Latest news with #Himmler
Medscape
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Medscape
Behind History's Icons II: Hitler's Jaw and Cold War Secrets
Ancient Egyptians believed that mummifying a king's body was key to his ascent into the realm of the gods. The preserved body, known as the Ach, a luminous spirit, was thought to begin this journey by entering the sarcophagus, seen as the womb of Nut, the mother goddess of the sky. The belief in the enduring power of human remains has been deep in global history. In the West, reverence for the relics of Christian saints took place early in the Church. Some of the most extraordinary examples include what was believed to be the foreskin of Jesus and the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. By the 19th century, European scientists had begun preserving and studying body parts of famous individuals — from Mohammed's beard and Buddha's teeth to Adolf Hitler's jaw. Following the Napoleon relics story, Part II probes Hitler's preserved jaws. Hitler's Final Days It was April 28, 1945. Hitler, 1889-1945, Germany's leader, paced furiously through the corridors of the Wolf's Lair, his secret headquarters near Rastenburg, close to Görlitz. He was furious, as his trusted deputy head of the Nazi Party's paramilitary force, Heinrich Himmler is believed to have been betrayed by Hitler for several months. He reportedly held secret talks with Western Allies to end the war. Shockingly, he is said to have offered to halt the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews if Americans — Germany's main enemy in the West — would ease their attacks. Hitler was reportedly stunned. In an effort to regain his composure, Hitler summons Hermann Fegelein — 1906-1945, his liaison to the Waffen Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Party's armed military unit responsible for combat operations. According to these reports, Hitler ordered their execution. Another report stated that he ordered his arrest and left the execution order to his subordinates. Himmler, in turn, expels Hitler from the Nazi Party and removes him from all party and state positions. However, in reality, Hitler was more composed than he appeared. As often in his life, even moments of lost composure serve a greater purpose. Historian and Himmler biographer Heinz Peter Longerich noted that just one week before his public outburst on April 22, 1945, Hitler privately declared that he would stop issuing orders. This was his way of signaling to his top officials that the war was lost. By this point, Hitler had effectively lost control over his army. Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, 1896-1966, had earlier refused to carry out a relief attack ordered by Hitler during the Battle of Berlin, calling it impossible. To avoid being linked to inevitable and shameful defeat, Hitler allowed others to handle peace negotiations and then publicly expelled them from the Nazi Party. Historians widely agree that Hitler decided to take his own life on April 27, 1945, one day before his outburst. When news of Himmler's betrayal became known, Hitler acted quickly and decisively. He first expelled Himmler from the party and then, by proxy, took revenge on Fegelein. Just before midnight, Hitler hurriedly married his partner, Eva Braun in 1912-1945. He then dictated his political and personal will to his secretary, Traudl Junge in 1920-2002. On the morning of April 30, Hitler tested poison ampoules on his German shepherd and later gave a similar poison to his colleagues. At approximately 3:30 PM, he had Braun swallow cyanide before shooting. However, myths and uncertainties surround what occurred next. Corpse Odyssey Hitler's death did not end speculation. Conspiracy theories quickly surfaced, claiming that he had faked his death and fled abroad, possibly to Argentina or Japan, with the help of body doubles and plastic surgery. According to conspiracy theories, Hitler fired a double shot and burned his body beyond recognition before escaping the submarine to Argentina or Japan. These theories claim that his outbursts of rage, will, distribution of poison vials, and suicide were staged. Until recently, Hitler was said to have lived a privileged life abroad, even after undergoing surgical alterations. Local historian and biographer Harald Sandner calls this 'humbug.' He pointed out that Hitler's body was examined multiple times by experts and moved at least 10 times. According to the report, Hitler and Braun's bodies were carried into the Reich Chancellery Garden at approximately 3:50 PM on April 30, 1945. The individuals who carried the bodies into the garden included Hitler's valet Heinz Linge, Criminal Director Peter Högl, Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff, and Obersturmführer Heinrich Josef Reiser. The bodies were then doused with gasoline and set on fire. Eyewitness accounts, including that of Rottenführer Hermann Karnau, mentioned that between 4 and 6:20 PM, the remains showed movement described as 'the flesh moved up and down,' which is consistent with the natural effects of burning human bodies and muscle contractions during cremation. On May 4, Soviet soldiers found the remains, initially unaware of their significance. The next day, the bodies were reburied and moved to Helios Hospital Berlin-Buch, where autopsies were performed on May 8. Fritz Echtmann, longtime assistant to Hitler's dentist Hugo Johannes Blaschke, 1881-1959, may be for propaganda reasons, confirmed the identity of Hitler's jaw remains as unclear. However, Soviet authorities promoted the narrative that Hitler had cowardly taken poison, rejecting the evidence that he had also shot himself, and confirmed the authenticity of the jaws. Soviet doctors later claimed Hitler had 'cowardly poisoned himself instead of heroically shooting himself.' On May 4, 1945, Soviet troops from the 3rd Shock Army discovered these bodies. Unaware that they belonged to Adolf and Eva Hitler, they wrapped them in blankets and buried them. On May 5, the next day, other Soviet soldiers found the bodies again and transported them in an ammunition box to the Pathological Institute at Helios Hospital Berlin-Buch. The bodies were autopsied between May 8 and May 10. Echtmann confirmed the authenticity of Hitler's jaw. For propaganda purposes, Soviet doctors later claimed that Hitler had 'cowardly poisoned himself instead of heroically shooting himself.' Even decades later, in 1968, the well-known Russian journalist and military history professor Lev Aleksandrovich Bezymensky in 1920-2007 wrote that Hitler's charred corpse smelled of