(This takes 6¾ minutes to read.)

Conscription of agriculturalists, Allied activity at sea, and prioritisation of the military’s needs lead to less food for the civilians under Fascism:

Fascist Italy entered the war in a general position of vulnerability regarding food supply and was forced over the course of the war to introduce increasingly stringent rationing. Starting in the late 1930s, a marked contraction in popular consumption — driven by autarkic policies and the growing prioritization of military preparations — began to undermine the régime’s ability to maintain consensus on the islands, particularly in large cities, where hardship and public discontent had been mounting throughout the second half of the decade. The blockade thus struck at what was already a vulnerable point in the foundations of fascist support.⁶⁷

The announcements of new rationing measures were themselves often accompanied by reports of increasing discontent, public protests and later rioting.⁶⁸ Within months of joining the war, there were indications of food shortages damaging popular support for the war throughout the country. Collected Carabinieri reports from December 1940 highlight the rising prices of fish, eggs, butter and pulses, along with scarcities of flour, pasta, oats, meat and other essentials in some provinces. This ‘economic malaise’ had ‘a significant impact on the public spirit’.⁶⁹

The islanders, however, with their additional vulnerability due to reliance on seaborne transport, found their suffering to be that much more acute, and their ‘consensus’ thus declined even faster. Just weeks after the Italian declaration of war, informers and secret police in Cagliari reported overhearing concerns voiced in public over food shortages. This was during the initial period when shipping to Sardinia was suspended, and the report noted patrons at one café stating impatience waiting for the arrival of ‘a few steamships’.⁷⁰

Similar concerns about the vulnerability of Sardinia’s sea communications were also reported in the northern city of Olbia in a report to the Chief of Police in late 1940.⁷¹ These concerns were accurate, given that, by November 1940, stockpiles of wheat in the Cagliari province had dropped to 75,000 quintals, ‘sufficient to cover [their] needs until 30 June 1941’. The consequent rationing of pasta impacted all but was deemed to ‘absolutely deficient’ for hard labouring miners.⁷²

Local Prefectures and their personnel often felt the brunt of rising public anger as the food situation on the islands continued to worsen into 1941. In March, for instance, there was ‘a certain turmoil’ in the Sardinian mining regions of Iglesias and Carbonia, as bread rations were tightened further, forcing some partial, temporary relaxations in these measures by the local authorities.⁷³

In April, multiple citizens in the municipality of Geraci Siculo near Palermo took the opportunity to complain to a visiting fascist Gerarch that they were being ‘left to starve’ and requested the removal of the local Prefectural Commissioner.⁷⁴ In the following months other protests exploded in Alimena and Mezzojuso, motivated by the reduction of rations assigned to the population.⁷⁵

By June, the Police Chief in Sardinia was reporting that students from the University of Sassari were organizing to ‘form a nucleus of opposition to the Régime’ known as the ‘Movimento universitario rivoluzionario antifascista’, and had recruited members in universities across the island. Both the public and secret police were forced to act to supress them, reporting the next month that public demonstrations of antifascism had been ‘attacked and crushed’.⁷⁶

As the war drew into the autumn of 1941, a period when the shipping losses and supply interruptions started to increase rapidly, stringent new rationing measures were brought into place, limiting most individuals to just 200 grams of bread per day.⁷⁷ A report for the Palermo prefecture noted that the ‘discomfort’ caused was not limited to ‘specific categories of consumers, but the whole population’.⁷⁸

The impact was not only a physical one for islanders, but also visual, as noted by the Prefect in Cagliari:

The greatest satisfaction of the citizens of Cagliari, in times of peace, was to pass by the market in the morning, where they always found it well supplied with meat, vegetables, fruit and abundant fish. Such a morning spectacle could no longer be given to the citizens of Cagliari in times of war.⁷⁹

It was easy enough for these citizens to link at least some of these shortages directly with the maritime war, given that the Italian Navy had requisitioned many of the fishing vessels operating from the island.⁸⁰ The island’s censorship office recorded that complaints about the scarcity of bread and the high prices caused by the difficulties in supply were dominating private correspondence in late 1941.⁸¹

In response to these shortages, public protests over food reached a new level of intensity on the islands. Reports soon surfaced of ‘communist propaganda’ being circulated among workers in the industrial and mining communities of Sardinia, accompanied by what was suspected to be deliberately slowed productivity.⁸²

Across Sicily, the Carabinieri reported multiple substantial protests in October, usually by women and young boys. In the Acireale comune of Catania province, around 300 women and 50 boys protested outside the town hall over bread shortages on 2 October, while in one neighbourhood of Catania city, about 1,000 women marched the same day, chanting ‘we want bread’.

This was followed by at least seven other substantial public protests over food across Acireale, Siracusa, and numerous areas of Catania and Messina in the space of one week. On at least one of these occasions, it took a (non-lethal) intervention from the Army to disperse the protest.⁸³

In November, the Palermo Police Chief (Questore) noted that coal shortages on the island were also causing severe dissatisfaction, and that there was an urgent need to increase availability.⁸⁴ By December, the ‘severe economic hardship’ showed ‘no signs of abating’ and plenty of public anger over the shortages of meat, milk and fats, as well as over coal deficiency.

Even supplies of beans and potatoes were limited, while the visible preferential treatment of the Armed Forces stationed in Sicily for the few meat stocks that were available was noted as stoking public resentment further.⁸⁵ It was a similar concurrent story in Sardinia, especially as the arrival of more military personnel on the island caused yet more strain to the supply situation.⁸⁶

[…]

Public anger increased over the course of 1942, even while much of that year represented Axis success in many aspects of the Mediterranean War. By March, security services warned that ‘Sicily is like a powder keg, and that the slightest shock will be enough for it to burst’.⁹²

Over June and July, even as the Axis powers successfully pushed the Allies back across North Africa and interdicted major convoys to Malta, the Sicilian population as a whole showed serious signs of ‘alarm and discontent’ over inadequate pasta availability. The malnutrition was found to be causing oedema (fluid retention and swelling) among the island’s working-class population.

By September, the Prefect for Palermo felt that while public opinion ‘remains favourably oriented towards the current war events’, the food situation had not notably improved. Public anger remained over the ‘almost total lack of pulses, eggs, sausages and cheese, the shortage of potatoes, and the insufficiency of meat and fresh fish’.⁹³

In the town of Ciminna, one local official was chased by residents who were angry over the lack of food and accused him of hoarding meat. The official, who was lucky to escape serious harm, noted that public anger over food was usually directed first at local authorities.⁹⁴ More broadly, it was feeding widespread disillusionment with the war and the fascist régime.

It was a similar story for Sardinia. One resident of the comune of Nuraminis, for instance, later recalled that the stringent rations of essentials such as bread, sugar and milk never provided anything close to enough for their needs. Despite efforts to supplement diets via black market purchasing, ‘Hunger became more and more intense, malaria broke out’.⁹⁵

Public signs of anger became more widespread in the face of such conditions, often taking the form of antifascist posters and graffiti. One report from March warned of graffiti in multiple public toilets with slogans such as ‘Mussolini [is] betraying us and starving us to death. Remember this people. Let the revolution break out, at least let us drive out that cuckold Mussolini’ and ‘To the ground, the Fascio! Mussolini down! Down with Mussolini!’⁹⁶

[…]

The fronte interno had been fundamentally undermined at an earlier stage than 1943, but in that year it effectively collapsed. Food shortages were a, perhaps the central reason and the transport issue was a key causal factor in these shortages for the islanders.

Beyond general disaffection and protest, anti-fascist activity and propaganda had begun to spread more widely on the islands. As one report from early July succinctly put it, there was abundant evidence that ‘in Sicily and Sardinia no one wears the fascist badge anymore and that the economic situation with regard to food and especially transport is disastrous. The Sicilian and Sardinian populations are said to be fed up and have all become anti-fascist’.¹⁰⁷

To conclude, food was undoubtedly a central issue in the deterioration of wartime public opinion and, for the islanders, this was intimately linked with the war at sea and the issue of maritime supply, on which they were heavily reliant for many key foodstuffs.

Overstretched shipping commitments, mismanagement, losses of ships and interruptions to the island routes all contributed to ensuring that food shortages were worse on the islands than the shortages on the mainland.

(Emphasis added.)

If you are aware that other populations have put up with food deficiencies, then Sardinia’s and Sicily’s impatience looks puzzling. My hypothesis is that since Sardinians and Sicilians did not choose Fascism, and the Fascists suppressed their languages, the food scarcities were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was little trust and little love between these Italic minorities and their régime, so most of them did not care about a government that was largely alien to them anyway.

(This takes 4⅔ minutes to read.)

Jewish opinions on abortion vary, but even ordinary Orthodox Jews support the right to abortion for extreme cases. It is difficult to determine if these were the same opinions that Jews had a century ago (given that abortion was a taboo subject back then), but we cannot rule out that some Jewish physicians did indeed perform illegal abortions in the German Reich. Unfortunately, this provided material for Fascist propagandists to exploit, and given that abortion was a shocking accusation back then, this must have been potent propaganda indeed.

Quoting Der Stürmer in Anson Rabinbach’s & Sander L. Gilman’s The Third Reich Sourcebook, pages 364–5:

In the year 1489, the king of France at the time issued a law mandating all Jews to subject themselves to Christian baptism. Anyone who refused was expelled from the country, The Jews in France were shocked and turned to the highest Jewish authority in Constantinople for assistance and advice. The head Jews, though, sent the famous “Toledo Letter” to the Jews: in France, It was later published in 1583 under the title La Silva Curiosa.¹

Here is a quote from that letter: “You complain that they threaten your lives, then let your children be baptized and become doctors and pharmacists so they can endanger the lives of your adversaries within the bounds of the law. Whoever can succeed in killing goyim publicly without endangering himself should do so. Whoever cannot do so should seek to cause their death by means of theft and trickery.”

From the very beginning, the Jew has acted in accordance with this counsel and these laws. He never became a pharmacist in order to produce pharmaceutical products that cured disease in Gentiles. He became a pharmacist in order to produce poisons he could use to eliminate Gentiles with impunity. He would never become a doctor in order to help sick Gentiles. He became a doctor in order to rob Gentiles of their health and their lives. The Jew hates all Gentiles. Every year, at the time of the Jewish New Year, the Jews gather in schools and synagogues to address their G-d [YHWH] with this prayer:

“May the bodies of Gentiles disappear from the face of the earth, may their tongues be parched, may their arrogance be humbled. May their spirit be shattered.”

The Jewish doctor has never had any interest in healing non-Jewish patients. He has never had an interest in healing the German Volk. He has always been intent on poisoning, decimating, and infecting the German Volk with disease.

The Abortionist Dr. Mayer

And this is why it was the Jewish doctor who demanded the elimination of Paragraph 218, the law against abortion. The Jewish doctor would prefer that the German Volk not give birth to children. He would prefer that the fruit of German women’s wombs be murdered. The Jewish Volk have been instructed as follows: “You shall multiply as the sand of the sea.”

The Jewish people did not practice abortion. Yet they propagated and encouraged abortion in Gentiles. The Jewish people, on the contrary, though, are supposed to multiply as “sand of the sea.”

This is why Jewish doctors have never performed abortions on Jewish women. Only on Gentiles. The abortion trial that came to an end before the State Supreme Court in Hamburg on 22 August 1938 is proof enough of that. Two Jewish and two Gentile defendants were in the docket. The two Gentiles were so Jewified and dummified that they went along with the Jews in performing the abortions. The Jews were the main offenders. Their names are Dr. Max Meyer and Dr. Wilfrid Alexander.

Dr. Meyer is a converted Jew. He let himself be baptized and became a doctor so that he could “endanger the lives of Gentiles with impunity.” He had a practice in the town of Altona for thirty-three years. His monthly income was 1,500 Reichsmarks. He supplemented this income by performing abortions for exorbitant fees.

He had already been convicted of performing abortions and sentenced to six months in prison on 25 June 1930. He received a mild sentence that was typical during the Systemzeit and that was then actually reduced to four months and ultimately resulted in a fine of only 5,000 Reichsmarks.

But the Jew Dr. Meyer was proved to have performed commercial abortions a second time and in seven cases. It goes without saying that this Jew has perhaps performed abortions in several hundred cases over the course of his many years in practice. It’s just that the rest of them could not be proved. Dr. Meyer was sentenced to serve five years in hard labor.

The Abortionist Jew Dr. Alexander

The Jew Dr. Alexander had a practice in Hamburg (Große Bergstrasse 84). On 11 September 1936, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labor for a sex offense in violation of Paragraph 176, Section 1 of the Penal Code. He forced himself upon a non-Jewish girl who came to him for an examination.

At the time, there weren’t any laws on the books to allow Jew Dr. Alexander to be charged with racial treason [Rassenschande] because the crime was committed in the summer of 1935 that is, prior to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. The Jew Alexander was convicted of three instances of performing abortion for commercial gain. He was sentenced to three years’ hard labor.

The Gentiles still sitting in the dock (a young, non-Jewish doctor and a non-Jewish midwife) were also sentenced to hard-labor terms. They are living proof of the old folk wisdom: if you fall in with a Jew, the Jew will take you down.

The German Volk can learn something from the dastardly deeds of these Jewish doctors Meyer and Alexander. The lesson is that the Jew, no matter where he is, is always but a Jew, and as such, the mortal enemy of all non-Jews. It is truly a blessing to the German Volk that the Jewish “doctor’s” hands have been tied.

Many neofascists have continued the tradition of accusing Jews of targeting White goyim for abortion. Quoting Martin Durham’s White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics, page 86:

In 1973, for instance, one group, the American White Nationalist Party, claimed that international bankers were using abortion as a way of destroying the white race. Whites, it argued, were the almost exclusive users of abortion, while the black race, which did not use abortion, was growing.

In the following decade, the White Patriot Party declared that every year a million ‘White infants’ were being ‘murdered thru Jew-engineered legalized abortion’ while WAR published a cartoon in which a young white woman asked readers if they knew that most abortionists were Jewish or other non-whites, ‘JEWISH RITUAL MURDER IS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA … AND IS VERY LEGAL’.¹³

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Further reading: R. Keysers, L’intoxication nazie de la jeunesse allemande (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pgs. 102–3.

(This takes 5⅔ minutes to read.)

One can easily argue that the Fascists introduced nothing new, but I can name some important exceptions: deploying the first tanks to traverse the desert, the first jet fighter, the first rocket to reach outer space, the first sonic weapon in battle, and the first paratroopers (or birdshit, if you prefer) to be committed in large-scale airborne operations. Given that militarism was intrinsic to Fascism, it would be more surprising if the Fascists never introduced any innovations in the martial arts.

It may sound like I am complimenting the Fascists, but that is not my intention. Rather, underestimating our enemies would prove a serious mistake in the short- or long-term, and we must therefore recognise their strengths if we are to defeat them.

The inspiration for this topic came from the Paratrooper in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, whom players unlock by researching Flight, Rifling, and Fascism, and he is the only unit whom researching Fascism unlocks. Although paratroopers are technically prefascist phenomena, there is a logic to linking paratroopers to Fascism, as I aim to demonstrate in this writing.

Quoting Nikolaos Theotokis’s Airborne Landing to Air Assault: A History of Military Parachuting, pages 9–10:

The Italians were among the first to experiment with parachutes for military purposes. [Fascist] Italy was also the first nation to form a real [read: official] parachute unit, although the country’s paratroopers were not involved in a large-scale airborne operation during the Second World War as long as Benito Mussolini was in power.

Qualified paratroopers were also provided by the officers and other ranks of the 10th Regiment Arditi, who carried out small-scale airborne assaults in North Africa. Parachute units could also be found among the country’s Carabinieri (Gendarme) forces and in the Italian air force (Regia Aeronautica).

The initial collective drop from CA 73 troop carriers was performed by military personnel using static-line parachutes on 6 November 1927 at Cinisello Balsamo, near Milan. By the end of the year, a trained company of [Fascist] troops was regarded ready for airborne warfare.

Meanwhile, on 27 April, a Regia Aeronautica pilot, General Allesandro Guidoni, was killed on landing at Montecelio airfield while testing a new model of parachute.¹³ The following year, [Fascist] paratroopers performed a mass display jump in North Africa.

In early 1938, a parachute training facility was established at Castel Benito, near Tripoli in Libya, [occupied by Fascist] Italy at the time. The same year, in March, a 300-strong paratroop unit, the 1st Battalion of the Air, was formed in Tripoli by the Air Force Marshal Italo Balbo, the Governor-General of Libya.¹⁴ The unit was recruited from the native population and officered by Italians.

In Libya Italy’s first airborne units were raised and stationed, being the Libyan Parachute Battalion and the 1st National Libyan Parachute Battalion of the Royal Corps of Colonial Troops.¹⁵ When the accident toll rose to fifteen dead and seventy-two seriously injured during parachute training at Castello Benito, the re-organization of the National Libyan Battalion was decided, as well as its formation with Italian volunteers entirely. The two battalions then joined forces to form a regiment.

In early 1938, a parachute battalion was established in [Fascist] Italy. On 1 July 1940, the 1st Royal Carabinieri Parachute Battalion was formed and was eventually deployed in North Africa. By the end of the year, the number of the Carabinieri parachute battalions had increased to three. The [Regia Aeronautica] also had formed a parachute unit.

Two parachute regiments were raised by the Army between April and August 1941 to be deployed in North Africa. One of these regiments was parachuted onto the Greek island of Cephalonia in what went down to history as the [Regio Esercito’s] first combat jump. On 30 April 1941, elements of the 6th Paratroop Regiment headed by Major Mario Zaninovich were dropped from Savoi-Marchetti SM82 transport aircraft that had took off from Otranto airfield.

