On 29 April 1945, Hitler completed his will and last political testament and married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun. He also received the news that Benito Mussolini met his death in Italy. Mussolini’s corpse, along with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been smashed in fury by a mob and hung upside down outside a gas station.
The following day, 30 April 1945, while holed up in his bunker under his headquarters in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. His wife, Eva Braun also killed herself.
This is how the media reported the news.
One of Time magazine’s most iconic covers of all time was used to mark Hitler’s death.
Inside the edition, TIME Magazine would also mention the death of Mussolini.
Karl Lehmann was a German-Jewish refugee. He arrived at Leighton Park in 1936 from Cologne, Germany, where conditions were no longer safe for him. Karl joined the BBC Monitoring Service, first at Evesham, then Reading, where he listened to and translated German wartime broadcasts, including the one on 1 May 1945 announcing the death of Adolf Hitler.
The 24-year-old was monitoring German state radio when listeners were told to prepare for an important announcement.
“They played solemn music and then they said Hitler had died,” he recalls. “They said he had fallen fighting Bolshevism. It was announced in a very sombre way.”
“We were the first people in Britain to hear the announcement,” he remembers. “The whole building cheered. We realised how important it was. It meant the end of the war against Germany.”
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to categorize any particular day as the eviliest day during World War II, but I think 20 April 1945 would be a good contender.
On that day, Allied bombers in Italy began a three-day attack on the bridges over the rivers Adige and Brenta to cut off German lines of retreat on the peninsula. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday as under a Gestapo reign of terror resulting in the hanging of 20 Russian prisoners of war and 20 Jewish children: Of these, at least nine were under the age of 12. All of the victims had been taken from Auschwitz to Neuengamme, the place of execution, for the purpose of medical experimentation.
On his 56th birthday, Adolf Hitler made his last trip to the surface, from the bunker, to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. Although the below picture was taken in March 1945, and the officer awarding the Iron Cross clearly isn’t Hitler, it does indicate how young these child soldiers were. The boy is Willi Hübner, he was 16 when he received the Iron Cross, but he looks about 12.
On 20 April 1945, it must have become blatantly clear that the Nazis would lose the war within a matter of weeks. Yet children would be sacrificed and murdered.
On Hitler’s 56th (and maybe for his) birthday, the SS took 20 children, who had been victims of medical experiments at Neuengamme, to a school building in Hamburg. Situated on Bullenhuser Damm, this location was a subcamp of Neuengamme. (10 boys and 10 girls, all Jewish) to be murdered.
The Nazis also murdered four adult prisoners that day, who had been looking after the children at the camp. The adults were two French doctors, Gabriel Florence and René Quenouille, and the Dutchmen Dirk Deutekom and Anton Hölzel.
The children were told that they had to be vaccinated against typhoid fever before their return journey. Then they were injected with morphine. They were hanged from hooks on the wall, but the SS men found it difficult to kill the mutilated children. The first child to be strung up was so light – due to disease and malnutrition – that the rope wouldn’t strangle him. SS untersturmführer Frahm had to use all of his own weight to tighten the noose. Then he hanged the others, two at a time, from different hooks. ‘Just like pictures on the wall’, he would recall later. He added that none of the children had cried.
One of those children was Jacqueline Morgenstern, she was 12 when she was murdered.
Before you continue reading, I want you to look into the eyes of Jacqueline, and imagine her body hanging on a hook like a piece of meat.
These are the names of the 20 children, remember all of them, Get their names ingrained in your brain.
Alexander Hornemann, 8, the Netherlands Eduard Hornemann, 12, the Netherlands Marek Steinbaum, 10, Poland Marek James, 6, Poland W. Junglieb, 12, Yugoslavia Roman Witonski, 7, Poland Roman Zeller, 12, Poland Sergio de Simone, 7, Italy Georges Andre Kohn, 12, France Eduard Reichenbaum, 10, Poland Jacqueline Morgenstern, 12, France Surcis Goldinger, 11, Poland Lelka Birnbaum, 12, Poland Eleonora Witonska, 5, Poland Ruchla Zylberberg, 10, Poland H.Wasserman, 8, Poland Lea Klygerman, 8, Poland Rywka Herszberg, 7, Poland Blumel Mekler, 11, Poland Mania Altman, 5, Poland
The murder of children is something I will never understand.