bitter almonds. In the second half of May 1945, grave robbers opened Hitler's grave, searching for a rumored Nazi treasure said to be buried with him. Soviet soldiers protected the bodies and moved them again, in ammunition crates, to Finow, 38 km away, where they were reburied. On May 22, 1945, the body was exhumed and reburied for unknown reasons. Forensic Investigation On June 9, 1945, Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov in 1896-1974 claimed that Hitler's death was uncertain. British historian Sir Richard John Evans suggested that the Soviet Union might have wanted to maintain the threat of Hitler's survival to justify a harsh occupation policy. Consequently, false information about Hitler's death is deliberately disseminated. This theory is supported by the fact that Hitler's suicide was reported in the Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on May 10, 1945. As late as June 5, Soviet Army officers confirmed this to American officers. Probably on orders from Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in 1878-1953 denials began just 4 days later. On June 7, 1945, the bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler were reportedly brought to Rathenau in a 'half-rotten state.' Between December 8, 1945, and January 13, 1946, Soviet Colonel General Bogdan Zakharovich Kobulov ordered a new examination of Hitler's body. To prevent this investigation, other Soviet officials arranged for the bodies to move to Magdeburg, Germany. Once again, the bodies were buried in ammunition crates in a 2 m deep pit in the courtyard of Westendstraße 32 (now Klausenerstraße 32). On February 21, 1946, the bodies were autopsied. They were then buried in the courtyard of a Soviet military settlement beneath an 18 cm thick concrete slab. On April 5, 1970, the KGB, a highly centralized and secretive organization Chief Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, 1914-1984, ordered the bodies to be destroyed. The military settlement was to be handed over to the East German authorities, and Andropov did not want to risk the bodies falling into their hands. Among historians, Sandner's accounts are valued but are not fully reliable. Sandner, who had never received formal training in history, did not provide detailed annotations in his books to clarify his reasoning. A publication by the French forensic scientist and pathologist Philippe Charlier in the European Journal of Internal Medicine is considered scientifically credible. Charlier reported that the Russian domestic intelligence service (Federal Security Service) allowed him and his team to examine Hitler's presumed skull and dentures, which had survived the final burning. Their investigation confirmed that the dentures belonged to Hitler. However, they were not 100% certain about the skull, which showed traces of a gunshot wound. These findings align with the report of German forensic biologist Mark Benecke, who was permitted to examine Hitler's alleged remains for a week in November 2001. Benecke wrote at the time: 'There is no doubt about the authenticity of the teeth. Hitler had a unique dental structure. He used a large metal bridge in 1944. Using old x-rays, I was able to clearly identify the teeth as Hitler's.' However, Benecke found no traces of poison or glass fragments in the ampoule. Surprised, he consulted Bezymensky. 'Bezymensky told me that the KGB had only allowed him to publish his book in 1986 on one condition: That he would support the poison theory,' Benecke wrote about his conversation with Bezymensky. Finally, the alleged fragment of Hitler's skull was stored in a plastic box, which was intended for computer disks. According to contemporary historian Joachim Fest in 1926-2006, Hitler's body was found 'slumped over,' with 'his head slightly bent forward…on the flowered sofa,' after he had shot a coin-sized hole in his temple with a pistol. If this description is correct, the skull fragment could not belong to Hitler. The entry and exit wounds suggest the shot came from below, most likely fired 'in the mouth.' To confirm identity, the remaining blood traces must be examined. However, Benecke stated that he would require comparative DNA from Hitler's relatives, such as his sister, who was buried near Munich. Exhumation is the only method to obtain genetic material. Conclusion Few other deaths are surrounded by myths similar to Hitler's death. The search for the truth about Hitler's death is complicated by the competing interests and the interests of those with partial knowledge. Historians now agree that Hitler died by suicide on April 30, 1945, either by shooting himself or by combining gunshots with poison. Scientific evidence confirms that Hitler's dentures are preserved and currently held by Russian domestic intelligence services. Whether the skull in the Russian State Archives belonged to him remains unclear.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Neo-Nazis Are Obsessed With the Occult
Deep in northwestern Westphalia, Germany, stands a twelfth-century castle conceived by Heinrich Himmler, leader of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel, as a kind of 'Camelot' for the triumphal knights of the Aryan race. The Wewelsburg Castle was also a fantasy nerd's dream come true. In its bowels lies an occult enclave straight out of Cecil B. DeMille: an Arthurian-style set of catacombs designed to look medieval but actually made of concrete. Above, in the Hall of the Supreme S.S. Leaders, there's a marble floor inlaid with a design of the Black Sun, or Sonnenrad—a circle containing swastika-like arms that epitomizes Nazi striving to create an idealized Norse-Aryan past for themselves. Himmler started renovations on the castle in the mid-1930s; the Nazi paradise he built was meant to host S.S. ceremonies, such as handing particularly distinguished murderers the Totenkopfring, a ring adorned with the signature S.S. skull but also a variety of quasi-Nordic runes and symbolic oak leaves, designed by Himmler's personal occultist, a purportedly clairvoyant mystic by the name of Karl Wiligut. The Nazis, in short, were obsessed with legend and magic. Consider the swastika itself: First written about in Germany by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the ruins of Troy in 1868, the swastika was seized on by Hitler—whose birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year—as emblematic of the idealized, quasi-mythical Aryan race he sought to recreate. More to the point, the Nazis were murder nerds, LARPing as wizards of racial superiority as they committed very real atrocities. And the same is true of their successors today. Partly aping their dead heroes and partly engaged in a similar delusion—self-mythologizing as the scions of an ancient white race—neo-Nazis are a remarkably myth-oriented bunch. This manifests in a lot of different ways, like engaging in werewolf-themed cultic neopaganism or dedicating themselves to Norse gods. Or, in a recent newsworthy example, following the Order of the Nine Angles, a late-twentieth-century neo-Nazi pseudoreligion that seeks to turn its adherents into racially pure Satanic wizards. Earlier this week, a Waukesha, Wisconsin, teenager and devotee of the Order of the Nine Angles, or ONA, was charged with murdering his mother and stepfather and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump, in order to further the Order's goals of a world plunged into chaotic violence. 