In the port area of the island’s capital, Argostoli, there was not even a single Greek soldier — only a number of armed Gendarmes, who did not fire a single shot. Although the landing was unopposed, the losses for the invaders were considerable. A number of paratroopers drowned after falling into the sea, while others were injured on landing.

Pages 17–8:

As early as 1921, General Hans von Seeckt, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army (Reichswehr) from 1920 until 1926, wrote how the use of relatively small but highly skilled mobile armies in co-operation with aircraft would matter most in future warfare.¹ How completely justified Seeckt was in his ideas is evident from the successes which awaited the German war machine from 1939 to 1942.

The Fallschirmjäger, the paratrooper branch of the Luftwaffe, the German air force before and during the Second World War, proved a principal component of this formidable machine. They went down in history as the first paratroopers to be committed in large-scale airborne assaults.

Due to the Versailles Treaty's military restrictions on Germany, paratroopers were organized and trained initially as part of a Prussian police unit. In April 1935, a parachute battalion was formed from volunteers in the Landespolizeigruppe (State Police Regiment) ‘General Göring’. Six months later, when the regiment was transferred to the Luftwaffe, the parachute battalion became the cadre for the country's future airborne forces.²

In 1936, the [Wehrmacht] started experimenting with airborne warfare after establishing a paratroop company. In March 1938, the Army paratroop company was enlarged to the size of a battalion with Major Richard Heidrich assuming command, However, they were transferred to the Luftwaffe when it was decided that the air force should have control of all parachute troops.

Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe’s commander, was a strong advocate of the forming of paratroop forces in Germany.³ Also present at the Red Army manoeuvres in the summer of 1935, during which a massive parachute drop was conducted, was another German officer, Colonel Kurt Student, who was thus also introduced to the concept of airborne operations.

(Emphasis added. Why Göring and Student would have permission to observe anything—let alone Red Army maneuvers—in the Soviet Union during 1935 is a mystery that every writer seems strangely uninterested in explaining, even after explicitly noting that the German Reich quickly severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1933. Bruce Quarrie nevertheless says in Fallschirmjäger: German Paratrooper 1935–45 that Göring was observing these maneuvers as early as 1931, when the Weimar Republic still existed and relations had not yet deteriorated. The best explanation that I can propose here is that there was still one uncancelled agreement in effect. In any case, horseshoe theorists shall soon be disappointed to learn who took inspiration from the Fallschirmjäger.)

In July 1938, Student was appointed commander of the Luftwaffe’s paratroop units. One of the first orders he received from Göring was to establish an airborne division by 17 September. The 7. Fliegerdivision (7th Air Division) was created to seize objectives using parachute and glider-borne troops. An Army unit, the 22nd Infantry Division, was trained to carry out air-landing missions as an integral part of Germany’s first airborne formation.

In January 1939, the Army’s paratroop battalion was transferred to the Luftwaffe’s 7th Air Division. Three months later, on 20 April, the German paratroop forces appeared for the first time in Hitler’s birthday parade. They marched in Berlin in review past Hitler under the command of Colonel (later General) Bruno Bräuer.⁴

The first airborne school was established at Stendal, a town in the Altmark region of Saxony.⁵ Twenty-four officers and 800 other ranks volunteered for parachute training. Many of them were already members of the Hitler Youth or the Nazi Labour organization. Their average age was only 18. Constant training and indoctrination quickly fostered an esprit de corps that instilled fierce loyalty, high morale and an aggressive self-confidence in the men, deemed the ‘parachutists’ spirit’.

South Africa’s first paratrooper, Robey Leibbrandt, received his training from the Third Reich in 1939. Likewise, the Fallschirmjäger inspired both the British Empire and the Eastern Axis.

Further reading: Hitler’s Paratrooper: The Life and Battles of Rudolf Witzig

Fallschirmjäger: German Paratroopers, 1937–1941

‘From Heaven to Hell: A Reinterpretation of Comparison between Germany’s Airborne Fallschirmjäger Operations and the Allied Airborne Operation at Arnhem in World War II’

Hitler’s sky warriors: German paratroopers in action, 1939–1945

On April 26, 1937, the Francoist regime perpetrated the brutal massacre of Guernica, with the help of the Condor Legion of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, killing 1,645 Basque civilians on a market day.

The town was bombed for over three hours by 40 Condor Legion fighter planes for the benefit of the cowardly Francoist murderers. The Condor Legion's Nazi fighters dropped thousands of 250-kilogram explosive bombs, thousands more 50-kilogram bombs, and over 3,000 incendiary bombs on the town—that is, they mixed explosive and incendiary bombs for greater destruction.

Furthermore, the bombers, having already unloaded their projectiles, flew low over the town and sadistically strafed the civilians who survived the bombing and tried to escape the massacre.

The Spanish Francoists and their Nazi friends, due to the fire caused by their incendiary bombs, literally wiped more than 70% of the town of Guernica off the map; 271 buildings were demolished. Their mission was total extermination.

Video link -> https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2048353365881413632/vid/avc1/1920x1080/CUcSOb9WZwME-H-w.mp4

Source -> https://xcancel.com/DaniMayakovski/status/2048353481572954515#m

One of the main perpetrators of the Guernica massacre, Heinrich Trettner, a staff officer in the Nazi Condor Legion, was protected by the US and UK.

From 1956 to 1959, Trettner became the chief of NATO's Logistics Department, thanks to the grace and influence of the land of the free, the land of Saving Private Ryan.

(This takes 3¼ minutes to read.)

As prisoner 8331 at the [Axis’s] Westerbork transit camp in Holland, Jacob Boas must have witnessed the sorrow and fear of hundreds if not thousands of fellow inmates before they were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to die at Auschwitz.

But he has no memory of it. Jacob Boas, a Dutch Jew, was born in the camp on Nov. 1, 1943, and was captive there until he, his parents and older brother along with 876 other prisoners were liberated by Canadian troops 18 months after Jacob was born.

There’s nothing that Jacob, or Jack, as he calls himself now, remembers of those 18 months.

“My earliest conscious memory is in postwar Amsterdam. I must’ve been around 2 or so because I was stuck in a high chair, the coal stove started smoking, and my mother came rushing in from the kitchen for the rescue,” Jack told me.

Each week during the war, a train of cattle cars delivered Westerbork prisoners, including Jack’s grandparents and other relatives, to die at Auschwitz or Sobibor. A total of 102,000 Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and many of them came through Westerbork, including Anne Frank.

Jack, his brother and their parents beat the odds through sheer luck: a camp commandant at Westerbork who had a policy of not immediately deporting mothers in late pregnancy, and a father with tailoring skills.

“The fact of being born in the transit camp has struck deep, impenetrable roots within me, coupled with a seemingly unslakable need to know,” Jack wrote in a book published two years ago, Until Further Notice … Theresienstadt On My Mind.

As a historian and author of six books, four of which deal with the Holocaust, Jack has spent his adult life trying to satisfy that need. He has also taught university courses on the Holocaust and writes magazine pieces.

I met Jack at a second-hand bookstore in Portland, Ore., where we both live. He works there every Monday as a volunteer. Jack is a self-effacing man, the kind who listens more than he talks. He’s not apt to come right out and tell you that he is a victim of the Holocaust. Jack’s story has come to me in segments, as we discovered we had a common obsession — German history. And the more we talk, the more intriguing his story becomes.

A false sense of security

Jack and I were having coffee at a Portland café when he showed me a photograph of a 1944 registration card from Camp Westerbork. It bears the names of his family: parents Barend and Anna, Jacob and his brother Marcus.

“Wife’s pregnancy exemption canceled because the child was born on Nov. 1, 1943,” states the typewritten card.

The camp commandant, Jack explained, had a policy regarding pregnant women that might seem merciful, but was not. Women in their third trimester were exempted from deportation until six weeks after giving birth, along with their husbands and children. This was part of a larger camp charade. Living conditions at Westerbork were not as bad as other camps. There were soccer matches, chess tournaments and concerts, and inmates wore their civilian clothes instead of concentration camp pajamas, so that prisoners would have a false sense of security before they were sent east.

The trimester “exemption” was one of two cards that had been protecting the Boas family. The other was Barend’s skills as a tailor. After their arrival at Westerbork, Barend was put to work in the camp’s tailor workshop, and later at the Nazis’ headquarters in The Hague.

In 1944, the family learned they were going to be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, which — although the [Axis] presented it as a model camp — served as a feeder camp to Auschwitz. But they never got to Theresienstadt. Canadian troops liberated Camp Westerbork on April 12, 1945.

The family began putting their lives back together in Amsterdam. Barend started a tailor shop. Anna was a seamstress. They moved to Montreal in 1957 because they had no living relatives left in the Netherlands and because of two events portending war: the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Jack got a BA in history and political science at McGill University in Montreal, married a McGill student and followed her to the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his PhD in European history. His dissertation was about German Jews living under Hitler from 1933–39. Research for his dissertation led to his first book: Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork.

Jack’s parents didn’t talk much about Westerbork. This was not unusual for Holocaust survivors. They just wanted to get on with their lives. But Jack loved tracing the lives of people in the past, including his relatives. It became the mission that shaped his life.

Survivor syndrome

As I was having coffee with Jack, he talked about his eight-year struggle to get financial compensation as a Holocaust survivor from Dutch authorities. Jack filled out the application in February 1979, and later sent a separate document pertaining to his physical and mental health.

Compensation requests were processed by Dutch authorities under a victims’ benefit act known by its Dutch initials, WUV. A WUV representative went to Jack’s San Francisco apartment to question him, which was followed by interviews by a psychiatrist hired by WUV administrators.

Reports written from these conversations said Jack suffered from “major identity issues,” struggled with depression, implied he was lazy and irresponsible, and noted that his marriage had failed. But the WUV psychiatrist said he was unable to “relate his (Jack’s) symptoms or his cognitive or identity issues directly with his family experience or with his wartime experience.” One report made the ludicrous assertion that approving Jack’s application for compensation would place “a heavy burden on the Dutch budget.”

So Jack’s application was rejected.

The WUV-hired psychiatrist was not a specialist in the problems of Holocaust survivors. Jack hired one who was, who concluded that Jack showed symptoms of “survivor syndrome,” which he listed as “repeated feelings of persecution, long-term depression, problems with authority, intense anxiety, displaced rage and aggression and obsession with the Holocaust.” Another psychiatrist engaged by Jack said Jack was suffering from “significant repercussions the camp experience had on him and his family.”

Jack’s application for compensation was finally approved in 1984.

It is important to note here that many thousands of […] survivors had to wait decades for compensation, partly due to racist or antisemitic attitudes as well as Cold War politics — including forced laborers, German military deserters, Sinti and Roma, and relatives of people murdered because they had disabilities. Even many Jewish survivors encountered long delays, especially those who fled early, lived in hiding, or lacked the documents postwar officials insisted on.

I went to a talk Jack gave on his latest book, Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant. “Burden of proof” refers to the ordeal he went through for compensation. The second part of the title refers to himself. “I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant,” he told his listeners.

Jack’s audience was mesmerized as he told of his lifelong pursuit to understand his identity in the context of the Holocaust — his research trips to Holland, an invitation by the German government to attend the commemoration of a victims’ memorial, his adventures as an extra in a Dutch docudrama about Bergen-Belsen. He is neither maudlin nor angry when he tells these stories. And he frequently jokes about his experiences.

So this is who prisoner 8331 has become: a surviving remnant who is piecing together a life from fragments, and who reminds us that even fractured memory can be an act of defiance.

(This takes 5⅓ minutes to read.)

Eric von Rosen had made himself known as a pioneer in Swedish aeronautics after his crossing the Baltic Sea during the Finnish War of Freedom in 1918. Later on he sometimes used aeroplanes for transports in Sweden and abroad. This was the case the 21st of February 1920, when he had been in Stockholm and needed urgently to go to Rockelstad. The trains were all cancelled due to bad weather, so the Count went to the small airfield in Stockholm. The Swedish pilots were unwilling to head out in the snowstorm that late, but a German former fighter-pilot, Hermann Göring, was available.

Eric and Göring flew through the snow-storm towards Rockelstad; they flew low along the railway until they reached Sparreholm, where they turned south across the lake and landed on the ice below Rockelstad. They tied the plane to the steamboat jetty and the two freezing men went in to heat up in front of the fireplace in the Hall. Countess Mary’s sister, Carin von Kantzow, was visiting this weekend, and when she came down the stairs Göring immediately fell in love.

When Carin and Göring started seeing each other in Stockholm it caused a scandal in the high-society, for Carin was married and had a young child. The pair moved to Germany later that year, where Göring soon leaned about a group of revolutionaries in Munich; Hitler and his henchmen, who had started with demonstrations on the streets.

Göring soon travelled to Hitler, who welcomed the national war hero into the party. Göring became a trophy that the [Fascists] could use to gain popularity with the masses. His noble background and social talent also made him the perfect ambassador for the [Fascists] among the upper classes.

Carin and Göring’s romantic love-story was soon exploited by Goebbels massive machinery of propaganda, and the couple was toured around the nation to boost popularity. Carin, who became the First Lady of the [German Fascists], was especially celebrated. But she did not live to see the atrocities committed in the [nineteen thirties], for she died of a weak heart in 1931, before Hitler gained power.

But even after death she remained a mascot of the [Fascists], who had a booklet printed to commemorate their Swedish Saint, in a gigantic edition. Göring even had a room in his Berlin flat arranged as a shrine to Carin. During the thirties Göring maintained close connections with his Swedish relatives, and the Count and Countess often went on visits to Germany.

Eric became something of an unofficial diplomat in the relationship between the Reich and Sweden. When the Swedish government out of a fear for diplomatic complications could not receive a high-ranking [German Fascist], they asked von Rosen to be the host. In Sweden the Count's pro-German opinion was well known, but he did not actively spread [Fascist] propaganda in the country, nor did he have a rôle in any of the national [fascist] parties.

After Hitler’s invasion of Denmark and Norway, Eric von Rosen wrote in the press to calm the Swedish people. He maintained that Göring’s strong love for the country was a guarantee that it would not be invaded. But privately Eric could not accept that the brother-peoples had been attacked, and when Hitler started his crusade against the Soviet Union, he understood that Hitler was a megalomaniac, and that Germany was to lose the war. Towards the end of the war he renounced Hitler and Göring altogether.

About the Swastika

Eric von Rosen found swastikas on a Viking rune-stone on Gotland, where he went through high-school. This seemed to him a typical Viking symbol, and as such it held great appeal to the nationalistic young Count. The Vikings used the swastika as a symbol of light and happiness. When Eric was preparing for his first expedition, the one to South America in 1901, he had swastikas painted on his crates and luggage, to separate them from those of the other participants. This way of choosing for oneself a personal emblem or token of luck, was common and fashionable at that time. During his travels among the descendants of the Inca in Bolivia, he was surprised to see how often their textiles were adorned with swastikas, and realised that this was a universal symbol that had been used by many cultures all over the world.

When he started rebuilding at Rockelstad the next year, he used the symbol as a decorative element everywhere in the house. They are easily spotted in the ceiling of the Great Hall, where they are painted green on a red background. The Hall was finished in 1903. When he planned his spectacular hunting-lodge in 1910, the architect Tengbom was commissioned to design a group of furniture in Old Nordic style, decorated with carved swastikas.

The aeroplane that von Rosen bought in 1918, to support the Finnish fight for independence was painted with large blue and white swastikas on its wings before it was delivered to General Mannerheim. The symbol then became the emblem of the Finnish Air Force and remained so until sometime during World War II.

It seems like a strange coincidence that Hermann Göring came to Rockelstad before he met Hitler or even heard of the Nazi movement. Could Göring, who apparently took a great deal of interest in Eric’s personal symbol of luck, have brought the swastika from Rockelstad to the movement in Munich?

We are not of that opinion. The background of the [Fascist] cross is probably a different one, where some sources claim that it emanated from DAP (Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) and later NSDAP — With all the distastefulness it thereafter is associated with.

Several individuals who have researched in Hitler’s notes claim to have found sketches of swastikas from as early as 1919. And besides, swastikas were quite abundant in Germany from the late 19th century on; it had been used by the nationalistic Volkes-movement as well as a logo for several companies, e.g. ASEA.

There are also several differences between the von Rosen sign and the [Third Reich’s] swastika. Von Rosen usually placed his sun-crosses in a circle, so that the arms of the cross are curved and it forms a circle itself. The [Third Reich’s] swastika is tilted so that it stands diagonally, and it has straight arms even when it is confined by a circular field.

I would exercise caution concerning the claim that Eric von Rosen already predicted in the summer of 1941 that the Third Reich was to lose the war — a prediction that few Westerners shared that year. Quoting Thomas Lundén’s ‘Swedish geography and the time spirit 1933–45 — Resistance, subordination, or tergiversation?’:

Ymer 1941, 301–303, includes the speech by Count E. v. Rosen to Field Marshal C.G. Mannerheim of Finland on Vega day, April 24, 1941, on the awarding of the Hedin medal for his scientific production: It is a speech strictly related to Mannerheim’s anthropological findings. von Rosen’s speech is remarkable in concentrating on Mannerheim’s fairly insignificant research. There is only a short reference to Mannerheim’s political rôle defending “that the Scandinavian and Finnish tribes are not… thrown under foreign rule.”

