Quoting Russ Bellant’s Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and U.S. Cold War Politics, pages xvii–xviii:

It’s May 17, 1985: President Reagan has been back in the nation’s capital less than two weeks from his much-criticized trip to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Now, floodlights and television cameras that are part of a President’s entourage are waiting at the Shoreham Hotel, as are 400 luncheon guests.

Ronald Reagan had recently characterized the Nazi Waffen SS as "victims." It seemed a rewrite of the history of World War II rather than a recommitment to its painful lessons. Reagan’s comments held special meaning for some of his afternoon luncheon guests. Although it was a Republican Party affair, it was not the usual GOP set, but a special ethnic outreach unit, the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council (NRHG{N}C). The Republican Heritage Groups Council is an umbrella for various ethnic Republican clubs and operates under the auspices of the Republican National Committee.

If President Reagan needed a boost after the Bitburg fiasco, this was the crowd to supply it. To the assembled media, Reagan’s visit that afternoon appeared as a routine stop, perhaps paying a re-election debt. The Republican Heritage Groups Council did, in fact, help elect Reagan. And they gave him a long standing ovation that afternoon at the Shoreham. To some of those attending the 1985 Council meeting, Reagan’s rehabilitation of the Waffen SS must have offered a sense of personal and historic vindication.

The Republican Heritage Groups Council has a special type of outreach. It appears to have consciously recruited some of its members—and some of its leaders—from an Eastern European émigré network which includes anti­-Semites, racists, authoritarians, and fascists, including sympathizers and collaborators of [the] Third Reich, former [Axis personnel], and even possible war criminals. The persons in this network represent only a radical right fraction of the ethnic communities [that] they claim to represent.

These antidemocratic and racialist components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council use anticommunist sentiments as a cover for their views while they operate as a de facto émigré fascist network within the Republican Party. Some of these less savory antidemocratic personalities were part of the 1987 Republican Heritage Groups Council meeting as well as that 1985 luncheon audience; and some would later join the 1988 election campaign of George [H.W.] Bush.

Ronald Reagan said that it wasn’t what it looked like when he saluted those dead Axis soldiers, but as I am about to show you, we have plenty of reasons to suspect that he was lying about that, such as how he endorsed the so‐called ‘Captive Nations’, which was littered with neofascists and antisemites:

[I]n 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his successful presidential campaign at a Labor Day “ethnic festival” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. According to Jersey City’s Ukrainian Weekly newspaper, “The majority of the more than 20 ethnic groups taking part in the festival were affiliated with the Captive Nations Committee of New York.” Ivan Dochev died in 2005, but on paper he remains an honorary president of the Captive Nations Committee of New York, which the AF–ABN established in the 1950s.

With a friend of the “captive nations” finally in the White House, the 25th annual Captive Nations Week was dedicated to the fake 40th anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko got an invitation to Washington where he shook hands with President Reagan and Vice President Bush. According to Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant, the BNF-affiliated VOC trustee, Radi Slavoff, arranged Ivan Dochev’s 1984 visit to the White House as executive director of the Republican Heritage Groups Council, the GOP’s “special ethnic outreach unit.”

There was possibly some significant overlap between the Republican Heritage Groups Council and the now defunct World Anti-Communist League, of which Ronald Reagan was undeniably a member:

Members of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) — a right wing international cartel of sorts — include[d] such luminaries as Ferdinand Marcos, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Adolfo Calero, commander in chief of the armed forces of the FDN contras. The WACL’s roots [went] back to 1954 with the establishment of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. [In the 1980s,] the WACL [grew] to six regional organizations with affiliates in more than 90 countries.

One of the most important people in the WACL [was] retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub. Singlaub began his military and intelligence career as an OSS member during World War II. In 1976, he became Chief of Staff of both the United Nations and U.S. Army Forces in South Korea. He was removed in 1977 after he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s withdrawal of troops from Korea.

Singlaub joined WACL in 1980 and formed an American chapter called the United States Council for World Freedom. Singlaub was elected president. Singlaub [gave] the WACL credibility in several ways:

• President Reagan began calling the contras “freedom fighters” in 1983, a term the WACL and others on the far right have used for years.

• When U.S. Congress temporarily cut off Nicaraguan contra funding in 1984, a group of various American conservative leaders raised $25 million in private “contributions.” Singlaub and the WACL were at the center of the campaign.

• Several WACL members [had] been appointed as ambassadors to the Bahamas, Costa Rica, and Guatemala by Reagan.

Then, at the 17th Annual WACL Conference, held in San Diego, California, Singlaub read a letter which said in part, “The World Anti-Communist League has long played a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day. Nancy and I send our best wishes for every future success.” The letter was signed by Ronald Reagan.

The WACL [was] so extreme — according to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson who wrote INSIDE THE LEAGUE, an exposé of the WACL — that the John Birch Society […] shunned it and advise[d] its members to do likewise.

Geoffry Stewart-Smith, a staunch British anti-communist, left the WACL because it is “largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international […] the very existence of this organization is a total disgrace to the free world.”

Reagan knew what he meant when he said that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought on the ‘wrong side’ in the Spanish Civil War. While he might have been demented as early as the 1980s, it is absurdly unlikely that anybody would willingly associate with these types all by mistake.

Aside from these and a former HJ member whom he very briefly employed before firing for unrelated reasons, some of Reagan’s other associates included

J. Peter Grace — A scion of the Grace fortunes, he [was] head of Reagan’s commission to study domestic economic cuts.[56] For 30 years his company employed Otto Ambrose, [an Axis] war criminal from the German drug cartel I.G. Farben. Ambrose, a chemist, developed “Zyklon B,” the actual gas used in the chambers to kill the Jews and others deemed “inferior.”[57] The German steel group, Flick, which has extensive [Axis] ties in the past and whose scandals [were] rocking German politics [in the 1980s], hold a controlling stock interest in the Grace company.[58]

The Grace family is intimately involved with the formation of the anti-Communist American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD).[59] AIFLD played a key rôle in the Kissinger plan to overthrow Allende in Chile, and insert the ruling [para]fascist Pinochet.[60] After the coup, which involved American Green Berets,[61] Kissinger sent a Mr. Rauff from the State Department to advise the newly formed Chilean secret police (DINA). Rauff had been in charge of the “mobile ovens” used to kill [Roma] and Jews, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe for the [Third Reich].[62] These same forces were later involved in the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.[63]

Helene von Damm — Personal White House appointment secretary long-time personal secretary to Ronald Reagan, she stands to be appointed Ambassador to Vienna, and controls all cabinet level appointments in the Reagan administration.[64] She came to the United States in the 1950s in the company of Albrecht Otto von Bolschwing, and worked for him as a translator.[65] Von Bolschwing gave the direct orders to Adolph Eichmann in the dread[ed] Eisenstatz, group, the SS killers.[66] Helene’s husband, Christian von Damm, ran the Bank of America in La Paz, Bolivia, which defaulted on a huge U.S. loan.[67]

The Reagan régime had no interest in pursuing Axis war criminals. Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, chapter 12:

Ignored for decades, [Axis officials] in America had suddenly become a political flash point by the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House, with anger fomenting on all sides. The vigilantes leaving bombs on the doorsteps of ex-Nazis were only part of the firestorm.

Many conservative Cold Warriors were furious, too, but for very different reasons. While the Jewish militants were angry that the American justice system hadn’t gone far enough to track down ex-Nazis, the conservatives were upset that it had gone too far, playing right into the hands of the Communists, they charged. Inside the gates of the White House, the conservative critics found a fierce ally in President Reagan’s own firebrand advisor, Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge-obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished, and from his prominent perch in Washington—as a top aide to Reagan at the White House, in his nationally syndicated newspaper columns, and in his frequent cable-TV appearances—he launched what amounted to a one-man PR assault through the 1980s. The Justice Department had better things to do than “running down seventy-year-old camp guards,” Buchanan wrote, or “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime.”

(Emphasis added in most cases.)

Reagan’s last fifteen minutes of shame came out in 2019, when Timothy J. Naftali published a telephone conversation that Governor Reagan had with President Richard Nixon, in which Gov. Reagan ridiculed Africans. (Reagan supported presidential candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960s, and ex-president Nixon would return the favor in the 1980s.) A less well known example was when Gov. Reagan dismissed three Jewish chaplains, understandingly provoking accusations of antisemitism:

Governor Ronald Reagan’s dismissal of three Jewish chaplains, the entire complement ministering on a full time basis to patients of that faith in California’s 14 mental hospitals, is a “blatant act of anti-Semitism.” That was the statement today of Percy Moore, executive director of Oakland’s anti-poverty program and the president of the California Community Action Program Directors Association, a state-wide organization composed of anti-poverty leaders.

Moore, who is black, said that the elimination of all three Jewish chaplains, effective July 1, while some 33 Catholic and Protestant chaplains are retained for full-time work in the mental hospitals, is “nothing more than a blatant act of anti-Semitism that is right in line with other recent acts of the Governor that discriminate against the poor and the sick, and with special impact of those of the minority groups.”

Rabbi Harry Hyman agreed. Of course, given Reagan’s tokenization of Jews, and more importantly, his support for the occupation of Palestine, too many people were willing to forgive or forget this episode. Nevertheless, Reagan’s support was not for Jews in general, but Herzlians like the Hebrew fascist Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom he admired:

“Few are the leaders who in their own lifetime have become a legend. Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky to whom you pay tribute was such a leader. He was a soldier, statesman and poet who believed in the sanctity of the individual. He was a visionary who dreamt of a free Israel in its historic homeland, a society based on justice and the spirit of the ancient prophets. I extend to you may very best wishes for the success of this historic event.”

Needless to say, this topic merely exposes Ronald Reagan’s associations with fascists and neofascists. A definitive iconoclasm would take hours to read, even though it would help explain why neofascists like the Daily Stormer admire Reagan, as did fascists like Léon Degrelle, who wrote in 1992 that

Enrichment follows investment, not the other way around. Since Hitler, only Ronald Reagan has seemed to understand this. As President, he realized that to restore prosperity in the United States meant boldly stimulating the economy with credits and a drastic reduction in taxes, instead of waiting for the country to emerge from economic stagnation on its own.

‘Prosperity’ indeed. Between further impoverishing the lower classes, wasting money on anticommunist terrorism, embracing apartheid, neglecting the AIDS crisis by demonizing homosexuals, and impoverishing scores of millions of Easterners, it is easy to understand why antisocialists consecrate this white supremacist.

Quoting Gabriella Romano’s The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy: The Case of ‘G’, page 29:

Virility, [George L.] Mosse argued, became a national symbol during the régime, embodied by the dictator’s himself, his physique, his behaviour and way of addressing the crowds, his gestures; dandyism, weakness, effeminacy were perceived as anything that stood in the way, anything that was anti-Mussolini and his ideology.

Furthermore, as the régime concentrated on demographic campaigns, homosexuality came to be perceived as sterile and therefore essentially anti-fascist and selfish, against what was good for the nation. The New Italian Man’s actions were to be inspired by his love for the country: private life was considered a responsible act towards the nation, sexuality had to be aimed at procreation.

(This story takes approximately ten minutes to read. Aside from the subjects of misogyny and white supremacy, it also mentions domestic abuse and menstruation, which a few readers may find too discomforting to read.)

Margot Liu née Holzmann had a talent for survival. A Jewish lesbian living in Berlin, she had endured [Fascism] in the 1930s. Yet, in September 1941 she found herself compelled to wear the Star of David. Rather than submit to its indignity and to the prospect of deportation to a concentration camp and eventual extermination, Margot found a way out.

