideological stance profoundly shaped its adherents’ contributions to the modernization debates.

[...]

The [Axis] régime in rump Serbia implemented some of the most brutal occupation policies and practices in the entire [Axis occupation of] Europe. The cumulative effects of forced labour, detention and execution of the ‘politically unreliable’, constant economic exploitation and food requisitioning were severely worsened by the harsh reprisals in response to the developing armed rebellion of the Communist and nationalist forces.

The initial [Axis] plan not to set up a collaborationist régime with political and governmental duties needed to be changed as the situation with the guerrilla resistance deteriorated and no further reinforcement of the [Wehrmacht] in Serbia was allowed due to the Eastern front demands. In that context, the originally installed purely administrative body functioning under firm German auspices proved inefficient, and what was suggested was ‘reorganizing and strengthening the Serbian administration so that the Serbs themselves might crush the rebellion’.⁵⁰

The puppet government of General Milan Nedić, a high-ranking pre-war military officer and politician with a favourable popular reputation, was thus established in August 1941. From the very beginning of the [Axis] occupation, Ljotić served as one of the most important men in the collaborationist setting in Serbia: he immediately founded the Serbian Volunteers’ Corps (SDK) which was integrated into the Wehrmacht; members of Zbor joined the collaborationist cabinet, while Ljotić himself became a Commissar for the Rebuilding of the City of Smederevo.

Ljotić’s actual political influence extended well beyond what was suggested by his official title. He had a privileged access to the [Wehrmacht] and occupation authorities in Serbia: although he never formally joined Nedić’s government, he maintained significant influence over its decision-making and plans throughout the war years. Still, the government’s areas of authority were heavily restricted from the very outset, and they only shrank as time went on, as the government failed to secure popular backing, pacify the population or eliminate the military rebellion.

The government functioned under constant [Axis] threats of even more brutal anti-civilian retaliations, executions of the most prominent members of the intelligentsia, and the dismemberment and occupation of Serbia by the other Axis forces, etc. According to Tomasevich:

[T]he Serbian puppet government was so subservient to the [...] occupation authorities [that] it cannot truly be said that it had its own policies in any field of government activity. It was simply an auxiliary organ of the [...] occupation régime.⁵¹

Distrusted by the political and SS elements in the [Third Reich’s] apparatus, the government’s activity was largely reduced to low-level administration, pro-[Axis] propaganda efforts and pointing out to the population the futility of any anti-[Axis] operations.

[...]

From the very beginning of the occupation, wartime writings held on to the rhetoric of participation in an exceptionally significant project, one of building the New European Order. They also constructed Serbia as an important, equal, honourable and respected member of the renovated European family of nations.

In fact, as Nedić’s Minister Olćan noted in 1943, while England’s plans for the post-war reconstruction of Europe relegated the Balkans to the political margins and envisaged an insignificant international position for the region,⁸⁰ Serbia under Nedić had been awarded a ‘dignified place in the European community’, which would, after the war, become a ‘family of harmony and happiness’.⁸¹

(Emphasis added.)

As elsewhere in Axis propaganda, Serbia’s collaborationist government critised the United Kingdom for abusing India:

Numerous lengthy treatises on Indian politics, culture, history, literature and religion criticized the ‘British rhetoric of superiority and detestation’ with regard to the local population, the rhetoric that some of the most prominent pre-war intellectuals had themselves internalized. [...] ‘India’s contacts with the West in more recent times brought to [the country] much misfortune, tragedy, unhappiness’.⁶³

While one could easily gloss over this as nothing but another generic attempt to persuade people into siding against the Western Allies, it is more useful to think of it in comparative terms: the colonisation of India was an example of a 'bad' occupation, whereas the Axis's presence in the Balkans was an instance of a 'good' occupation. In other words, no matter how rough the Serbs might have had it, the Indians had it worse. When seen in this light, Axis propaganda (hypocritically) criticizing British colonialism becomes much easier to understand.

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Click here for events that happened today (October 26).