Some of the perpetrators of the Holocaust just went about their business as if it was the most natural thing in the world. In the above photograph, you see a picture of the first German commander of Camp Schoorl SS-Untersturmführer Schmidt visiting Amsterdam as if he was a tourist. He is just one of the many criminals, although a lesser-known one, responsible for the murder of millions.
Fortunately, some survived, and some bystanders bear witness to the appalling crimes committed.
Edith Reiss, from Bolton, England, describes witnessing antisemitic violence on the streets of Göttingen, Germany when she was a visitor there in 1939
“It must have been August 26, 27, something like that, of 1939. And I had taken pictures during my holiday in the Harz Mountains and left them at a photographer’s studio in the town of Göttingen.
I went to pick up the pictures. And there were several other people in the store. I had to wait. And as I was waiting, I heard a commotion outside the shop.
Then I picked up my pictures and came out of the shop. And there, I saw a man in the Brownshirt uniform kicking an old man into the pavement into the gutter. Now there was a crowd of about 12 people standing around, looking. As I came out of the shop, I was horrified to see what was happening.
The Brownshirt walked away from the man, leaving him in the gutter. I immediately rushed to pick him up. And as I picked him up, I saw he had a patch on his coat that had the Jewish symbol Juden, J-U-D-E-N, which meant Jew. I picked him up, and as I did so, a person nearby touched my elbow and said, “Don’t get involved.”
I said, why not? Why can’t you help this man? And they used two words, concentration camp. So I helped the man along the street, and then he turned to me. He said, “I will be alright.”
Kurt Klein, who emigrated from Walldorf, Germany, to the United States in 1937, recalls how Nazi policies and propaganda affected his life at school.
“Well, there was, of course, a gradual alienation with my non-Jewish friends and classmates. And whereas in the beginning, they were almost apologetic about it, saying things such as, “Well, Hitler doesn’t mean people like you really, or your parents, but you will admit there are certain Jews who really deserve to get Hitler’s wrath,” …and so on—in the beginning, they would still be half apologetic about it. This soon turned into a real taunting of Jewish boys and girls.
They might say, “You know, there are now some concentration camps. And if you don’t behave and if you don’t watch it, you’ll wind up in one of those.” and gradually they even stopped talking to us altogether.
But I had seen the gradual change of that. I also saw how they were exposed to Nazi propaganda. For instance, it became mandatory for all schools and all classes to attend such films as the Leni Riefenstahl film, Triumph of the Will. And I myself had to attend it also. And I could see how they were swallowing that up and how it affected them and how they were imbued with this idea of German glory. And anything they would tell them about the Jews, of course, they also swallowed whole.
And so I remember coming out of this film and, having seen the reaction of my classmates, walking along and thinking, how did I get into this position? I didn’t do anything. Why is all this venom directed at me and my family and all the people I know? So I could see the role that propaganda can play and how it can influence people.
What was it like for you to sit in a class and watch a film like this?
Well, it was a totally shattering experience for me to find that all these people were turning away from me, and what was even worse, that some teachers were espousing that same ideology. For instance, I remember a gym teacher of ours giving a lecture once in class to the effect of– this is as close to what he said as I can remember: There are certain elements among us here who are merely guests in this country. They will be treated OK as long as they behave themselves. Unfortunately, they have not always behaved themselves, and therefore we cannot guarantee what will happen to them. I mean, this completely undid me, and not because perhaps even of the content, but because I could see that the Nazis were reaching everybody, not only my classmates.”
From Democracy to Dictatorship
Alfred Wolf, a Holocaust survivor from Eberbach, Germany, recalls the changes he noticed in Germany after the election of Adolf Hitler.
“Do you remember Election Day?
Not per se.
Did you know about it? Were you aware of this?
Oh, yes. Oh, elections dominated the whole atmosphere very much as a presidential election does here, except that elections of various types happened a little more often in Germany.
Did your parents have a chance to vote?
Oh, yes. Well, Jews in the Weimar Republic were very much part and parcel of civic life. There was no exclusion that I was aware of. And they were very proud of the fact that they were full citizens.
Did your parents and grandparents think of moving out of there?