It should be unsurprising that this bourgeois fascist indulged in antisemitism as early as the 1920s. From Henrik Rosengren’s “‘A Wagner for the Jews’: Moses Pergament, Richard Wagner and anti-Semitism in Swedish cultural life in the interwar period”:

Sv. Dagbl. [Svenska Dagbladet] […] did not hesitate to print an anti-Semitic and race-scientific essay written by the ethnographer and explorer Eric von Rosen, published on 28 January 1929. Von Rosen dwelt on the supposed dangers of Jewish influence, and claimed that regardless of a Jew’s intelligence, he could almost never understand the ‘Germanic spirit’.⁵⁰ The professedly scientific approach adopted by von Rosen apparently entitled him to publication in SvD. His article was based on the same type of anti-Semitic opinion held by Wagner and his followers.

(This takes 6¾ minutes to read.)

[Fascist] Italy enacted antisemitic laws from the summer of 1938 — partly modelled on [the Third Reich] and partly on its own racist system in the East African colonies⁷⁶ — accompanied by numerous decrees. One of these legislative decrees in February 1939 announced the establishment of ‘the Real Estate Management and Liquidation Agency’, the ‘Ente gestione e liquidazione immobiliare’ (‘Egeli’), which worked closely with the ‘Department for Jewish Property’ in the Ministry of Finance.⁷⁷

The régime campaigned to render ‘Jewish capital’ available to the ‘nation’⁷⁸ and adopted the term ‘arianizzazione’⁷⁹ from the German context. Until 1943, the ‘Egeli’ and other ministries issued an increasing number of decrees, expanding robbery and other discriminatory measures.⁸⁰ The robbery in [Fascist] Italy was not linked to deportation until the establishment of the so-called ‘Republic of Salò’, the fascist rump state under Mussolini in 1943, where the ‘Egeli’ continued its business.⁸¹

While [Fascist] Italy robbed its Jewish population within Italy and framed it as a way to benefit ‘needy citizens’, as a fascist newspaper wrote,⁸² it nonetheless protected its Jewish citizens in countries such as Croatia, Greece and Tunisia.⁸³ Sara Berger has explained this behaviour by reference to the different strategies of Mussolini and certain Italian diplomats, who saw themselves as acting in an aristocratic tradition.⁸⁴ Unlike other states allied to [the Third Reich], Italian diplomats not only claimed the property of Jewish–Italian citizens abroad but also stressed that these citizens represented state interests in trade and finance, to the great annoyance of the [Third Reich].⁸⁵

In 1920, the Hungarian Parliament was the first in Europe to pass a ‘Numerus Clausus Law’ directed at Jewish students.⁸⁶ But it was only in 1938 that the Hungarian government under Miklós Horthy began to issue antisemitic laws at regular intervals, almost all of which contained paragraphs regulating the robbery of the Jewish population. In May 1938, the ‘First Jewish Law’ restricted access to the labour market; in May 1939, the ‘Second Jewish Law’ defined who was to be considered a ‘Jew’ and again restricted access to various professional groups. The ‘Third Jewish Law’ further extended the practice of robbery.⁸⁷

Institutions like the Hungarian ‘Institute for the Research of the Jewish Question’ in Budapest,⁸⁸ together with the government and sections of the non-Jewish population, shared the antisemitic narrative that it was necessary to ‘return’ the ‘wealth of the Jews’ to the ‘nation’ from which the Jews had stolen it.⁸⁹ The Hungarian government, which referred to [the Third Reich] as a ‘model,’⁹⁰ gradually pushed the Jewish population out of the economy and workplaces.

In contrast to the other Axis powers, [the Kingdom of] Hungary did not create institutions of robbery until 1944 but instead empowered several ministries to impose antisemitic measures.⁹¹ The term ‘Magyarisation’ played a role in Horthy’s politics, but it referred more to a language policy; for example, he spoke of the ‘Magyarisation’ of Slovak or ‘Ruthenian names’. He insisted that ‘Jewish names’ should only be converted into a Hungarian version in individual cases.⁹²

With the [Wehrmacht] invasion of Hungary in March 1944, the Jewish population was robbed by the occupying forces, and robbery was linked to the deportations.⁹³ The new Hungarian government continued the robbery to its advantage⁹⁴ and sought to involve multiple actors, such as municipalities and other authorities, in the process.⁹⁵ The government authorised local authorities to distribute Jewish property to the local population at their own discretion.⁹⁶

The institutionalisation of robbery, including the introduction of new terminology, is documented in a letter from the government commissioner Árpád Toldi to the Minister of the Interior Gábor Vanja in late January 1945, concerning the regulation on ‘former Jewish property’. The words ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jew’ were to be deleted from the name of the authority because, it was argued, there was no longer any ‘Jewish’ but only ‘national’ property. The authority should therefore be renamed ‘National Authority for Assets passed to State Ownership’, ‘Államraszállt Vagyonok Országos Hatósága’.⁹⁷

In [the Kingdom of] Romania, the Ministry of National Economy promoted and monitored the ‘Romanianisation’ of the economy. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Social Work⁹⁸ housed the Central Romanianisation Office (Oficiul Central de Românizare)⁹⁹, established in 1939, and controlled the ‘Romanianisation’ of employment through inspectors.¹⁰⁰

The National Romanianisation Centre (Centrul Național de Românizare) was subordinate to the State Under-Secretariat for Romanianisation, Colonisation and Inventory and was responsible for the expropriation of rural and urban property, the distribution of robbed goods to ‘ethnic’ Romanians and the transfer of assets to state property.¹⁰¹

Antonescu promoted ‘Romanianisation’ and a nationalist Europe without Jews.¹⁰² The régime sought to create a ‘Romanian’ middle class that defined itself through its non-Jewishness. Accordingly, ‘Romanianisation’ was directed against Jewish Romanians, as well as against Roma and, to varying degrees, other national minorities such as Bulgarians and Ukrainians.¹⁰³

[The Kingdom of] Romania attempted to implement a racist social policy by involving the non-Jewish population in the robbery. It distributed apartments, furniture and clothing, held auctions outside deportees’ houses and donated to ‘charity’ organisations.¹⁰⁴

Even when the régime stopped the deportations in the autumn of 1942, it continued to pursue ‘Romanianisation’.¹⁰⁵ In August 1943, Antonescu ordered that a portion of the money extorted from the Jewish population be handed over to the Committee of Welfare for Social Works, the foundation of his wife Maria Antonescu. Receipts, Antonescu emphasised, were not required.¹⁰⁶

Slovakia, under Jozef Tiso and his party, Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, passed a series of ‘Aryanisation’ laws to regulate robbery from 1939.¹⁰⁷ One of Slovakia’s goals was to create a ‘Slovak middle class’, defined primarily as non-Jewish.¹⁰⁸ Tiso’s justification for enrichment followed an antisemitic pattern: he argued that the state was not carrying out ‘robbery’ but that the ‘Slovak nation’ was ‘taking back’ what ‘the Jew’ had previously taken away.¹⁰⁹

The Central Economic Office was known as the ‘Aryanisation Office’¹¹⁰ and was set up by Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka in September 1940. His protégé Augustín Morávek headed the office. The idea was initiated by Dieter Wisliceny, a so-called ‘Judenberater’ in the office of Adolf Eichmann, whom [the Third Reich] sent to Slovakia as an advisor on robbery and murder.

Also involved in the robbery and its connection to deportation was the ‘Judenzentrale’.¹¹¹ The [bourgeois] state, the Slovak population and the ‘Volksdeutsche’ benefited from this antisemitic policy, as did local administrations and members of the party and the Hlinka Guard.¹¹² The Slovak turnaround in deportation policy in November 1942¹¹³ did not mean an end to the policy of robbery. Until after the Slovak uprising against the Tiso régime in August 1944, the state continued to rob the Jews.¹¹⁴

The Bulgarian Prime Minister Bogdan Filov appointed Petăr Gabrovski, a member of the far-right party of the Ratnici, as Interior Minister in 1940. Already in the autumn of 1940, six months before joining the Axis in March 1941, Aleksandăr Belev — working at the Interior Ministry at that time — was drafting an antisemitic law based on the [Third Reich’s] model. It came into force in January 1941 with the approval of the National Assembly and the Tsar as the euphemistically called ‘Law for the Protection of the Nation’.¹¹⁵

Belev then worked under Gabrovski in the ‘Commissariat for Jewish Affairs’, the ‘Komisasrstvo za evreiskite vuprosi’, also called the office for ‘Bulgarization’, which Filov established by decree in August 1942.¹¹⁶ In the spring of 1943, this institution employed over 100 permanent and almost 60 temporary employés to register the Jewish population and their property and to draw up deportation lists.¹¹⁷ The government also secured legal means to give the ‘Public Aid Organisation’, a state organisation oriented on the ‘National Socialist People’s Welfare’, access to the booty.¹¹⁸

When the Bulgarian régime in 1943 stopped preparing deportations from so-called ‘core Bulgaria’,¹¹⁹ the state within its borders after World War I, it nevertheless continued the robbery as part of the ‘Bulgarisation’ project, aimed against the Jewish, as well as the Serbian, Greek and Roma parts of its population.¹²⁰ At the same time, the Bulgarian authorities handed over the Jews in the newly conquered territories in Macedonia, Thrace and Pirot to the [Third Reich] for deportation,¹²¹ robbed them of their possessions and redistributed these to the non-Jewish population.¹²²

In Croatia, the fascist party under the dictator Ante Pavelić immediately began to implement a German-style programme of robbery and murder at a rapid pace, issuing decrees modelled on the Nuremberg Laws.¹²³ In the German-controlled part of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’, founded in April 1941 with German and Italian support after the [Third Reich’s] invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Greece,¹²⁴ the Ustaše regime created the euphemistically called ‘State Office for Renewal’, ‘Državno ravnateljstvo za ponovu’ (‘Ponova’), also known as ‘Office for Aryanisation’, in June 1941, which reorganised itself several times in order to administer the robbery of the Jewish, as well as the Serbian and Roma, population under a single authority.¹²⁵

In the ‘State Office for Renewal’, lists of the robbed property of the Jewish population were compiled, as were lists of the ‘trustees’ of shops, companies and apartments. Before the deportation, it sent out forms in which the Jewish population were required to provide precise information about their property. Further instructions were intended to regulate into which local bank or cooperative the robbed goods were to be deposited.¹²⁶

The ‘State Office for Renewal’ also demanded the broad participation of the non-Jewish population: Teachers, professors, court staff, tax and financial officials, civil servants, police, district personnel, the Ustaše, the army — all were to become accomplices by organising the robbery and receiving a share of the booty.¹²⁷ At the same time, the Pavelić régime demanded that inhabitants hand over all possessions that they had already taken from their Jewish neighbours, on the grounds that the profit belonged to the state.¹²⁸

While the German term ‘Arisierung’ can be found in the German documents, ‘Arizacija’ rarely appears in the Croatian documents, and ‘Croatisation’ does not appear at all. Instead, the term ‘nationalisation’ is used in the sources, as well as phrases such as ‘the economy should pass into Croatian hands’.¹²⁹

(Emphasis added.)

(This extract takes 5⅓ minutes to read.)

Soon after Robert Burke led an anti-Nazi protest at Columbia in 1936, he was expelled. In 2025, history repeats itself over and over.

Robert Burke was a junior at Columbia University who dared to protest the administration’s ties to [the Third Reich] in 1936. Organizing a group of 300 students, he led a demonstration in front of President Nicholas Butler’s home to oppose the university’s support of an event that propagated [Fascist] policies and beliefs on college campuses. What transpired after that evening is a pattern of severe punishment and silencing of dissent levied against nonviolent student protesters who demonstrate against genocidal régimes. And it’s happening again at Columbia and across universities in the U.S. today.

The Rise of Nazism on University Campuses in 1930s

Soon after Adolf Hitler rose to power, Germany’s Civil Service Law was enacted in April 1933. Its goal was to remove civil servants of […] non-Aryan backgrounds from their rôles as teachers, professors and government employees. Famously, Albert Einstein left [the Third Reich] in 1933 as a direct consequence of this legislation.

The law also sought to fire or remove any individual who refused to abide by [Fascist] beliefs, and the party took a special interest in German universities. One such institution, Heidelberg University, supported the [Third Reich] and proactively removed scores of professors and students for racial and political reasons. Just one month after the Civil Service Law went into effect, university faculty and students took part in book burnings on Heidelberg’s campus.

In February 1936, Heidelberg University invited representatives from universities in the U.S. and Europe to attend a 550th anniversary celebration of its founding. While Oxford, Cambridge and others rejected the invitation and hoped [that] their absence would serve as a “condemnation of Nazi attacks upon academic freedom,” Columbia University agreed to attend, setting the stage for anti-fascist protests on its campus.

Columbia Accepts Invitation to Heidelberg University

Columbia Assistant Secretary Philip Hayden announced on February 28, 1936 that the administration would send a representative to Heidelberg because “it is the custom of Columbia University to be represented, whenever conveniently possible, at all celebrations of educational institutions here and abroad.”

Writer’s note: Made in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Student Union chapter at Columbia and the Burke Defense Committee, a 20-page document called “The Dismissal of Bob Burke. Heidelberg Comes to Columbia” details the timeline of events leading to Burke’s expulsion and after. Much of the information from February 1936 to July 1936 in this article comes from that document.

Many students were furious at the administration’s decision to support an event that propagated [Fascist] beliefs and policies in higher education. The university’s student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, responded on March 2 by calling for Columbia to rescind its acceptance. Student journalists argued that the university’s presence “will in effect be bestowing a benediction upon the spoliation of education and culture by the Hitler regime.”

They continued: “[Columbia] will be giving its approval to those who have suppressed academic freedom, perverted the content and teaching of all branches of learning, fostered a fraudulent ‘race science,’ dismissed and persecuted scholars on religious, political and racial grounds.”

Soon after Hayden’s announcement, the American Student Union (ASU) chapter voted to oppose the university’s participation and organized demonstrations against it. They created a petition and garnered more than 1,000 signatures from students and faculty, including Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey.

On March 30, Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler agreed to meet with a committee of students regarding the Heidelberg event. During that meeting, he promised to provide “full consideration to the views of the students in a study of the entire matter.” But Dr. Butler never spoke with them again.

So, Columbia students made their divestment demands known through a nonviolent protest at his home.

Robert Burke Leads Anti-Nazi Protest at Columbia President’s House

Before Robert Burke was expelled from Columbia University, he was the president-elect of his junior class and a leading member of the America Student Union at the university. A native of Youngstown, OH, he was disgusted by Columbia’s decision to join Heidelberg’s anniversary celebration as well as the administration’s refusal to meet with protesting students.

It should be noted that The New York Times reported on April 28 that Joseph Goebbels himself would be in attendance at the event. The article reads: “Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi functionaries will be among the most prominent hosts to scholars and scientists who have been invited to represent the universities of the world.”

In other words, it had become clear to students that this engagement with Heidelberg University was not simply an academic courtesy, but rather a tacit endorsement of the [Fascist] takeover of universities and colleges.

Nearly 45 days after President Butler promised to meet with students and reconsider the invitation, Philip Hayden told the student committee that “Dr. Butler has nothing to see the committee about.”

In response to the administration’s stonewalling, Robert Burke led a group of 300 students onto South Field on the evening of May 12, 1936. After engaging in a mock book burning to criticize Columbia’s ties to [the Third Reich], student protesters went to Dr. Butler’s home “in a final attempt to shake his indifference to university opinion.”

Toward the end of the 30-minute demonstration, Burke gave a speech. According to affidavits signed by Columbia students who were there, Burke said in part: “Nicky, and I hope you hear this too, you can send a representative to Heidelberg but let it be known that he is not the choice of the student body.”

The protest was then peacefully disbanded and demonstrators went home. Student affidavits contend that “not only did Burke refrain from any personal or abusive language but that he also attempted to quiet a few individuals who shouted personal comments.”

But nine days after the anti[fascist] demonstration, Robert Burke was summoned to Dean Herbert Hawkes’ office.

University Administration Targets Burke for Leading Anti-Fascist Protest

On May 21, Burke met with Dean Hawkes and summarized their meeting as follows:

“[Hawkes] confronted me with the accusation of having been a leader of a demonstration which was in exceedingly poor taste, rowdy and had violated the sanctity of Dr. Butler’s home. He told me that someone had shouted profane remarks about Dr. Butler and that someone had left picket signs in the foyer of Dr. Butler’s house. I told the Dean that I hadn’t heard the profanity and that I was sorry that someone had left picket signs … I maintained that as far as picketing Dr. Butler’s house went and speaking in front of it, we were within our rights and well within the bounds of decency. This became our major point of difference.”

Burke said he warned Dean Hawkes that his expulsion would have a chilling effect on student speech at Columbia: “I told the Dean that if I were expelled it would appear to the student body that this action was an attempt to frighten the ASU out of any action of significance and to frighten politically conscious students so that they would not take part in ASU affairs.”

Three days later, the American Student Union sent a letter to Dean Hawkes to apologize for any obscene language that may have been used during the demonstration outside Dr. Butler’s house.

One week after their initial meeting, Dean Hawkes again confronted Robert Burke and accused him of “distorting” what he said during their previous meeting. Burke recounted that the two of them “again argued the right of students to picket Dr. Butler’s house and I again apologized for the two questionable matters, making it clear that I had not used profanity nor left the picket signs.”

In a short letter sent from Dean Hawkes himself, Robert Burke was expelled from Columbia University on June 16, 1936.