At a birthday party that month hosted by her landlady Frau A., she met Chi Lang Liu, a Chinese waiter who had moved to [the Weimar Republic] in 1932. Margot knew that marrying this man would provide her with Chinese citizenship, thus shielding her from the [Third Reich’s] genocidal laws.⁶⁶

As her girlfriend Martha Halusa averred after the war, in an application to the committee on the ‘Victims of Fascism’ with the Berlin Magistrate, ‘my girlfriend (Freundin) Frau Liu married a Chinese man to save herself from evacuation.’⁶⁷

On 11 October, while celebrating Chi’s birthday, he and Margot had sex for the first time, at which point they decided to become engaged. Eight days later, Chi would claim, ‘Holzmann told me that she had not had her period and that I had to marry her then and there.’⁶⁸

When questioned about the episode some months later, Margot would swear to the police that her periods were highly irregular due to an unspecified ‘affliction of the womb (Unterleibsleiden).’ Unsure if her period was simply late or if Chi had indeed impregnated her, Margot averred, ‘I told Chi that I had not yet had my period without any specific purpose, whereupon he told his entire circle of friends, that I was bearing a little Chinese.’⁶⁹

She was not, as it turned out, pregnant. Margot married Chi on 13 November, securing Chinese citizenship. She was thereby ‘released from wearing the Star of David and protected from evacuation,’ as the Kripo would compulsively mention in their reports on the relationship months later.⁷⁰

Chi claimed that he slept alone on their wedding night, abandoned by his new bride for Martha’s bed in her apartment in the house of the S. family. When he arrived at Martha’s apartment two days later to see Margot, she finally allowed him to spend the night in the bed she shared with Martha. Only in December did Margot and Chi move together into a furnished room let by a Frau Kr. Martha took a room in the same building soon thereafter.⁷¹

Martha had met Margot 12 years earlier when they danced together at the Hamburg cabaret Alkazar. As Margot had lost friends and family to the inexorable progress of [Fascist] antisemitism — her mother died and her father ‘was evacuated,’ that is, sent to a concentration camp and likely exterminated — she relied on Martha more and more.

She would protest to the police investigating her for lesbianism, ‘it is understandable that I would confide in Halusa, who[m] I have been friends with for so long, and draw closer to her.’⁷² In Martha’s postwar application, in which she calls Margot her ‘partner’ and her ‘girlfriend,’ we have surer proof that they were indeed in a romantic relationship.⁷³ But while under interrogation by the Kripo, each woman did their best to deny lesbian proclivities.

Chi eventually noticed that Margot was carrying on an affair with Martha — ‘it became clear to me then that Halusa and my wife practiced lesbian love.’ This in turn had led to numerous arguments and fights between him and his wife. Margot eventually disappeared on 15 May 1942, whereupon Chi again moved and later filed for divorce.

That fall, the criminal police Streife West — not the KJ.M.II.2 division to which M. belonged — received an anonymous tip.⁷⁴ It is entirely likely [that] Chi himself sent it; Martha claimed after the war that Chi ‘denounced us several times.’⁷⁵ The tip claimed that Margot and Martha were lesbians and also engaged in [sex work].⁷⁶

The charge is not an unusual one, for, as noted above, lesbian women often engaged in [sex work].⁷⁷ Moreover, though [sex work] was not technically illegal, [sex workers] faced increasingly draconian regulations and persecution as the war progressed.⁷⁸

The tip prompted a detective K. to open an investigation and to invite Chi to provide information regarding his relationship with Margot. So perturbing did he evidently find Chi’s story, that three days later he visited Margot’s new residence in the apartment of a Frau St.

To his consternation, Frau St.’s 12-year-old daughter answered the door. He questioned her about Margot, and the girl affirmed that although she technically slept on the sofa of her mother’s apartment, Margot frequently bedded with Martha in a separate room. K.’s report concluded:

Through marriage the full-blooded Jewess Liu has now become a Chinese citizen. Both [she and Martha] practice lesbian love and the public is shocked, that lesbian love would be entertained between an Aryan and a Jewess, moreover there are children in the household who are thereby morally endangered.⁷⁹

It is curious that the race of each party constituted such a strong point of interest. While the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had banned marriage and sex between Aryans and Jews out of the deep-seated [Fascist] fear of miscegenation, there was no danger of ‘mixed-race’ children resulting from Margot and Martha’s fornication.⁸⁰ Of course, the inspector could have believed [that] Martha and Margot had violated the laws that forbade Jews from socializing with Aryans; in either event, the report referred to no statute.

More important, the passage makes clear that Margot and Martha’s alleged crimes consisted not so much in loving each other, as in causing a public disturbance and exposing children to what K. considered morally deleterious behavior. What his report counter-intuitively brings to light, however, is that none of the individuals either women came into contact with seemed the slightest bit distraught by their alleged lesbianism.

The detective noted no perturbation on the part of Frau St.’s daughter, nor from the landlady herself (it seems [that] he did not even speak to her). That is, despite claiming ‘the public is shocked’ by Margot and Martha’s behavior, K. did not take down a single expression of surprise, anger, or shock in his report. This is peculiar, particularly because he would soon thereafter forward the account to division KJ.M.II.2, where it would be used as evidence to build a case against Margot and Martha.

Even stranger, no report in the entire file from either division notes the slightest irritation or amazement on the part of any of the numerous landladies with whom the pair lived during the months encompassed in the file. Nor were any of them asked to give evidence.

The next day, inspector K. transferred the file to M. at KJ.M.II.2 ‘for jurisdictional reasons.’⁸¹ Several weeks thereafter, on 15 October, M. brought in Margot and Martha. The two women had a very different story to tell. Margot contested having ever been in a same-sex relationship with Martha, asserting instead, ‘before the promulgation of the Nürnberg laws [of 1935], I was intimately friendly with the German-blooded Hans S. for six years.’

Moreover, she characterized Chi as a Janus-faced ruffian, telling the police that, ‘before the marriage, my husband had only shown himself in the best light. On the day of our marriage my husband was as though changed. He treated me like his maid and hit me numerous times thereafter.’⁸² Chi apparently told her, in the presence of their landlady, that he would connive to put her in jail. He further threatened that if this did not work, he would stab her to death.⁸³

At this stage, Margot’s statement took a bizarre turn. Though unsuccessful in convincing the police of her heterosexuality, she had effectively denied the allegation of prostitution, proving to the inspector that she had recently found employment.⁸⁴

The police left the question of whether she had previously prostituted herself unanswered. But Margot used the question of employment to attack her husband, underscoring that he only appeared to work.

While she had kept the household together by selling over 2000 Reichsmark (RM) worth of clothing, her husband called in sick from work and frittered his time and savings away gambling.⁸⁵ When they first married, he had described his predilection to her ‘as a harmless social game. It has to do with playing ‘Ma Jong’ and various other games of chance.’⁸⁶

Shortly before Easter 1943, however, Chi disappeared. He called Margot three days later, demanding that she bring him something to eat on Dresdener Straße. She described the scene that confronted her thus:

I saw around thirty people at the table and standing around the playing table. Massive sums of money lay on the table. When I entered, everyone became agitated and my husband sprang up from the playing table, and shoved me through the door.⁸⁷

Margot had caught the barest glimpse of a gambling ring. She later reported to M. that, according to Chi’s friends, he had won around 15,000 RM at these games, which brought Chinese men ‘from all cities in Germany and also from Vienna, who had come to Berlin only for the purpose of the game.’⁸⁸

If Margot is to be believed — and it is possible that she simply possessed an overactive imagination — then dozens of Chinese citizens traveled from all corners of the Reich to take part in an underground racket. This is doubly curious as Germany’s 1939 census showed a mere 1,138 Chinese living in the Greater Reich. After the onset of hostilities between China and [the Third Reich] on 9 December, 1941, the régime began interning some Chinese citizens in concentration camps and deporting others.⁸⁹

When Martha came to the police station, she gave a short statement in support of Margot. She contested at the outset, ‘I am normally sexually inclined and have never had intimate relations with Margot.’ While Martha did admit to practicing [sex work], she insisted [that] she regularly visited a doctor to check for venereal diseases, a routine practice in [the German Reich] for regulating and monitoring [sex workers].⁹⁰

At the end of her statement she made a ham-handed attempt to discredit Chi, indicating that he had called Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of independent China, his Führer and that ‘he said, that Chiang Kai-shek is good and [that] Hitler is bad.’⁹¹

For Margot, the investigation seems to have turned out well on balance. On one hand, M. did not believe either woman’s avowals of heterosexuality. He noted in particular, ‘that the prostitutes in Berlin’s West say of Halusa and Liu that they entertain an intimate relationship.’⁹²

He further indicated — just as in the cases above — because Margot and Martha ‘were not previously registered as lesbians with us (sind als Lesbierinnen hier karteimäßig bisher nicht bekannt geworden),’ that ‘registration cards have been provided for (Karteikarten wurden angelegt).’⁹³ Again, the purpose and significance of the registration remains unclear.

M.’s report mentioned that Chi’s lawyer had promised [that] Margot would keep her Chinese citizenship if she assumed fault for the marriage’s dissolution. While he referred Chi’s case of gambling to the state police for further investigation, the shield of foreign citizenship apparently continued to protect Margot.⁹⁴

Given that the government had begun taking Chinese into custody after China declared war, it is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship.

Not only did the police detectives persistently insist that Margot’s Chinese citizenship safeguarded her from deportation to a concentration camp, they also demonstrated remarkably little interest in finding a way around this seemingly legalistic hurdle.

As in each of the cases above, M. sent the case file to the state’s attorney at the district court in Berlin. There is no record, however, of what, if any, conclusion [that] the state’s attorney or court reached on the matter, and here the criminal police record drops off.⁹⁵

But Martha’s 1945 application provides a sketch of what happened to the couple. Of the denunciations by Chi she claimed that the two of them escaped unscathed, ‘because we made his behavior out to be an act of revenge.’⁹⁶ She indicated that they began printing anti-fascist flyers in 1943 and that they stayed hidden for the rest of the war, living on Swinemünder Straße.⁹⁷

Walking her dog one evening, Martha claimed [that] she ran into the owner of a nearby store and her boyfriend. In February 1945, this pair invited Martha and Margot, who[m] they knew were a couple, to a birthday celebration, where ‘anti-Nazi conversations took place.’⁹⁸

Unfortunately, they were Gestapo agents and the party was a trap. Margot and Martha were arrested and taken to the SS prison on Oranienburgerstraße. If they had escaped the Kripo without much trouble, their interrogations at the hands of the Gestapo were heinous:

The questioning was terrible; but my girlfriend Frau Liu had it the hardest, because she was dealt with in the most inhuman way not only for political reasons, but also because she is a Jew. After one interrogation she was so battered that I could hardly recognize her. The Gestapo inspector Heinz let out his entire rage on my girlfriend. The Gestapo bureaucrats told us that we were candidates for execution (Todeskandidaten).⁹⁹

Martha was charged with treason and other political crimes. With Margot she was transferred to a Gestapo prison. In April, as the [Soviets] advanced on Berlin and the régime was frantically destroying files, the couple was summoned to a hearing. The soldier escorting them ‘whispered, be brave, the Russians are in Bernau, files are all destroyed, lie to get yourselves out of here (lügt euch raus).’¹⁰⁰

That is precisely what they did. Martha and Margot told the Gestapo official that they were in prison merely for having made statements against the régime while intoxicated. Margot remained mute about her Jewishness. They were instructed to take themselves to the Oranienburgerstraße Gestapo offices, which they did not do. As soon as Margot and Martha were set free, ‘we hid ourselves for four more days until the Russians came. Then finally we were saved and the Hitler-régime was destroyed.’¹⁰¹

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 267–269:

Rudolf Vrba […] wrote that:

I am a Jew. In spite of that — indeed because of that I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. Kasztner. […] I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’²⁶

When Professor Jacob Talmon criticised Hannah Arendt for referring to this, Vrba asked:

Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders — for example Dr. R. Kasztner — bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.²⁷

These letters are not found in Hebrew history text books.²⁸ The [Auschwitz] Protocols were erased from Zionism’s holocaust historiography because they did not accord with its narrative.²⁹ That was why Vrba described Israel as a ‘state of the Judenrats and Kastners’.³⁰ For Fatran, Vrba could never be considered as credible as Zionist members of the Judenrat or Vaada.

