Latest news with #NationalSocialists
Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- General
- Hindustan Times
Worse than Nazis: German zoo staff get death threats for feeding baboons to lions
A German zoo has come under fire for feeding baboons to lions there. The Tiergarten Nuremberg culled the baboon population in the zoo, due to overcrowding in the enclosure. The Copenhagen Zoo, in 2014, killed an 18-month-old giraffe and fed it to lions. Image for representation(Pixabay) The zoo euthanized 12 baboons at the end of July and then fed some of the carcasses to lions housed there. The death threats started at this point. Some of the remains of the baboons were also used for research, Sky News reported, but the rest became food for the zoo's carnivores. When the zoo had initially announced plans to cull the baboon population, last year, when numbers exceeded 40, protesters gathered outside to express their outrage. Naturally, things have come to a boil with the news of these baboons being fed to the animals there. Zoo director defends move The zoo's director, Dr Dag Encke, defended the move, telling Sky News 'We love these animals. We want to save a species. But for the sake of the species, we have to kill individuals otherwise we are not able to keep up a population in a restricted area.' Also Read | Tiger and lion share rare cuddle in viral video, leaving viewers amazed by their unexpected bond He also shared that the police are investigating cases where he and his staff received death threats. 'The staff are really suffering, sorting out all these bad words, insults and threats,' Encke shared. Zoo staff get threats The zoo director shared that the normal threat is 'we will kill you, and we'll feed you to the lions'. However, he took umbrage to the Nazi parallels being drawn. 'But what is really disgusting is when they say that's worse than Dr Mengele from the National Socialists, who was one of the most cruel people in human history. That is really insulting all the victims of the Second World War and the Nazi regime,' he said. Josef Mengele, who got the moniker Angel of Death, was a Nazi officer known for conducting deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. However, this is not the first zoo to cull animals. The Copenhagen Zoo, in 2014, killed an 18-month-old giraffe and fed it to lions, to avoid inbreeding. In July, this year, a Denmark zoo courted controversy when it sought unwanted pets, so it could feed the predators hosted there.
Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Zoo bombarded with death threats after feeding 12 healthy baboons to the lions
The director of Tiergarten Nuremberg in Germany, Dr Dag Encke, said that zoo staff have been compared to Josef Mengele, the monstrous Nazi physician who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz Staff at a German zoo have received death threats after feeding baboon carcasses to lions. The healthy Guinea baboons were culled at the end of July after their enclosure at Tiergarten Nuremberg became overcrowded - with some of their remains being used for research, with the rest thrown to the carnivores. Last year, the zoo announced its plans after the population rose to 40. The zoo was closed last Tuesday for the cull to take place, but activists who'd gathered outside were arrested as they tried to climb the fence. It comes after reports a comatose woman woke before organ harvesting surgery but 'docs operated anyway'. Police shame British drugs mules by making them pose for photos with suitcases The zoo's director Dr Dag Encke has now come out to explain the facility's motive, saying they had tried to sterilise and rehome some of the baboons to no avail. "We love these animals. We want to save a species. But for the sake of the species, we have to kill individuals otherwise we are not able to keep up a population in a restricted area," Dr Dag Encke told Sky News. He revealed that an investigation has been launched after staff received death threats. "The staff are really suffering, sorting out all these bad words, insults and threats," Dr Encke said. "The normal threat is 'we will kill you, and we'll feed you to the lions'. "But what is really disgusting is when they say that's worse than Dr Mengele from the National Socialists, who was one of the most cruel people in human history. That is really insulting all the victims of the Second World War and the Nazi regime." Josef Mengele - known as the "Angel of Death" - was a doctor and SS officer who performed grotesque and usually fatal experiments on Auschwitz captives. The act of killing zoo creatures to feed to predators has been a practice sometimes used in zoos for years. Similar outrage came in 2014 when Copenhagen Zoo euthanised a young giraffe and fed the carcass to lions to avoid inbreeding in the giraffe enclosure, which it said was its duty. Head of policy at Born Free Foundation, Dr Mark Jones, said thousands of healthy animals are being killed each year in similar circumstances. "It reflects the fact animals in zoos are often treated as commodities that are disposable or replaceable," he said. It comes after a zoo in Denmark asked for owners of small, healthy pets to donate their furry friends as food for its predators - and some people came out in favour of the idea. The Aalborg zoo said it is trying to" mimic the natural food chain" of the animals housed there "for the sake of both animal welfare and professional integrity" and offers assurances the pets will be"gently euthanized" by trained staff.
