It is ironic that the antisocialists designated this day ‘European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’, because August 23rd in the years 1941–1945 demonstrates evidence that does not fit nicely with their repetitive attempts to equate socialism in one country with Fascism. The anticommunist invasion of Stalingrad is another good example that they prefer to ignore (because otherwise they’ll slip into exonerating the Axis):

At noon on the twenty‐third of August, Panzers of the Sixth Army rolled towards Stalingrad. Above them roared the might of Airfleet Four, saluting the soldiers with their sirens. They were on route to Stalingrad to unleash the heaviest bombing campaign yet seen on the Eastern Front. When the air raid sirens sounded, many people assumed [that] it was a test. Only when the sky became dark with planes and antiaircraft batteries open fire did people rush to the shelters.

Bombs rained down on the city. Approximately 80% of buildings were destroyed in the first day of bombing. Most of Stalingrad’s suburbs were built of wood. Inside the city itself, there were oil storage facilities and timberyards. The city was parched by the August sun. [Axis] incendiary bombs caused the whole city to flare up like gunpowder. Rivers of burning oil and petrol flowed towards the Volga. First the surface of the water and then the ships caught fire.

[Luftflotte] 4, commanded by General [Wolfram Freiherr] von Richthofen, flew fifteen hundred missions on the twenty‐third of August. Its aircraft dropped a thousand tonnes of bombs and lost only three [vehicles]. On that single day, an estimated forty thousand people died in Stalingrad. Most of the survivors fled the city, but some chose to stay and share the city’s fate.

At about four P.M., [Colonel General Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst] Paulus’s tanks reached the Volga. Approaching Stalingrad from the north, all [that] the [Axis soldiers] could see through their binoculars was fire and smoke. It seemed [that] nothing could prevent the [Axis] from entering the burning city, and yet [its] attempt to take Stalingrad in one swift assault was bloodily repulsed.

Many historians mark the Battle of Stalingrad as the beginning of the end for the Axis. I respectfully disagree, but I cannot dispute that the Axis only dug its hole deeper throughout its failed attempt to capture the city.

One of the quibbles that I have with this otherwise worthwhile documentary—an issue that I have with commentators on WWII in general, to be fair—is its tendency to refer to the Axis forces mostly as ‘the Germans, the Germans, the Germans’. I never liked this tendency, not only because it implies that Germans who abhor what their countrymen did somehow had something to do with this, but also because it distracts us from the other Axis nationalities (e.g. Austrians) that contributed. A reminder from Dmitry Degtev’s Battle of Stalingrad: The Beginning of the End for Hitler in the East, pg. 53:

On the morning of 24 August, in the battle for the Izbushensky farm (near the village of Ust‐Khoperskaya), the Savoia Cavalry Regiment (3rd Rgt ‘Savoia Cavalleria’) from the 3rd Mobile Division ‘Amadeo Duke D’Acosta’ defeated the 812th Rifle Regiment of the 304th Rifle Division. This battle went down in history as ‘the last horse sabre attack at the gallop’.

The 812th Regiment was defeated, 150 men were killed, and the remaining 900 surrendered. However, due to the disorganisation of the Italian [Fascist]s, 300 men later simply fled, and only 600 were captured as a result. The trophies of the ‘macaronis’ were four regimental guns, 10 mortars and 40 machine guns and light machine guns. They themselves lost 40 killed, 79 wounded and 108 horses.

In fairness, the documentary does mention the other Axis powers several times, but repeatedly emphasizing somebody’s nationality still leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Terms such as ‘Fascists’ (if you want to kick it old school like me), ‘Axis’ (if the context is either September 27, 1940 or later), ‘German(ic) Fascists’ (to avoid any possible confusion), ‘Nazis’ (if you want to sound generic and don’t mind reusing a misnomer), or ‘(German) anticommunists’ (just to annoy contemporary anticommunists) would all work better than the overly broad and misleading ‘Germans’, but now I’m just rambling.

Anyway, the Battle of Stalingrad, aside from showing us more of the Axis’s atrocities, gives us an important lesson that the Zionists have chosen to ignore:

[Vasily] Chuikov’s task was to hold the city and its industrial centres, but the city was consuming his men at a terrifying rate. Those who survived for any length of time learned new tactics for this ruined urban landscape. Ironically, it was the [Axis] by bombing the city to rubble that had done most to undermine [its] own tactics. Tanks, the [Axis’s] shock weapon, quickly got stuck in the mountains of broken bricks, while from around every corner, they were pelted with Molotov cocktails.

[Axis] bomb‐aimers were finding it more and more difficult to spot targets in the city. From the air, it was almost impossible to distinguish between [friend] and [foe], nor were the Heinkels very accurate, scattering their bombs over a path of several hundred metres.

To further negate [Axis] air superiority, Chuikov ordered his [soldiers] to advance as close as possible to the enemy lines. The distance between Red Army and [Axis] positions was reduced to as little as ten metres. This made it impossible for Heinkels to bomb the enemy without also hitting their own troops.

This next lesson is less important, but, well… just read it yourselves:

The […] 48th Panzer Corps tried to launch a counterattack. They met the attacking Soviet forces head‐on near the village of Ust‐Medveditsky. An enormous tank battle raged for more than a day. At its end, the […] Panzer Corps lay crushed. Ones of its divisions had been hindered by an unlikely foe. While the division had been in reserve with its vehicles standing idle, field mice had got inside the vehicles and gnawed through the electrical wiring. This humble ally of the Red Army had put dozens of tanks out of action.

We all know what that means.

(Forgive me, I couldn’t resist.)

---

Click here for other events that happened today (August 23).

1923: Two Fascists in Argenta murdered an antifascist priest, Giovanni Minzoni, fracturing his skull and beating him to death with clubs (probably on Italo Balbo’s orders).
1939: Berlin and Moscow agreed to a nonaggression treaty. Apart from that, Rome sent a message to Berlin noting that when the two empires negotiated the Pact of Steel, article 3 obliged one to join any war in which the other was engaged, yet the two had the understanding that Fascist Italy would be unready for war until 1943. As well, Berlin appointed Albert Forster as the State President of the Free City of Danzig, and it also promoted Erwin Rommel to the rank of major general, posting him to the Staff of the Chancellor’s headquarters to be responsible again for the Chancellor’s safety. Lastly, U‐27 departed Wilhelmshaven for her only war patrol.
1940: Rain and clouds prevented the Fascists from mounting large raids against Britain, giving British airmen a chance to rest and crews a chance to repair airfields. Single‐aircraft raids were, however, mounted against southern and central England, as were raids against shipping; two merchant ships sunk and one became damaged by He 115 torpedo bombers. Coincidentally, Fascist propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels launched a new campaign that stressed the British fighting spirit in an attempt to rally Germans behind the war effort. Overnight, Fascist bombers raided British cities. Aside from this, Fascist submarine U‐37 torpedoed Norwegian ship Keret in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland at 0222 hours, killing thirteen but leaving seven alive. In the general area, at 1250 hours, U‐37 sank British ship Severn Leigh, slaughtering one gunner and thirty‐two of the rest of the crew, but leaving ten survivors.
1941: The Third Reich’s head of state rejected Heinz Guderian’s advice to attack Moscow. Berlin moved troops to the south instead. At 2347 hours, Axis submarine U‐143 (Oberleutnant zur See Harald Gelhaus) torpedoed the 1,409‐ton Norwegian merchant steamer Inger twice as it was heading towards Loch Ewe, Scotland, and Comandante Cappellini took orders to move to a new patrol area in the Atlantic Ocean at 0000 hours.
1942: In what amounted to little more than a publicity stunt, the 1.Gebirgsjäger Division soldiers hoisted the Reichskriegsfahne flag on Mount Elbrus, which was the highest point in the Caucasus Mountains. As well, Hans‐Joachim Marseille returned to his unit at Sanyet El Qutaifiya, Egypt, and Axis submarine U‐506 sank British ship Hamla southwest of Freetown, West Africa at 2337 hours, slaughtering all forty aboard. Additionally, Axis and Allied aircraft engaged in combat over Darwin, Australia between 1200 and 1245 hours; the Axis lost seven bombers and eight Zero fighters to P‐40 Warhawk fighters of the U.S. 49th Fighter Group, and this became to be the last Axis attempt to raid Darwin.
1943: The Axis lost Kharkiv to the Red Army after the Battle of Kursk.
1944: The Axis lost Marseille to the Allies. Meanwhile, King Michael of Romania dismissed the Axis government of Marshal Antonescu, who was later arrested; Romania switched sides from the Axis to the Allies.
1945: The Axis resistance in the Manchuria region of northeastern China was effectively over, and the Axis garrison at Paramushiro surrendered to the Soviets. On the other hand, He Yingqin ordered Axis generals in northern and eastern China to continue to maintain peace until Nationalist forces would arrive to relieve them. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur ordered the release of all Filipinos—most of whom were Axis collaborators—interned by the U.S. Army. He claimed that their fates would be tried by the Filipino government rather than the U.S. military. Lastly, the Axis news agency Do Trzei announced the death of Subhash Chandra Bose.

As odd as it may seem, I had been unaware of these terrors until I watched somebody play the WWII video game Secret Weapons Over Normandy, where they appear as an unexpected enemy. I nearly cringed at the sight of the Axis powers having one glaring technologic superiority over us (we can grant them that), but it is apparent that even these monstrosities could not turn the tide of the war. What happened?

A brief history, first. Jet fighters had been a theoretic possibility since at least the 1920s, and the Fascists commenced experimenting with jet propulsion in the late 1930s. The experiments with jet fighters in particular became successful in the summer of 1942, and the Me 262 was officially ready for deployment in April 1944. The Eastern Axis even constructed one prototype in 1945 largely based on it: the Nakajima Kikka. So far so good, but while the Third Reich had over one thousand two hundred of these jets in storage (making them WWII’s commonest jet by far), only several dozen of them were actually ready to fight at any given time, and perhaps only four hundred in total ever saw any action.

This was not all. Although it is hardly deniable that the Me 262 was a remarkable work of engineering, it had its weaknesses and limitations as well. Because the jets sucked up so much fuel, they could only stay in the air for approximately one hour, whereas an ordinary Allied warplane could stay in the air several times longer than that. Like some of the Axis’s other innovations, the Me 262 proved to be somewhat gimmicky.

The jet’s strengths and weaknesses were almost like those of a cheetah. The cheetah is famous for being the world’s fastest animal, but what is less known about cheetahs is that they can only sprint so far before becoming exhausted. Gazelles, in contrast, are slower, but they can sustain their modest speed for a longer period of time (which is why cheetahs have yet to extinguish them).

Berlin’s order to construct versions that could bomb, a function never intended for the Me 262, complicated its production, and another important problem was that the pilots found jets troublesome to fly, even after they received training for them. The pilots simply weren’t used to this new technology; transitioning from traditional warplanes to jet fighters proved awkward. Quoting Walter Schuck:

In an Me 109 plane, one could just switch off the engine and drift down slowly […] but in this plane it wasn’t possible at all. I was traveling at a speed of 500 mph and couldn’t reduce it. The plane just wouldn’t descend. I had to fly in circles until I reached an altitude where I could ask for permission to land. Once I finally landed, I was completely soaked in sweat…

Dan Snow notes another problem:

The cockpit itself was cramped, basic, and clumsy. With the [Axis] essentially relying on a decentralised network of labour camps to create parts for the aircraft, the instrument panels inside would vary from jet to jet.

Very sadly, the Axis sacrificed dozens of thousands of neoslaves for many of these jets, and they ended lives more directly by destroying hundreds of Allied vehicles. It was not only uncomfortable but very difficult for Allied pilots to face them head‐on since they had never dealt with rapid machines like these before. Even so, the Allies managed to take out around one hundred of them. How?

The trick was to intercept them while they were either taking off, landing, or stationary. In fact, this was the standard method for dealing with them; successful dogfights against them were uncommon, but since the jets were incapable of making sharp turns, it was still possible to destroy them as they were in the middle of flight, too.

Pictured: An Me 262 on an Axis airfield.

I should mention that technically the Allies did deploy some jets of their own for combat. The problem was that the Gloster Meteor was slower, less heavily armed, rarer, and saw less action than the Messerschmitt Me 262. When the Allies officially deployed it in 1944, its only purpose was to intercept Axis rockets targeting the United Kingdom, and even after London approved it for continental use, its purpose remained primarily defensive rather than offensive. It probably never got into any (conventional) dogfights with the Axis either, as the Western Allies feared the possibility of the Axis or the Eastern Allies recovering a copy. So the Gloster Meteor could not really compete with the Axis’s jets despite being the best candidate for the job.

Finally, arguably the Me 262’s greatest weakness (like its extremely rare Eastern counterpart the Nakajima Kikka) was the want of resources, including time. They officially appeared late in the war, only a few hundred ever saw any action, and the Allies’ successful seizures and destructions of Axis resources, most notably oil, made the jets too costly to manufacture and deploy in larger numbers. With all of these factors taken into account, the Me 262 was less terrifying than it could have been, and few other Axis jets even made it past the conceptual stages.

Pictured: Miniature model of the Messerschmitt P.1111, a proposed Axis jet that never saw the light of day.

Many remember the Me 262 for being history’s first successful jet fighter and for its long‐term influence on many later flightcraft, but we can derive another lesson from it: as our oppressors taught the Yugoslavs in the 1990s, and are teaching the Palestinians now, the Me 262 can serve as another reminder that technology isn’t everything.

Pictured: A ruined Me 262.

Further reading:

Me 262: Hitler’s jet plane

The race for Hitler’s X‐planes: Britain’s 1945 mission to capture secret Luftwaffe technology

Fighting Hitler’s jets: the extraordinary story of the American airmen who beat the Luftwaffe and defeated Nazi Germany

…and much, much more.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 22).

1895: László Almásy, Axis aviator and explorer, was born.
1938: Prinz Eugen launched at the Germaniawerft yard in Kiel.
1939: Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Reich’s delegation departed Berlin aboard two Condor aircraft for Königsberg, East Prussia. With a nonaggression pact nearly secured with Moscow, Berlin ordered the reinvasion of Poland to commence four days later. The top military commanders received orders to be brutal and show no compassion in the upcoming conflict, but the Chancellor said that even though he was important for Germany, anybody could murder him at any time. Less importantly, Georg von Küchler became the commanding officer of 3rd Army and Westerwald began supporting cruiser Deutschland in the Arctic Sea.
1940: Adolf Galland became Geschwaderkommodore JG 26 ‘Schlageter’, and Fascist bombers raided British cities, including Aberdeen, Bristol, and Hull, but the Fascists lost several vehicles at sea and elsewhere.
1941: The Axis began the Siege of Leningrad.
1942: The 16th Panzer Division began to cross the Don River toward Stalingrad, and the Fascist bourgeoisie increased the work week for foreign workers in the Third Reich to fifty‐four hours. On the other hand, Axis torpedo boat Generale Antonio Cantore struck a mine five miles west of Tobruk and sank. Axis submarine I‐30 departed Lorient, France with fifty T‐Enigma coding machines (which would enable communications between the IJN and the Kriegsmarine), blueprint of air‐defense radar, five G7a torpedoes, three G7e electric torpedoes, and other technologies on board.
1943: Axis troops in Kharkov, Ukraine began evacuating after sundown.
1944: Axis forces on Crete committed populicide against the inhabitants of Amari Valley, and Berlin ordered the destruction of Paris, starting tomorrow. As well, the Wehrmachtbericht mentioned Léon Degrelle, and the Luftwaffe’s 111/KG3 launched twenty‐one sorties during the early hours from their new base at Venlo in the south east of the Netherlands. All Heinkel bombers returned safely after launching their V‐1 flying bombs. One of these impacted on just half a mile down Oak Lane, where the railway bridge had just been repaired. Another clipped some elm trees near some cottages and span into on of them killing two adults and orphaning the two children who were dug out of the wreckage unhurt.
1945: Axis forces in the Manchuria region of northeastern China surrendered. In the two‐week campaign, eighty thousand Axis personnel suffered either death or injury and fifty‐four became prisoners, including one hundred forty‐three generals. Additionally, the Axis began to withdraw from larger towns in Malaya. Since British colonial administration had not yet returned, this resulted in Malay–Chinese ethnic violence escalating in some of these towns. Likewise, Axis troops at Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong arrested and executed civilians Lam Tsah and Lam Kuan in retaliation of an attack on the Axis on August 19, 1945. Company commander Yasuo Kishi personally executed Lam Kuan.
1946: Döme Sztójay, Axis head of state, dropped dead.