'Jewish occupied governments must fall. The white race cannot survive unless America collapses,' the 17-year-old, Nikita Casap, wrote in a manifesto. 'Huge amounts of violence will be required.' He called himself a 'niner' (a Nine Angles devotee) and encouraged his imitators to read a variety of extremist books. In doing so, Casap drew on nearly a century of blood-drenched legacy in his pairing of violent death with a potent dose of magical thinking. The symbol of the Order of the Nine Angles looks, more than anything, like a mutilated cat's cradle, just as their ideology is a muddle of inverted myths, profligate cruelty, and pure bigotry. It's a religion of shock and destruction, and as such, it has appealed particularly to young men—teens seeking to break away from their parents, and aimless mid-twenties men who want to blaze a path of dubious glory by blood. The movement was created in the 1970s by a British neo-Nazi named David Myatt, nicknamed the 'Cat Strangler' by his friends because of his affinity for torturing animals. His ideology reflects the charming sobriquet. In 1999, a 22-year-old man reportedly inspired by Myatt's book A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution planted bombs embedded with nails in areas frequented by London's minority and gay communities, injuring 129 people and killing three. In Myatt's work and speeches, an increasingly elaborate cosmology is paired with direct calls to terrorist action, all in the service of ushering in an eschatological race war. Affiliated with the so-called 'Left-Hand Path' of magic—dark or black magic—the ONA offers such occult hokum as a world divided into the seven branches of the 'Tree of Wyrd,' a creator deity named Vindex, and individual cells called 'nexions.' It's a religion of edgelords who've cliff-dived over the edge into madness. The chief tenet of the Order of the Nine Angles, though, is chaos. It's a religion of edgelords who've cliff-dived over the edge into madness. The creation of chaos—ideally through violence, particularly murder and rape—is a form of magic, which, if enacted often enough and brutally enough, will destabilize a moral order dominated by 'Magian' (Jewish) and 'Nazarene' (Christian) morality. The ultimate goal of the Order is a climactic race war, which will usher in a new 'Aeon,' or age—in essence, a Thousand-Year Reich. With enough chaos magic unleashed on the world through acts of violence—the more spectacular the better, like Casap's would-be assassination of Trump—the 'Dark Imperium' led by evil wizards will commence. 'According to the ONA, Judeo-Christian morals, such as 'Don't rape and murder people,' and 'racial equality, human rights'—those are part of a worldwide illusion,' Barrett Gay, a threat-analysis researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me in an interview. 'Part of becoming self-actualized and pursuing the eternal Imperium is to act out the taboos of that system, and by doing so you take away its power. They practice a more mystical form of accelerationism: They believe they can destabilize the entire moral fabric of our civilization through mystically boosted, but also very real, murder and rape.' They also, Gay added, 'get into some weirder stuff, like an Aryan empire in space.' The movement made the transcontinental jump from the U.K. to the United States by the mid-1990s, but took off in the early 2000s. One early and prominent American branch got the cheesily murderous name the Tempel ov Blood. The cult spread among neo-Nazis on the now-defunct white supremacist forum Iron March; according to Gay, until quite recently, information on the Order was hard to come by unless you already knew what you were looking for, deep in the fever swamps of Telegram. It isn't, in and of itself, a path to radicalization: It's a method of making murderers out of those already inclined toward white supremacist ideals; an instrument of self-justification and self-aggrandizement. It isn't especially innovative, either: The Ku Klux Klan wore robes and called themselves wizards too. All of the Order of the Nine Angles' seminal texts are written in a pseudo-elevated tone, larded with jargon that reads like a particularly depraved D&D campaign. Rites such as the 'Black Mass of Heresy' open with adulation of Hitler and include chants like: We believe in justice for our oppressed comradesAnd seek an end to the world-widePersecution of believe in the magick of our wyrdAnd curse all who oppose us. This is, to put it mildly, dorky; it's generally a social faux pas to chant loudly about the 'magick' of your 'wyrd.' It's also part of a murderous doctrine of total amorality. These two things go together better than you think; as events around us are illustrating all the time, things can be ridiculous and awful all at once. The 'Sevenfold Way' of the Order dictates an incremental increase in violence—with a particular focus on sexual violence, which is something of an obsession in the creed—along with personal asceticism and the military or paramilitary training common among neo-Nazi groups of all stripes. To put it another way: The rigmarole of the order is an occult support structure for the endgame of creating a decentralized army of racist rapists and murderers. And it's been quite successful. There's been a lot of murder, and a great many terror attempts and attacks, inspired by this ideology. There's been a lot of murder, and a great many terror attempts and attacks, inspired by this ideology. It's been taken up by a number of neo-Nazi groups as their chosen niche sub-ideology, and has inspired lone gunners like Casap, along with multiple rapes and widespread dissemination of child pornography (in keeping with its doctrine of sexual depravity). In 1997, members of a