It was not until 1997 that Vrba appeared in Bauer’s writings as a reliable eyewitness and it was not until 1999, a year after Vrba’s memoirs were published in Hebrew, that an account of his escape from Auschwitz was mentioned in Gutman’s Hebrew writings for school students.³¹

Bauer had been forced to accept that the [Auschwitz] Protocols could be credited with making three major breakthroughs: changing the Allies’ belief that Auschwitz was a huge labour camp, mainly for Poles; that it was the first detailed and reliable report of the extermination and thirdly ‘it jolted the Swiss into undertaking wide publication of the German mass killing at Auschwitz.’³²

Linn, an Education Professor at Haifa University, first became aware of Vrba via his interview in Lanzmann’s Shoah. Linn met Vrba by chance at the University of British Columbia.³³ Despite having been taught about the Holocaust, she had not heard of him. When Linn conducted a survey of her own students 98% were ignorant of the fact that any Jews had escaped from Auschwitz. Neither the escape nor the [Auschwitz] Protocols had formed part of Israeli schools’ Holocaust curriculum.

Linn’s explanation was that ‘Vrba’s escape contradict[ed] Bauer’s thesis that the Jews didn’t know, and that if they were aware, then they didn’t really grasp the situation.’ The Jewish leaders however ‘did know and did grasp what was happening, because they saved themselves.’ Linn reserved her main ire for Gutman whose The Holocaust and its meaning, a basic text taught in Israeli schools did not mention Vrba and Wetzler’s escape from Auschwitz.³⁴

Official Israeli holocaust history has erased the record of anti-Zionist Jewish resistance to the [Fascists]. This was not only because of the fiction that only Zionists represented the Jews of Europe but because some of the most prominent Jewish collaborators with the [Fascists] were Zionists.³⁵ In its place Israel’s holocaust historians have substituted the heroic myth of Zionist resistance.³⁶

Vrba was first given academic legitimacy by a German journal. In 1996, he gave his views of the role of the Jewish Councils, in Vierteljahrsheft fuer Zeitgeschichte. Bauer responded, agreeing that the Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were ignorant of their impending fate.³⁷

It was only after a dogged campaign by Linn that the [Auschwitz] Protocols and Vrba’s memoirs were printed in Hebrew in 1998 and that Vrba received an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.³⁸ Linn asked whether a narrative of escape or resistance by a non-Zionist Jew could ever be made to harmonise with the national myths dominating Israel.³⁹

In 1963 Vrba published his memoirs, I Escaped from Auschwitz. They were published in virtually every language bar one — Hebrew. Publishers, including YV [Yad Vashem], weren’t interested.⁴⁰ Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights, first published in 1945, suffered a similar fate, only being translated into Hebrew in 2001.

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be moulded along with the political order of that time… extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’⁴¹

After the war Edelman insisted on living in Poland and refused to accept the Zionist claim to ownership of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.⁴²

Vrba and Wetzler were rendered anonymous. Oskar Neumann referred to ‘two young Jewish chaps…’ in his 1956 memoirs.⁴³ Oskar Krasniansky refers to ‘two young people’⁴⁴ and Rothkirchen to ‘two young men’.⁴⁵ In Bauer’s The Holocaust — Some Historical Aspects they are referred to as ‘two Slovak Jews’⁴⁶ Dina Porat wrote about ‘two young Slovak Jews…’⁴⁷ Porat cited Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies as her source, yet Gilbert named both.⁴⁸

In the 1990 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Wetzler and Vrba are mentioned by name.⁴⁹ But in the 2001 edition they are referred to as ‘two Jewish prisoners.’ The USHMM and the Hebrew inscription of the Auschwitz escape in YV refers to ‘two young Slovak Jews.’⁵⁰

Erich Kulka interviewed Vrba and Wetzler in Czechoslovakia, giving them full recognition.⁵¹ After he joined YV, Vrba was referred to as ‘Rosenberg-Vrba’.⁵²

Whilst admitting that the [Auschwitz] Protocols had saved about 200,000 Jews from deportation he complained that Vrba had ‘attacked and humiliated’ former members of UZ [Ústredňa Židov; the Slovakian Jewish Council or Judenrat].⁵³

In YV the Hungarian version of the Protocols can only be found in a file dealing with the Kasztner case, minus its authors’ names!⁵⁴ Nor is there an English or Hebrew version.⁵⁵ The escapees are referred to as ‘two young Slovak Jews.’ As John Conway noted: ‘energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew’.⁵⁶

The silencing of Vrba and Wetzler was exploited by [Shoah] deniers such as Arthur Butz, author of Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz argued that if the content of the Protocols were true, Israeli historians would certainly know their names and publicise their report.’⁵⁷ Butz alleged that the Protocols were invented by the [War Refugee Board]. Another holocaust denier who adopted this line of argument was Robert Faurisson.⁵⁸

The five Jewish escapees from Auschwitz were airbrushed out of Zionist history. When Otto Kulka asked why Vrba and Wexler’s part in informing the UZ was missing from Rothkirchen’s presentation at a 1968 YV conference on Jewish Resistance, she replied, ‘I was speaking of the organised escapes. The escapes from Auschwitz were acts of individual heroism.’ This was both untrue and irrelevant. The Zionists played no part in the camp’s resistance.⁵⁹

As Porat conceded, ‘one notion remained unchanged in the Yishuv’, that the Jewish Resistance was primarily Zionist.’⁶⁰ The problem was that neither Edelman nor Vrba had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’⁶¹

In 1994, at a conference at the USHMM, Vrba asked who was the better historian, those who had direct experience of the [Fascists] or those who wrote about them?⁶² Vrba’s crime was that he was neither a Zionist nor a historian.⁶³

A useful summary of how the experiences of those who were present during the Holocaust was marginalised is given by Conway.⁶⁴ Fatran described his allegations that the UZ concealed information about the Holocaust from Slovakian Jewry as being ‘blatantly contrary to the historical truth’⁶⁵ despite the fact that she had justified such concealment.⁶⁶

(Emphasis added.)

For as violent and horrific as the Libyan campaign was, the entire 10 years coincidentally occurred in the first decade of Fascist rule. Historians have noted that there is a difference between the first and second decades of Fascist control, with the second decade signifying a turning point to where the régime embraces all of its violent characteristics.

R.J. Bosworth agrees with this assessment in his book Mussolini and the Eclipse of Fascism and indicates that by 1932 there was no universal meaning for Fascism and that Mussolini still had not yet demonstrated that totalitarianism was synonymous with evil.²⁹

Yet, in 1932 when Mussolini published the definition of Fascism he opened the definition by writing Fascism “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”³⁰

Here it becomes clear that Fascism looks to embrace war as central to its dogma and thus indicates a turning point where Fascism would utilize war to carry out its ideas.

[…]

In Rome on October 2nd of 1935, Mussolini would declare war on Ethiopia. In this declaration of war Mussolini would go on to say “Never before, as at this historical hour, have the people of Italy revealed the quality of its spirit and such force of character, and it is against this people to which mankind owes its greatest conquests, this people of heroes, of poets, of saints, of navigators, of colonizers, that the world dares threaten sanctions.”³⁴

This excerpt, though mostly aimed at dispelling the possibilities of sanctions from Britain and France, also shows Mussolini praising Italy’s past and complementing his people for being united in wanting war with Ethiopia. After seven months of fighting, [the Regio Esercito] would enter Addis Ababa and claim victory.

On May 5th of 1936, Mussolini would give a speech about the end of the war saying “it is our peace, Roman peace, which is expressed in this simple, irrevocable, definite phrase: Ethiopia is Italian! It is Italian in fact because it is occupied by our victorious armies. It is Italian in law because of the law of Rome and civilization which triumphs over barbarities.”³⁵

The reference to Rome here in the case of Ethiopia is new but not surprising, as Mussolini seemingly evokes Rome whenever he gets a victory reaffirming how vital Romanità is to his Fascism. Four days after this speech, Mussolini would give another speech proclaiming the Italian Empire.

In the speech Mussolini goes on to say “Italy has at last got her Empire, the Fascist Empire, which bears the indestructible signs of the determination and the power of the Roman Littorio, because this is the goal towards which, for fourteen years, the overflowing and disciplined energies of the young, sturdy generations of Italy were encouraged. It is an Empire of peace, because Italy wants peace for herself and for all, and decides upon warfare only when compelled to do so by imperious, uncontrollable necessities of life.”³⁶

This speech does a lot in that Mussolini claims [that] Italy only wants peace even though he defined Fascism as strictly opposing peace.

‘I have never met anyone who wasn’t against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.’ — David Low, 1946

(Mirror.)

“At this time (1931 at the earliest) I learned of the existence of friendly relations between Privy Councillor Dr. Emil Kirdorf, a leading man in the coal industry in the Ruhr, and the Führer. […] Through Kirdorf and later through Fritz Thyssen, the Führer was introduced to the circles of Rhenish-Westphalian industry, which supported him and the party financially.”⁸⁷

These words come from a statement made by Walter Funk to the Allied investigating authorities after the Second World War. Even before 1933, Funk was an intermediary between the NSDAP leadership and German major industry. Professionally, he was editor-in-chief of the Berliner Börsenzeitung and later also worked as Reich Economics Minister and Reichsbank President.⁸⁸ So these are the words of an insider.

The rôle of the major industrialists Emil Kirdorf and Fritz Thyssen has been greatly downplayed in historiography in order to deny the links between German major industry and Hitler.⁸⁹ The reasons for th[ese] apologetics are beside the point here. In any case, in later works on this subject, Kirdorf was in principle no longer dealt with at all and Thyssen was often assigned the rôle of a loner.⁹⁰

Fundamentally, it should be noted that these positions and accounts of Kirdorf and Thyssen have already been debunked in detail by the author of this essay, both in his dissertation (2012) and in later publications on the subject.⁹¹

As chairman of the supervisory board and major shareholder of Vereinigte Stahlwerke — the largest steel group in Europe at the time — and as a member of the board of the Bergbauverein, Thyssen was without question one of the 19 leading major industrialists of the Weimar Republic and was therefore certainly one of the absolute leaders of major industry in Germany at the time.⁹²

In the case of Emil Kirdorf, it was argued that he was over eighty-years old and in “retirement” when he met Hitler, and despite his fifty years as a leading industrialist and multiple association chairman, he suddenly had no political contacts and of course no political influence whatsoever, as well as no access to the money pots of big industry or the industrial associations. At most he was an old man who could at best be described as a kind of “ghost driver” or loner.⁹³

As already mentioned, the reality was quite different and the only grain of truth in this apologetic is that Kirdorf gave up his position as Chairman of the Board of GBAG — the largest German mining company — in 1926. However, this was not because he wanted to “retire”, but because his old company was suddenly to become the main shareholder of Vereinigte Stahlwerke.

Although Vereinigte Stahlwerke was the largest steel group in Europe, it was impossible for GBAG to become the main owner of this completely indebted group in the midst of the arms crisis. With this new rôle, the banks risked GBAG’s existence in the poker game for Vereinigte Stahlwerke.⁹⁴ This was the company that Kirdorf had built up since 1873 and he was understandably unwilling to accept this new situation. Kirdorf therefore resigned from the board.⁹⁵

In 1927, when Kirdorf met Hitler a year later, he was still deputy chairman of the supervisory board of “Discontogesellschaft” — one of the most important major German banks — and after the merger of this bank with Deutsche Bank in 1929, he moved first to the supervisory board and from 1932 to the main committee of Deutsche Bank.⁹⁶

In addition to Kirdorf, the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank alone included 13 corporate leaders from the coal and steel and heavy industry sectors, many representatives of other branches of industry, such as board members of IG Farben, Siemens-Werke and eight bankers from other banks.⁹⁷

Kirdorf was also a member of the Rhenish-Westphalian Committee of Deutsche Bank, where a “who’s who” of Rhenish entrepreneurship was also to be found. In addition to Kirdorf, the Rhenish-Westphalian committee included group leaders from Klöckner-Eisen-AG, Rheinische Braunkohlen AG, Rheinisches Braunkohlesyndikat, Deutz AG, Hoesch AG and others.⁹⁸

The coal industrialist Karl Wilke, a mine director at GBAG, reported on the extent of Kirdorf’s influence among German industrialists. He wrote in his memoirs that Kirdorf’s villa became a “place of pilgrimage” at the end of the 1920s, where the “Nestor of German heavy industry” — as Kirdorf was called — was revered as a “patriarch”.⁹⁹