Further reading: ‘Complicity and Conflict: Columbia University’s Response to Fascism, 1933–1937’

(This takes 3½ minutes to read.)

Quoting Gar Smith’s ‘Stones to Drones: A Short History of War on Earth’:

In Norway, Hitler’s retreating troops methodically destroyed buildings, roads, crops, forests, water supplies, and wildlife. Fifty percent of Norway’s reindeer were killed.

This appears to be the author’s personal estimate; finding a book or other research that agrees with it has proven to be frustratingly difficult, which means that 50% could be an overestimate.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Axis destroyed a very substantial portion of Europe’s reindeer population. Quoting Foreign Commerce Weekly, vol. xxv, page 28:

The wanton killing of reindeer by the [Axis] during Norway’s occupation reduced herds by an estimated 25 percent. In an effort to provide food for their starving armies in Finland, the [Axis] scoured the mountains, often wiping out whole herds with blasts of machine-gun fire from fighter planes. Defying [Axis] orders, Lapp herdsmen fled with their herds to the most isolated mountain districts, there to await liberation.

News of Norway, vol. 7, page 156:

Nearly 15,000 reindeer will be imported from Sweden by the province of Nordland, in northern Norway. During the war, the [Axis] wantonly killed most of Nordland’s reindeer stock.

Norman Polmar’s & Thomas B. Allen’s World War II: the Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941–1945, page 594:

The [Axis] declared a SCORCHED EARTH policy in northern Norway, evacuating the population, razing villages, killing cattle and reindeer.

Although the following quotes are not exactly about Norway, it is very safe to assume that most of the information remains applicable there as well. Quoting Lee Broderick’s, Iain Banks’s, & Oula Seitsonen’s ‘Military supply, everyday demand, and reindeer: Zooarchaeology of Nazi German Second World War military presence in Finnish Lapland, Northernmost Europe’ (mirror):

As an extreme example, the supply of remote outposts in Petsamo (Skolt Sámi: Peäccam) on the Arctic Ocean coast relied on men and draught animals, such as reindeer and imported mules, and later also on [Axis]-built cableways (Lundemo, 2020: 127, 137; Westerlund, 2008: 49, 115).

[…]

On the Arctic front, all warring sides relied also on reindeer transportation. For the [Third Reich] this was provided by the expert Sámi and Finnish reindeer handlers (Fig. 2; Lundemo, 2020: 101, 137). There is at least one receipt in the archives showing that the [Third Reich] occasionally bought the draught reindeer, sledges, and harnesses from the Finns (T-17944/50, 1942).

To begin with in 1941, when [Wehrmacht soldiers] arrived in Lapland, there were numerous incidents of shooting free-ranging reindeer for food. This was repeatedly forbidden in the standing orders of the [Axis] troops: “Reindeer is a domestic animal like cattle in Germany” (Junila, 2000: 140; also Lundemo, 2020: 61; RH2020-224, 1942).

[…]

The [Axis]-laid explosives injured and took lives of numerous locals and their reindeer in the post-war years, and unexploded ordnance is still yearly encountered.

[…]

The preservation condition of the assemblage tends towards moderate. Altogether 51% of the bones were identified to the species level, and further 31% to size and class (Table 2). The collected faunal assemblage is heavily dominated by the local semi-domesticated reindeer (70% of bones identified to species) herded in the area for centuries by both Sámi and Finns.

This is a highly interesting and significant finding, as the supplying of [Axis] troops and their prisoners with reindeer meat is absent from the historical documents, beyond the illegal shootings and selling of draught animals (Junila, 2000; Lundemo, 2020).

[…]

Both soldiers’ and prisoners’ bone assemblages are dominated by the indigenous reindeer herded by Sámi herders and Finnish settlers for centuries (e.g. Seitsonen and Viljanmaa, 2021; Turunen et al., 2018). Over 80% of identified bones from the prisoner contexts originate from reindeer, and over 60% in the soldiers’ deposits.

Reindeer remains were encountered at all sites except Inari Military Hospital. Some of the reindeer bones might relate to the illegal shootings as recorded in the historical documents (Junila, 2000; Lundemo, 2020).

[…]

Compared to the soldiers’ deposits, their diet appears to have been far less supplemented with imported meat. Then again, bones of indigenous reindeer dominate both the soldiers’ and prisoners’ faunal remains. This clearly illustrates the local replenishment of the food supply, likely related to unofficial bartering with the local herders. There is slight correlation between the proximity of the main supply arteries and the lower percentages of reindeer. At all sites situated over three kilometres away from the main routes, over half of the faunal remains consist of reindeer (sites 4, 6 and 8).

Quoting Eerika Anna-Maria Koskinen-Koivisto’s & Oula Seitsonen’s “‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’: heritage of Second World War forced movement and destruction in a Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnish Lapland”:

[Wehrmacht] troops, feeling and betrayed by their former brothers-in-arms, resorted to scorched earth tactics and destroyed virtually everything within their reach, from military installations to bridges, mile posts, culverts, private property, and livestock; the loss of reindeer, the foundation of herder livelihood and identity, troubled many Sámi families (Ursin 1980; Lehtola 1994, 144–146, 167; Tuominen 2015).

At the same time, [Axis soldiers] were also carrying out scorched earth tactics along the Norwegian northern coast in Finnmark, and forced the local population to exile (Olsen and Witmore 2014; Figenschau 2016). […] [T]he loss of reindeer shot by the [Axis] still seems to instigate sadness in the herders (M1–4).

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

(This takes nearly six minutes to read.)

Quoting Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, chapter 4:

An act of partisan sabotage intervened in Odessa, triggering vicious retaliation against local Jews. On 22 October, General Glogojanu moved the 10th Infantry Division and the Odessa Military Command headquarters into the former NKVD headquarters near the port to better enforce order in the city. Civilians warned that the building was mined. German and Romanian pioneers had already searched the headquarters; and now Romanian pioneers who rechecked it for a third time again found nothing.²³² Then, at 5:35 p.m., the building exploded, killing seventy-nine soldiers and sailors, including Glogojanu, wounding forty-three others, and leaving thirteen missing.²³³

General Constantin Trestioreanu, the 10th Infantry Division’s second in command, had been elsewhere and appeared an hour later to direct rescue efforts and reprisals. “I took measures to hang in public squares in Odessa Jews and communists,” he reported.²³⁴ Troops hanged Jews from lampposts along the central thoroughfares and shot others.

General Iacobici informed Marshal Antonescu that he had ordered “severe reprisals,” including executing one hundred or two hundred communists for each soldier or officer killed, respectively, and displaying the corpses to deter further partisan attacks.

A warehouse caught fire in the night, heightening fears of further sabotage. Iacobici sent General Nicolae Macici, the II Corps commander, to take control. He was disgusted with Trestioreanu and his staff. “You’re a bunch of cowards and scaredy cats, by now Odessa should’ve been turned inside out!”²³⁵ Macici initiated a new wave of atrocities that convulsed the city.

Commanders directed soldiers’ pent-up anger at the departed Soviet troops, who had inflicted so many Romanian casualties, against the Jews of Odessa. Soldiers shot thousands of Jewish men in a square by the port near the smoldering ruins of the Odessa Military Command and escorted Jewish women, children, and elderly to the city jail that held over twenty thousand Jews. Marshal Antonescu added fuel to the fire by confirming General Iacobici’s orders, and adding, “All Communists in Odessa will be taken as hostages as well as a member of each Jewish family.”²³⁶

On 24 October, soldiers marched Jews from Odessa’s jail two kilometers down the road toward Dalnik, shooting any who fell behind. After reaching antitank ditches, which were used as improvised mass graves, they machine-gunned groups of forty to fifty Jews at a time. Other soldiers shoved thousands of Jews into four warehouses near the jail, two with men and two with women and children, and set them ablaze.²³⁷ They shot or threw grenades at anyone who tried to escape.

Major Gherman Pântea, a bilingual basarabean recently appointed as the city’s mayor, was appalled. He prevailed upon Macici to turn back the convoys of Jews being marched to antitank ditches on the edge of the city. Pântea also refused to move the mayoral offices outside Odessa when ordered to by General Nicolae Ghineraru, acting commander of the 10th Infantry Division. Pântea believed [that] the civilian administration could not do its job to restore the city to functioning order from so far away, and the move would only increase panic and suffering for locals because he would not be on the spot to challenge the military authorities.

Ghineraru scoffed, “I don’t need the city, nor your citizens. If I was in the Marshal’s place, I would set alight this infected city with all your citizens in 24 hours.” Pântea wrote Antonescu, begging him to intervene. “I am not the Jews’ defender, but I am convinced Mister Marshal that these hasty and unjust measures will later make [things] worse for us.”²³⁸

Antonescu instead ordered Macici to kill all Romanian Jewish refugees in Odessa and put communists “inside a building that will be mined and detonated” on the day that Glogojanu and the other casualties from the headquarters were buried.²³⁹ Macici had already stopped reprisals by the time he received these instructions, but he blew up one of the burned, corpse-filled warehouses the next day to fulfill the letter of Antonescu’s order.

The Odessa massacre’s total number of victims has been the subject of wild speculation. At the time, Einsatzgruppe D reported ten thousand dead.²⁴⁰ Postwar investigations claimed nineteen to twenty-three thousand victims, and some today suggest forty thousand.²⁴¹ Trial records indicate hundreds hanged, five thousand shot near the port, hundreds machine-gunned at the antitank ditches on the road to Dalnik, five thousand burned in the warehouses, and hundreds more killed elsewhere. Hundreds of Jews killed after the city fell but before the headquarters exploded should be added. The Odessa massacre likely claimed the lives of twelve thousand of the eighty to ninety thousand Jews not evacuated from the city.²⁴²

Some Jews were released following the massacre, but the SSI reported, “The return of the evacuated Jews has led to deep dissatisfaction among the Christian inhabitants who took over their abandoned houses in the belief that the explosion in the military headquarters would result in a radical purge of Jews.”²⁴³ The Antonescu régime decided to deport “suspect” Jews from Odessa to camps on the Bug. Soon convoys of ten thousand to twelve thousand Jews were trudging along muddy roads in freezing rain. Gendarmes robbed, raped, and shot Jews along the way. By November forty thousand Jews had been expelled from Odessa, but forty thousand remained.²⁴⁴ These were herded into a ghetto in the Slobodka industrial zone to be deported over the Bug after [an Axis] victory.

(Emphasis added.)

It is overwhelmingly tempting to compare this with another atrocious occupation. The Central Powers’ occupation of Armenia is a good example, but we shall focus on the occupation of Palestine as it is more contemporary.

The explosion killing seventy-nine Axis soldiers and sailors, and how this became the justification for reprisals, immediately calls to mind how the indigenous assault on a military institution near Gaza on October 7. The analogy is imperfect, as armed settlers have said on the record that they slaughtered others to prevent Hamas from capturing them, and it would be surprising if any of the Axis victims of the explosion were unarmed upon their deaths, but it is hard to overlook how both losses of life became justifications for overwhelming retaliations.

The Axis hanged numerous Jews and communists as one of the retaliations, and probably all of these victims were unarmed before capture. There can be no doubt that the Axis did this to make room for settlers and discourage further resistance. Palestine’s occupiers have likewise slaughtered thousands of unarmed Palestinians, partly in an attempt to discourage resistance, and perhaps more importantly, to make room for settlers. Both the Axis and the Herzlians have proven to be merciless.

We see that the Axis massacred thousands of Jewish men of military age while forcing thousands of other Jews into an (undoubtedly crowded) city jail. The similarity between the Herzlians’ slaughters of Palestinians while forcing thousands of others into deeply unpleasant prisons is impossible to miss. (An inexperienced analyst may prefer to liken it to Hamas abducting hundreds of foreigners on October 7, but the goals, scale, and context do not align well with those of the Axis.)

Lastly, xenophobic Gentiles stealing Jews’ houses bears an unequivocal resemblance to Herzlians stealing Palestinian houses in both the late 1940s and elsewhen. Even the returns of evacuated Jews bear a resemblance to evacuated Palestinians returning to their houses in the mid-2000s, or Palestinians returning to their houses in the 2020s as part of prisoner exchanges.

Another analyst could find more parallels, and of course there are also important differences between the two occupations, most obviously how the Axis occupation of Odessa was much briefer than Palestine’s occupation, as well as the numbers of casualties. However, I think that the similarities are both numerous and compelling enough to put both occupations in the same genealogy of European colonialism.

Questions to ask yourselves:

1. What are some others ways wherein the Axis occupation of Odessa resembles Palestine’s occupation?
2. Aside from the duration and the numbers of casualties, what is one important difference between them?
3. Can you name another atrocious occupation that belongs to European colonialism’s genealogy?

You are free to submit your answers below.

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The cozy relationship that developed between maritime Fujianese entrepreneurs and the Japanese Empire developed out of Xiamen’s identity as a translocal hub, and the Japanese–Fujianese relationship contributed significantly to the enduring dominance of the Fujianese over the Asian cocaine trade. Cocaine is therefore an entry point into the understudied world of Japanese imperialism in South China and Southeast Asia.

Historian Miriam Kingsberg’s recent book examines how the [Imperial] government sought to monopolize the drug trade and control drug use within their territorial possession of Manchukuo in North China (2014). Coastal southern Fujian offers a compelling comparison with Kingsberg’s analysis of Manchukuo, as Xiamen was a key site for Japanese informal empire in China but remained firmly under Chinese control until 1937. Under the formal control of a succession of local warlords, Xiamen was the center of the [Imperial] sphere of influence in South China, where the [Imperial] government never had to worry about drug use because it was not their jurisdiction.

From the [Imperial] perspective, Xiamen was attractive as the gateway from China to Southeast Asia, and the most important port of call for ships from [the Empire of] Japan’s new colony in Taiwan. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Xiamen was flooded with Taiwanese citizens (who were Japanese imperial citizens), and even more so with local people claiming Japanese–Taiwanese citizenship. These were people who were ethnically, culturally, and linguistically Chinese, but registered as Japanese: the so-called “registered people” (Ch. jimin 籍民; J. sekimin).

The [Imperial] consuls in Xiamen were engaged in a citizenship-based imperialism, peculiar to South China, wherein the [Imperial] government actively granted passports to tens of thousands of local Fujianese people (see, for example, Brooks 2000; Thilly 2015; Wang 2007). One of the stated goals of this practice was for the [Imperial] foreign ministry to extend jurisdiction over the business networks connecting China and Southeast Asia (Inoue 1993, 12–13). The [Imperial] consuls in Fujian clearly understood the potential of harnessing the entrepreneurial genius of translocal Xiamen.

A principal consequence of [the Imperial bourgeoisie’s] policy of granting passports to Fujianese was the rapid domination of the drug trade by people with Taiwanese citizenship. The extraterritorial protection granted to jimin by [Imperial] consuls and their independent police forces provided almost perfect insulation from local Chinese municipal and warlord governments (Esselstrom 2009, 43–44; Thai 2016, 91; see also Tseng 2014 on jimin-owned businesses in the port of Shantou).

Thus, an expanding drug trade seems foreseeable in hindsight; but, beyond the reluctance of [Imperial] consuls to reign in drug dealers, there is little evidence that a robust drug trade was the deliberate aim of Japan’s southern strategy. There is, however, ample evidence that people in Fujian flocked in large numbers to take up Japanese citizenship in order to better profit from the drug trade (Thilly 2015; Wang 2007).

In this sense, [Imperial] consuls and pharmaceutical companies worked together with Chinese drug traders to form an alternative model of Sino-Japanese cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s. In some cases, the relationships created through the drug trade furthered the cause of [Imperial] expansion into the Chinese mainland—in particular, the history of Taiwanese-owned opium dens and the rise of the Xiamen [Imperial] police force to protect them from Chinese interference (Thilly 2015; Wang 2007).

But in other cases—like the cocaine trade examined in this article—the end result was unpredictable, and less obviously advantageous to [the Empire of] Japan. As historian Steven Karch writes, cocaine was never a “vital product line” for the [Imperial] drug companies involved in production, and “the cocaine trade was just not that important” (1999, 158). The cocaine trade is thus an example of an unforeseen consequence of [Imperial] policy in South China and maritime Asia, as the only clear beneficiaries were Chinese smugglers and, to a lesser degree, the [Imperial] pharmaceutical companies who supplied them.

(Emphasis added.)

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WARSAW, Poland — In the Polish town of Jedwabne, where historians agree that townspeople killed most of their Jewish neighbors during World War II, a brand-new “information center” denies the crime.

The information center is housed in two shipping containers that stand taller than anything else at the memorial site. On the side of one container, in Polish, are the words “The earth doesn’t lie” — a slogan promoted by those who believe that exhuming the site would exonerate the Poles of Jedwabne.

The containers were installed earlier this month and celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony shared online by Wojciech Sumlinski, a right-wing Polish activist. Last year, he took credit for placing seven boulders near Jedwabne’s official memorial, bearing plaques that deny Polish responsibility and claim that Jews historically conspired against Poles.

“We call it a denial museum, because that’s what it is,” Abraham Waserstein, whose grandfather Szmul Wasersztein was one of the few survivors of the 1941 massacre, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the new installation. “Putting these containers in Jedwabne [is] further desecrating the only remnants of Jewish community left there, our family’s legacy there.”

Waserstein, a law student at Duke University, said [that] he and his family have reached out to local advocates with the goal of removing the new pavilions. But they may be fighting an uphill battle: The boulders that Sumlinski installed last year remain at the site and can be seen in the footage he posted of the new additions.