Swedish affiliate group murdered a gay Algerian man in a Gothenburg park, as part of a human sacrifice (which ONA literature refers to as a 'culling'). In 2008, eight young Russian Satanists killed four teenagers in the Yaroslavl region, fried their hearts over a bonfire, ate them, and buried the bodies in a peat bog; an ONA cult dedicated to their deeds sprang up in the region. The pace picked up in the 2010s and 2020s; affiliates of the Order were charged with possessing child pornography, planning terror attacks, multiple child rapes, and murders. In 2022, a U.S. soldier and Order member was caught plotting to ambush members of his unit in order to cause 'the deaths of as many soldiers as possible.' The same year, an 18-year-old in London murdered two sisters in a park after signing a pact with a demon in blood, promising to 'sacrifice only women.' Why are murder and magic so intertwined for these adherents? Whether you wear Crusader gear, don a skull ring bedecked with runes, chant black masses, or sacrifice to Odin, it all serves the same goal: It's a process of bonding and becoming. Neo-Nazis lean so heavily on myth because their ideology is prima facie absurd; the purported oppression of whites needs tortuous, even mythological explanations to ring remotely true. Hence the dorky architecture propping up all that manic violence. It serves social and psychological purposes too: The commission of crimes in service of an ideology binds one tighter to it. Embracing a faith that is repugnant and outlandish to outsiders shuts one off from the rest of the world. And the profession of belief in concert with others is one of the most ancient, and simple, forms of human communion. It's also a big confidence booster, at age 17, to think you're at one with the underlying forces of the cosmos. Even if you're not one hundred percent sold on the 'magick' of your 'wyrd,' it's exciting to be part of a secret scary movement that does scary things, and know you can scare or impress people just by being part of it. It's one thing to post racist things online from the comfort of your home; another thing entirely to embrace the notion that you are a master of magic, a powerful wizard whose bloodletting will usher in an 'Imperium' of racially pure enlightenment. To wield that kind of power is to be wondrous; to stride atop multiple planes of reality. In other words, the appeal of evil wizardry is, on some level, the same as the desire to be Harry Potter: to be the most special boy in the world. These ideologies dangle just that promise, convincing people around the world that shooting your mother will make you a wizard, instead of just another killer. That's what creates murder nerds, and the myths and legends that support them: the urge to achieve a great apotheosis and to do so via the blunt instruments of the knife, the gun, and the pain of others. In Westphalia, the Wewelsburg Castle is now a museum of the horrors of the S.S. Despite Himmler's grandiose desire to drench his murders in myth and mystery, the elaborate occult ceremonies he and his pet clairvoyant hoped for didn't materialize; there were unfathomable atrocities to commit. Less than a kilometer from Himmler's faked-up magic playground stand the remnants of a concentration camp where over a thousand people died, conscripted as slave labor to build ever-grander extensions to the castle. The tombs in the great S.S. catacomb are empty; they always were. But the graves are full, the only true monument to the small, sadistic men who dreamed they were the kings of legend. All they ever made was a heap of bones.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Her father owned Himmler's personal copy of ‘Mein Kampf' — but how?
The book had long lingered there. Known, but not acknowledged. Sitting on her father's bookshelf for decades after the war in Western Europe had culminated in an Allied victory on May 8, 1945. Except it was no ordinary book. It was Heinrich Himmler's — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — personal copy of Adolf Hitler's Volume I of 'Mein Kampf,' replete with Himmler's own annotations. It wasn't until the death of her father, John Fletcher Sisson, who served in the 4th Infantry Division, in 1992 that author and historical preservationist Karen Sisson Marshall recognized what she described to Military Times as the 'magnitude of evil' the book possessed. But what began as a simple process of donating a piece of history forced Marshall to contemplate her own father's history — and his path to possessing such ephemera. Can you talk about what occurred after your father's death in 1992 and what led you down this path? Two days after my father died, I was asked to go through the files for my mother. As I was going through his files I discovered a 70-page manuscript that had been typed fully, that had been completed and even edited. There was memorabilia, information from World War II and and then this letter that I found with his pictures from the time he returned to Normandy in 1979. He had retraced his own footsteps and he identified on an old map where he thought they had been. I was shocked when my mother told me she didn't know anything about any of this. As I said in the book, I felt like I was meeting a man I'd never met. So then, for the first time, I actually paid attention to Himmler's 'Mein Kampf' book. I had always been aware of it, vaguely, but I didn't realize that he had kept this little book on Himmler with it. I just had never taken anything seriously about his service in World War II. So what we did was we published his manuscript into a small pamphlet and my mother gave it to her close friends and that was it. But in 2004 for a number of reasons, I decided that I was going to find a home for the 'Mein Kampf' volume. My mother came to live with us after dad died, and I realized she was getting older — that was probably the most important impetus. I began to think about this book. I'd gone back to school and gotten a degree in historic preservation and I think I was becoming more aware of the past, its ramifications. So I brought it up to her that I did not want to be responsible for the book if something happened to her. I tell the story in the book and I shouldn't laugh, but it was actually very amusing. I was just wandering around, calling people up, telling them that I had Heinrich Himmler's 'Mein Kampf' and I didn't know what to do with it. Can you share a little more about the process of deciding what to do with Himmler's book? I got my degree and this was, I think, really important. I had gone back to school and I began