The two major Axis powers in both the East and the West had their own atomic weapons programmes and they were maybe more advanced in nuclear technology than we previously suspected; it is possible that Axis scientists even achieved a few nuclear detonations somewhere in the Greater German Reich, though some analysts doubt this.

That being said, it is clear that the Axis still made nowhere nearly enough progress to compete with the Allies, for reasons which are mostly identical in both the East and the West. The first problem was that for at least one year, an Axis victory seemed plausible. This made the Axis’s atomic weapons projects seem exceedingly risky investments that would have taken away valuable resources from more immediate concerns. Consequently, they had much lower budgets than the Manhattan Project.

The next most important reason was the want of materials, notably uranium (some of which Jewish neoslaves might have mined). There was indeed a modest expansion in uranium mining during the Fascist era, and the Third Reich had enough uranium to make one bomb. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that they had enough in 1945 for a bomb ready for deployment in the battlefield instead of testing. Quoting John H. Gill in The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II, chapter 7:

Activity at the KAT virtually ceased and, at the end of the month, the Eighth Air Force inflicted another significant loss on the German program by devastating Diebner’s key uranium processing facility at Oranienburg. […] The June bombing raids had cut off the supply of processed uranium, disrupted the plutonium manufacturing process and killed or injured dozens of critical workers. A new DEGUSSA uranium refinery was under construction south of Berlin, but the Oranienburg plant was a near‐total loss and it would take months to repair the KAT.

Due to Allied intervention, the Axis lost a good deal of nuclear materials, at sea and elsewhere. See Thomas Gallagher’s Assault in Norway: Sabotaging The Nazi Nuclear Program for more examples.

Apart from Allied submarines disrupting exports from Malaya, the Eastern Axis’s nuclear programmes did not suffer such a loss of materials, but only because the Eastern Axis had less uranium, and what little that it did have was of low quality. To make matters worse, Allied warfare directly impacted the Eastern Axis’s research, sending many of its institutes up in flames. The surviving scientists consoled theirselves by unintentionally underestimating the time when the Allies’ nuclear weapons would be officially ready for deployment.

In the Third Reich’s case, the white supremacist laws caused many physicists and other researchers (e.g. Nikolaus Riehl) to flee to the future Allied powers. Research on the military potential of atomic energy started off slow because the Fascists were suspicious of quantum mechanics as a ‘Jewish’ science. This xenophobia was only one of the reasons why few scientists were involved in the projects.

Lastly, there was a want of confidence in the scientists theirselves concerning the probability of nuclear weapons; morale was low. The Eastern Axis’s most senior physicist, Hantarō Nagaoka, was the most critical on the very project on which he worked, and he published an article titled ‘A Critique of the Application of Nuclear Fission to Weapons’. For the Western Axis, the situation was little better:

Another problem was the mistrust among supporters and opponents of the [Third Reich]. Some members of the Uranium Club—for example, Schumann, Diebner, and Erich Bagge—were members or followers of the [NSDAP]; others—among them, Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg, Gerlach, and Karl Wirtz—were not. Everyone who chose not to openly support the régime had to find a way to deal with its factual power.

Heisenberg decided against open opposition, because that would deprive him of any possibility to act and mitigate the consequences of the […] régime ([16], pp. 208–210). After a year‐long investigation ordered by SS leader Himmler with several interrogations at the SS Headquarters in Berlin in 1937, he had no illusions about the criminal character of the régime [27]. And he had to be careful not to cast doubt again on his alleged loyalty to the party line.

As a result of the different individual attitudes, there was, as Wirtz said, no atmosphere of confidence among the participating groups and no trust between the scientists and the political institutions ([28], p. 57).

Some Axis scientists might have even sabotaged the project deliberately, as the Farm Hall tapes suggest. The scarcity of time, money, and other resources sealed the projects’ fates.

Nevertheless, the work continued after 1945: the Zionists probably acquired their nuclear technology from surviving Axis personnel.

See also:

Hitler's nuclear pile — WWII uranium cube reactor & the Alsos mission: Atomkeller Haigerloch

Secret Nazi nuclear facility found during excavation; Secret Nazi nuclear weapons testing bunker unearthed in Austria

The Uranium Club: Unearthing the Lost Relics of the Nazi Nuclear Program

Uranprojekt: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s Nuclear Weapons Program during World War II

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 21).

1934: Benito Mussolini met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in Florence. Meanwhile, an international Jewish conference in Geneva declared that the boycotting of the Third Reich would be redoubled until the rights of German Jews were fully restored.
1936: Fascist Italy accepted a French proposal to pursue a policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War. Britain announced a similar policy to the Third Reich’s, warning that any attempt to interfere with British shipping in Spanish waters would be met with stern measures.
1937: The Spanish Nationalists captured Villacarriedo. Meanwhile, patrolling Imperial E8N floatplanes intercepted six Chinese Gamma 2E light bombers over the suburbs of Shanghai. The Imperialists succeeded in forcing the Chinese to abandon the planned attack on the Kunda Texile Factory, yet failed to shoot down any flightcraft (although the Imperialists claimed two victories anyway). Lt. Yue Yiqin of the 22nd Pursuit Squadron of the Chinese 4th Pursuit Group, flying a Hawk III biplane fighter, shot down the Imperial floatplane flown by Petty Officer First Class Shigeru Yano, who survived the downing. Yano attempted to ram a Chinese aircraft as he went down; he failed to make contact as none of the Chinese fighters reported being rammed, yet Yano believed that he did.
1938: The Third Reich’s head of state visited the sailing ship Horst Wessel, and the Imperial 10th Division captured Luoshan, Hubei Province and Xinzi, Jiangxi Province in China.
1940: Johann Schalk received the Ehrenpokal der Luftwaffe, while the ‘tree of liberty’, planted in Saverne after Alsace was restored to France at the end of World War I, was chopped down by members of the Hitler Youth.
1941: As the Axis captured the Ukrainian port city of Kherson and the Bila Tserkva massacre took place in Ukraine, Berlin ordered Army Group North to encircle Leningrad, believing that the loss of the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution would deal a crushing blow to Soviet morale. Coincidentally, the Axis officially opened the Drancy internment camp in France and also commissioned the submarines U‐376 and U‐584. But less happily for the Fascist bourgeoisie, the communist activist Pierre Georges murdered Axis naval cadet Alfons Moser at the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris by shooting him in the back.
1942: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.
1943: The Axis lost both Kiska and Wewak.
1944: Canadian and Polish units captured the strategically important town of Falaise, Calvados, France, from the Axis. (Coincidentally, Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, began.)
1945: The first major Imperial Japanese surrender ceremony in China took place at the Zhijiang Airport in Hunan Province.

Even though some Fascist politicians were self‐identified Catholics, colonizing Poland took precedence over any Christian solidarity, so Polish churches had to vanish:

The nature of repression differed between the annexed territories, intended as a Lebensraum for Germans, and the General Government, which served as a reservoir of Polish laborers. In the former, all traces of Polish identity would have to disappear. This was accomplished through the arrests and executions of Catholic priests, the closure of churches, and restrictions on Catholic practices. Moreover, schools that served Catholic and Jewish populations were closed.

The Catholic Church was the main target because it was considered a bastion of Polish identity. As early as July 1939, the Army High Command declared the Catholic clergy as “primarily responsible for nationalistic rabble‐rousing” (Huener 2021, 53). The image of the “agitator‐priest” (Hetzkaplan) as an enemy of Germandom drew on a legacy of Prussian animosity toward Catholicism during the partitions of Poland (Huener 2021).

The Warthegau, which had the largest Polish population within the annexed zones, experienced the brunt of these policies (Epstein 2010, 2). Hitler wished the Gau “to become flourishing German land in ten years” (Epstein 2010, 5), and he found a willing executioner in Greiser, an “anti‐Polish Nazi zealot” from the formerly Prussian province of Posen.

Greiser succeeded in decimating the Polish clergy in the Warthegau: of the 2,100 secular and religious clergy, 133 (6%) were killed in the Gau territory, 1,523 (73%) were arrested, and 1,092 (52%) were sent to concentration camps, where two thirds died (Huener 2021, 208).

As a result, entire districts had no priests to serve parishioners during the war (Huener 2021, 167). Charitable and educational institutions previously maintained by the Catholic Church were abolished. Some 97% of all church buildings and shrines were closed, desecrated, or destroyed (Huener 2021, 2). [Fascist] authorities also restricted the times of worship, prohibited public displays of faith, and tried to prevent individuals from travelling outside of their parish to attend services elsewhere.

Greiser closed Polish schools, although this policy was applied less consistently than repression against the Church. Instead of going to school, Poles aged 14 and above were forced to work. Poles were strictly segregated from Germans and faced restricted hours for using public baths and entering shops and markets. Public spaces and cafes were designated “for Germans only.”³

Greiser also began deportations into the General Government in order to create space for German settlers. However, these slowed as [the Fascists] realized that they needed Polish laborers and farmers. From mid‐1940 onward, thousands of Poles were put to work in the Warthegau or in the Altreich.

On the other hand, while the General Government also experienced large‐scale violence and roundups for forced labor, de‐Polonization was limited. There was “an unresolved conflict in [Axis] minds” over whether this region should become a pure German colony (Lukas 2012, 32). For the time being, [the Axis] administration sought to control rather than eradicate Polish culture. As Gąsiorowski (2010, 72) states, “despite the difficult food and material situation and the growing terror in the General Government, [one] was still allowed to be a Pole.”

Allowing religion was viewed as important for preventing unrest. It is estimated that 95% of the clergy in the General Government remained in the same parish during the war (Lukas 2012, 15), a marked contrast to the Warthegau. Religious life continued uninterrupted [in the General Government]; there were no mass closings of churches or restrictions on religious services [there], although training new priests was prohibited (Kłoczowski, Müllerowa and Skarbek 1986, 354–355).⁴

[…]

The arrest and execution of clergy, along with the closure of churches, especially on the scale witnessed in the Warthegau, significantly diminishes the supply of religious services. We know that vacancies created by [Fascist] arrests and executions typically remained unfilled until the war’s end.⁵

While the "orphaned" parishes were occasionally visited by the surviving priests from elsewhere, who secretly baptized children and officiated marriages, and some religious rites were perfomed by lay Catholics, an average repressed community experienced a disruption in religious practices (Huener 2021, 243).

For example, the deportation of Father Ignacy Bronszewski from his parish of Białotarsk (Włocławek diocese) to the General Government in March 1941 resulted in the interruption of worship until February 1945. As a result, most parishioners stopped attending church altogether (Huener 2021, 234). Even in parishes where the priests avoided persecution, the availability and quality of religious services were reduced.

As noted above, the [Fascist] government restricted days of the week and hours of the day when the churches could operate. Eventually, most churches were closed, vandalized, or destroyed. In addition, overwhelmed with the demand from outside their parish, some priests asked their parishioners to attend services less frequently and to keep their confessions brief (Huener 2021, 244).

Supply shifts can have important consequences on future religious behavior (Finke and Iannaccone 1993). In our context, due to habit formation, those who were unable to attend religious services during the war may not have returned to their old customs. Intergenerational religious preference transmission and peer effects (Patacchini and Zenou 2016) can lead to changes in the religious practices of future generations. Hence, this channel predicts a drop in religious observance, which can persist for decades.

[…]

Figure 7 shows a clear discontinuity in average mass attendance across four survey years (1991, 1995, 2001, and 2015). The results in Table A.6 show an effect of −6.9 percentage points, or 0.45 standard deviations, on average attendance. The estimate is largely driven by the first two years of our sample (see Figure A.1). In particular, we estimate an effect of −11.3 percentage points for the first year for which systematic data exist, which represents more than 0.5 standard deviations.

The estimates for all survey years are negative, albeit they gradually diminish in magnitude and significance. Hence, the persecution of clergy appears to have weakened the norm of church attendance, with effects lasting into the early years of the post‐transition period. […] As shown in Table 2, municipalities with high rates of priest victimization had lower church attendance [after 1989].

This relationship holds for the average across our sample period and for 1991 and 1995 in particular, the years for which we observe more sizable treatment effects in the geographic RD framework. The result is consistent with the religious supply channel detailed in Section 3.

We should note that in 44% of municipalities, all priests were removed, i.e. there is limited variation in the proportion of victimized priests, our main explanatory variable. This proxy for reduced supply of religious services also neglects the interruption of supply following the destruction or closure of church buildings, which was almost universal in the Warthegau.

Furthermore, even though mass attendance is a significant predictor of PiS [Law and Justice] and LPR [League of Polish Families] vote shares, we find higher support for these parties in municipalities with higher rates of priest victimization (Table 2). The estimate is significant at a 10% level for the 2005 election, but not for other years. We interpret this pattern as suggestive evidence for the martyrdom channel.

This research also inadvertently complicates equations between socialism in one country and Fascism.

Once the party strengthened its grip on power, however, the Church holdings were confiscated and Catholic education was restricted. Yet even during the Stalinist period, religious practices were tolerated, even among party members (Grzymala‐Busse 2015, 155). Instead of restricting church attendance, the Communist government sought to harness religiosity to its advantage.

In 1949–56, it enlisted priests sympathetic to the Communist cause to disseminate communist ideology from the pulpit. Survivors of Gestapo arrests and concentration camps were particularly desirable recruits, as the authorities believed they would be more supportive of communist policies. At the height of the infiltration campaign, approximately 10% of all priests in Poland were the so‐called “patriot” priests (księża patrioci) (Nalepa and Pop‐Eleches 2022).

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 20).

1940: Hermann Göring sent peace proposals to Britain via Netherlandish and Turkish foreign ministries! Nevertheless, the British ignored them. Aside from that, the Eighth Route Army launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive, a successful campaign to disrupt Axis war infrastructure and logistics in occupied northern China. (Coincidentally, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the fourth of his famous wartime speeches, containing the line ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’.)
1942: István Horthy de Nagybánya, Axis Deputy Regent, died in a flight accident.
1943: The Axis submarine U‐197 was sunk in the Indian Ocean by a PBY Catalina of № 265 Squadron RAF; on the same day, the Axis submarine U‐670 sank in the Bay of Danzig after a collision with the target ship Bulkoburg. Meanwhile, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Thailand signed a peace treaty, in which four provinces of Axis‐occupied British Malaya (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu) were to be made part of Thailand. Thai administration would begin on October 18. Finally, Soviet Major General P. V. Bogdanov, who had collaborated with the enemy after being captured by the Wehrmacht, was recaptured and turned over to the Soviet counterintelligence service, SMERSH. Moscow would execute Bogdanov, along with five other former Red Army generals, on April 19, 1950.
1944: One hundred sixty‐eight captured Allied airmen, including Phil Lamason, accused by the Gestapo of being ‘terror fliers’, arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Battle of Romania began with a major Soviet Union offensive.
1985: Wilhelm Meendsen‐Bohlken, Axis fleet commander, expired.

(Mirror.)

Polish capitulation in September 1939 brought for people in Łódź significant changes. On 9 November 1939, the city was annexed into the new Greater German Reich. […] Businesses and buildings of Polish and Jewish owners were expropriated with the aim of providing them to companies under [Fascist] management.²¹ The city was meant to become an industrial base for the war economy.

