(This takes approximately seven minutes to read.)

We all know that the Shoah was not the first instance of mass violence against Jews in history, but I suspect that few of us have wondered what the largest loss of Jewish life was before then. The answer lies in the pogroms of the 1910s and the early 1920s: with the possible exception of the Polish–Cossack War of the mid‐17th century, this was the deadliest massacre of Jews before the 1940s. Quoting Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe in The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19: Prelude to the Holocaust, pages vii–viii:

The pogroms […] between 1917 and 1921 represent the largest and bloodiest anti-Jewish massacres prior to the Holocaust. The estimated number of Jews murdered in Ukraine in the aftermaths of World War I ranges from 50,000 to 200,000,¹ with many more Jews suffering violence, rape,² and loss of property.

Altogether 1.6 million Jews were affected by these violent events. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of these pogroms, there is no doubt that this was the largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence before the Shoah[.]

[…]

Being overshadowed by the Holocaust, the pogroms in Ukraine are still not widely known. This unfortunate state of affairs is due to a number of factors. […] The relative lack of research on these events provides a further explanation of why the […] pogroms are much less known than the persecution [that] the Jews suffered at the hand of the [Axis] and other perpetrators during the Shoah.

If, over the last 70 years, research on the Holocaust has resulted in several thousand publications, which can be housed only in the library of a large institute such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the publications relating to the pogroms of 1917−1921 would fill no more than two or three shelves.

As you can see, this catastrophe is so obscure that it does not even have an official name, and Herzlians theirselves hardly ever discuss it for more than a few seconds. (A rare exception is the Times of Israel’s interview with Jeffrey Veidlinger in 2021.) I have dubbed it the ‘proto-Shoah’ for convenience’s sake. I suspect that if the upper classes regularly promoted its memory, it would raise awkward questions as to why they did not impose an ethnostate on Palestine in the 1920s if the Shoah was indeed the primary (or sole) reason for that in 1948.

The proto-Shoah, contrary to what Rossoliński-Liebe implied, was neither limited to the Ukraine nor did it last for only four years. On the contrary, we could argue that it started as early as 1914 before persisting all the way up to 1923, and it affected other regions, such as Poland:

In the last week of November, there occurred in the eastern Galician city of Lemberg (or, in Polish, Lwow), amid fierce fighting for control of the region between the Poles and Ukrainians who — along with very numerous Jews — jointly inhabited it, the most violent and deadly of all Polish pogroms of the postwar- and indeed the interwar years.

In three days 72 Jews were murdered and 443 others injured; 38 houses were burned, and in the pogroms aftermath 3,620 damage claims were officially submitted. It was, together with lawless civilians, mainly troops of the Haller legions who, with the connivance or toleration of their military superiors, carried out the pogrom.

White Russia:

One has only to recall the extermination of the Jews by Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov’s cavalry units during his famous raid through the rear of the Red Army in the fall of 1919. In this case, the massacre of the Jews occurred on Great Russian territory (Elets and other cities), and thus Ukrainian territory could have had nothing to do with these slaughters.

The Kingdom of Hungary

The mob that attacked the Jews in the villages of Diszel and Marcali in late summer of 1919 apparently wanted to force their “racial enemies” out of their communities (and in the process line their own pockets). Yet, in the end, they not only expelled middle-class Jews and stole their cash and valuables, but they also brutally murdered two families[.]

The Kingdom of Romania:

Although hostilities ceased in most of Europe in November 1918, Romanian soldiers continued fighting in Transylvania. The rhetoric of the war framed it as a crusade against communism after Béla Kun came to power in Hungary on 21 March 1919.

That November police distributed antisemitic posters around the country on the orders of the short-lived government led by Arthur Văitoianu (1864–1956). These posters identified members of Béla Kun’s Communist Party as Jewish and denounced all Jews as Bolsheviks who had to be liquidated. Isolated attacks on Jews and on Jewish property followed, including some by Romanian soldiers acting under orders, with no legal repercussions.⁵²

And so on. All told, I suspect that European antisemites exterminated more than 115,000 Jews from 1914 to 1923, and not merely in the Ukraine.

Many historians have interpreted this disaster as a precursor to the Shoah, but we need more research establishing links between both. Per Polly Zavadivker:

none of the recent scholarship has provided empirical evidence that links the anti-Jewish violence of that era to that of 1939–1945 as an origin event. Veidlinger, too, focuses on the descriptive history of the pogroms, but leaves the claim—the framing device of the book that makes it compelling to a wide readership—entirely unsubstantiated.

It would be quite an exaggeration to argue that the proto-Shoah ‘caused’ the Shoah, but we have a few clues indicating that the proto-Shoah probably influenced the Third Reich. For byspel:

Another German soldier in Galicia was disgusted with the Jewish merchants [whom] he encountered. “Before the peace,” he wrote, “I could not understand why there were pogroms in Russia. Since I have seen the Jewish way of doing business, it is no longer a puzzle how a hard-working farmer could beat one of these pests to death.”

The soldier concluded with a sentiment expressed by leading figures in the Third Reich: “Here is further proof [the encounter with Jews] that anti-Semitism is always a healthy reaction to seeing the Jewish masses represented. This, too, is a legacy of the front!”³⁸ While these excerpts traded in traditional anti-Semitic tropes, the “masses” of Jews cited in this context soon devolved into the specter of transient revolutionaries threatening the German frontier.

Der Frontsoldat erzählt published that soldier’s sentiment in 1939. Clearly, there were at least a few Third Reich officials familiar with the proto-Shoah, and it would be a most astounding coincidence if none of the leading officials were even aware of it. Quoting Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of Nationalism Socialism, 1917–1945, page 191:

In an article in an August 1923 edition of the Völkisch Observer, “The Ukraine and Russia,” Rosenberg, presumably, on behalf of the “editorial staff,” drew attention to Poltavets-Ostranitsa’s newspaper The Ukrainian Cossack. The essay argued: “We believe that Great Russians and Ukrainians will finally decide for a more federal arrangement of their empire after the smashing of Jewish-Bolshevik Moscow.” The piece emphasized that the Ukraine, where “patriots” were struggling against a “centralized dictatorship,” occupied a similar position to Bavaria, where rightists were opposing the “November Republic.”¹²¹

As far as I can tell, none of the politicians in Berlin had any major complaints against the anti-Jewish tyrant Symon Petliura, and somebody there wanted to exploit the French library dedicated to him. Quoting Patricia Kennedy Grimsted’s ‘The Odyssey of the Petliura Library and the Records of the Ukrainian National Republic during World War II’:

When France was invaded by [the Fascists] and Paris fell to occupying forces in 1940—still during the period of the [German]–Soviet pact—Hitler was already planning his Drang nach Osten. As one phase of the preparations, [Axis] specialists had targeted various Slavic émigré libraries in France and other countries in Western Europe as important intelligence sources, and their followers as potential allies in the [Axis’s] subsequent anti-Soviet campaign.

As librarian Ivan Rudychiv confided in his diary in January 1941, the notion “was circulating among Russian émigré circles [in Paris] that Petliura was the first great nationalist, and that Hitler was a student of Petliura.” Furthermore, it was rumored, Hitler was already endorsing Ukrainian independence.¹⁶

For [Axis] propagandists, although the [Ukrainian National Republic] was traditionally pro-French and pro-Polish and anti-German, Petliura’s antisemitic reputation made him a symbol to be manipulated for the [Axis] cause. The Petliura Library had an additional appeal, in that its martyr patron died at the hand of an acquitted assassin who sought revenge for Petliura’s alleged rôle in anti-Jewish pogroms.¹⁷

Speculations that his assassin had been encouraged by Soviet intelligence sources could also increase the usefulness of Petliura’s martyrdom to [Axis] propagandists anxious to exploit anti-Soviet sentiments abroad and in the soon-to-be occupied Ukrainian lands.

(Keep in mind that the Kingdom of Italy and the Twoth Reich were on opposing sides in World War I, and later that was all water under the bridge. Thus, it would be unsurprising if the Third Reich’s head of state was indeed ‘a student of Petliura’ as rumoured here.)

As the Western Axis powers steadily occupied in the Soviet Union, it inspired anti-Jewish fury in Ukrainian anticommunists. Quoting David Engel’s The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927, page 95:

From 25 to 27 July 1941, Ukrainian police in the service of the recently-completed [Axis] occupation of Lwów were joined by mobs of Ukrainian peasants from nearby villages in brutal attacks upon Jews in the city streets and in their homes, in a fashion reminiscent of the pogroms of two decades previous. Upwards of 2,000 Jews were killed over the course of three days. The events were presented at the time as an act of revenge for the death of a Ukrainian national hero on the fifteenth anniversary of his murder. They have been known ever since as “the days of Petliura.”³³⁹

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

While the evidence linking the proto-Shoah to the Shoah may be circumstantial and insufficient (for now), Stefan Ihrig’s investigation of the links between the Meds Yeghern and the Shoah has shown that an impressive quantity of circumstantial evidence can make a ‘smoking gun’ practically superfluous. A great potential for research exists here.

There is more that I want to write about the proto-Shoah, but this topic is getting lengthy enough as it is. Suffice it to say that even if by some bizarre coincidence all of the leading Axis officials were unaware of this catastrophe, there can be no doubt that it further normalised anti-Jewish violence for many: if so many anticommunists could get away with plundering as well as slaughtering so many Jews, it would have been all too easy for Axis officials or collaborators to look at that and think that they could do the same.

Further reading: In the Midst of Civilized Europe: the Pogroms of 1918–1921

Quoting Jerzy Łazor’s ‘Control and Regulation of Capital Flows between Poland and Palestine in the Interwar Period’ in Foreign Financial Institutions & National Financial Systems, pages 233–235:

In the 1930s impoverished Polish Jews found it hard to procure the necessary funds, while richer strata of the Jewish community were less interested in migration. Now the situation worsened. Both Polish and Zionist officials understood that a new solution was needed, and studied the [Fascist] system known as Haʻavarah as a successful model for such an arrangement.

Within Haʻavarah, which had been created in 1933, emigrating German Jews would transfer their assets to a central agency, which used them to finance exports of [Fascist] products to Palestine. Emigrants would then receive money from the sale of these products, losing on average about 35 per cent of their initial capital payments. This allowed [Fascist] goods in Palestine to be sold below market prices, and their exports surged.

The system provoked a serious debate both in the Jewish diaspora, and in the jishuv (the Jewish society in Palestine). It was created at roughly the same time as the boycott movement, initiated by European Jews, and aimed at limiting imports from [the Third Reich]. Jews in Europe felt betrayed. Despite its moral and political ambiguities, Haʻavarah proved to be an economic success. It allowed some 20,000 people to come to Palestine, bringing with them around six million £P.²⁸

As early as May 1936, a Palestinian delegation came to Poland to negotiate a transfer agreement. It included two former Polish MPs: Fiszel Rottenstreich and Icchak Grünbaum. The third member of the delegation — Dr. Salheimer — was particularly interesting, since his home institution, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, was responsible for the Palestinian part of Haʻavarah operations.

The situation soon became more complicated. Joszua Farbstein, another former Polish MP and erstwhile head of the Department of Industry and Commerce of the Jewish Agency Executive, came to Poland at the same time. The press was rife with speculation and accused Farbstein of attempting to negotiate with the Polish government on his own account. I found no traces of this in Polish archives.

Farbstein was not the only Palestinian guest in Poland at the time: Moussa Chelouche, head of the Palestinian–Polish Chamber of Commerce in Tel Aviv, was another. Chelouche, an important figure in the Ashrai Bank and the Immigrant’s Bank Poland–Palestine Ltd, allegedly tried to dissuade the Polish government from accepting the Anglo-Palestine Bank as a major component of the new transfer. Again, I was not able to find any confirmation of these actions, beyond allegations in the Palestinian press.

Finally, Poland was in negotiations over their ‘marriage of convenience’ with the revisionist movement. Both sides had to tread lightly.²⁹

After Rottenstreich’s anti-Polish speech in August 1936 the Poles refused to talk to him. Further negotiations were thus concluded with Grünbaum alone.³⁰ Grünbaum was no novice. An important figure in Jewish interwar politics in Poland, he had been one of the creators of the minority bloc in the Sejm.

At the same time, institutions in Palestine — including the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Executive of the Jewish Agency — tried to influence Polish officials through their representatives in Palestine. Since Bank P.K.O. was a plausible Polish choice for the main bank of the new transfer system, particular pressure was put on this subject. The director of its Tel Aviv branch, Tadeusz Piech, was told that his bank was too small, and reminded that it had only survived the banking runs in 1935–1936 with the help of the Anglo-Palestine Bank.³¹

Palestinian Jews insisted that the new arrangement should not threaten Haʻavarah. Since the list of Polish and [Fascist] goods competing on the Palestinian market was fairly long, a successful agreement with Poland could hurt Haʻavarah. Many considered it crucial for the development of the jishuv: it guaranteed a substantial flow of capital combined with a relatively low level of capitalist immigration: an outcome which went hand in hand with ruling Zionist ideology.

Polish consuls noted that the Jews’ insistence on the rôle of the Anglo-Palestine Bank was a sure sign that the Haʻavarah was considered more important than a possible agreement with Poland (although this logic seems a bit flawed). It was probably understood in Palestine that Poland would not be able to provide the amount of capital [that] the Jews needed (and which they were getting from [the Third Reich]). Moreover, with the Haʻavarah playing such an important rôle, there was no place for a particularly strong rise in Polish exports.³²

(See pages 235–245 if you have time to read more.)

If local conditions and context help explain why the Bigio didn’t return to Piazza Vittoria in 2013, national trends of the kind outlined in the introduction point to why the idea was first entertained. The Paroli administration’s commitment to the project was of a piece with the ‘new’ right’s efforts to overturn traditional anti-Fascist historical memory. Reclaiming public space was a small but important element of this.

In some FI and AN-controlled areas of Italy, streets, squares, and parks were renamed after Fascists (and neo-Fascists), new plaques commemorating Fascist-era events or individual Fascists were erected and old plaques and inscriptions restored. In one notable case, in 2012, the AN mayor of Affile in Lazio funded the construction of a mausoleum for the Fascist military leader and alleged war criminal Rodolfo Graziani.⁷⁹

The justificatory narratives used by local leaders typically stressed the same points: these were not ideological acts but rather a sign of a new calmness within Italy; Fascism was now history rather than politics, to be viewed without prejudice or fear.

“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the [Axis] dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the [Axis] leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy.

Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter), and over the past six months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man. Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history newsletter on the entire Substack platform.

Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The [Axis] apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the […] Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before [September 1939], the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the [Third Reich] prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the [Third Reich], “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the [Axis] camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable [Axis] atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults.

Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all […] If anything some of the truth had been held back.”

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host has described Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil.

Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.)

(I would like to politely remind readers that conflating Jews with Zionists is exactly what Herzlians want to see.)

In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister Jewish culprit.

The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson told Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”)

“Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.

Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

[Two decades] ago, Oleksandr Alfyorov was a young “Hetmanite,” or follower of Pavlo Skoropadsky (1873–1945), the [Central Powers’] puppet ruler of Ukraine in World War I, who later spent the interwar period cozying up to the [Third Reich]. Skoropadsky had a villa in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb that later hosted the conference dedicated to the “Final Solution.” Skoropadsky and his followers vied with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to be the [Axis’s] preferred Quislings in Ukraine.

The Hetmanites were a smaller, more openly pro-[Reich] monarchist movement (supported by [the Third Reich] in the 1930s) that just barely survived the Cold War in North America. In the 2000s, Alfyorov helped to revive Skoropadsky’s “Union of Hetman-Statesmen” in Ukraine and led its “conservative” youth group.