to think about why I was ignoring my father's role in history? That's when I began to look around the house and look at these artifacts and think, 'Who was my father?' So the book fell in line with that. Sotheby's essentially hung up on me, thinking I was a crank. And that is how I was treated, sort of like a crank by various places I would call — I probably sounded like one to be fair. You have to remember, we're in the very beginnings of the internet. That's where the Baldwin's [Bookbar comes in. I finally went in because I had bought books from him and he knew I was legitimate. He finally listened to me and he's the one who found the article on the internet about Volume II. That in turn led us to meet the curator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and going through that whole process of learning how you authenticate something. In your book, 'Finding My Father's Footsteps' you write about two soldiers and two crossed stories. How did you resolve those of Mr. Williams and his father's, and your own? I never questioned my father, but the world has to question him. It was then that I received a phone call from Mr. Williams [a pseudonym]. Mr. Williams couldn't have been nicer. We chatted. I told him my father's story, and he said, 'Mrs. Marshall, with all due respect, I believe your father lied to you.' Just like that. What a gut punch. His father had told him that at the end of World War II, he was in possession of both volumes — one and two. So he thought my father's story had to be made up. He seemed to indicate that my father must have, for some reason, decided to take one of the books from his dad, otherwise he couldn't explain his father's story. So in the book I focused my story on resolving my father's story. I do not want to call into question his father's story, because I want to respect the fact that soldiers came home and just tell you a little bit of their experience. In this book you had to work backwards — you had the ending, albeit a confusing one, and to resolve it you had to work back from the beginning. How did you eventually come to resolve the question of your father's honor? I wish I could tell you that I was such a good researcher, but I met Bob Babcock, who is the historian for the 4th Infantry Division and he sent me the list of documents they had and I was intrigued by [Swede] Henley's name. I got copies of different diaries and journals. It wasn't until I had gone through it that I realized he'd been my father's commanding officer at the end of the war. My father's own journal ended in January [1945], but Henley kept a diary for all of the 11 months that he fought through Europe. So I followed Henley's diary knowing my father was under him. So there it was when Henley put the entry in his diary that they had taken 3,000 prisoners in Tegernsee, [Germany], on May 3. My father's story always was: 'I was the commanding officer in charge of securing Heinrich Himmler's home.' Somehow my father's story just came completely alive. He even sent a postcard home to my grandmother from Tegernsee. So I was like, 'Okay, there's no question in my mind. This is what I think happened.' The intelligence officer has to file a report, has to report back to their commanding officer and tell them what they've done. So I think my father must have been in a report, and I think William's father saw the report. And so when he said he had both copies, I think that's what he thought. I think he meant he had Volume II, and that he knew Volume I was in the system. That's what I think, but I am surmising. You write about holding Himmler's copy of 'Mein Kampf' and recognizing the magnitude of evil it possessed. Were there any personal annotations of Himmler's that stood out to you after it was translated? I drew a very strong line between Dr. [Richard] Brightman's expertise on Heinrich Himmler and what our family was doing. I actually don't know what the annotations are. I did not want explore that side of the book with him. Can you tell me a little bit about your father, John's, wartime experience? The 4th Infantry Division had a storied contribution to the Second World War — it was the first U.S. unit to land on Utah Beach, helped to liberate Paris, fought in the grueling battles of the Hurtgen Forest and in the Battle of the Bulge and was among the first units to liberate Dachau. How did researching and following in your father's footsteps bring about a different understanding of your father? It changed my life. At that moment when I stood there in Normandy, I reflected back yelling at my father at the dinner table about the Vietnam War. I yelled, 'You just don't understand that people are dying. You don't care that people are dying. You don't know anything.' I knew he had a Nazi bullet — we all knew the story about the bullet that was in his abdomen that didn't go away. That was sort of a little family joke, you know, that he still had the bullet. I obviously knew somewhere in the back of my foolish 19-year-old brain that my father had been shot at. I don't know why I never put two and two together. It wasn't until I stood there in Normandy that I put the pieces together. As you mentioned, you were among the protesters of the Vietnam War. How did researching your father's war experience affirm or alter your opinions on war and its necessity? What our generation did … it's just unconscionable what we did. I guess because we were all kids, but we somehow blamed the soldiers who were just kids like us who were sent off to war. We mixed it up. You can stand your ground politically but not conflate the politician's war with the soldier's war. It has been really nice to go to those 22nd Infantry reunions. It's mainly Vietnam vets now, and we've talked and I'm very honest when I sell the book, I always say, 'You know, if you're going to be offended by the fact that I was an anti-war demonstrator, please don't buy the book.' I've had wonderful discussions with these men. How would you like your book used as a blueprint for others? At the heart of my book is the idea of how well do we know the stories that impact our lives? What I'm hoping to do is to inspire people to go up in the attic. Get those letters down. Think about someone you love and go learn the story behind the story. You don't have to become an expert on World War II, just become an expert on your area. Every war has all kinds of stories to tell — important stories to tell. World War II called upon an entire generation to do unbelievable things and the vast majority of them rose to the occasion. And we now have these stories buried in our attics.