That was no exaggeration. On Kirdorf’s birthday alone in 1927 — when he first met Hitler — over 300 industrialists undertook a torchlight procession to Kirdorf’s villa in pouring rain. The list of participants in this torchlight procession included Gustav Knepper, Ernst Tengelmann, Albert Hoppstetter, Karl Ruschen, Hermann Kellermann, Erich Fickler, Ernst Büskül and Gerd Haarmann — in short, the who’s who of leading coal industrialists who sat on the board of the mining association.¹⁰⁰

Arriving at Kirdorf’s villa, Alfred Hugenberg, who was also on the board of the mining association,¹⁰¹ gave a speech where he said the following about Kirdorf:

“Today the torches speak [...] As students, we honored our teachers and leaders with torches. Today, the managers and directors of the Ruhr coal mines honor their teacher and leader Emil Kirdorf.”¹⁰²

Little more needs to be said about Kirdorf’s influence in the economy and his political rôle — except that he had direct access to the Bergbauverein’s funds, as he was a member of the Bergbauverein’s executive committee until the early 1930s, and it was there that decisions were made about the use of the organization’s funds.¹⁰³ On a side note, the association’s correspondence also demonstrates clearly that Kirdorf was involved in the decisions on the use of these funds.¹⁰⁴

Finally, it must be said that the coal industrialists Emil Kirdorf, Fritz Thyssen and Albert Vögler were close friends.¹⁰⁵ All three were among the 19 leading major capitalists of the Weimar Republic.¹⁰⁶ It was precisely because of their close personal relationship that they played a major rôle in opening doors for Hitler and other [Fascist] leaders in the business world, giving them access to the political influence and money of German heavy industry.¹⁰⁷

Over the course of three years the fascist colonial authorities in the […] colony of Cyrenaica emptied an entire region of its people in an effort to quell an anti-colonial rebellion and prepare the colony for settlement and incorporation into Mussolini’s envisioned Fascist empire. In this short time span, fascist authorities forcibly deported the semi-nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica from their homeland in the Jebel region and interned them in concentration camps on the desert coast.

These policies resulted in the deaths of more than half of the semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica, the decimation of their herds, and the near elimination of their way of life. [Fascist] Italy proudly broadcast this episode of colonial conquest to its fellow Western imperial powers who watched a genocide unfold with relative disinterest.

This international neglect provided Fascist Italy with the opportunity to pursue its genocidal policies with minimal consequences or scrutiny, strengthen its geopolitical position in colonial Africa, and elaborate an increasingly radical, violent, and self-assured ideology for […] Fascist colonialism.

[…]

Over a period of four short years the Fascist colonial government forcibly deported an estimated 100,000 “semi-nomadic” people from the colony’s interior and held them in a string of 16 concentration camps on the Mediterranean Coast.

From 1929 to 1934 Cyrenaica’s estimated population dropped from 225,000 to 142,000, indicating that 83,000 people disappeared from the colony in only five years. Of the 83,000 missing, about 60,000–70,000 are believed to have died as a result of the policies of deportation and internment.²

[…]

With the rebellion in Tripolitania crushed and the Benghazi parliament formally suppressed, the fascist regime was free to use whatever means necessary to “pacify” Cyrenaica. The “pacification” of Cyrenaica was by no means the first time that the Italian government employed novel weapons and tactics against its colonial subjects.

The initial invasion of Libya in 1911 saw the first use of aeronautical anti-civilian tactics. The [Regia Aeronautica] would swoop low over Libyan villages and hand-drop explosives on military targets in order to terrorize the civilian population.²³

The Fascists utilized airplanes in Libya again in 1926 when [Fascist] Italy became the first country to intentionally use poisonous gas against civilian populations by dropping canisters of phosgene gas on caravans in the Libyan interior.²⁴

By the end of the 1920s the military situation in Cyrenaica had become untenable for the [Fascists]. Omar al-Mukhtar’s highly mobile guerrilla bands known as duar were able to attack [Fascist] military positions and then quickly disappear back into civilian society making them nearly impossible for a formal army to suppress.

The Governor of Cyrenaica from 1926 to 1929, Attilio Terruzzi, bemoaned that even armies of 5,000 or 10,000 men were insufficient against even a few hundred guerilla fighters who, owing to their semi-nomadic lifestyle, weren’t tied to any specific location and seemed to be able to appear and disappear spontaneously across hundreds of kilometers.²⁵ Terruzzi’s strategy was to use brute force and technological superiority to combat an enemy with better knowledge of the terrain and integration into the local society.

Located around three miles away from Mauthausen concentration camp, the Gusen site had attracted the SS because of its proximity to the Gusen and Kastenhof stone quarries. SS authorities purchased land at the site on May 25, 1938. Managers of the SS-owned firm Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DESt-German Earth and Stone Works), which used concentration camp prisoner labor to extract and finish construction materials at Mauthausen, established next to the “Wiener Graben” stone quarry in 1938, deployed a forced labor detachment from Mauthausen on a daily basis to the Gusen quarries beginning in 1938.

Tiring of marching the prisoner detachment three miles to the Gusen quarries, SS authorities authorized the construction of concentration camp Gusen in late 1939. During the winter of 1939–1940, German, Austrian, and Polish concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen constructed the camp and prisoner barracks.

Although the site counted as an external labor detachment of Mauthausen during its initial construction, the SS opened Gusen as a separate camp on May 25, 1940, identifying the surviving 212 prisoners from the construction detachment by separate Gusen incarceration numbers and removing their names from Mauthausen records. That same day, a transport of approximately 1,084 Polish prisoners arrived in Gusen.

Over the next several weeks, the SS transferred some 8,000 Polish prisoners to Gusen from other concentration camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Gusen retained its autonomous status until early 1944. It had its own numbering system, death registry, SS guard battalion, and postal administration.

During the period of its construction, SS Sergeant Anton Streitwieser commanded the Gusen external detachment site. On July 1, 1940, SS Captain Karl Chmielewski became the camp commandant. In late 1942, SS First Lieutenant Fritz Seidler replaced him. Seidler commanded the camp until liberation.

Prisoners

In addition to German, Austrian, and Polish prisoners, the SS incarcerated in Gusen approximately 4,000 Spanish Republicans (Spanish refugees, who had found refuge from the Franco regime in France in 1939 and whom Vichy French authorities turned over to the Germans in 1940) in 1940 and 4,400 Soviet prisoners of war in 1941. Nearly three-quarters of the Spanish Republicans died in the first year at Gusen. By the beginning of 1943, fewer than 500 Soviet prisoners of war were still alive in the camp.

During the later war years, the arrival of more than 3,000 Yugoslavs, more than 9,000 Soviet civilians and more than 2,400 Frenchmen further diversified Gusen's inmate population. Yet the high mortality rate, caused in particular by Commandant Chmielewski's brutal and sadistic management of the camp, kept the prisoner population to between 6,000 and 7,000 up until 1943. Better rations and less arbitrary mistreatment led to a decrease in the death rate from the summer of 1943 until the autumn of 1944, as the SS sought to maintain its labor force.

The need for labor to construct underground tunnels in 1944, induced the SS to increase the prisoner population to more than 24,000 by the end of 1944, including the arrival of 2,750 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz in June 1944, thousands of Polish Jews from Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Flossenbürg in the late summer and autumn of 1944, 1,000 Polish civilians captured in October 1944 during the Warsaw Home Army uprising, and some 1,500 Italian civilians.

To better understand how the Italian economic connections with [the British Empire] affected those with [the Third Reich] and vice versa, the period analysed in this section is reduced to the months of Italian non-belligerency, from 1 September 1939 to 10 June 1940.

The events of these 9 months in fact show with greater clarity — actually, in some cases, they bring to light — many of the dynamics that were previously hidden. The [A]llied maritime blockade was certainly the element, that added new important and delicate issues to the general relations and particularly to the economic talks that Italy had with Great Britain — that was, de facto, the only manager of the block.

A few days after the beginning of the [Wehrmacht’s] attack on Poland, in fact, the Italian Foreign Minister had urged his London embassy to ask the competent authorities to allow the Italian ships that were in German ports on 1 September to return home without undergoing the controls of British patrols at sea.

The answer was not only a positive one, but Italian ships were even offered to be escorted by the British fleet across the North Sea. The political meaning of such an offer was not underestimated by Rome, so that Ciano ordered that “the issues of an economic nature that up to now have been dealt directly with the technical departments from today must be exclusively forwarded and managed by this Ministry”.⁶⁹

In early October, then, the Italian competent authorities started to meet the naval attaché at the British embassy in Rome on a weekly base, in order to smooth possible frictions in the controls of the maritime blockade. These meetings turned out to be the starting point for the creation at the end of the month of a permanent Anglo-Italian joint standing committee.⁷⁰

The purpose of the latter would have been not only to deal with all the issues of the blockade, but also to draft a possible commercial agreement, that, given the circumstances, was perceived immediately by both parts as a possible strategical step in the relations between the two countries. Perhaps to give more importance to this — after all — unexpected event, London decided to issue an order according to which the British would have provided assurances to their companies for the payments of Italian buyers.

[Fascist] Italy, in fact, was not only lacking foreign currency reserves to liquidate purchases abroad but had also a significative passive disbalance in the clearing with the United Kingdom.⁷¹ Showing such a trustful position, London hoped to get the negotiations off to a good start.

[…]

Coming to the British, it should be said that the already mentioned division about the position that had to be taken with [Fascist] Italy, together with the eventual unwillingness of Mussolini to send war material to London were ultimately the elements that influenced the negotiations for the commercial agreement, bringing them to a failure.

A memorandum drafted in February 1940 by the Italian Economic War Office outlined the main stages of Anglo-Italian economic relations since the outbreak of the war, and let us know that a preliminary agreement for commercial exchange was signed in November 1939 and that specific negotiations also started for the supply by [Fascist] Italy to Great Britain of other goods for military use.⁸¹

In early January Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of The Rolls and president of the British delegation in the Joint Standing Committee, was sent to Rome as the person in charge of the negotiations, carrying tangible proposals for a radical solution to the issue of control over smuggling.⁸² Before leaving London, Greene attended a meeting at the MEW “to discuss plans for the Italian negotiations”,⁸³ but when he arrived in [Fascist] Italy he immediately understood that the problem of economic agreement with the Italians was to be treated as a political problem.

In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, in fact, he wrote clearly that the consequences of the [A]llied blockade of German coal exports departing from neutral ports (Rotterdam in primis), had gone far beyond the purely economic and commercial domain.

With this measure, the British had effectively forced the Italians to buy a much higher share of coal in Great Britain and this, while Rome’s deficit in clearing continued, inevitably implied a reduction in the amount of other commodities that the fascist government could at that point buy, as well as the danger of German reprisals.

(Emphasis added.)

When people said that the NGU Azov unit “shed any far-right associations,” that included the Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky, who now commands the 3rd Army Corps in the Ground Forces. From 2023 until recently, Biletsky led the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which will continue to exist in the new corps, like the NGU Azov Brigade.

Certain “experts” argued before the war, such as Anton Shekhovtsov in 2020, that “the toxic far-right leadership formally left the [Azov] regiment and founded what would become a far-right party called ‘National Corps.’” The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko refuted this, also in 2020: “the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment.”

Shekhovtsov, a far-right activist turned “far-right expert,” was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by then-Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in which they called for the U.S. government to designate the “Azov Battalion” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

In the spring of 2022, the Soufan Group, led by Rose and Soufan, made a U-turn and published a special report on Ukraine that claimed, “Azov has been largely regularized under the command and control of the Ukrainian armed forces, which has worked to winnow extremists from its midst. […] According to experts on the European far-right like Anton Shekhovtsov, the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago.” Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post that the National Guard “had to purge a lot of those extremist elements.”

Vyacheslav Likhachev is another “expert” cited by the media to downplay the far-right in Ukraine. He has echoed Shekhovtsov’s claim that Biletsky and the National Corps retained no more than a symbolic link with Azov, having tried and failed “to exploit the Azov ‘trademark’ in political life.” To be fair, the NGU Azov unit, wanting U.S. support, has paid lip service to this narrative. In a March 2022 statement to CNN, the Azov Regiment said it “appreciates and respects Andriy Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander, but we have nothing to do with his political activities and the National Corps party.” However, as Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2020,

the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters — a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019.

Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money.” Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps.

