Latest news with #YadVashem
Forbes
23-05-2025
- Forbes
Searching For A British Princess Buried On Jerusalem's Mount Of Olives
Britain's Prince William visits the grave of his great-grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg ... More during a visit to the Mary Magdalene Church, in east Jerusalem, on June 28, 2018. (Photo by SEBASTIAN SCHEINER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) On a sunny day in Jerusalem, I decided to go looking for a princess. Not just any princess, but Princess Alice of Battenberg, also known as Royal Highness Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, grandmother of King Charles III. Alice was also named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust center, for saving a Jewish family. Royal watchers know her as the mother of the late Prince Phillip, as shown in an episode of the popular British TV show The Crown. How did the British-born Princess end up on the Mount of Olives, outside the Garden of Gethsemane, under the seven golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church? We drove the narrow roads of East Jerusalem to find out. The Mount of Olives is an appropriate place for a princess to be buried. King David named it as a site for prayer and would prostrate himself there. The local olive trees have long furnished the oil used to anoint kings and high priests. At his coronation, King Charles III of England was anointed with olive oil from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, where his grandmother is buried. The Mount of Olives, across a valley from Jerusalem's walls, has been a Jewish graveyard for 3,000 years. The view towards the walls of the old city, the Dome of the Rock and the Tower of David, is literally to die for. No wonder with over 150,000 graves, locals call it 'the most expensive real estate in Jerusalem.' Mount of Olives View in Jerusalem city scape, Israel. But Princess Alice is not buried amongst the stone crypts on the hillside. Instead, she resides within the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, a beautiful Russian Orthodox church. Princess Alice lived a long and difficult life with courage and conviction. A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was born in Britain's Windsor Castle in 1885. She was related to most of Europe's royal families. Yet that did not guarantee an easy life. She was born profoundly deaf but learned lip-reading by age eight. She also learned to sign, and was fluent in English, German, French and later, Greek. At 17 she met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. She married him a year later. The Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, where the tomb of Princess Anne now resides, was built in 1888. Known for its distinctive golden onion domes it was built in memory of the Russian Czar's mother, Empress Maria Alexandrovna. In 1908 Princess Alice visited Russia and met with her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. Alice was impressed with the plans of the Duchess to found a religious order of nurses. After her own conversion to Orthodoxy in 1928, Alice worked with the poor and gave away most of her possessions. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, is shown in a reunion ... More with his mother, Princess Alice of Greece. Princess Alice, widow of Prince Andrew of Greece is living a semi-cloistered life as a nun on the Aegean Island of Tinos, where she has formed an order of deaconesses. She wears a habit similar to that of the Greek Orthodox religious orders. In 1918, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna were killed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. Duchess Feodorovna's remains were ultimately buried at Monastery of Mary Magdalene. At the end of her life, Princess Alice would ask to be buried in Jerusalem next to her aunt. Princess Alice had four daughters and Phillip, who was born in Greece in 1921. However, shortly after his birth, defeat in the Greek Turkish war resulted in Alice's husband Prince Andrew being charged with treason. Well aware of the murders of their cousins the Romanovs, the family fled in a Royal Navy ship in 1922, with Phillip hidden in a fruit box. The family lived briefly in Paris, but Philip was sent to live in England for boarding school. Princess Alice had a breakdown, claiming she was receiving divine messages and had healing powers. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was forcibly removed from her family and committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930, She was treated by Sigmund Freud, who insisted Alice had a sex addiction and needed to have her ovaries X-rayed. Alice was eventually released in 1932, but the family had dissolved. The daughters were married off to German noblemen. Prince Andrew had gone to live on the French Rivera with a countess. Princess Alice returned to Greece alone in 1938. When Axis forces took over Greece in 1941, she worked with the Red Cross and organized soup kitchens and shelters. Because her daughters had married Germans, the Nazis presumed she was pro-German. But when a German general asked what he could do for her, she said, 'You could leave my country.' Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum on September 7, ... More 2007 in Jerusalem, Israel. During the Second World War, Prince Edward's grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg sheltered Jewish refugees, for which she is recognised with a symbolic tree as 'Righteous Among the Nations' at Yad Vashem. (Photo by Mati Milstein/British Embassy via Getty Images) During the German occupation, more than 85% of the 77,000 Jews living in Greece were murdered. Princess Alice had long known the family of Haimaki Cohen, a Jew and former member of Parliament. In 1941, they fled to then Italian-controlled Athens. But in 1943, the Germans occupied Athens and began deporting Jews. Rachel Cohen, her daughter and son were unable to escape. When Princess Alice heard about their situation, she offered to shelter the family. The Germans were suspicious. When Alice was questioned by the Gestapo, she pretended not to understand their questions due to her deafness until they left. The Cohens were successfully hidden until liberation in 1944. Princess Alice survived the war, attending Phillip's wedding to Elizabeth in 1947. At Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, she wore a gray nun's habit. The royal family insisted she leave Greece again after a coup overthrow the government in 1967. She died in Great Britain in 1969 and was buried in Windsor Castle. But before her death she had asked to be buried near her Aunt Elizabeth. In 1988, her remains were moved to the Church of Mary Magdalen. In 1993 Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Princess Alice. A year later, her children, Prince Philip and Princess George of Hanover, traveled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to plant a tree in her honor. Prince Philip said, "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress." In 2018 her great-grandson Prince William visited her crypt, on the first official Royal visit to Israel. Finding Princess Alice and getting in to see her can be tricky. Many tours will take you to the church and many holy sites nearby. One can also hire a taxi for the day. There is little parking in the area so drop-off and pick-up should be coordinated. Landscape view of Mary Magdalene Church on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Several websites state that the church is open to visitors only on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. However, we were told that it is open to visitors throughout the week. To view Princess Anne's tomb, you must request that the tomb area be opened. On our visit, after circling around on the narrow, dusty roads, we found an entrance. Father Roman, a distinguished figure with curly black hair and floor-sweeping black cassock, let us in. We walked through the garden tended by the nuns and into the beautiful church. After marveling at the glittering artifacts inside, he brought us outside again. He opened a door to Princess Alice's crypt. It was like a journey to the past, with photographs of the Romanovs and other royal families. Princess Alice lay in a simple coffin, finally at peace. circa 1910: Alice, Princess of Greece, (1885 - 1969), the wife of Prince Andrew of Greece, (1882 - ... More 1944), and mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Born Princess Alice of Battenberg, she was a great grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. (Photo by) We stayed a moment, alone with our thoughts. But before we left, we had an only-in-Israel moment. I asked Father Roman how long he had been in charge of the church. 'Six years,' he said. 'Is that when you came from Russia?' I asked, visualizing him stepping off an Aeroflot jet. 'No, I grew up here. I served in the IDF Givati Brigade.' Open-mouthed, our guide, a Jerusalem deputy mayor, and Father Roman started swapping army stories.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany's Wadephul expresses 'horror and shame' at Holocaust memorial
Germany's new Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Sunday expressed his "horror and shame" for the country's responsibility for the Holocaust, as he visited the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. Wadephul, who took office this week, said Germany has a responsibility "to remember the victims," to "honour the survivors" and to learn the lessons from the crimes of the Holocaust. He laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance to commemorate the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazi regime in Germany. "With horror and shame, I stand here as German foreign minister," Wadephul said. "This place reminds us Germans again and again that the monstrosity of the Shoah was ordered in German, planned by Germans and carried out by Germans." Following the visit, Wadephul was due to hold talks with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany's Wadephul visits Jerusalem Holocaust memorial ahead of talks
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Sunday visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Wadephul was due to lay a wreath at the site, which commemorates the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi regime in Germany. The foreign minister, who took office earlier this week, is set for talks with his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later on Sunday before visiting Ramallah for dicussions with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa. Wadephul's visit to Israel takes place against the backdrop of celebrations marking 60 years of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel. After meeting with relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas following his arrival in the country on Saturday, he was given a demonstration of the Israeli Arrow 3 air defence system, which is due to deployed by Germany, early on Sunday. The system can destroy approaching missiles at altitudes of up to over 100 kilometres. The German Air Force is due to achieve operational readiness this year with the system, which is being deployed at three sites in Germany. Wadephul's conversation with Netanyahu are set to include discussions on German arms deliveries for Israel, as well as a diplomatic initiative by the Netherlands announced earlier this week to review the EU-Israel Association Agreement on trade. The proposed review, which is set to be discussed by EU foreign ministers, comes amid the ongoing Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, where around two million Palestinians live.
