The Origins of Nazi Violence

In recent years, right-wing terrorism has been on the increase in Germany. The worst case of right-wing terrorism was perpetrated by the National-Socialist Underground or NSU. The NSU murdered ten people, including a police officer, while also committing forty-three attempted murders, three bombings and several robberies between 2000 and 2007. Today Germany’s radical right has created a follow-up organisation called NSU 2.0. Despite a court case against the NSU, right-wing terrorism continues unabated. In 2019, a Neo-Nazi tried to kill fifty Jewish worshipers in a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle. Though this extremist failed to kill Jews but he still managed to murder two other people.

In 2020, another German Neo-Nazi killed nine people, as well as his mother and himself in the western German city of Hanau. One of the more infamous political assassination by Germany’s right-wing extremists was of Regierungspräsident (region district president) Walter Lübcke in 2019. The worst excess of right-wing terrorism, however, occurred more than forty years ago in Munch in 1980. It became known as the “Octoberfest bombing” when Neo-Nazi Gundolf Köhler murdered thirteen people.

Right-wing terrorism in Germany has a one-hundred year old history. Dating back to the end of the Great War (World War I), argues Florian Huber in his book Revenge of the Losers. The beginnings of right-wing terrorism in Germany date to the tumultuous years of what one of Germany’s most astute observers, Sebastian Haffner, once called “a failed

— source counterpunch.org | Thomas Klikauer | Apr 9, 2021

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How the US Supported Hitler’s Rise to Power

Peter Kuznick

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Jewish-Dutch Notary Suspected To Have Betrayed Anne Frank

A six-year investigation into who betrayed Anne Frank and her family has yielded a surprising result.

A cold case team that included retired US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Vincent Pankoke and about 20 historians, criminologists and data specialists has identified a little-known Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, as a highly probable suspect who revealed the family’s hideout to the Nazis in August 1944.

A CBS documentary and an accompanying book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, based on the investigative team’s findings, detail how the Jewish-Dutch notary van den Bergh allegedly handed over a list of hiding places of Jews in Amsterdam to the Germans to save his wife, three daughters and himself.

His list included the address of the canal-facing warehouse on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where Frank and seven other Jews lived in a secret annexe for nearly two years.

Important clues in an unsigned note

The main piece of evidence was an unsigned note that Anne’s father, Otto Frank, received in 1946, which was found in an old postwar investigation dossier. It specifically named

— source dw.com | 18/Jan/2022

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Germany’s Neo-Nazi Death Squad: NSU and NSU 2.0

Ten years ago, one of Germany’s most violent post-war Neo-Nazi killing squad, the so-called National-Socialist Underground or NSU-network came to light when their caravan exploded and their Neo-Nazi hideout was set on fire to eliminate all evidence. This occurred in the former East-German city of Zwickau. Recently, a secret government file on the NSU was leaked.

The 150 page report talks about Neo-Nazis engaging in military-style war games. These self-appointed killer squads are furnished with weapons, explosives, armory, etc. One reported list includes secret locations for shooting and killing practices in the state of Hessen, where Neo-Nazis like to use remote forests. Yet, German Neo-Nazis also conducted such killing practices with their associates in Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Years ago, some of these Neo-Nazi gatherings laid the foundation for what was going to come: the NSU-network, that killed ten people: nine migrants and one policewoman.

Today, we know – and comes to know that despite what the government and much of Germany’s media have told us – that the NSU was not only three people. The NSU-network was never

— source | Thomas Klikauer | Nov 12, 2021

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A Nazi Era Dissident’s Reflections on Stupidity

Seven and a half years of Bharatiya Janata Party rule have left India’s economy in shambles, her social fabric frayed and her standing amongst the community of nations diminished.

And yet, there are many in our housing societies, workplaces, families, and friends’ circles who genuinely believe the exact opposite. One is left wondering how such a thing is even possible.

Seventy-six years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who opposed the Nazis, wondered something similar. How could a nation that had given the world Gutenberg, Goethe, and Beethoven possibly have embraced a madman like Hitler? Bonhoeffer thought about it long and hard. Was it a deep, hidden malice against the Jews that had finally surfaced, or had ordinary Germans simply fallen prey to Goebbels’s propaganda machinery? Or was it a combination of both?