Budapest Times
01-06-2025
- Politics
- Budapest Times
Scrabbling for spoils amid a terrible lot of death
Germany's National Socialists, call them Nazis, wanted to expand the country's lebensraum, its living space, by crushing other nations and murdering Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks supposedly inferior to their "superior' Aryan selves. And, of course, there were lots of nice paintings and other objets d'art to be picked up along the way, so those were fair game too. Biographer Jonathan Petropoulos writes of a prominent offender, Bruno Lohse, and doesn't directly raise the incongruity that while many milllions of soldiers and civilians were being slaughtered in the combat zones, there was a parallel murky world of greed and corruption where the prevailing environment was simply profiteering from persecution and theft. Readers will surely pause to see the parallel themselves. And there was a pecking order for the spoils. Naturally, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had first choice, for his planned monumental Führermuseum in Linz, his boyhood town in annexed Austria. Second dibs went to Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Hitler's most loyal supporter, then to ideological schools and museums. It was shocking criminality, and Nazi art agents sometimes competed with each other, while some 'filthy' Jewish families were less 'filthy' than others if they had collections and wealth enough to allow them to bargain their way out of the cattle trucks and Zyklon B. And German agents were not above trading 'degenerate' modernist art, for more-prized Old Masters. Göring (1893-1946) was an all-powerful figure in the Nazi Party, having established the Gestapo secret political police and concentration camps for the 'corrective treatment' of undesirables. He headed the Luftwaffe, the air force, and was Reichsmarschall, highest rank in the Wehrmacht armed forces. Göring often dressed in hunting costume, to link himself to landed society in particular and country life in general. And he was especially keen to project himself as a kind of Renaissance man, a collector not only of hunting trophies but also of art. He began collecting in a modest way in the 1920s and more ambitiously in the mid-1930s, but the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 and the conquest of much of Europe and a large swathe of the Soviet Union, offered the possibility of almost limitless acquisition. Insatiable, he used his impregnable position to enrich himself and build what he boasted after his capture in 1945 was the finest private collection in Europe (a disputed claim). He had a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a baronial set-up named Carinhall, and it was here that he kept the bulk of his hoard. Göring could not tell a good painting from a bad one, but he employed professional experts to scour Europe for paintings, sculptures, tapestries, jewellery, carpets, fragments of Roman buidings; all he could lay his hands on. Much enrichment came from Jewish collections in the occupied countries, and many gifts from those who sought his favour. By the end of the war he had, besides some 1700 paintings, 250 sculptures, 108 tapestries, 200 pieces of antique furniture, 75 stained-glass windows, 60 Persian or French rugs and 175 other various pieces. The pictures included many by Brueghel, Cranach, Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruysdael, Tintoretto, Titian and Van Dyck. He went to great lengths to avoid being considered a looter. But behind the scenes he used currency manipulation and pressure of various kinds to effect gifts and purchases at the lowest prices. He carried devalued Reichsmarks. Göring's bloodhound in occupied Paris was Dr. Bruno Lohse (1911-2007), the deputy director of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the ERR, a new and secretive Nazi organ tasked with looting Jewish-owned cultural property. Lohse initially was conscripted into the