No. That thought did not occur to them because, in the Weimar Republic, the instability of national politics was such that we were sure, very much in the spirit of my father’s bet, that parties like the Nazis would come and go, and we just had to sit and be patient, and they would be sure to go.
So when did you finally realize that it’s not going away?
The most visible change after– I don’t remember whether it was after a week or so– that the flag of the country was changed. The black, red, and gold flag of the Weimar Republic was eliminated. And the swastika flag– black, white, and red– was hoisted in the school. The director of the school, who was a registered Democrat, walked out and said, I refuse to teach under this flag. And he was immediately arrested. He was very lucky in that they just reduced his rank from director to a teacher, but we realized that a different wind was blowing.”
Holocaust survivor Barbara Fischman Traub describes the reactions of her neighbours as she and her family were marched through their hometown of Sighet, Hungary, to the ghetto during the Holocaust.
“Early in the morning, it was the week after Passover, so it must have been the end of April, early May– end of April, I believe. I think it is a very beautiful town. And it was the time when the lilacs began to bloom.
The lilac in my mother’s garden was very special because it was double-petaled purple lilac. And you could see already the buds. And this was the morning when they rang– and again, the gendarmes– and we were packed by then, mother, and I, and the cook, and across the street, my brother’s wife, Rosie– Rose– and the two little babies, my nieces.
We had our valises. And in the street where we lived, there were a few Jews. It was a mixed neighbourhood. So there were about four Jewish families and they were all packed and the gendarmes came.
And they took us towards another street where there were some more Jews. They put us in the centre of the street where the cars and horses were driven, and they started to force us to march to the ghetto. The ghetto was in the Jewish section of the town which was on the other side of the town.
Were your neighbours aware of what was going on?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Those very neighbours in whose courtyard I played as a child, those very neighbours who were guests at my mother’s dining room table months before, peeked through their windows and turned their faces.
And as I look back now, strange that it pains me so much. That trek through the main street, in the middle of the street, driven like cattle, with the valises, with the baggage, with my little nieces, with the little infant who was five, six weeks old, being driven to that Corso where my father, had a big business where people would come to buy, would tip their hat and say, “How do you do, Mr Fischman,” and turned to my mother and say, “How are you?” [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN], which is a very respectful way to address a lady in Hungarian. “How are you, my lady?”
These very people who used to watch my bicycle through town and say, “[INAUDIBLE], you have the first girl’s bicycle–” because they never saw a girl’s bicycle, you know, without a handlebar– these neighbours who used to pinch my cheek when I was a little girl, they stood and watched, stony-faced, as we were driven to this town with the Hungarian gendarmes using truncheons on old people who couldn’t walk fast enough. It was so shameful, so humiliating. But I know now that the shame was theirs, not ours. But I didn’t know it then.”
Dutch Police, a friend for the people
Marion Pritchard, a member of the Dutch resistance who hid a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation of Holland, describes what happened when a Dutch Nazi policeman investigated her house.
“Miek van der Loeff, who was the director of the Amsterdam Municipal Electrical Works by then, asked me to find a place for his friend, Freddy, and Freddy’s three children to go into hiding. And I couldn’t find any place that would take all four of them. So then Miek moved us into the servants’ quarters of his mother-in-law’s house out in the country. That’s that yellow house in the pictures.
When you agreed to do this, what was your relationship with this person who asked you up until that time?
Oh. His parents were best friends with my parents, and I had known him all my life. My parents were older than the parents of children my age. So my parents’ friends children tended to be 10 to 15 years older than I. But I knew them all.
And so Miek is the one who asked me to find a place. And he and his brother built a hiding place underneath the living room floor. At night, I’d open it up.
Because when you heard a motor vehicle come, or a truck, or whatever, you knew that it wasn’t somebody Dutch. You knew it was most likely the Nazis looking for Jews. So we practised, and I could get him and the kids in there and cover it all up in about 30 seconds.
This one particular night, a Dutch Nazi policeman brought three German Nazi officers to the house. And I thought they were in the hiding place, but I’d let them out—I let the kids out after half an hour because I hadn’t had time to give the baby her sleeping powder. And she began to cry. And Freddy decided to stay in the hiding place, because he was working on his PhD thesis, and he was in the middle of an important chapter. Some people know how to concentrate.