The Independent
22-04-2025
- General
- The Independent
Walter Frankenstein, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Berlin, dies at 100
Walter Frankenstein, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Berlin with his wife and infant children and spent his later years educating young people to keep the events alive in memory, has died. He was 100. Klaus Hillenbrand, a close friend who wrote a book about Frankenstein, confirmed the death on Tuesday. He said Frankenstein died on Monday. The foundation that oversees Berlin's Holocaust memorial also confirmed that he died Monday in Stockholm. Frankenstein was born in 1924 in Flatow in what is now Poland but was then part of Germany. Three years after the Nazis came to power, in 1936, he was no longer allowed to attend the town's public school because he was Jewish. With the help of an uncle, his mother sent him to Berlin where he could continue his school education, and he later trained as a bricklayer at the Jewish community's vocational school. He stayed at the Jewish Auerbach'sche Orphanage where he met Leonie Rosner, who would later become his wife. In an interview with The Associated Press in 2018, Frankenstein described how he witnessed Kristallnacht — the 'Night of Broken Glass' on November 9, 1938, when Nazis, among them many ordinary Germans, terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria. They killed at least 91 people and vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses. They also burned more than 1,400 synagogues, according to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Frankenstein, who was then 14, climbed on the roof of the orphanage and saw fire lighting up the city. 'Then we knew: the synagogues were burning,' he said. 'The next morning, when I had to go to school, there was sparkling, broken glass everywhere on the streets.' Starting in 1941, Frankenstein had to do forced labor in Berlin, repeatedly threatened by the danger of being deported by the Nazis. In 1943, five weeks after their son Peter-Uri was born, he went into hiding with his wife, Leonie, as the Nazis were deporting thousands of Jews from Berlin to Auschwitz. 'We had promised ourselves not to do what Hitler wanted,' Frankenstein told the AP. 'So we went into hiding.' Together with their baby, the couple spent 25 months in hiding in Berlin. A second son, Michael, was born in 1944, during their time on the run. They stayed with friends or in bombed-out buildings. Up to 7,000 Berlin Jews had gone into hiding, but only 1,700 of them were able to survive. The others were either arrested, died of illness or perished in air raids. In 1945, when Berlin was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, Frankenstein's children were among the youngest of a total of only 25 Jewish children who had survived in Berlin. Before the Holocaust, Berlin had the biggest Jewish community in Germany. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, around 160,500 Jews lived in Berlin. By the end of World War II in 1945 their numbers had diminished to about 7,000 through emigration and extermination. All in all, some 6 million European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. After the collapse of the Nazis' Third Reich, the Frankensteins immigrated to what was then Palestine and later became Israel. Eleven years later, in 1956, they moved to Sweden, where they settled for good. Later in life, Walter Frankenstein returned to Germany several times a year. He often talked to schoolchildren about his life and in 2014, he received Germany's highest honor, the Order of Merit. He was also an ardent fan of the Hertha Berlin soccer club. As a teenager he went to its games, and when Jews were no longer allowed to visit the stadium he would listen to reports of matches on the radio. In 2018, Frankenstein became an honorary member of the club with the membership number 1924, his year of birth. Every time Frankenstein traveled to Berlin in his later years, he brought along the small blue case containing the Order of Merit. Inside the case's lid, he had attached the first 'mark' he got from the Germans: the yellow badge, or Jewish star, that he had to wear during the Nazi reign to identify him as a Jew. 'The first one marked me, the second one honored me,' he said.