Pavlo Skoropadsky

Alfyorov has reportedly “emphasized that the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance needs to expand the chronological framework, which was narrowed during the [Banderite] reforms of 2014–2015.”

He is not just thinking of Skoropadsky, but appears to be far more interested in the “thousand-year history” of Ukraine than the [Fascist]-era “liberation movement.” Given the prevalence of [anticommunist] [neo]paganism in the Azov movement, and those fascinated with Ukraine’s supposed “Aryan” roots, it makes you wonder about his relationship to those ideas. When Alfyorov laid out his five priorities for the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP, Ukrayinsʹkyy instytut natsionalʹnoyi pam'yati), two related to the Thousand-Year History.

3. Strong inclusive national memory. Promote the thousand-year history of the Ukrainian people without looking back at centuries-old Russian narratives. Tell the history of Ukraine without looking to the East, as if Russia had never existed. Strengthen the mutual integration of the memories of Ukraine and Europe. We are not going to Europe — we are returning home.

[…]

5. A broad contextual framework for history. We will not only talk about the history of Ukraine in the 20th century, but also focus on other periods of Ukrainian history. We will reveal to society the thousand-year-old tradition of Ukrainian statehood and its continuity.

In 2014, Alfyorov became the press secretary to the Azov Regiment (until 2015) and Andriy Biletsky (until 2018). In 2016, he joined the leadership of Biletsky’s “National Corps,” a new Azovite political party. One year later, the Azov movement formed the “National Militia,” which in 2020 relaunched as the paramilitary “Centuria.” As Leonid Ragozin put it, the Azov movement is “built on a very clear ideological foundation - far right politics and adoration of nazi collaborators.”

Alfyorov spoke at a press conference with the neo[fascist] leadership of Centuria in 2018. He might have first gotten involved with the UINP in 2019, when he lectured officers of the Joint Operational Headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces on “The Role of Religion in the Formation of Ukrainian Statehood.” He thanked Roman Kulyk, a far-right UINP staffer, for the opportunity (more about him next time).

When the National Corps and Centuria formed new Azov units in 2022, which largely consolidated in the 3rd Assault Brigade, Alfyorov became an officer in the Special Operation Forces “Azov-Kyiv” Regiment, and later a “historian lieutenant” in Biletsky’s brigade. Alfyorov was put in charge of the 3rd Assault Brigade’s ideological “humanitarian training group,” or “Khorunza service,” which keeps the unit grounded in Azov’s “very clear ideological foundation.”

Centuria’s 2025 social media tribute to “Perun Day,” the Slavic god of war, and “Aryan,” an ideological officer from the 3rd Assault Brigade Khorunza service

In the spring of 2022, the Kyiv city administration pledged “to get rid of all dubious and false signs of Russian-Ukrainian friendship that affect our cultural consciousness and contribute to the spread of Russian propaganda and falsification of Ukrainian history.”

Furthermore, it established a “toponymic commission” or “expert working group” on “De-Russification” led by Azov-Kyiv Regiment officer Oleksandr Alfyorov. The group included “experts” from the UINP and various institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). Since 2010, Alfyorov worked as a research fellow at the NASU Institute of History, and apparently he joined the commission as its representative.

According to Alfyorov, “the work of the expert commission was undermined, and in some cases even neutralized.” Nevertheless, they identified almost 300 “city objects” to be renamed and offered two options for Ukrainians to choose from, by opening the “Kyiv Digital” app and locating the “vote for derussification” page. (Alfyorov rejects this term, because “there is a hidden reality that Rus’ and rus’ke [what belongs to Rus’] are ours.” He also objects to “decolonization,” because this would “connect us with Africa and Latin America.” So he prefers “de-imperialization.”)

As a result, the “Heroes of the Azov Regiment” and “Heroes of Mariupol” streets appeared in the capital, replacing those named after Marshals of the Soviet Union. In 2023, Alfyorov helped to rename Leo Tolstoy Square and its corresponding metro station in central Kyiv to “Ukrainian Heroes Square,” and Leo Tolstoy Street was changed to honor “Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.”

[…]

The news broke in late May about Alfyorov’s appointment to lead the UINP. Apparently he wants to rehabilitate not just [Axis] collaborators, such as the Hetmanites and OUN-UPA, but Ukrainian soldiers who swore loyalty to Hitler. The historian Marta Havryshko reported in July, “The first bold move by the new head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory—Azov veteran Oleksandr Alferov, known for praising Hitler and curating an exhibition glorifying the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—was to rehabilitate Zenon Wrublewsky, a fighter from that very division.”

In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.

"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration," read the document, written by Meir to Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.

The letter, marked "top secret" and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw.

In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli–Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.

The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958 were unaware of Israel’s intent to impose a selection process on Jews leaving Poland — survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.

The "coordination committee" Meir refers to was a joint panel consisting of representatives of the government and the Jewish Agency.

Rudnicki’s study, undertaken together with Israeli scholars headed by Prof. Marcos Silber of the University of Haifa, has already been published in a book in Polish.

The Hebrew version of the book [was] published in a few months. However, the document containing the suggestion about the selection process does not appear in the book because it did not impact relations between the two countries.

"Although there are numerous documents on the issue of immigration, we did not find in the archives of Israel or Poland — where they also opened the party archive for us — any response to this request by Golda to the ambassador in Poland," Rudnicki told Haaretz. "In this respect, the document remains an internal matter of Israel," he said.

However, Rudnicki concedes that the content of the document surprised him as a scholar and a Jew.

"This is a very cynical document," he said. "It is known that Golda was a brutal politician who defended interests more than people."

Katz died more than 20 years ago, and no proof has been found that anything was done regarding the foreign minister’s query.

The 1956–1958 wave of immigration from Poland, also known as the "Gomułka Aliyah" was the second wave of immigration from Poland after World War II. In those years, due to a major lifting of restrictions on Jews leaving the country, some 40,000 Polish Jews came to Israel.

In the first wave, in 1950, Poland prevented anyone who had professions essential to Polish economy and society from leaving, including Jewish doctors and engineers. With the rise to power of president Władysław Gomułka and his initiation of reforms at the beginning of what became known as the "Gomułka thaw," the Polish government allowed people with professions more in demand to leave the country, including Jews who had taken up senior positions in the Communist Party.

"Until 1950, there was indeed selection by the Poles on the basis of professions in demand," Rudnicki said. "After 1956 the Poles imposed no limitations, and certainly did not intentionally send handicapped and aged people to Israel. That is an Israeli story, not a Polish one," the historian said.

During the years to which the document refers, waves of immigration were also underway from other countries, placing a heavy burden on the young state.

Statistics show that the rate of immigration at that time was similar to that at the height of immigration from the former Soviet Union from 1990 to 1999.

Quoting Michael Jabara Carley’s 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, pages 44–5:

The war scare prompted the French government to sound out Poland about its support, though the Poles had already offered numerous indications of their intent. On May 22 Bonnet called in the Polish ambassador in Paris, Juliusz Łukasiewicz, to ask what the Polish policy would be. “We’ll not move,” replied Łukasiewicz.

The Franco-Polish defense treaty included no obligation in the event of war over Czechoslovakia. If France attacked [the Third Reich] to support the Czech government, then France would be the aggressor. Not apparently overreacting to this extraordinary statement, Bonnet then inquired about the Polish attitude toward the Soviet Union, stressing the importance of Soviet support, given Polish “passiveness.”

Łukasiewicz was equally categorical: “the Poles considered the Russians to be enemies [and we] will oppose by force, if necessary, any Russian entry onto [our] territory including overflights by Russian aircraft.” Czechoslovakia, Łukasiewicz added, was unworthy of French support.²⁴

If Bonnet had any doubts that the Polish ambassador was not accurately representing his government’s views, these were quickly put to rest by Field Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz. He told the French ambassador in Warsaw, Léon Noël, that the Poles considered Russia, no matter who governed it, to be “Enemy № I.” “If the German remains an adversary, he is not less a European and a man of order; for Poles, the Russian is a barbarian, an Asiatic, a corrupt and poisonous element, with which any contact is perilous and any compromise, lethal.”

According to the Polish government, aggressive action by France, or the movement of Soviet troops, say even across [the Kingdom of] Romania, could prompt the Poles to side with [the Third Reich]. This would suit many Poles, reported Noël: they “dream of conquests at the expense of the USSR, exaggerating its difficulties and counting on its collapse.” France had better not force Poland to choose between [the Soviet Union] and [the Third Reich], because their choice, according to Noël, could easily be guessed.²⁵

As Daladier put it to the Soviet ambassador, “Not only can we not count on Polish support, but we have no faith that Poland will not strike [us] in the back.” Polish loyalty was in doubt even in the event of direct [Fascist] aggression against France.²⁶

Pages 68–9:

Colonel Józef Beck was the Polish foreign minister and a key subordinate of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Polish nationalist leader who had died in 1935. Beck began his career as a soldier during the First World War, but after the war he was increasingly chosen for diplomatic work and in 1932 he became foreign minister.

Like Piłsudski, Beck was a Polish nationalist who hoped to reestablish Poland as a great power, as it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and this failure left Polish nationalists sour and quick to take offense.

Yet they tended to carry on the business of state as though Poland was a great power—dangerous conduct in the 1930s as [the Third Reich] grew stronger and more predatory. Beck leaned toward [the Third Reich] in the late 1930s, which brought Poland into conflict with the Soviet Union. Essentially the Polish government tried to ride the tiger’s back, and ultimately could not do so. If Poland then fell out with its other great neighbor, [the Soviet Union], it would be in grave danger.

[…]

In a meeting with the British ambassador on September 24, Beck said that Poland would not “tie its hands” regarding Teschen; “it did not have belligerent intentions but it could not agree that German demands being satisfied, Poland should receive nothing.”

Put another way, Beck said he did not intend to leave to [the Third Reich] the exclusive benefits of a dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Anyway, added Beck, there was nothing to worry about because the Czech government had indicated verbally to the Polish minister in Prague that it agreed in principle to the cession of territory to Poland.

The Poles had other ways of sending their message to Paris: when the French military attache asked for information on German troop movements, his counterpart could say little in view of the French position on Teschen. If [the Third Reich] entered Czechoslovakia, this Polish officer added, Poland would take advantage of the situation to act in its own interests.

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Wojciech Morawski in Foreign Financial Institutions & National Financial Systems, pages 156–7:

Ties between Polish and Italian banking date to before the First World War. Józef (Giuseppe) Toeplitz, a member of one of the leading Warsaw banking families, started working in Banca Commerciale Italian[a]. He become its chairman in 1917 and held the position until 1933. In 1919 BCI acquired Bank Zjednoczonych Ziem Polskich SA in Warsaw.

During the time of inflation, Italian capital had a foothold in Upper Silesia in the aforementioned Polski Powszechny Bank Kredytowy SA in Katowice, owned by Italo-Austrian firms: Societa Italiana di Credito Commerciale and Banco di Credito Italiano-Viennese. In 1925 the bank was put into liquidation.

In 1927 BCI took part in the bail out of Bank Handlowy w Warszawie SA. As a result, Bank Zjednoczonych Ziem Polskich merged with BHW, and BCI gained nine per cent of the latter’s share capital. In 1935 they were taken over by Giuseppe Toeplitz’s heirs and Assicurazione Generali Trieste.

[Fascist] investments in Polish banking were surprisingly effective, considering their modest size. [Fascist] Italy was the most important foreign shareholder in the biggest Polish private bank and two chairmen of the Polish Banking Union (Związek Banków w Polsce): Henryk Kaden (1924–1927) and Stanisław Lubomirski (1932) had ties with [Fascist] capital.

Quoting Laura Stanciu’s ‘Italian multinational banking in interwar east central Europe’:

In 1927 one more east-European institution joined [the Banca Commerciale Italiana’s] group as an associated bank — Handlowy Bank, Warsaw, the largest Polish private bank.

[…]

However, there was an exception to thriving BCI’s banking activities in the region. At a time when most of its east central European industrial investments were being gradually liquidated, Toeplitz offered large credits to Poland. As a native, Toeplitz was determined to support the largest Polish private bank which, in the mid-1920s, was facing financial difficulties.

In 1925, BCI offered Handlowy Bank, Warsaw [hereafter Handlobank], a $2 m. loan in exchange for 42 per cent of its shares. Two years later, BCI participated in a syndicate, which provided another loan, but its stake in the bank fell to eight per cent.⁸¹

Rossi was appointed a Handlobank director on behalf of BCI but, for the Polish bank, BCI was more important as a creditor than as shareholder. It granted Handlobank the largest single credit — 25 per cent of Handlobank’s total credits. Furthermore, BCI’s credits to Polish industry were three times larger, and channelled through Handlobank.⁸² The total, $17.5 m., was almost as much as the investment in Foresta.⁸³

One can conclude that Toeplitz had indeed significant power within BCI since he could, single-mindedly, allocate substantial funds to Poland when BCI’s industrial investments were giving negative signals about the profitability of the east central European market.

Not surprisingly, Polish industrialists and bankers could not reimburse such credits and BCI ended up with large shareholdings in exchange. Given its unwillingness to engage in industrial development, from 1930 BCI’s management began negotiations with the Polish government to recover its credits.

However, the government distinguished between BCI’s banking and industrial credits and recognised only those which were less extensive.⁸⁴ A compromise was finally reached in 1938, with non-reimbursed industrial credits being compensated by a free supply of coal from Poland to Italy.⁸⁵

On the whole, Toeplitz’s initiative to provide financial assistance to the largest Polish private bank and other local companies proved very costly. BCI’s Polish involvement ended in 1934 when Toeplitz was no longer on top of the hierarchy. This shows once more that BCI’s unprofitable Polish financial commitment was entirely a result of Toeplitz’s private interests and, therefore, was liquidated immediately after his departure from the bank.

I learned about this as I was trying to find research on the economic relations between the Third Reich and preoccupied Poland. So far I have not uncovered much, but it is easy to understand why anticommunists would prefer not to talk about the subject. Concerning foreign capital in share capital of Polish joint-stock banks: the Weimar Republic had 6.5 million złote with a 2.8% share in 1930, whereas the Third Reich had 7.5 million złote with a 5.1% share in 1936. In 1938, the Third Reich was the largest source of Polish banks’ foreign liabilities and assets. (Curiously, Fascist Italy was the smallest source.) Clearly, the economic relations between these two dictatorships of the bourgeoisie was more substantial than the present gap in research implies.

While discussing the perpetually overrated German–Soviet Pact, antisocialists sometimes make claims like this:

Germany made a proposal for the Soviet Union to join the Axis on November 15, 1940.

Some of these claims involve interpreting information pessimistically. For instance:

Molotov also insisted that before the Soviet Union would agree to join the Axis it would require ‘a base for naval and air forces on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles’ and recognition that the area south of Batum and Baku in the direction of the Persian Gulf was the ‘center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union’.³¹

This is highly misleading. Although Molotov did confusingly refer to a ‘four power pact’, it was not Axis membership that was discussed, but a separate pact involving Berlin, Moscow, Rome, and Tōkyō. This may sound like a ‘meaningless’ distinction, but we have good reasons to doubt that Moscow ever sincerely anticipated long-term agreements with the Axis, including membership.