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Telegraph
Bayeux Tapestry piece stolen by Nazis will be returned to France
A missing fragment from the Bayeux Tapestry that was looted by Nazi archaeologists will be returned to France, after it was discovered in northern Germany. The missing piece of the 11th-century tapestry was taken from the collection of Karl Schlabow, a textile archaeologist who worked in league with the Nazi SS as they scoured Europe for Germanic artefacts. Schlabow and his colleagues looted the piece after Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, sent them to study it in occupied France in 1941. According to German newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung, a member of the team removed part of the fragment and took it back to Germany, where it was hidden for decades. But this month, it emerged that the elusive fragment had finally been discovered in the state archives of Schleswig-Holstein, where the Schlabow collection is held. A press conference is due to be held in late March where further details about the fragment, which was taken from the underside of the tapestry, will be revealed. The Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066 and his ascension to the throne, is an integral part of France's cultural heritage. It is full of brutal depictions of combat, with the bodies of slain soldiers littering the bottom half of the tapestry. Schlabow looted the fragment while working for Ahnenerbe, an occult-obsessed organisation created by Himmler to promote the idea that Germans descended from a superior Aryan race. Research by Ahnenerbe was often used by the Nazi regime to justify its racist policies, though the group largely engaged in bizarre pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Himmler himself was fascinated by occult mysteries, keeping a rock crystal on display in his lair of Wewelsburg Castle that supposedly represented the Holy Grail. The fragment is being returned to France just in time for major restoration work that will start this summer, when the tapestry will leave its public viewing gallery in Bayeux, Normandy for two years. 'In terms of economic and cultural influence, this is the most complex and ambitious project … ever undertaken by the Town of Bayeux,' said Bayeux mayor Patrick Gomont of the £30 million restoration efforts. However, even after the Schlabow piece has been stitched back into the tapestry, it will not be complete. Another section of up to 10ft of fabric, which is presumed to show the coronation of William I, is also missing - and its whereabouts are still unknown.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Politics
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‘To Adolf Hitler in Loyal Subservience!'
Anyone with an interest in the history of political vengeance should pay a visit to the rare-book room at the Library of Congress and request the bound volume with the call number DD244.R6. Compiled by Hitler's chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, Dreissig Novemberköpfe, or Thirty November Heads, is the future chancellor's political hit list as of 1927: The book profiles government officials, legislators, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, and one popular satirist targeted by Rosenberg for 'poisoning the life essence' of the German people with democratic processes and ideas. The title is a mendacious nod both to November 1918, the month associated with the founding of the Weimar Republic—'November Republic,' 'November Criminals,' 'November Traitors'—and to the 1789 French Revolution, when heads rolled from guillotines into the hands of the people. While Thirty November Heads is perhaps the most public catalog of Hitler's political enemies, the more sinister one was the list of communists, social democrats, and people within the Nazis' own ranks that was being secretly compiled by Hitler's Sicherheitsdienst, or 'SD.' Established in 1931, this 'Security Service' was run by Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious, 20-something assistant to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Working out of a spare, upper-floor office in the Nazi Party's Munich headquarters, Heydrich assiduously collected the names of—and compromising information on—potential Nazi targets on thousands of index cards, a shadow operation within the dark realm of Himmler's black-uniformed SS protection squads. [Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days] Following the Reichstag elections, on March 5, 1933, which came on the heels of Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30, the Nazis seized control of state and local government with a deluge of 200,000 brown-uniformed storm troopers. Local authorities were thrown out of their offices. Swastika banners were hoisted over town halls. Citizens attempting to remove these unauthorized symbols were assailed. Some were sent to concentration camps. In the southern state of Bavaria, two of Hitler's closest associates, Adolf Wagner and Hans Frank, were installed as state interior minister and state minister of justice, respectively. Himmler was appointed the new chief of the Bavarian state police, known as the 'Green Police' because of the color of their uniforms, while retaining his position as head of the SS. Joseph Hartinger, a Bavarian state prosecutor, immediately recognized the conflict of interest. 'Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the state police,' Hartinger observed, 'and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in concentration camps.' Himmler suspended Green Police authority over the recently established network of detention facilities, transforming them into black sites in the justice system, a hellish world beyond the reach of accountability or judicial recourse. Himmler also placed his assistant Heydrich in charge of Department IV, the intelligence service of the Bavarian state police. Heydrich now had access to thousands of classified police files, including the reports of police informants who had infiltrated the Nazi Party's ranks. For people such as Herbert Hunglinger and Sebastian Nefzger, this was a catastrophe. Hunglinger was a 53-year-old retired police major who had joined the Nazi Party in 1920, according him the honorific Alter Kämpfer, 'Old Warrior,' bestowed on those who had joined the movement in the earliest years, before National Socialism had become politically fashionable. Hunglinger helped establish the Führerschule, a special school for training party leaders, and was said to have possessed the personal trust of the Führer. But recognizing the threat Hitler posed, Hunglinger was all the while feeding intelligence to Bavarian authorities. When his cover was blown, Hunglinger was subjected to brutal interrogation. He confessed his role as a police informant and was dispatched to Dachau, along with five other moles ferreted out by Heydrich via his examination of the Department IV police files. In Dachau, Hunglinger was placed in Barrack X, a series of single concrete cells, where he was lashed and beaten at regular intervals by SS guards. The pain was such that he begged for a revolver to shoot himself. 'We don't have revolvers,' Hunglinger was told, according to postwar testimony. 