BERLIN, GERMANY — A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers were looting. An exhibition of Khaldei’s work opens in Berlin this week.
It was early on the morning of May 2, 1945 and Yevgeny Khaldei had gone to the Reichstag, the German parliament building in the center of Berlin. Three hours earlier the last German commander left in the capital had capitulated, but there was still sporadic fighting going on. Khaldei had his Leica camera with him–and a Soviet flag. MORE>>>>>
American genealogist Sallyann Sack suspected for years that the collection held answers to questions about her family.
In the 1980s, she put in a request trying to trace the birth parents of her adopted cousin, who had survived Buchenwald as a 9-year-old, then been brought by her aunt and uncle to the United States. A form letter came back saying the search had turned up nothing.
But digging deeper during her time here, Sack was able to cross-reference the woman’s second given name and access records of search requests made to the ITS since it opened in 1955 — often detailed letters by individuals who reveal nuggets of family history while seeking a missing loved one. Read more »
Charlie Brown was a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot with the 379th Bomber Group at Kimbolton ,England. His B-17 was called ‘Ye Old Pub’ and was in a terrible state, having been hit by flak and fighters. The compass was damaged and they were flying deeper over enemy territory instead of heading home to Kimbolton.
After flying over an enemy airfield, a German pilot named Franz Steigler was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17. When he got near the B-17, he could not believe his eyes. In his words, he “had never seen a plane in such a bad state.” The tail and rear section was severely damaged, and the tail gunner wounded. The top gunner was all over the top of the fuselage. The nose was smashed and there were holes everywhere
Despite having ammunition, Franz flew to the side of the B-17 and looked at Charlie Brown, the pilot. Brown was scared and struggling to control his damaged and blood-stained plane.Read more »
LONDON - Documents released Monday show how the British government tried to send thousands of Palestine-bound Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide back to postwar Germany without inflaming world opinion.
Could it be done? The answer was no. It was just two years after the end of the war and the world was outraged by the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in what became known as the Holocaust.
Despite the best efforts of early spin doctors to portray the move in the most sympathetic light, the decision to turn away the more than 4,500 Jews on board the Exodus refugee ship turned into a humanitarian and public relations debacle for Britain. Read more »
As the calendar reads September 23, 1980, Iran recalls the spirit of its mythical archer and hero, Arash Kamangir, to launch Operation Kaman 99, its largest ever Air Force retaliation against US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein, just a day after Iraq launched surprise aerial attacks on the Islamic Republic.
On September 22, 1980, a war-experienced Iraq initiated massive air strikes on strategic locations in the newly-established Islamic Republic of Iran in the hope of crippling the country’s Air Force and gaining air supremacy.
At 1:45 pm local time, 6 Mig-23 fighter jets bombarded an airbase near Ahvaz in Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan. Read more »
Historically the Walpurgisnacht is derived from Pagan spring customs. In the Norse tradition, Walpurgisnacht is considered the “Enclosure of the Fallen”.It commemorates the time when Odin died to retrieve the knowledge of the runes, and the night is said to be a time of weakness in the boundary between the living and the dead. Bonfires were built to keep away the dead and chaotic spirits that were said to walk among the living then. This is followed by the return of light and the sun as celebrated during May Day. Due to Walpurga’s holy day falling on the same day, her name became associated with the celebrations. Early Christianity had a policy of ‘Christianising’ pagan festivals so it is no accident that St. Walpurga’s day was set to May 1st. Walpurga was honored in the same way that Vikings had celebrated spring and as they spread throughout Europe, the two dates became mixed together and created the Walpurgis Night celebration. MORE>>>
For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners gunned down Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Alexei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia’s throne.
Some said the delicate 13-year-old had somehow survived and escaped; others believed his bones were lost in Russia’s vastness, buried in secret amid fear and chaos as the country lurched into civil war.
Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Alexei and his sister, Grand Duchess Maria. Read more »
A university has withdrawn a researcher’s fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed.
Nicholas Kollerstrom, an academic specialising in astronomy, posted the article, The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion, on the website of the revisionist Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
He claimed that only one million Jews died in the war and that “the only intentional mass extermination program[me] in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans”. Read more »
BERLIN (Reuters) - A ban in Germany on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf should be lifted so the book can be published with editorial comments, a Jewish leader said on Friday.