New York Times
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History's Villains
All of a sudden, everyone was coming for Darryl Cooper. There were the newspaper columnists, the historians, the Jewish groups: 'Repugnant,' said the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, in a statement. Even the Biden White House released a statement, calling him 'a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda.' So it was time for Mr. Cooper, one of the most popular podcasters in the country, to do what he does best: hit record. In a special episode of his history program, 'Martyr Made,' Mr. Cooper addressed the controversy, which had exploded out of his Sept. 2 appearance on 'The Tucker Carlson Show,' the podcast started by the former Fox News host. At first, Mr. Cooper — a gifted historical storyteller but not a trained historian — defended the claims he had made on Mr. Carlson's show: One, that Winston Churchill was the 'chief villain' of the war, not, by implication, Adolf Hitler. And two, that millions had died in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe because the Nazis had not adequately planned to feed them. But then he pivoted. He admitted he had been 'hyperbolic' about Mr. Churchill and said he had not meant to imply the Holocaust was the result of logistical problems. Then he read harrowing testimony from a survivor of the infamous 1941 massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, at one point becoming so overwhelmed that he had to collect himself. This emotional ventriloquism is a big part of Mr. Cooper's approach and appeal. On TikTok, a fan praised him as 'one of the best historians of our time because he tries to go out of his way to understand the perspective of everyone involved in a situation.' Or, as Joe Rogan put it when he had Mr. Cooper on his show in March: Mr. Cooper's work inhabits extreme positions in an attempt to understand the psychology behind them. The critics, who Mr. Rogan suggested were 'paranoid' Jews, were overreacting, missing the point. These critics have probably helped make Mr. Cooper bigger than ever. He has the most subscribed-to history newsletter on Substack, one spot ahead of the eminent economic historian Adam Tooze's. In the wake of the Rogan interview, 'Martyr Made' was the seventh-most popular podcast on Spotify, just after Mr. Carlson's, though it has since fallen. Mr. Cooper's followers on X include Vice President JD Vance and David Sacks, President Trump's artificial intelligence and crypto czar. This year, a guest on The New York Times Opinion's 'Ezra Klein Show' — a fairly reliable barometer of the elite liberal mood — recommended 'Martyr Made' as a good window into right-wing thinking. All of which makes Mr. Cooper a man of this second Trumpian moment: an idiosyncratic autodidact with no formal affiliations who has built a huge audience by promising his listeners ostensibly forbidden histories, a self-fashioned 'brave truth-teller' willing to challenge elite consensus, said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University who has written about the history of right-wing media. His project syncs up with the radical skepticism ascendant on the American right, which is currently upending decades of institutional wisdom around public health, education and international trade. And in its outlook, if not its politics, this skepticism rhymes with the 'woke' left's, promising deeper realities concealed by a dying power structure. To his detractors, Mr. Cooper is a fascist, sloppily peddling old debunked arguments. To his supporters, he is pure of heart, merely asking uncomfortable questions about our national mythology. 'The Western order is coming apart,' Mr. Carlson said in an interview. 'This whole postwar structure is going away and we need to rethink it. Darryl is a threat to that.' The question is, what kind of a threat? Establishing His Style As befits a self-taught outsider, Mr. Cooper, 43, is far from a tweedy professor holed up in the archives of a university. He has said he lives in northern Idaho, where public records indicate that he and his wife own a log home set on more than 30 acres. On X, Mr. Cooper has posted about hobbies that include mixed martial arts and a tabletop strategy board game about World War II. In broadcasts, he gives the impression of a sturdy, slightly nerdy ex-military man, which, it turns out, is what he is. (For this story, Mr. Cooper agreed to answer questions only by email because, he wrote, he had gotten himself into trouble with 'poorly worded and incomplete verbal interview answers lately,' a reference to his appearance on 'The Tucker Carlson Show.' He published his answers on his Substack on March 23, writing that he had been a 'victim of press smears in the past.') Born in California and raised by a single mother, Mr. Cooper had a peripatetic childhood, attending 30 to 40 schools from K-12, he said in the email interview. Much of the time, he had his nose in a book, his way of 'maintaining some consistency as we moved from place to place.' He read his way, too, through a 10-year career in the Navy, after attending only three semesters of college. When he finished his service, he said he went to work for the Department of Defense as a consultant for foreign buyers of the Navy's Aegis Weapons System. His job took him around the world. In 2014, a war in Gaza broke out. Mr. Cooper found himself curious about it, but realized he did not know much about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond what he called the 'American pop culture version of events.' So he went on a reading binge. As he went through stacks of books about early Zionism and Mandate Palestine, a friend recommended that Mr. Cooper start a history podcast like 'Hardcore History,' Dan Carlin's epic, dramatic podcast about wars ancient and