German Army to fight in Poland, but he had a PhD in art history was approached by the ERR. Its sole purpose was to plunder Europe, though it had tentacles, basically following the German Army. When Lohse arrived at the ERR headquarters in Paris he found art looting on an industrial scale. The organisation stole whatever it could lay its hands on, whether a painting of really no value except to the family, furniture, tables, plates, cutlery, candlesticks. And France was the place for art — or more valuable art – more so than any other part of Europe. One estimate is that the ERR stole one-third of all the art in private collections in the country; the Rothschilds, Alphonse Kann, David-Weills and other great Jewish families. The machinations to grab the Schloss family artworks make particularly eye-opening reading. The Göring connection made Lohse among the most promient individuals in the ERR. He felt he was king of Paris, armed with a pass from the Reischmarschall that allowed him to travel freely and buy what he wanted. Lohse helped his patron commandeer some 700 pictures from ERR in Paris, with Göring never parting with a pfennig. Petropoulos, who is a European history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, US, ranks Lohse in the top five of history's all-time art looters. The author met him for the first time in Munich in 1998 after writing to seek an interview for a book he was writing about the complicity of art experts in Nazi plundering ('The Faustian Bargain. The Art World in Nazi Germany' published in 2000). By the late 1990s, most of the Nazi art experts who helped loot European Jews were either dead or living quiet lives under the radar, but not so Lohse. Over the next nine years, he and Petropoulos met more than two dozen times, and the author was invited to Lohse's Munich flat, where he saw on the walls Expressionist works and Dutch Old Masters worth millions. Lohse would often pull out a box of old photographs and mementos, allowing Petropoulos to peer over his shoulder and to pepper him with questions. Lohse died in 2007 and bequeathed the box to Petropoulos, who used it as source material for the new 'Göring's Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World'. Lohse's large walk-in bank vault in Zurich was found to hold works by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Corot and Wouwerman, confirming suspicions that at the ERR he slyly siphoned off pieces to sell or keep for himself. Petropoloulos tackles the questions of how Lohse amassed such works, what do we learn about the nexus of culture and barbarism, and what of the post-war networks that grew and the fate of much Nazi-stolen art? There were challenges in writing about Lohse, such as separating his stories from the truth, the dearth of archival sources, the culture of silence among the participants and their general desire to conceal this history. The author determines that the physically imposing Lohse was personally involved in emptying Jewish homes and boasted to a German officer that he had beaten Jewish owners to death 'with his own hands'. The biographer learned that the wartime networks of Nazi dealers did indeed persist into peacetime, individuals such as Lohse growing prosperous selling to museums and collectors, often cashing in on goods with complicated wartime pasts. Lohse was jailed at the end of the war and investigated. He was tried and acquitted in France in 1950 then returned to the art trade from his new base in Munich, where other former Nazi art experts had also gone back to work, trading mostly within a 'circle of trust' in Germany and Switzerland. Göring avoided being hanged as a war criminal by taking poison. Lohse was imprisoned in France for about two and a half years and faced charges of pillaging but was unexpectedly acquitted in 1950, perhaps due to poor prosecuiton, good defence and other vague factors. Some 20 percent of items stolen in France remain out there somewhere. It's all quite a story.
