Latest news with #NaziGermany
The Sun
12 hours ago
- General
- The Sun
Fury as Labour's Attorney General likened mounting calls to leave ECHR with Nazi Germany
LABOUR'S Attorney General sparked fury last night after likening mounting calls to disregard international law with the rise of Nazi Germany. 3 3 She is among many who have criticised Strasbourg edicts for blocking Britain from deporting foreign criminals. In a speech at the Royal United Services Institute yesterday, Cabinet Minister Lord Hermer said Labour's approach was to reject the 'siren song' from some MPs that the UK 'abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power.' He added: 'This is not a new song. The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when the conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by 'realist' jurists in Germany most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law. 'Because of the experience of what followed 1933, far-sighted individuals rebuilt and transformed the institutions of international law, as well as internal constitutional law.' The year 1933 was the year that Adolf Hitler rose to power as German Chancellor. They were not mentioned by name, but the Tories said that a comparison was made. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said: 'It is appalling that Hermer would insinuate those who think we should leave the ECHR are like the Nazis. ' David Lammy tried that disgusting smear with Brexiteers and it didn't work for him - it won't work for Hermer either. It seems Labour haven't learned a thing.' Winston Churchill would be aghast at the creeping power of Euro judges – we must ditch them, Robert Jenrick says 3
The Independent
a day ago
- General
- The Independent
Nordic nations embrace total defense as the risk of sabotage and war rises
In 1944, Norwegian resistance fighters in the town of Kongsberg blew up a factory making cannons for occupying Nazi German forces during World War II. More than 80 years later, the municipality could once again be a target for sabotage and is preparing for war. The local authorities have dusted off Cold War-era bomb shelters, installed a new satellite communications system and are working with the military on plans to help a deployment of Western forces in case of conflict. 'The lesson we learned from Ukraine is that everybody pitched in,' said Odd John Resser, Kongsberg's Emergency Planning Officer, noting breweries that pivoted to making Molotov cocktails, local authorities that built schools in shelters and weapons factories which ramped up production. Across the Nordic nations, governments are boosting defense spending, reassessing security and pushing the concept of total defense. It's an approach which mobilizes the whole of society to defend against military and non-military threats. As Moscow wages war in Ukraine, Western officials are accusing Russia of being behind a campaign of sabotage, arson and cyberattacks and there are jitters across the continent about whether Europe can rely on the U.S. as a partner. The Norwegian government published its first national security strategy in May, saying the country is facing its most serious security situation since World War Two. 'After decades of peace,' it warned, 'a new era has begun for Norway and for Europe." 'What is now happening in Ukraine has to be a wake-up call for all and we must strengthen our defense to prevent anything like that from happening to us,' Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told The Associated Press. Total defense Norway announced in January that it plans to start building bomb shelters in new buildings after halting the practice in 1998. The Swedish government appointed its first minister for civil defense in 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Residents aged 16 to 70 are required to serve in the event or threat of war, either in the military or helping to provide rescue, firefighting, healthcare or other services. Finland's civil defense shelters are the envy of the Nordics and can fit around 86% of the Finnish population. One public shelter in Helsinki can fit 6,000 people, is designed to withstand the fallout from a nuclear attack and is in an almost constant state of readiness with beds and sinks tucked away behind blast doors and an underground hockey pitch. Norway and some other Nordic nations also tell residents to have enough food and water stored for seven days. 'How would you and your nearest family manage if the electricity supply was cut off for a longer period? What would you do if the water supply failed?' the Norwegian handbook asks. AP spoke to 11 people in Kongsberg and the majority said they had some form of supplies. While most didn't have a stockpile for seven days – and some had nothing at all – two people said they could probably survive for more than a week. 'Russia is very close to Norway and you don't know what's going to happen. I would rather be prepared than not prepared,' said Katina Bakke, who works in a sports shop in Kongsberg. Community support for troops Although Norwegian authorities are not expecting an imminent conflict, if war comes to Northern Europe, Kongsberg could be critical. The municipality, 85 kilometers (52 miles) southwest of the Norwegian capital Oslo with a population of around 27,000 people, is the headquarters of the Kongsberg Group, which makes high-precision weapons currently used in Ukraine. The company opened a new factory in 2024, ramping up production of advanced missiles used by multiple European countries. The town could also play host to troops if there is a conflict. In May, local authorities across the region met with the military to plan support for Western troops with logistics and healthcare in the event of a deployment. 