Switzerland ready to host Putin for any Geneva peace talks, minister says
Neutral Switzerland is a signatory to the ICC but Cassis told Swiss national broadcaster SRF that provided Putin was coming for peace purposes, the country could receive him.
"This has to do with our diplomatic role, with international Geneva as (the European) headquarters of the United Nations," Cassis told the broadcaster.
French President Emmanuel Macron mooted Geneva as a potential location for Ukraine peace talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after a meeting between U.S. President Trump, Zelenskiy and European leaders in Washington.
The ICC issued its warrant in 2023, just over a year after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, accusing Putin of the war crime of deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
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Kim Jong Un's sister condemns South Korea following joint US military drills
The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said her country will never see South Korea as a partner for diplomacy, state media reported on Wednesday in what was her latest taunt of Seoul 's new efforts to mend ties. Kim Yo Jong, who is one of her brother's top foreign policy officials, denounced the ongoing South Korea -US military drills as a 'reckless' invasion rehearsal and claimed Seoul 's peace gestures conceal a 'sinister intention' against Pyongyang. Her comments came during a meeting on Tuesday with senior Foreign Ministry officials about her brother's diplomatic strategies in the face of persistent threats from rivals and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said. On Monday, Kim Jong Un condemned the South Korean-US military drills and vowed a rapid expansion of his nuclear forces as he inspected his most advanced warship being fitted with nuclear-capable systems. The North's news agency said Kim Yo Jong condemned the South as the 'top-class faithful dog' of the United States and that the reparation of inter-Korean relations desired by Seoul 'will never' happen. The siblings' back-to-back statements followed the latest outreach by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who said last week that Seoul would seek to restore a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement aimed at reducing border tensions, while urging Pyongyang to reciprocate by rebuilding trust and resuming dialogue. In a nationally televised speech Friday, Lee said his government respects North Korea's current system and that the wealthier South 'will not pursue any form of unification by absorption and has no intention of engaging in hostile acts.' But he also stressed that the South remains committed to an international push to denuclearise the North and urged Pyongyang to resume dialogue with Washington and Seoul. Angered by expanding South Korean-US military drills, Kim Jong Un last year declared that North Korea was abandoning long-standing goals of a peaceful unification with South Korea and rewrote the North's constitution to mark the South as a permanent enemy. Kim Yo Jong has repeatedly dismissed calls to revive negotiations aimed at winding down the North's nuclear and missile programs, which derailed in 2019 following her brother's collapsed summit with US President Donald Trump during his first term. Since Russia 's invasion of Ukraine, Kim Jong Un has made Moscow the priority of his foreign policy, sending troops and weapons to support President Vladimir Putin 's war, while also using the conflict as a distraction to accelerate his military nuclear program. In her meeting on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong suggested that Pyongyang seeks to compete with Seoul diplomatically, claiming the South 'will not even have a subordinate role in the regional diplomatic arena,' which she claimed will be centered on the North.
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Times
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How postwar Germans tried to censor films with Nazi villains
Running throughout the middle of the 1960s, Combat! was one of the most vivid and successful Second World War dramas yet aired on the small screen. Its fictional but meticulously realistic account of an American infantry unit battling through German-occupied France after D-Day left millions, from Toronto to Taiwan, Los Angeles to Lima, glued to their black-and-white television sets every week. Yet it stuck in the craw for one group of viewers: West German officialdom. Two decades after the end of the war, diplomats and civil servants were horrified by what they saw as a flood of 'anti-German' films and television series that slandered the Wehrmacht soldiers as villains. 'You see them plundering, committing arson and murdering women and children,' the West German outpost in Caracas wrote in a cable to the foreign ministry, adding that it was quietly lobbying to have Combat! taken off the airwaves. This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich's war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government. It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht', which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its 'party soldiers' in the SS were to blame. Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women. However, the West German state under Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor from 1949 to 1963, insisted on its innocence as a matter of policy. This was not just a political strategy to court the votes of millions of Wehrmacht veterans; it was also viewed as an essential part of the justification for West Germany's rearmament against the threat from the Soviet bloc from the early 1950s. • Secret files reveal the Nazis chosen to run West Germany In 1951 Adenauer had even persuaded Dwight Eisenhower, who had led the Allied assault on Nazi Germany and then became the supreme commander of Nato forces in Europe, to issue a statement absolving the 'great majority' of German soldiers. This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich's crimes against humanity. Some of these incidents are already notorious: in 1956, for example, the West German interior ministry and embassy in Paris tried to have Night and Fog, the French director Alain Resnais' award-winning documentary about the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, withdrawn from the programme at the Cannes film festival. Jutta Braun, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, has uncovered evidence that these efforts were much more extensive than previously known, and lasted until well into the 1970s. Sifting through the archives of the German Federal Press Office (BPA), Braun found officials had not only maintained a list of 'anti-German propaganda' in war films but also used underhand means to try to get them pulled from cinemas and television schedules. Its targets were numerous: not only Combat! and Night and Fog but also other popular American series such as The Rat Patrol, which told the story of American and British soldiers trying to sabotage Rommel's Afrika Korps, and Jericho, which followed British, American and French spies behind enemy lines. In 1965 the West German embassy in Washington, led by an ambassador who had previously headed the anti-American propaganda section in the Nazi German foreign ministry, went so far as to blame 'the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry' for the tide of 'hate-films' that had added murderous German soldiers to the pantheon of 'bad guys'. The campaign also affected Canada, where the public broadcaster, CBC, had aired a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and a film from 1944 that imagined the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The West German embassy complained that it was 'defaming' a Nato ally and secured an apology from the head of CBC, who said the scheduling had been a mistake by his staff. Other diplomats suggested using threats and financial pressure to bully the films' sponsors and distributors into backing out. 