modern. Mr. Cooper was a fan. And Mr. Carlin gave him another model, too — like many online personalities, he was not a trained expert in the field he was expounding on, but an extremely well-read enthusiast. The next year, Mr. Cooper released the first episode of a 30-hour show he called 'Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem,' which established the 'Martyr Made' template. The show begins with a visceral description of what he thought it would be like to be a European Jew living through a pogrom — intended to make the audience, regardless of their political leanings, understand the conditions from which Zionism was born. Over the next six episodes, Mr. Cooper ping-pongs between Zionist and Palestinian perspectives, condensing reams of academic history into a sweeping story about a tragic cycle of revenge, reading first-person accounts along the way. (Sometimes, he does voices.) The show is critical of Zionism, and Mr. Cooper has been outspoken on X about his disgust with the Israeli government's conduct in its current war in Gaza, a stance that has won him some fans on the left. Mr. Cooper has said he is proud to receive correspondence from both Israelis and Palestinians who say they are more sympathetic to the other side after listening to his program. Over the next few years, shows about Jonestown, the American labor wars and Jeffrey Epstein followed. The plain-spoken Mr. Cooper refined his approach, weaving anecdote, digression, testimony and historical analysis into hourslong narratives. The nearly eight-hour final episode of the Jonestown series is, among other things, a panoptic account of urban disorder and left-wing politics in the 1970s, and features a dizzying array of references, including to the anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and the filmmaker Terrence Malick. In an era in which much political content preaches to the choir, and comes in rabid, bite-size chunks, a long-form history podcast may seem like an absurdly cumbersome way to push a message. But Mr. Cooper has done just that. According to Substack's public leaderboard, Mr. Cooper's newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers, who each pay $5 a month. This means, at the very least, he is making approximately $50,000 a month, minus the platform's 10 percent cut. (And that does not include whatever Mr. Cooper makes in revenue from various streaming platforms.) 'If he weren't good at it, I'd be less worried,' said Patrick Wyman, a trained historian and the host of the podcast 'Tides of History.' Courting Controversy Mr. Cooper's first real brush with national attention came in 2021, when he posted a widely shared Twitter thread about the psychology behind right-wing election denialism. In it, Mr. Cooper attributed Trump supporters' skepticism of mainstream media to their feeling misled by the national press over sensational — and never substantiated — accounts of President Trump's alleged collusion with the Russian government. The series of posts demonstrated Mr. Cooper's gift for asking one side to inhabit the seemingly incomprehensible mind-set of the other. It was also, critics said, tendentious and sloppy. What Mr. Cooper did portray accurately was a kind of nihilism taking root in American life, the loss of even the idea of a shared truth. In this contested space, conditions were ripe to make people believe new, once-fringe ideas. On his podcast, Mr. Cooper moved methodically, pointing to sources and research. On social media, he played the role of provocateur. Aware of his own reputation as a right-winger, Mr. Cooper sometimes trolls his critics, who have pored over his accounts for signs of his flirtation with extremism. To be fair, they have not had to look very far. Mr. Cooper has left a long trail of posts criticizing democracy. ('Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure.') And he has presented fascism as an understandable response to the excesses of the left. ('Fascism is merely what happens when normal people realize that the left will never stop until they're forced to.') Last year, Mr. Cooper posted on X two images side by side. The first was a historical image of Nazi leaders in Paris. The second was a photograph of the controversial 'Last Supper'-themed tableau at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, which featured drag queens. Mr. Cooper wrote that the former image was 'infinitely preferable in virtually every way.' He later deleted the post for being in 'bad taste,' but defended the sentiment behind it in the email interview: 'It is hard to imagine that any historical catastrophe could have led to a worse present result than a country like France, for a thousand years a jewel of Christendom, concluding that the best use of their limited time in front of a global audience was a blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper.' (Mr. Cooper is Christian and sometimes writes about theology, although he did not confirm via email to which denomination he belonged, if any.) This is a pattern of Mr. Cooper's: to say something shocking and then to backtrack slightly. It's a strategy, his critics say, to slowly shift the boundaries of mainstream discourse. 'From my perspective, he is very clearly laundering ideas and talking points that have been very common among the white nationalist far right for decades,' Mr. Wyman said. 