Szmul Wasersztein was among a handful of Jews who escaped on July 10, 1941, when Polish residents rounded up and killed hundreds of their Jewish neighbors, mostly by burning them alive in a barn.

Wasersztein’s deposition in 1945 was key to recording the Jedwabne massacre and led to the convictions of 12 Polish residents in 1949. His testimony also formed the heart of “Neighbors,” a 2000 book by historian Jan Tomasz Gross that sparked intense national debate. The crimes of Jedwabne, rupturing historical narratives that centered solely on the victimhood and heroism of Poles under [Fascism], became a symbol of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

Former president Aleksander Kwasniewski officially apologized for the pogrom in 2001, and an official investigation by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance confirmed the next year that the murder was carried out by Poles.

But Jedwabne has since become a flashpoint in Polish politics, with some far-right politicians claiming [that] it was Germans who perpetrated the massacre and characterizing research on Polish complicity as part of an effort to slander their nation. The school of those promoting a revisionist narrative includes the president [whom] Poles elected last year, Karol Nowrocki.

Sumlinski described Saturday’s ceremony as “the moment when groups friendly to Jewish circles, sowing the Jedwabne lie, ultimately lost the battle for Jedwabne.”

Some nationalist activists and politicians have called for exhumations of the site to prove the victims were shot by German officers rather than burned by Poles. (A partial exhumation in 2001 concluded that Polish townspeople were responsible, but further exhumation was halted because Jewish law forbids disturbing the dead.)

In addition to the exhibit that appears to call for exhumations, another shipping container installed this month demands “conditions for seeking and defending historical truth,” which it says are “in Poland’s national interest.”

Sumlinski repeatedly targeted Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, one of the world’s leading Jewish museums, in a video in front of the installations.

He said that Jedwabne’s new “museum” represented “a place of resistance, perhaps one of our last lines of defense against what is being prepared for us, against the vision of Polin, against the strategy introduced by [Justice] Minister Żurek to support Jewish life and counter antisemitism.”

Annual commemorations of the 1941 pogrom are routinely disrupted in Jedwabne. Last July, Grzegorz Braun, a far-right member of the European Parliament, joined protesters in temporarily barricading Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and other visitors from leaving the memorial by blocking their cars.

Anna Bikont, a Polish Jewish journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza who wrote about Jedwabne in her 2004 book “The Crime and the Silence,” said defiance against historical accounts about the town still mobilizes its community of less than 2,000 people.

“You can’t win the elections in Jedwabne without saying that it was a lie, what Gross said,” said Bikont.

Bikont interviewed two brothers, Zygmunt and Jerzy Laudański, who took leading rôles in the massacre. They served six and eight years in prison, respectively. Their sentences were cut short during a wave of amnesty in 1956 from leader Władysław Gomułka, following the death of Joseph Stalin.

“They told me that they didn’t do it,” said Bikont. “But at the same time, they told me I had to tell Adam Michnik, my chief at Gazeta Wyborcza, that if we started to write about what the Poles did with Jews, the Poles would start to write about what Jews did with Poles. And it would not be a good story for Jews, so better not to do it. So it was menacing.”

The brothers told Bikont that when they returned from prison, they were cheered in Jedwabne and had parties thrown in their honor.

Waserstein, while fighting against the installations denying his grandfather’s testimony, has also branched out to advocacy. He and his family members founded a nonprofit, Shoah Truths, to combat Holocaust denial through education, community engagement and legal advocacy support.

They are also working on the first English translation of Wasersztein’s memoir, “La denuncia: 10 de julio de 1941,” published posthumously in 2001. Wasersztein spent most of his life in Cuba and Costa Rica after the war.

And they filed a notice of criminal act in Poland last year over the boulders, arguing that the installations constituted desecration and incitement to violence. The investigation has been extended until July, which will mark the 85th anniversary of the pogrom.

“Of course we want to get the boulders taken down, of course we want to get the [denial] museum banned,” Waserstein said. “But at the end of the day, just like my grandfather filed his complaint in 1945 to set the record straight and say, ‘Here’s the truth,’ that’s what we wanted to do.”

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Turning to my examination of West German Naziware, I begin my discussion with KZ-Manager—arguably the most notorious of the C64 releases—in which players are tasked with running an extermination camp like a business, a cynical detail given that the [Third Reich] approached the Final Solution like an industry. The game appeared around 1988 and was put on the Index by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Minors in July 1989, before being banned one and a half years later. Unsurprisingly, the ban did little to remove KZ-Manager from circulation.

Compared to later adaptations—such as the one on the more advanced Commodore Amiga with its significantly improved processor—the C64 version must be considered technically limited with little to no non-textual elements. KZ-Manager does not contain representations of human beings dying in the gas chambers. As such, it exemplifies the “super-rational element […] reflected in the early games’ graphics, which have a spare, modernist feel,” adding a dark twist to the frequently abstract quality of 8-bit games in that it gives pixeled gestalt to the [Axis’s] inhumane “rationality” (Slovin 139).

The goal of the player is to kill a specified number of people—some versions mention Jews while certain mods focus on Turks or Sinti and Roma—in a race against time, while keeping an eye on the public opinion and other contingent factors that determine the success of the virtual death camp officer. The interface uses drop-down menus to allow players to execute certain orders and most of the information is displayed in writing as KZ-Manager makes explicit the murderous goals that the player must meet.

Along these lines, it is noteworthy that it takes real effort to fail in this game, the program suggesting that the Final Solution is only a matter of time, and that the extermination of European Jewry can hardly be botched. As such, the game mechanic utilizes and then corrupts ludology’s tenet that “one of the primary reasons to play a game is to gain a sense of being effective in the world” (Skelly xiii).

The Anti Türkentest is entirely text-based—except for a swastika intermittently placed prominently in the center of the screen—and presents the player with a selection of ten randomly selected multiple-choice quiz questions whose content is racist throughout. A “correct” answer to any of these questions will yield a euphoric “Richtig Nazi” (“Correct, Nazi”), one of the rare voice effects on the C64.

After the test’s completion the player will be judged according to his answers, similar to the popular “character tests” that can be found on Facebook and other social media sites today. The questions in the game are culled from ethnically charged jokes that circulated in West Germany during that time, making it immediately obvious which answer is the desired one and often offering only one that is clearly deemed incorrect, which in this case is synonymous with “not racist.”

Anti Türkentest differs from KZ-Manager not only in terms of genre, but also in that it hides its xenophobia behind a shield of faux humor.¹⁵ In contrast to KZ-Manager, the genesis of Anti Türkentest has been better documented. In 1989, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an anonymous interview with the Berlin-based programmer of the Anti Türkentest, quoted in their article “Bravo, Hitlerjunge” [Well done, Hitler-Youth], who claimed “dass er sein Spiel im Informatik-Unterricht entwickeln konnte, der Lehrer ‘habe nichts eblickt” [that he was able to develop his game during IT-education, since the teacher ‘did not realize what his student was doing’].

The interviewer added, “die Eltern offenbar auch nicht” [same with the parents, apparently] and concludes “Das Produkt des 18jährigen fand sofort reißenden Absatz” [the 18-year-old’s product became a hot commodity immediately]. The programmer finally confirms that: “Viele in meiner Klasse wollten diesen Test haben, weil sie über Ausländer genauso denken wie ich” [a lot of my classmates wanted to get their hands on the Test because they have the same opinion about foreigners that I have] (29/1989).

The last statement makes it clear that the impetus to code Anti Türkentest grew out of a deep-seated bias toward Turkish immigrants in Germany that was amplified by the programmer’s assenting cohort. This said, as soon as the game left behind the school environment in which it had been initially conceived, the original intent of its programmer ceased to play a major rôle.

The offensive software spread across Germany—it went viral, to use today’s parlance—by being copied from storage medium to storage medium, often hidden among several other, professionally produced games so that there would not have been any direct connection to the Berlin programmer who had written and originally distributed it among his classmates—but not, it should be noted, as part of a right-wing group. In many instances, to speak from personal experience, one simply came across the game, whether one had been aware of its existence or not.

The Axis never attempted to annihilate Turks — in fact, Istanbul and Berlin were on good terms for most of World War II. So why were they the targets of German neofascist software? Mostly because petty bourgeois Germans were in competition with Turkish immigrants, though the desire to circumvent the law might have been another reason.

To watch some gameplay of KZ Manager Millenium: Hamburg Edition, click here. Cheers to TheCrazyEven for suffering through some of it for us. I thanked him therefor as it must have been an embarrassing experience, but he confided in me that while he was not exactly embarrassed playing it, he was still deeply uncomfortable—for obvious reasons. (Note that the music in the video, despite its triumphantly gloomy tone, was not part of the game. It was merely something that TheCrazyEven had playing in the background.)

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The Snake Island Institute (SII) is a military think tank on the rise and a central node in the “Azov Lobby.” Shortly before launching SII last year, its president Vladyslav Sobolevsky and executive director Maryna Hrytsenko visited Washington, D.C. with a delegation from the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade. Sobolevsky, an alleged war criminal, was a deputy commander of that openly neo[fascist] unit, and before 2022, deputy chief of staff of the “National Corps,” the political party of the Azov movement.

“I am glad that we are not quite a party, but a social movement with real membership,” Sobolevsky once said about the National Corps. “We don’t even care about elections, we care about people who believe in our ideas and are ready to follow us.” In 2020, he squashed “the last Ukrainian peacemaker” Sergei Sivokho’s “National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity.” Asked about his favorite books that year, Sobolevsky named some by German WWII generals, Erich von Manstein and Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand, as well as “Campaign in Russia: The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front,” by the Belgian [fascist] leader Léon Degrelle.

Last spring, Sobolevsky participated in a national security conference hosted by Harvard Business School and MIT, speaking after the deputy head of the U.S. Special Operations Command. In the fall, Sobolevsky and Hrytsenko returned to Washington for meetings at the State Department, the Atlantic Council, the Army and Navy Club, and with “DoD [Department of Defense] and congressional teams.” Now the Snake Island Institute has concluded another trip to Washington and “high-level meetings on Capitol Hill,” this time without him.

But first, some other updates on the Snake Island Institute that didn’t make it into my latest “Azov Lobby Review” (Fall 2025–Winter 2026). For starters, the SII has a new communications director, Christopher Collins. According to his website, “Since 2019, I have supported development projects financed by USAID, the FCDO [U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office], Global Affairs Canada, and European agencies.” At the time of the Russian invasion, Collins was a senior project manager for the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute.

In February 2022, Frances Lee Forbes worked in the U.S. Senate as a legislative correspondent for Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-D). Last December, she became the International Partnerships Coordinator of Snake Island Institute. Earlier in 2025, SII hired a pair of Azov Battalion veterans, Maksym Pyska and Artem Klimin, as its Ukraine Partnership Officers. Klimin was a deputy battalion commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade, and Pyska most likely also served in this unit. In 2017, they co-founded the “National Militia,” the “combat wing” or “street branch” of the Azov movement and its National Corps. This neo[fascist] paramilitary organization relaunched as “Centuria” in 2020.

As a reminder, just before the SII made it to Washington in September, Grace Wright left her job on Capitol Hill as the communications director for Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) to become the Senior Analytics Manager of Snake Island Institute. Her old boss is a member of the House Foreign Affairs and House Intelligence committees. The SII also has new interns, such as Theo Hisherik, a British Jewish political science student at John Hopkins University in Baltimore who wrote a blog post for the Times of Israel about the necessity of confronting Iran: “The time for hesitant half-measures is over.”

In February, 3rd Assault Brigade combat medic Viktoria Honcharuk visited England, and addressed the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. She also met with the director of the Joint Services Command and Staff College. In March, the UK Defence Academy gave Honcharuk a shout-out for International Women’s Day. The next day she appeared on BBC News for a report on the “Ukrainian anti-drone ‘Bullet’ that could help defend Gulf.” Honcharuk, who used to work on Wall Street, is the SII’s Director of Defense Tech, and joined the latest trip to Washington.

Before Honcharuk got to England, the Snake Island Institute published a report, “Holding Back the Sky: Ukraine’s Air Defense Campaign, 2022-2025.” The SII produced this report with the “Intelligence Team” of the Azov movement’s “Colonel Yevhen Konovalets Military School,” which is named for the founder of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that helped the [Axis] to perpetrate the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Former CIA director David Petraeus praised their “superb analysis.” Laura Cooper, the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia (2017-25), was so impressed that “I’m having my students at Georgetown refer to it during the technology segment of the course I’m teaching on Russia’s war on Ukraine. Thanks to Snake Island Institute for producing this!”

“Love everything the Snake Island Institute puts out,” said Chris O’Connor, the logistics warfare chair of the Naval Warfare Studies Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Perhaps thanks to him, SII’s Vladyslav Sobolevsky and Viktoria Honcharuk addressed a packed room at the Naval Postgraduate School last year.

Before the full delegation arrived in Washington, SII co-founders Maryna Hrytsenko (executive director) and Catarina Buchatskiy (Director of Analytics) flew to Florida. They participated in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Miami Security Forum, which promoted the “Donroe Doctrine” for 2–3 days in the Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at the Trump National Doral golf resort. The Heritage Foundation’s event organizer salivated at the possibility “for some real changes in Cuba.” Retired colonel Mike Jernigan from the Heritage Foundation — formerly the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Engineer School (2019-21) and a production fixer for the famous Youtuber “Mr. Beast” (2022-25) — moderated a panel discussion with Hrytsenko and Buchatskiy on the “Ukrainian Frontline Experience.”

Before co-founding Snake Island Institute, Maryna Hrytsenko was a foreign policy aide in Washington for Oleksandra Ustinova, the head of the liberal nationalist “Holos” faction in Ukrainian parliament. Catarina Buchatskiy, who interned at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, led a project with Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution about “lessons from the war in Ukraine for Taiwan, including research on the use of UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] in Ukraine and how to transfer operational and tactical lessons to Taiwan.” Buchatskiy said she “got called a baby murderer” for wearing her “I love Raytheon” shirt around campus. Her boyfriend is the CEO of Neros Technologies, a Peter Thiel-funded startup company based in California that is among the “leading U.S. drone producers.”

During a recent podcast interview for the Council on Foreign Relations, Catarina Buchatskiy made it sound as if the initiative to create Snake Island Institute did not come from the Azov movement, but herself and Hrytsenko. “We wanted to create a platform for the military,” she half-explained.

The concept of having this neutral third party that represents the military and works for them on their behalf is novel, in a way, and it definitely was not intuitive to a lot of our military partners when we first started talking to them about it, but pretty quickly, we were like, OK, let’s find the top military units that are really really the best of the best, and the best that we have, and sign them on. We’ll kind of act as their institute.

In other words, Snake Island Institute is a think tank that works for Ukraine’s most powerful neo[fascist] movement, because the Azovite 3rd Army Corps and 3rd Assault Brigade are clearly its main “military partners.” Anyway, I removed the paywall for my recent “Azov Lobby Review,” and might do the same with this article, but consider becoming a paying subscriber to learn more about SII’s latest trip to Washington and to support my work.

(This takes 7¾ minutes to read.)

Overlaps between neo[fascists], Germany’s military, and police forces are not new. Scandals break disturbingly frequently, often to a chorus of promises from the relevant authorities that they will stamp the problem out. Looking at some of the most prominent scandals from recent decades, the same people who Germany’s politicians claim are meant to protect us look more like a threat themselves. Whether its army officers planning false-flag terrorist operations and training neo[fascist] networks, or Sicherheitbehörde with thorough ties to neo[fascist] networks and rendered incompetent by their own racism, Germany’s military and police forces have a violent recent history.

Bundeswehr and the Uniter Group

While the current government continues to pump increasing amounts of money into the Bundeswehr, its employees greet each other with Hitler salutes, place swastikas around their workplace, and wear SS uniforms for themed parties. In one of the more recent scandals at the end of 2025, 19 soldiers of an elite unit were fired for showing the Hitler heil alongside sexual misconduct. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, stated that he was “shocked”. Except these acts are anything but surprising. In 2024, the army registered 280 cases of suspected right-wing extremism, although we can assume many cases were not reported. Of those that were, only 97 resulted in the offending soldier’s dismissal.

The extent of the problem can be illustrated through the story of Uniter, a former registered Verein [club] in Germany with extensive ties to the military and far-right networks. Founded in 2012 and led by André S., an elite kommando in the Bundeswehr, Uniter was described as a prepper group and a cult—one ceremony allegedly included drinking red wine from a human skull. It carried out weapons training for its estimated 2,000 members across Germany, and printed badges so that they would be able to recognise each other after “Day X”. One of their shooting competitions was named after a Turkish man murdered by the neo[fascist] NSU Complex.

Their work was organised through numerous group chats, mostly broken down on geographical lines. These group chats served as broader networks for Uniter, who led the chats while maintaining a degree of separation from them. Not everyone who was in the chats was a member of Uniter. The “Nordkreuz” chat, focused on northern Germany, is the most notorious.

One member, Marko G., is a police officer who runs a private shooting range. He made the news in 2019 when 55,000 bullets and an uzi gun—which is illegal in Germany—were found on his property, most of which had been stolen from the Bundeswehr and police. The uzi was reported as stolen from a Bundeswehr unit, but when Marco G. claimed in court that he bought it at a street market, the judge took his word for it. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s internal minister, Lorenz Caffier, even trained at this shooting range and bought a gun from Marco G.

The story of Franco A. is another example of how deep the problems are rooted into the German army. A member of the group chats who knew the leader André S., he was reportedly not a member of Uniter, although he had two of their “Day X” patches at home. Franco A. was educated in the elite Saint-Cyr military academy in France, one of the handful of German soldiers selected for the program every year.