I have talked about this canard before. The reason that I have seldom mentioned it is that I consider it both unimportant and uninteresting: the little evidence available for this historic curiosity is unimpressive, limited to a few passing suggestions and rumours, as I shall soon show you. Wikipedia has an entire article on it, and includes dubious claims such as this:

After negotiations from 12 to 14 November 1940, Ribbentrop presented Molotov with a written draft for an Axis pact agreement that defined the world spheres of influence of the four proposed Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union).[5]

On the contrary, if you read the given citation (Pariahs, Partners, Predators, pg. 201), there is no such proposal for a Quadrupartite Pact. The earlier page does vaguely mention ‘the four Axis powers’, but the author provided no citation and his source of information is unclear. We have a bigger problem on our hands, though: this is a low-quality source. Quoting Gabriel Gorodetsky:

The […] weak point of the book is the fact that the primary evidence derives from German archives, which have long been open to western scholars. The sporadic use of Soviet archives becomes a serious shortcoming when Nekrich attempts to guide the reader through the labyrinth of events surrounding the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact and the calamity of 22 June. Only a few archival sources are quoted from the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Chiefs of Staff, or even the Foreign Ministry.

A graver fault is the tenuous thread that ties the story together. Nekrich’s intuitive tendency is to present a continuous determinist course for the “special relations.” He assumes that the relations were forged by a distinctive ideological symbiosis, a “brown–red” fascist–communist ideology that drew the two countries together. By so doing, he endorses the obsolete totalitarian model. Thus, for instance, he plays down Stalin’s intensive efforts to achieve alliance with the west by implementing a system of collective security in 1934–1939. Instead he blows out of all proportion the sporadic and low-level contacts maintained with the Germans, contacts that are attested only by dubious and unreliable sources.

Nekrich would not be the last, of course. One author referenced Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, D, ii, but this is merely an internal note from a member of a German delegation dated September 3, 1938. (In fact the entire volume is about 1937–1938, not 1940.) Another writer referenced AMVnR, PRETI/ 1 / 3 pap.1 op.2sh pop.1 l.7, report by D. Shishmanov, general secretary of the Bulgarian FM, 25 Nov. 1940: a report by a Bulgarian diplomat, available only in an archive, and without further source.

Another author made reference to The Incompatible Allies, presumably page 323: no relevant information here either. (The closest is Stalin sending Molotov to Berlin ‘so that further development of the relationship between the two countries could be discussed.’) Another reference that a few authors use is Nazi–Soviet Relations: the closest line that supports this is presumably ‘[…] the Italian Ambassador to Matsuoka as to whether at the conversation between Matsuoka and Stalin the relations of the Soviet Union with the Axis had been taken up, Matsuoka answered that Stalin had told him that he was a convinced adherent of the Axis and an opponent [Gegner] of England and America.’ If this is verifiable then it appears to be no more than a third‐party source; worth little more than hearsay.

One maybe acceptable source is Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: The war years, Sept. 1, 1940–Jan. 31, 1941, but references to the Soviet Union, or ‘Russia’ as they usually called it, entering the Axis are scarce and limited to shallow, off-the-cuff remarks. An example from page 621:

Whether the Americans would really take an active part in the war was, moreover, uncertain, for, in view of the world coalition which Germany was gradually assembling, the United States would, upon active intervention in the war, practically have to declare war on the whole world. This would be difficult even for Roosevelt.

A number of other states would join the Tripartite Pact. A way was being found by which Russia could also be enrolled in the combination. If this succeeded there was hope that Turkey, too, could be drawn into the sphere of this world coalition.

Page 713:

According to it Soviet Russia “renewed” the proposal of mutual assistance made last autumn.⁴ If it is accepted, Russia will raise no objection to Bulgaria’s accession to the Tripartite Pact, which Russia herself “very probably, almost certainly” will also join. Besides, the proposal stated anew Russia’s sympathy for Bulgaria’s national aspirations.

The Minister President replied, as he told me, that the proposal was entirely new to him, he knew nothing of a concrete proposal having been made on a previous occasion, and he could now only receive it and promise to study it. For the rest he referred the Russian to the reply which meanwhile was being sent to Moscow. He told me that the proposal would, of course, be rejected. The difficulty lay in finding a formulation (text en clair apparently missing) that would not offend the Russians.

Pg. 726:

handwritten leaflets have publicized Russia’s proposal of a mutual assistance pact and the declaration of her readiness to support “the return of the area from Adrianople to the line Enos-Midia, and western Thrace including Dedeagach, Drama, and Kavalla,” and join the Tripartite Pact together with Bulgaria.⁵ […] one Russian source is said to have characterized the leafleft as the act of provocateurs.

Pg. 757:

The fact that the Russian Government itself is considering the possibility of acceding to the Tripartite Pact proves that Bulgaria has not done anything contrary to Russian interests.

Pg. 773:

The objections of the Soviet Union to the accession of Bulgaria to the well-known Tripartite Pact will be dropped, on condition that the mutual assistance pact between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria be concluded. It is entirely possible that in that case the Soviet Union will join the Tripartite Pact. [The Tsardom of Bulgaria had no such interest in a pact with the Soviets.]

Pg. 1032:

The Foreign Minister then emphasized in conclusion that the Russians themselves would be invited to join the Tripartite Pact, but all these things must not be done too hastily.

While a few of these may look alarming, I would not stress over claims lacking corroborating evidence. Considering that Adolf Schicklgruber announced his plan in Mein Kampf to seize Eastern land, and succeeded at it for a while, the very suggestion that Moscow seriously considered allying with the Third Reich ought to strike everybody as ridiculous on its face. Only by pointing out superficial similarities between the Soviet Union and the German Reich do antisocialists trick people into taking it seriously.

This trivia was very boring for me to research, because primary sources have so little to say about it and are much more concerned with other matters. Much like the trivia that ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’, this is another distraction that is ‘important’ solely because antisocialists have decided that it is, to the point where they completely overlook the Third Reich’s much more important (and much more interesting) relations with foreign capitalists and even the other Axis powers.

The only interesting aspect in this trivia is that it raises the question of why either Berlin or Moscow would talk about an alliance if, according to antisocialists, they were already allied by means of the German–Soviet Pact. I am sure that antisocialists can concoct some clever little explanation for that, but there are plenty of better things that you could be doing than indulging in their petty distractions.

In May 1942, two months before the start of the great deportation action, [an Axis] film crew arrived in the Warsaw ghetto. Its aim was to create anti-Jewish propaganda material showing the allegedly prosperous life of the inhabitants of the gated district, and above all that rich Jews did not help the poor.

[…]

[Axis officials] forced Jews to act out scenes showing that some people in the ghetto lived well, and others starved to death. The “real” scenes from the ghetto looked like that they drove better-dressed Jews to the Szulc’s restaurant at the corner of Nowolipki and Karmelicka Streets. They ordered them to take tables and eat various dishes. Poor, badly dressed Jews were also led into the restaurant and asked those sitting at the tables for help. At the behest of German directors, the richer Jews beat and pushed the poor, [1] recalled Lucjan Gurman, whose account is kept in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute.

[…]

The following I was told about further filming in the ghetto: there is a Jewish restaurant on the corner of Żelazna and Chłodna Streets. Yesterday at 9 am, the Germans took all the waitresses, young girls out of there, put them on the street and made them make cheerful and provocative faces. At the same time, they gathered a group of begging children and ordered them to march in front of selected waitresses with outstretched hands, but these hands received nothing. This was filmed to show that the Jews live in luxury and do not share their goods with the starving.

Then they took the waitresses to the flat of the president [of the Warsaw Jewish Council] Czerniaków at 20 Chłodna Street, seated them at the table and ordered to serve tchem decanters with water, which was to imitate vodka, and other types of dishes. The waitresses had to be cheerful and noisy again. This scene was also filmed. Later, the Germans shot some more pictures in private Jewish apartments, in a house at 6 Chłodna Street and elsewhere. They only filmed nicely furnished apartments. It was supposed to show “the world” that Jews live quite well in the ghetto. And this is to be proof of it. [3]

— Lewin wrote three days later, on May 16.

Four days later, Szmuel Szajnkinder wrote:

20th of May. Tomorrow is the Feast of Shelters. The sun is shining like it does it summer, but it is still cold. People are dressed in half winter clothes. The clock shows 4 pm. The worst hour of the day, when I finish work in the office and come home, where I am waiting for two hungry household members. Neither they prepared dinner for me, nor did I leave them any money for that dinner this morning.

[…]

They also came to film at the popular Szulc’s restaurant on the corner of Nowolipki and Karmelicka, where before the war there was a ‘nice company’ nest. They called people from the street, seated them at tables, ordered them to order the best dishes and filmed… Then they lined up a row of ragged tramps in front of the entrance, and a fat, elegantly dressed Jew with a cigar stuck in his mouth had to walk through this line and… spit on them. They photographed… circumcision, a Friday evening was staged.

Yet many different versions and variants of these events could be heard in the city. Now they are filming at “Adaś”. Previously, they were in “Sztuka”, a “better” place at 2 Leszno Street, and on a brand new, luxuriously decorated beach on the ruins of 26 Leszno Street. They filmed everywhere. They walk everywhere with Jewish traitors and denunciators doing them favors…

What are they doing this for? For whom? No one knows. However, it feels like nothing good will come of it. People only ask why they are not filming the “departure point” at the corner of Karmelicka and Leszno Streets, where yesterday a gendarme smashed with a rifle the head of a 10-year-old Jewish boy who was running with 3 or 5 kilograms of potatoes.

Why do they not film Pawiak [prison], where the sounds of shots are constantly heard, or Więzienna Street [Prison Street], where they catch passing Jews, transport them at Pawiak and inflict barbaric, monstrous (really) suffering on them? Why don’t they film a car that often drives Karmelicka Street and kills innocent passersby? Why don’t they film the wall in front of the Iron Gate, where the monster shoots Jews every day for breakfast and prides himself on being the best shooter of all German pilots? He has already shot 171 Jews. Why aren’t they filming policemen who walk down the street and beat them, kicking Jewish pedestrians?

Why? This single word embodies the cry of despair of tens of thousands [of Jews], clotted blood, suffering beyond human strength and pain, hunger and poverty. Why and what for? […] Also the film, which is now being shot and edited, will not provide any answers to these questions. [4]

On June 11, Jechiel Górny wrote:

Today, around 2.30 pm, several Jewish policemen came to the bakery of Goldfarb and Frasz at 16 Pawia Street and demanded 5 loaves of bread for the Jewish Police Headquarters. According to the order of the German authorities, they explained, this bread must be delivered to 18 Pavia Street, where a film is being shot. At 18 Pawia Street, dozens of Jews were already gathered — mainly Hasidic types, with beards and sidelocks. Plates with fish, brought from the “Szulc” restaurant in Karmelicka Street, were placed on the tables. Germans with cameras were standing in the corners of the room, taking pictures. The Jewish policemen reported that the film made in the ghetto was financed entirely by the Jewish community. [5]

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting ‘The Taste of Life in the Ghetto #14. “Adaś” Restaurant – 19, Leszno Street’:

The picture depicted by Różycki was also solidified to a certain extent in the form of propaganda scenes of a film which the [Axis] made in the ghetto. The actors were usually randomly chosen people, caught in the middle of the street and forced to take part in this gruesome undertaking.

Samuel Puterman recalled it in his diary: “The guests were supposed to eat a lot, voraciously, and wash down the food with alcohol. They were filming waiters, bustling around the tables, laden with trays, on which gourmet delicacies were piled up. […] They photographed the general view of the crowded room, single ladies who were ordered to lift up their dresses high, […] Jews eating sardines from the can with their fingers, Jews playing under the table with the bare calves of the female companions of the libation, Jews throwing half-eaten goose quarters under the table. The film reel did not show fainting women and the black and blue faces of people hit with a whip.” Samuel Puterman, “The Diary”, Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) Archive, file reference no. 302/27, p. 68.).

Cheers to Zaid Jilani for showing me this.

Further reading: ‘The Warsaw Ghetto, Seen from the Screening Room: The Images That Dominate A Film Unfinished’

‘A practical gaze at the Warsaw Ghetto: revealing excess & lack in A Film Unfinished’. Quote:

As mentioned above, the Warsaw ghetto footage contains images of healthy and well-dressed individuals that are frequently contrasted with those who are emaciated and wrapped in rags and cloths. These repeated contrasts throughout the footage reinforce the [Fascist] myth that the inequality and poor conditions of the ghetto were the product of Jewish hoarding, selfishness, and indifference to their fellow man, rather than a result of [Axis] management.

In Greece, the main problem of Occupation principles was to make the production machine work again to promote to the Reich the raw materials that had been secured by contracts between Greek and German companies, so that various military infrastructure projects could be carried out and the [Axis] units could be maintained.

The most important of the mines in Macedonia, which were in the [Wehrmacht’s] occupation zone, were private. The representatives of the [Third Reich’s] industries, immediately after the occupation of Greece, acquired control of the mines either by participating in the capital of the company or by concluding multi-year contracts with their owners for the supply of the ores. Very soon the export of ores to [the Reich] became extremely important and covered a significant part of the needs of the Reich war industry, as it was cut off from the international market. Greek chromium exports in 1943 accounted for 27% of [the Reich’s] total need for this ore.

In the same year, however, production declined due to guerrilla action. The importance of the mines for the [Axis] becomes also conspicuous from the reports of the [Axis] authorities to their administration. From the very beginning, the military commander of Thessaloniki and the Aegean Sea, invited all-male unemployed to work, if they were requested by the Occupation authorities “to get paid or unpaid or (to offer) forced labor”. If they refused, they would be locked up in concentration camps “for education use”.

From the summer of 1942, the number of those interested in recruiting workers began to decline. There was a shortage of manpower in the mines, which met the needs of the Reich and the [Wehrmacht] troops in Thessaloniki. This reluctance was due to the miserable working conditions, low wages as well as the action of the EAM (National Liberation Front) …

In November and December 1942, the [Reich] called the men born from 1912 to 1921 and the military classes 1925–1932 and 1943–1944. The above orders of the [Reich] for “compulsory labor” provoked the protest of Athanasios Chrysochou, the General Director of the Prefectures of Macedonia, who asked not to exclude the Jews from the compulsory labor, giving the impetus for the first anti-Jewish measures (Fleischer, 1986).

Shortly afterward, on January 30, 1943, the [Axis] commander of Southeast Europe imposed a general obligation to work on the Greek population aged 16–45. That was an attempt to introduce political mobilization in Greece, a few months before its imposition in the occupied countries of Western Europe.

Within this context, the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki is included. More specifically, on 11-[July]-1942, males between the ages of 18–45 were ordered to gather in Eleftherias Square, where [Axis goons] were torturing and humiliating them for hours. The town’s chief military adviser, Friedrich Heine, ordered the official census of able-to-work male Jews (aged 18 to 45) who had to work on military projects undertaken by the [Axis] companies I. Müller and Bauteitung as well as by the paramilitary organization Todt.

3,500 people were recruited for forced labor, 3,000 in road construction, 500 in the construction of Sedes airport, and 34 in the mines. Another source states that there were a total of 5,000 Jews used in road construction and mining until October 1942.

Max Merten forced the Israeli[te] Community of Thessaloniki (ICTH) to pay a ransom of 2.5 billion drachmas to the [Reich] administration on December 15 of the same year. He demanded them, with the excuse of increasing salaries, to hire Greek Christian workers and set the Jews free. The records of the Bank of Greece identified seven of the checks with which the ransom of 1,036,000,000 drachmas was repaid, from November 1942 until January 1943. The checks were endorsed by Marx Merten and his agents.

From March to August 1943, 50,000 Greek Jews were deported to concentration camps in 19 commercial trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The [Axis] forced every person condemned to death to pay for the train ticket that led to their destruction.

[…]

The trial of Major and civil engineer Deter, which took place in Athens in November 1947, caused concern in Athenian business circles. The charges are related to financial crimes. Apologizing, the major involved loud names in Greek economic life. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison, but the court expressed the wish to grant him a pardon, due to his state of health and the services he had offered “to the Greeks” during the occupation.