'He understands the rules of the game and what you can and can't say.' Asked by email to describe his politics, Mr. Cooper avoided labels, but blamed liberalism for destroying 'local institutions that embodied the ancient human way of being together.' He suggested that most Americans felt unrepresented by their government, but added that any attempt to change our current system of mass democracy would 'lead to disorder and unpredictable consequences.' He said that 'anarchy is worse than tyranny for regular people,' and confirmed his admiration for Francisco Franco, the far-right dictator of Spain. Some of these sentiments have made him a divisive figure on the right. In a column last year in The Free Press, the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari coined the term 'the Barbarian Right' to refer to Mr. Cooper and others, calling them 'a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought' by attacking 'what they see as the founding 'mythology' of the postwar world … that the Nazis were actually, you know, evil.' The conservative military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who was part of the 1776 Commission — the Trump administration's rebuttal to The Times's 1619 Project — has also criticized Mr. Cooper, saying he was not 'aware of the facts' of World War II. Yet there is little dispute that Mr. Cooper's way of doing things, in affect as well as in politics, is becoming more popular on the right. The new Trump administration has been more aggressive than ever in targeting what it sees as anti-American history about representation and diversity, and in regarding international agreements and human rights as weak and suspicious. In this environment, figures like Mr. Cooper have come to the fore, advancing the notion that the left is a powerful force of social disorder, the main villain of global politics. Ms. Hemmer, the Vanderbilt historian, described it as a nativist, isolationist strain, once embodied by figures like the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan — himself the author of a book, 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,' about Mr. Churchill's belligerence. 'In the '80s and '90s, it was a minor key in the party,' she said. 'Now, it's the chorus.' Who's Suppressed? The idea that right-wing authoritarianism is a lesser evil than left-wing authoritarianism brings Mr. Cooper into conversation with a tradition of historians and writers who view World War II as a clash of two evils in which the atrocities committed by the Germans were not morally different from those that had been perpetrated by the Soviets. That's an important frame for Mr. Cooper's new series, 'Enemy: The German's War,' which Mr. Cooper fast-tracked after his appearance on Mr. Carlson's show. He released the first episode in January. 'Anyone expecting me to validate their prejudices will be sorely disappointed,' Mr. Cooper wrote in an email. 'That goes for people used to dehumanizing Germans as well as for people hoping, since I've shown a willingness to engage alternate narratives of the war, that I'm going to excuse or deny atrocities committed by the Third Reich.' In February, Mr. Cooper posted to X an image of a stack of books, including many mainstream histories, that he said he used to prepare for the show. That stack also featured several books by David Irving, a disgraced British historian who has denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and helped popularize the theory about Mr. Churchill's culpability in World War II espoused by Mr. Cooper on Mr. Carlson's show. Mr. Cooper has defended Mr. Irving's work, even though Mr. Irving was found by a British court in 2000 to have misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence in his books. To Mr. Cooper, he's an example of 'pressure groups' succeeding in censoring questioning voices. It's a theme that seems to resonate with him: powerful forces keeping people from knowing the full story, even if the story has been discredited. Asked in an interview whether it was true that the German account of World War II had been suppressed, the historian Richard Evans, who was a central witness in the case against Mr. Irving, replied with incredulity. 'That's ridiculous,' he said. 'Who are these people suppressing knowledge? It's just a fantasy.' Mr. Evans pointed to his own three-volume history of the Third Reich as proof. The first episode of Mr. Cooper's new series opens with a long reading from 'Germany Must Perish!,' a 1941 tract by an American Jewish businessman calling for the mass sterilization of Germans — and a text used by both Nazi war criminals and German revisionist historians to claim that World War II was motivated by a genuine German fear of a Jewish plot to take over the world. It's a classic Cooper move — to try to put his listeners in the mind-set of a group considered beyond the pale, to get listeners to understand how they arrived at their justifications. But to what end? What are the present political implications of trying to empathize with Germans under the Nazi regime, to better understand their own justifications for their crimes? On a recent episode of the 'New Founding' podcast, Mr. Cooper suggested that he worried the accepted American account of World War II ran the danger of providing the United States with the justification for committing crimes abroad. A friend of Mr. Cooper's, a history grad student named Alexander von Sternberg, grappled with this in a column, 'Darryl Cooper: Revisionist History and Misplaced Empathy.' Pointing out many errors in Mr. Cooper's interpretations and the one-sidedness of his framing, Mr. von Sternberg bemoaned the lack of rigor in Mr. Cooper's approach to sourcing. He also asked why this second-rate argument was being put forward in an attempt to understand the Nazis. 'If the empathy we feel is merely to serve the contrarian impulses so many of us possess, then what kind of empathy is that?' Mr. von Sternberg wrote, voicing the question central to the project of making a podcast for a large audience in 2025 that seeks to humanize the Nazis. 'It certainly does not appear to foster a greater, more complex understanding of the human condition. In fact, it simply sounds like a typical way to shift loyalties from one narrative over to another.'