So then the Dutch policeman came back. Because it was customary for the person in hiding to sleep in the same bed with a member of the host family. Because if the Nazis came, and they found, say, that there were five beds slept in but only four people, they could guess that the fifth person had gone out the window or something like that. So this night, just the Dutch Nazi policeman came back. And I couldn’t think of anything else to do except to shoot him.
How did you have a gun?
Miek, the gentile who had asked me to find a place for them, had given it to me. And I had put it behind the books on the shelf above the bed, never intending to use it. I’m against capital punishment, and I’m against abortion. I can make exceptions on abortion, of course. But I am basically opposed to capital punishment and killing in general.
But your unconscious is quite powerful. And when it was a choice, most likely, between the kids and him, I chose him. And I didn’t wait to see what he was going to do or what he was going to say.
By then, obviously, if he’d gone into the other room, he would have seen the kids. He might have known the kids around anyway. But my instinct was that if I didn’t get rid of him, those kids were doomed.
So we talked briefly. We decided that Karel would go walk to the village, which of course was strictly against the rules. You’re not supposed to be out during curfew. Especially if you’re a Jew, you’re not supposed to be out during curfew. And I suggested that he stay with the kids and that I go to the village, but he wasn’t having any of that.
And he went to see the baker– and I have a picture of the baker somewhere– who in normal times brought his wares around in a wagon with a horse. And the baker agreed that as soon as curfew ended in the morning, he would come with his horse and wagon and get the body. And before Karel came back, together they went to see the local undertaker. And the local undertaker agreed to bury the body in a coffin with somebody who was having a funeral the next day.”
Barbara Turkeltaub, a Jewish girl who was hidden by Catholic nuns during the war, describes witnessing a Nazi massacre.
I usually was a very good girl and listen, very conform to what I needed to do. That one particular day that looked such a nice day early in the morning—we were very early up. We were up at six o’clock because there was like a mass in the morning. They had like a little chapel and they went to mass and they took us there too. My sister was not very often there, because she wouldn’t sit. But they took me almost every time.
Now, after the mass, we would go and have breakfast. And after breakfast, it was a quiet time. So during that quiet time, which was still very early, I venture. I didn’t remember that I wasn’t supposed to. And I ventured and the forest was, I mean, right there, very close by. So I went into the forest and I went a little bit farther and was very curious. I wasn’t frightened at all, and I didn’t have to go very far from there. I started to hear these noises. These noises. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
I didn’t really associate this with shooting, because it sounds different. I don’t know. Anyway, I went towards the sound. And I didn’t go very far. I saw this huge ditch. And around it a group of—I began to hear also voices. Voices. And I saw a group of women, and who were undressed, and some of them were holding babies in their arms. And the Germans were shooting randomly. I mean, and they were falling.
I was so stunned, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t. I was just hypnotized. I was there. And very soon afterwards, somebody grabbed me and carry me again from there. And that was one of the nuns, older nuns. And they were telling me, she was telling me, and the others were dead. You were told not to venture. You were told not to go. You have not listened to us. It’s very bad.”
The letter above is dated 18 December 1943. However, it is in direct connection with a program that started eight years earlier. On 12 December 1935, the Lebensborn program began as a campaign to encourage so-called “racially valuable” Germans to have more children. Lebensborn initially focused on giving financial assistance to members of the SS with large families and providing pregnant “German-blooded” women with medical care in comfortable maternity houses. During World War II, the program also became involved in the kidnapping of thousands of foreign children for adoption into German families to counter Germany’s declining birthrate.
On 13 September 1936, nine months after the program had been initiated, Heinrich Himmler wrote the following to members of the SS:
“The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations: • Support racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families with many children. • Placement and care of racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after a thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children. • Care for the children. • Care for the children’s mothers. It is the honourable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” The application for admission must be filed prior to 23 September 1936.”
One of the children conceived via the Lebensborn program is Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad from the Swedish pop band ABBA.
After her birth on 15 November 1945, the result of an encounter between her mother, Synni, and a German sergeant, Alfred Haase, Anni-Frid’s mother and grandmother were branded as traitors and ostracized in their village in Northern Norway. They were forced to emigrate to Sweden, where Anni-Frid’s mother died of kidney failure before her daughter was two.