In September 1950, the law on leniency measures was published with beneficial provisions for collaborationists. A few days later, the criminal prosecution of three […] executives of the German tobacco industry was suspended, following German pressure within the context of trade negotiations.

And finally, the case of Max Merten, who was a political advisor to the military commander of Thessaloniki-Aegean, was also suspended. The multi-day (February-March) trial ended in a 25-year prison sentence. Legislative Decree 4016.1959 on the amendment of the legislation on war criminals automatically suspended the assessment of any sentence that had been imposed. Two days later, he was released and deported. Merten’s name was a symbol of impunity for war criminals.

(Emphasis added. Curiously, before the author could propose how to prevent these crimes from falling into obscurity or oblivion, his ultimate paragraph abruptly cuts off.)

Roberto “Blowtorch Bob” D’Aubuisson […] became infamous in his home country of El Salvador during the civil war against the leftist FMLN movement for leading CIA-trained death squads that carried out scores of massacres. He was trained at the infamous “School of the Americas” in 1972.

The Hitler-loving D’Aubuisson was quoted as saying, “You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of Communism and you began to kill them.” A former National Guard and founder of the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance or ARENA party, it wasn’t popular support but rather support from abroad that was the true source of his power. Robert E. White, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, called him a “pathological killer” on American national television.

There is no area of the Cold War quite as consistent as the United States’ support for jackbooted anti-communist dictators and neo-fascist mass murderers such as ol’ Bob. His victims were by no means limited to left-wing categories—other undesirables in Bob’s way to neo-liberal privatized power were civilians, villagers, priests, nuns, women, children, infants and pretty much anyone unlucky enough to get between his death squads and supporters of the left-wing in El Salvador.

Despite this, D’Aubuisson and many others like him received exorbitant amounts of financial support and training from the United States. As the New York Times stated,

“In El Salvador, American aid was used for police training in the 1950’s and 1960’s and many officers in the three branches of the police later became leaders of the right wing death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s” (1).

A favorite of wealthy landowners and rich capitalists, D’Aubuisson first became known through nighttime television broadcasts where he accused civilian leaders, teachers and unionists of being communist subversives (the mutilated bodies [NSFL] of some were later found). D’Aubuisson studied intelligence and security in Virginia and New York, and in 1970 and 1971 studied at the International Police Academy in Washington. The academy was later closed after members of Congress said it had taught techniques of torture.

D’Aubuisson died in 1992 from esophageal cancer at age 48. He was never tried for any of his crimes. In fact, he was flown into the United States for medical treatment several times. His story is far from exceptional in Latin America, where [neo]imperialism has run amok for decades under the convenient guise of “counter-insurgency” programs.

R. D’Aubuisson, in addition to approving of the Third Reich, took inspiration from the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Taiwan, attended the annual CAL conference in Buenos Aires for death squad supplies, admired Chile’s parafascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and served as El Salvador’s representative to the antisemitic World Anti-Communist League.

Unsurprisingly, Palestine’s oppressors supplied arms and military advisors to El Salvador’s dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, proving for the umpteenth time that Herzlians don’t care about Jewish people. This dictatorship of the bourgeoisie wasted ∼63,750 lives. Of course, since none of the victims was a white cishet capitalist man, their deaths are absolutely worthless to antisocialists, hence why they (almost) never discuss them.

See also: ‘Roberto D’Aubuisson: A Right-Wing Leader’s Rise to Power’

‘A matter of western civilisation: transnational support for the Salvadoran counterrevolution, 1979–1982’

Faces of War: a (NSFW) documentary on the anticommunist violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

To the U.S. State Department’s reassurance, […] it found ‘little evidence’ to support concerns about a resurgence of ‘irrational extremes’ and ‘international fascism.’¹⁶ In a 1971 internal memorandum, one official dismissed the ‘psychologically imbalanced persons’ who joined the numerous militant splinter groups as little more than a ‘motley circle containing nationalists disappointed by the NPD as well as simple adventurers and persons with an over-inflated ego.’¹⁷

Yet, he insisted, the ‘Ghost of Weimar’ loomed: ‘Still there is the fear that the democracy and the human rights embodied in the Basic Law are alien to the German character and will be discarded as soon as the well-ordered lives Germans have led since the Allied occupation are subjected to uncertainty and suspicion.’¹⁸ If such a situation arose, ‘first it will be 1930 and then 1933 all over again.’

Little did the State Department know, however, that the resurgence of an increasingly violent West German extremism was already boiling up—not only in West Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, or Cologne, but right at home on American soil. Indeed, it would be American citizens, American printing presses, and even the U.S. Postal Service that would, within just a few years, become critical to the reinvigoration of the West German radical Right, the transatlantic neo[fascist] movement, and the ‘international fascism’ that the State Department had so confidently dismissed.

At the same time as West Germany’s right-wing scene was dissolving into a disorganized hodgepodge of militant splinter groups, an American teenager named Gary Rex Lauck was sitting in his bedroom in Lincoln, Nebraska—with a swastika flag on his wall and a well-read copy of Mein Kampf on his bookshelf—plotting to save the Aryan ‘master race.’

After changing his name to Gerhard to embrace his Germanic roots, the self-proclaimed neo-Nazi—who proudly called himself an ‘Auslandsdeutscher [German living abroad] first and American citizen second’—soon made his first pilgrimage to the ‘Fatherland,’ flying across the Atlantic Ocean to West Germany.¹⁹ When he arrived, however, he was dismayed to find not a hardcore group of comrades but rather a fragmented scene in which the threat of arrest made it ‘impossible for sympathizers to establish contact and join the resistance.’²⁰

On the plane back to the U.S., he had an idea: he would single-handedly unify and re-energize the movement by establishing his own neo[fascist] organization. In 1972, at age nineteen, he did just that. Within a decade, the so-called Farm Belt Führer became one of the most influential players in the resurgence of West German neo[fascism] and Holocaust denial—all from the comfort of his home in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Unlike other prominent American neo[fascists], Lauck was only minimally interested in the U.S. Instead, his organization, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – Auslands- und Aufbauorganisation (NSDAP/AO) drew inspiration from the identically titled organization that comprised Nazi party members living abroad during the Third Reich and strove primarily to resurrect [Fascism] in Germany. In this grandiose endeavor, Lauck was well aware that his American identity was both a ‘weapon’ and a hindrance.²¹

On the one hand, the lack of a U.S. ban on Nazi propaganda, coupled with the unwillingness of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to arrest Lauck for his activities on foreign soil, made the U.S. a safe haven. On the other hand, cut off from Soviet-aligned East Germany until the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Lauck could not reach all of what he affectionately referred to as ‘Großdeutschland’ (Greater Germany) and instead resorted to operating primarily in West Germany throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

As outlined in an early NSDAP/AO manifesto, Lauck’s strategy was two-pronged: ‘creating a unified organization’ and ‘supplying the entire German NS movement with propaganda.’ For the former he promoted a ‘cell system’ (Zellensystem) by which pairs or small groups operated independently of the ‘foreign headquarters’ (Auslandszentrale) in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This structure, he insisted, would not only ensure fewer arrests if one member were caught, but also grant members ‘quite a bit of freedom’ to ‘build and lead their cells’ and ‘prove their worth in active combat.’²² For the latter, he self-published his own German-language newsletter, NS-Kampfruf (NS Battle Cry), with a catchy slogan ‘Trotz Verbot nicht tot!’ (‘Despite the ban, not dead!’), which provided a forum for German neo[fascists] to publish their own articles after mailing their drafts westward to an anonymous post office box in Lincoln.

Lauck also copied and disseminated longer writings, such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious 1973 Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie) by former Waffen-SS officer and Auschwitz guard Thies Christophersen, with whom Lauck was well acquainted. To ensure that the propaganda was as visible as possible, he produced tens of thousands of swastika stickers with the NSDAP/AO’s address on them, which members could purchase through mail-order, plaster on telephone poles, and gift to new recruits.

[…]

Nowhere is the NSDAP/AO’s impact on the renaissance of West Germany’s neo[fascist] movement clearer than in Kühnen’s adulatory writings. Without Lauck, Kühnen wrote in his 1979 prison manifesto Die zweite Revolution (The Second Revolution), originally published by Thies Christophersen’s Kritik Verlag, ‘there would be no ‘neo-Nazism’ to be taken seriously in Germany today. It was he who, out of a multitude of tiny NS combat groups, created a unified movement’ that was ‘sensible and logical’ and bestowed upon ‘the German freedom movement the chance at a new beginning.’³³

Years later, in his own autobiography, Lauck bragged that Kühnen ‘devoted a whole chapter to my work’ (in reality, just a two-page subsection) in one of his later books, the 1985 Führertum zwischen Volksgemeinschaft und Elitedenken (Leadership between People’s Community and Elitism).³⁴ Here Kühnen elaborated that prior to Lauck the neo-Nazi movement suffered from ‘no organization, no propaganda material, no concept, simply nothing: except for a few fanatical young National Socialists who dared to carry out their apparently hopeless work.’³⁵ Not surprisingly, Lauck later published both of these books, along with six others, as a 600-page volume of Kühnen’s collected writings.

This information may look somewhat confusing, because some Jewish patients survived, whereas others died from the Axis’s criminal negligence, and others still became victims of the Axis’s concentration camps in 1944. The short explanation is that Jewish patients invariably suffered lower living standards, but several phenomena inhibited the annihilation process, making the patients’ fates almost unpredictable.

In this hospital in the Paris region, the majority of Jewish patients survived [White supremacy]. The Gestapo seems to have been more active in the hunt for Resistance fighters. It asked to be informed of the recovery of Jews from the Drancy camp in order to reintegrate them, but this did not happen.

Jewish patients — like other patients at the hospital — were victims of […] starvation and disease that lead to the deaths of 12 of the 38. They were not victims of the Collaboration: the doctors seem to have been benevolent and sometimes actively contributed to their survival. One may speculate that some of the patients did not in fact have psychiatric disorders and that they took refuge there, as evidenced by the almost immediate exit of many of them with a ‘cured’ certificate, just after the liberation of Paris.

It is uncommon to hear news of the fate of Jews hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals during the Occupation. Georges and Tourne (1994: 25) describe the Saint-Alban hospital in Lozère, which was directed by Lucien Bonnafé, as ‘The first psychiatric establishment which, through its involvement in the Resistance, effectively became an asylum by welcoming Jews and Resistance fighters hunted by the Gestapo, and at the same time lost its function of segregation and isolation’.

[…]

In France, Jewish patients at the Fleury-les-Aubrais hospital and the doctors in charge were under constant surveillance by the authorities. At the beginning of the Occupation, there appear to have been no medical ‘certificates of confirmation’ because the patients who were deemed not sick were quickly sent back to the camps from which they came; later, however, the pathology of patients and the need for their hospitalization was repeatedly reaffirmed.

The legitimacy of psychiatric care for Jewish patients present at the hospital in March 1943 was strongly confirmed by the director of the hospital by specifying whether they were not ‘transportable’ — as if the probability of their departure was already known. From the start of the implementation of the Final Solution, the proximity of the hospital to the two Loiret camps, in addition to [Axis] surveillance, made it more difficult to resist the authorities, but the protection of Jewish hospital patients by doctors is very noticeable in the correspondence.

Moreover, on 1 October 1942, the list of names of Jews hospitalized at Fleury-les-Aubrais hospital,¹⁹ written by the (acting) commander²⁰ of the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, attested that, from then onwards, there would be no return to the camps.²¹ All but one of the people on this list, as well as those who had not come from Loiret camps, survived; L. Israel died at the hospital. The hospitalization protected the Jewish internees until the transportation on 5 March 1944. Two escapes took place: one in 1942 to avoid a return to the camp and deportation; the second was in 1944, the day before the transportation for Paris, in order to avoid this. We follow the itinerary of these two people.

[…]

The 17 people taken from Fleury-les-Aubrais to the Sainte-Anne Hospital on 5 March 1944 were not sent to an extermination camp. How can this be explained? We may hypothesize a particular context and circumstances that would account for their survival. These patients were placed in the part of the Sainte-Anne Hospital occupied by the [Axis] (von Bueltzingsloewen, 2007b), perhaps in order to deport them more easily. Among other possible conjectures, there is evidence of the benevolent attitude of the German chief doctor, Dr. Formanek (Pewzner-Apeloig, 2014), who also helped in the escape of a Resistance fighter (Henry, Lavielle and Patenotte, 2016).

In their anti-Semiti[sm], the [Axis authorities] in no way abandoned the deportation of Jewish mental patients, but in two French hospitals of which we are aware, they were confronted with the inertia of the institutions and most often with the ill-will of the doctors. Deportation was based more on the category of Jew than on their mental illness or sickness.

The Liberation finally put a stop to the deportation of Jews and the mentally ill. Deportation had certainly been the original objective of the transportation of the Jewish patients from the Fleury-les-Aubrais Hospital. Until the last minute the [Axis powers] strove to deport and murder as many Jews as possible from all over Europe, sometimes at the expense of their war effort. In France, a last deportation convoy from Drancy left on 17 August 1944 and one from Compiègne left on 18 August 1944 (Chaigneau, 1981).

[…]

Unlike [the Third Reich’s] doctors and psychiatrists, who were predominantly [Fascist], French psychiatrists did not join the Collaboration en masse. Thus, they did not directly contribute to the deportation of the disabled and the mentally ill.

However, the successive censuses imposed by the laws of Vichy and by the Occupation ensured that the label ‘Jew’ or ‘Israelite’ appeared on all the files of hospitalized Jews, who were thus vulnerable and easily identified. Access to the archives of two psychiatric hospitals, one in the Paris region and the second in the central region near the Loiret camps where the Jews were imprisoned, gives us some indication of the fate of the Jews in these two hospitals, but without enabling us to make generalizations.

In the central region, the few hospitalized psychiatric patients coming from one of the two internment camps for Jews close to the hospital were under constant surveillance by the [Axis], the administration, and the camp commandant. There were repeated requests to the doctors for a quick return to the camp in cases where their observations did not confirm psychiatric disorders. The majority of those who returned to the camp were deported and murdered.

On [Axis] orders, all the Jews still hospitalized in Fleury-les-Aubrais were transported to Paris in March 1944, but survived. On the other hand, Jews hospitalized in the Paris area at the Villejuif Hospital shared the common fate of hospital patients, dying of malnutrition and illness, but escaping deportation. But this situation would have been short-lived if the Liberation had not happened.

(Emphasis added.)

I had originally intended to make a thread asking why there is so little interest in the Medz Yeghern, which struck me as odd considering how useful it would have been for modern anti-Muslim propaganda. For the life of me I cannot distinctly think back to a discussion where somebody casually brought up the Medz Yeghern—let alone the Sayfo—even after the WTC’s destruction, when anti-Muslim sentiment was on the rise.

I remember browsing the Richard Dawkins forum, FSTDT, and Rapture Ready back when I was an angsty atheist, yet I cannot unforget one instance where someone mentioned the Medz Yeghern. (Not to say that it must have been because nobody ever mentioned it, only that I never saw anybody who did.) My guess was that Rapture-ready Evangelicals and atheist snobs alike avoided the topic because the mere thought of displaying any solidarity with Eastern Orthodox Christians sounded utterly revolting to them, but that felt like too cynical of an explanation.

So I thought about it some more.

That was when it hit me: remembering the Shoah but forgetting about the Medz Yeghern, the slaughter of Native Americans, the slaughter of Southwest Africans, and all of the other violence that inspired the Third Reich is a political decision, not a logical one.