1935: Due to a food shortage in the Rhineland–Palatinate and Saarland, Berlin proclaimed meatless and butterless days for those regions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini called international sanctions against Italy ‘the most odious of injustices’ during a speech commemorating the 13th anniversary of the March on Rome.
1937: The Third Reich commenced expelling 18,000 Polish Jews.
1942: In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the Guadalcanal Campaign, one U.S. aircraft carrier was sunk and another carrier became heavily damaged, while two Axis carriers and one cruiser took heavy damage.
1944: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended with an overwhelming Yankee victory. Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Axis aviator, was killed in this action.
1956: Walter Wilhelm Gieseking, Axis composer, perished.
1960: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, died.
1961: Sadae Inoue, another Axis general, expired.

This past summer, Batulin participated in the “Nation Europa” conference, and so did Kristian Udarov, another fighter from the Terror battalion and the Belarusian Volunteer Corps. Yesterday, Udarov’s younger brother died fighting in the National Guard’s Azov Brigade. Earlier this year, Vadin Kitar took a photo with Udarov, who is affiliated with the far-right Ukrainian organization “Tradition & Order,” which was also represented at the neo-Nazi conference in Lviv.

Denis “White Rex” Kapustin, the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps and one of the most notorious neo[fascists] in Europe, prominently featured in this event, which went unreported by the western media. “White Rex” was one of the only people whose identity wasn’t concealed in photos that the HUR released surrounding the operation to clear the chemical plant, including an awards ceremony led by military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Reportedly for his neo[fascist] fighters, this mission was dedicated to avenging the death of Mykola Kokhanivsky, the extremist commander of the rogue “OUN” volunteer battalion, who died this year in the Vovchansk area.

Several years ago, the Security Service of Ukraine arrested Aleksandr Skachkov, a Russian neo[fascist] who served in Kokhanivsky’s unit, for circulating the neo[fascist] manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the 2019 mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko discovered that Kokhanivsky was an early promoter of the Telegram channel, “Tarrant’s lads,” that Skachkov was accused of running. In my article about Nation Europa, I explained that the HUR Timur unit’s “Team Nobody” is linked to a Telegram channel that has provided its subscribers a “full video in good quality” of the Christchurch massacres.

British military intelligence gave two thumbs up to Budanov’s neo[fascist] special forces, if only after completing their mission in Vovchansk. A public “intelligence update” on October 1 said, “It is likely that Ukrainian control of the plant will facilitate further counter offensives in the north of the city to push the RGF [Russian Ground Forces] back towards the Ukraine-Russia border.”

Although the western media hasn’t given too much attention to the HUR’s achievement in Vovchansk, this British update stirred a few triumphant articles, such as “Ukraine Recaptures Vital Chemical Plant in Latest Blow for Vladimir Putin” (Huffington Post) and “Russian Stronghold Falls” (National Interest). I’m no military analyst and have no idea how important a victory this may have been for Ukraine, but the British seemed to hint at the possibility of more cross-borders from the HUR’s neo[fascist] special forces.

Before Russia’s 2024 offensive in the Vovchansk and Kharkiv directions, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) and its allied units carried out a series of incursions into the Belgorod region of Russia. In the spring of 2023, journalist Leonid Ragozin noticed that Aleksandr Skachkov, the alleged circulator of the Christchurch manifesto, participated in the first RVC raid. Skachkov had a KKK patch on his chest, produced by a company commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade.

As some readers may recall, Vadim Kitar’s girlfriend is the main representative of the Azov-linked brand, “Company Group Team,” and last year, Volodymyr Zelensky gave a peculiar shoutout to this “military community” on Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces Day. Indeed, the “CGT” brand, perhaps above all others, appears to unite those in Ukraine’s “autonomous neo-nazi army” — the Azov movement and allied units. For example, in June 2024, when the Azovite commander of the NGU Svoboda battalion’s Paragon company gave an interview to the battalion’s official podcast, he was interviewed by a neo[fascist] CGT enthusiast from the Svoboda unit.

Last year, when Petro Poroshenko visited the aforementioned 36th marine brigade and received a neo[fascist] patch from one of its units, the former president put his arm around a soldier wearing a CGT shirt. These are just a couple examples that I found months ago, before discovering the degree(s) of separation between them and the Vedmedi SS. Seeing the CGT spokesperson fundraise for her boyfriend’s Junger Group in recent days, I looked up the definition of a “company group” again: “a collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control.”