One of the first administrative decisions of the [Fascist] occupation administration was the introduction of labor conscription for all Polish nationals, initially from ages 16 to 60, then from age 14 and lastly from age 10. Several important [Fascist] companies — among these Krupp, BMW, Askania, and Telefunken — took advantage of this opportunity and located their production plants in Łódź.²²

[…]

In 1941 Telefunken relocated part of its production lines to Łódź. The city was chosen for several reasons: the distance from areas exposed to aerial bombardment and short lines of product delivery to military units at the eastern front. However, one of the most important reasons was the availability of an appropriate workforce.²⁴ In Łódź, the company intended to produce vacuum tubes used in military communication.

For this kind of production, precision and sleight of hand were of great importance; therefore, mostly young workers, especially girls were preferred. Already in 1942, Telefunken employed more than 2,000 workers in its two production plants in Łódź. Whereas the management and engineer positions in the plants were occupied by Germans, the foremen and office positions were staffed by ethnic Germans (“Volksdeutsche”) from Łódź.

However, the majority of the production workers were girls of ages 12 to 16. They were recruited for work partly under coercion, but partly, due to the labor conscription, to “volunteer” to work for Telefunken. This allowed them to remain at home and be exempted from forced relocation for work in [the Third Reich].

[…]

The first transports of the workers from Łódź arrived in late summer 1944. It was planned that the new Telefunken plant will be located in the fortress Wilhelmsburg, which was supposed to provide protection from aerial attacks. Because at the moment of arrival of first transports with girls from Łódź the industrial park of the factory had not yet been completed, the girls were delegated for work for the local farmers.

One of the female workers recalls the moments, when the farmers chose “suitable” personnel: “Because the factory was not finished yet, we had to work for the local farmers. […] At one day, all Polish girls were forced to the city square. Interested farmers taxed them very carefully. Some even assessed their teeth! Every [farmer] tried to choose the strongest women. Nobody asked about agreement. They took us like a livestock to their farms.”²⁹ With the completion of production facilities in November 1944, the girls re‐commenced work for Telefunken.

Living and work conditions

The living conditions in Ulm were characterized by unsuitable accommodation in the camps, scarcity of food, harassment, and punishment. From the point of view of the company management, the full productivity of the plant was in the foreground. “Human material,” as the management reports and documents repeatedly state, could be “used for consumption”.³⁰ As the heads of Telefunken were under the greatest production pressure, they ensured only a minimum of living conditions that guaranteed survival.

Telefunken‐laborers in Ulm were accommodated in two main locations.³¹ First was the fortress of Wilhelmsburg, directly at the production site. In the southern part of the fortress were sleeping quarters for 600 to 800 workers as well administration offices, kitchen, canteen, and storage facilities. Production areas were underground in the basement.

The northern part of the fortress still housed barracks for the [Wehrmacht], which posed an additional risk for the forced laborers of becoming an object of unintentional bombardment. Another 600 girls from Łódź were located in the “Kepler‐Mittelschule”, a school building located in the northern part of the city.

Both quarters were unsuitable for accommodation of a larger number of persons. From the beginning of the war, the city administration in Ulm grappled with the problem of providing living places for the increasing number of forced laborers. The sudden transfer of more than a thousand additional persons in the final phase of the war only aggravated these difficulties. Therefore, both the Wilhelmsburg and the Kepler‐School had only a provisional character and lacked basic sanitary facilities. They were dark, cold, and leaky. Lack of water was especially severe.

This situation is vivid in the recollection of former forced laborers: “Rooms were cold. There was no electricity. It was dark, even during the day, because the windows had no glass, just paper. There was no water. Toilets were closed. The lack of water was very difficult. For the first time we understood what real thirst means. […] We couldn’t even wash our hands. The administration didn’t care that there were no toilets. We had to go to the attic.”³²

Due to the lack of living spaces, the girls had to live in cramped small rooms. For sleeping, only military bunk beds were provided. The rooms were scarcely equipped — a few double beds, a table, several stools, and closets. There were no stoves or other heating. Beds were equipped with sacks filled with sawdust. To cover themselves during sleep, each girl received two blankets.

The living conditions considerably deteriorated in the winter. On 17 December 1944, Ulm was the target of the severest aerial attack during the war. A number of city buildings were destroyed, among others the Kepler‐School.

Although no girls from Łódź lost their lives in the resulting fire, they had to be relocated to the Wilhelmsburg. It meant that the quarters had to be even more densely populated and girls had to share beds: “The beds were the same as the beds in the concentration camps. Bunk beds. We had to sleep in a bed in pairs. Beddings and blankets were always dirty.”³³

It also led to the further deterioration of sanitation in the camp: “The worst were hygiene conditions. We couldn’t wash properly. It just wasn’t possible in a room where there were a lot of people and only a small bowl of water. And so many women.”³⁴

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

In order to discipline the girls and motivate them for work, a system of daily terror was introduced. The camp’s superintendent, Captain Thalhofer, was particularly brutal in his treatment. He punished the girls indiscriminately, often abused them, and beat them or let his subordinates hit the victims.³⁵ Other guards followed this example.

Especially contacts between male and female workers provided opportunities for physical abuse: “Three girls visited us in our [male] barracks. They did not even sit down, when suddenly German female supervisor came in and started shouting. She was accompanied by two armed guards. She had a pistol in her hand. She started to curse in German. She used the wors[t] words to describe the girls. […] And with the hand with the pistol, she started to beat the girls in the head and face. She was spiting on them, she pulled their hair, she was kicking the girls. After few minutes, she sent the girls with guards back to their barracks. And she told us that next time, we will be also beaten by the guards.”³⁶

Severe living conditions were aggravated by a lack of appropriate food. The laborers were provided only minimal rations for survival and effective work. The daily diet consisted of products with insufficient nutritional value for physical work and retaining health.

Memories of the surviving girls still retain the always accompanying hunger: “And this disgusting food. […] In the morning 2 slices of bread, at noon cabbage soup. Cabbage turnip and potatoes — we mostly ate that. […] In the evening we got black cereal coffee and boiled potatoes with some margarine. That’s all.”³⁷ Recollections of other forced laborers support this testimony: “The diet: beets, jam from red beets, soup from snails, porridge with worms. So just hunger and no hope of improvement.”³⁸

The workers received no milk or other dairy products, also no fresh fruits or vegetables. Meat was a seldom addition to the meals. Mostly, girls supplemented their diet with products that they stole from the storages and surrounding fields or received from the guards or Ulm citizens. These were prepared in secret and shared among co‐workers living in the same room.

[…]

The municipal medical officer, Dr. Eduard Schefold (1880–1958), who was responsible for the provision of medical care in the camp, lacked empathy for the fate of the girls and did not try to improve the conditions in which they lived.⁴³ Among his greatest concerns were unwelcomed pregnancies among the girls. He denied Polish girls the right to reproduction and complained that, due to lack of space, abortions among Polish workers could not be conducted, which led to a situation women unrestrainedly having babies.⁴⁴

If it was no longer possible to prevent childbirth, pregnant women were sent to so‐called “maternity hospitals.” In Ulm, such an institution was also used as an abortion facility. In the “maternity hospital,” Polish toddlers were deliberately exposed to such catastrophic living conditions that the majority of them died within the first few months of their lives.⁴⁵

Sick girls were rarely admitted to hospitals. In most cases, they had to stay in the barracks for the duration of their illness. There were no isolated barracks for the sick, and even the simplest medication or wound dressing was difficult to find. This led in some cases to fatal consequences: “My roommate, who had a cold, later developed tuberculosis. She was with us from December to April […] but no doctor was there. When the Americans arrived, we took her to the hospital. Afterwards we wanted to visit her, but she has already died.”⁴⁶

[…]

The investigation of the fate of Polish female forced laborers from Łódź working for Telefunken in Ulm shows a system that aimed at the total exploitation of the workers towards ever increasing efficiency and lowering costs of production. Such exploitation was symptomatic for the last years of the war, during which the life and health of the foreign workforce was systematically ignored. Atrocious living and working conditions contributed to deteriorating health, outbreak of epidemics, and deaths.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 19).

1923: Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, one of Benito Mussolini’s educators, perished.
1934: The German referendum that year approved Adolf Schicklgruber’s appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.
1941: As Joseph Goebbels met with his Chancellor, the Axis captured Gomel and Kherson. Likewise, the Third Reich and the Kingdom of Romania signed the Tiraspol Agreement, rendering the region of Transnistria under control of the latter.
1942: The Axis successfully repelled Operation Jubilee: the amphibious Allied assault on Dieppe, France. Additionally, the Axis exterminated scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Menzhinskoe by machine gun fire, and it liquidated a workers’ ghetto in Kovel. Axis police teams also conducted house‐to‐house searches in the Kaunas ghetto.
1943: Axis defenses along the Mius River succumbed to a breach near Stalino (now Donetsk), Ukraine, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Oberstgeneral Hans Jeschonnek suicided. Less importantly, the Wehrmachtbericht daily radio report mentioned Paul von Kleist.
1944: Paris, France rose against Axis occupation with the help of Allied troops. Axis troops in the Falaise pocket in France received orders to break out, and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge committed suicide by taking cyanide near Metz, France after being relieved of his command and recalled to Berlin.
1945: Tōkyō told its troops that surrendering under the terms of a ceasefire would not be considered a loss of honour under the bushidō, which demanded fighting to the death. Thousands resultingly began laying down their arms as the Soviets landed on Maoka to deal with more Axis holdouts. (Coincidentally, the Kuomintang lost against the Communists in the Battle of Yongjiazhen as the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, took power in Hanoi, Vietnam.) On the other hand, Malayan nationalist leader and Axis collaborator Ibrahim Yaacob (who, despite his name, seems to have been a gentile) and his family escaped Malaya for Java. Hiroshi Nemoto also became the commanding officer of the Axis’s North China Area Army while still retaining his command over the Japanese Mongolian Garrison Army. At Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong, Axis commander Lieutenant Chozaburo Matsumoto ordered several civilians nearby to be tied to stakes and beaten in retaliation for a Chinese assault. When company commander Lieutenant Yasuo Kishi returned to duty later that day, he ordered the arrest and beheading of village elders Tsang Sau and Lam Fook. Later in the evening, Matsumoto ordered further arrests.

(Mirror.)

He wanted to fight the British in order to gain independence. Stern, in his utter naïveté, believed [that] he could form an alliance with Hitler against the British. […] Haganah, and the mainstream Zionists, and even Irgun realized [that] you had to wait for the defeat of the [Axis] before you could then take on the British. It was a question of tactics; it wasn’t a question of principle.

So the idea that you negotiate with the [European Fascists], of course, was acceptable. Nineteen thirty‐three, they negotiated Haʻavara, the transfer agreement, a trade agreement with the [Third Reich] that broke the Jewish boycott of [it]. So, again, there was no difference in principle, but tactically you could see that Stern was, again, impatient. He couldn’t wait, he couldn’t see that sometimes you can’t do everything at once.

[…]

Stern totally disregarded the anti‐Jewish side of Fascism. He was so focussed on trying to build an alliance against the British that he was only thinking about this maxim: ‘The enemy of my enemy’s my friend.’ So, in 1940, he tries to, first of all, to meet the Fascists from Italy.

They made a kind of agreement, which [was] called the Jerusalem Agreement, made by the Stern Group, which said that he’s gonna be one side, and Ital[y] will be the other side.

He agreed to recognise the Italian Fascists as the sovereign power in most of the region while the Italian Fascists would recognize Stern […] and the Lehi as the sole sovereign power in historic Palestine, but one of the most interesting parts of the agreement was that it required the Italian Fascists to use their military power to dissolve what they referred to as the Jewish diaspora, meaning that Stern wanted the Fascist military to forcibly remove Jews who were not in Palestine, and make them go to Palestine.

The problem was that, unbeknownst to Stern, these messages had been intercepted by his rivals at the Irgun, and for a while he was actually communicating—unbeknownst to him—with the Irgun rather than with the Italian Fascists.

Cheers to Tony Greenstein for showing me this.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 18).

1890: Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, was unfortunately born.
1912: Otto Ernst Remer, Axis general, burdened humanity with his existence.
1916: Neagu Bunea Djuvara, Romanian fascist, arrived to worsen the world.
1933: The Volksempfänger was first presented to the German public at a radio exhibition; the presiding Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, delivered an accompanying speech heralding the radio as the ‘eighth great power’.
1937: Imperial Japanese Army General Masakazu Kawabe entered Beiping, China and proclaimed himself the city’s military governor.
1938: Colonel‐General Ludwig Beck’s fellow Fascists forced him to resign as Chief of the Army General Staff because of his consistent opposition to Berlin’s decision to attack Czechoslovakia. Apart from that, the Imperialists lost one bomber.
1939: Bucharest placed an additional order to purchase six more He 112 fighters, and Berlin ordered the construction of Havelland. Additionally, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop pushed for his visit to Moscow, offering Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov favorable terms in terms of spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. (Coincidentally, Soviet negotiations with the Western régimes stalled again as Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck continued to resist allowing Soviet entry into Polish territory even in the face of a Fascist invasion!)
1940: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, took place. At that point, it was the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides (especially for the Fascists). Elsewhen, perhaps after Rudolf Betzendahl became Togo’s commanding officer, Alessandro Malaspina sighted armed merchant cruiser HMS Circassia in the Atlantic Ocean at 1620 hours. At 1700 hours and at eight hundred metres, Circassia suddenly steered toward the submarine, and the Fascists dove deeper to avoid being rammed (it was unclear whether Circassia was intending to ram or if she was merely zigzagging). At the distance of a couple hundred metres, Circassia fired three rounds at the submarine’s periscope followed by three depth charges, causing some damage with instruments within the conning tower from the vibration. Alessandro Malaspina remained submerged for half an hour before extending her periscope again, by which time Circassia had already left the area.
1941: In southern Ukraine, the Axis established a bridgehead across the Dnieper River at Zaporizhia. Further southwest along the river, the Axis began an assault on Kherson city, which was situated on the western bank of the river. The port facilities of Odessa, Ukraine was struck by He 111 bombers of the Luftwaffe KG 27; the pilots reported overwhelming success in terms of Soviet shipping destroyed. Out at sea, two Axis torpedo boats, NMS Viscolul and NMS Vijelia, damaged a Soviet destroyer south of Odessa.
1942: Berlin issued the Commando Order: all Allied commandos encountered by the Reich’s forces in Eurafrica now had to die immediately, even if in uniform or if they attempted to surrender. As well, the Axis assaulted Novorossiysk and Tuapse on the Black Sea coast in southern Russia, and one hundred kilometers to the northeast, the 1st Panzer Army captured Krasnodar. The Axis submarine U‐553 attacked Allied convoy TAW‐13 close to the coast of southeastern Cuba, then Axis submarine wolfpack Blücher, which consisted of U‐214, U‐333, U‐406, U‐566, U‐590, U‐594, and U‐653, attacked Allied convoy SL‐118 west of Portugal. Two Axis transports arrived at Buna and disembarked reinforcements, and six Axis destroyers delivered 916 troops to Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands; about four hundred were of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Japanese Infantry Regiment who landed at Taivu Point, while the other about five hundred were of the Yokosuka 5th Special Naval Landing Force who landed at Kokumbona; this was the first Axis reinforcement of Guadalcanal by warships.
1943: Otto Skorzeny conducted an aerial reconnaissance mission over La Maddalena, Italy, but his He 111 aircraft was shot down by Allied fighters. Although Skorzeny survived the crash, he suffered three broken ribs. Apart from that, General Hans Jeschinnek, Chief of the Luftwaffe’s staff since 1939, having already lost faith with Hermann Göring, committed suicide at the Luftwaffe Lager Robinson headquarters in Goldap, Ostpreußen (East Prussia) following his controversial order to the air defence units in Berlin to fire on Luftwaffe fighters which had landed there in error during the RAF’s raid on Peenemünde.
1944: The Greater German Reich’s Seventh Army retreated across Orne River in France, leaving 18,000 men behind to be captured. In southern France, Germans began evacuating from areas of Spanish border and Bay of Biscay. On the other hand, a V‐1 bomb blew up and destroyed the railway bridge over Oak Lane in Newington, Kent, England. This happened as an express train was approaching. The locomotive and the tender jumped the gap, but the first two carriages crashed onto the road. Seven passengers and a railway worker who had run to the bridge for shelter died.
1945: Some of the Axis’s last remaining troops prepared theirselves as Soviet forces landed at Takeda Beach on Shumshu Island and launched the Battle of Shumshu; the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Axis’s Kuril Islands commenced. (Coincidentally, Sukarno took office as Indonesia’s first president, following the country's declaration of independence the previous day.) On the other hand, nearly four thousand Axis troops surrendered along the Hailar River in Liaobei Province, China, effectively ending organised resistance.