“I’m basically in favour of the book being made publicly accessible with annotation,” Stephan Kramer, general secretary of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, told German radio.
Speaking on broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Kramer said he believed such an edition should be made available online, where the book can already be read in most countries. Read more »
AN exhibition of rare colour photographs of occupied Paris in World War II has sparked a controversy in France, with some politicians saying it paints too rosy a picture of life under the Nazis.
Paris deputy mayor Christophe Girard, who heads the city’s culture department, has even suggested shutting down the show of work by French photographer Andre Zucca unless the organisers seek to counterbalance the cheery vision on display.
“It doesn’t explain enough that this was Nazi propaganda, and this makes me vomit … As it stands, we’re looking at revisionist history,” Mr Girard said today.
Called Parisians Under the Occupation, the 270 colour photos depict a wartime Paris with more emphasis on joy than the jackboot - which Mr Girard said is inappropriate for an occupation still painful in French collective memory. Read more »
“Yes, it was a good war,” writes Richard Cohen in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, “Human Smoke,” that World War II produced more evil than good.
Baker’s compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II.
Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War.’”
On some points, Cohen is on sold ground. There are things worth fighting for: God and country, family and freedom. Martyrs have ever inspired men. And to some evils pacifism is no answer. Resistance, even unto death, may be required of a man. Read more »
The dark past of two senior journalists at one of Berlin’s biggest newspapers has come to light after one of them was outed as a former Stasi collaborator and his colleague chose to come forward and talk about his past voluntarily.
One of the biggest newspapers in Berlin will carry out background checks on all its journalists after two senior staff admitted to having worked for the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, during the Cold War.
The Berliner Zeitung, a left-leaning daily, admitted on Monday that its assistant politics editor was a Stasi informant for a decade, from the age of 18 until the collapse of East Germany in 1989. The 50-year-old, who has not been named, told colleagues about his secret and apologized to them during an editorial conference, the paper’s editor Josef Depenbrock said. Read more »
(CNN) — FBI wiretaps have “given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was,” as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.
“You see him being intensely self-critical. King really and truly believed that he was there to be of service to others. This was not a man with any egomaniacal joy of being a famous person, or being a leader,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David Garrow in a recent interview with CNN.
Hoping to prove the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was under the influence of Communists, the FBI kept the civil rights leader under constant surveillance.
In a country where patriotism is looked down upon, a new film about a World War I pilot — one of most expensive movies ever made in Germany — takes a new twist: It paints the Red Baron as a national hero.
According to historical accounts, Manfred von Richthofen — dubbed the Red Baron due to the color of his aircraft — shot down 80 Allied planes as a fighter pilot during World War I and became not only the most successful German pilot but also an icon of his era.
Ninety-years after his death, an 18-million-euro ($28-million) film which opens in Germany on April 10, recounts the war adventures of the Prussian nobleman whose life ended at the age of 25. The English-language German production is based on a biography of von Richthofen by historian Joachim Castan, which came out last fall.
Hitler was confident of winning World War II and planned to give Berlin a monumental makeover by 1950. A group in Berlin has collected records about his ‘Germania’ vision — and plans to lead tours through what’s left of the old construction site.
Hitler never liked Berlin. He saw it as a dirty, liberal-minded place and was disdainful of its leftist political leanings. But he had an idea for fixing it after World War II came to an end. His famous vision of Berlin for 1950 — planned in detail by his architect, Albert Speer — was a grand Fascist city called “Germania,” and a new Berlin exhibition looks at models and physical traces of it left behind by Hitler’s regime.
The Nuremberg Congress Hall was the most ambitious building project attempted by the Nazis. It’s now set to reopen Friday, March 7 with a concert starring clarinetist Giora Feidman playing Jewish klezmer music.
The foundation stone was laid in 1935, but the gigantic oval building on Dutzendteich Lake, modeled on the Coliseum in Rome, but 25 percent bigger, was never finished.
The building was part of the Nazi rally grounds where Hitler held his massive military parades during the Third Reich. It memorably featured as a backdrop in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentary “Triumph of the Will,” which was commissioned by Hitler as a chronicle of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress.