Before I elaborate, I want to address a few suggestions. Jew-haters propose that the Shoah is better known than other extermination campaigns because ‘the Jews’ control the mainstream media and the education system. This assertion is easily falsifiable: if indeed ‘the Jews’ controlled those phenomena, then surely they would repeatedly jump at the chance to tell us about the Polish–Cossack Wars, or more recently, the pogroms from 1917 to 1923: the proto-Shoah. On the contrary, when I asked several Jewish adults whom Symon Petliura was, none of them could answer in the affirmative.

On the other hand, the most cynical anticolonialists among us suggest that the Shoah is more familiar to people because most of the victims were ‘White’ (at least by today’s standards). Now, this proposal certainly sounds more plausible than the other, but it, too, raises questions: why the Shoah and not, say, the Haitian Revolution, the Irish potato famine, the Third Reich’s slaughter of 1.8 million Poles, or the tens of millions of other Slavs that the Axis and its collaborators massacred? Surely those victims all count as ‘White’ now, don’t they? Then why do we hear comparatively little about them?

The answer, I am sad to say, is that exploiting the Shoah is more useful to the White bourgeoisie than exploiting any other extermination campaign, because the exploitation thereof serves its interests in West Asia. Quoting controversial Norman G. Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, ch. 2:

Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. […] Michael Berenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum. “We see in [its] perpetration a violation of every essential American value.” The Holocaust museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the “appropriate answer to Nazism” with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.⁶³

The politicization begins even before one crosses the museum’s threshold. It is situated on Raoul Wallenberg Place. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is honored because he rescued thousands of Jews and ended up in a Soviet prison. Fellow Swede Count Folke Bernadotte is not honored because, although he too rescued thousands of Jews, former [Herzlian] Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir ordered his assassination for being too “pro-Arab.”⁶⁴

The crux of Holocaust museum politics, however, bears on whom to memorialize. Were Jews the only victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of [Fascist] persecution also count as victims?⁶⁵ During the museum’s planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the “undisputed expert on the Holocaust period,” Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. “As always, they began with Jews,” he typically intoned. “As always, they did not stop with Jews alone.”⁶⁶ Yet not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the first genocidal victims, of [German Fascism].⁶⁷

Justifying preemption of the [Samudaripen] posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The [Third Reich] systematically murdered as many as a half-million [Roma and Sinti], with proportional losses roughly equal to the Jewish genocide.⁶⁸ Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that [they] did not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did.⁶⁹

Multiple motives lurked behind the museum’s marginalizing of the [Samudaripen]. First: one simply couldn’t compare the loss of [Romani] and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for [Romani] representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as “cockamamie,” executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether [Roma and Sinti] even “existed” as a people: “There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people […] if there is such a thing.”

He did allow, however, that “there was a suffering element under the Nazis.” Edward Linenthal recalls the [Romani] representatives’ “deep suspicion” of the council, “fueled by clear evidence that some council members viewed Rom participation in the museum the way a family deals with unwelcome, embarrassing relatives.”⁷⁰

Second: acknowledging the [Samudaripen] meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish “moral capital.” Third: if the [Third Reich] persecuted [Roma] and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the [Samudaripen]? In the museum’s permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of [German Fascism] receive only token recognition.⁷¹

Finally, the Holocaust museum’s political agenda has also been shaped by the Israel–Palestine conflict. Before serving as the museum’s director, Walter Reich wrote a paean to Joan Peters’s fraudulent From Time Immemorial, which claimed that Palestine was literally empty before Zionist colonization.⁷² Under State Department pressure, Reich was forced to resign after refusing to invite Yasir Arafat, now a compliant American ally, to visit the museum.

Offered a subdirector’s position, Holocaust theologian John Roth was then badgered into resigning because of past criticism of Israel. Repudiating a book the museum originally endorsed because it included a chapter by Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian critical of Israel, Miles Lerman, the museum’s chairman, avowed, “To put this museum on the opposite side of Israel — it’s inconceivable.”⁷³

(Emphasis added.)

This could also explain why Herzlians seldom mention—much less discuss—the proto-Shoah that resulted in at least 115,000 Jewish deaths, as that would have been as good a justification as any for imposing a Jewish ethnostate on Palestine. However, the Herzlian declaration of independence never mentions it, and more often than not, this disaster is only vaguely implied in the ‘two thousand years of antisemitism’ McHistory lesson, where it is simply bundled together with all of the generic pogroms. Ask anybody a seriously good question like ‘What was the largest massacre of Jews before the Holocaust?’ and you’ll very probably get either a blank stare, a shrug, or their verbal equivalents.

It pains me to concede that my inspiration for taking Fascism more seriously is at least marginally indebted to mainstream Shoah education, but many of the facts that I have learned and shared with you over the years I have done so in spite of and not because of mainstream Shoah education—except in the sense that it failed to teach you about those facts. Whatever (little) credit that Herzlians can take for inspiring me shall eventually lead to their own undoing: they would be appalled to see me reference the Shoah as another incentive for abolishing capitalism rather than for supporting an apartheid régime, which is the lesson that they want you to take instead.

Unlike a certain other antiliberal, I am not going to radically suggest that we should all forget the Shoah because its memory has frequently been used, and presumably can only be used, for evil purposes. No, ignoring the upper classes when they abuse Shoah history would effectively be a capitulation to them, allowing them another concession that they do not deserve. The Shoah was primarily a tragedy that the upper classes afflicted on both lower-class Jews and their legally ‘Jewish’ relatives. Why should we let the upper classes exploit that history as if it were theirs?

The poorest people in the world devote no energy to memorialising the Holocaust. […] I have never seen any postwar example where the Holocaust inspired a person to act in an unquestionably good way.

On the contrary, the Shoah has inspired me to learn more about its causes, to teach others about Jewish history, and to share more about history in general. Plenty of lower-class people like me have called out Herzlians for abusing the Shoah as a justification for their exterminatory, neocolonial project, yet they simultaneously scold us for so much as implying that the Nakba shares any similarities whatsoever with the Shoah. What does the White establishment expect when the only extermination campaign that it cares to teach us is (almost always) this one?

The time to reclaim Shoah history from the upper classes is long overdue. We must offer an alternative to mainstream Shoah education: an education that, while not necessarily formal, nevertheless offers Jews and other learners valuable information as well as lessons that they are unlikely to find elsehow. We shall do away with all of the oversimplifications found in mainstream Shoah education and the misunderstandings resulting therefrom.

Our first task shall be to refute the misconception that the Shoah happened because Jews lacked or needed an ethnostate; on the contrary, most Herzlians were uninterested in saving ordinary Jews. Saying that Jews must be segregated from us also logically leads to the classic Herzlian conclusion that antisemitism is somehow ‘intrinsic’ to civilization. In reality, civilisations such as China simply had no antisemitism or anti-Judaism at all. Antisemitism, to quote Amadeo Bordiga, ‘directly results from economic constraints.’ In short, it is a consequence of capitalism’s deficiencies. So was the Shoah.

Next, we shall do away with the excessive Eurocentrism found in standard lessons. While some Eurocentrism is inevitable (for obvious reasons), overlooking the Shoah’s effects on North African Jews and West Asian Jews needlessly contributes to the erasure that Jews of color suffer. Worth adding is how the Shoah inevitably overlapped with the Samudaripen. Additionally, the precedents in both Afrasia and the Americas that I mentioned earlier need to be discussed in public: if so many empires could get away with their annihilation campaigns, it should be no wonder that the Third Reich and its allies thought that they could do the same.

Last but not least, all extermination campaigns should encourage us to behave inversely to the perpetrators. Merely showing compassion, respect, or (dare I say it) love to disadvantaged minorities is not enough to prevent future extermination attempts, but it can certainly help us mitigate the effects. This may seem like the most obvious lesson to take, but Herzlians typically imply (even if they now seldom say it outright) that antisemitism is a ‘fixed’ aspect of the human race that shall never disappear. While abolishing capitalism is the surest way to ensure the gradual extinction of both antisemitism and white supremacy, it also helps to show diaspora Jews compassion and give them other reasons to stay in the diaspora rather than vainly look for ‘safety’ in an unpopular ethnostate. As antisemitism shrinks, so too shall the main justification for Herzlianism.

(This takes approximately ten minutes to read. Aside from anti-Jewish violence, it also discusses one instance of animal abuse.)

For anyone still unaware, (the) Tōrāh is Judaism’s and Samaritanism’s foundational text and their most sacred object. Abrahamic tradition attributes its authorship to Prophet Moses, who in turn was inspired by the Almighty. This attribution is probably legendary, but whatever the case may be the Torah remains a work of great cultural importance.

I have mentioned before how the Fascists destroyed Toroth, but after I found one particularly baffling example of Torah desecration, I decided that the phenomenon deserved its own thread to supplement my discussion of Fascist anti-Judaism. Before we delve into how the Fascists intentionally desecrated these works, it is important to grasp the Torah’s value even if you are completely irreligious. For starters, Sifrei Torah are not exactly the sorts of objects that you can find on an assembly line. To quote Karen Kaplan:

Creating a Torah scroll requires experience, patience, and dedication to detail. The words are written, letter by letter, with the greatest care, by a highly trained scribe. There can be no mistakes. It must all hold together perfectly. And then it’s rolled into a scroll.

Judaists have numerous rules for treating Sifrei Torah, including how they should face the readers, and if something or someone severely damages a Sefer Torah, it has to be buried or ‘secreted’ as Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried put it. Here is a brief look at how Jews respect the Torah from Katherine Aron-Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, ch. 4:

The idea that the Torah, as a divine object, had a preexistence in heaven had been developed in early rabbinic literature. Jews are not allowed to touch it with their hands, when it is carried before them in a procession in their synagogues. It is the only Jewish object [that] Jews are expected to bow down before.⁹⁴

When the Crusaders (from whom the Third Reich took inspiration) intentionally desecrated Toroth, it traumatised Jewish onlookers:

The Hebrew chroniclers first emphasized the holiness and beauty of the Torah, how it was honored by a particular Jewish community, and how terrible it was that the uncircumcised contaminated it.

[…]

The Mainz Anonymous depicts the grief of the Jewish women who saw the Torah as it was torn in the Mainz synagogue in 1098: “There was also a Torah scroll in the room; the errant ones came into the room, found it, and tore it to shreds. When the holy and pure women, daughters of kings, saw that the Torah had been torn, they called in a loud voice to their husbands: ‘Look, see, the Holy Torah—it is being torn by the enemy!’ And they all said, men and women together: ‘Alas, the Holy Torah, the perfection of beauty, the delight of our eyes, to which we used to bow in the synagogue, kissing and honoring it. How has it now fallen into the hands of the impure uncircumcised ones?’”⁹⁸

It may still be uneasy to understand why someone would attach so much importance to a scroll, especially if you hold some of its contents in low regard, but imagine how you would feel if somebody destroyed one of your most cherished or valuable possessions. Alternatively, imagine how you would feel if somebody destroyed an irreplaceable work of history.

While none of those is quite the same thing as a Sefer Torah (with several exceptions), the point is to give you an approximation of how you would feel. Sifrei Torah are not only sacred ritual objects: they take great skill to make, they have distinguishing features that make them unique to their synagogues, and they are effectively family heirlooms, often being sources of fond memories.

It is because Jewish communities instilled so much value in these scrolls that Fascist gentiles found it fulfilling to deliberately damage them. This was not only a source of amusement for the Fascists, it was also a useful demonstration of power and an intimidating rejection of Jewish cultures that made Jews feel even more tempted to either leave or avoid the Fascist bourgeoisie’s increasingly homogeneous empires, thereby freeing up room and other resources for the White, gentile colonisers. Quoting Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, page 3:

[A]s dawn broke over the town’s elegant houses, something else had happened in Schlageter Square. By now, all Jews had been assembled. Some, like Oskar and his family, had been standing there for some four hours. A good-­sized crowd of citizens had also gathered. At the center of the square the [Fascists] had piled Jewish ritual objects from the synagogues along with items from the Jewish community house, which had been destroyed earlier.

Clearly visible on the pole in the middle were the synagogues’ Torah scrolls. There, after first rolling out the scrolls in the square and forcing the rabbis to walk on them, the [Fascists] hung the Torah. Then, before the assembled crowd, they set the pyre ablaze (simultaneously with one of the synagogues, it seems): the Hebrew Bible […] was thus publicly burned.

Page 109:

In Vienna, after Austria joined the Reich in March 1938, Torah scrolls were used as carpets.³¹

Pages 115–118:

The [Germanic Fascists] burned the Hebrew Bible on November 9 and 10, 1938. Not one copy but thousands, not in one place but in hundreds of communities across the Reich, and not only in such metropolises as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne but in such small communities as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1,070 inhabitants where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof of the synagogue and the [Fascists] marched mockingly up and down the main street with Torah scrolls before destroying them.¹ By fire and other means, the destruction of the Book of Books was at the center of Kristallnacht, when fourteen hundred synagogues were set on fire.²

In Berlin, [Fascists] burned the Torah scrolls of the Hebrew Bible in front of the Levetzowstrasse synagogue, while others carried the scrolls from the Fasanenstrasse synagogue to Wittenberg Square and burned them there.³ The scrolls that were saved from Wittenberg Square were later buried by the community in Weissensee according to Jewish tradition.

In Pestalozzistrasse shredded Torah scrolls and prayer books as well as religious objects from the altar littered the area near the synagogue. Children were mockingly marching on the shredded Torah with top hats on.⁴ In the Jewish quarter of Leopoldgasse in Vienna, the Arks and Torah scrolls from four synagogues were piled up in the street and set on fire. In Mosbach, in Baden, a community of five thousand souls, a photograph captured local inhabitants watching as the interior of the synagogue was burned on the morning of November 10.⁵

Destroying the Hebrew Bible in small communities was a public event [that] no one could ignore, one in which children often participated.

In Fritzlar, a small town in Hessen where in the year 919 the Reichstag gave birth to the Holy Roman German Empire, Torah scrolls were rolled along the Nikolausstrasse as Hitler Youth rode their bicycles over them.⁶ Children played with the Torah on the street in Hirschberg, in Silesia, while in Herford, a small town in western Germany, they shredded it to pieces to a general bellowing and laughing.⁷

In the village of Kippenheim, Baden (1,821 inhabitants), youth threw the Torah scrolls into the local brook, while in one quarter of Vienna, schoolchildren were taken to watch the Torah set on fire.⁸

Jewish children conjured their own image of the Bible on that day. Batya Emanuael, thirteen years old, watched with her brother the destruction of a small synagogue that stood next to their house in Frankfurt: “A window was pushed open, a chair flew out. […] It was followed by another chair and yet another. And then there was silence. […] A white snake jumped down from the windowsill and slithered down, down to the ground below, it seemed unending. ‘Scrolls of the Law, Torah Scrolls,’ we gasped, not wanting to believe our eyes.”⁹

In Aachen, [Fascists] tore the Torah in front of the synagogue and put scraps in their pockets, claiming [that] it would bring them good luck (an old belief of unknown origins).¹⁰ In Vienna, Siegfried Merecki, a fifty-one-year-­old lawyer with three children, lived near one of the city’s synagogues. That night he saw “packages being carried away. […] Shadowy figures were moving toward the bridge over the Danube. Then I understood. The Torah scrolls were being taken to the bridge and thrown into the river. I watched and counted six [scrolls] and heard hideous laughter.”¹¹

Also in Vienna, Jews were dressed in the robes and decorations of the Ark and then marched and chased through the streets with torn Torah scrolls tied to their backs, while in Frankfurt Jews were forced to tear up the Torah and burn it.¹² In small Schmieheim, a Protestant community of 752 souls in Baden, [Fascists] rolled the synagogue’s seven Torah scrolls down the street like a carpet. Some rolls were later hung in the train station of the nearby village of Dinglingen bei Lahr.¹³

A Jewish woman who attempted to save the scrolls and ritual objects in Lichtenfeld, Bavaria, was stopped by children. A scuffle ensued, and the woman was killed. The children later played football with the prayer books.¹⁴

In Altdorf, a Catholic village of 1,112 souls in Baden, a [Fascist] mimicked the Jewish prayer in front of the synagogue using the talith, the Jewish prayer shawl, as toilet paper, and then read from the prayer book, spitting invective against Jews.¹⁵ And in Wittlich, in western Germany, “a shouting SA man climbed to the roof, waving the rolls of the Torah: ‘Wipe your asses with it, Jews,’ he screamed while he hurled them like bands of confetti on Carnival.”¹⁶

In Württemberg, a man who picked up Jewish prayer books in the street, presumably as an act of respect toward the holy objects, was later hanged publicly on a tree on the road from Steinach to Hall. In Euskirchen in the Rhineland, the Torah was rolled open and hung from the adorned roof of the synagogue at Annaturmstrasse, visible to the crowd who gathered before the building as well as to those who viewed the smoking temple from a distance. As Torah scrolls burned in a synagogue’s yard in Düsseldorf, German men, some wearing the robes of the rabbis and cantors, danced around the fire.¹⁷

Page 161:

[Wehrmacht] soldiers during the Polish campaign first treated Jews according to anti-­Jewish acts familiar from the prewar years. Previous experience is often the first guide for action. Synagogues were burned and Torah scrolls destroyed all over Poland.