Jewish representatives that had been removed had to be appeased, so they do not turn to the public, with the payment of severance fees and the [Fascist] assurance to Swedish authorities that Aryanising their foreign representation is “perfectly within the right” of [Fascist] companies and that strict procedures will be followed.

We can already observe during this period first instances of our first theoretical framework in action, such as in the case of Ludwig Klaar when the GES argues in favour of him despite his half‐Jewishness, citing his economic achievements for his German employer. Our second theoretical framework is also apparent in how his case was treated.

The GES referred to him, being a foreign representative of a [Fascist] company abroad, as a Mischling instead of a Hellenic codename, reinforcing the notion that the two nomenclatures are effectively two sides of the same coin. The superficial differences and the artificiality of this system that could bear vast consequences become visible in how after 1940, if deals had to be signed quickly, a non‐Aryan representative could be used, but he had to categorised non‐Jewish after the fact. One’s stamp on a file made all the difference.

Furthermore, we are presented with an interesting paradox connected to [Fascist] companies’ private investigations into racial matters and their prohibition from doing so. We can trace Bjerre’s argument that [Fascist] companies’ own investigations were no longer accepted from Summer 1940 back to the aide‐mémoire from the 9th of February 1939 where [Fascist] companies were first told to refrain from contacting Swedish companies directly about their racial composition. Despite this, they continued doing so well into the 1940s, leading to direct complaints from the Swedish embassy.

We can see from Van Scherpenberg’s response, in line with [Fascist] pre‐war caution that such infractions were something they sought to avoid, yet turned to seemingly tolerate out of practical necessity by the early 1940s, certainly after the expansion of foreign trade Aryanisation’s scope. In Denmark for instance, Bjerre demonstrates several examples of Danish companies also still being interrogated on their racial composition after 1940.¹²⁶

[…]

Swedish companies that were to be aryanised were often asked to fire for example Jewish employees, board members and get rid of Jewish share capital. This happened within the framework of discrimination between smaller and larger companies described previously, and in line with our first theoretical framework in that leniency towards economically significant exporters to [the Third Reich] or important buyers of [Fascist] goods became increasingly apparent, especially within the GCCS.

By June 1941, AB Turitz for instance was subjected to Aryanisation, yet only in the top management circles.¹⁹⁸ However, as part of this and the latter takeover by Upplands Enskilda Banken, the Jewish leadership only went into “hiding”, still exercising control over the company. Smaller companies, such as A. Wiklund A.B.A.W., were asked more explicitly, often with the usage of semantic and stylistic writing techniques to exert pressure, to relinquish their Jewish contingent:

Dear Mr. Consul, […] we learned that Mr. Hohenacker had a longer conversation about the increasingly acute staff questions at the company Wiklund, which concern all German businesses equally. […] That it is impossible for any German firm to continue working with the company Wiklund, if the misters Hirsch, Nachmansson senior and junior are not eliminated from the board of directors corresponds entirely to our assessment. […] You know, dear Mr. Consul that the Adlerwerke have, during the long‐lasting friendly cooperation with the house Wiklund, always avoided to intervene in internal affairs. […] In this case we have no other choice if we want to achieve the goal of continuing our existing trade relationship.¹⁹⁹

Some [Fascist] representatives in Sweden, like Ernst Seidel working for Simons und Frowein AG even hoped that the suspension of [Fascist] deliveries to Swedish–Jewish companies will lead to a self‐reduction of Jewish influence in Swedish companies.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 17).

1911: Martin Sandberger, SS functionary and Shoah perpetrator, was unfortunately born.
1942: German Army Group A established bridgeheads across the Kuban River while the Reserve Police Battalion 101 massacred 1,700 Jews in the Polish village of Łomazy. (Coincidentally, U.S. Marines raided the Axis‐held Pacific island of Makin while the USAAF made its first air raid on occupied Europe, bombing railroad marshaling yards at Sotteville‐lès‐Rouen. These were somewhere around the same time that the Second Moscow Conference ended.)
1943: The Axis took down sixty bombers from the U.S. Eighth Air Force during the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission, but it lost Sicily to the Allies as the U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrived in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Somewhere around the same time that the first Québec Conference of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and William Lyon Mackenzie King began, the Royal Air Force commenced Operation Hydra: the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against the Third Reich’s V‐weapon program.
1945: At Talitzou by the Sino‐Korean border, Puyi, then the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo, formally renounced the imperial throne, dissolving the state, and ceding its territory to the Republic of China. (Coincidentally, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, igniting the Indonesian National Revolution against the Dutch Empire.) Meanwhile, the Third Reich’s last submarine, U‐977, surrendered to the Allies.
1971: Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List, Axis field marshal, dropped dead.
1987: Rudolf Walter Richard Heß, leading members of the NSDAP, hung hisself in prison… I have no comment.

Do you remember when antifeminists would cite the SCUM Manifesto, or a few strangers online writing ‘kill all men’ as an obvious joke or overreaction, as evidence in support of antifeminism? What about conservatives citing a violent kidnapper shouting ‘black lives matter’, or a stranger publicly saying mean things about whites, as evidence against the Black Lives Matter movement (or even against Afro‐Americans in general)?

Well, this tactic was exactly what the Axis deployed: find an obscure ideologue proposing an extreme solution, then magnify his importance to such a ridiculous extent that it justifies one’s own actions. Theodore N. Kaufman, a petty bourgeois Jew without any political power, would have been quickly forgotten by history if only the Axis overlooked him, but he unwittingly made Axis propagandists’ job a little easier by writing a polemic titled Germany Must Perish!, and you better believe that they were going to milk that cow for all that she was worth:

A month after the [re]invasion [of Soviet Eurasia] came one of the most peculiar propaganda elements of the war: Theodore N. Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish! Kaufman was a 31‐year‐old American Jew who owned a theater ticket agency in New Jersey. In March 1941, he self‐published a 100‐page book that called for the sterilization of the entire German population (excepting only Jews and those no longer fertile).

It would be inhumane, he wrote, to kill the Germans, but sterilization would eliminate them within two generations. He also included a map proposing the partition of German territory among neighboring nations. As he wrote in the introduction, Germany had been a source of misery for the rest of the world from its beginning:

This time Germany has forced a TOTAL WAR upon the world.
As a result, she must be prepared to pay a TOTAL PENALTY.
And there is one, and only one, such Total Penalty:
Germany must perish forever!
In fact—not in fancy!¹⁹

Kaufman had earlier presented himself as the president (and perhaps sole member) of the American Federation of Peace, which in 1939 had urged Congress either to stay out of Europe’s war, or to sterilize all Americans to keep their children from becoming homicidal monsters.

He did have a gift for public relations. Before reviewers received his book, a small black coffin came in the mail announcing that his book would arrive the next day.²⁰ Kaufman’s effort got limited attention in the United States, generally negative, though he, in the fashion of film publicists, found several passages that could be made to sound positive to include in his second printing.²¹

That would have been the end of it, but copies made their way to [the Third Reich]. Although the United States was not yet a combatant, the [Axis] immediately presented Kaufman’s book as the official American plan to deal with Germany. On July 23, 1941, a month after the [re]invasion of [Soviet Eurasia], a Berlin press conference revealed Kaufman’s plan. The next day, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a story that covered most of the front page: “The Product of Criminal Jewish Sadism: Roosevelt Demands the Sterilization of the German People.”

The article stated that “Theodor Kaufmann [sic]”²² had “a monstrous plan for the extermination of the German people and the total fragmentation of Germany,” noting that he was president of the American Federation of Peace and

one of the closest advisers to the New York Jew Samuel Roseman [sic], who as is well known provides advice and assistance in speechwriting to the current president of the United States, Roosevelt. […] Given the close relationship of the writer to the White House, this monstrous war program can be seen as a synthesis of genuine Talmudic hatred and Roosevelt’s views on foreign policy.²³

The story received prime coverage in other German newspapers as well. Many articles followed in the German press, all of which claimed that Kaufman’s proposal was incontrovertible proof of international Jewry’s intent physically to destroy Germany and its people.²⁴ Das Reich avoided commentary, simply carrying particularly startling passages from Kaufman’s book.²⁵

Significant parts were read over national radio. It is important to remember that from July to September 1941, Third Reich bureaucracies were engaged in energetic and explicit internal discussions on killing the Jews, discussions reflected in more general terms in public discourse.²⁶

But that was only the beginning. Joseph Goebbels read Kaufman’s book early in August. In his diary, he expressed outrage, then wrote:

This Jew did a real service for the enemy [German] side. Had he written this book for us, he could not have made it any better. I will have this published in an edition of millions for Germany and above all for the front, and will write the forward and afterward myself.²⁷

Goebbels realized that Kaufman’s diatribe had little significance in the United States, but that did not prevent him from recognizing its propaganda value.²⁸ Goebbels discussed Kaufman’s book with Hitler a few weeks later, who was also outraged.

Notably, Hanover’s mayor cited Kaufman’s polemic as an excuse to evict the city’s Jews:

Hundreds of Jews in Hanover received notices Monday to evacuate their homes within 24 hours.

They were permitted to take only “the most necessary objects and furniture” and advised [that] the remainder of their property would be sold, the proceeds to be turned over to them “at a given time.” [Read: never.]

One reason cited for the action was said to have been a book written by “the Jew Kaufmann [sic] in New York.” The book, it was alleged, demands sterilization of all Germans and employment of German soldiers as coolies in foreign lands.

[…]

Theodore N. Kaufman, whose book “Germany Must Perish!” was cited by the mayor of Hanover […] in his eviction notice to Jews of that city, said Monday, “This is just a flimsy pretext for another of the innate cruelties of the German people.”

The author said, “I don’t think [that] it was my book that prompted this barbarity. They employed every possible German cruelty against the Jews long before my book was published.”

Silly prejudice aside, Kaufman raised one valid point here: he cannot be blamed for the eviction of Hanover’s Jews, or for any of the Axis’s other atrocities, for that matter. Some anticommunists might think that that is a great idea, but anybody who can apply materialist analysis knows that the causes behind atrocities run far deeper than an irrelevant stranger saying mean things about a kind of people. Freeing up room for gentiles is one example.

In many ways, Kaufman’s importance parallels Haj Amin al‐Husayni’s. Even though the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an unpopular, Zionist‐appointed politician who failed to prevent thousands of Palestinians from serving the Allies, and failed to organize any efficient Waffen‐SS divisions, he remains the only link that Zionists have between Palestinians and the Shoah, so they inflate his importance to astronomic proportions.

Click here for examples.

Hajj Amin‐al‐Husseini was highly influential and extremely popular throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.¹⁷ The Husseini family of Jerusalem was one of the most powerful and respected clans in Palestinian Arab society for centuries. The Husseinis claim to be descendants of Hussein, the son of the Caliph Ali and his wife Fatima, daughter of Muhammad.¹⁸ For centuries, the Husseinis had held important positions in Palestine, including Mufti of Jerusalem.¹⁹ Under the British Mandate in Palestine, due in part to the power and prestige of his family, Hajj Amin al‐Husseini served as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Thus, he was the most powerful Arab official in British Palestine and controlled a large budget and a network of patronage that included imams of mosques, judges in the Islamic courts, Islamic schools, and Islamic endowments (waqf).²⁰ By virtue of these two offices, Husseini “became the most influential Arab in Palestine.”²¹

Source.

On the contrary, René Wildangel documented that, among other facts, ‘Filastin, like the other traditional Christian paper, al‐Karmil, edited by Najib Nassar, was generally closer to the biggest opposition bloc (al‐muʻarada) against Amin al‐Husayni, and was dominated by the Nashashibi family. Al‐Sirat al‐Mustaqim, edited by ʻAbdullah al‐Qalqili, supported the same faction’ and ‘Arab Palestinian support for the old political élite disintegrated, and the dissatisfaction with the mufti, which had been growing for quite some time, fed the growing factionalism in Palestinian politics.⁴⁷’

No matter: Benjamin Netanyahu had to blame him for the Shoah, and ordinary Zionists shoehorn mentions of him wherever they please. For example:

If one insists on invoking the Holocaust, it should also not be forgotten that the Palestinians actively collaborated with Hitler. Their leader, Haj Amin al‐Husseini, met with Hitler to collaborate on plans to eliminate the Jews. So Palestinians are not innocent of Holocaust guilt.

You get the picture.

True, Kaufman was no war criminal (not even a minor one like the Mufti), but that is irrelevant: Walter Rauff caused far more damage than one Mufti ever did, yet he is of far less concern to Zionists. So criminality is not the issue here. Kaufman became important because the Axis decided that he should be, then the Zionists bestowed the Grand Mufti with the same importance, not so much because of something intrinsic to his misbehavior, but because of his value to propagandists.

The propagandists would have completed their jobs all the same; these two blokes only made them a little easier.

That being said, in at least one of these cases the professional liars still had some trouble reprogramming ordinaries despite the unwitting aid and their exhaustive efforts:

The […] German response to [Fascism’s] anti‐Semitic argument was more indifference than internalization. Despite the steady anti‐Semitic propaganda [that] we have surveyed, [Fascist] internal communication consistently worried about the lack of passionate anti‐Semitism on the part of the German population.⁸⁹

Anti‐Semitism increased gradually as the war went on. For the first two years, most Germans did not pay much heed to the alleged Jewish threat, since there seemed little chance the Jews would be able to do anything to Germany. Propaganda emphasized Germany’s other enemies, and the [Axis was] winning the war. The Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) of the SS provided confidential reports on public morale until 1943, when Goebbels had them eliminated because they too accurately reflected public doubts about the war.⁹⁰

A July 1941 SD report, written after the first appearance of the Kaufman story, noted that people read newspaper accounts with interest, but without any particular concern. “Frequently, there were characteristic expressions of popular humor: ‘Sure, they would if they could.”’ It did seem to strengthen anti‐Semitic attitudes, but others saw it as propagandistic preparation for the expected entrance of the United States into the war.⁹¹

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 16).

1904: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator, was born.
1919: Karl‐Heinz Euling, Waffen‐SS captain, was unleashed on the earth.
1933: Pro‐Reich Canadians provoked a riot at Christie Pits.
1934: Rome ordered the 48,000 troops rushed to the Austro‐Italian border during the July Putsch to return to their regular bases. Meanwhile, Schicklgruber’s amnesty announcement went into effect, releasing the prisoners in time to vote in Sunday’s referendum.
1935: Representatives of France, Great Britain and Fascist Italy met in Paris to negotiate a solution to the Abyssinia Crisis. Haile Selassie offered new economic concessions to Italy, stressing that he would not accept a military occupation but would grant facilities for mining, road construction and railway operations.
1942: As the Soviets evacuated Maykop and Axis positions in Egypt were bombed by Yankee aeroplanes for the first time, the Kriegsmarine began Operation Wunderland with the objective of entering the Kara Sea and destroying as many Soviet vessels as possible. Meanwhile in Bilbao, Spain, a mass was held at the Basilica of Begoña to commemorate members of the Begoña Regiment who died in the Civil War. After the service there was some shouting between the Carlist and Falangist factions, and during the ensuing scuffle a Falangist threw two hand grenades and wounded thirty people.
1944: First flight of a jet with forward‐swept wings, the Junkers Ju 287.
1945: Takijirō Ōnishi, Axis admiral, took his own life.

Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, page 46:

Attempts to organise resistance in the Białystok ghetto were not very successful. This was partly owing to a tactical miscalculation by the resistance leadership, which tried both to fight in the ghetto and also to strengthen the rural partisans, but had too few resources to achieve both tasks properly.

They were also undermined by the collaboration of the Zionist‐led Judenrat with the [Axis]. “The policy of the Białystok Judenrat was all the more convincing because its chief champion and executor was Ephraim Barasz, an engineer by profession and a liberal Zionist in his political beliefs.” Barasz had previously had the reputation of being an “honest man”, which enabled him more effectively to lull the ghetto’s inhabitants into a false sense of security.

In February 1943, the [Axis] demanded the surrender of 6,300 Białystok Jews for extermination. The Judenrat complied by preparing lists of people whose sin was that they were poor or had fled to Białystok from the annihilated provincial ghettoes. The deal was arranged in absolute secrecy, without any warning or hint from Barasz or other Judenrat members to the ghetto population of what was in store for it.

However, the resistance United Anti‐Fascist Bloc prevented most people on the lists from reporting for transportation to their deaths, and the ghetto inhabitants fought back when the [Axis] came to collect them. On 15 August 1943 the [Axis] informed Barasz they intended to liquidate the ghetto. “Barasz returned to the ghetto and did not warn anybody that only a few hours were left to the 40,000‐odd Jews” still in there, nor did he encourage them to revolt.

The Anti‐Fasci[s]t Bloc nevertheless managed to arm 300 combatants with firearms and grenades and a further 200 with Molotov cocktails, home‐made bombs, knives and axes. These weapons, many of them smuggled into the ghetto in most daring ways, were grossly inadequate for a large‐scale revolt, but the resistance nevertheless lasted until 26 August and the [Axis] had to use artillery and aircraft to subdue it. About 100 [Fascists] were killed.⁵⁷

---

Click here for other events that happened today (August 15).

1939: Twenty‐six Ju87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel met unexpected ground fog during a dive‐bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crashed and burned.
1940: A Fascist submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Fascist provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco‐Italian War in October.
1941: Hungary’s leaders officially ended their large‐scale deportations because the Axis occupying forces in East Galicia did not want to handle more deportees. Elsewhen, an Allied firing squad executed Corporal Josef Jakobs at the Tower of London for his espionage on the Axis’s behalf.
1943: Superior Axis forces surrounded Cretan partisans during the Battle of Trahili, who managed to escape against all odds.
1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasted his declaration of surrender following the Axis’s defeat in World War II; Korea gained independence from the Empire of Japan. Shortly before or after the broadcast, Korechika Anami, the Axis’s last remaining War Minister, committed suicide.
1953: Ludwig Prandtl, Axis physicist and aerospace scientist, expired.
1989: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator who helped plan the assault on Pearl Harbor, died.

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

Reports of “red rockets” fired from Jewish neighborhoods in cities as far away as Bucharest flooded in after air raids, but investigations determined these were tracers from antiaircraft guns, not signals by Jewish communists.²³

Soldiers were not immune to panic. On 22–23 June, the 3rd Călărași Regiment in Siret, a border town in Bukovina, reported being fired on by civilians, so a military praetor was assigned to investigate. He ordered gendarmes to look for snipers, investigated reports of local Ukrainian or Lipovan (Russian Orthodox schematics) snipers in other nearby villages, arrested a Romanian lawyer concealing a Jewish family from deportation, and oversaw the evacuation of civilians.

Fortunately, the military praetor concluded that Soviet soldiers had fired the shots, although nervous [Axis] soldiers were likely responsible, and no one was executed.²⁴ Any air victories were celebrated to bolster morale. On 23 June, First Lieutenant Hoira Agarici downed three Soviet bombers over Constanța, and his feat became a popular song, “Agarici has gone to hunt bolșevici.”²⁵ However, a constant flow of warnings from the MCG about saboteurs, spies, and parachutists in the rear kept soldiers, and civilians, on edge.

Soviet counterattacks reduced Axis bridgeheads on the Prut; one Romanian toehold was described as a “nest of projectiles,” and in some places Axis forces were forced to evacuate back over the river, triggering the first mass reprisals against Jews.²⁶ One of the worst massacres occurred after Axis troops evacuated the Sculeni bridgehead. The town had changed hands four times in the previous three days, when Axis troops finally evacuated twenty‐five hundred civilians, including a thousand Jews, also joined the exodus to escape the carnage.

Colonel Ermil Matieș, commanding the 6th Vânători Regiment, ordered his intelligence officer “to arrest and execute all the suspected Jews” blamed for directing Soviet artillery fire onto his men. On 26 June, officers began to “classify” Jews with the help of soldiers and civilians from Sculeni. Soldiers marched Jews who had been fingered as communists into the hills around the village of Stânca Roznovanu and forced them to dig mass graves before being shot.

[Axis] soldiers and […] civilians arrived to watch, sometimes joining in to beat men to turn over valuables, and to rape women. Over the next several days soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate, killing women, children, and the elderly, totaling around six hundred people.²⁷ Shocked civilian authorities reported the soldiers’ atrocities, prompting an investigation, but Matieș justified the crimes as legitimate reprisals, and no one was punished.²⁸

The Stânca Roznovanu massacre shows how mass reprisals quickly turned into genocidal massacres as permissive officers allowed soldiers—joined by civilians—to do whatever they wanted to Jews.

Meanwhile, Soviet troops had even crossed the Danube, establishing bridgeheads near Ismail, which increased [Axis] commanders’ fears of Jewish uprisings in the rear to support Soviet attacks at the front, especially in Iași.²⁹ The city had come under regular air attack because it was an important rail hub on the frontier.

On 26 June, bombs killed two hundred citizens, including thirty‐eight Jews.³⁰ Some people fled to the countryside, but most lacked the means; Jews were not allowed to leave. Some Romanians blamed corrupt or incompetent authorities for inadequate air defenses, but even more told stories about Jewish communists signaling Soviet pilots.³¹ The press contributed to hysteria with stories about Jewish agents.

Iași garrison commander Colonel Constantin Lupu, Prefect Colonel Dumitru Captaru, Police Superintendent Colonel Constantin Chirilovici, and two others formed an emergency committee that ordered a search leading to the arrest of 207 Jews for possessing flashlights or red cloths and the provisional arrest of 317 other Jews. The few women rounded up were immediately released. The men were beaten during interrogations at police headquarters, but many were soon freed, owing to lack of evidence.³²

Certain that police interrogators were blind or bought off, soldiers took matters into their own hands. Sergeant Mircea Manoliu, a former Legionary, first started shooting released Jews instead of escorting them home, then shooting newly detained Jews instead of taking them to police headquarters.³³

Iași city authorities were losing control, in part because of institutional confusion. There was an array of groups within the city operating independently and often at cross purposes, including police, gendarmes, garrison troops, units heading to the front, SSI agents, and [Wehrmacht] soldiers.³⁴

Police lacked authority over soldiers; 14th Infantry Division soldiers were mostly spread out in the countryside; Romanian military police had no control over [Wehrmacht] soldiers; German 198th Infantry Division and Todt Organization troops had their own missions; and SSI agents operated clandestinely.

On 27 June, after hearing gunfire, Colonel Chirilovici found a group of Romanians in a Jewish cemetery singing Legionary songs while receiving rifles from two men who said they had orders from army intelligence to arm volunteers in case of a Jewish–communist uprising. He discovered later they were SSI officers.³⁵

German patrols prowled the streets as well. Colonel Lupu began preparations to deport “suspect” Jewish men to prevent “rebellious actions in Iași on the part of the Jews” that army intelligence had been predicting for a year.³⁶

Hundreds of Jewish men from towns in the evacuation zone had already been deported, and now the conducător wanted to do the same thing on a far grander scale in Iași, since by now nearly half the city’s population was Jewish after having been swollen by ten thousand Jews—refugees from Bessarabia the year before and deportees from surrounding towns in recent weeks.³⁷

Colonel Captaru requested the 6th Vânători and 13th Dorobanți Regiments to organize patrols to help the overstretched municipal police after reports of looting during the blackout. Unintentionally, these orders destabilized Iași even further and set the stage for a pogrom.

On 28 June, the situation in the city deteriorated, and inflammatory army propaganda did not help. An article in Soldatul reminded soldiers it had been a year since Soviet troops entered northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, calling the day a “black page in the calendar of the Romanian nation,” but rejoiced that soon Romania would be “reborn in all its ancient virtues, under the correct leadership of a great soldier and Romanian, General Ion Antonescu.”³⁸

At 10 a.m. soldiers from the 13th Dorobanți and 24th Artillery Regiments, including Sergeant Manoliu, entered the Tătărași neighborhood to search for radios but quickly began ransacking Jewish homes. Police arrived to find soldiers holding Jews, many beaten and bleeding, at gunpoint as civilians shouted encouragement. When the police tried to intercede, those on the scene “screamed that [the police] belonged to the Jews and had been bribed by them.”³⁹

Manoliu told a passing German patrol “the police were protecting the Jews.”⁴⁰ The [Wehrmacht] let the Romanian soldiers continue searching for radios and did nothing to stop the abuses. Only when Colonel Lupu and a military praetor came with gendarmes was the looting stopped and Manoliu temporarily detained.⁴¹

Calm was not restored for very long. An air raid alarm at 9 p.m. put the city on edge, then antiaircraft gunfire was misidentified as blue or green “flares” (actually different‐colored tracers indicating different antiaircraft guns), and by 10 p.m. [Axis] patrols reported being fired upon. The patrols shot back and searched homes but never found any snipers.⁴² German patrols reported casualties; it took days for Romanian authorities to confirm that this was false.⁴³

At 11 p.m. General Antonescu phoned Lupu, ordering him to restore order and deport all Jewish men in the city at once.⁴⁴ Soon afterward, two [Axis] columns passing through Iași on the way to the front reported being fired at by snipers. By 3 a.m. soldiers across the city were grabbing Jews from buildings they thought were the sources of fire and summarily executing them. A report recorded three hundred dead and fifty wounded during the night.⁴⁵ As the sun rose, civilians joined soldiers, turning reprisals into a pogrom.

“That Sunday,” as locals subsequently referred to 29 June, soldiers, gendarmes, civilians, and some Germans killed thousands of Jews, mostly men, but women and children too. At dawn city authorities realized that, despite all the gunfire, not a single soldier had been killed; nonetheless, soldiers and gendarmes pulled Jews into the streets, sorting out military‐age men, to be arrested. Anyone who resisted was shot. [Axis] patrols marched “convoys” of Jews to various collection points or directly to police headquarters.⁴⁶

Those who fell behind or lowered hands from over their heads were shot, and streets were quickly littered with bodies. The cells at police headquarters were already crammed, so its courtyard was used as overflow, and by 9 a.m. it contained perhaps two thousand Jews.⁴⁷ Civilians began looting Jewish properties. City authorities believed Jewish communists and “very weak Romanian communist elements” had attacked to hinder troop movements by purposefully triggering a pogrom to spread disorder, so commanders made feeble attempts to restore order.⁴⁸

(Emphasis added. Click here for a few statistics.)

The Iași pogrom remains controversial. For decades Antonescu was held responsible for manipulating what occurred in an attempt to exterminate the city’s entire Jewish population; but he did not order the massacre. Nor did city authorities try to murder all Jews. The death toll is still hotly contested. Rumors soon afterward among Jews in Bucharest claimed ten thousand dead.⁶³ Since then, estimates ranging from 3,200 victims (tabulating only the dead from police headquarters and the two trains) to 13,200 (subtracting between censuses) have been proposed.⁶⁴

The truth lies in between these extremes. A year after the pogrom, the Iași Jewish community reported it lacked death certificates for some seven thousand Jewish men who “disappeared” during the violence.⁶⁵ With slain Jewish women, children, and elderly added, the total figure was probably close to eight thousand dead. Although the number of victims may not be as high as commonly assumed, this does not lessen the depth of depravity plumbed by [Axis] soldiers and civilians.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 14).

1890: Bruno Emil Tesch, Axis chemist who co‐invented Zyklon B, arrived to worsen life with his existence.
1934: Adolf Schicklgruber received a signed document containing Hindenburg's ‘last wish’, which was for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. Schicklgruber did not have the document published. Hermann Göring was injured in an accident outside Munich when the car he was driving collided with a truck on a narrow road. He sustained injuries to his back and cuts to his face and knees, but left the hospital the next day.
1936: Nationalist forces led by Juan Yagüe captured the walled city of Badajoz. Once inside, a savage repression known as the Massacre of Badajoz began, making headlines around the world. Meanwhile, Portugal accepted a French proposal for neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, an important step in the international nonintervention agreement that France was seeking.
1937: The Battle of Santander began. Chinese warplanes attacked Imperial ships in Shanghai harbour, but most of the bombs missed their targets and struck civilian areas instead, killing over 1,000.
1940: Fascist administrator Gustav Simon abrogated the Constitution of Luxembourg, banned all opposition parties and made German the only official language there.
1941: Axis forces captured Krivoy Rog while the Third Reich commissioned the submarine U‐583. Meanwhile, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill jointly issued the Atlantic Charter, stating the Allied goals for the postbellum world as British bombers conducted an overnight raid on the railway yards at Hanover.
1943: Allied bombers flew a record distance, traveling 2,500 miles from Australia to carry out the first bombing raid on the island of Borneo, striking the Axis oil reserves at Balikpapan. Meanwhile, the Axis lost both the Battle of Roosevelt Ridge and the Battle of Belgorod. To make matters even worse for them, Rome was declared an open city by the Italian government a day after its twoth bombing, making the announcement in a radio broadcast by Stetani, the official news agency. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Italian Prime Minister confirmed the decision later in the day, offering to remove Rome’s defenses, under the supervision of the Allies, in exchange for no further bombing. Finally, the British submarine Saracen was damaged by depth charges from Italian corvettes off Bastia, Corsica and scuttled to prevent capture.
1944: The Osovets Offensive officially ended with the completion of Soviet objectives. Canadian and Polish troops began Operation Tractable, the final offensive of the Battle of Normandy. An Italian prisoner of war was killed during a violent conflict between Yankee soldiers and Italian POWs. Finally, the Axis submarine U‐618 was sunk in the Bay of Biscay by British ships and aircraft.
1945: Emperor Hirohito recorded a radio message to the Japanese people saying that the war should end and that they must ‘bear the unbearable.’ That night the Kyūjō incident occurred, an effort by a group of officers to steal the recording and stop the move to surrender. The attempt would fail and the conspirators would commit suicide.
1947: The Western Allies completed the Buchenwald Trial. Of the thirty‐one convicted staff members of the Buchenwald concentration camp, they executed only eleven, and gave the rest prison sentences, most of whom they let out early.
1956: Konstantin Hermann Karl Freiherr von Neurath, Axis diplomat and war criminal, dropped dead.
1988: Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, Axis businessman, expired.

In late 2022, a map of Russia partitioned appeared in the office of Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, with the new borders drawn by hand. A couple weeks later, Budanov turned 37, and carved a birthday cake of the same map. His spokesman is a former coordinator of the Capitulation Resistance Movement.

[…]

In mid‐April 2023, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told ABC News that “the moment has come for this country [Russia] to collapse,” and the OUN‐B announced the revival of the ABN [under] the [euphemism] “Anti‐Imperial Bloc of Nations.” Meanwhile, Foreign Policy published an article that warned, “talk of Russian disintegration in Western capitals could raise nationalistic fervor and make Russians rally behind Putin.”