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

1891: Karl Elmendorff, Fascist opera conductor, was born.
1895: Arthur Schmidt, Axis commander, stained the world.
1908: Gotthard Handrick, Axis fighter pilot, started his life.
1913: The Butcher of Lyon and later CIA asset, Nikolaus Barbie, disgraced humanity with his presence.
1921: Michael I of Romania, Axis collaborator, blighted the earth.
1927: The Fascist luxury liner SS Principessa Mafalda sunk off Brazil’s coast, taking 314 lives down with it.
1936: Count Nobile Ciano conducted a two‐day visit to the Third Reich, which resulted in the Rome–Berlin Axis Pact. Meanwhile, the Rexist ‘March on Brussels’ ended in failure due to low turnout and rowdiness by those who did show up; the authorities made several hundred arrests including Rexist leader Léon Degrelle when he tried to address his followers (though they soon released him).
1939: Mitsubishi delivered the second Zero fighter prototype to the Imperial Japanese Navy for testing.
1940: Sixteen Axis BR20M bombers attacked Felixstowe and Harwich in Britain; one crashed on take off and two crashed on the return flight. Meanwhile, four groups of Axis Bf 109 fighters swept southern England, shooting down ten Allied fighters while losing fourteen of their own. At dusk, Axis He 111 bombers attacked Montrose airfield in Scotland. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Birmingham, Pembroke, Cardiff, and Liverpool. Lastly, the Regia Marina formed the Forza Navale Speciale (FNS) under Vice Admiral Vittorio Tur.
1941: The Axis lost its fighter pilot Franz Xaver Freiherr von Werra to Allied firepower, but the Axis exterminated 1,776 Jewish women and 812 Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 2,578 people), and the Axis set a warehouse full of civilians, mostly Jews, on fire at Dalnik, Ukraine.

Axis submarine Galileo Ferraris attacked Allied convoy HG-75 west of Gibraltar and was discovered by an Allied Catalina flightcraft; Galileo Ferraris's crew scuttled the submarine after being attacked by the Allies, but the Axis was able to hit HMS Lamerton with the deck gun before the engagement was over; six Italians died in the engagement, forty-four survived. Later in the same day, Axis submarine U-563 attacked HG-75, but she was driven away by Allied corvette HMS Heliotrope.
1942: Erwin Rommel visited Rome to press for more supplies for the war in North Africa. He arrived in Egypt to assume command of all Axis units in North Africa by the evening.
1944: Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in the Third Reich that assisted army deserters and others in hiding from the Fascists. As well, the final attempt of the Imperial Japanese Navy to win the war climaxed at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Coincidentally, the Axis lost its last Romanian city, Carei, to the Eastern Allies.
1945: Five decades of Imperial rule in Taiwan formally ended when the Republic of China assumed control. Meanwhile, Robert Ley, head of the ‘German Labour Front’, committed suicide while awaiting trial for war crimes… no comment.
2000: Mochitsura Hashimoto, Axis submarine commander, expired.

As trains carrying writers from around Europe rolled into Weimar on Thursday, October 24 1941, the [Axis’s] articulation of an alternative model of European literature began with, or rather through, these writers themselves.³³ In political terms, the group the Germans assembled in Weimar reflected the map of [the Axis in] Europe. Predictably, it included some invitees distinguished solely by their [...] fascist political commitments.

In literary–political terms, however, it represented regions and trends that the French model of European literature had generally excluded from the upper echelons of international literary exchange. Substantial contingents represented the literatures of Europe’s northern and southeastern periphery, from Norway and Finland to Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. Of course, individual writers from some of these countries had achieved success in Paris.

But the writers the [Axis] called ‘European’ were generally ‘national writers’ ― both in the sense that their readership was largely confined to their nation and in the sense that they placed their talents at the service of the political-cultural project of the nation, rejecting the autonomous status of the ‘international writer’.³⁴

In their national contexts, several were important figures. Veikko Antero Koskenniemi was Finland’s ‘unofficial national poet,’ author in 1940 of new lyrics for the hymn in Sibelius’s Finlandia; historical novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova was a leading intellectual of interwar Bulgaria; Slovakian novelist Jozef Cíger Hronsky led the influential nationalist cultural association Matica Slovenská.³⁵

The focus on national writers accounts for the heavy representation of authors of naturalistic novels set in the rural village or farm — not so much out of ideological linkages to [Fascist] ‘blood and soil’ ideology, but because this was the central literary genre for many of Europe’s predominantly agricultural societies.