It is estimated that 20,000 Polish children were kidnapped who passed the Germanization criteria and were integrated into the Lebensborn program.
Below is the translation of the letter above:
Lodz. 18 Dec. 1943 To Mr Karl Müller
Richrath / Langenfeld Rietherbach St. 11 R IV / I – A. E. – 023 – Hei / MHW –
Subject: placement of a child Reference: Preceding correspondence Condition: proof of health (2 persons)
Dear Mr Müller! I am pleased to finally announce that I have found two boys, one of which you will most likely approve. They are Sep Piehl, born on 3 December 1935, and Eugen Bartel, born on 11 March 1937. I believe that at least one of them is of an age that is well-suited to your household. The children currently live in Oberweis (Upper Danube). Arrange to take the 6:19 train leaving Gmunden on 4 January 1944, and arrive in Oberweis at 6:37. If you need overnight accommodation, confirm with me and I will arrange it. It is necessary that you bring your identification papers with you. Please notify me no later than 22 December 1943, whether I can expect you in Oberweis on 4 January. In any event, please complete the accompanying proofs of health for yourself and your wife. The authorized departmental or SS physician will, as is standard, provide me with the completed forms. I hope that my news to you has given you special Christmas joy.
Hail Hitler! On behalf of: signed
Most people will have heard of the Wannsee conference, but only a few know about the meeting that preceded the conference. That meeting may have had greater implications than the Wannsee conference.
On the afternoon of the 12th of December 1941, Hitler ordered the leading members of the Nazi party to a meeting in his private rooms at the Reich Chancellery.
The announcement Hitler made on 12 December to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter refers to an earlier statement he had made on 30 January 1939:
“If the world of international financial Jewry, both in and outside of Europe, should succeed in plunging the Nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”
With the United States being dragged into World War II on 7 December 1941 and the subsequent declaration of war on the US by Nazi Germany on 11 December, the war, especially regarding the above statement, had become truly a World War. Hitler announced this declaration of war on 11 December in the German Reichstag, a speech also broadcast on the radio. On 12 December 1941, he had a meeting with the most important Nazi leaders.
Attendance in this meeting was obligatory for Nazis in high party offices. No official list of the people who attended this meeting exists, but the following leaders of Nazi Germany, are known to have been there:
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Hans Frank and Philipp Bouhler. More than likely, Alfred Rosenberg; Gauleiters Arthur Greiser, Fritz Bracht, and Fritz Sauckel, Reichskommissars Hinrich Lohse and Erich Koch, and Alfred Meyer were also present. Known to have been absent from this meeting were Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich.
Joseph Göbbels. noted the following in his diary on 13 December 1941.
“Regarding the Jewish question, the Fuehrer is determined to clean the table. He prophesized that should the Jews once again bring about a world war, they would be annihilated. These were no empty words. The world war has come, therefore the annihilation of the Jews has to be its inevitable consequence. The question has to be examined without any sentimentality. We are not here to pity Jews but to have pity for our own German people. If the German people have sacrificed about 160,000 dead in the battles in the east, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”
What is so significant about the December 12 meeting is that Adolf Hitler himself was present and had called for the meeting. Believe it or not, but to this day there are still people who claim that Hitler had no hand in the murder of Jews, clearly, that meeting shows his full knowledge and endorsement and also that he ordered the mass murder.
On that same day, the first group of Jews was deported to Majdanek: 150 men who had been captured in a manhunt in the Lublin ghetto. By 6 January 1945, just 17 of them were still alive and were liberated from the camp by an order of the German Labor Ministry in Lublin. Between 22 February and 9 November 1942, at least 4000 Jews from Lublin were murdered in Majdanek.
Werner Galnik, a young Jewish boy in the Riga Ghetto in Latvia worded it probably the best in his diary entry of 12 December 1941.
“I figured this way: Hitler loves only the Germans, but no other people, and particularly not us Jews. Does it follow that because we are Jews we must be prisoners? Did my father perhaps steal or murder that he should be arrested? And what had my dear mother done? And what did we children do?”