As reported in a lengthy New York Times article, in 2013, he submitted his masters thesis to the program in which he argued that the Jewish Torah was the origin of all subversion and a plan by which Jews would achieve world dominance. Migration to Europe, he argued, was diluting racial purity and should be considered a form of genocide. When the thesis was reviewed by French and German commanders, the French commander recommended he be removed from service. The German commander, who held decision making authority, simply made him re-write the thesis and submit it again, saying he had gotten carried away.

Jump to 2017, and the now elite German soldier Franco A. was caught retrieving a gun [that] he had hidden in the Vienna airport. Upon running his fingerprints, the police received a match to a refugee named David Benjamin. The year before, Franco A. had put on a fake accent and registered himself as a refugee, claiming [that] he was a Syrian Christian of French descent. Investigators found a list of further potential targets at his house, including the Antonio Amadeus Stiftung, and various politicians. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison for planning a false-flag terrorist attack. Uniter has since been disbanded, and the group chats shut down. The vast majority of the group chat members, however, have not been outed or faced any repercussions.

If the actions of Uniter shocked Germany, more concerning is that many more soldiers with similar views appear to still be in the Bundeswehr. Ammunition continues to disappear from the Bundeswehr at an alarming rate, and sieg heil scandals and cases of suspected right-wing extremism pop up regularly in the military. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that another group chat already exists, and that other plans are already being struck.

Police, Verfassungsschutz and the NSU Complex

The problem is not limited to the military. In May 2025, the federal government admitted that at least 193 German police officers were currently under investigation for right-wing extremism or conspiracy theories. Police officers regularly make the news for things like passing on information to neo[fascist] cells, misplacing more than a ton of ammunition which most likely went to neo[fascists], or meeting in a bar with the neo[fascist] responsible for arson attacks targeting migrants and anti-fascists in Neukölln.

Racist beliefs are widespread in the police: one recent government-backed study found that men who looked Arabic or Turkish were assumed by police to be lacking in respect. The racist beliefs held by many police officers are not only dangerous because of the power [that the officers hold, but also because of how it impacts their investigations. The government study mentioned above states that “police can fail to recognize ‘non-Germans’ as victims of hate crimes […] In the worst cases, there can even be a reversal of blame.”

These problems extend to the Verfassungsschutz as well. The German intelligence service for internal affairs, its name literally refers to the protection of the constitution. The apparatus has the powerful ability to declare organisations as extremist or hostile to the German constitution—whether the group is left-wing or right-wing—and therefore place them under intrusive observation.

But the Verfassungsschutz itself has run into controversies for its connections to the far-right, including an ongoing debate on whether its staff can be members of the AfD. In an ongoing political drama, the organisation has even begun to collect information on its former head, Haans-Georg Maaßen, due to his right-wing extremism.

The mixing between neo[fascist] movements and Germany’s security forces has been documented for decades, but in 2011 the suicide of two men in a camper van outside of Eisenach brought a new wave of attention. The two men had just attempted to rob a bank and, realising [that] they were about to be caught, killed themselves. From here it did not take long until the third accomplice was found alive, and reports emerged in the German press of a right-wing terror group that had been active for over a decade.

The National Socialist Underground (NSU, or NSU Komplex) had murdered 10 people; 8 men with Turkish backgrounds, one Greek man, and a police officer. They also carried out arson attacks and bank robberies across the country. It is also possible there are more murders, which have not been tied to them. The murders were carried out in part to provoke fear in migrant communities.

Tellingly, even before 2011 many of these murders made the news, and people had recognised a pattern. But instead of suspecting right-wing racist murders, the media described them as Dönermorde (döner murders). The police recognised the pattern in that the victims mostly had Turkish backgrounds, and drew the conclusion that these were gang murders. While the police was thrown off by racist assumptions, the Verfassungsschutz was deeply enmeshed in the far-right circles of the NSU.

It turned out that the Verfassungsschutz had already infiltrated these networks with so-called V-Leute. V-Leute are paid informants who report back on the groups they are members of. The sheer volume of V-Leute in the neo[fascist] scene has led to the critique that the Verfassungsschutz was effectively bankrolling the NSU. Yet instead of drawing on these informants, when the murders came to light a member of the Verfassungsschutz reacted by shredding the files of 7 V-Leute who might have relevant information, as one staffer later admitted in court.

Another Verfassungsschutz staff member, Andreas T., was even present for one of the murders. He was sitting in an internet cafe, chatting about an affair on a dating website, while Halit Yozgat was murdered in the next room over. Andreas T. claimed not to have noticed, something that Forensic Architecture later argued was impossible.

To this day, the exact extent of networks and people supporting the trio who carried out the murders is still unknown, although several supporters have been tried. Some evidence, such as the NSU’s extensive database of potential victims filled with detailed notes (“Good target, but too old”) and some 10,000 entries, points to a much larger support complex than has been uncovered so far. What exactly the Verfassungsschutz knows about the NSU is also still unclear.

The thorough failure of the police and Verfassungsschutz was a partial reason for why the NSU murders have become so entrenched in discussions of far-right violence, but also for the wave of activism which resulted from the murder spree. Much of this work has gone through NSU Komplex Auflösen (Unraveling the NSU Complex), a group made up of activists and family members of the victims, which organised a grassroots tribunal under the same name to counteract the failures of the state.

This organising work anchored the NSU Komplex into German discourse, while also providing the platform for attempts to provide clarity and knowledge about the NSU Komplex, such as the Forensic Architecture work on Andreas T. These efforts brought not only more information about the attacks into public discourse, but also actively created space for the voices of the family members.

What we don’t know

News of another cache of ammunition or another group chat with racist memes still breaks regularly in Germany. The AfD has a growing relationship to Germany’s civil service, which includes the police, Bundeswehr, as well as teachers; they had 220 civil service members stand for them in elections between 2020 and 2025. For every leaked police group chat like this one uncovered in 2023, filled with memes of sexual violence, racist jokes, and started by a Polizeioberkommissar (police chief inspector), there are an unknown number which have not made the news.

While we know about the 20,000 rounds of munition that were stolen from the Bundeswehr at the end of 2025, the Nordkreuz story highlights that small amounts of ammo slip into the hands of neo[fascists] on a regular basis. Each scandal that breaks is a sign of the still growing but largely still invisible ranks of neo[fascists] in positions of authority in Germany—until the next attack.

(Mirror. This takes 3–4½ minutes to read.)

In addition to the peaceful protests, […] dozens of groups in virtually all of the regions of the country took up arms for direct armed resistance against those whom they perceived as the tools of a foreign oppressor. Nothing united these groups except strong nationalist feelings and perhaps the hope that they were fighting in the initial skirmishes of a new war opposing the [Western] and the [Eastern] blocs.

These partisan formations were never larger than two dozen fighters, lightly armed with hand guns, hunting and assault rifles, grenades and very rarely automatic weapons. Overwhelmingly formed of peasants, but sometimes including refugees from the cities, students, former military officers, tradesmen or former business owners, they generally operated in remote regions close to the villages of some members of the group.⁹

Romanian guerrillas mounted attacks against local communist officials and propaganda campaigns by distributing leaflets and manifestoes; they attacked official buildings such as town halls, mountain lodges and tax offices and communist-organized meetings and balls and sometimes engaged in outright banditry to support their activities.

Politically, they belonged to almost the entire spectrum of pre-war Romania, from non-affiliated to members of the historical parties (national liberals and national peasants), members of left-wing organizations and even former communists to a significant number of members of fascist organizations such as the Iron Guard.¹⁰

Some of the leaders of the main guerrilla groups had a purely military background, such as Major Nicolae Dabija who led a strong group in the Apuseni Mountains in the West of the country or Colonel Ioan Uță, commander of a group from south-eastern Romania. Others, such as Vasile Macoveiciuc were nationalists who had been through German-led guerrilla schools established near the frontlines in the summer of 1944.

Military-trained guerrillas included Gavrilă Olteanu, an anti-Semitic and anti-Hungarian radical guilty of war crimes who claimed to fight on behalf of a prominent leader of the National-Peasants Party. Some fascist guerrillas were home-grown and trained, like the high-school students from the central Transylvanian town of Făgăraș, or the most elusive anti-communist fighter, Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, who escaped capture until 1976. Others, though, such as Filon Verca, went through [Axis] sabotage schools established in Austria after [the Kingdom of] Romania changed sides in August 1944 and were parachuted in the country in the last winter of the war.

It made sense, in a way, for many anti-communist armed groups to have leaders or to be wholly composed of members of pro-fascist organizations, as they had been the most radical opponents of the Soviet Union and already had paramilitary training and, as the history of pre-war Romania shows, a penchant for armed violence. Yet many other guerrillas and guerrilla leaders had loose political associations with any groups, if any.

[…]

The Macavei brothers, partisans working with the group of former army Major Nicolae Dabija in the Apuseni and sympathizers of the opposition National Peasants Party, proved particularly hard to capture. […] In the early 1950s the Securitate sent a whole company to make arrests in the villages supporting the partisans led by Teodor Șușman, a former local mayor close to the National Peasants Party.¹⁸ […] Capotă and his co-leader Iosif Dejeu, both militants of the National Peasants Party, were executed in September 1958.

[…]

[A]pproaches were taken in April 1954 by the Operative Group Făgăraș, a task force specially set to deal with the Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu legionary (fascist) group operating on the northern slopes of the Făgăraș Mountains. […] In the Apuseni Mountains, the National Peasants Party partisans led by Ștefan Popa were attacked by 200 Securitate troops from the Sibiu Battalion on 8 March 1949. Three partisans were killed and two captured.⁴²

[…]

The mostly legionary (fascist) groups operating in Dobrogea, for instance, had to face the reality that their region was an operational zone of the Red Army after 1944; Constanța—the region’s center and the most important maritime port of the country had the largest garrison of Soviet troops in the country. […] Treason and the use of informers led to the destruction of an armed group called “King Michael’s Partisans—the Secret Army” operating in 1948–49 as a subversive organization in the Cluj-Gherla-Turda area and then as an armed resistance group in the area Gherla-Dej.

[…]

The lack of help from many locals, coupled with the increasingly distant prospect of the beginning of a war between the capitalist West and the communist East also factored in many rebels’ decision to surrender, sometimes splintering a specific group and even leading, through betrayal, to the capture of their comrades.

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In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.”

The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his worldview. They also coincided with the administration’s efforts to remove content related to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal websites.

Unlike his posture toward the Smithsonian, Trump has not publicly commented on the USHMM’s content or publicly called for any modifications. But two former museum employees who left amid the changes told POLITICO they believed the museum was altering its content preemptively, so as to not draw unwanted negative attention from the Trump administration. Both were granted anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation.

“It seems like they were trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change,” one of the people said.

The museum pulled from its website a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” at some point after Aug. 29, 2025, the last time the page was captured on the Internet Archive. That page provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between American de jure racism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about “African American Soldiers during World War II” and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust,” among other topics.

It also linked to a 2018 video on the museum’s YouTube channel featuring a conversation between a Holocaust survivor and a woman whose father was lynched in Alabama. That video is now unlisted, meaning it does not show up on the USHMM’s YouTube page but is still accessible via direct URL.

Leaders at the museum also renamed a one-day civic education workshop designed for college students from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” In an email, obtained by POLITICO, between a senior staff member at the museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and a staffer planning the workshop, the senior staff member said the change was necessary due to “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.”

Since taking office, Trump has tightened his grip on the USHMM, an independent museum that relies on both private donations and federal appropriations and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian. In an unprecedented move last year, the president purged from its board several of President Joe Biden’s appointees before the end of their terms. And in the months since, he has installed his own loyalists on the board — most notably replacing Stuart Eizenstat, who helped found the museum, with GOP megalobbyist Jeffrey Miller as chair last month.

In an unsolicited statement to POLITICO during this story’s reporting, a museum spokesperson emphasized: “The Trump administration has not requested any changes to the Museum’s content or programming.”

Asked to respond specifically to the claims made in this story, the spokesperson said in a follow-up statement that “The allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false.” The spokesperson added that “Neither the Trump administration nor others ordered changes to the Museum’s content or programming.”

The spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about why the teaching materials page had been taken down, but provided links to active webpages on the museum’s site about racism in Germany and the U.S., the 1936 Olympics and Americans and the Holocaust.

Neither Miller nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Eizenstat declined to comment.

The “Fragility of Democracy” workshop was intended to engage students to “examine key questions, including: What motivated ordinary Germans to vote for an extremist party like the Nazis in free and fair elections? What factors strengthened or weakened democracy in 1920s Germany?” according to copies of two flyers advertising the workshop — one with the original name and one with the new name.

The program behind the workshop, called Civic Learning for Campus Communities, had started in 2020. After years of research and testing, the “Fragility of Democracy” workshop piloted in 2024. The program was canceled in July 2025.

In emails reviewed by POLITICO sent from a museum employee to two professors who had planned on hosting the workshops, the employee attributed the cancellation to “a set of cuts that are due to limited federal funds and a difficult fundraising environment.” But the employee — who has since left USHMM — said museum leadership had privately told them the cancellation was also about “shifting priorities.”

“The decisions here … from the name change to cutting the program, absolutely seem to be preemptive in order to save face and not cause any disturbances,” the second former staffer said. They added that there was concern about “engaging in conversations that might take the participant out of the context of Europe, 1933 to 1945, and into present day.”

The museum recorded a $52.4 million increase in net assets that fiscal year, and its total assets surpassed $1 billion, according to a public report that attributes that financial position to “strong support from the Museum’s donors and the success of fundraising campaigns.” The spokesperson did not respond directly to questions about why the program was canceled, and why that cancellation was attributed to fundraising challenges.

Marc Carpenter, a history professor at the University of Jamestown, had planned to host the workshop before being informed in July 2025 that the program was ending. He said he was “surprised” by the “really abrupt” timing of the cancellation.

“It just feels like a shame for this to happen in any context,” Carpenter said. “The museum generally brings together wonderful programming for universities, and it seemed especially suited to the call for civic engagement that seemed to be core to both what our university was doing, but also to what the museum’s mission was.”

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Coercive institutions were complemented by administrative bodies specifically designed to exclude Jews and Roma from the social and economic life of the country. The Hlinka Guard, the party’s militia, embodied the [bourgeois] state’s coercive power and became notorious for the brutality of its members. Another coercive institution, the State Security Headquarters (in Slovak: Ústredňa štátnej bezpečnosti) was established in January 1940. The Ilava camp was transformed into a detention centre for political opponents.⁴¹

While violence was central to consolidating the régime, forced labour quickly emerged as an important mechanism to enforce its policies, again borrowing from the German [Reich’s] model but adapting it to local conditions.

Several examples support my claim here. The Slovak Military Act of January 1940 mandated that all Jews and Roma be discharged from military service by the end of the month, stripping them of any military ranks they had previously earned. Subsequently, both groups were conscripted for compulsory labour, most notably in the VI Labour Battalion (in Slovak: 6. robotný prápor). They were marked by distinct uniforms to signify their outsider status: Jews wore blue crossed stripes on their sleeves, while Roma wore red stripes.

[…]

The new railway, spanning 50 kilometres with an additional 12 kilometres refurbished, thus came to represent the régime’s commitment to integrating these remote provinces and was seen as a key step in the national development of eastern Slovakia.⁵⁶ It was not only presented as a gesture from the centre but was also actively demanded by voices from the borderlands.

The primary task of the Eastern Slovak Labour Units — predominantly composed of local Roma — was to build this railway. These units operated at sites in Hanušovce nad Topľou, Bystré nad Topľou, and Lipníky (Pod Petičom). Scholars have noted that the Eastern Slovak Labour Units were characterized by an “almost mass concentration of recruits.”⁵⁷ Yet the exact number of detainees is difficult to determine: the transportation of new individuals was consistently offset by frequent escapes, the release of those unfit for work, and the transfer of those wounded during labour.⁵⁸

What emerges clearly, especially from witness accounts of Romani survivors, is how gruelling and dangerous the work was, particularly the stone labour in Pod Petičom. The experience was further exacerbated by the frequent violence inflicted by Slovak gendarmes. One witness recounted,

We were young. And I was hungry, and we had to lift the stones. I couldn’t manage it. Then one of them came and said, “Can’t you manage? Do you see where you’ll go? There, to where those men are, and you’ll get such a thrashing that … you might even be killed.” And that’s how it was.⁵⁹

In the forced labour units, the reality for Roma was anything but “civilized.” They were subjected to brutal working conditions, leading to widespread injuries, illnesses, and fatalities.⁶⁰ The railway was more than just an infrastructural necessity; it formed part of a larger narrative of national progress, using forced Romani labour to construct the tracks — a powerful image of how the [dictatorship of the bourgeoisie] employed marginalized communities to physically manifest its vision of a more “civilized” eastern Slovakia. With the railway’s completion, many of these forced labourers were transferred to other units, including in Dubnica, Ilava, and Revúca.⁶¹

Beyond the railway, the [fascist bourgeoisie] pushed for a wider “civilisation” process that went beyond large-scale infrastructure to shape the daily lives of towns and villages. A 1940 broadcast by Slovak Radio actively encouraged villages to engage in “a healthy competition” to elevate their cultural and economic status, suggesting projects such as building cultural centres, schools, and churches; establishing cooperatives; improving public hygiene; and ridding communities of “the Jewish element.”⁶²

Indeed, numerous local civilisational projects emerged across eastern Slovakia, and from various initiatives. These projects included regulating rivers like the Ondava and Topľa to prevent flooding, constructing water stations, and building sewage systems and walkways.⁶³

In towns like Prešov and Medzilaborce, such improvements were framed as signs of the régime’s commitment to modernising rural peripheries and countering the image of eastern Slovakia as an “uncivilized” backwater.⁶⁴ The construction of public buildings, road networks, sewage systems, even pavements and swimming pools showcased the local drive to bring order and development to towns like Michalovce and Sečovce.⁶⁵

The [dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’s] efforts to modernize went hand in hand with its aim to cleanse eastern Slovakia of its “uncivilized” image. Police headquarters in towns like Prešov noted the dual pressures placed on municipal and district offices to maintain public order, responding both to the expectations of local communities and to the demands of higher authorities.