Page 209:

One object was no longer of interest to the [Fascists]. The [Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt] did not [always] bother to collect Torah scrolls, although one official noted that “perhaps the leather can still have some use for bookbinding.” Scrolls were used in areas occupied by the [Third Reich] for binding books and making such leather objects as belts and shoes.⁵³

Quoting Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich’s Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation:

Before destroying synagogues throughout Germany and eastern Europe, the [Fascists] would often desecrate and destroy the sacred objects that they found within, including Torah scrolls. This was part of the larger [Fascist] effort not only to wipe out all Jewish communities but to humiliate and eradicate the Jewish culture[s] as well.

In 1941 in Slobodka, Ukraine, for example, [Axis] troops filled the town synagogue with dead cats and forced Jewish inhabitants to tear up Torah scrolls and then strew the pieces across the corpses of the animals. What this event reveals is the fact that destruction was not enough—the Torah, as the book most sacred to the Jewish people and therefore emblematic of Jewish belief and culture as a whole, had to be desacralized and stripped of its power.

Attempts to desecrate sacred Jewish objects appear in anti-Semitic cartoons as well, such as those found in Julius Streicher’s infamous Der Stürmer. In one cartoon, for example, a Jewish man prays before an altar topped with a bag of gold that is marked with a Star of David. Beneath the altar, at his feet, lies a discarded Torah scroll.²⁴ Wealth and greed, the cartoon claims, are what are truly sacred to the Jew; the Torah is merely a prop that is discarded when the real sacred object—money—appears.

It is true that [Fascism] did not invent the act of burning or desecrating the Torah. Indeed, Torah scrolls were often trampled underfoot or burned—along with the synagogues that held them—by mobs during pogroms throughout European history. Torah scrolls were not officially burned by the church, however, as was the case with the Talmud, which was publicly burned a number of times in Italy and France between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.²⁵

The destruction of Torah scrolls during the [Fascist era], however, is unparalleled. It is impossible to know how many Torah scrolls were desecrated and destroyed by the [Fascists] throughout [the Third Reich] and its occupied territories, but the number is certainly in the thousands.

Believe it or not, these remarkably tasteless displays of dominance were not entirely what prompted me to discuss this subject. Inspiration struck after I found an article on shoe soles made from Torahic parchment. Quoting Jay Prosser’s ‘Cecil Roth’s Torah scroll shoe soles: collecting Holocaust relics in Greece’:

Other scrolls, such as the one [that] we find left over in Roth’s shoe soles, were stolen by the [Fascists] or local populations to provide material for new goods. In accordance with halacha (Jewish religious law), the parchment of Sifrei Torah is kosher animal skin and most often calf. Yad Vashem holds a number of leather goods ‘recycled’ from desecrated scrolls, including a handbag, a toy drum, and a wallet.¹⁹

Yad Vashem also holds three shoe soles which are the Sefer Torah fragments most comparable to Roth’s: one pair of insoles found in the shoes of [an Axis] officer in Italy; plus a single sole without any known provenance or history.²⁰ Only in the case of Roth’s Sefer Torah soles can we know the collector, the year, as well as the country of collection. Only with these soles can we reconstruct most of the story involving collection.

To end this on a less depressing note, the Axis’s approach to the Torah was not always as straightforward as these desecrations. Mihai I. Poliec found a curious instance where a few Wehrmacht officials prevented an Axis merchant from destroying Sifrei Torah that he found in a closet, and Jay Prosser’s article talks about the Third Reich sometimes seizing these scriptures as mere trophies, whereafter they eventually ended up in Jewish hands again:

Scrolls faced a number of possible different fates. Fire, bomb, or other damage destroyed some completely. Many were stolen from synagogues to be transported to the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, the antisemitic center for holding and debasing Jewish culture.¹⁶

The fortunate ones were stored and restored after the war. Most famous among these are the Czech Scrolls, the 1,600 scrolls uprooted from synagogues across Bohemia and Moravia, which were held in the Jewish Museum in Prague during the war, then in an abandoned synagogue outside of Prague. In 1964 they were rescued and brought to Westminster Synagogue in London.¹⁷ They are now lent to Jewish communities around the world.

Although the construction of a national highway network made the Third Reich less unpopular, this decrease in unpopularity owes a good deal to Fascist dishonesty:

The fact that Autobahn-like highways had already been in general use, both domestically and abroad, long before the [Fascists] ever came to power in Germany has been adequately demonstrated at the beginning of this article. These historical facts, however, seemed to diminish the effectiveness of [Fascist] propaganda surrounding the Autobahn construction, since after all this great project of Reich Chancellor Hitler would appear as merely a copy or, at best, a continuation of already long-established projects.

In order to be able to emphasize the outstanding position of the Reich Chancellor, the Führer [leader] of all Germans, and especially his unique genius, it was not enough for the Reichsautobahn project to be mentioned merely as another point in the long history of highway construction. Rather, various means were to be used to try to portray [the Third Reich’s] Reichsautobahn as an outstanding monumental project, unprecedented anywhere in the world, and in this process to elevate Adolf Hitler as its sole, G-d-given ingenious mastermind.

One of the measures to let Hitler be seen — especially in his perception on the part of the German people — as the “true inventor” of the Autobahn was the subsequent creation of falsified historical facts. Since genuine historical facts, such as the construction and use of foreign highways like the [Fascist] Autostrada could hardly be erased from the history books as well as from the memory of the people, historical facts now had to be invented in retrospect, which were supposed to prove that Hitler had already thought up concrete ideas and plans long before others had begun their (historically secured) planning in this regard.

Especially the time period of Hitler’s imprisonment from March 1924 to December of the same year in the prison of Landsberg am Lech was now officially stated as the period in which Hitler had his ingenious mental inspirations of building a [Reich]-wide highway. In various media this was now stated as a generally known fact, as shown for example by the poem of Herybert Menzel, one of the most famous German poets at the time of the Third Reich:

Während seiner Haft, als seine Bewegung zerschlagen war, als seine Gegner ihn selbst vernichtet hielten, als er das Buch der Deutschen schrieb, da schlug er auch die Karte unseres Vaterlandes auf seinen Knien auseinander und dachte in sie hinein seine Reichsautobahnen: So werden sie laufen! Da kaum noch einer an ihn glaubte, glaubte er so fest an sich und seine Aufgabe und bereitete alles vor.

[During his imprisonment, when his movement was crushed, when his opponents thought he himself was destroyed, when he wrote the Book of the Germans, he also unfolded the map of our fatherland on his knees and thought into it his Reichsautobahn: So it will proceed! Since hardly anyone believed in him anymore, he believed so firmly in himself and his task and prepared everything.]

Herybert MENZEL, Das Erlebnis der Reichsautobahn, Reichsministerium Speer, Munich 1943. Excerpt in: KULKE, 2016

However, in contrast to these invented historiographies, no evidence or hints at his strokes of genius regarding the construction of the Autobahn can be found in Adolf Hitler’s factual history. Even in his two-volume book Mein Kampf, which for the biggest part had been written during his imprisonment in Landsberg and which almost comprehensively describes every detail and motivation of his political and social convictions, there is no mention whatsoever of road building projects he was planning, let alone of a nationwide highway system.³⁹

Facts and evidence that could speak against Hitler as the first thinker of the Autobahn were erased or reinterpreted as far as possible. This is what happened, for example, with the Rheinische Provinzialstraße Köln-Bonn, which had already been in public operation since August 1932. From the state side, this actual Autobahn was “downgraded” and now merely listed as a Kraftwagenstraße erster Ordnung [first-order motor road].⁴⁰

Thus, in [German Fascism’s] historiography, the Reichsautobahn built by Führer Hitler could be praised as the very first. It was not until the end of the 1930s that plans became known to integrate the Rheinische Provinzialstraße Köln-Bonn into the German Reichsautobahn network, deliberately concealing the fact that this road had actually been in active use for several years before the Reichsautobahn conceived by the Führer had been completed. The same was done with the AVUS, which was opened to traffic in 1940 as a connection to the Berlin Ring.

It should come as no surprise that the actual inventors and builders of the preceding Autobahn highways did not agree with the forced erasure of their works from the history books and the memory of the Germans, only to be able to elevate the [Third] Reich Chancellor, who demonstrably had no influence whatsoever on the initial planning and construction of the German Autobahn. Within [the Third Reich], however, those complaints were silenced with sustained pressure from the [Fascists].

For example, German news magazine Der Spiegel printed parts of a letter from Fritz Todt, Generalinspektor now responsible for Reichsautobahn construction, to Kurt Kaftan, the press officer of HAFRABA, which reveal the means [that] the [Fascists] used to silence dissenting voices to the falsification of German historiography:

Ich darf Sie bei dieser Gelegenheit darauf aufmerksam machen, daß Ihre Darlegungen auch insofern nicht richtig sind, als die Jetzige Ausführung der Reichsautobahnen schon auf Pläne des Führers im Jahre 1924 zurückgeht. Diese Reichsautobahnen, wie wir sie jetzt bauen, haben nicht als von der Hafraba vorbereitet, und nicht als von mir […] gebaut zu gelten, sondern einzig und allein als die Straßen Adolf Hitlers. Sehr geehrter Herr Kaftan, ich schreibe Ihnen diesen Brief nicht als Rüge, aber als eine Warnung und in der Absicht, daß Sie für Ihre schriftstellerische Tätigkeit die Einstellung finden möchten, die ich für die einzig richtige halte.

[I would like to take this opportunity to point out to you that your statements also are incorrect insofar as the current construction of the Reichsautobahn already goes back to plans of the Führer in 1924. These Reich highways, as we are building them now, are not to be considered as prepared by the Hafraba, and not as built by me […], but solely as the roads of Adolf Hitler. Dear Mr. Kaftan, I am writing you this letter not as a rebuke, but as a warning and with the intention that you would like to find for your writing activity the attitude which I consider to be the only correct one.]

DER SPIEGEL 3/1963, p. 57

For the longest time, historians have glossed over the relations between the Eastern and Western Axis powers as shallow and unimportant. This perception has only been reinforced by disgruntled Axis officials theirselves, some of whom denied the alliance’s importance so as to ease their prosecutions, and it is all too easy for casual observers to agree with this conclusion after spotting instances of poor teamwork, like when Berlin failed to notify Tōkyō in advance about the German–Soviet Pact in 1939.

Au contraire, historian Daniel Hedinger published a book in 2021 titled Die Achse: Berlin-Rom-Tokio, 1919–1946: an iconoclastic reassessment of the supposed ‘hollow alliance’ between the Axis powers. Unfortunately for us, Herr Hedinger’s book is unavailable in English as of this writing, but I still have reasons to offer that the relations between the Western and Eastern Axis are, if nothing else, worth reexamining.

For example, quoting Rotem Kowner’s ‘When economics, strategy, and racial ideology meet: inter-Axis connections in the wartime Indian Ocean’:

During the first years of the war in Europe, economics and the settlement of economic disputes formed the crux of Japanese–German relations. Upon the [Fascist] conquest of the Netherlands and France, and even more so after the [Imperial] takeover of Southeast Asia almost two years later, the two nations were still grappling with various forms of economic discord, especially over their respective rights to exploit the natural resources of the French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia.

However, as the fighting in Europe continued, economic issues (notably shortages of certain raw materials) became a growing motive for improving relations between the two nations. During their negotiations, both sides had pressing needs that could not wait for the conclusion of the imminent agreement. Tōkyō required certain military technologies and some raw materials that its main European ally already possessed, and also needed new markets for its Southeast Asian products in order to keep the local economies alive.

Berlin, in contrast, was desperate for certain raw materials that its Asian ally monopolized in Southeast Asia. These materials included, among others, tungsten, which was used for hardening metals (in items such as turbines and armour-piercing munitions) and for making wear-resistant abrasives; tin, which was used in alloys, as a solder, and for plating steel containers meant for food preservation; bauxite, for the production of aluminium used in various forms of military equipment such as tanks and industrial machinery; and, most significantly, natural rubber.¹²

Rubber had been used in all complex weapon systems since the early twentieth century, and thus became an indispensable raw material for wartime economies. Its military importance, alongside its growing scarcity in [the Third Reich] and its availability in the newly gained territories of the Japanese empire, made natural rubber the prime raw material present in the economic exchanges carried out by these Axis powers during the war, as well as providing an indirect impetus for the enhancement of their military cooperation.

Before the Second World War, Germany was a world leader in the development and production of synthetic rubber, primarily from coal and limestone, and later from natural gas too.¹³ Synthetic rubber was nonetheless the product of an emergency, produced because of the insufficient and unstable supply of natural rubber, and as a rule inferior to the latter.

However, the production of synthetic rubber did not meet [the Third Reich’s] projected and actual military demands. Critically, it was also inadequate for the production of high-performance engineering and military components.¹⁴ For instance, synthetic rubber tyres with large cross-sections tended to crack, especially at low temperatures. Hence, natural rubber remained an essential material for the production of many military articles from gas masks to large tyres.¹⁵

Natural rubber had one major disadvantage, however, as far as the European Axis countries were concerned. It could not be produced in Europe or in any other territory occupied by Germany or Italy. Extracted mostly from the tropical Pará rubber tree, it was mainly produced in Southeast Asia (85% of world production in 1939). Its largest producers were British Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore), with 39% of world production, and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), with 38%.¹⁶

[…]

A major turning point in the [Third Reich’s] quest for Southeast Asian rubber occurred on 7 December 1941, with the [Axis] onslaught on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent outbreak of the Pacific War. In the following months, [the Empire of] Japan took over both Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, the world’s leading exporters of natural rubber. [The Chancellor] could not conceal his delight at the abundant ‘rubber, oil, zinc, tungsten, and a number of other products’ which fell suddenly into [Axis] hands, remarking that ‘Japan will be one of the richest countries in the world. What a transformation!’²⁵

The joy over the presumably easy access to rubber was short-lived as the Allied powers did their utmost to prevent [Europe’s Axis empires] from obtaining natural rubber and other raw materials. Soon, a bitter struggle for the procurement of natural rubber began to take shape on both sides.²⁶

Loading their cargo directly in Southeast Asian ports, blockade-runners remained the only means for transporting rubber and other raw materials to [the Third Reich]. They usually circumnavigated Africa and carried back from Asia badly needed materials for the European Axis powers’ war effort.