'Besides, you're not worth the bullet.' In a 'charitable' gesture, he was handed a leather belt and told to hang himself. When guards discovered that Hunglinger was still alive the next day, he was given a particularly severe beating. 'That should do it,' an SS guard observed. The next day Hunglinger was found dead, hanged by the neck. Sebastian Nefzger, another police informant who had infiltrated the Nazi Party, was found dead in his cell with his wrists slit. An autopsy revealed that the 33-year-old salesman, with a wife and child, had in fact 'died from asphyxiation, resulting from strangulation and beating.' The flesh on his back had been flayed to the bone. Loyalty was the sine qua non of service to Hitler and his movement. SS men swore blood allegiance to their Führer: 'Treue ist mein Eid,' 'Loyalty is my oath.' Treue was reciprocated with Treue, betrayal with unspeakable savagery. The pervasiveness of this blood credo throughout the National Socialist hierarchy, including among Hitler's closest associates, is evidenced by an inscription in Hitler's copy of November Heads now held at the Library of Congress. 'To Adolf Hitler in loyal subservience!' reads the handwritten dedication. The author of that dedication was Gregor Strasser, who—in addition to being co-owner of Kampf Verlag, the publishing house that had brought out Thirty November Heads—was in the early 1930s considered equal to Hitler by many in the Nazi Party and superior to him by some. Karl Lüdecke was a Hitler disciple who knew Strasser well. 'Within Nazidom, Gregor Strasser was, next to Hitler, the most powerful man and the most effective speaker,' Lüdecke recalled. According to Lüdecke, Strasser was also the most articulate and ardent voice of 'the socialist wing' of the Nazi movement, 'strong-willed, independent, creative, with a mind of his own—ambitious, but unwilling to sell his soul for the sake of advancement.' Hitler was the fanatical nationalist. Strasser was the committed socialist. Together, the two men lent credence to the National Socialist Party name. [Read: What Germany says about far-right politics] Strasser possessed a pragmatism that Hitler lacked. 'The visionary genius of this man is singular,' Strasser said of Hitler. 'But what good is genius that is not anchored in reality, whose brilliant ideas cannot be implemented in the real world.' Implementation became Strasser's job. The two men had met in the summer of 1921, and across the next decade Strasser assumed growing control over the party's evolution. It was Strasser who managed the surge in party membership from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 by 1931. He quadrupled the number of party chapters, from 71 to more than 270, and, most important, restructured party administration to align with voting precincts, helping drive the Nazis' stunning electoral successes in the early '30s. As evidence that he considered himself the chancellor's peer, Strasser never addressed Hitler as Mein Führer, only Herr Hitler. Hitler and Strasser divided Germany into respective political realms. Hitler commanded the south. Strasser, along with his younger brother, Otto, oversaw the north. Hermann Rauschning was a prominent Nazi in the port city of Danzig. 'Hitler's nature was incomprehensible to the North German,' Rauschning observed. North Germans preferred a man like Strasser, who was 'practical, clearer headed' and 'quick to act without bombast and bathos, with a sound peasant's judgment.' When Hitler visited the Ruhr industrial region, he was annoyed by the predominance of Strasser posters. The left-wing weekly journal Die Weltbühne took the measure of both men: 'It doesn't require much prophetic skill to be of the opinion that in the not-too-distant future Strasser will press his lord and master Hitler into a corner and take the reins of the party.' Within senior party ranks, Strasser was commonly known as 'Gregor the Great.' Despite his near-equal position within the party, Strasser placed loyalty to Hitler above all else. Rosenberg recalled that Strasser invariably ended his speeches with the declaration 'I fought as a Hitler man, and I will go to my grave as a Hitler man.' But when Hitler clashed with Otto Strasser over the direction of the National Socialist movement, Gregor was forced to choose between Hitler and his brother. One day in the spring of 1928, while Gregor was away, Hitler appeared in the Strasser brothers' Berlin office and threatened to dispatch 10 storm troopers to pull Otto into line. Otto drew a revolver from his desk. 'I have eight shots, Herr Hitler,' he said. 'That means eight fewer storm troopers.' Hitler stormed out of the office. But Gregor would side with Hitler over his brother. 'Thank God we did not lose Strasser,' Hitler said at the time. 'Loyal subservience'—treue Gefolgschaft—indeed. But subservience did not mean permanent blindness. In 1932, when the party radicals—Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm—pressed Hitler on a 'rule or ruin' strategy, Strasser spoke his mind to Hitler, urging accommodation and restraint. When the Nazis took a beating at the polls in the November 6, 1932, Reichstag election, shedding 2 million votes and 40 Reichstag seats, the party was thrown into crisis. 'The Führer had misplayed his cards' was the line circulating among senior Nazi Party ranks. The game was up. Karl Lüdecke recalled that Hitler, 'with his own chances diving towards zero, was rushing feverishly with his aides from place to place, fighting desperately to fend off a complete Nazi collapse.' Strasser calmly took matters in hand. He told Hitler that the time had come for accommodation. The party should enter into a coalition with Berlin's ultimate power broker, Kurt von Schleicher, who was a confidant of German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler waffled, then dug in. 'Strasser argued that Schleicher had to be tolerated,' Goebbels reported to his diary. 'The Führer clashed as fiercely with him as I have ever seen.' Hitler was furious when he learned that Strasser had met with Schleicher to explore potential cooperation. He accused Strasser of betrayal. Strasser was reportedly dumbfounded. 'Herr Hitler, do you really believe me capable of such a dirty trick?' Strasser asked. 'Yes,' Hitler replied. Strasser was 'deeply wounded' by Hitler's accusation. Hans Frank met with Strasser shortly afterward. Frank knew Strasser to be one of the most 'confident and pragmatic men' he had ever met. But he found Strasser completely undone, despairing that Hitler was now in the clutches of the party radicals. 'Frank, this is horrific,' Strasser said. 