Oleh Medunytsia, predicting that “our activities within the ABN will lead to the collapse of Russia,” embarked for the United States, to tour the Ukrainian American community as the new OUN‐B leader, and participate in the next “PostRussia Forum,” which took place over four days in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York City. The Hudson Institute, the home of Trump’s former CIA director, hosted the DC portion of the event.

In Manhattan, the OUN‐B leader made the final speech of the conference (about reviving the ABN), and sat on a panel next to Austrian Twitter sensation Gunther Fehlinger, a clownish advocate for expanding NATO and dismembering Russia, China, and BRICS.

[…]

Levus and Kryvdyk, longtime assistants to far‐right politician Andriy Parubiy, used to run an OUN‐B front called the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative” with Oleh Medunytsia and Borys Potapenko from Michigan. Among other things, they arranged annual trips to Ukraine for Republican think tankers that tend to speak at conferences in Washington organized by Banderite leaders of the aforementioned “ODFFU, Inc.”

In September 2022, about a week after the “PostRussia Forum” got its new name, the Ukrainian Strategic Initiative officially joined Kyiv‐Mohyla Academy under the leadership of Ostap Kryvdyk, who is not necessarily an OUN‐B member. This NaUKMA think tank, which originated in an OUN‐B front, even has a “PostRussia department,” led by another Banderite coordinator of the Capitulation Resistance Movement, who addressed the European Congress of Ukrainians this year.

OUN‐B leader Oleh Medunytsia made it back just in time for another 150th anniversary Mikhnovsky memorial concert at the Lviv National Philharmonic Hall, which was organized by the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center. Medunytsia delivered the opening speech, followed by OUN‐B newspaper editor Viktor Roh.

Among the performers was Sofiya Fedyna, a nationalist member of parliament from the European Solidarity party. In 2019, Fedyna faced criminal charges after Zelensky made a tense visit to the frontline and she suggested that someone might kill the new president with a grenade.

To announce Ukraine’s much hyped 2023 counteroffensive, the commander‐in‐chief, Valerii Zaluzhny, released a high‐quality propaganda video starring the Svoboda Battalion in an élite brigade of the National Guard. “The time has come to take back what belongs to us,” he captioned the video in late May.

The OUN‐B has at least two highly placed members in the far‐right Svoboda party which created this unit. The head of political education is Yuriy Syrotiuk, and the chief ideologist is Oleksandr Sych, a former director of the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center.

As of this year, Syrotiuk is a vice president of the ABN. In 2015, he participated in clashes outside of the Ukrainian parliament building, and was arrested for “participating in mass disorder” after someone threw a grenade which killed several police officers and wounded “more than 140 people.” At that point, Svoboda was determined to stop parliament from granting autonomy to Donbass separatists as part of the Minsk peace process.

Last year, Syrotiuk posed with the OUN‐B newspaper as a grenade launcher operator in the 5th Assault Brigade. “The Irreversible Liquidation of the Russia Empire Has Begun,” or so he says, but what happens when Kyiv stops entertaining this fantasy?

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 13).

1866: Giovanni Agnelli, Axis businessman, was born.
1902: Felix Heinrich Wankel, Fascist engineer, was born.
1937: The Empire of Japan started the Battle of Shanghai.
1944: Axis troops began the pillage and razing of Anogeia in Crete that would continue until September 5.

Table 2 shows the results of estimating the legacy of PNF membership in the 1920s across a range of categories of conflictual political events that took place during the Years of Lead in Italy. We report estimates for the variables included into the count model (the second equation) and not the inflating stage (probability of having a conflictual event in a province‐month).¹¹

All observations are defined at the province‐month level. In Column 1, the dependent variable considers all conflictual political events present in our dataset between 1969 and 1988, independently of the identity of the perpetrator. Column 2 includes all violent events in the dataset, also independently of the identity of perpetrator. All other columns refer to conflictual events—non‐violent (Column 4) and violent (Column 3)—perpetrated by neofascist actors.

We observe a positive and statistically significant effect of above‐average PNF membership in the 1920s on both conflictual and violent events that took place in Italy during the Years of Lead (Columns 1 and 2, respectively). The coefficient in the first column indicates that in provinces with strong PNF membership in the 1920s, the number of conflictual political events during the Years of Lead was 72.7 per cent 12 higher.

The estimated effect of PNF membership increases in magnitude and statistical significance for events perpetrated by neofascist organizations, and of violent nature. For instance, Column 3 shows an increase in the expected number of violent neofascist events in 1969–88 by 120 per cent in provinces with higher PNF membership in the 1920s. By contrast, the coefficient of the PNF legacy is not significant for non‐violent events (Column 4). Hence, our theory predicts violent legacies but not non‐violent legacies.

[…]

According to another alternative interpretation, neofascist violence during the Years of Lead might be a response to the violence that took place during the period preceding the formation of the fascist régime in Italy. Between 1920 and 1921 repeated violent clashes occurred between socialist and fascist groups. Memories of this period could have affected future cycles of violence.

To account for this, in Column 2 of Appendix Table A12, we add to the count model a variable capturing the total number of deaths in the political clashes that occurred between 1920 and 1921, as they might be systematically correlated with the early presence of PNF members. Our results are not substantially affected by the inclusion of this variable.

Further, we could observe neofascist violence during the Years of Lead as a response either to actions carried out by the government against far‐right political groups or to state repression against such groups in general. In Appendix Table A13, we analyse whether retaliation could be an alternative factor explaining the rise of neofascist violence in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Column 1, we reproduce the specification of Column 2 in Appendix Table A12 by adding to the first equation the total number of events of state repression against far‐right actors (at the province–month level).²²

The effect of higher PNF membership remains strong and highly significant. In the remaining columns of Appendix Table A13, we explore the legacy effect when the sample is split according to the cumulated level of state repression over the whole time period, to capture those areas where the activity of the state is systematically higher.²³

We observe a non‐monotonic trend in the effect of PNF membership: the impact of the fascist legacy seems to increase for low levels of repression, then drops when repression seems to reach its optimum level and it is effectively able to tackle the neofascist organizational structures that coordinate violence. After this point, we observe a strong backlash: excessive repression is likely to exacerbate tensions and magnifies the effect of the legacy, leading to a substantial increase in the level of far‐right violence.

Finally, local neofascist violence could also be explained with a logic of revenge resulting from the killings of fascist militants by partisans following Liberation Day in 1945, instead of early PNF membership. Liberation of Italy was completed on 25 April 1945, but in the following months left‐wing members of partisan bands caused about 10,000 deaths through extra‐judicial executions of individuals who were somehow considered linked to the fascist régime (Dondi 1999; Grandi 2013).

Given the brutality of these actions, neofascist violence during the Years of Lead might capture a long‐lasting retaliation for these killings, which are likely to coincide with early PNF membership. Such retaliation could also represent a channel through which the fascist legacy exacerbates the level of neofascist violence.

To evaluate this possibility, in Appendix Table A14 we add to the specifications of Table 2 and Appendix Tables A8 and A12 the number of extrajudicial deaths in a given province immediately after Liberation Day, together with its interaction with the dummy variable capturing strong fascist legacy.

The effect of the legacy stays strong and positive, whereas the independent effect of the killings on the level of neofascist violence appears to be negative, contradicting a potential retaliation argument. Retaliation does not seem to be a mediating factor either, as the interaction term is never statistically significant.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 12).

1916: Ioan Dicezare, Axis fighter pilot, was born.
1944: Waffen‐SS troops massacred 560 people in Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Coincidentally, other Reich troops finished the week‐long Wola massacre, during which time they massacred at least 40,000 people indiscriminately or in mass executions… on the other hand, the Axis did lose Alençon to General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque’s army (the first city in France to be liberated by French forces), but knowing that is not enough to make me feel better.
1973: Karl Ziegler, scientific Patron Member of the SS, perished.
1983: Theodor Burchardi, Axis Admiral, left the world.
2013: Hans‐Ekkehard Bob, Luftwaffe pilot, finally expired.

Sheen is an investigative journalist and an expert on Kahanism and other forms of Jewish extremism both inside present-day [occupied Palestine] and around the world.

Last year he wrote an important essay on the history of Kahanism, published by The Institute for Palestine Studies. In this episode of the podcast, Sheen takes us through some of his findings.

He explains the history of Rabbi Kahane and his followers. Sheen explains how the Kahanists have for decades infiltrated local Democratic Party politics in the United States – the topic of the bulk of the essay.

Due to the fact that most American Jews tend to vote Democratic, explains Sheen, “if a politician wanted to so-called ‘Get the Jewish vote,’ then their way to do so is to present themselves as a Democrat. And Kahanists realize this.”

This is the reason Dov Hikind — a former Jewish terrorist with incredibly regressive and bigoted politics — was a Democratic Party lawmaker in the New York State Assembly for 35 years, Sheen explains.

My colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman and I interviewed Sheen a few days before the current genocide began — on 4 October 2023 to be precise. But we’ve decided to release the interview in full, as the issues it raises are more relevant than ever.

In a new introduction for the episode, filmed recently, Sheen says that “if anything, the thesis of the monograph has been borne true: that the Democratic Party can be even worse in some cases than the Republican Party.”

He said that “what we have in recent months is the culmination of all that: we have the [Democratic Party] president of the United States [Joe Biden] who was the biggest recipient ever of AIPAC aid, supporting genocidal policies, supporting Kahanist policies.”

(Source.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 11).

1938: The Empire of Japan lost to the Soviets in the Battle of Khasan.
1940: Under the aegis of the Fascist consulate in Monaco, a mass to commemorate the liberation of the internees of Saint‐Cyprien and Vernet, officiated by Don Luigi De Biasi (himself a former Saint‐Cyprien prisoner), was held in Monaco’s Principality.
1943: Luigi Petrucci, the Italian ambassador and authorized minister in the NDH, and General Mario Robotti, the commander of the Second Italian Army and administrator of all annexed and occupied Croatian territories, held a meeting discussing questions concerning the relationship between Fascist Italy and the NDH. Meanwhile, Brazilian police apprehended the Axis spy William Marcus ‘Willy’ Baarn in the small town of Gargau.

Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 58–60:

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti‐Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti‐Semite.’⁸⁸ Ruppin associated Judaism with capitalism and his writings reflected his belief in the identity between anti‐Semitism and anti‐capitalism. His diary contained entries that were symptomatic of self‐hatred.⁸⁹

The issue of the physical image of the Jew troubled Ruppin.⁹⁰ At a theatre performance he complained about the ‘Jewish physiognomy of one of the actresses.’ He subscribed to the myth, much loved by the [Fascists], that the Jews had an especially strong sex drive, hence circumcision.⁹¹

On 16 August 1933 Ruppin described how, five days previously, he had travelled to Jena:

to meet Prof. Hans F.K. Günther, the founder of [Fascist] race theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Günther was most congenial… and agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior but different, and that the Jewish Question has to be solved justly.⁹²

Hans Günther, a member of the [NSDAP] from 1929, was Heinrich Himmler’s ideological mentor and ‘the highest scientific authority concerning racial theory.’⁹³ In May 1930 he was appointed Professor to the Chair in Racial Anthropology at Jena University, after the intervention of Wilhelm Frick, the [German Reich’s] first [Fascist] state minister. Günther praised Zionism ‘for recognizing the genuine racial consciousness (Volkstum) of the Jews.’⁹⁴

This meeting appeared in the German edition of Ruppin’s diaries but was omitted from both the English and Hebrew editions, which were edited by Alex Bein. Bloom wrote of how:

the idea of segregation was central to Ruppin’s eugenic planning… in order to produce a culture of their own, the Jews had to live… separated from any other culture… only such ‘kinship of race’ would encourage him to be healthy and creative.⁹⁵

Lewis Namier, a former Political Secretary of the ZO in London and the personal secretary of Weizmann during the 1930s wrote the preface to Ruppin’s Jews in the Modern World, which appeared in 1934, a few months after the Ruppin‐Günther meeting. Bloom described how:

Weizmann — who worked closely with Ruppin — read it and had to warn Namier not to be so open in expressing their common toleration of [Fascism] (my emphasis)

Because:

the louts will say, the Jews themselves think that it will be all for the good, etc.⁹⁶

Namier was seen, even by many Zionists, as ‘an intense Jewish anti‐Semite.’ He wrote that:

not everyone who feels uncomfortable with regard to us must be called an anti‐Semite, nor is there anything necessarily and inherently wicked in anti‐Semitism.⁹⁷

In his final book, The Jew’s War of Survival, Ruppin wrote that the [Fascist] race laws were:

returning to Judaism those Jews who had been lost to it because of increased assimilation in Germany.⁹⁸

Bloom commented that ‘Ruppin’s attitude towards the [Fascists], then, reflects the general reaction of many Zionists, including “liberals” like Weizmann.’⁹⁹ It [may be] true that the leading Zionists had no reason to foresee the Holocaust but nonetheless their reaction to the rise of Hitler was shameful.

Amos Morris‐Reich asked why Ruppin didn’t express any reservations about Günther in the privacy of his diary, instead describing it as a ‘pleasant encounter.’¹⁰⁰ Ruppin’s Sociology of the Jews ‘incorporated many of Günther’s ideas and theories in the text.’ One of its main sources of inspiration was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hitler’s ‘John the Baptist’.¹⁰¹

Ruppin saw Günther’s writings as ‘a treasure chest of material’. Bloom argued that Ruppin’s ‘nationalist‐Zionist view and his view of race are closely connected’.¹⁰² Morris‐Reich, however, argued that Ruppin’s concern with ‘racial unity’ of the Jews was ‘not to be confused with racial purity’. He argued that Ruppin’s opposition to Jewish assimilation was based on his view of ‘racial uniqueness’ as a ‘component of national uniqueness.’¹⁰³ But that is precisely what makes Zionism racist!

Morris‐Reich accepted that there wasn’t simply an identity of interest between Zionism and [Fascism] but also an ideological affinity. He argued that Ruppin’s concern was ‘eugenic rather than racial.’ A distinction without a difference. What is the purpose of eugenics if not ‘improving’ the ‘race’?

Ruppin saw a problem:

where Jews live in the midst of peoples whose racial make‐up is very different from theirs. This seems to be Ruppin’s and Günther’s common ground: that a solution to the Jewish problem must include the Jews’ removal from Northern Europe.¹⁰⁴

Morris‐Reich found these statements, in the light of the Holocaust, as ‘insensitive’ and ‘unfortunate in the extreme’. Nonetheless he argued that ‘Ruppin’s project was nationalist, whereas Günther’s was international.’¹⁰⁵ These are verbal semantics. Clearly Ruppin and Günther shared a lot in common.

Morris‐Reich’s main objection to Bloom’s critique was that he was using Ruppin as an example of the ‘essence’ of Zionism whereas Ruppin ‘never developed a social‐Darwinist theory’. But Ruppin went further than espousing a theory. He put Social Darwinism into practice, for example with his treatment of the Yemenite workers.¹⁰⁶

Bloom argued that Ruppin’s interaction with the [Fascists] cannot be dismissed as simply realpolitik. Rather it was ‘clearly the outcome of a congruent weltanschaung’. For Ruppin and many other eugenicists, ‘the pre‐mass murderer Hitler seemed a refreshing politician.’¹⁰⁷

The encounter between Günther and Ruppin … must be seen as part of Ruppin’s series of ‘friendly’ meetings with the Nazi Foreign Office and Treasury Office.¹⁰⁸

Bloom suggested that Ruppin’s meeting with Günther had practical implications for the plan he was promoting for the emigration of German Jews. They were also preliminary to discussions about the Haʻavara Agreement. Ruppin ‘wanted to reassure the [Fascists] as to the Zionist movement’s deep understanding of the therapeutic and eugenic dimension of such an agreement.’¹⁰⁹

(Emphasis added in most cases.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 10).