Known in the Imperial Japanese Navy (Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kaigun, henceforth IJN) by their code name Yanagi-sen (‘willow ships’), between 1941 and 1944 these ships delivered 43,983 tons of natural rubber to the [European Axis empires’] war industries. They also carried 68,117 tons of other essential materials, mostly from Southeast Asia, such as tungsten, tin, and quinine, and altogether about two-thirds of the [Third Reich’s] annual requirement for these items.²⁷

These figures nonetheless conceal a dramatic development. Although by mid-1942 [the Western Axis] had unlimited access, at least in theory, to natural rubber, shipping it safely to Europe became extremely dangerous.²⁸ This situation prompted increasing cooperation between [Western Axis] commercial representatives in East Asia, but their options were limited.²⁹

While the only viable route was now via the sea, the Allies’ blockade became so effective, especially after the introduction of the Checkmate System on 8 June 1943, that fewer and fewer Axis blockade-runners succeeded in reaching Europe.³⁰ By late 1942 and early 1943, only one of the six ships that left for Europe reached its destination.³¹ As the toll of using surface ships became unbearable, this route was virtually terminated by the end of 1943.

Adding to this, the Empire of Manchuria supplied the German Reich with soybeans, the IJN inspired the Kriegsmarine’s only aircraft carrier, the Third Reich supplied the Empire of Japan with 25,000 trained dogs by December 1941, supplied it with twenty thousand Karabiner 98ks, supplied it with MP 34s, supplied the model for its E27 radar detectors, inspired the Nakajima Kikka, and more. Were it not for Allied activity, the Eastern Axis would have also acquired 20mm guns, torpedo data computers, radar blueprints, radar equipment, and a Naxos radar detector.

As we can see here, it was not a sheer lack of trying that inhibited cooperation between the Eastern and West Axis powers. There was plenty of trying, and not all of it unsuccessful: in particular, the Axis powers exhibited good teamwork when it came to conquering certain European Allied powers with colonies in Asia. When the French and Netherlandish republics fell to the Third Reich, the colonies of French Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies were ripe for the Empire of Japan’s taking.

Pictured: Fascist propaganda depicting a Regio Esercito soldier, a Wehrmacht one, and one from the IJA standing together with rifles in their hands. The text reads, ‘Three folks, one war!’

Pictured: Fascist propaganda depicting a Regio Esercito soldier, a Wehrmacht one, and one from the IJA standing on a battlefield with tattered Allied flags thereon. The text reads, ‘To conquer!’

True, the Eastern and Western Axis armies never fought side-by-side on the same battlefield (unless you count the submarines Luigi Torelli and Comandante Cappellini), but such close coordination was rare between the Eastern and Western Allied armies, too. Now, there is a rumour that Berlin had a plan for South Asia after defeating the Soviet Union: Operation Orient, wherein the Wehrmacht and the IJA would have shaken hands in India, but such a plan probably never existed.

On the other hand, Kantokuen, a plan wherein the Empire of Japan would have invaded the far eastern Soviet Union, was indeed something that Tōkyō seriously contemplated. This possibility, incidentally, explains Berlin’s infamous decision to declare war on Imperial America. Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 71–72:

On December 7, 1941, Hitler, in his headquarters deep in the forests of East Prussia, had not yet fully digested the ominous news of the Soviet counteroffensive in front of Moscow, when he learned that, on the other side of the world, the [Eastern Axis] had attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor. We will soon deal with the background and significance of this attack, which brought the U.S. into the war.

At this time it ought to be pointed out that it caused the U.S. to declare war on [the Empire of] Japan, but not on [the Third Reich], which had nothing to do with the attack and had not even been aware of the [Eastern Axis’s] plans. Hitler had no obligation whatsoever to rush to the aid of his [Imperial] friends, as is claimed by some American historians, just as the [Imperial] leaders had not felt an obligation to rush to Hitler’s side when he went to war against Poland, France, and the Soviet Union.

However, on December 11, 1941 — four days after Pearl Harbor — the [Reich’s] dictator suddenly declared war on the U.S. This seemingly irrational decision must be understood in light of the [Axis] predicament in the Soviet Union. Hitler almost certainly speculated that this entirely gratuitous gesture of solidarity would induce his Far Eastern ally to reciprocate with a declaration of war on the enemy of [Fascism], the Soviet Union, and this would have forced the Soviets into the extremely perilous predicament of a two-front war. (The bulk of the [IJA] was stationed in northern China and would therefore have been able to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the Vladivostok area.)

Hitler appears to have believed that he could exorcize the spectre of defeat in the Soviet Union, and in the war in general, by summoning a sort of [Imperial] deus ex machina to the Soviet Union’s vulnerable Siberian frontier. According to the German historian Hans W. Gatzke, the Führer was convinced that “if Germany failed to join Japan [in the war against the United States], it would […] end all hope for Japanese help against the Soviet Union.”²⁵

But [the Eastern Axis] did not take [Berlin’s] bait. Tōkyō, too, despised the Soviet state, but the Land of the Rising Sun, now at war against the U.S., could afford the luxury of a two-front war as little as the Soviets. Tōkyō preferred to put all of its money on a “southern” strategy, hoping to win the big prize of Southeast Asia — including oil-rich Indonesia and rubber-rich Indochina — rather than embark on a venture in the inhospitable reaches of Siberia. Only at the very end of the war, after the surrender of [the Western Axis], would it come to hostilities between the Soviet Union and [the Empire of] Japan.

(All emphasis added.)

Now, this was undeniably a costly mistake, and Tōkyō’s refusal to take the gamble may indicate poor teamwork, but one could also argue that it was exactly because of the Third Reich’s faith in the Empire of Japan that Berlin joined it in its war on Imperial America, hoping to encourage Tōkyō to redeclare war on the Soviets. Besides, the IJA had defeated the Imperial Russian Army in 1905, and for a while the Soviet regions of Kamchatka and Northern Sakhalin were under Imperial occupation until 1925. With all of this context in mind, Berlin’s declaration of war on the Yankees did not sound as reckless as it does now.

Further reading: Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936

Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Ultranationalism in German–Japanese Relations, 1930–45

Japanese–German Business Relations: Co-operation and Rivalry in the Inter-war Period

Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945

Japan and Germany: Two Latecomers to the World Stage, 1890–1945

‘The German and Japanese Empires: Great Power Competition and the World Wars in Trans- Imperial Perspective’

‘Shaping Japanese Fascism by European Cultural Transfer’

‘Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires’

‘The fascist new–old order’

‘Germanisation of Japan and a little viceversa: A time of mutual promotion and National Socialism’

‘Creating Japan’s Propaganda: Shaping the Nation by Implementing Methods of German–Italian Fascism’

‘Japan’s Renouncement of the West: Using Methods of German–Italian Fascism’

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese–German Relations, 1860–2010

Although the French Republic was headed by self-identified socialists in 1936–1938, it would be more accurate to categorise them as social democrats; Prime Minister Léon Blum denounced the R.S.F.S.R. as a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’ and refused to have communists participate in his cabinet. (That did not stop the Fascist press from attacking him, of course.) His deputy Édouard Daladier collaborated with Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in appeasing the Third Reich, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs signed a declaration with Ribbentrop.

Bafflingly, Léon Blum permitted all of this despite taking pride in his Jewish heritage. It is shocking that a Jewish adult with his amount of political power would appease the Third Reich at all, but it feels less shocking after learning that he was a Herzlian.

Let us now examine this dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’s economic relations with the Third Reich:

The two governments tried to stabilize trade by a convention of July 28, 1934, which established a clearing mechanism to pay for commercial exchanges. As a result, in 1934, for the only year in the interwar period, [the Third Reich] ranked as France’s top overall customer and supplier.²⁴

Relations deteriorated, however, in the next year. In June 1935 [Reich] officials demanded [that] the replacement of the clearing mechanism with a less restrictive payment accord. A French delegation in Berlin agreed to discuss replacing the clearing accord only on the condition that [the Third Reich] make good on its commercial payments in arrears, which totaled 300 million francs.

The French and German governments, however, found it impossible to negotiate on these terms, and the French and German negotiating teams in Paris in July received orders from their governments simply to liquidate the clearing mechanism.

As a result of the termination of the clearing system, the value of German exports to France rose slightly from 124.1 million marks in the first half of 1935 to 125.4 million marks in the first half of 1936, while the value of German imports from France fell dramatically from 104.1 million marks in the first half of 1935 to 43 million marks in the first half of 1936.²⁵

By the time [that] negotiations resumed in January 1937, France and [the Third Reich] had been without a commercial accord for a year and a half, to the detriment of French exporters.

The Blum government, which took office on June 4, 1936, made the first steps toward closer economic ties to [the Third Reich] through the governors of the central banks of [the Third Reich] and France. It was evident in these steps that the government had on its agenda a general reconciliation with [the Third Reich] through economic cooperation. On June 24, 1936, the French financial attaché in Berlin, Marcel Berthelot, discussed the possibility of an arms limitation pact with Schacht, who declared that he favored the idea.²⁶

[…]

Schacht’s propositions were political as well as economic and must have appealed to the French ministers’ principle that through economic collaboration political tensions and conflict could be reduced. He proposed that [the Third Reich] participate in a system of international security, provided that it was not based on the Treaty of Versailles, and in a disarmament agreement in return for French economic cooperation and the reconstitution of a German colonial domain.

In his meeting with Schacht on August 28, Blum replied that it would be possible to open conversations along these lines from the French government’s point of view.²⁸

[…]

Besides liberalizing the system of commercial payments, facilitating trade between [the Third Reich] and the French empire, and providing for the payment of German debts to France, the commercial accords of July 10, 1937, adopted Schacht’s proposal for exchanging French iron for German coke. In fact, before the definitive accord, the director of commercial accords in the ministry of commerce, Hervé Alphand, arrived at a temporary arrangement with [Fascist] officials at the end of February 1937.

Alphand agreed, with the approval of the ministry of public works, to an increase in the monthly exports of French iron ore to [the Third Reich] from 515,000 tons in January 1937 to 620,000 tons for March and April in return for the maintenance by [the Third Reich] of its monthly coke shipments at their January 1937 level of 271,000 tons.

The SICAP handled these exchanges of coke and iron, which [Fascist] officials insisted on treating in pounds sterling. The volume of exchanges between March and June was such that the SICAP had accumulated over 800,000 pounds from them by July 8, 1937.

A confidential protocol to the commercial accord of July 10, 1937, fixed the level of French iron ore exports to [the Third Reich] at 601,000 tons per month in exchange for 275,000 tons of monthly German coke exports to France. This level of French iron ore exports to [the Third Reich], over 7.2 million tons per year, represented an increase of one million tons over the level of French iron ore exports to [the Third Reich] for 1935.

The new level of German coke exports to France represented almost the entirety of France’s needs in coke. Thus, the French government tightened the link between French and German heavy industry, to the detriment of Belgium, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, each of which had coke to offer for iron at the time of a world iron shortage.⁵⁰

[…]

For the most part, the accords of July 10, 1937, yielded happy results for trade between France and [the Third Reich]. The monthly value of French exports to [the Third Reich] increased dramatically from 8 million marks in 1936 to 15 million marks in the last months of 1937, while that of [Reich] exports to France rose from 22 to 26 million marks. For 1938 the value of French exports to [the Third Reich] rose another 435 million francs over 1937 to 1.9 billion francs—almost triple the level of 1936—while [Reich] exports to France fell slightly. The trade balance, then, became less detrimental to France, and what was left of it paid off German debts owed to France. Moreover, the backlog of commercial payments owed to France disappeared by the beginning of 1939.⁶¹

Needless to say, France’s capitalists were alive and well throughout this era, and continued exerting a powerful influence on politics:

Although business leaders were not solely responsible for the accords, it is significant that the government under the Popular Front, which had pledged to reduce the influence of business on government, allowed business organizations access to trade policy as previous governments had. It allowed the Paris Chamber of Commerce to continue its crucial rôle in the formulation and implementation of trade policy; it allowed the SICAP to continue its monopoly over the handling of coal imports and to exercise decisive influence over the approval of specific barter operations between [the Third Reich] and the French empire; and it allowed the Association Nationale des Porteurs Français des Valeurs Mobilières to negotiate the implementation of the transfer accord with [the Third Reich], despite this organization’s resistance to the government’s directions.

So much for the Popular Front’s ‘socialism’.

How timely Anders Behring Breivik was! You'd think massacres happen randomly, the product of disturbed minds without any political context, but this man left us a gem of historical timing.

By Alberto García Watson

On July 22, 2011, while the Norwegian government was preparing to take a step that, in theory, many brave people in the "free world" should applaud: recognizing the Palestinian state, this blond gentleman, neo-Nazi in ideology but with a Zionist heart, appeared, dispensing bullets to teenagers as if he were saving the Western world from an Islamic invasion that only exists in his head... and in certain "think tanks" in Washington or Tel Aviv.

Breivik, the self-proclaimed savior of Europe, killed 77 people, mostly young members of the Norwegian Labour Party, to "defend" Western values. What a brave modern crusader! But not just any crusader: one who, in addition to abhorring Islam, finds an ideological ally in Zionism. Because of course, when your greatest fear is cultural mixing and multiculturalism, who better than the state that has made segregation a political art?

Yes, because Breivik, besides being a neo-Nazi, is openly a Zionist. A contradiction, some might say. But not for the twisted logic of modern Islamophobia. In his "manifesto," Breivik praises Israel as a bulwark of resistance against Islam, while simultaneously lamenting European cultural purity. Racism allied with more racism? Who would have imagined it!

And while Norway buried its children, then-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, a direct victim of that fascist terrorism, spoke of more democracy, more openness, more tolerance. Fine words.

But then, what did this champion of humanism do when he became Secretary General of NATO? Why, of course, he enthusiastically supported neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, and spent millions of euros. Because it seems the problem with Breivik wasn't his ideology, but his punctuality. If he had waited a few years and changed his uniform, he'd have an office in Kiev today.

Irony of fate! The man who suffered neo-Nazi terrorism at home ended up arming and supporting swastika-bearing battalions in Eastern Europe. Because, of course, if today's Nazis shoot at Moscow and not Oslo, then they are "freedom fighters" (despite carrying Mein Kampf in their backpacks).

And Palestine? Ah, yes. That state that Norway was going to recognize in 2011... and finally recognized in May 2023. It only took 12 years, tens of thousands of deaths, total destruction in Gaza, countless illegal settlements in the West Bank, and a genocide broadcast live. Because Norway, ever so prudent, needed its time. You know, lest another domestic massacre interrupt the diplomatic calendar.

But hey, they finally did it, didn't they? Congratulations! A round of applause for Nordic diplomacy, so elegant, so Aryan, so correct. They recognized Palestine when it was almost archaeology, when dead children numbered in the thousands and the international community looked on with an indifferent yawn. But it doesn't matter: the symbolic is what counts, even if it comes late, even if it arrives stained with blood.

And meanwhile, Breivik remains in his luxury cell, writing letters and filing lawsuits because his PlayStation has no new games. The Nazi-Zionist murderer who tried to twist history with bullets didn't quite succeed. But his ideas, those are still alive and well, disguised as "concern for security," "defense of European values," or "fighting extremism," although curiously, always in one direction.

The official story will say that Breivik was convicted and that his massacre stopped nothing. But the real story is murkier: his message was absorbed, reinterpreted, and, in part, institutionalized by those who call themselves defenders of democratic values.

Because in this Western circus, sometimes the clowns wear uniforms, sometimes ties, and sometimes, like Breivik, they simply carry a rifle and a strong desire to “save the world.”