'We do not wish to impose a political burden on our export sector, but the embassy regards an intensified pressure in this area as promising,' the embassy in Guatemala wrote back to Bonn in 1967, as the central American state was gripped by enthusiasm for Combat!. One member of staff in the Washington embassy boasted of having persuaded a Kentucky-based tobacco company to pull its sponsorship for an unspecified Second World War television series. In 1965 the embassy planted articles in the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, one of the biggest German-language newspapers in the US, that called on Americans with German roots to lodge protests with the broadcasters, the sponsors and their local congressmen. It explicitly called this a 'campaign … with the goal of curbing anti-German television broadcasts'. Not even WGBH, a worthy public broadcaster in Boston that relayed programmes from West Germany, was spared. The embassy criticised it for making an English-language version of a German documentary about everyday life in a concentration camp instead of picking up an 'excellent' television adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos. 'This 'defensive battle' against so-called 'anti-German' films, especially in the United States, shows how hard the BPA was working to uphold the 'honour of the German soldier',' Braun said, adding that it 'reveals the authoritarian understanding of the state' and lack of a 'pluralistic view of the world'. Britain got off lightly. The embassy in London kept a watchful eye on popular series such as Colditz, an early 1970s drama about Allied prisoners of war trying to escape from Colditz Castle in Saxony, and Fawlty Towers. This was not always a comfortable experience: when the West German broadcaster WDR syndicated Fawlty Towers in 1978, it omitted the famous 'Don't mention the war' episode in which Basil Fawlty cannot keep himself from abusing a family of German hotel guests. Yet the West German diplomats in the UK were on the whole much more restrained than their counterparts in the Americas, praising the quality of television shows such as the documentary series Inside Germany and Thames Television's 1975 programme The Final Solution: Auschwitz. In fact the embassy was sanguine when the BBC broadcast a strident wartime propaganda film called 49th Parallel in 1974, more than 30 years after it was a hit in cinemas, and a London correspondent for the Welt newspaper published an apoplectic editorial calling on the West German government to defend its veterans. Karl-Günther von Hase, the West German ambassador in London and a previous head of the BPA, was forgiving of the British public's taste in war films and saw the issue in a more nuanced light. Most of the commentary in the British press, he noted, had come out against the 'glut of 'stupid-Hun' films'. He cabled to Bonn: 'There is scarcely any western country where the experience of the war has remained so alive as it has here. Britain had to fiercely defend its existence and mobilise the very last of its strength in two world wars.' Braun also found intriguing evidence that Britain might have meddled in the German media on at least one occasion. In the 1950s the Overseas News Agency, a New York-based entity that was secretly funded by what is now known as MI6, approached the BPA with a plan to plant positive articles about the history of soldiery, from Alexander the Great to the present day, in dozens of local newspapers. The BPA, which thought the idea fit with its own secret strategy of 'counter-infiltration', handed the agency 2,700 deutschmarks (a little over €8,000 in today's terms) to help it deliver the texts to 90 West German publications. Braun said it was not entirely clear whether the articles about soldiers were a covert British attempt to tilt the West German population towards supporting rearmament, or simply an opportunistic scheme dreamt up by the agency's go-between with the government in Bonn. However, she said these dark arts and the murky nexus of intelligence, spin and journalism were characteristic of the postwar years. Early in his chancellorship, Adenauer told Otto Lenz, his chief of staff, that the 'most urgent' priority was 'the establishment of appealing propaganda' for the state. Various proposals circulated at the highest level of his government for upgrading the BPA into a 'propaganda ministry' reminiscent of its Nazi predecessor under Joseph Goebbels, but in the service of democratic ideals. Although these plans were ultimately discarded, the BPA still 'stood in the shadow' of Goebbels's super-ministry, according to Braun. It stooped to methods such as suppressing its own opinion polling whenever the results cast the Germans in an unfavourable light, such as a study that found only 12 per cent of them had a positive opinion of Jews. It also hired several senior officials who had previously worked in Goebbels's propaganda apparatus. Felix von Eckardt, who ran the office from 1952 to 1955, had written more than 25 screenplays during the Third Reich, including The Dismissal (1942), which implied Hitler was Bismarck's true heir. Hans Schirmer, director of its overseas department in the 1950s, had joined the Nazi party weeks after Hitler seized power in 1933 and worked for Goebbels's ministry. A number of others had worked for the regime's newspapers. 'I was astonished how easy it was even for former journalists at Nazi, antisemitic hate-sheets such as Der Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter to get jobs at the press office,' Braun said. 'And how simple it seems to have been for these people to 'write in any direction' — before 1945 in the service of the Nazi war of aggression, and then in the young Federal Republic to improve the image of the postwar democracy.' In the end, however, the BPA never attained anything like the level of power or influence that the propaganda ministry had wielded under the Third Reich, and democratically minded officials in its upper echelons often shot down the more outlandish plans for manipulating the public. Braun cited a 'witticism' from Von Hase: 'Goebbels sold criminal policies dangerously well. You could plausibly claim that our policies weren't criminal, but you also have to admit that they weren't dangerously well sold either.' 'That is correct,' Braun added. 'And, of course, it's a good thing.' The study is published in Das Kanzleramt: Bundesdeutsche Demokratie und NS Vergangenheit (The Chancellery: West German Democracy and the Nazi Past) by Jutta Braun, Nadine Freund, Christian Mentel and Gunnar Take