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The general consensus is that once you introduce Hitler into a debate or argument you have lost that argument. I also subscribed to this opinion, however I have changed my view on this.
I believe, not comparing some current far right politicians to Hitler, is a mistake. For example, despite what Putin thinks he is, he basically has become a far right dictator, who is following a similar path as Hitler in 1936-1939. But Putin is is not only one.
Hitler didn’t start off as a dictator he gradually became a dictator, He started with legitimate political means. He also knew how to tap into the zeitgeist of the German population in the 1920s and 1930s, When I say the German population I mean the mainstream conservative German civilians. They were afraid that their values were slowly being eroded, although there was no clear evidence of that, it was the perception of the time.
They were not listened to by other politicians, Their concerns and fears were not addressed. Hitler did listen, he devised most of the Nazi policies, based on those fears.
The far right and far left movements, they are basically the same but in name, that are emerging at the moment globally are doing the exact same thing as Hitler did. But if you say that in a debate nowadays, you are immediately dismissed.
We should listen to all opinions and if there are concerns, be they real or just a perception, they need to be addresses and not dismissed.
April 30,1945 was a day that would have given a great sense of relief for millions around the globe, that was the day that Adolf Hitler decided to take his own life.
However for a few people it was a day filled with tragedy. Four Dutch Jewish citizens died that day in Bergen Belsen. Although the camp had been liberated a few weeks earlier, most of the people remained in the camp because of fear of disease, and also some were just not healthy enough to be moved.
Laurence Wand one of the liberators said this about that time
“The policy was, right from the beginning, was to get people out of that awful place into proper surroundings and you couldn’t take them out until they’d been cleaned and the army had set up a ‘human laundry’ – or was in the process of setting up a ‘human laundry’ – which consisted of trestle tables, water supply, trestle tables, a clothing dump, a stretcher dump, old clothing to be discarded, fresh clothing to be provided after the inmates would be brought out of the huts, hosed down, washed down, deloused, and then put into fresh clothes and then evacuated from the camp…The primary task of course was to save life and to get people fed, to get them out of the camp into proper conditions where they could be nursed and looked after and saved from dying.”
Unfortunately many still died
Selma Stibbe-Frank was born in Emmen, the Netherlands, on 2 April 1909 . She died because of her treatment by the Nazis in Bergen Belsen on April 1945. Her husband, Maurits Meijer Stibbe, had been murdered in Auschwitz on January 31,1944.
One of the few things which remain of Selma is a certificate, issued on 19 February 1927 by the management of De Bijenkorf, department store. Selma Frank had been working from 15 November 1924 to 19 February 1927 as an office clerk in the Statistics department. The management wrote in the certificate:
‘She has always carried out the tasks she was given to our satisfaction and her behaviour could not be faulted. Miss Frank leaves our company at her own request’.
Selma’s story is just so tragic, although she had been liberated she never got to enjoy her freedom. She died on the same day as the man who was responsible for her death.
You are telling the world that you have carried out this military mission in the Ukraine, to protect its citizens, to rid it of Nazis. However you have not fully explained to us what you consider to be Nazis.
I would love it of you could just clarify that matter to a simpleton like me. When you say Nazi, are you referring to the Ukraine’s Jewish president whose grandfather barely survived the Holocaust?
Or were you perhaps referring to the 10 year old school girl Polina, who was murdered on your orders?
Maybe it is the 2 year old Shpak who was murdered during a shelling ordered by you. Was he that Nazi you were referring to? Is that the type of funerals you want to see more in the Ukraine to achieve your goals?
Dear Comrade Putin, if you can’t explain it to me may you can explain it to Oleh,Shpak’s Father? Because he asked “I don’t know if there is a God. What is this all for? For what?”
Dear Comrade Putin, your actions look a lot like that of a nationalised German Austrian, he also said in the 1930’s that he wanted to liberated the people in the Sudeten land and Poland. But he was a Nazi, So are you perhaps a Nazi, Comrade Putin? If so, the only thing for you to do to rid the Ukraine from Nazis is by withdrawing your troops.
Perhaps that isn’t your goal. Perhaps you long to the Russia of the days of yore? Where it was still part of the USSR and maybe you want to rule like Czar Nicholas once did. Maybe you want to become the new USSczaR.