Gennady Makhnenko, the leader of a neo-Nazi totalitarian cult in Severodonetsk, referred to himself as a pastor. However, his activities can barely be seen as religious. He trained orphaned children to become soldiers for the Ukrainian army. Archive footage and revealed documents show that the cult leader's efforts to turn children into cold-blooded killers were not only known, but actively supported by foreign religious organisations.

Today, in many liberated territories in Donbass, you can find hastily abandoned documents indicating the transfer of thousands of dollars to Ukrainian cults from the United States, Europe, and Canada. The peculiar Ukrainian "religion" emerged as a result of a secret CIA project called "Prolog", immediately after the end of World War II. At that time, U.S. intelligence agencies aimed to foment separatist and nationalist sentiments in Soviet Ukraine.

What are the current goals of the cult leaders and their sponsors?

Other mirrors for the documentary:

• https://lbry.vern.cc/@RTDocumentary:4/Cults_The_Cia's_Secret_Weapon:3

• https://librarian.pussthecat.org/@RTDocumentary:4/Cults_The_Cia's_Secret_Weapon:3

Quoting Maggie Clinton’s Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925–1937, pages 115–116:

On the flip side, some Blue Shirts insisted that Communists ­were in fact indistinguishable from garden-variety hedonistic denizens of the colonial concessions, ­whether Chinese or foreign. Communists, in this telling, did not merely disguise themselves in a manner that revealed their immorality and craven acquiescence to colonial violations of Chinese sovereignty. Rather, a Communist was essentially the same as any other self-­indulgent bourgeois.

A 1934 article in Sweat and Blood Weekly came to this conclusion based on the readiness with which Communists took cover in Shanghai’s colonial settlements. Communists might proclaim themselves to be anti-capitalist and anti-­imperialist, but they in fact delighted in the de­cadent pastimes on offer there.

“Like cap­i­tal­ists,” the author explained, Communists reveled in “its Western-­style buildings, cars, mistresses, roulette wheels, dancing, ­horse and dog races, and massages—­all manner of earthly delights.”⁵⁹ They might champion things like “proletarian lit­er­ature” but they certainly did not live like proletarians.

The charge that Communists ­were basically club-­going playboys is visually registered in a cartoon on the cover of Society Mercury, in which a cadre (indicated by his worker’s cap) welcomes a proposition from a cartoonishly curvaceous, qipao-clad waitress (fig. 3.2).⁶⁰

From this perspective, Communist hedonism and high living revealed a kind of deceitfulness dif­fer­ent from that sketched by Xu ­Enceng: Communists lived the good life while inflicting ruin on every­one ­else. Indecision over ­whether Communists merely disguised themselves as bourgeois, ­were actually bourgeois at heart, or ­were just generally debased gave rise to vari­ous mash-up charges, including that they advocated “wife sharing” and the “nationalization of wives.”⁶¹

For anybody wondering why anticommunists would spew fatuous bullshit like this, I’ll explain:

The reason that anticommunists accused us and continue to accuse us of being upper-class hypocrites is that it makes them look like the good guys. Most of them do not want the vile stigma that comes with hating the proletariat, thus they make up this brainless stereotype that we’re rich, and therefore an attack on us is not an attack on the proletariat at all.

It is not as though anticommunists reach these conclusions by carefully surveying communist parties, strikers, or antifascist activists. It’s a stereotype that anticommunists make up.

“The Nazis considered the ‘Zigeuner’ […] to be a social nuisance that would spoil the pure blood of the Aryan Master-race,” says Ruth Barnett, a Jewish Holocaust survivor rescued from Germany by the British organised ‘kindertransport’. She was rescued and brought to England as a child in 1939 and fostered on a Sussex farm and now uses her experience to teach school children about difference and prejudice. Ruth says that the mass murder of between a quarter of a million and one million Roma and Sinti by the [Axis] has been “airbrushed” from many classic accounts of the Holocaust.

The newly unearthed pictures were taken by soldiers as they advanced eastward across Europe. Picture © from the Romany Collection of Robert Dawson. All rights reserved. www.robertdawson.co.uk

“The Nazi attempt to wipe out all the Jews and Roma in Europe is called ‘The Shoah’ or ‘the burden’ by Jews, and ‘O Porrajmos’, or ‘the devouring’, by Roma,” says Ruth. “When the Nazis were defeated in 1945 and the camps liberated, the world was horrified to learn how the Jews had been rounded up, brutally treated, exploited as slave labour and murdered in gas chambers. There was hardly a mention of the Sinti and Roma […] who went through the same awful experiences.”

Shauna Levin, Director of René Cassin, a Jewish human rights organisation that campaigns on Roma rights and recognition, links this apparent historical amnesia to the present: “Although there are varying estimates about the exact death toll experienced by the Roma community, there is no question that Roma suffering during this time has not received enough attention,” she says. “Germany only officially recognised the Porrajmos in 1982. This is symbolic of the general reluctance to condemn anti-Roma biases that still exists today.”

The photograph of the [Axis] soldier and the Roma child come from a previously unpublished collection of what Professor Rainer Schulze, an expert on the […] ‘final solution’ and the Roma, describes as “an extremely rare historical record of encounters between German soldiers and Roma populations as the German Army invaded the Caucus and Balkan regions of Eastern Europe.”

The collection, never before seen in public, was extracted “for a considerable sum” from the “murky” and “secretive” world of private Holocaust memorabilia collectors by Roma […] heritage collector Bob Dawson. Unlike the Holocaust memorabilia collectors who keep their collections of objects and photographs under wraps, Bob Dawson has made his collection available to scholars and campaigners. The majority of Bob Dawson’s collections are now kept by Reading University and the photographs of the [Axis] soldiers with Roma are his most recent acquisition.

Picture © from the Romany Collection of Robert Dawson. All rights reserved. www.robertdawson.co.uk

“You have to understand that photographs of Gypsies in World War Two are very scarce,” says Bob Dawson. “Jews might be photographed to show them ‘getting what they deserved’ are so much commoner. Nazi racial theory met a stumbling block with the Roma and Sinti as, because of their ethnic origins in Northern India, they were more ‘Aryan’ than the Germans and yet the Nazis realised that they were not Aryan in the same way as the Nordic ideal.”

Bob Dawson explains that [Axis] racial theorists, such as Hans Günther, had to find an explanation to explain “alleged racial flaws” and that the solution was to label Roma and Sinti as ‘asocial’ and distinct from Germanic Ayrans because of their mingling with “inferior races”. “Gypsyness one generation further back than Jews was fatal under Nazi racial laws,” he says. “Therefore they could be even less fit for photographing than Jews, and of course, there were not as many of them either. If you have a look at some of the collections that are for sale, many have no Gypsy photographs at all, or only occasional ones. Therefore an accumulation like this is very rare indeed.”

Picture © from the Romany Collection of Robert Dawson. All rights reserved. www.robertdawson.co.uk

Professor Schulze agrees that the photographs are a unique discovery and that up till now there were “only very few” publicly available pictures taken of such normal looking encounters between [Axis] soldiers and Roma and Sinti during the rise and fall of [the] Third Reich. Most surviving photos of Roma and Sinti are “official” photographs, explains Professor Schulze, mainly taken during Dr. Joseph Mengele's infamous medical experiments on Jewish and [Romani] children at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.

“Obviously there would have been more ‘unofficial’ photographs taken by German soldiers,” he says. “But these have either been lost to the ravages of time or remain in private collections.” Professor Schulze adds that, although the pictures are almost certainly encounters between [Axis] soldiers and Roma populations in Southern Eastern Europe, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly when and where they were taken.

Picture © from the Romany Collection of Robert Dawson. All rights reserved. www.robertdawson.co.uk

“Some of the captioning mentions Croatia,” says Professor Schulze, “some pictures show cattle trucks and some may be work details, deportations or even preludes to massacres, but without clear information from whoever took them, their exact provenance will remain unclear.” Bob Dawson agrees that certainties about the photographs are elusive. He has gleaned what clues [that] he can from the captioning and cataloguing of the photographs and doubts whether the original seller, whom he describes “more as an accumulator than a collector”, would have any more information to give.

“Some of the photographs had writing on the back, obviously written by the soldier concerned,” he says. “Others had been taken from albums and the seller had put labels on the back with any information present when they were in the soldier’s album. When there was original information on the back it could be very difficult to decipher and old forms of German were sometimes used.”

Quoting Roger Branfill-Cook’s Torpedo: The Complete History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Naval Weapon, page 32:

[T]he [Fascists] developed and used with some degree of success their barchino esplosivo Type MT. This ‘exploding motorboat’ was operated by the famous Decima MAS, a cover name for the stealth units of the Regia Marina.

The method of operation was simple, but extremely hazardous. Carried to the scene of action by a mother craft, the MT-boat’s pilot steered directly for his target, set the charge to explode on contact, locked the controls and threw himself backward into the water, cradling in his arms his large, folded, back-rest cushion. The cushion floated, and he hauled himself up out of the water and onto his tiny raft, in order to escape the shock wave of the imminent explosion.

The immensely brave and dedicated pilots succeeded in crippling the British heavy cruiser HMs York in Suda Bay, Crete, on 25 March 1941 and sinking an oiler. The cruiser was beached with her engines out of action, and despite desperate efforts to repair her, she was wrecked by Stuka dive-bombers and scuttled.

On 26 July 1941 Decima MAS attempted a major attack on Malta’s Grand Harbour, which failed disastrously, through British early warning radar and the rapid-firing twin 6pdr guns of the coastal defences, and the unit’s leaders were killed.

Pages 32–33:

‘Linse’ in German means ‘lentil’, an appropriate name for the tiny, skimming explosive motorboats with which the Kleinkampfterband, or ‘small battle units’, were supposed to stop the Allied invasion of Fortress Europe — alongside the […] midget submarines. Of all the special attack units, the Linse seemed, even to its operators, to be the most suicidal, No doubt inspired by their Italian allies’ success with the MT-boat, the [Kriegsmarine] decided to copy the idea but go one stage further, combining raw courage with more advanced technology.

The Linse was a small wooden motorboat powered by the ubiquitous Ford V-8 petrol engine, with a reliable output of 95bhp. That was sufficient to propel these 1.8- ton 5.75m (18ft 10in) long × 1.75m (5ft 9in) wide boats at a top speed of 35 knots. In the stern compartment was a 300kg (660℔s) explosive charge, with a 7-second delay fuse. The charge in later boats was increased to 400kg (880℔s), They were intended to be used in groups of three, two filled with explosive[s] and steered by one man, and a third control boat, with a crew of three in a large rear compartment: the helmsman and two radio operators each directing an explosive Linse.

The explosive-boat pilots, who were less likely to be volunteers, but rather, picked from a penal battalion, would head at full speed for their chosen target. At the last moment they would illuminate red and green lights fitted to the stern of their Linse, and ba[il] out into the water, hoping to be picked up by the following control boat. The crew of the latter would, however, already have their hands full, using the red and green lights to direct the two Linse by radio control during the final part of their attack run. The radio system used was that taken from the Goliath remote control demolition tank, and was well-proven.

If all went well, each Linse would impact on the hull of the target vessel, when a metal framework around the bow would compress and fire a small explosive charge. This would blow off the bow section, leaving the rear section carrying the main charge to sink below the waterline of the victim. After 7 seconds the delayed action fuse would operate and blow the main charge. Ar that moment it was to be hoped that the crew of the control boat had faithfully followed their pilots and recovered them out of the water. Lacking the large floating cushion of the Decima MAS pilots, they would be at fearful risk of concussion from the blast.

All this adrenalin-fuelled uction, of course, would be framed in the gun-sights of the target vessel, which would be firing with every weapon that could bear. No wonder the Linse attacks were referred to by their operators as ‘Opferkämpfer’, or ‘suicide missions’.

Despite the drawbacks, these devices were actually taken into action. Their first recorded use was during an attack on the Anzio beachhead in April 1944 in conjunction with [insert slur here] units. That attack was a complete failure. However, it appears that Linse operators sank the Hunt-class destroyer HMS Quorn off the Normandy beaches on 3 August 1944, with the loss of 130 officers and men.

The final fling for the Linse occurred at Split on 12 February 1945, when six motorboats crossed the defensive boom and entered the harbour. They attacked the AA cruiser HMS Delhi and were engaged by the ship’s 20mm Oerlikons, They missed Delhi but one hit LCF 8 (landing craft flak) lying alongside and blew up. The resultant blast seriously damaged one of Delhi’s propeller shaft brackets and jammed her rudder. She had to be towed to Malta, and after surveying back at Chatham, she was deemed to be beyond economic repair.

It was suggested that perhaps the Linse units could also act as lifeboats for [insert slur here] pilots who had got into difficulty, Another scheme was to employ them to lay down smokescreens off the beaches. But finally, a degree of sanity prevailed and these extra tasks were dropped.

(For anybody wondering: yes, the Kriegsmarine named one of their vehicles after a racial slur, albeit one more shocking now than it was back then.)

The Imperial Japanese Army Air Service is infamous for its kamikaze tactic. Less well known is that the IJN, as you could see in my discussion of human torpedos, also deployed this suicidal tactic. Erminio Bagnasco’s Italian Assault Craft, 1940–1945: Human Torpedoes and other Special Attack Weapons, page 50:

Although [the Empire of] Japan had been building torpedo-armed mini-submarines with crews of 2, 3 and 5 people since 1936, the design and construction of underwater and surface assault craft only began in early 1944.

The surface craft, developed collaboratively by the Army and Navy, were explosive motorboats inspired by similar Italian craft, though a little less elaborate, and conceived essentially for coastal defence. At first known as ‘Maru Yon’ and later ‘Shynyo’ (literally ‘Ocean Agitator’), several variants of these boats were built (from ‘№ 1’ to ‘№ 5’), totalling 6200 units by the Navy and about 3000 by the Army.

The ‘Shynyo’ attack technique was usual for the explosive motorboats, inspired by the Italian use of this type of craft. The pilot was expected to abandon the motorboat by jumping into water just before impact with the target, but it was quite common amongst [Imperial] operators to sacrifice themselves by driving their boats until the end, or perishing from the effects of the explosion after bailing out too late.

This was a peculiarity of the ‘Shynyo’, which effectively became suicide boats, unlike similar Italian, German and British craft where the pilot’s survival was central to the operational concept.

The first mass use of the ‘Shyny’ occurred in January 1945, against the U.S. invasion fleet in the Gulf of Lingayen in the Philippines. The action took the U.S. Navy by complete surprise, and many landing and transport ships and craft were sunk or suffered considerable damage as a consequence, even though the amphibious operations suffered no significant slow-downs.

However, having recovered from the initial surprise, the Americans organised appropriate defences using mainly small units (PC, PCE and PT Boats), but above all the well-armed escort gunships of the LCS(L) type. In subsequent amphibious operations, the attacks by ‘Shynyo’ were almost completely neutralised, despite the high number of boats available to the [Axis] defence forces.

To get an idea of the quantities involved, it should be remembered that at the time of the occupation of the small island of Kerama Retto about 390 ‘Shynyos’ were found, ready to attack the [Allies] if they attempted a landing on Okinawa. The plan failed because Kerama Retto was occupied before Okinawa, completely surprising the [Axis]. On Okinawa, the [Axis was] forced to sabotage more than 700 explosive motorboats that could not be employed.

In anticipation of the invasion of the [Imperial] home territory a total of about 2000 ‘Shynyo’ were ready for the last-ditch defence, as early as the late spring of 1945. It was estimated that this mass of light motorboats could have attacked the Allied invasion fleet for ten consecutive days.

(Emphasis added.)