'If the allies are coming to Norway, either staying, training, doing war work or in transit towards the east, we will have a big task for the whole community to support that,' Resser said. By readying for the worst, Resser said, the municipality also prepares for other — more likely — threats such as a pandemic, extreme weather or power outages such as the one that immobilized Spain and Portugal in April. Power generation and print-outs Authorities in Kongsberg were not always so proactive but a flood in 2007 and an exercise simulating a four-day power disruption in 2016 made them realize they needed to step up. They did a risk assessment, as obliged by law, identified more than 30 vulnerabilities and started spending money on contingency plans. Back-up power generators were bought for the town hall, medical facilities and old people's homes as well as a satellite link to be able to call for help. In case of a cyberattack, the local health authorities print and file critical patient data once a week. There were teething problems — the first satellite phones purchased in 2017 could only connect from the local graveyard which was 'not practical' in -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) in winter, said Resser. The second system was discovered to be broken in November last year, shortly after Donald Trump was elected for a second term as U.S. president. Unsure of what Trump's election would mean for Norway, the local authorities chose a Norwegian satellite communications provider over an American competitor, Resser said, because the municipality wanted to make sure it had 'national control' in an emergency. The 'key difference' in the resilience model used across the Nordic nations is that it 'empowers' local authorities to make decisions said Martha Turnbull, Director at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, Finland. In the Nordics it's not up to the army to bring in bottles of water in a crisis; rather, there is the 'expectation' that local authorities will respond, along with civilians and businesses, Turnbull said. Sabotage Europeans elsewhere need to realize the threat from Moscow can reach 'much deeper' than nations bordering Russia, said Matthew Redhead, a national security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London. 'The threat is rising,' from Russia's campaign of vandalism, sabotage and arson across Europe and Moscow could target energy grids, internet cables and water supplies, Norway's Defense Minister Tore O. Sandvik told AP. 'Sabotage has become one of the threats that is now on the radar to an extent that we haven't seen probably since the Second World War' said Even Tvedt, Chief Security Officer at the Kongsberg Group. Reeling off suspicious incidents at the company, he detailed how in 2024 an activist tried to destroy engines for fighter jets, drones were spotted over an area where it's illegal to fly and attempts were made to get through a factory perimeter. It's not always possible to identify motivation or to say if the incidents are separate, linked or just 'some kid' flying a drone, but the number of suspicious events indicates sabotage is highly possible, Tvedt said. Moscow is ramping up its activities in Europe to a 'pre-war' level, said Redhead, but away from Russia ordinary people and local authorities may be less ready for a crisis because 'we don't think we will be on the front line.' 'Freaking people out about this at some point is potentially quite necessary.'
Washington Post
a day ago
- General
- Washington Post
Nordic nations embrace total defense as the risk of sabotage and war rises
KONGSBERG, Norway — In 1944, Norwegian resistance fighters in the town of Kongsberg blew up a factory making cannons for occupying Nazi German forces during World War II. More than 80 years later, the municipality could once again be a target for sabotage and is preparing for war. The local authorities have dusted off Cold War-era bomb shelters, installed a new satellite communications system and are working with the military on plans to help a deployment of Western forces in case of conflict.
Associated Press
a day ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Nordic nations embrace total defense as the risk of sabotage and war rises
KONGSBERG, Norway (AP) — In 1944, Norwegian resistance fighters in the town of Kongsberg blew up a factory making cannons for occupying Nazi German forces during World War II. More than 80 years later, the municipality could once again be a target for sabotage and is preparing for war. The local authorities have dusted off Cold War-era bomb shelters, installed a new satellite communications system and are working with the military on plans to help a deployment of Western forces in case of conflict. 'The lesson we learned from Ukraine is that everybody pitched in,' said Odd John Resser, Kongsberg's Emergency Planning Officer, noting breweries that pivoted to making Molotov cocktails, local authorities that built schools in shelters and weapons factories which ramped up production. Across the Nordic nations, governments are boosting defense spending, reassessing security and pushing the concept of total defense. It's an approach which mobilizes the whole of society to defend against military and non-military threats. As Moscow wages war in Ukraine, Western officials are accusing Russia of being behind a campaign of sabotage, arson and cyberattacks and there are jitters across the continent about whether Europe can rely on the U.S. as a partner. The Norwegian government published its first national security strategy in May, saying the country is facing its most serious security situation since World War Two. 'After decades of peace,' it warned, 'a new era has begun for Norway and for Europe.' 'What is now happening in Ukraine has to be a wake-up call for all and we must strengthen our defense to prevent anything like that from happening to us,' Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told The Associated Press. Total defense Norway announced in January that it plans to start building bomb shelters in new buildings after halting the practice in 1998. The Swedish government appointed its first minister for civil defense in 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Residents aged 16 to 70 are required to serve in the event or threat of war, either in the military or helping to provide rescue, firefighting, healthcare or other services. Finland's civil defense shelters are the envy of the Nordics and can fit around 86% of the Finnish population. One public shelter in Helsinki can fit 6,000 people, is designed to withstand the fallout from a nuclear attack and is in an almost constant state of readiness with beds and sinks tucked away behind blast doors and an underground hockey pitch. Norway and some other Nordic nations also tell residents to have enough food and water stored for seven days. 