If you ask me that is what you want to be. But people will not remember you as a Czar. They will see you like cowards such as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. That is what you real legacy will be.
Is that what you really want? It is not too late yet, you can still change that.
On December 7,1941, 80 years ago today, a hurried dispatch from the ranking United States naval officer in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, was sent to all major navy commands and fleet units provided the first official word of the attack at the ill-prepared Pearl Harbor base. It said simply: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NOT DRILL.
Later that day Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor , Hawaii Territory, killing over 2,300 Americans. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. A total of twelve ships sank or were beached in the attack and nine additional vessels were damaged. More than 160 aircraft were destroyed and more than 150 others damaged.
The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress and declared, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941–a date which will live in infamy–the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
The Senate voted for war against Japan by 82 to 0, and the House of Representatives approved the resolution by a vote of 388 to 1. The sole dissenter was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a devout pacifist who had also cast a dissenting vote against the U.S. entrance into World War I. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the U.S. government responded in kind.
Also on the day following Pearl Harbor, Alan Lomax, head of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, sent a telegram to colleagues around the U.S. asking them to collect people’s immediate reactions to the bombing. Over the next few days prominent folklorists such as John Lomax, John Henry Faulk, Charles Todd, Robert Sonkin, and Lewis Jones responded by recording “man on the street” interviews in New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They interviewed salesmen, electricians, janitors, oilmen, cabdrivers, housewives, students, soldiers, physicians, and others regarding the events of December 7. Among the interviewees was a California woman then visiting her family in Dallas, Texas.
“My first thought was what a great pity that… another nation should be added to those aggressors who strove to limit our freedom. I find myself at the age of eighty, an old woman, hanging on to the tail of the world, trying to keep up. I do not want the driver’s seat. But the eternal verities–there are certain things that I wish to express: one thing that I am very sure of is that hatred is death, but love is light. I want to contribute to the civilization of the world but…when I look at the holocaust that is going on in the world today, I’m almost ready to let go…”
Adolf Hitler responded by declaring war on the US on 11 December, firmly bringing America into both fronts of the war.
There are some in Germany and in other countries who portray all of those involved in the 20 July plot as heroes. I believe this is a misinterpretation. Firstly they are not heroes because they did not succeed, and secondly, there were quite a few of them who had no issues with the Nazi policies but had more of an issue with Adolf Hitler.
Arthur Nebe was one of the plotters. He was to lead a team of 12 policemen to kill Himmler, but the signal to act never reached him. After the failed assassination attempt, Nebe fled and went into hiding.
Prior to this part in the plot, Nebe rose through the ranks of the Prussian police force to become head of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei; Kripo) in 1936, which was amalgamated into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939.
In an August 1939 speech, he defined crime as “a recurring disease on the body of the people.” This disease was supposedly passed hereditarily from criminals and “asocial individuals” to their children. In the Nazi state, asocials were people who behaved in a way considered outside of social norms. The category included people identified as vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and alcoholics; the arbeitsscheu (work-shy); and the homeless. This category also included Roma. The Nazi regime viewed Roma as behaviorally abnormal and racially inferior. Defining crime as a disease connected to certain groups radicalized Kripo’s practice.
Kripo officials from the KTI developed early techniques to gas people en masse. In October 1939, Nebe instructed the KTI to experiment with methods of killing people with mental and physical disabilities. This effort was conducted in cooperation with the Euthanasia Program. A KTI chemical engineer and toxicology expert, Albert Widmann, tested possible killing methods. He ultimately suggested carbon monoxide gas. In the fall of 1941, Widmann helped create gas vans. The vans used carbon monoxide gas generated from exhaust fumes.
Planners of Operation Reinhard killing centers adopted this development. At Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, large motor engines were used to generate carbon monoxide gas for the gas chambers.
In 1941 during operation Barbarossa, Nebe volunteered to serve as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B, one of the four mobile death squads of the SS. During Nebe’s tenure, this deadly unit was responsible for the mass murders of 45,000 people in the areas around Bialystok, Minsk, and Mogilev. Many of these victims were Jews. Nebe was not forced to take control of this Unit, he volunteered.