The Journal
14-05-2025
- The Journal
Three Nazi-worshipping extremists found guilty of planning attacks on mosques and synagogues in UK
THREE NAZI-WORSHIPPING EXTREMISTS who believed a race war was imminent in the United Kingdom have been found guilty of planning terrorist attacks on mosques and synagogues. A jury at Sheffield Crown Court heard how Christopher Ringrose, 34, Marco Pitzettu, 25, and Brogan Stewart, 25, were preparing to use the more than 200 weapons they had amassed, including machetes, swords, crossbows and an illegal stun gun. Ringrose had also 3D-printed most of the components of a semi-automatic firearm at the time of his arrest and was trying to get the remaining parts. The trio, who are not believed to have met in the real world before they appeared together in the dock of a court, were arrested when security services believed an attack was imminent after undercover officers infiltrated their online group, the court heard. A nine-week-long trial heard how the group idolised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, shared racist slurs and glorified mass murderers. Brogan Stewart PA PA Today, a jury rejected claims the defendants were fantasists with no intention of carrying out their threats and found the three men guilty of a charge of preparing acts of terrorism and charges of collecting information likely to be useful to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism. Ringrose was also convicted of manufacturing a prohibited weapon. Pitzettu pleaded guilty to obtaining an illegal stun gun at a previous hearing. The defendants will be sentenced on 17 July. Christopher Ringrose PA PA The judge, Justice Cutts, told them: 'You must all expect substantial custodial sentences'. Opening the trial in March, Jonathan Sandiford KC, prosecuting, said: 'The prosecution say that these three defendants were right-wing extremists who regarded themselves as National Socialists, or Nazis, and they supported the National Socialist movement in the UK, such as it is or indeed was.' He said the defendants followed a cause which embraced an admiration for Adolf Hitler, white supremacy, a 'hatred towards black and other non-white races', and glorification and admiration for mass killers who have targeted the black and Muslim community. He told the jury of seven men and five women that the trio all held a 'belief that there must soon be a race war between the white and other races'. Marco Pitzettu PA PA The prosecutor told the jury that the defendants formed a group called Einsatz 14 in January 2024, with 'like-minded extremists' who wanted to 'go to war for their chosen cause'. Advertisement He said Stewart told the group: 'Hitler did more for his people than any politician. And for Britain to have a p*** and zionist in charge of the country is absolutely outrageous.' Sandiford said this last comment was a reference to the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has Pakistani ancestry. The jury was also shown a short video Stewart posted of himself wearing a German army helmet, a Nazi armband and a skull face covering. Sandiford explained how Stewart discussed torturing a Muslim leader using his 'information extraction kit' with an undercover officer. Brogan Stewart's crossbow PA PA He explained how Stewart set up a group called Einsatz 14 with him as 'Fuhrer' and an undercover officer called Blackheart as the 'Obergruppenfuhrer', which the other two defendants also joined. He said that when Blackheart asked him about the group's ideology, Stewart replied: 'Personally, I've taken inspiration from the SS', and added: 'I also hope that we can extort political rivals and potentially plan operations to meet migrants landing on our beaches and deal with them. 'As the race war comes to unfold I'd expect members to stand by, wait for orders and deploy to combat our…' The court heard that Stewart sent the officer a list of 'standard uniform' for Einsatz 14 which included a Black SS helmet, 'mask, balaclava, skull face mask or anything to hide identity' as well as a Swastika armband, although the defendant said this was 'Not a given. It must be earned'. Brogan Stewart's tomahawk PA PA Sandiford said potential recruits were sent a vetting form with questions such as: 'What is your opinion on the historic paramilitary force, the SS?' and 'Out of so many different options, who would you say you hold most of your hatred for – kikes, n******, shitskins, fags etc and why'. He told the court that Stewart developed a mission statement for the group which said its 'basic duties' included to 'target mosques, Islamic education centres and other similar locations'. Sandiford told the jury the group discussed potential targets at the end of January 2024. He told the court Stewart sent Blackheart details of the Islamic Education Centre on Mexborough Road in Leeds, including a Google Maps image. The officer asked Stewart for more detailed information about the plan and he replied that they could smash windows or ambush someone, the court heard. According to Sandiford, Stewart said: 'It depends how far we are willing to go. It could be a beating with batons and bats or something more serious.' Bethan David, Head of the Crown Prosecution Service's Counter Terrorism Division, said: 'These extremists were plotting violent acts of terrorism against synagogues, mosques and an Islamic Education Centre. By their own admission, they were inspired by SS tactics and supremacist ideology. 'Had Christopher Ringrose managed to completely finish building the 3D-printed semi-automatic firearm that he had started to, it could have been used leading to devastating consequences.'