Writers in this vein included prominent figures like internationally successful Belgian children’s author (and Flemish nationalist) Felix Timmermans, and Europe’s greatest novelist of ‘the soil’, Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, who communicated his support for the Writers’ Union by telegram.³⁶

Moreover, a significant group among these ‘national’ writers could also be classified as ‘regional’. Works by writers like the Transylvanian-Hungarian Josef Nyirö, Dutch writer and Frisian nationalist Pieter Sybesma, or Norwegian Lars Hansen, whose ishavslitteratur ― travel literature set amid the icy landscapes of the North Pole ― sold well in Germany, all expressed unique forms of life seen to have emerged from the intensely local relationship between people and their regions or landscapes.³⁷

But the predilection for rural themes did not mean the writers were themselves all provincials. The group included many sophisticated, multi-lingual, urban intellectuals, often responsible for translations into their national languages of major works from more established literary languages, above all French and German ― but not for this reason any less nationalist.³⁸

Right-wing Finnish nationalist Koskenniemi, for example, had translated Goethe and Balzac into Finnish. Croatian Antun Bonifačić’, cultural director of the Ustasha régime’s foreign office, had studied at the Sorbonne and published a study on Paul Valéry.³⁹

As these writers mixed and mingled with one another, while being told repeatedly that they were ‘the intellectual select [geistige Auslese] of all European nations,’ they were offered a definition of European writer that built on a [fascistised], antisemitic updating of the traditional German-Herderian model of literature: European literature was composed of national literatures, and only those writers who most authentically expressed their nations’ spirits deserved the title ‘European’.⁴⁰

This was a European literature with no place for cosmopolitan exiles, modernists who appealed to Parisian trends while ignoring the local public, or, needless to say, Jews; nor for those European nationalities now slated for repression, like the Poles, Czechs or Russians, among many others. But with regard to those nationalities it included, this model called on the broad currency of the German model of literature, which after all had stimulated the emergence of some of these national literatures to begin with.⁴¹

Moreover, by including and celebrating regional and rural writers, this vision of European literature capitalized on the international 1930s trend for literary regionalism. Partaking of what Roberto Dainotto calls the ‘metaphysics of place,’ writers and critics across Europe saw in realist texts about specific rural regions a comforting vision of uncorrupted traditions ― cast against the cultural rootlessness and superficiality of urban modernity ― as a basis for literary (and political) renewal and regeneration.⁴²

In Germany this kind of thinking had received its most sophisticated exposition by Martin Heidegger, and had been fully systematized in multi-volume works of völkisch and racist literary theory.⁴³ Thus the writers gathered at Weimar cannot simply be dismissed as ‘applauding pieces of scenery, comparable to the participants in any number of State and Party events’.⁴⁴

On the contrary, this assemblage reflected a careful strategy on the [Axis’s] part: presenting this particular group of authors to the world, to one another, and to themselves as European deliberately labeled national and indeed regional writers as the most European. It turned Larbaud’s definition of the European writer, whereby the ‘European’ was the supra-national, precisely on its head.

(Emphasis added.)

The inclusionary pretensions coupled with the exclusionary practices should sound familiar to some of you: creators (usually white cishet men) who either promote or conform to the status quo are honoured by prestigious institutions while revolutionary socialists are ignored.

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Click here for other events that happened today (October 24).

1910: Gunter d’Alquen, SS officer and journalist, was sadly born.
1922: The Fascists held a huge rally in Naples and made the final plans for the march on Rome.
1934: The Gestapo sent a telegram to every police station in the Reich ordering them to send to Berlin all files on men known for their ‘homosexual practices’.
1938: Joachim von Ribbentrop contacted Warsaw to suggest an anti‐Soviet alliance that would guarantee the Polish–German border for twenty‐five years.
1941: Axis troops shot 142 Greek hostages in another reprisal to discourage antifascism. Meanwhile, other Axis soldiers marched Jews from Odessa’s jail two kilometers down the road toward Dalnik, shooting any who fell behind.
1944: The Empire of Japan’s center force suffered temporary repulsion in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
1945: The Axis lost the infamous Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway, to a firing squad.
1990: Somebody revealed the existence of Operation Gladio.