Months of debate over the transport fees that Deutsche Bahn is charging a traveling Holocaust memorial escalated when a Jewish community leader called Bahn chief Hartmut Mehdorn “a Nazi at heart.”
“If Mehdorn had held the same position in the Third Reich he would have arranged the deportation of Jews with great conviction,” Michael Szentei-Heise, a Jewish community leader said at the opening of the Zug der Erinnerung, or Train of Commemoration, exhibition in Dusseldorf on Sunday, March 9.
The German state railway company responded with a statement Tuesday that it was considering legal action.
“The remarks are unforgivable and we will ask our lawyers to look into the matter,” the statement said.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Lithuania is investigating a former chairman of Yad Vashem on suspicion that he murdered civilians during the Holocaust. Yitzhak Arad, a noted historian and partisan fighter who served 21 years as the chairman of Israel’s national Holocaust museum, is suspected by Lithuanian prosecutors of being involved in the wartime killing of Lithuanian civilians. The issue came to light when Lithuanian authorities sought to question Arad, a request Israel has refused.” Apparently the Jew Arad was some kind of commissar under Stalin. Read more »
Stereotypes do not equal bigotry, narrow-mindedness or hatred. Stereotypes are the wisdom of our forefathers inarticulately phrased and applied generally to different groups within a population.For instance, segregation was not supported by our ancestors because they hated people of African descent, but because they knew something that we still know, but that our media has told us to forget again. The amnesia of our folk has been imbued into our consciousness in so many ways.
Jews were not kept out of certain clubs, hotels and businesses because there was a mindless hatred or “anti-Semitism” involved, but because our ancestors knew what most other people historically also knew about the character and the team efforts of Jewish tribalists within a host country, culture or society. Again, what many sense or already know intrinsically and subconsciously has to be relearned again thanks to media efforts conducted for the purposes of collective amnesia.
Plato was right, at least in part. He believed that a person knew everything at birth, yet somehow forgot this storehouse of knowledge. Read more »
The following is an exchange between me and a somewhat irritated viewer. Sara, a teacher from Ohio writes: “u distgust me, u are pathetic and ignorant, i am not a religious freak but people like you will burn in hell. maybe it was your parents fault for teaching you these beliefs, please do not insatll this hate in your children and let them live happy peaceful and loving lives.” by the way i found ur site researching on the holocaust to teach my ninth graders. they asked me if there were still people like that today.
i am going to use you for an example of how there are still ignorant people out there who dedicate their lives to hating others instead of trying to make the world a better place. i am just wondering do you really think it was a great thing to murder millions of innocent men,
women, children because of their religion. They were starved, gassed and tortured and ur selling things that say “hitler was right”. im curious
if you have been taught this way from ur parents or if you discovered the beauty of hatred all on your own. maybe u should sell t-shirts that
have pictures of mass corspes on them with a smilely face. if u decide to use that idea i want some credit. please respond i am curious to know
how you came to be this way and ur rationalization. “
Sara,
I normally don’t take the time to respond to this stuff but since you asked for a response, I will. For me personally my parents were very
multi cultural christians, I myself reject multiculturalism and christianity. For instance the end result of multiculturalism is destruction of true diversity. If we all end up mixed and having no unique physical characteristics or heritage, how can diversity exist?
For that matter if the line “Diversity is our strength” is to be used, how can people say that “there are no differences in race”
Millions of Germans tuned in to a television film about the 1945 sinking of a Nazi ship full of refugees in the Baltic, which cost 9,000 lives and surpassed the Titanic as the worst maritime disaster in modern times.
“Die Gustloff,” a two-part multi-million euro movie shown on German state broadcaster ZDF, was the most-watched TV program on Sunday, March 2, with 8.45 million people tuning in. The second half of the three-hour film will be broadcast on Monday evening.
The “Wilhelm Gustloff” had been built to hold 1,500 passengers. The 209 metre-long (685 feet) ship, named after the assassinated head of the Swiss Nazi party, was launched in 1937 and conceived as a cruise liner for the Nazis’ leisure organisation Kraft durch Freude, or “strength through joy.” Once war broke out, it was used by the German military.