The NGU Azov Brigade might have distanced itself from Andriy Biletsky in the past few years, but as deputy commander Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko admitted in 2023, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd Brigade [led by Biletsky].” In addition to the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, which unites the Azovite units and salutes Biletsky as their collective leader, the NGU Azov Brigade has a “standard-bearer school” named after Mykola Stsiborskyi, a fascist OUN ideologue who drafted an explicitly totalitarian constitution for Ukraine on the eve of World War II.

The Azovites have also called this their “Natiocracy School,” named for Stsiborskyi’s concept of nationalist dictatorship. Kuzmenko observed several years ago, this school trains “political-ideological officers” for the NGU Azov unit, and was “tied to the far-right National Corps party” since its establishment in 2017. He called this “another strong link between AR [the Azov Regiment] and the larger Azov movement.”

(Mirrors.)

Despite the brutality and atrocious nature of the crimes carried out at Hadamar, American authorities could not prosecute Hadamar defendants as a violation of international law since it was German nationals mistreating German citizens with disabilities as directed by the German head of state.

However, the [Axis] kept meticulous records, and investigators found [that] Polish and Russian nationals were among the victims. International law agreed upon at the 1907 Hague Convention protected civilians during wartime. This agreement, along with the Geneva Convention and Moscow Declaration, allowed U.S. authorities to prosecute Hadamar defendants for war crimes.

The jurisdiction of the U.S. military commission trying the Hadamar defendants was challenged immediately and throughout, but in the end, the commission relied on the absence of regulation to prove jurisdiction.

All seven Hadamar defendants were found guilty, but only three received death sentences. The remaining four received prison sentences based on their involvement, but in the ensuing years, many of these sentences were reduced. By 1951, not one surviving Hadamar defendant remained in prison.

With eyes on Mariupol in the early days of the war, the western media mostly abandoned any remaining concern and curiosity about neo[fascists] in the Azov Regiment (and other Azovite units). Hundreds of Azov fighters, in addition to other soldiers and civilians, held out for weeks in the city’s massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works. New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, called it “Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.”

In “The Battle for Azovstal,” a podcast episode by the New York Times, Schwirtz claimed that “this group has a very complicated history going back to 2014,” when Andriy Biletsky, an infamous neo[fascist], founded a “battalion of misfits” that welcomed everyone. “Anybody who wanted to could join […] And, very, quickly, the Azov Battalion became associated with a band of far-right nationalists bordering on fascists.” But this was just “a small contingent of people,” and an “association that the Azov Battalion had in its infancy.” Or so they said…

As I’ve said before, the New York Times is a case study in the western media’s whitewashing of the most powerful neo[fascist] movement in Ukraine, and probably the world. Andrew Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for the NYT, appears to have been its first reporter to describe the “Azov group” as anything other than a “pro-Ukrainian paramilitary” force, a “militia fighting in the east,” or “one volunteer unit.” In 2015, Kramer wrote that Azov is “openly neo-Nazi.”

In early 2022, the NGU Azov Regiment was still “far-right,” according to the New York Times. On February 25, the day after Russia attacked Ukraine, the NYT worried that Azov “has drawn far-right fighters from around the world.” Over the next month, the Times said this “far-right military unit” is “known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.” That spring, amidst the Russian siege of Mariupol, the ideology of the Azov Regiment started to become past-tense in the “newspaper of record,” for example: “the Azov Battalion … was founded as a far-right volunteer unit.”

During the second half of April, Azov evolved from “a force that does include far-right soldiers, some of them foreign, including white supremacists and people who have been described as fascists”; to “a highly skilled and controversial unit” that is “filled with far-right fighters”; to “a force that does include nationalist soldiers, which the Kremlin has used to paint the unit as fascist”; and finally, a complicated unit “whose history as a far-right group has helped fuel Russia’s largely false claim that it is fighting fascists in Ukraine.” The Times settled on a phrase about Azov’s “history” that it repeatedly deployed. The far-right “roots” of the unit “lent a veneer of credibility” to Russian propaganda.

In May 2022, one might have read in the New York Times, “Though the Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 out of Ukraine’s ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups, experts say the group has quelled much of its extremist side under pressure from authorities.” Around that time, the NYT conducted a soft-ball interview with Lt. Illia Samoilenko, “an intelligence officer who speaks fluent English, [and] seemed intent on defining the legacy of the Azov Battalion.”

“We know about our past,” he said. He acknowledged the Azov regiment’s “obscure” origins and its past association with far-right extremists — something he said the group had shed when it became part of the national military. Independent military analysts and experts who study the far right support that assertion, saying that Azov’s incorporation into the regular combat forces of the Ukrainian military led to a purging of extremist elements. Lt. Samoilenko said lingering public misperceptions about the battalion could explain why the group did not get as much support as it might have in the run up to the war.

Some so-called experts might “support that [evidence-free] assertion,” but the New York Times must have known this was hardly the consensus among those who study the far-right in Ukraine. The Times did not bother to fact-check Samoilenko, and subsequently began to describe Azov as “a former far-right militia” with ambiguous “connections to far-right movements” and “a hard-core contingent” that has “far-right origins.” The newspaper became a broken record when it mentioned “the Azov regiment, whose roots in far-right movements have offered a veneer of credibility for Mr. Putin’s tenuous claims that Ukraine has been infected with Nazism.”

As for Samoilenko, better known as “Gandalf,” he once told a Czech reporter, “I don’t believe in any Holocaust, it’s just a story.”

I’m just a story, too.

The group needs to reach 1500 verified members before it can apply to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to form an official federal party, which it hopes to do within a year. (The bar for becoming a state party is even lower, at 500 members needed in Victoria.)

The stunt at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on Friday, when neo-Nazis including Jacob Hersant booed in the darkness of an Anzac dawn service, was part of a co-ordinated push to rebrand nationally as “everyday Australians” fed up with so-called “woke” politics and so funnel more recruits into their extreme ideologies.

That plan, which is revealed in online records and Sewell’s videos for followers, could now be in jeopardy, as bipartisan backlash to the shrine stunt and other disruptions by fringe agitators this election campaign threatens to build into a national crackdown on far-right extremism.

But neo[fascist] watchers who track the group online, such as The White Rose Society, call their political ambitions serious and frightening. Even if they don’t ever get a candidate up at the ballot box, the tactic could help the neo[fascist] group gain false legitimacy as they push further into right-wing politics — and evade crackdowns by authorities.

Extremism expert Josh Roose said [that] Australian neo[fascists] had been successful, for their relatively small numbers, in eclipsing other groups in the far right, including in recent stunts during the election. “Now they’re following in the footsteps of Hitler [into politics], though they have zero chance of actually getting elected, but they’ll exploit every loophole they can.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7857520

Around 1,000 activists, many clad in black and wearing masks, marched through the streets of Paris on Saturday to commemorate the 1994 death of an ultra-nationalist student. The event, which was initially banned, took place without major incident, according to police, though 13 arrests were made. A counter rally was not authorised.

Although the Third Reich officially surrendered on May 8, 1945, some bipeds (such as Chris Alexander) have mistaken this for the end of World War II: a risibly Eurocentric conclusion. Yet even if one chooses to overlook the Empire of Japan, there were a few illegal battles in Europe that broke out later that month. The Battle of Poljana is one such example:

Even more worrying to the Yugoslav leadership was the vast host of collaborationist formations, including the Croatian fascist Ustashe, royalist Chetniks, Serbian Volunteer Corps (Serbisches Freiwilligen-Korps, SFK), Slovene Home Guards (Domobranci), and (white) Russian Protective Corps (Russisches Schutzkorps, RSK), which were retreating together with the [Wehrmacht]. Although often at odds with one another, they were all united in their fierce anti-Communism, and a firm intention not to fall into the Partisans’ hands.

With these forces at large, Communist hold of the country would never be entirely secure: it was feared that the Western powers would retain them in their service, and possibly use them to invade the country, either independently, or as a part of a wider foreign intervention.¹⁴

For as long as [Heeresgruppe E’s] front remained intact, the Yugoslavs could not concentrate against the collaborationists; without [Reich] “corsets” on the battlefield and their logistical support, however, the latter could not hold out for long.

All being said, agreeing to German proposals would bring immense practical dividends: it would open the road to southern Austria, enable the tightening of the ring around domestic foes, and secure large quantities of military equipment, all with little cost in blood and time. Once their most dangerous enemy was disarmed, and own troop contingent in Slovenia strengthened, the Yugoslavs would be free to dictate new terms.¹⁵

[…]

The disarming rarely went smoothly, especially where collaborationist units were involved. On 11 May, the Slovene Home Guards, supported by artillery and tanks, attacked a brigade of the 14th [Yugoslav Division] guarding the Drava bridges at Ferlach.

By the next day, the attack had succeeded in opening the way to Klagenfurt for a large column of about 30 000 members of the Battle Group von Seeler (including the RSK, parts of the SFK, and a host of smaller units) retreating from Ljubljana. The Partisans, who had lost ca. 200 KIA and four tanks, were forced to request the assistance from the British, who eventually let them have the materiel, but not the prisoners.³⁹

[…]

The last clash between the [Wehrmacht] and the Yugoslav Army took place some 12 kilometres southwest of Dravograd on 13 May 1945. On this day, Partisan pickets stopped the head of a large Axis column (of about 12 000 men)⁴¹ as it tried to exit the Meža River Valley at a place called Poljana.

Following their usual practice, the Partisans demanded all of the heavy weapons, at the same time agreeing to leave every tenth man his rifle, and officers their pistols. In this way, the column “would fall like ripe fruit” to another Yugoslav brigade posted some distance behind, at Völkermarkt.

After some deliberation, [Wehrmacht] officers agreed to a twelve point-treaty proposed by the Partisans. At that moment, a senior naval officer appeared at the scene and repudiated the terms, threatening to open the way to the border with force. He had informed the staff of [Heeresgruppe E] of his decision, but whether he acted on their instructions, as claimed by the Yugoslavs, is not certain.

The envoys of both sides were still talking when suddenly shots rang out (who fired first is unclear). The battle was pretty much a one-sided affair: the [anticommunists] were bunched up in the narrow valley, unable to deploy, whereas the Yugoslavs controlled the surrounding heights, and had ample automatic weapons and mortars.

After some 45 minutes, the firing stopped; the sight of dozens of burning vehicles and an estimated several hundred casualties proved too much for the remainder of the column, which surrendered unconditionally.⁴² Two days later, on 15 May 1945, in the same area, the bulk of the [Nezavisna država Hrvatska] forces followed suit, which brought an end to military operations in Yugoslavia.⁴³

Fighting between us and remnants of the Western Axis continued throughout May 1945 and climaxed in the obscure and largely forgotten Battle of Odžak, Europe’s last World War II battle—unless you count the numerous Axis collaborators who fought the Soviets throughout 1945 and the years afterwards.

Further reading: Axis Forces in Yugoslavia 1941–45

Freuding spoke at the Kyiv Security Forum, “Ukraine's Premier International Platform on War, Peace, and Security,” which was dedicated to the Ukrainian version of “Victory Day” and called on the world to “Unite Again to Defeat the Global Aggressor.” The German general said he is proud that “we equaled Russian military power with regard to drones.” Other speakers included Admiral Rob Bauer, the former Chair of the NATO Military Committee (2021-25); CIA veteran Ralph Goff, who was almost appointed its chief of clandestine operations this spring; the famous historian Timothy Snyder; and former CIA director David Petraeus, another fan of Azov’s drone capabilities.

The opening ceremony of the latest Kyiv Security Forum included a video that claimed in World War II, “hundreds of thousands joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA], resisting both Nazi and Soviet forces.” In fact, tens of thousands joined the far-right UPA in 1943-44, and many of them were already [Axis] collaborators and war criminals. The first panel featured Valery Horishny, who[m] I wrote about before on this blog because he made a speech at the United Nations in January. This hardcore neo[fascist] from the Azov unit in Ukraine’s National Guard, who has dedicated poetry to Adolf Hitler, also spoke at last year’s “Kyiv Security Forum for Youth.”

“It now looks like deliberate policy by Western governments to whitewash, support and use open neo-Nazis in Ukraine in proxy war,” the political scientist Ivan Katchanovski commented on the Romanov-Freuding meeting. “There was a similar policy of Western governments to whitewash, support and use open Nazi collaborators from OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] and UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army] in the Cold War.”