Criticisms ranged from issues like alcoholism and poor sanitation to overcrowded housing, where multiple generations lived without proper facilities. Efforts to make villages “more Slovak” reinforced the [dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’s] exclusionary policies, ensuring that the drive for “civilisation” came at the expense of already marginalized groups.⁶⁶

Local offices played a significant rôle in determining which Jews and Roma were deemed “useful” and thus permitted to remain in their towns and villages, and which were labelled as expendable, leading to their transfer to forced labour camps and units within the state or, later, to deportation to concentration and extermination camps.

An example of this duality can be seen in a 1943 report from the District Office in Humenné to the Ministry of the Interior. The report clarified that, within its jurisdiction, there were no Roma to resettle outside of the town’s borders, and the majority of Roma were “industrious, making their living primarily through work on local roads, where they are currently needed due to a shortage of other workers.” It further noted that most Romani dwellings had already been removed from busy areas in most municipalities.

However, in certain places — specifically Vyšný Hruškov, Papín, Nižná Jablonka, and Zbudské Dlhé — the relocation of their dwellings had not yet occurred. The reason given was practical: the village of Zbudské Dlhé, as well as the local land cooperative, did not possess suitable land to relocate these dwellings without causing further hygiene or aesthetic issues. Consequently, the village had to negotiate with the forest estate or private landowners to purchase appropriate land, a process that remained incomplete.⁶⁷

This example illustrates the [upper classes’] insistence on aesthetic and hygienic “improvements” as part of their civilisational projects and how local authorities played a decisive rôle in implementing or negotiating such policies.

(Emphasis added.)

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I know that I have discussed this before, but it is worth bringing up again but there remain too many people who neglect to bespeak the other Axis powers’ crimes. Implications that solely the German Fascists or specifically their head of state were responsible for the Shoah are quite common but misleading. In reality, all of the Western Axis powers were involved in antisemitic as well as antiziganist atrocities, and usually without orders from Berlin.

It is true that the Third Reich contributed to European antisemitism along with antiziganism. I can’t deny that. Even so, given that these powers (unlike the Eastern Axis) had lengthy histories of both phenomena, external pressure would have been redundant.

Quoting Radu Ioanid’s The Holocaust in Romania: the Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944:

Forced by the national—and international—outcry […] President Iliescu created the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel and composed of scholars from Romania, the United States, Israel, France, and Germany, which presented to President Iliescu its report in October 2004. The report was endorsed by President Ion Iliescu and his successor, President Traian Băsescu, who was elected at the end of the same year.

The Commission summarized through its volume containing the report along with a second volume of documents the history of the Holocaust in Romania, concluding that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered or died in the territories under Romanian control, and that an additional 135,000 Romanian Jews living under Hungarian jurisdiction were also murdered. The final report also concluded that 25,000 Roma were deported to Transnistria, out of whom about 11,000 perished.

Quoting Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, chapter 4:

Bartu Buzea recalled one case of summary execution for indiscipline. A sergeant who had been ordered to shoot a Jewish family instead let them go after [he carnally abused] the daughter. After finding out, the 2nd Grăniceri Regiment commander assembled the unit and, after some words about discipline, shot the sergeant.¹⁵² Soldiers still got away with looting under the cover of authorized reprisals.

Cetatea Albă’s few remaining Jews were held in a synagogue, while Jews from nearby towns were imprisoned in another. On 3 August, Major Virgil Drăgan, commander of the city market; Captain Olimpiu Mihailescu, assistant gendarme commander; and Major Horia Olteanu, an SSI officer, met with two SS officers. Einsatzgruppe D now ignored the Commissar Order’s limits and murdered Jews indiscriminately.¹⁵³ The Cetatea Albă garrison commander was absent, but these low-ranking officers went ahead, without orders, with plans to liquidate the Jews in the city.

When Captain Alexandru Ochișor reminded them at dawn of recent orders instructing suspected communists be sent to Chișinău, they woke Colonel Marcela Petala, the Third Army chief praetor who happened to be visiting the city, to obtain permission to shoot the Jews. Petala was angry to be disturbed. “In Chișinău all Jews are imprisoned in a ghetto and in every night they pull out hundreds of Jews f[or] executions!”¹⁵⁴

Under Ochișor’s eye, groups of forty were driven to the maritime railway station, where in two days some one thousand Jews were interrogated, stripped of valuables, and shot in a quarry.¹⁵⁵ A month later, 150 Jews from Chilia Nouă who stopped in Cetatea Albă were murdered for their belongings.¹⁵⁶ Soldiers were almost never punished for crimes against Jews.

While the Fourth Army crossed at Dubossary, gendarmes pushed twenty-five thousand Jews across the Dniester at Mogilev.¹⁵⁷ General von Schobert complained that Jews clogged roads and bridges, threatened telecommunications, consumed rations, spread disease, and should be kept for labor. On 6 August, General Ciupercă issued an order repeating these points and banning gendarmes from pushing Jews over at Dubossary.¹⁵⁸ General Antonescu met Hitler that day too. He received a Knight’s Cross and orders for the Fourth Army to capture Odessa.¹⁵⁹

During the meeting, the crisis at Mogilev worsened. [Wehrmacht] troops pushed three thousand Jews back into northern Bessarabia and shot thousands of others who were too exhausted to move.¹⁶⁰ The following day Romanian gendarmes stopped [Wehrmacht] troops from sending back more Jews; nevertheless, within a week 12,500 Jews, not counting 4,000 dead, had been returned. Antonescu whined that this was “contrary to the guidelines which the Führer had set forth to him in Munich regarding the treatment of eastern Jews.”¹⁶¹

On 15 August, gendarmes guarding twelve hundred Jews at the Tătăraști labor camp in southern Bessarabia shot hundreds when they became “aggressive.”¹⁶² By now soldiers and gendarmes had killed an estimated 43,500 Jews in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia.¹⁶³

(Emphasis added.)

The reasons for these atrocities were profit and making room for White, Gentile colonisers, as we can deduce from this:

As the Fourth Army clawed its way forward, the [Marele Cartier General] made a land grab. A month earlier the conducător had informed the German Military Mission that [the Kingdom of] Romania was interested in annexing part of Ukraine, so when Hitler, as part of another request for the Third Army to advance (this time beyond the Dnieper River), suggested the Romanian Army secure southern Ukraine between the Dniester and the Dnieper Rivers for the German Army, General Antonescu assumed—mistakenly or shrewdly—that the führer offered the whole territory as a prize.

[The Kingdom of] Romania could police the whole area, the conducător responded, but it could only administer and economically exploit the smaller region between the Dniester and the Bug. Antonescu had maneuvered Hitler into giving [the Kingdom of] Romania not just territory to occupy but to govern.¹⁸³

On 30 August, eight days after Mihai I promoted Antonescu to marshal, deputy chief of staff General Nicolae Tătăranu and General Arthur Hauffe (who had replaced General Hansen as commander of the German Military Mission) signed a deal in Tighina. The Tighina Agreement granted the MCG authority over the territory between the Dniester and the Bug, required the Romanian Army to provide rear security between the Bug and the Dnieper, granted the German Army some key concessions, including control over railroads, and clarified that Jews should be held in ghettos and camps west of the Bug until after final victory.¹⁸⁴

Further reading: The History of the Holocaust in Romania

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On March 22, shortly after the spring equinox, the Hitlerite core of the Azov movement could not resist the urge to highlight the 1488th day of the Russo-Ukrainian war, simply because this is the favorite number of many neo[fascists] around the world. In the 1980s, U.S. neo[fascist] leader David Lane wrote his Fourteen Words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and “88 Precepts” in a prison cell. “88” (H.H.) is a well-known code for “Heil Hitler.”

Among those who commemorated the 1488th day, Dmitriy Krukovsky from the 53rd Mechanized Brigade and Alexey Levkin from Ukraine’s Russian Volunteer Corps came as no surprise. Krukovsky has a tattoo of Adolf Hitler, and led the Azovite paramilitary youth group Centuria in 2024-25. The Russian Levkin, a celebrity ideologue in Centuria, is the chief organizer of National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) concerts in Ukraine, and even a “Fuhrernight” in 2019. Levkin sings,

Blood and soil under wheels of Totenkopf

Pressing rivals’ short skulls into filthy mire

Preachers of Kabbalah, offspring thereof

Labour in Death Camps, burn in furnace fire

3rd Assault Brigade medic Yury Pavlyshyn, now a leader of its Hatred Battalion who appears on billboards and in videos for the 3rd Army Corps, is the bass guitar player in Levkin’s Russo-Ukrainian NSBM bands M8L8TH (aka “Hitler’s Hammer”) and AKVLT (“Adolf Cult”). Pavlyshyn’s latest tattoo is of Charles Manson, so of course he also had to post something — the same image as Krukovsky, who reposted it from a mutual friend of the Russian Volunteer Corps’ commander “White Rex.”

From Pavlyshyn, the image found Yan Klishayev, who I wrote about recently. Klishayev, the neo[fascist] coordinator of the new Veteran Corps of the Azov movement, also acknowledged the 1488 milestone, on the day before he signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Minister for Veterans Affairs of Ukraine.

“Bolgar,” a notable Azovite in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), who used to have the numbers 14 and 88 in his Instagram username, shared the same screenshot from an application counting the days since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. He formed the openly neo-Nazi “Neptune” group in the 12th Azov Brigade (even featuring an 88 in its emblem), and now commands the personnel training battalion of the 1st Azov Corps. Vladyslav Blinsky, a company commander from the 3rd Assault Brigade and co-founder of the popular Azovite brand “Only Wars,” captioned a picture of himself with a POW, “1488 days of this fool.”

Neo[fascist] football hooligans, who gave rise to the Azov movement years ago, naturally found reason to celebrate, for example the “Dynamo Ultras,” part of the “White Boys Club” in Kyiv. “Northern Division,” the new youth movement associated with the neo[fascist] rap group “Nord Division,” held a “large-scale sporting event” (big brawl of hooligans) apparently supported by the HUR, or Ukrainian military intelligence. Nord Division originated in the Azovite HUR Kraken regiment.

Supposedly these fanatics commemorated Ukrainian Volunteer Day from the previous weekend, but they posed with a large banner that said “1488 days of war.” As told by Events in Ukraine, “Nord Division” has a neo[fascist] rap song according to which HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov “supervises us” and “gives us assignments,” and even “listens to our tracks in Russian” before interviews. “All of Ukraine’s counterintelligence says that we are art.” Now Budanov heads the Office of the President.

Almost a month earlier, the full-scale war in Ukraine entered its 5th year. Stanislav Ryzhenkov, a veteran of the NGU Azov Regiment, received a standing ovation in the European Parliament (as seen in the video below). “We will win this war,” he said. Ryzhenkov, a former POW after his neo[fascist] unit surrendered in Mariupol, is now an advisor to the mayor of Kyiv as the city council’s commissioner for veterans affairs. He addressed the European Parliament at the invitation of center-right Lithuanian MEP Petras Auštrevičius, who previously won an auction for a framed photo of Ryzhenkov missing an arm in the Azovstal complex in Mariupol.

Meanwhile in Kyiv’s Mariinsky Palace, a visibly uncomfortable Volodymyr Zelensky handed the “Hero of Ukraine” award to an emotionless senior lieutenant in the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade. In 2022, Oleksandr Khyzhnayk joined the 98th Territorial Defense Battalion “Azov-Dnipro,” a unit with neo[fascist] emblems that formed the 1st Mechanized Battalion in the 3rd Assault Brigade. “There is no exhaustion from the war,” he said after the ceremony.

There is a certain demotivation due to what is happening outside the army. Corruption scandals, the population’s support for the military has decreased, and of course, scandals with the TCK [mobilization offices], namely people who see TCK employees as the enemy…

Commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces General Oleksandr Syrsky also presented awards to service members of the NGU 1st Azov Corps. And at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, there was a documentary screening co-starring Vladislav Shatilo, a neo[fascist] Azov veteran. He appeared at last year’s February 24 NATO HQ commemoration in connection with the film. Vladislav Shatilo, a friend of the Hitler-tattooed Centuria leader Dmitriy Krukovsky, now leads the Veteran Corps in Chernihiv. Vladislav Shatilo used to be a football hooligan, part of the “SS Men” (Parny SS) ultras along with his friend Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who has a swastika tattoo, and led the local branch of the National Corps, the political party of the Azov movement.

At a February 24th demonstration in Brussels, a representative of the Azovite patronage service told the media, “I want to say to all Europeans that although you try to understand Ukrainians, you cannot.”

Someone who works with NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic commented that day, “The most exciting part of the frontier now is UGVs [Unmanned Ground Vehicles]. They are becoming stronger, faster, more independent and are an integral part of how the 3rd Assault Brigade fights.” Perhaps he saw that the Modern War Institute at West Point had just published “War Without Soldiers: The Evolution of Warfare in the Age of Machines,” a blog post that General James Mingus wrote (with the help of an intelligence officer) days after he ceased to be the 39th vice chief of staff of the U.S. army.

General Mingus’ short February 24 article opened with a robotic military operation of the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade from last summer, the claim to fame for its star UGV company “NC13,” which originated in a unit with a modified emblem of the Waffen-SS Dirlewanger Brigade. That day the London-based magazine New Scientist also published a report from the Azov movement’s “Killhouse Academy” in Kyiv which opened a school for UGV operators last summer: “How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war.”

NC13 commander Mykola Zinkevich at the 2026 Munich Security Breakfast, and wearing his modified Dirlewanger patch at an award ceremony with the “White Führer” of the Azov movement. Less than a year before the Russian invasion, his “Galician Youth” posted Nazi leaflets in Lviv.

At the Latvian National Opera in Riga, the President of Latvia attended a Ukraine-themed concert, which featured a screening of Azovite propaganda directed by Yevhen Matviyenko, in particular two episodes of his “Varta” project. I already wrote about one of them before. “Made in Ukraine” showcases proud neo[fascists] in the Special Operations Forces “Azov-Kyiv” Regiment established in 2022, which spearheaded the 3rd Assault Brigade, the elite infantry unit that now leads the 3rd Army Corps. The other short film “She” features some women from the 3rd Assault Brigade, including a hardcore neo[fascist] who died in the war, and a medic now serving in the Hatred Battalion.

According to the Russian Volunteer Corps, the high-profile neo[fascist] HUR unit, its supporters took to the streets in Germany, Austria, France, Finland, Poland, and even Israel on February 24. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko noted, “Italian neo-fascists affiliated with CasaPound organized a commemorative marathon on the streets of Italy, honoring Ukrainian far-right fighters from Azov, Right Sector, and other groups who were killed during the war. Many of them were posthumously awarded the title of Heroes of Ukraine. Streets, schools, and other public facilities have been named after them.”

Anyway, here’s a table of contents for today’s post.

• Russian Nazis on the rise in Ukraine?
• Nazi propaganda roundup
• Heroization and Azovization
• Conferences (Davos—Kyiv—London—DC—and beyond…)

(This takes five minutes to read.)

Distinguished historian Rory Yeomans, who is currently an independent researcher financed by the British Council, told BIRN in an interview that revisionist views of the wartime Ustaša movement and the [Axis-aligned] Independent State of Croatia, NDH, have entered Croatia’s political mainstream in recent years.

“Such views used to be seen as the lunatic fringe; now they are part of the mainstream. That’s terrifying,” said Yeomans, the author of books including Visions of Annihilation: the Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945 and The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia.

He also expressed concern that such views were being expressed by “would-be historians” in mainstream media in the country.

“Then you read the comments under the articles and you read that ‘Communists lied us for 70 years; there was no death camp in Jasenovac, there was no genocide; they lied about the NDH’,” he explained.

Between 1941 and 1945, Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp which was run by the Ustaša. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has managed to name 83,145 victims of the camp, while the total death toll is generally believed to be between 100,000 and 110,000.

Yeomans said that some journalists and historians in Croatia are disregarding the facts and claiming that Ustaša did not commit massive crimes against Serbs, Jews and Roma and that the NDH was “a benevolent régime”.

“If you say, I want to prove that the NDH was a cultured and civilised state, and then you go to the archives and you find all the information you can find that proves that and then you just discard everything which militates against that, that’s the bad way of writing history,” he explained.

Trends in Croatia and Serbia regarding the rewriting of WWII history are also quite similar, he suggested.

Yeomans cited the recent rehabilitation of Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic, the Serbian nationalist Chetnik movement leader.

The Belgrade court cleared Mihailovic of his alleged WWII-era crimes, arguing that he did not get a fair trial under the Yugoslav régime, but Yeomans said that does not mean the Chetnik leader was innocent.

“Even if Mihailovic was tried today, he would be found guilty of war crimes, because, even if he wasn’t personally involved, he was the commander of the groups that committed really horrible crimes, mass killings,” he said.