Imprisoned (and eventually executed) for his opposition to the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer penned his thoughts on the matter in a prison cell. In an essay called On Stupidity, he

— source thewire.in | Rohit Kumar | 12/Nov/2021

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When Dhyan Chand and India’s Olympians Refused to Salute Hitler

The Berlin Olympics were declared open on August 1, 1936. M.N. Masood, a member of the team, left a minute-by-minute description of the opening ceremony that provides fascinating information. It was nothing less than a grand spectacle of Hitler’s ‘thousand-year Reich’. The Wehrmacht was fully mobilised in setting up the support infrastructure and the competitors were transported to the venue in army trucks. The Indians, with Dhyan Chand carrying the flag, were by far the most colourfully dressed of the contingents present. As Masood noted,

‘With our golden “kullahs” and light blue turbans, our contingent appeared as members of a marriage procession of some rich Hindu gentleman, rather than competitors in the Olympic Games.’

But this was no ordinary ‘marriage procession’ – the members of the Indian team were about to make a huge political statement by becoming one of the only two contingents who refused to salute Adolf Hitler.

— source thewire.in | Boria Majumdar, Nalin Mehta | Aug 6, 2021

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The Nazi Past of US Geopolitics

Geopolitics is the linking of political power to geographic space. Perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard remains one of its best abstract representations. It’s not only the USA that has geopolitical goals; many other countries, like the UK, France, Russia and Germany, also developed distinct geopolitical ideas. In nineteenth century Germany, geopolitics included imperialist expansion based on a biological conception of geography.

Germany’s geopolitics was turbo-charged in 1923 when a German general, geographer, politician, professor and teacher of top-ranking Nazi, Rudolf Hess, founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal for Geopolitics). During the 1920s, the journal’s editor Karl Haushofer had been a student of Rudolf Hess. In 1933, he became Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Führer until his infamous flight to Scotland in 1941. The goal was to convince none other than the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to join Nazi-Germany’s invasion of the Soviet-Union. The effort failed, of course.

Karl Haushofer might not be the inventor of term Lebensraum (living space) but he certainly was the one who shaped the term into a strategic plan and introduced the idea to Adolf Hitler. The relatively uneducated Hitler (who was born Adolf Schicklgruber in Austria’s rural hinterland) never attended university, never

— source counterpunch.org | Thomas Klikauer | May 26, 2021

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Hitler’s American business partners

Dieter Schroeder, Joachim Schroeder
1930s – Ford, GM, IBM, and the Nazis

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How Real Nazis Came to the Americas: the Recruitment of Klaus Barbie

By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, he had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin.) After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before the Allies moved into Germany.

Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entered on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand.

By the early 1960s, Barbie was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed, the old Nazi became a central player in the US-inspired Condor Program, aimed at suppressing popular insurgencies and keeping US-controlled dictators in power throughout Latin America. Barbie helped organize the so-

— source counterpunch.org | Jeffrey St. Clair | Feb 26, 2021

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The Forgotten Holocaust” of the Roma

On January 27, 1945, a detachment of the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division entered what appeared to be a hastily abandoned labor camp. “Arbeit Macht Frei” was cast into the gates, “work sets you free.” The Soviet troops were about to confront the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis had made genocide a national industry.

On January 6, 2021, Arbeit Macht Frei was seen in the US Capitol. The slogan was on a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt worn by an insurrectionist who mugged for cameras with other pro-Trump rioters as they desecrated the halls of American democracy with Nazi-inspired flags and insignia. Just the month before, members of the Proud Boys had taken to the streets of DC for Trump in “6MWE” shirts (6 million wasn’t enough).

That anti-Semitic, anti-Roma bile is below contempt or comment, other than to say that now is not the moment for the rest of us to stand back and stand by. It’s time to acknowledge and remember.

“The forgotten Holocaust,” is how Professor Eve Rosenhaft, a German historian, describes the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis on the Roma, which by the time the Russians liberated Auschwitz had already claimed 25% of the Roma population in Europe. No Nazi war criminals stood trial at Nuremberg for atrocities committed against the Roma. Germany refused to recognize the Nazi persecution of the Roma until 1982. It took France until 2016 to acknowledge the role of its collaborators in the mass murder of the Roma, and for decades the US Government has demonstrated ambivalence toward Roma representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council.

Initially, it was estimated that “only” 250,000 Roma had been murdered in the Holocaust, but by 1995, US Holocaust Memorial Research Institute senior historian, Dr. Sybil Milton, stated it was closer to “a million-and-a-half” victims. A combination of the SS destroying concentration camp records as the

— source counterpunch.org | Tom Rodgers | Jan 27, 2021

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