---

Russia announced a unilateral ceasefire from May 8-10 to coincide with events marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of [the Third Reich]. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that he couldn’t guarantee the safety of foreign officials celebrating in Moscow, and Ukraine launched a large drone attack on the night of May 6-7 that grounded flights in the Russian capital, presumably as some of those officials were arriving. The symbolic drone strikes followed a suspiciously-timed ceremony in Kyiv that saw Zelensky honor the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which is probably the most important neo[fascist] unit in the Ukrainian armed forces.

The President of Ukraine also presented a battle flag to the commander of the Azov movement’s Yevhen Konovalets Military School (YKMS, named after the founder of the fascistic OUN) that has formed the 354th Mechanized Training Regiment in the Ground Forces of Ukraine. Vladyslav Datsky (AKA “Datsyk”) received the “Hero of Ukraine” medal, the highest state award. “Datsyk” has a Slavic swastika, or kolovrat, tattooed on the back of his right leg. He commands the “Decepticons” platoon, which has a Black Sun in its chevron, and co-starred in the Azovite propaganda film “We Were Recruits” that I wrote about in my last post.

Zelensky also awarded the 3rd Assault Brigade “For Courage and Bravery,” which was received by the new commander of the unit, Yaroslav Levenets. Until recently, he was only known publicly as “Bot,” and led the 1st Mechanized Battalion in Andriy Biletsky’s 3rd Assault Brigade. Biletsky, the leader of the Azov movement, will remain in charge as the head of the new 3rd Army Corps. It should include about five brigades, but how many are “Azovite” remains to be seen.

In April 1938, journeyman diplomat Herbert von Dirksen was appointed [as the Third Reich’s] ambassador to London. A committed [Fascist] and rabid antisemite, he also harboured a particularly visceral loathing of Poles, believing them to be subhuman, eagerly supporting Poland’s total erasure. Despite this, due to his English language fluency and aristocratic manners, he charmed British officials and citizens alike, and was widely perceived locally as [the Third Reich’s] respectable face.

Even more vitally though, Dirksen — in common with many powerful elements of the British establishment — was convinced that not only could war be avoided, but London and Berlin would instead forge a global economic, military, and political alliance. His 18 months in Britain before [September 1939] were spent working tirelessly to achieve these goals, by establishing and maintaining communication lines between officials and decisionmakers in the two countries, while attempting to broker deals.

Dirksen published an official memoir in 1950, detailing his lengthy diplomatic career. However, far more revealing insights into the period immediately preceding World War II, and behind-the-scenes efforts to achieve enduring detente between Britain and [the Third Reich], are contained in the virtually unknown Dirksen Papers, a two-volume record released by the Soviet Union’s Foreign Languages Publishing House without his consent. They contain private communications sent to and from Dirksen, diary entries, and memos he wrote for himself, never intended for public consumption.

The contents were sourced from a vast trove of documents found by the Red Army after it seized Gröditzberg, a castle owned by Dirksen where he spent most of World War II. Mainstream historians have markedly made no use of the Dirksen Papers. Whether this is due to their bombshell disclosures posing a variety of dire threats to established Western narratives of World War II, and revealing much the British government wishes to remain forever secret, is a matter of speculation.

Immediately after World War II began, Dirksen “keenly” felt an “obligation” to author a detailed post-mortem on the failure of Britain’s peace overtures to [the Third Reich], and his own. He was particularly compelled to write it as “all important documents” in Berlin’s London embassy had been burned following Britain’s formal declaration of war on September 3rd 1939. Reflecting on his experiences, Dirksen spoke of “the tragic and paramount thing about the rise of the new Anglo-German war”:

---

“Germany demanded an equal place with Britain as a world power…Britain was in principle prepared to concede. But, whereas Germany demanded immediate, complete and unequivocal satisfaction of her demands, Britain - although she was ready to renounce her Eastern commitments, and […] allow Germany a predominant position in East and Southeast Europe, and to discuss genuine world political partnership with Germany - wanted this to be done only by way of negotiation and a gradual revision of British policy.”

---

‘German Reply’

From London’s perspective, Dirksen lamented, this radical change in the global order “could be effected in a period of months, but not of days or weeks.” Another stumbling block was the British and French making a “guarantee” to defend Poland in the event she was attacked by [the Third Reich], in March 1939. This bellicose stance — along with belligerent speeches from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — was at total odds with simultaneous conciliatory approaches such as Düsseldorf, and the private stances and utterances of British officials to their [Reich] counterparts.

In any event, it appears London instantly regretted its pledge to defend Poland. Dirksen records in his post-mortem how subsequently, senior British officials told him they sought “an Anglo-German entente” that would “render Britain’s guarantee policy nugatory” and “enable Britain to extricate her from her predicament in regard to Poland,” so Warsaw would “be left to face Germany alone”.

(Emphasis original.)

While the British upper classes were probably disinterested in starting another war, much of that disinterest arose merely from wanting to strike a kind of bargain with the Third Reich that they would never dare enter into with the Soviets. Quoting Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Origins of Modern Germany, page 453:

[The Fascists’] successes in foreign policy were due less to German rearmament, the deficiencies and limitations of which were known in competent military circles, than to the tacit alliance of powerful reactionary elements in England and France which, although loathe to see a reassertion of German equality, were still more unwilling to check it by military alliance with Soviet Russia or to run the risk of social revolution [in the Reich] as a result of [Fascism’s] fall.

It is probable that the Third Reich never sincerely wanted conflict with the British Empire at all, and duelled mostly because of the conflicting imperialist interests, more or less similarly to the conflict between the Third Reich and Austria.

Per Gerhard Weinberg’s The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933–36, pages 342–346, British membership was part of Ribbentrop’s original designs for the Anti‐Comintern Pact in October 1935, and when Ribbentrop became ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1936, the Chancellor made clear to him that it was his greatest wish to welcome Britain into the Anti‐Comintern Pact. While Ribbentrop acted sceptical of this ambition, he placed some hope in King Edward VIII, whom Ribbentrop considered friendly to the German Reich. See Zara Steiner’s The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939, pages 262–263.

The Chancellor himself was an Anglomaniac who greatly admired the British Empire, and wanted an official alliance or at least a neutrality with it; only when the British state repeatedly rejected his offer did his opinion on the British sour.

Even when warfare broke out between these two anticommunist states though, Berlin still wanted an Anglo‐German alliance, and despite bombing London the Chancellery nevertheless commanded its armoured units not to advance into the undefended city of Dunkirk, allegedly to ‘spare’ the British forces. This was probably more of a tactical decision than a kind gesture, as they were overextended and at risk of being of cut off, but it suggests that they wanted diplomacy regardless.

And this only the tip of the iceberg. Between the British Empire’s important influence on the Third Reich, its sale of raw materials to the Third Reich, its extension of credits thereto, its eugenic influence thereon, its internment of Jewish refugees, and the plans for Operation Unthinkable, it should be easy for all lower-class people to hate the British ruling class (even more).

From another excellent article by Daniel Hedinger:

Besides Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the preferred destinations for fascist propaganda were in East Asia, especially Shanghai and Tōkyō. The reason for this expansion of efforts was growing Italian interest in this region due to recent geopolitical changes.

In September 1931, [the Imperialists] occupied Manchuria, and the first battle for Shanghai took place early the following year. In February 1933, [the Empire of] Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, breaking with the post-war order for all the world to see. The man who led the [Imperial] delegation out of Geneva’s Palais des Nations was Matsuoka Yōsuke — a notorious [Imperial] fascist.⁴⁴

After his return to [the Empire of] Japan, Matsuoka called for the abolition of all political parties and a fascist revolution, referring to the March on Rome in Italy and the seizure of power (Machtergreifung) in Germany as his model; furthermore, he believed in the supremacy and the global mission of the so-called Yamato race.⁴⁵

This and his bold move in Switzerland made him the most popular man in [the Empire of] Japan, as the Italian ambassador emphasised in a report detailing Matsuoka’s arrival in Tōkyō, where 50,000 people gave him an enthusiastic reception.⁴⁶ The right-wing organisation Matsuoka founded soon had several million members. Rumours were that a ‘March on Tōkyō’ was imminent.⁴⁷

During his stay in Europe, Matsuoka had met with Mussolini and Hitler; eight years later, after the signing of the Tripartite Pact (1940), he would meet them (now as the foreign minister of [the Empire of] Japan) once again.⁴⁸

Many contemporaries read [the Empire of] Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations within the context of the global wave of fascism and the crisis of the liberal-democratic order, and indeed, [the Empire of] Japan’s actions triggered a chain of other withdrawals from Geneva and paved the way for an ‘ultranationalist reformulation’ of the League.⁴⁹

Events taking place in East Asia are therefore essential to any understanding of the history of the internationalisation of fascism during the ideology’s first global moment in the early 1930s.

At home too, [the Empire of] Japan was experiencing its own fascism boom at home.⁵⁰ ‘No topic is more popularly and more heatedly discussed in Japanese periodicals today than is fascism’, one political commentator observed in early 1932.⁵¹ Intellectuals, now in heated debate on the topic, interpreted this phenomenon in the light of a ‘fascist storm that has now seized the entire world’.⁵²

But they also admitted that ultraright ideologies had found particularly fertile ground in [the Empire of] Japan due to the circumstances surrounding the occupation of Manchuria. Some even went a step further, claiming that what was labelled a ‘Manchurian Incident’ was itself a product of an authentically Japanese form of fascism.⁵³

And indeed, the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in early 1932 provided an environment for fascism to become fashionable at home. The question that then preoccupied intellectuals, politicians and police alike was whether [the Empire of] Japan would turn fascist.

[…]

For Nakatani, the foundation of [the Imperialists’] new Manchurian empire was the initial step towards a ‘federation of the whole of Asia’,⁷¹ and indeed, with Manchukuo, [the Imperialists] had gained an enormous colonial testing ground for fascist industrial, social and labour policies.

Obviously, when it came to imperial expansion, [the Empire of] Japan was far ahead of its future partners. For the rest of the decade, therefore, the Germans and Italians studied the settlement and industrial policy in Manchuria with great interest.⁷²

As early as the 1930s, Italian fascists were very interested in the (geo)political changes taking place in East Asia. One indication is that Mussolini was studying the reports from East Asia, especially those concerning pan-Asianism, very carefully and in person.⁷³

Another indication is that in 1930, the Duce sent Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and the future foreign minister, to Shanghai as consul general. Mussolini’s daughter Edda, who accompanied her husband, not only experienced first-hand the first battle of Shanghai in early 1932, but also went on a propaganda trip to Tōkyō in time for the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome.⁷⁴

Consequently, around 1933, it seemed that two competing internationals, one in Europe and one in Asia, both aiming for a regional-national rebirth, would come into existence.

(Emphasis added.)

Chalk up another argument for setting World War II’s starting date to September 1931.

Ploiești, a Romanian city in Prahova County, is home to the world’s first modern and oldest operating oil refinery. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that this spot is most famous for its oil, which played a very important rôle in both world wars. In a tragic irony, a Romanian Jew named Lazăr Edeleanu was responsible for discovering amphetamine and inventing the modern method for refining crude oil. He designed this method—the Edeleanu process—either in or near this city, both of which were critical to the Axis:

Ploești is rather important because of the degree to which it supplied oil to the [Western Axis’s] war effort. There are conflicting statistics as to the percentage Ploești oil refineries added to the total German oil production. The numbers range from 25% to over 30% of totals mentioned throughout the primary and secondary materials [that] I have reviewed.