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Yahoo
Nazi-worshipping trio's cache of swords and crossbows uncovered
A trio of Nazi-obsessed fanatics amassed a cache of swords, crossbows and a 3D-printed semi-automatic firearm in preparation for an attack on a mosque or a synagogue. Right-wing extremists Christopher Ringrose, 34, Marco Pitzettu, 25, and Brogan Stewart, 25, were found guilty of terrorism offences at Sheffield Crown Court on Wednesday. The men, who were part of a militant online group, claimed they were merely fantasists who never intended to carry out an attack. Credit: Counter Terrorism Policing North East However, the jury rejected their claims, and anti-terrorism detectives believe that if they had not been arrested, they would have carried out a mass casualty attack. A nine-week-long trial heard how the group, which had been infiltrated by undercover officers, idolised Hitler and the Nazis, shared racist slurs and glorified mass murderers. Ringrose had also 3D-printed most of the components of a semi-automatic firearm at the time of his arrest and was trying to get the remaining parts. Jurors were shown a video of a police firearms expert testing a completed version of the weapon to show it would have been viable. Opening the trial in March, Jonathan Sandiford KC, prosecuting, said: 'The prosecution say that these three defendants were Right-wing extremists who regarded themselves as National Socialists, or Nazis, and they supported the National Socialist movement in the UK, such as it is or indeed was.' He said the defendants followed a cause that embraced an admiration for Hitler, white supremacy, a 'hatred towards black and other non-white races', and glorification and admiration for mass killers who have targeted the black and Muslim community. The prosecutor told the jury that the defendants formed a group called Einsatz 14 in January 2024, with 'like-minded extremists' who wanted to 'go to war for their chosen cause'. He told the jury of seven men and five women that the men all held a 'belief that there must soon be a race war between the white and other races'. Credit: Counter Terrorism Policing North East Mr Sandiford said an undercover officer called Blackheart was also part of Einsatz 14 and was referred to as the 'Obergruppenführer'. Stewart developed a mission statement for the group that said its 'basic duties' were to 'target mosques, Islamic education centres and other similar locations'. The court heard the group discussed potential targets at the end of January 2024. The court heard Stewart sent Blackheart details of the Islamic education centre on Mexborough Road in Leeds, including a Google Maps image. Det Ch Supt James Dunkerley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said the men had collected more than 200 weapons, including knives, swords, body armour and a stun gun. But he said that 'most concerning' was the fact they tried to acquire a gun and this led them to build a 3D-printed firearm. The officer said: 'We saw this building of a firearm, and we saw them then changing their conversation and an up-tick in their hatred and looking to identify a real-world target, which could have been talk of a synagogue, an Islamic institution, a mosque, education... 'When we saw that up-tick changing, and they were looking to come out into the real world, that's when we took the action to arrest them.' Mr Dunkerley said: 'That was a tipping point for us. The protection of the public was absolutely paramount, and this wasn't some fantasy.' He added: 'If they took that 3D-printed firearm onto the streets and discharged it, it would kill somebody.' Bethan David, head of the Crown Prosecution Service's Counter Terrorism Division, said: 'These extremists were plotting violent acts of terrorism against synagogues, mosques and an Islamic education centre. By their own admission, they were inspired by SS tactics and supremacist ideology. 'Had Christopher Ringrose managed to completely finish building the 3D-printed semi-automatic firearm that he had started, it could have been used, leading to devastating consequences.' Ringrose, of Cannock, Staffordshire; Pitzettu, of Mickleover, Derbyshire; and Stewart, of Tingley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, were all found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism and charges of collecting information likely to be useful to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism. Ringrose was also convicted of manufacturing a prohibited weapon, while Pitzettu pleaded guilty to obtaining an illegal stun gun at a previous hearing. The defendants will be sentenced on July 17. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