Hatred of Communism

Yeomans suggested that many of the Croatian historians who are trying to rewrite the past are motivated by a “hatred towards communism and strongly dislike the socialist Yugoslavia”.

“And part of the reason why I think they are becoming more successful is that socialist Yugoslavia never dealt with the issue of Bleiburg and never dealt with post-war crimes, which there were many, not just against Croats, but as well Serbian nationalists and Slovenian nationalists, and Bosniak separatists,” he said.

After Ustaša and NDH forces — as well as other Yugoslav forces that collaborated with the fascists — surrendered to the British Army at Bleiburg in Austria, the Communist Partisans killed an unknown number of them, along with an unknown number of civilians who were accompanying them.

In Yugoslav times, victims’ families gathered at Bleiburg to commemorate the dead, but also partly to praise the fallen NDH, making it a symbolic place for Croatian right-wingers. After Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia, the state started to use the event to officially commemorate the crimes.

Revisionist historians claim that a conspiracy of silence existed among Yugoslav-era historians who sought to cover up Bleiburg and other post-war crimes. The revisionists also seek to downplay the crimes committed by the NDH.

But Yeomans emphasised that as early as April 11, 1941 — a day after taking power — the Ustašas arrested the first Jews in Zagreb.

Then in May 1941, a group of nearly 170 Jewish youths were arrested in Zagreb by the Ustaša police and transported first to the Danica concentration camp in central Croatia and then to Jadovno, near the coast, where all but three perished.

Yeomans also said the Ustaša régime started purges of state companies and institutions in May 1941 and completed them by July the same year, a process that took Nazi Germany around a decade.

“It’s very interesting listening to Croatian politicians then they say, ‘Well it was tragic, but unfortunately Croatia sided with the Nazis.’ It’s almost like they try to blame Hitler and Mussolini for what happened in Croatia, which had nothing to do with Hitler and Mussolini. Essentially, this was the decision of the people that led Croatia in 1941, although nobody voted for them and they didn’t have a popular mandate,” Yeomans said.

Tackling WWII myths

“In my opinion, from what I can see in Croatia, there are two basic myths,” Yeomans said.

“The first myth is that nobody supported the Ustaša régime and everyone was against them, apart from a few quislings, and that everyone supported the Partisans,” he explained.

The second myth, the one preferred by Serbian nationalists, is that the most Croats supported the Ustaša régime — although Yeomans cautions that it is “very hard to measure how much the general population supports the values of the régime”.

Politically in Croatia, the last government, led by the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, did not directly encourage revisionist ideas about WWII, but created an atmosphere in which they could flourish and gain legitimacy, Yeomans believes.

He cited the controversial culture minister Zlatko Hasanbegovic, “who has a problematic past when it comes to confronting the Ustaša régime and the Holocaust”, he said.

After Croatian newspaper Novosti reported that Hasanbegovic had written for a pro-fascist bulletin while he was a student, the minister responded by saying that he was never “an apologist for any criminal régime, regardless of whether it was an Ustaša or Communist régime”.

However he did not specifically apologise for the article in which he described the Ustaša as martyrs and heroes.

“These people create a certain ‘mood music’ and other factors react to that. I’ve read his interviews in different papers — Le Monde, Il Piccolo — and I think [that] it’s very problematic when he says [that] ‘we condemn all totalitarian movements’, actually saying that socialist Yugoslavia was equivalent to the Independent State of Croatia, and that isn’t true on any kind of level,” Yeomans explained.

“In that way, what one actually says is that the Holocaust that took place in the Independent State of Croatia is not exceptional and that it is not different to any other period of history,” he added.

He also noted that such revisionist tendencies were not seen under the previous HDZ-led governments of Ivo Sanader and Jadranka Kosor, between 2003 and 2011.

“Even under [1990s right-wing President] Franjo Tudjman, it was less extreme than now, because Tudjman in a certain way wanted to reconcile Partisans and Ustašas, bizarre as the idea was, and revisionist history reflected that,” he said.

“The new younger revisionists, by contrast, demonised the Partisan movement and sought to normalise and rehabilitate the Ustaša movement and deny their mass crimes, not just relativise them, by claiming the Partisans were the real war criminals,” he added.

“This can be seen in the way they are trying to turn Jasenovac from a concentration camp where Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists were murdered into simply a ‘labour and collection camp’ which, they claim, after the war the Partisans used deliberately to kill Croats and destroy their national consciousness.”

(Emphasis original.)

(This extract takes 4½ minutes to read. Unfortunately, the author’s English isn’t great, but if I knew of a good alternative I would share that instead.)

[The Kingdom of] Romania, home to a few thousand Italians, living in small communities either in big cities or in towns near stone mines, played for some time during the interwar period a key rôle in Mussolini’s plans for expanding [Fascist] Italy’s strategic influence in Central and Eastern Europe.¹

The diplomatic relationship between Rome and Bucharest was relatively cold, peaking in 1926–1927 for a short amount of time with the signing of a bilateral Pact of friendship and cordial cooperation (September 16th, 1926) and with the Italian ratification of the Treaty on Bessarabia of 28th October 1920 (March 7th, 1927).²

After 1933, when the bilateral treaty expired, there was no other sign of rapproach[e]ment between the two countries. Despite that or maybe precisely because of that situation, Fascist Italy’s propaganda in [the Kingdom of] Romania was very active. Its results were to be found especially in newspapers, but it could have also been heard on the radio, at some university lectures or in public conferences, in Parliament speeches and, also, quite interestingly, on screen, in propaganda films.

[…]

What kind of propaganda films were sent from Rome to Bucharest? The subjects contained the favourite themes of the fundamentals of Fascist iconography: the visits of Il Duce in the Peninsula, sometimes in areas where major works had been initialized — the land-reclamation project (bonifica integrale), building highways, aqueducts, building a new bridge that connected Venice to the continent — his speeches on several themes of internal or international politics, policies regarding natality and education of youth etc.

Some examples of titles regarding such film projections are illustrative: “Discorso del Duce a Torino”/“The Speech of Il Duce in Torino” (1933), “Visita del Duce in Terra di Puglia”/“The visit of Il Duce in Puglia” (1934), “Giornate del Duce in Lombardia”/“The days of Il Duce in Lombardia” (1934), “Mussolini parla”/“Mussolini speaks” (1935), “Sabaudia”¹⁰ (1936).

How did the Italian ethnics in [the Kingdom of] Romania react after the projections? Presumably quite in favour of the régime. In [A]ugust 1935, for instance, after projections of films belonging to the Italian Institute LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografice Educativa) took place in the most important cities of the country, a diplomat from Bucharest wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome about “the huge enthusiasm of our colonies” shown on this occasion.¹¹

Other projections dating from March and April 1936, unfolded in the hall of the Italian School in Bucharest, were described to have “interested more than expected the numerous Italian and Romanian public that assisted”.¹² Sometimes, the movies were repeatedly “asked for” by Romanian circles, as it was the case of certain schools in Galaţi where the Italian professor Ferdinando Manno teached in 1933.¹³

Most of the times, Italy’s diplomatic agencies in the country insisted to receive as well certain films, even if they were not equipped with machinery or salons. Others did their best in trying to achieve whatever was necessary in terms of gear in order to receive the films. For instance, the “Dopolavoro” organisation in Bucharest achieved at the beginning of 1936 a projector who could display sound films in order to receive from Italy some LUCE propaganda documentaries concerning the war in Abyssinia.¹⁴

The arrival of a film from Mussolini’s Italy was always an occasion for all the Italian community to gather around: the fact that the projections were established to mark important events is a proof of that. On November 5th, 1933 the film “Discorso del Duce a Torino” was projected in Bucharest, where both the Italian colony and all the Fasci Italiani in the country reunited, celebrating the national holidays: the 28th of October — the day of “the march on Rome”, the first day of the in[aug]uration of the régime, when the official Fascist calendar began, and the 4th of November, marking the Italian victory in the First World War.¹⁵ In like manner, in the summer of 1935, some LUCE films were projected in Constanta in order to celebrate the inauguration of a local House of Italy (Casa d’Italia).¹⁶

Sometimes, according to the public in view and to its preferences or to the propagandistic needs of the organisers, certain films were requested specifically from Rome. For example, the Italian Fasci in Cluj requested on April[] 21st, 1933 films and slides which portrayed Ancient and Modern Rome and Italy or, anyways, a similar and appropriate film that could be presented to the youth of the city.¹⁷

There also existed propaganda films in a closed circuit, especially intended for private projections with a public made out of Italian ethnics from the Romanian diaspora or other well-chosen guests from the host country.

If the Italian audience could be made of ethnics living or not living in [the Kingdom of] Romania, of different officials or staff on a diplomatic or cultural mission (pro[fes]sors, diplomats), the Romanian public was, usually, made of sympathizers of the régime or at least of the Italian culture, among influential people that had the means to promote the things they saw on screen.

For example, it is worthy to mention that in the summer of 1936, the famous journalist and controversialist Pamfil Șeicaru, manager of the “Curent” newspaper, assisted such a projection of the movie “Con la Colonna Starace a Gondar”, writing, subsequently, an extremely admiring article towards Mussolini’s Italy.¹⁸

Reporting this event, the Italian prime minister in Bucharest, Ugo Sola, noted, well pleased, that when such private projections had been used in the past by the Communists, they received fierce reactions from all Nationalist newspapers and groups, meaning from almost the entire political mainstream, which had temporarily led to the idea of forbidding similar displays in the future.

[…]

In conclusion, by the mid-1930s, although Italian cinema was not in the top three of the Romanians preferences, it had still undergone an important work of promoting across the country key messages and symbols of the Fascist ideology. What one could see in the propaganda films sent to Bucharest and to the main cities?

The changing face of Italy under the régime, its civilizing mission in Africa as the heir of Ancient Rome, the presumably overwhelming consent and enthusiasm of the population towards the dictatorship and Il Duce, all championed the Fascist cause in front of the Romanian spectators’ eyes in a standardized manner, according to the official narrative.

Were they influential? It might look that way since not only simple Italian emigrants and young Romanians, but also prominent public figures were keen to participate to such movie projections and continuously asked for more.

(Emphasis added.)

(This takes 6⅓ minutes to read.)

The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a guest of the people; he has offended by trying to turn himself into the host. […] Thoughtful Germans hold that it is impossible for a Jew to be a patriot […] What will happen in Germany is not now known. Some regrettable things have already happened. But the Germans will doubtless prove themselves equal to the situation by devising methods of control at once unobjectionable and effective.

These words come not from a fascist in the German Reich nor even one elsewhere in Eurasia, but from the beloved American capitalist Henry Ford, who wrote this in his 1920 work The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. He is the only American mentioned positively in My Struggle.

To classify Henry Ford as a fascist would be only a slight exaggeration. His Masonic membership and particularly his professed pacifism were both highly unusual for any fascist. Yet neither of those prevented him from receiving awards from the Fascists, nor did they prevent his business from accounting for the second largest share of army and transport trucks in the Third Reich, nor did they prevent both his business and General Motors from supplying Fascist Italy with vehicles — to say nothing of how Ford Werke AG used neoslaves from Auschwitz. Curiously, despite having little positive to say about Zionism, Ford’s business also distributed one thousand products to Palestine; the Ford Motor Co., Ltd. and subsidiaries had some operations there. (It is highly unlikely that the indigenous or ‘Arab’ population was the largest market for these products, given that the Middle East’s indigenous populations favoured riding camelback or horseback whereas the settlers favored machines.)

The origins of Ford’s antisemitism have long puzzled historians, especially since he was on good terms with a few individual Jews (e.g. Rosika Schwimmer). It is unclear if it originated from an unpleasant incident, parental advice, miseducation, or some other typical source.

We know, however, that antisemitism is useful to capitalist goyim since it harms economic competition. It is in the very first chapter of The International Jew that Ford claimed that ‘most of the big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers or their agents.’ Ford’s problem was not with businesses, trusts, banks, or even monopolies, but with the Jewish presence in these phenomena, which supposedly worsened all of them. He portrayed Jews as unworthy competitors, unfair in business, and blamed them for class struggle. Like the Fascists, he believed that it was possible to harmonize labour with capital:

That, indeed, is one of the tragedies of these times, that “labor” and “capital” are fighting each other, when the conditions against which each one of them protests, and from which each one of them suffers, is not within their power to remedy at all, unless they find a way to wrest world control from that group of international financiers who create and control both these conditions.

Yet Ford circumspectly acknowledged (if only for a moment) that

all Jews are not rich controllers of wealth. There are poor Jews aplenty, though most of them even in their poverty are their own masters. While it may be true that the chief financial controllers of the country are Jews, it is not true that every Jew is one of the financial controllers of the country. The classes must be kept distinct for a reason which will appear when the methods of the rich Jews and the methods of the poor Jews to gain power are differentiated.

[…]

The rich German Jew could buy the recognition he desired by acquiring financial power over those interests which most directly affected the ruling class of Germany, but how was the poor Jew to gain the recognition he desired? — for all Jews are actuated by the same desire; it is in them; they feel the spur to mastery.

Thus, Ford hit two targets with one arrow by implying that even poor Jews can be sources of trouble, saying that they merely hunger for power (rather than wanting the power to end hunger). He even went so far as to claim that ‘the bond of sympathy between’ rich and poor Jews ‘never breaks’: a claim that is arguably even untruer today than it was a century ago.

It is unsurprising that Henry Ford was such a great inspiration to the Fascists. Quoting Susan Ronald’s Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941, chapter 11:

In 1931, when a Detroit News reporter interviewed Hitler in his Munich office, he seemed surprised that a large picture of Henry Ford hung over the future leader’s desk. Hitler gazed reverently at the Ford portrait and said, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”

Ford had used his Dearborn Independent for hundreds of articles, some of which were “repackaged into booklets and distributed around the world” to give Ford’s message: “The Jew has no civilization to point to […] no great achievement in any realm.” Ford, the king of mass production and assembly line manufacturing of cars, also mass-produced anti-Semitism for American and world audiences.³

Receiving endorsements from a Fascist head of state would normally discredit the recipient forever, but Ford, being an American capitalist icon, has yet to fall from grace. In his own time many ordinary Americans respected him regardless of his bigotry; his cult of personality has been so persistent that antisocialists have been falsely crediting him with the eight-hour workday as well as comparing Elon Musk favorably to him, a comparison that is more appropriate than they realize.

Should we respect Henry Ford in spite of his antisemitism? He did acquiesce to numerous worker demands, such as paying better wages and reducing working hours, but we do not applaud oppressors for softening their oppression. Henry Ford, even if one irresponsibly chooses to overlook or forgive his bigotry, was certainly an oppressor. Quoting but one brief example from Stephen Norwood’s ‘Ford's Brass Knuckles: Harry Bennett, The Cult of Muscularity, and Anti-Labor Terror—1920–1945’:

One of Perry’s lieutenants knocked Herbert Harris, the other CIO organizer, unconscious, and carried him out of the park to his automobile, where Ford Servicemen blindfolded him. They drove him to “one of the usual whipping places” at the Trinity River bottoms. They told Harris, as he regained consciousness in the car, that he would be burned at the stake. At the “whipping place,” “Fats” Perry ordered Harris to remove his clothing. Servicemen then applied two coats of tar from his neck to his ankles, and covered him with feathers.

They then drove the still blindfolded Harris back to Dallas and dumped him in front of the Morning News building, where they had arranged for a photographer to take his picture. The next morning the Servicemen presented their superintendent with a specimen of the tar and feathers they had used, and were congratulated for a “damn good job.”’ Harris had to be hospitalized for three days.⁸

Ford’s famous hiring of Black workers also came with a caveat. Per Christopher L. Foote’s, Warren C. Whatley’s, & Gavin Wright’s ‘Arbitraging a Discriminatory Labor Market: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918–1947’:

How […] can Ford be viewed as an arbitraging firm? The answer lies in extending the analysis to nonwage features of the employment contract, and a prime example is working conditions. Though black [folk] were represented in most jobs at Ford, they were disproportionately assigned to the most distasteful jobs, such as those in the metal foundry, where workers were paid the same as co-workers who worked in less onerous jobs.

In a sense, Ford captured the negative wage differential that the outside market attached to black labor by masking it with a positive differential for difficult work. In this way, Ford could profit from discrimination elsewhere without generating major differences in the observed wages of its own black and white workers.

Like all other capitalists, Henry Ford received disproportionate amounts of money when homeless people were receiving (almost) none: the boneheadedness of this system should become apparent to anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes, unless you think that wasting money is a good idea. Now, you may disagree that one can waste money by leaving it unspent, but Ford also wasted money by spending it on a poorly planned Brazilian plantation that disrupted Aveiro’s wildlife, to name only the most obnoxious example from his monopolization of resources.

Between his antisemitism, union busting, casual White supremacy, resource mismanagement, and general wastefulness, it is easy to understand why the upper classes today consecrate this bourgeois paskudnyak. As for us, we would be better off looking up to people such as these strikers:

See also: Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate

Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States

‘Ford and Hitler’ in Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933

Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle against Hate Speech (review)

‘“Any color as long as it’s black”: Henry Ford and the ethics of business’

‘The Propaganda of Prejudice: Anti-Semitic Themes in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent’

‘Pathway to the Shoah: The Protocols, "Jewish Bolshevism", Rosenberg, Goebbels, Ford, and Hitler’

‘Productivism in Henry Ford’s The International Jew’

‘The History of Antisemitism: Henry Ford’