In July 1941, Arthur Nebe reported that a “solution to the Jewish problem” was “impractical” in his region of operation due to “the overwhelming number of the Jews”, as in there were too many Jews to be killed by too few men. By August 1941, Nebe came to realize that Einsatzgruppe’s resources were insufficient to meet the expanded mandate of the killing operations, due to the inclusion of Jewish women and children since that month. This mean, seem to some as a person with a conscience, but the only reason he said these things, is not because he didn’t want to kill more Jews, he said it because he did feel he didn’t have enough men to do the job. Just let that train of thought sink in for a minute.
In late 1941, Nebe was posted back to Berlin and resumed his career with the RSHA. Nebe commanded the Kripo until he was denounced and executed after the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944.
Nebe was arrested in January 1945 after a former mistress betrayed him. He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on 2 March and, according to official records, was executed in Berlin at Plötzensee Prison on 21 March 1945 by being hanged with piano wire from a meat hook, in accordance with Hitler’s order that the bomb plotters were to be “hanged like cattle.”
The case of Walter Seifert is a disturbing one. It is also an indication on something that I have argued for a long time, the Denazification program after World War 2 did not work. It was merely a political bit of veneer.
For you who don’t know what the Denazification program was;Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following World War 2.
It was attempted through a series of directives issued by the Allied Control Council, seated in Berlin, beginning in January 1946. “Denazification directives” identified specific people and groups and outlined judicial procedures and guidelines for handling them. Though all the occupying forces had agreed on the initiative, the methods used for denazification and the intensity with which they were applied differed between the occupation zones.
Although I have seen no records to show that Walter Seifert had been subjected to the program, it is sage to presume that he did. As a former sergeant with the Luftwaffe in the fact he joined the Germany security police at the end of 1945, one can conclude from this that he must have been a subject to the Denazification program.
On 23 August 1946 he was treated for a bronchial catarrh, and an examination by a specialist on 5 September diagnosed with tuberculosis in the right lung, resulting in his dismissal from the police on 30 September, as he was unfit for service. From then on Seifert attempted to enforce his claims for subsistence, feeling he was being treated unfairly by the government which he claimed was cheating him of his war pension.
He reportedly fell apart after his wife died of an embolism during premature birth on 11 February 1961. Holding the doctors responsible for the death of his wife he wrote a 120-page letter titled “Muttermord — Einzelschicksal und Analyse eines Systems” (Matricide – Individual fate and analysis of a system), and sent it to agencies, doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Therein he tried to prove that the treatment of his wife’s embolism was done wrong, called society a criminal system and equated doctors with murderers, writing:
“The doctor is the greatest mass murderer of the poor in the history of mankind (…) What to do? Appeal to their ‘conscience’ – useless, whoever does something like that has no conscience. Does the aforementioned science count before any court? No, thus begins the vigilante justice, the terror of the medical society in the pluralistic chaos of criminality. But terror can only be extirpated with counter-terror, and whoever denies me the protection of the law forces the cudgel into my hand.”
While doctors said he had schizophrenia, they did not consider him violent.
However on June 11,1964, his 42nd birthday ,he entered a Catholic elementary school in Cologne, located at the Volkhovener Weg 209-211, with a homemade flamethrower and a long lance, reportedly yelling, “I am Adolf Hitler the Second!” He used the flamethrower to start fires in classrooms, stabbing victims with his lance. Killing eight pupils and two teachers, and wounding twenty-two others. When police arrived at the scene, he fled from the school compound and poisoned himself by taking cyanide.. He was taken to a hospital, where he died the same evening.
None of the children died immediately. Some suffered for more then a week before they died.
Dorothea Binner, 9, died on 15 June, Renate Fühlen, 9, died on 19 June, Ingeborg Hahn, 9, died on 30 June, Ruth Hoffmann, 10, died on 20 June, Klara Kröger, 9, died on 16 June, Stephan Lischka, 9, died on 16 June, Karin Reinhold, 11, died on 20 June, Rosel Röhrig, 12, died on 18 June.
I know he may have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. But I think the fact that he had actively been a Nazi ,he was still indoctrinated with that ideology, and that ideology was not rooted out with the Denazification program, because it was successful on only very few Nazis.
Walter Seifert basically had a chip on his shoulder and suffered from this sense of entitlement that so many Nazis had.
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