1874: Antanas Smetona, Lithuania’s parafascist head of state, was unfortunately born. So was Jiro Minami.
1934: Basil Cochrane Newton and Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow agreed to the Exchange Agreement for Commercial Payments in Berlin.
1936: Cruiser Köln completed operations off Spain.
1937: The Imperial Consul General in China demanded that the Chinese withdraw the Peace Preservation Corps from Shanghai due to the death of Lieutenant Isao Oyama at Hongqiao Airport on the previous day. Meanwhile, additional Imperialists began arriving in Shanghai.
1938: The anticommunists destroyed the main synagogue at Nürnberg, and the Namita Detachment of the Imperial 11th Army Group and the Imperial 9th Division attacked Ruichang, Jiangxi, China.
1939: Poland responded to the Third Reich’s message from the previous day, noting that should a war between the two régimes start, it would be Reich’s aggression that started it, and Poland could not be blamed. Reinhard Heydrich ordered SS Officer Alfred Naujocks to fake an attack on a radio station near Gleiwitz, which was on the border with Poland. ‘Practical proof is needed for these attacks of the Poles for the foreign press as well as German propaganda’, said Heydrich (according to Naujocks). Lastly, Fascist Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano departed Rome for Salzburg in southern Germany (occupied Austria) to meet with his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop.
1940: The Kingdom of Romania passed antisemitic laws, and the Fascist occupation government in Luxembourg deemed the French language illegal; the Fascist occupation government in Belgium likewise declared that listening to BBC broadcasts was illegal.
1941: Axis destroyers damaged Tuman with eleven direct hits before Soviet coastal guns drive them away. Thirty‐seven officers and men escaped from the sinking vessel as the Axis destroyers withdrew; fifteen died, including the commanding officer Lieutenant L. Shestakov and the commissar.
1942: The Axis started deporting the Lvov ghetto’s Jews to concentration camps, and troops of the Axis’s 6.Armee crossed the Don River in southern Russia, reaching the suburbs of Stalingrad. The Axis reached the Krasnodar‐Pyatigorsk‐Maikop line in southern Russia. Over Novorossiysk, five He 111 bombers of the Luftwaffe group KG 55 suffered an assault by Soviet LaGG‐3 fighters; Soviet pilots claimed three bombers destroyed, one of which by deliberate ramming. Lastly, Max Merten arrived in Thessaloniki for service with the Axis occupation administration in Thessaloniki, Greece.
1943: A transport of about 3,000 arrived at Auschwitz from the liquidated ghetto in Sosnowiec, Poland. The Axis registered 110 men and 195 women into the camp, but exterminated the remainder. On the same day, Auschwitz received 754 sewing machines from the liquidated ghetto of Bedzin.
1944: As the Battle of Guam effectively ended, the Battle of Narva ended with a defensive Axis victory.
1945: Faced with the threat of more atomic bombs and the menace of the Soviets, the Axis announced that it was willing to surrender provided that the Emperor’s future status could be assured. In the meantime, in reaction to our gradual presence in transportation hubs and major cities in China, Chiang Kaishek ordered surrendered Axis commands to secure their own areas until Nationalist troops arrived to take control!
1979: Walther Gerlach, Axis nuclear physicist, perished.
1999: A Los Angeles neofascist, Buford O. Furrow, Jr., shot up a synagogue and later murdered a Filipino postal worker.
2012: Ioan Dicezare, Axis pilot, expired.

That [the Third Reich] and its European collaborators had murdered six million Jews was widely known after 1945. But for many years this stupefying fact had little political and intellectual resonance. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Shoah was not seen as an atrocity separate from other atrocities of the war: the attempted extermination of Slav populations, [Roma, Sinti], disabled people and homosexuals.

Of course, most European peoples had reasons of their own not to dwell on the killing of Jews. Germans were obsessed with their own trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the [Axis], wanted to present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism.

Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war ended in 1945. Germany had former [Fascists] as its chancellor and president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an apparatchik in the Vichy régime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement in [Axis] atrocities.

Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence and some sort of statist denial regarding the Holocaust’, as Idith Zertal writes in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005). It wasn’t until long after 1945 that the Holocaust began to be publicly remembered.

[Under Zionism] itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material for the construction of a strong new [ethno]state. ‘Everything they had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’

Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left [Zionism’s neocolony] partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his memoir, Where Memory Leads (2016), that academic scholars initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem.

Attitudes began to change only with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In The Seventh Million (1993), the [Jewish] historian Tom Segev recounts that Ben-Gurion, who was accused by Begin and other political rivals of insensitivity to Shoah survivors, decided to stage a ‘national catharsis’ by holding the trial of [an Axis] war criminal.

He hoped to educate Jews from Arab countries about the Shoah and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with) and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community.

Segev goes on to describe how Begin advanced this process of forging a Shoah consciousness among darker-skinned Jews who had long been the target of racist humiliations by the country’s white establishment. Begin healed their injuries of class and race by promising them stolen Palestinian land and a socioeconomic status above dispossessed and destitute Arabs.

This distribution of the wages of Israeli-ness coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the U.S. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) folded the mass murder of Jews into the larger category of the crimes of Nazism.

In his essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.

Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish victims. They were scrambling to learn the new rules of the geopolitical game. In the chameleon-like shifts of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union moved from being a stalwart ally against [the Third Reich] to a totalitarian evil; Germany moved from being a totalitarian evil to a stalwart democratic ally against totalitarian evil.

Accordingly, the editor of Commentary urged American Jews to nurture a ‘realistic attitude rather than a punitive and recriminatory one’ towards Germany, which was now a pillar of ‘Western democratic civilisation’.

[…]

Améry would have felt even more betrayed if he had seen the staff memorandum of the American Jewish Committee in 1951, which regretted the fact that ‘for most Jews reasoning about Germany and Germans is still beclouded by strong emotion.’

Novick explains that American Jews, like other ethnic groups, were anxious to avoid the charge of dual loyalty and to take advantage of the dramatically expanding opportunities offered by postwar America. They became more alert to [the Zionist régime’s] presence during the extensively publicised and controversy-haunted Eichmann trial, which made inescapable the fact that Jews had been [German Fascism’s] primary targets and victims.

But it was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when [Zionism] seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both [Zionism’s neocolony] and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world. Jewish organisations started to deploy the motto ‘Never Again’ to lobby for American policies favourable to [Zionism].

The U.S., facing humiliating defeat in East Asia, began to see an apparently invincible [régime] as a valuable proxy in the Middle East, and began its lavish subvention of the [ethno]state. In turn, the narrative, promoted by [Zionist] leaders and American Zionist groups, that the Shoah was a present and imminent danger to Jews began to serve as a basis for collective self-definition for many Jewish Americans in the 1970s.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 9).

1940: The Axis‐aligned Kingdom of Romania introduced new antisemitic laws, based on the Nuremberg Laws, using a ‘biological conception of the nation’ to define who was a Jew and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians.
1942: An Axis cruiser force surprised and defeated the Allied naval forces that were protecting Allied amphibious forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal’s initial stages.
1944: A V‐1 flying bomb exploded in the air above the town of Lamberhurst after being shot at by a fighter, and the bomb scattered one‐kilogram incendiary bombs.
1945: Emperor Kangde of Manchukuo received advice that his capital would soon relocate from Xinjing (Changchun), Jilin Province, China to Tonghua, Andong Province, China as a response to the Soviet invasion. As well, the United States B‐29 Bockscar launched the atomic bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki, massacring 35,000 people simultaneously (including 23,200–28,200 Japanese war workers, 2,000 Korean forced workers, and 150 Axis soldiers).
1948: Hugo Boss, Axis businessman, perished.
1957: Carl Clauberg, Axis physician who sterilized women for a living, died.

[Transcript]

In the months following [the Axis] invasion of the Soviet Union, SS squads — the so‐called Einsatzgruppen — executed hundreds of Muslim prisoners of war who had fought in the Red Army, assuming that their circumcision proved that they were Jewish.¹

In Berlin, these executions soon became the subject of controversy. During a meeting of officers of the Wehrmacht, SS and Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in summer 1941, Erwin von Lahousen, an official of the Wehrmacht intelligence agency representing his boss, Wilhelm Canaris, engaged in a row with the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, about these killings.

Lahousen brought up the selection of hundreds of Muslim Tatars, who had been sent to ‘special treatment’ because they were taken for Jews. Müller acknowledged that the SS had made mistakes in this respect, remarking that it was the first time that he had heard that Muslims were circumcised like Jews.

A few weeks later, Müller’s superior, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, sent out instructions urging the Einsatzgruppen to be more careful: The ‘circumcision’ and ‘Jewish appearance’ could not be taken as sufficient ‘proof of Jewish descent’, he made clear.² Muslims and Jews were not to be confused.

In the following year, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories issued a similar directive on the identification of ‘Jews’ in the Eastern territories, warning that only in the western Russian territories could circumcision be seen as a proof of Jewishness. ‘In those regions, though, in which Mohammedans exist we will not be able to base the Jewishness of the person on circumcision alone’.³ There, other indicators, such as names, origins and ethnic appearance, had to be considered as well.

(Emphasis added. Source.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 8).

1881: Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, Axis field marshal, worsened life with his presence.
1940: Wilhelm Keitel signed the ‘Aufbau Ost’ directive.
1944: The Third Reich executed Axis field marshal Job Wilhelm Georg Erwin Erdmann von Witzleben for planning to murder the Chancellor. Coincidentally, the Allies successfully killed Waffen‐SS tank commander Michael Wittmann and his crew.
1945: Shinchiku Airfield took an Allied bombing, and the Axis lost eleven small craft in the South China Sea.
1969: Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Axis eugenicist who misinformed students (including Josef Mengele) for a living, finally perished.
2003: Dirk Hoogendam, SS officer, finally dropped dead.

Based on a review of the research results of historiographers and other experts on mining in the Labin region, and a critical evaluation of the archival sources preserved at the State Archive in Pazin, in this paper we are analysing the circumstances and reasons for building the miners’ town in Raša.⁹ Namely, it has usually been considered as an example of fascist régime architecture in Istria or evaluated for its architectural features.

However, although this architectural complex indisputably exhibits certain stylistic features of fascist architecture, it was not built by the régime, but by a company engaged in the extraction of coal in the Istrian mines and placing it on the market, which is why, in our opinion, the town reflects the importance of this branch of economy, of coal as an energy resource, and of the need to accommodate non‐domicile workers, all of which was essential for maintaining and increasing the annual coal production, which peaked shortly before World War II and exceeded 1,000,000 tons of coal per year.

[…]

The construction works began in April 1936 and were carried out by workers from Bergamo, and on August 7 that same year, Mussolini visited the site. […] However, regarding the construction of the settlement, although the régime’s publicity claimed that it would be completed within 547 days, it was still being built in 1938, when 500 workers were employed to this purpose.³³

[…]

Looking at the plan of the settlement, one can see that the central position is occupied by a square with the church of St. Barbara in the form of a mining wagon turned upside down, its belfry shaped like a miner’s lamp, and the rectory. Other public and representative buildings were located there as well, and so was the football field (and the football club, which was briefly in the Third Italian League).

To the northeast, in the direction of Labin, there was a smaller élite part of the settlement intended for the management (the villette), while to the west of the main square there were houses for the miners’ families, each comprising four two‐room apartments, as well as a hotel for single workers with four‐bed rooms.³⁴ The houses had hot water supply and sewage, and all the facilities were equipped with furniture, specially designed for this purpose.

There was also a telephone exchange with 130 lines, waterworks, public lighting, a 22‐room staff hotel, and a 152‐bed workers’ hotel (in four‐bed rooms), a heating plant, an ambulance, a post office, a school, a kindergarten, a swimming pool and other public offices, 22,000 square meters of streets and roads, a regulated stream, driveways, etc.³⁵ Of course, the whole complex seems to have been intended for workers and their families from other parts of the country, while workers from Labin and their families were not to be accommodated there.³⁶

[…]

According to the above, and based on the scholarly literature and an analysis of archival sources, it can be concluded that the workers’ settlement of Arsia or Raša was built primarily to increase the number of workers at the local mines and boost the production of coal, and since the domicile workforce was not enough, miners had to be brought from other parts of Italy.

But although the village of Raša was built with this purpose in mind, it had particularly high infrastructure standards with regard to other contemporaneous settlements of this type (with hot water, a heating plant, sports fields, a kindergarten, a cinema, a theatre hall, etc.). Thus, Raša was created as an investment in mining, although the company was increasingly taking on features of a state‐owned enterprise and the [Fascist] régime was inclined to claim all the merits and everything that was considered a success.

Although none of this might sound especially harmful, keep in mind that the Fascist bourgeoisie needed to maximize its extraction of domestic resources not only for its policy of autarky but also to facilitate its imperialist campaigns.

---

Click here for other events that happened today (August 7).

1870: Gustav Krupp, bourgeois Fascist, was tragically born.
1926: Spain and Fascist Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation and Judicial Settlement.
1934: The Third Reich’s head of state spoke at Paul von Hindenburg's burial site at the Tannenberg Memorial, East Prussia.
1937: Emil Nolde, Fascist artist, was born.
1938: The Imperialists captured Dengjiahe in Jiangxi Province.
1942: Elements of the Axis’s 6.Armee crossed the Don River near Kalach‐na‐Donu, southern Russia, west of Stalingrad.

The fact that Mr. Waldheim served in the [Wehrmacht] has led to charges that he supported [Fascism]. “What nonsense!” he says. “I was against the Nazis.” His aides maintain that the charges were circulated by [Zionism’s] Mission to the United Nations, but Yehuda Z. Blum, [Zionism’s] delegate, denies this indignantly: “We don’t believe Waldheim ever supported the Nazis and we never said he did. We have many differences with him, but that isn’t one of them.”

Here is a sample of what we know:

Continued German criticism of Obrana initiatives forced Dido Kvaternik, Chief of Ustaša Internal Security, to resign in September 1942.⁸⁷ Regardless, between 10 June and 30 July, Wehrmacht units, supported by Ustaša troops, conducted their own extensive “pacification” campaign against Partisans in the Kozara Mountains of western Bosnia.

One of the officers involved in this operation was Kurt Waldheim, who was serving as a communications officer with a Kampfgruppe in Bosnia. He later became Secretary‐General of the United Nations and President of Austria. In July, Pavelić awarded Waldheim the Order of King Zvonimir (an eleventh‐century king linked to the Ustaša myth of the glorious Croatian medieval kingdom), following the first successful wave of massacres.

During the operation, the [Axis] displaced some 60,000 predominantly Serb civilians, many of whom were ultimately killed or sent to the camp that came to embody the horrors of the Ustaša régime, Jasenovac. Of those sent to Jasenovac, most died.⁸⁸ The extent of the campaign caused Glaise to write, “Kozara was cleared to the last man, and likewise, the last woman and last child.”⁸⁹

Waldheim’s involvement in Operation Kozara did not come to light until 1986, when he was running for the presidency of Austria. The Austrian government appointed a special commission to look into the charges, which were later found to be true. These revelations did not stop his election as Austria’s president, nor Pope John Paul II from making him a Knight of the Order of Pius IX.⁹⁰

(Source herein.)

The CIA knew about Waldheim’s war crimes as early as 1945. Needless to say, they were in no hurry to apprehend him either.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 6).

1944: The Axis continued brutally suppressing the Warsaw Uprising; the Gestapo, fearing of another uprising, ordered a round‐up of all able‐bodied young men in Kraków.
1945: The Empire of Japan was devastated when the United States B‐29 Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, massacring approximately 70,000 people (mostly civilians) instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
2001: Wilhelm Mohnke, Axis general, finally perished.

On the second Friday of July, flags were flown at half-mast in Romaniw’s home state of Victoria, and its government held a state funeral for him at the Ukrainian Catholic church in North Melbourne. Representing the Prime Minister was Bill Shorten, the Minister for Government Services and former leader of the Labour Party, which also governs in Victoria. “We still seek his wise counsel,” Shorten said at the funeral. “The urge is still there to seek the vague approval from the charismatic leader.”