Ploești was vital to the Axis’s war effort. In fact, Winston Churchill named it, with only mild exaggeration, ‘the taproot of German might’. The Axis would have been inclined to agree:

How did the [Fascists] react to their oil production situation in relation to their military activities? As early as November 20, 1940 Adolf Hitler wrote in a letter to Mussolini that “If the [Ploești] petrol refineries are destroyed the damage will be irreparable.” In a November 1942 speech, Colonel Alfred Jodl announced to the district leaders of the [NSDAP] that in the Eastern Front, “no success gained by the enemy there can be directly disastrous unless we should lose the Rumanian oil fields.”⁷

The Allies knew that [Fascist] oil producers, before [1939], had been under great pressure to increase their production. In 1936 only 7% of [the Third Reich’s] oil came from its own oil fields and this was supplemented by synthetically produced oil, which amounted to about 30% of national consumption. This meant that in 1936, [the Third Reich] was importing about 60% of its national oil appetite.⁸

The [Fascists] in subsequent years tried to boost their ability to produce more oil at home. However, even with these extraordinary programs, the [Fascists] found themselves with only a two to three months supply of motor and aviation fuel when the war [intensified] in 1939. The amount of stockpiles they had in reserve were only about half of their peacetime production.

It should be noted that these synthetic refineries also produced nitrogen and methanol which are used in the production of explosives and chemicals. The official History of the Fifteenth Air Force quickly came to the conclusion that bombing oil production facilities would reduce both oil and explosives production.⁹

[…]

The [Axis] had reinforced Ploești’s anti-aircraft defenses that made it the third most heavily defended target of the Reich. Only Berlin and Vienna were more heavily protected than the Ploești oil refineries.³⁰ The amount of resources that the [Axis] threw into Ploești is important to analyze. For example, the [Axis] had 225 fighters committed to defend Ploești. These pilots had been reassigned from the Russian front and all of them were well experienced.³¹

The war on the Eastern Front was going poorly for the [Axis] by 1943 and for the [Luftwaffe] to commit such resources to a target must have reaffirmed, for the Allies, the fears of [Axis] war planners about their oil situation. […] Ploești was the single largest location for producing oil in Axis Europe.

Quoting Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pages 308, 310–311:

In October 1940 the Wehrmacht marched into [the Kingdom of] Romania to secure the Ploești oil fields, and behind it followed a second army of technical experts. Advisors from the Reichsbank settled into Bucharest to help manage the national bank, port specialists arrived to improve transportation facilities on the Danube, and legal advisors came to reform [the Kingdom of] Romania’s mining laws and allow for more German investment. Their primary aim: “to have influence over the petroleum economy.”⁴⁴

[…]

Between 1940 and 1942 [Reich] firms gained a majority in nearly half of [the Kingdom of] Romania’s oil companies through the holding company Kontinental Öl GmbH, and joint industrial committees staffed by [Reich] technocrats managed projects for drilling, refining, oil exploration, underground storage, transportation, and antiaircraft defense.⁵⁰

Neubacher drew on this investment presence to pressure Romanian[s] into delivering oil. He had first done this in May 1940, strong-arming [the Kingdom of] Romania’s Defense Minister into signing an oil-for-arms agreement that fixed the exchange rate between petroleum and weapons at a price favorable to [the Third Reich]. In the following years Neubacher institutionalized these oil-for-arms deals, and continued to secure petroleum deliveries to [the Third Reich] at favorable prices.⁵¹

After a disappointing year of delivery in 1942, Neubacher tried to squeeze [the Kingdom of] Romania’s domestic oil consumption in order to increase exports. The country’s abundance of oil and dearth of coal meant that much of its economy ran on petroleum, from rail transportation to household heating.

Neubacher now demanded that [the Kingdom of] Romania transition from oil to coal-burning locomotives and he began a campaign to improve the production of natural gas for use in domestic heating. He accompanied this with pressure on Romanian authorities to ration domestic oil consumption. These efforts succeeded for a time. By 1943 45 percent of all Romanian oil production was going to [the Third Reich].⁵²

Needless to say, the Kingdom of Romania was not the sole offender. Dishonourable mentions include the United Mexican States and, of course, Corporate America for literally fuelling the Axis war machine.

Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 118–119, 121–122:

Mussolini’s brutal and corrupt fascist régime was thoroughly despised by the majority of Italians, and they welcomed his fall in the summer of 1943 with relief and enthusiasm. Their liberators, the Americans and the British, now had an opportunity to help the Italians replace Il Duce’s fascist régime with a[nother] system of govern­ment. (Incidentally, Canadian troops also played an important rôle in the Italian campaign, but Washington and London did not involve Ottawa in the least in the political decision-making process.)

A signifi­cant anti-fascist resistance movement had been politically and militar­ily active in Italy. This movement enjoyed wide support among the population and it claimed a leading rôle in the reconstruction of the country. However, the [Western] Allies refused to cooperate with this anti-fascist front: it was too left-wing for their taste, and not only because the Communists played an important rôle in it. It was obvious that the overwhelming majority of Italian antifascists favoured radical social, political, and economic reforms, including the abolition of the monar­chy.

Churchill, in particular, was allegedly obsessed by the spectre of such radical reforms on the other side of the Alps, reforms that in the eyes of this conservative statesman amounted to the “Bolshevization” of Italy. And so neither the plans and wishes of the Italians themselves nor the merits and aspirations of their anti-fascist resistance movement carried any weight.

Instead, a deal was made with officers and politi­cians who represented the traditional Italian power élite, such as the monarchy, the army, the great landowners, bankers and industrialists, and the Vatican. It did not seem to bother the Allies that it was precise­ly this élite that had made it possible for Mussolini to come to power in 1922 and that had profited enormously from his régime, for which it was despised by the majority of Italians.

The Italian partisans were dis­armed militarily and neutralized politically, except of course behind [Axis] lines in northern Italy, where they were and remained a force to be reckoned with. Marshal Badoglio, a former collaborator of Mussolini’s, who had been responsible for terrible war crimes in Ethiopia,² was allowed to become the first head of government of postfascist Italy. In the liberated part of Italy the new system looked suspiciously like the old one and was therefore dismissed by many as fascismo senza Mussolini, or “fascism minus Mussolini.”³

[…]

The military situation of the Western Allies in Italy in early 1944 was hardly wonderful. The [Axis] put up a very effective resistance, and the long and murderous fighting around Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, could be compared to the terrible battles of the First World War. As it was now obvious that by way of the Italian boot Berlin could never be reached before the Red Army, preparations were accelerated for Operation Overlord, the landings on the French Atlantic coast.

The urgency of this task increased rapidly as the Red Army advanced systematically along the entire length of the Eastern Front and was poised in the spring of 1944 to invade [the Kingdoms of] Hungary and Romania. “When Russian troops began to push the Germans back,” write two American historians, Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, “it became imperative for American and English [sic] strategy to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of Communist hands.”⁸

The Americans and the British also worried about the possibility that [the Third Reich] might suddenly collapse before they could have opened a second front in France. In this case, the Soviets would occupy all of Germany, liberate even Western Europe, and would be able to do there as they pleased, exactly as the British-Americans had done in Italy. “The possibility of a complete Russian victory over Germany before American forces landed on the Continent,” writes the American historian Mark A. Stoler, was “nightmarish” for Washington, and of course also for London, but this scenario had to be envisaged.⁹

Contingency plans were therefore prepared for an emergency landing on the coast of France and the subsequent use of airborne troops com­bined with a rapid overland push by armoured units in order to occu­py as much territory as possible in Western Europe and Germany before the arrival of the Soviets. This operation was code-named Rankin, and troops were kept in a state of preparedness for Rankin until three months after the landings in Normandy.¹⁰

(Emphasis added.)

This explains why the Western Allies bailed out Axis capitalists, failed to prosecute most of the Axis’s war criminals, hesitated to release concentration camp prisoners, did nothing to prosecute the Fascists for their crimes in Africa, reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution, and reused surviving Axis employés for anticommunism, to name only a few disappointments.

It would have been one thing if the Western Allies acted solely for defensive purposes, as the United Kingdom did in 1940, and Imperial America did in December 1941. Nevertheless, because communism was resisting the Axis already, there was a danger that the lower-classes could overthrow their masters and seize the means of production, along with other resources, for theirselves. Thus, the Western Allies invaded Axis territories with the long-term goal of reinforcing the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie; they could not trust the Axis to control the lower classes forever.

A 26-year-old man was convicted […] of first-degree murder, along with a hate crime allegation, for killing a gay former classmate in Foothill Ranch six years ago.

Jurors, who began deliberating Tuesday afternoon, convicted Samuel Lincoln Woodward for the Jan. 3, 2018, stabbing death of Blaze Bernstein, 19.

Woodward’s attorneys conceded during the trial that he killed Bernstein, but denied it was a hate crime or a premeditated act, saying at worst he should be convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

The jury, however, found Woodward guilty of first-degree murder, and also found true allegations that the killing was a hate crime, and that he personally used a deadly weapon —a knife.

Cheers were heard in the courtroom audience as the verdict was read, particularly when the hate crime allegation was found to be true.

There was no visible reaction from Woodward, whose sat facing forward, his face obscured by his long, shaggy hair.

Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 25.

The hate-crime enhancement alleged Woodward killed Bernstein because of the victim’s sexual orientation, not because he was Jewish, though jurors were also given evidence of the defendant’s association with a neo-Nazi group known as the Atomwaffen Division to consider a pattern of bigotry.

Woodward and Bernstein attended the Orange County School of the Arts together for four years. Bernstein graduated after six years at the school and went on to become a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Woodward, meanwhile, transferred to Corona Del Mar High School, from which he graduated. He then attended Cal State Channel Islands before dropping out in his second semester.

Following the verdict, Bernstein’s mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, thanked everyone who has supported the family since Blaze’s death. She also asked the media to give the family time to “process this outcome and to live our lives knowing that this murderer will no longer be able to hurt any other people.

“This is a great relief that justice was served and this despicable human who murdered our son will no longer be a threat to the public,” she said.

Woodward spent five days testifying during the trial, often taking up to 30 seconds to respond to yes or no questions.

Woodward said he reached out to Bernstein hours after a long text-exchange conversation with his big brother’s best friend, Dylan Gronendyke, on New Year’s Day in 2018. As Woodward complained that he could not establish any meaningful relationships and would even leave the house and go to a parking lot alone just to give his parents the impression he went out with friends, Gronendyke encouraged him to return to college and to not give up trying to make friends.

Nearly a day passed before Bernstein responded to Woodward, and the two agreed to meet up the night of Jan. 2, 2018. Woodward stuffed snacks and drinks and marijuana into a sleeping bag and picked up Bernstein, who directed the two to Borrego Park, where the victim’s mother said he had many lifelong memories, such as playing soccer as a youth.

Woodward testified he took two hits off a heady strain of marijuana and felt he was nodding off until he felt a strange sensation on his legs and immediately thought he had gotten too relaxed and urinated on himself as he had done previously.

When he snapped to, Woodward testified, he realized his pants were undone and the victim had his hand on his groin. Bernstein also appeared to be photographing or video recording the encounter, he testified.

This triggered panic in Woodward, who said he was in “mortal terror” his family, who objected to homosexuality on religious grounds, would find out. He said the “look” on his father’s face alone could be so upsetting he struggled to get the phone away from Bernstein, who, the defendant claimed, was saying words to the effect that he would “out’” Woodward, who had a reputation in high school for homophobia.

When he could not get the phone, Woodward said he snapped and repeatedly stabbed Bernstein and then smashed the phone. Woodward said he dug a shallow grave with his hands and left the body in the park.

When Bernstein failed to show for a dental appointment, which was unusual, and could not be contacted, his worried parents began searching for clues and contacted authorities. The victim’s body was found Jan. 9, 2018, in an area of the park that had been scoured previously, but a recent rain made it easier to see him, Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker said.

Attorney Ken Morrison of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office presented evidence during the trial about Woodward’s diagnosis of autism, saying it was not an effort to excuse the crime, but to help jurors understand his state of mind — and for them to reject the hate-crime allegations and accept a lesser-degree of homicide.

“Samuel Lincoln Woodward should be held accountable for what he did,” Morrison said during his closing argument. “He should not be held accountable for what he did not do. This case was over-charged.”

Morrison characterized his client as someone struggling through life, not understanding until he was 18 that he had autism when it was too late for the usually prescribed interventions. The disorder made it difficult for him to communicate and led to social awkwardness and loneliness, and the late diagnosis made him especially vulnerable to being wooed by a fringe, extremist group like Atomwaffen Division, the defense attorney argued.

The group’s attraction was a sense of belonging, a “brotherhood” of “strong men,” Morrison argued.