'Göring is a brutal egotist who could care less about Germany, Goebbels is a club-footed devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer's guards.' Strasser resigned his party posts, as well as his Reichstag seat, but retained his party membership, ostensibly so as not to damage the already faltering political movement he had helped build. Strasser departed Berlin for a six-week vacation in Italy. Goering and Goebbels, as Lüdecke later recalled, 'struck while the iron was hot.' By the end of January 1933, Hitler was chancellor, Göring was a cabinet minister and the chief of police of Prussia, and Goebbels would soon be minister of propaganda. Strasser withdrew from political life, devoting himself to his business interests. [Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler] Hitler spoke of bringing Strasser back into the party, but no one took him seriously. Hitler had always seen Strasser as a threat and seemed to be relieved to have him out of the way. Some thought Hitler's talk of reengaging with Strasser was tactical, to keep Ernst Röhm, who had succeeded Strasser as the second-most-powerful man in the party, off-guard. In the early summer of 1934, when Hitler feared a possible coup by Röhn and his army of storm troopers, Hitler decided to resolve any doubts about who held absolute authority. On Saturday, June 30, he flew to Munich and dispatched Himmler and SS men on a blood purge of senior storm-trooper ranks—a killing spree code-named Operation Hummingbird. Röhm was taken into custody, handed a pistol, and told to shoot himself. 'If I am to be killed,' he said, 'let Adolf do it himself.' Röhm was shot dead on the spot. Dozens of senior Röhm associates were summarily executed. That same day, the SS paid a visit to the Berlin residence of Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. When he opened the door, he was asked whether he was von Schleicher. 'Yes, I am General von Schleicher,' he said, and was shot dead on the spot. Schleicher's wife, hearing the gunfire, rushed into the foyer and was gunned down as well. Another former chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, also received a knock on the door of a Berlin address where he was thought to be residing, while, in fact, he had already fled the country. That same afternoon, Gregor Strasser was having lunch with his family at his home in Berlin. At 1:30 p.m., five Gestapo officers entered the house and informed Strasser that he was suspected of 'treasonous activities' and that his office in Munich was to be searched. This must have come as a surprise to Strasser. On February 1 of that year, Strasser had been awarded the Golden Party Pin, one of the Nazi Party's highest honors, inscribed with Strasser's founding-membership rank, Number 9. Upon arrival at his office, Strasser was handed over to a waiting SS detachment. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but the most credible has him being placed in a cell at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albrecht Palace, where on Reinhard Heydrich's orders he was shot—in the neck rather than the head, to prolong the agony. He bled to death on the concrete floor over the course of an hour. During those same hours, Strasser's private attorney was shot in his office after refusing to surrender documents 'concerning Strasser's conflict with Hitler,' and Strasser's former chief of staff was also shot from behind outside his Munich apartment. Strasser's right-hand man, the Nazi military officer Paul Schulz, was seized and taken for a ride by the Gestapo before being thrown out on the road with the words 'Now run, you swine!' Schulz was shot five times and left for dead, but he miraculously survived. (After dragging himself down the road, he was found by a passing car and eventually escaped to Switzerland.) In all, the Night of the Long Knives officially claimed 84 victims, but the actual number was probably much higher. By June, all but one of Rosenberg's 30 November heads were either dead, imprisoned, or living in exile. The first November head to go down, before Rosenberg even published his book, was Walther Rathenau, the Weimar-era foreign minister who insisted that Germany respect the 'war guilt clause' in the Treaty of Versailles and adhere to the onerous war-reparation payments. In Thirty November Heads, Rosenberg observes that this 'racial Jew and liberal esthete' received his just desserts when he was assassinated, in June 1922, by right-wing extremists. Another November head, Matthias Erzberger, who helped negotiate the November 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War, was also assassinated by a far-right group before Rosenberg's book was published. Including Rathenau and Erzberger in the book was Rosenberg's not-so-subtle way of nodding to the fate that awaited the remaining 28. A few others had by 1934 already died of old age or natural causes. These included Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who, according to Rosenberg, had as 'chancellor of capitulation' and 'foreign minister of subservience politics' helped subjugate all of Europe to the 'reign of Jewish high finance.' Others, like the Social Democratic Party's leader, Otto Wels, and the popular satirist Kurt Tucholsky (Hitler 'has a mustache like Chaplin though hardly as funny'), had fled into exile before dying—Wels to France, where he succumbed to a heart attack, and Tucholsky to Sweden, where he committed suicide. On August 23, 1933, Robert Weismann, 'a Jew and a Jurist,' was one of the first 33 Germans to be 'denationalized,' their citizenship legally stripped, and deported as an undesirable alien. By 1934, most of the other remaining November heads were in concentration camps. [Graeme Wood: Germany's anti-extremist firewall is collapsing] The lone member of Rosenberg's list to still be alive and free in Germany as of June 1934 was November head No. 18, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht was, according to Rosenberg, a central banker who learned the 'dark arts' of high finance from Jewish bankers—'Goldschmidts, Mendelssohns, Wassermanns'—and brought ruin to the German economy with inflationary practices while pocketing for himself an annual, inflation-proof salary of '250,000 Goldmarks.' But while Schacht was, according to Rosenberg's book, a 'criminal abuser of the German people and the 'father of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the German people,' he would emerge six years later as one of Hitler's most important facilitators, introducing him to financiers, hosting election fundraisers, and urging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. For these efforts, Hitler rewarded him with a cabinet post and the presidency of the Third Reich's central bank. Yet Schacht soon found himself dismayed by the government in which he was now complicit. 'How could you ever take upon yourself the responsibility of determining the fate of human beings without any judicial proceedings?' Schacht asked Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives. 'No matter what the circumstances, you should have allowed the trials to take place, even if they had only been summary trials.' Schacht continued to quarrel with Hitler, and in 1938 went so far as to publicly rebuke him for what happened to Jews on Kristallnacht. Eventually, like the other surviving November heads, Schacht would find himself dispatched to a series of concentration camps, ending up at Dachau. Hitler reciprocated Treue with Treue. Until he didn't. After the bloody 1934 purge, Hitler gave a speech justifying his actions. 'If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this,' he said. 'In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.' Hitler was as explicit as he was unapologetic. 'I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason,' he said, before going on to dismiss the killing of others, such as Strasser and Schleicher, as collateral damage. 'I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life,' Hitler continued. 'Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