With Russian elections coming to a close the zionist controlled media is on a feeding frenzy, calling the elections rigged and unfair. I guess nobody should know “rigged” and “unfair” elections better than them. Every few years they tell us who our choices are and then narrow it down to 2 parties who will both eagerly do their bidding. Both these “choices” will continue to destroy this countries genetic makeup through increased third world immigration. Both parties will give their undying support for the Zionist agenda in Israel and around the world further stoking the fires of hatred for Americans, and both will spend this country into oblivion through their welfare programs and aid to foreign countries who deserve nothing from us.
Yes it seems that the press while living in a huge glass house, insists on throwing stones. The fact of the matter is Russia is quickly becoming a state that is totally self reliant, their economy is on the rise, their military is stronger and the majority of Russian people finally feel that they have a government that wants the best for Russians. Contrast that to the US!
Hwah Hwah, the lemmings have fallen for another Jewish hoax. Let’s see, Diary of Anne Frank….fake, Wiesel’s Night…false, and now this latest best-seller is a complete fabrication as well.
Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.
She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish.
Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press. Read more »
When it comes to historical drama, there are few eras which can pull the crowds like the Third Reich. On Sunday, Feb. 24, such a movie won an Oscar for best foreign-language film.
Germany’s Nazi past has been a recurrent theme in films made in the country in recent years. From “Downfall,” which controversially portrayed the human side of Hitler, to a recent irreverent comedy about the Nazi dictator called “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” German films have been breaking new ground by using humor and irony to tackle issues still sensitive in the country.
The latest film, ”The Counterfeiters,”sheds light on a little-known chapter of Nazi history. It tells the spectacular tale of the largest forgery operation of all time, conducted from within the squalor of one of Hitler’s concentration camps.
( This is actually a post I previously put up, but since its Black History month I thought the kids who have endured this “education” could use a dose of truth) As I watched my favorite show tonight, I was disturbed by a quick commercial that attempted to remind all of us dumb White folks that without Blacks we would not have the Air conditioner or the Lawn Mower? Why was I disturbed by this you ask? Well to be blatantly lied to usually has that effect on me, you see both these inventions were made by you guessed it Europeans! While our politically correct Orwellian government would have you believe that the Air Conditioner was invented by Frederick Jones in 1949, it was actually patented 43 years earlier by Dr. Willis Carrier. Dr. Willis Carrier Read more »
A former Nazi guard extradited from Canada arrived in Italy on Saturday to serve a life sentence for war crimes committed there during World War Two.
Michael Seifert, who had lived in Canada since 1951, landed at Rome’s Ciampino airport before dawn on Saturday.
Italian TV footage showed the 83-year-old, wearing a baseball cap and walking slowly with the help of a cane as local police escorted him out of the airport.
An Italian military tribunal convicted Seifert in absentia in 2000 for torturing and murdering at least 18 people while serving as a guard at a prison camp in the northern city of Bolzano between December 1944 and April 1945. Read more »
Several dozen people protested outside a theater Saturday where a 104-year-old singer who once performed for Adolf Hitler took the stage in the Netherlands for the first time in four decades.
Johannes Heesters was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an actor who was willing to perform for the Nazis, and the Allies allowed him to continue his career after the war. But in his native country he is viewed by some as irredeemable.
“He kept singing for the Nazi regime, for the Wehrmacht, and he earned millions,” said Piet Schouten, representative of a committee formed to protest Heesters’ performance at De Flint theater in Amersfoort. Read more »
WASHINGTON — Recounting family members killed in gas chambers, aging survivors of the Holocaust went before Congress Thursday to ask for their day in court.The survivors want to force the handful of international insurers who sold life insurance policies to Jewish families before World War II to publicly disclose their books on the hundreds of thousands of policyholders.
And they want the opportunity to take those companies to court, describing futile paper chases to collect on life insurance policies their parents had faithfully maintained before they were ordered out of their homes by Nazi troops. Read more »
A French court gave far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen a three-month suspended prison sentence on Friday and fined him 10,000 euros (7,250 pounds) for saying that the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane”.Le Pen was found guilty of “justification of war crimes” and “contesting crimes against humanity” in the trial which opened in December.
It centred around a comment Le Pen made in a 2005 interview with right-wing weekly magazine Rivarol, which angered the government, anti-racism organisations and Jewish groups. Read more »
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