'How would you and your nearest family manage if the electricity supply was cut off for a longer period? What would you do if the water supply failed?' the Norwegian handbook asks. AP spoke to 11 people in Kongsberg and the majority said they had some form of supplies. While most didn't have a stockpile for seven days – and some had nothing at all – two people said they could probably survive for more than a week. 'Russia is very close to Norway and you don't know what's going to happen. I would rather be prepared than not prepared,' said Katina Bakke, who works in a sports shop in Kongsberg. Community support for troops Although Norwegian authorities are not expecting an imminent conflict, if war comes to Northern Europe, Kongsberg could be critical. The municipality, 85 kilometers (52 miles) southwest of the Norwegian capital Oslo with a population of around 27,000 people, is the headquarters of the Kongsberg Group, which makes high-precision weapons currently used in Ukraine. The company opened a new factory in 2024, ramping up production of advanced missiles used by multiple European countries. The town could also play host to troops if there is a conflict. In May, local authorities across the region met with the military to plan support for Western troops with logistics and healthcare in the event of a deployment. 'If the allies are coming to Norway, either staying, training, doing war work or in transit towards the east, we will have a big task for the whole community to support that,' Resser said. By readying for the worst, Resser said, the municipality also prepares for other — more likely — threats such as a pandemic, extreme weather or power outages such as the one that immobilized Spain and Portugal in April. Power generation and print-outs Authorities in Kongsberg were not always so proactive but a flood in 2007 and an exercise simulating a four-day power disruption in 2016 made them realize they needed to step up. They did a risk assessment, as obliged by law, identified more than 30 vulnerabilities and started spending money on contingency plans. Back-up power generators were bought for the town hall, medical facilities and old people's homes as well as a satellite link to be able to call for help. In case of a cyberattack, the local health authorities print and file critical patient data once a week. There were teething problems — the first satellite phones purchased in 2017 could only connect from the local graveyard which was 'not practical' in -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) in winter, said Resser. The second system was discovered to be broken in November last year, shortly after Donald Trump was elected for a second term as U.S. president. Unsure of what Trump's election would mean for Norway, the local authorities chose a Norwegian satellite communications provider over an American competitor, Resser said, because the municipality wanted to make sure it had 'national control' in an emergency. The 'key difference' in the resilience model used across the Nordic nations is that it 'empowers' local authorities to make decisions said Martha Turnbull, Director at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, Finland. In the Nordics it's not up to the army to bring in bottles of water in a crisis; rather, there is the 'expectation' that local authorities will respond, along with civilians and businesses, Turnbull said. Sabotage Europeans elsewhere need to realize the threat from Moscow can reach 'much deeper' than nations bordering Russia, said Matthew Redhead, a national security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London. 'The threat is rising,' from Russia's campaign of vandalism, sabotage and arson across Europe and Moscow could target energy grids, internet cables and water supplies, Norway's Defense Minister Tore O. Sandvik told AP. 'Sabotage has become one of the threats that is now on the radar to an extent that we haven't seen probably since the Second World War' said Even Tvedt, Chief Security Officer at the Kongsberg Group. Reeling off suspicious incidents at the company, he detailed how in 2024 an activist tried to destroy engines for fighter jets, drones were spotted over an area where it's illegal to fly and attempts were made to get through a factory perimeter. It's not always possible to identify motivation or to say if the incidents are separate, linked or just 'some kid' flying a drone, but the number of suspicious events indicates sabotage is highly possible, Tvedt said. Moscow is ramping up its activities in Europe to a 'pre-war' level, said Redhead, but away from Russia ordinary people and local authorities may be less ready for a crisis because 'we don't think we will be on the front line.' 'Freaking people out about this at some point is potentially quite necessary.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow And The Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during the Second World War, has died aged 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel Terminus, (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow And The Pity that marked a turning point, not only in his career, but in the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation, an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance, even the town's former Nazi commander, Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Just people, speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise, driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he said. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a US army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. After The Sorrow And The Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory Of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyon', exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