Woodward told a defense-hired psychiatric expert, Martha Rogers, that he didn’t pay much attention to the group’s hateful rhetoric and was buoyed by their positive reinforcement, Morrison argued.

Woodward grew disillusioned with the group, he told Rogers, after a two-month excursion in the summer of 2017 to Texas with the man who lured him into the group, when he ran out of money for food and a motel, Morrison said.

Morrison argued that though Woodward and Bernstein did not interact much when they were classmates, there were projects they worked on together and that Woodward considered him a “chill guy.” Morrison said the defendant was surprised to find out Bernstein was gay when they reconnected on a dating app in June 2017, and Woodward grew to admire how the victim was comfortable with his sexual orientation while the defendant struggled with his own.

“Blaze Bernstein was in a lot of ways intimidating because he had qualities [that Woodward] thought he lacked,” Morrison said. “Sam was questioning all these things, looking for strong men, something he aspired to be.’”

Walker argued to jurors that the evidence pointed to Woodward planning to attack Bernstein in a “ceremonial” killing to win the prestige of the neo[fascist] group. She said he wore a sweater with a skull image on it to “strike fear” into the victim, and that it had Bernstein’s blood spattered on it after the attack.

When Bernstein’s panicked parents went through their missing son’s social media looking for clues, they called Woodward, who lied to them about what had happened to their son, according to the prosecutor. Walker said Woodward also began searching for information on DNA and even got a haircut to change his appearance while the search for Bernstein made headlines.

“The abundance of evidence here is overwhelming,” Walker said.

She brushed aside Morrison’s arguments that Bernstein had betrayed Woodward’s requests to keep it quiet that the two matched on a dating app.

Walker said Bernstein was rightly “shocked” to see Woodward seeking males on the dating app and sent a link to his public profile to a few fellow classmates from the school of the arts.

Walker said Bernstein kept his promise not to share the details of their conversations with others.

“Blaze Bernstein is not here to defend himself against these allegations,” Walker said.

(Source.)

This takes approximately six minutes to read.

Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pages 345, 349–352:

[Robert A.] Divine’s own account of the itinerary of the second Neutrality Act clarifies just how the divisions among the isolationists blocked the approval of a law that, while remaining equally rigid in its formal impartiality, would have allowed the president to drastically reduce trade with [Fascist] Italy in the sectors most crucial to the war effort.¹⁴³ That bill had been specifically drafted to meet the demands of the group of isolationist senators headed by Senator Nye, especially including Key Pittman from Nevada.¹⁴⁴

[…]

Joseph C. Green, in charge of the Office of Arms and Munitions Control, enforced the enforcement of the neutrality acts. All the protests, pressures, suggestions, and other mail sent to the U.S. government concerning the war in Ethiopia arrived on his desk. His judgment was quite clear; in one of his long and detailed missives to a colleague, he summarized the course of events:

The reason for the defeat of the bill [presented by Pittman and McReynolds on behalf of the administration] has never been thoroughly understood by the public. I say reason [emphasis in original] advisedly. There was only one. The various criticisms directed against the bill on grounds of law and policy had no real effect. The bill would have passed had it not been for the highly organized and highly effective opposition of the Italian-Americans.

Fascist organizations all over the country had their members write five form letters each — one to the President, one to the Secretary of State, and one to each of their two senators and to their Representative of Congress. I handled over 10,000 such letters during the month of January. These letters were supplemented by the public appearance of Fascist representatives before the Committees and by intensive lobbying in the Senate and House Office buildings.

Senators and Representatives — particularly the latter — from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and California trembled openly in their boots. The Italian-Americans are such a highly organized minority that Representatives facing election in November did not dare to vote for a neutrality bill which met with their displeasure.

Many of them were perfectly frank in their discussions with me in regard the situation with which they were confronted. One man from Connecticut, who was in principle strongly in favor of the bill, asked me how he could possibly vote for it in view of the fact that he had 40,000 Italians in his district.

The crisis came on February 7. McReynolds went to Pittman and told him that he could not proceed with the [administration’s] bill. Pittman and McReynolds came up to the White House and jointly told the President the same thing.

After a conference between the President, the Secretary [of State], Judge Moore [Assistant Secretary at the State Department], Pittman and McReynolds, the bill was dropped and Pittman hastily drafted the substitute which was eventually passed. […] The Administration unsuccessfully attempted to make it clear to the public that it had not changed its attitude, but that Congress had refused to follow its lead. […]

The Italian-Americans gave us a fine object lesson in the use of political pressure by an organized minority.¹⁵⁹

The lesson [that] Green referred to concerned the opportunities offered by the American constitutional and electoral system for minorities to exert political influence. The Italian-Americans were not alone in having access to legally defined spaces from which to influence politics, starting with congressional hearings[.]

The presidential elections, founded on a two-way winner-takes-all electoral college, acted as a multiplier of the votes they mustered, since any changed vote represents the gain (and loss) of two votes between the two major candidates. In the electoral college system, a minority group that can show its organizational strength and that identifies itself as a single-issue interest group can force each candidate to court its vote by taking a clear stand on that issue as an almost irresistible form of political conditioning on elected representatives.

Green did not know, although he intuited, that the Italo-American capacity to promptly mobilize and achieve goals was not spontaneous. The State Department, through an investigation by its chief special agent in New York, made a notable effort to find proof that the propaganda emanating from the Italo-American community was really the fruit of organizing by the consulates.¹⁶⁰

Several similar incidents in previous months had led to the dismissal of the Italian vice-consul in Detroit, and this gave the State Department hope that it might be able to repeat the exposure and the request for expulsion.¹⁶¹

A few cases had been raised before the newly sitting Committee on Un-American Activities in the House of Representatives. The special agent of New York affirmed that the organizers of a meeting he had investigated clearly had close ties with the consulate of New York, though they were American citizens. He was not able to prove that their activity had been directly incited by the consulate.

The investigative officer in Washington could only reassure his superiors that they would continue their efforts to find proof of a tangible relationship between the consulate and the American Friends of Italy, the committee used for antisanction propaganda, in the hope that they would drop their guard and show less caution in protecting the illusion of the New York consul’s noninvolvement.¹⁶² This hope came to naught, since Rosso and his collaborators were evidently aware of the gravity of any proven involvement by [foreign] authorities.

While it is probable, if not certain, that the consulates suggested and helped organize the activities of these prominent Italo-Americans, this was not the decisive aspect of the Italian contribution to the Italo-American campaign anyway. The real link was strictly political and had been decided years earlier. The most important rôle of Italian-Americans was their electoral power, which they used to the fullest extent possible in the American system.

The choice to naturalize, that is to take on American citizenship, was a natural path for immigrants; one might even say it was obligatory. American citizenship was prized because it guaranteed not only stability and permanent residence in the United States and the possibility of bringing over more relatives, but also the promise of upward mobility. As a citizen, the immigrant became part of the nation, participating in American political life and, within limits, organizing collectively and choosing and influencing a party (for most immigrants this was the Democratic Party) and its elected officials.

But [Rome] often acted contrarily to this process, both before and after the Fascist seizure of power. [Fascist] rhetoric about the adventures and suffering of the emigrant, rather than translating into living conditions that might lead him to remain in the mother country in order to spare him those pains, favored activities aimed at maintaining the emigrant’s links to the mother country: Italian schools, support for emigrants’ organizations, Italian language publications, congresses of emigrants’ representatives, legislation that maintained the right to vote in Italy even after taking foreign citizenship, and bank branches to make it convenient to send remittances back to Italy — a source of income the government relied upon for its balance of payments.

This network gave rise to public and private structures dedicated to nurturing the links between the emigrant and his land of origin, which were sometimes counterproductive for the government, and more often for the emigrant. In the specific case of the United States, every impediment introduced in the process of naturalization was not only damaging to the emigrant, but meant that he wielded less political influence that might favor the [Fascist] government.

(Emphasis added.)

As easy as it may be to resent Italo-American adults for supporting Fascist Italy’s war effort, Imperial America’s inadequate support for immigrant communities, coupled with Fascist Italy’s grooming of the Italian diaspora, made supporting Fascist Italy an obvious choice for ordinary Italians. The exceptions came from organized labor. Quoting John P. Diggins’s Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, page 83:

The obbligato of platitudes carried a few discordant notes. The Unione of Pueblo (Colorado), Lavoratore Italiano of Pittsburg (Kansas), and La Follia di New York had harsh words for Mussolini the “renegade and opportunist” and Fascism the “Frankenstein.” By and large, these small and scattered anti-Fascist publications represented the opinion of Italian-American labor.

Perhaps membership in a support network, or ‘family’, made it easier for these Italians to oppose fascism? I am uncertain. In any event, I trust that you yourselves can spot the parallels (or the differences) between this and the ‘State of Israel’s’ exploitation of the Jewish diaspora.

Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, 347–8:

It was true that American Catholics constituted an important base for Ambassador Rosso as he prepared a campaign opposed to intervention against [Fascist] Italy. Precisely because the Protestant churches and their communities, as well as African-American organizations, were the most important militant forces in the anti-Fascist struggle,¹⁴⁸ the Catholic hierarchy with few exceptions (such as the archbishops of Chicago¹⁴⁹ and Baltimore¹⁵⁰) reacted by defending the [Fascist] government.¹⁵¹

The Catholic press was particularly motivated to defend what had been characterized as the silence of Pius XI about the war. Father William B. Smith, in an unpublished thesis for Catholic University of America, summarized the press coverage thus:

It would seem that the majority of writers on the Ethiopian war in American Catholic periodicals stayed away from any consideration of religious motives or justification of the event. If such was suggested, moral principles were usually brought forth to answer opposition to the war.

This is not to say that Catholics in America favored the war. Many did not, and said so, but most said nothing. There was still a certain feeling of identification with the Italians because of the number of Catholics in Italy, and also, no doubt, because the Pope was not considered to have spoken so definitively as to allow for no doubt on the question. […] [S]ome did defend the silence of the Holy Father, while others denied it, and a few proposed justification for Italy’s invasion.¹⁵²

In truth, Smith’s conclusions, which carry the imprimatur of Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, diverged in part from some of the very documentation he provided.¹⁵³

From his evidence, one can see that only the Catholic Worker, linked to the Catholic union movement, took an editorial stance of total condemnation of Fascist aggression,¹⁵⁴ whereas other periodicals more representative of the Church in the United States (such as America, a Jesuit publication; Commonweal; and The Catholic World) and the great majority of diocesan papers were committed to offering justifications for Mussolini’s war and above all to strenuously defending the papal position.

Such rhetoric offered Rosso ample room for action among American Catholics, even without resorting to such extremists as Father Coughlin, Roosevelt’s fearsome adversary and supporter of American abstention in the matter of the Ethiopian dispute, who could have further provoked the administration.¹⁵⁵

Rosso clearly grasped that the sympathies of American Catholics were due, apart from to the attitude of Pius XI and other exponents of the Italian Church hierarchy, to the ethnic makeup of their own church. It was mostly composed of the Irish, easily led to favor a policy that was presented above all as anti-English, as indicated by Rosso’s telegram to Mussolini. In this context, Rosso deemed it of great importance to develop influence in the Irish community by expanding his contacts among Irish publications such as the Gaelic American and the Irish Times, which published an article titled “Mr. Hull Has Declared War on Italy.”

(Emphasis added.)

Although a Catholic reader shall no doubt cringe at this history, that is not my goal in sharing this. In fact, this is, above all, a topic intended for Jewish readers.

As you can tell, ordinary Catholics had a great respect for the Kingdom of Italy since its founding. Having always been an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and having Vatican City in its midst, the Kingdom of Italy was practically sacred even to Catholics who were not Italian at all. This made many Catholics, especially upper-class ones, willing to overlook Rome’s atrocities.

The fact that many Irish Catholics shrugged at the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia is also worth emphasizing. At first I thought that it was a moot point, and obnoxious to bring up when so many Irelanders today are busy demonstrating against the war on Gazans. When I thought about it, though, mentioning it makes perfect sense: the Irish, theirselves victims of colonization, should have been the last to tolerate the invasion of Ethiopia… yet many did anyway.

As we should all know, the Fascist colonization of Ethiopia ultimately failed, and I suspect that very few Catholics today would still endorse it if someone educated them on the event.

Need I specify the parallels?