According to the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations (AFUO), which Romaniw led since the 1990s, “His huge impact — as an untiring community leader, patriot, warrior, mentor and friend — was unmatched. His skill as a collaborator, mediator and unifier strengthened our community immeasurably. Upon his broad shoulders our community grew and prospered, and weathered many storms. He was for so many of us a Ukrainian-Australian hero — a true legend.” The AFUO even declared, “There will never be a person of whom we were so proud.”

Stefan Romaniw acknowledged that the OUN-B operates “through its various façades and partner structures,” meaning its various front groups and other organizations in which the Banderites exercise considerable influence, typically after many years of entryism.

For example, the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center is a “façade structure that is essentially synonymous with the OUN-B leadership in Ukraine and its headquarters building in Kyiv, which is located a short walk from the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, and also close to the “Maidan,” or Independence Square. The AFUO is an important “partner structure” in Australia that functioned as a de facto OUN-B front under Stefan Romaniw’s decades-long stewardship.

“Tactics change, means and methods are updated,” according to Romaniw, but “Ukrainian nationalism as an ideology and political movement is fundamentally based on unchanging values.” For him, this meant honoring the 20th century ideologues of Ukrainian fascism, such as Mykola Mikhnovsky, Dmytro Dontsov, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Stepan Lenkavsky, and adapting modern strategies to advance their catastrophic agenda in the 21st century.

[…]

In 2001, Stefan Romaniw was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for “service to education and language learning.” A couple years later, he received the Australian Centenary Medal, and in 2004, the Victorian premier further honored Romaniw with his appointment as an Australia Day Ambassador.

It would be ironic if this glory from the state propelled Romaniw to the top of the clandestine OUN-B. He probably joined its international leadership by 2005, when Andriy Haidamakha started his second term as Providnyk, or “Leader.”

The Senate of Australia gave Romaniw an important victory in 2003, when “after heavy lobbying by Australia’s Ukrainian community,” it recognized the “Holodomor,” or 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, as “one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history” which killed “an estimated 7 million Ukrainians.” (This “estimate” roughly doubled the millions of victims.)

In 2005, under the leadership of OUN-B member Askold Lozynskyj from New York, the Ukrainian World Congress put Romaniw in charge of its International Coordinating Committee for Holodomor Awareness and Recognition. That turned out to be a lifetime appointment. In this capacity, Stefan Romaniw started to work closely with the Ukrainian government.

Apparently, the third president of Ukraine (Viktor Yushchenko, 2005-2010) adopted the memory politics of his Banderite wife from Chicago. As told by historian Georgiy Kasianov in his 2022 book, Memory Crash: Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s,

It is well known that Viktor Yushchenko, who was well informed about the numerous and diverse studies of historians and demographers of the 2000s, chose to ignore their data and insisted that the total number of Holodomor victims amounted to seven to ten million people. The source of his inspiration is no secret: it was actively defended by the “nomenklatura” of the Ukrainian diaspora, in particular the leadership of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC).

The June 1, 2008 report of the International Coordination Committee of the UWC headed by Stefan Romaniw, the leader of the OUN (Bandera faction), clearly contained the figure of seven to ten million victims, which was to be promoted to the presidential secretariat and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. The victimhood competition evolved in the context of a political situation in which the formula “seven to ten is greater than six” played an important rôle.

Stanislav Kulchytsky recalled, that the head of the World Congress of Ukrainians Askold Lozynskyj insisted on 7–10 million simply because it is bigger than 6 million, the number of Jews who perished during Holocaust. Lozynskyj in turn suggested that Kulchytsky and his followers deliberately reduce the number of Holodomor victims to avoid competition with the Holocaust. The very term “Holocaust” was appropriated. During the period of active build-up of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33 was quite often called the Ukrainian Holocaust.

It should be mentioned that this pattern of manipulation of the figures was not appropriated even by the majority of supporters of the genocidal version of Holodomor in Ukrainian academia.

During Yushchenko’s presidency, Romaniw received all three classes of the Ukrainian Order of Merit, mainly for his “Holodomor” activism. In late 2007, Romaniw visited Yushchenko at his presidential residence to discuss the “year of global activities” planned for 2008 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the famine. This included a global relay of the “International Holodomor Remembrance Flame,” also known as the “Ukrainian Genocide Torch,” which the Banderites largely spearheaded.

The rising OUN-B leader also worked with the Foreign Ministry and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and singled out Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the nationalist SBU director under Yushchenko, as someone who “has proven to be a true leader on these issues, certainly setting the pace.”

“Stefan Romaniw, chair of the International Coordinating Committee of the 75th Anniversary of the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, acting chair of the Security Service of Ukraine, at an August press conference in Kyiv.” (Ukrainian Weekly, 2007)

With powerful friends in Ukraine, Stefan Romaniw became the Secretary General of the Ukrainian World Congress in 2008. Meanwhile, Volodymyr Viatrovych was put in charge of the SBU archives, and relinquished his duties as the director of an important OUN-B front in Ukraine, the “Center for Research of the Liberation Movement,” which started to work out of a problematic museum in Lviv — staffed by Banderites, but managed by the SBU.

It was during this period, as the SBU and OUN-B grew closer in the Yushchenko years, that Stefan Romaniw emerged as a leader of the Ukrainian diaspora, and ascended the Banderite throne in 2009.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 5).

1944: While Polish insurgents were liberating an Axis labor camp (Gęsiówka) in Warsaw, thereby freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, the Fascists in Wola meanwhile commenced the worst massacre in Poland’s history, taking 40,000–50,000 civilians and POWs over the course of a week. Coincidentally, at least 1,104 Axis POWs in Australia attempted to escape from a camp at Cowra, New South Wales; 545 temporarily succeeded but later suffered either homicide, suicide, or recapture.
1998: Otto Kretschmer, Axis naval officer, expired.
2000: Tullio Crali, member of the Fascist ‘Futurist’ movement, expired.

(Mirror.)

Quoting Meho Grbić’s Bosnia and Hercegovina 1878–1945: Islam, War and Politics, page 74:

During Fehim Spaho’s time as Reis‐ul‐ulema he complained to the NDH authorities that Jews that converted to the Islamic faith were treated unequal to the Jews that converted to Catholicism. The Reis‐ul‐ulema complained that Jews who converted to Islam in the town of Zavidovići were accused of being communists and sent to the concentration camp Gospić while Jews who converted to Catholicism moved freely around in the town.²⁷⁷

In a document dated 22 January 1942 from Mostar concerning the same issue as stated above concerning the Jews. The document stated that the Ustaša authorities were taking measures to punish the Jews harshly if they did not wear the Star of David and changed their surname no matter if they converted to Islam or Catholicism.

The document also stated that the Islamic religious authorities in Mostar have passed wrong information to the Reis‐ul‐ulema that Jews that have converted to Islam were punished but the Jews converted to the Catholic faith were not punished. All Jews were punished but it seemed like more Jews converted to the Islamic faith were punished because there were much more Jews that converted to the Islamic faith in Mostar. The document states that certain woman from Mostar, Jelisaveta Singer was punished to pay a fine of 1000 Croatian Kuna because she converted to the Catholic faith.²⁷⁸

(Emphasis added.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 4).

1876: Giovanni Giuriati, Fascist lawyer and politician, burdened the world with his existence.
1893: Fritz Gause, professional Fascist apologist, polluted the Earth with his presence.
1913: Johann Niemann, SS officer and deputy commandant of Sobibór camp during Operation Reinhard, was unleashed on humanity.
1936: Ioannis Metaxas, Greek parafascist, suspended parliament and the Constitution and established the 4th of August Régime.
1940: Zeʻev Jabotinsky, Hebrew fascist, perished.
1944: A tip from a Dutch informer lead the Gestapo to a sealed‐off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they found and sadly arrested the diarist Anne Frank, her family, and four others. (Coincidentally, the Finnish Parliament, by derogation, elected Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim as President of Finland to replace Risto Ryti, who had resigned.)

Evidence linking past experiences of worsening health with support for radical political views has generated concerns about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 had a devastating health impact: 4.1 million Italians contracted influenza and about 500 000 died. We tested the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy. To provide a “thicker” interpretation of these patterns, we applied historical text mining to the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s newspaper). Our observations were consistent with evidence from other contexts that worsening mortality rates can fuel radical politics. Unequal impacts of pandemics may contribute to political polarization.

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 3).

1912: Fritz Hellwig, Fascist politician, was born.
1936: It was an awkward moment for the Fascists as Afro‐American Jesse Owens won the hundred‐metre dash, defeating Ralph Metcalfe, at the Berlin Olympics.
1940: Fascist forces invaded British Somaliland.
2008: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died.

Historical downward trends in mortality rates reversed in the early 1930s in Germany. At the district/city level, these increases were positively associated with a rising [NSDAP] vote share. Each increase of 10 deaths per 1000 population was associated with a 6.51-percentage-point increase in [NSDAP] vote share (95% confidence interval = 1.17–11.8). The strongest associations were with deaths due to infectious and communicable diseases, suicides, and alcohol-related deaths.

Worsening mortality had no association with votes for the Communist Party or for other contemporary political parties. Greater welfare payments were associated with smaller increases in both mortality and [NSDAP] vote share, and adjusting for welfare generosity mitigated the association by approximately one-third.

Conclusions

Worsening mortality rates were positively associated with the rise of the [NSDAP] in 1930s Germany. Social security mitigated the association between mortality and [NSDAP] vote share. Our findings add to the growing evidence that population health declines can be a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the health [under dictatorships of the bourgeoisie].

(I know that this post is awfully more straightforward than the rest, and it is a questionable choice for Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, but to be honest I am feeling so unwell today that I lack the drive to offer something better.)

Further reading: Worsening Health and Voting Patterns in Nazi Germany

---

Click here for events that happened today (August 2).

1897: Karl‐Otto Koch, Axis SS officer, arrived to make life worse for us.
1928: Fascist Italy signed a ‘Treaty of Friendship’ with the Ethiopian Empire. Oh dear…
1934: President Hindenburg, who praised Adolf Schicklgruber for his ‘gallant personal intervention’ which had ‘rescued the German people from great danger’, perished. Consequently, Adolf Schicklgruber became Germany’s Führer.
1943: The Fascists were extremely unhappy to learn that Jewish prisoners staged a revolt at one of the deadliest Axis death camps: Treblinka, where approximately 900,000 persons perished in fewer than 18 months. Meanwhile, the Axis destroyer Amagiri rammed the Allied Motor Torpedo Boat PT‐109, sinking it.
1945: Pietro Mascagni, Fascist composer, died as the Potsdam Conference ended.
1980: Neofascists bombed the Bologna Centrale railway station, massacring 85 people in Bologna and wounding over 200.

(It is timely that I should talk about this, and not merely because it was almost nine decades ago today that the Olympics opened in Berlin with a ceremony presided over by the Third Reich’s head of state.)

[Postfascist] literature on physical education in Germany and Italy borrowed from Sontag’s work on fascist aestheticization to explore the ways fascist states used sports to transform their citizens into state tools, masculinize men and feminize women, promote régime legitimacy, and prepare their population for war.¹⁷

It also suggested that a contrary athletic opposition to ‘fascist athletic movement’ emerged in Europe’s [pseudo]democracies and the United States. From these studies, two distinct ‘types of athlete’ materialized — the fascist athlete and the antifascist athlete.

Thanks to Riefenstahl, these images have become an almost ubiquitous feature of the historic memory of the Berlin Games. Geraldine Biddle‐Perry contends that Riefenstahl helped to create the fascist and antifascist athletic through her production of images of the Berlin Games. ‘These two contrasting pictures,’ she says, ‘have come to dominate Olympic historical imagination [and] other bodies […] are less easy to recall.’¹⁸

[…]

Most critical readings ignore the reality of the thousands of committed antifascist athletes who gathered in Barcelona in one of the most quixotic challenge[s] to the [Third Reich’s] Games. In the summer of 1936, following the rise of Spain’s Popular Front government, several thousand left‐wing sportsmen and women organized a counter Olympics called the Barcelona People’s Olympiad set to run a week before to the Berlin Games. Unlike the Berlin Olympics, the People’s Olympiad was a ‘festival to reaffirm Olympic values’.²⁰

It would have included élite athletes, middling competitors, and complete novices. Competitors did not need to compete for a nation‐state. Athletes signed up as political exiles, including athletes from Italy and Germany, and under the flags of regions including the Basque region, Alsace‐Lorraine, and the Jews of Palestine. In addition, the Barcelona Games featured a variety of non‐traditional sports including Basque Pelota, table tennis, and chess.²¹

Unfortunately for the attendees, the Spanish Civil War, which started on July 19, forestalled the beginning of the Olympiad. Many of the athletes who signed up to compete found their entry to Barcelona barred or ended up in Spain with nobody to compete against them. Some athletes that arrived early remained to fight [alongside] Spanish communists.

[…]

If the Barcelona People’s Olympiad mostly reflected workers sport’s rejection of the [Fascist] Games, there was an equally prominent antifascist movement among sports stakeholders in bourgeois sporting organizations. In fact, in many ways, the Barcelona People’s Olympiad emerged because of the failure of the earlier American led international boycott movement.

Beginning as early as 1933, influential stakeholders inside of sports bureaucracies and religious organizations in the United States, responding to [the Third Reich’s] unjust treatment of Jews, pushed for the American Olympic Association to boycott the Games. In their efforts to pressure the International Olympic Committee to move the Games, they battled against recalcitrant sports administrators in the United States and in Switzerland who privileged apolitical sport.

The boycott debate raged inside of sporting organizations and in parliaments on both sides of the Atlantic; however, despite the righteousness of their cause, boycott advocate[s’] concerns were not widely shared among the elite éthletes.

In July 1933, the Denaturalization Law rescinded German citizenship for hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, and the President of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, issued a public report that assured the American public that the IOC would never hold the Games in Berlin if the Germans interfered with ‘the fundamental Olympic theory of equality of all races.’³⁰ The IOC reacted ambivalently to the [German Reich’s] new racial laws, but with alacrity to the possibility of an Olympics without the Americans.

The President of the International Olympic Committee, Henri de Baillet‐Latour, showed little private sympathy for Jews. ‘I am personally not fond of Jews and of the Jewish influence,’ he wrote to Brundage. ‘I know that they (the Jews) shout before there is reason to do so.’³¹ Despite his personal prejudices, Baillet‐Latour wielded the threatened American boycott in 1933 to win promises from the German delegation to permit German and foreign Jews to compete at the Games.³²

The American Olympic Association remained divided over the merits of participation in the Berlin Games. Many officials supported a boycott, but others privately shared Hitler’s suspicions about Jewish influence and wanted to limit their investigation of the Berlin Games to questions of prejudice in sport rather than in society.

Brundage acknowledged that, ‘the very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race’, but he tempered his criticism of the [Third Reich’s] domestic politics.

Brundage also considered the Jewish issue, which he called ‘the Berlin Problem’, a sideshow to the serious business of athletic competition. He viewed the boycott movement as a political ploy hatched by Jews ‘clever enough to realize the propaganda value of sport.’³³ He worried that a strong opposition to the Berlin Games would rouse American antisemites.³⁴

His skepticism was widely shared by other athletic organizers. Evan Hunter, the secretary of the British Olympic Committee, wrote Brundage, saying, ‘My own view is that we are pandering too much to the Jews.’³⁵

In May 1934, the IOC issued a pro forma report that announced that the organization was satisfied with German preparations for the Games, but Brundage still faced significant opposition Gus Kirby of the Amateur Athletic Union, who proposed the non‐certification of American athletes unless the [Third Reich] pledged to recruit and train Jewish athletes.

To quell domestic critics, Brundage visited [the Third Reich] as an official guest of the Games organizers, visiting numerous sporting facilities and clubs. He made only cursory examinations of the discrimination against Jews and met with only one German–Jewish athlete. The day after he returned to the U.S., he announced that the German Olympic Committee was living up to their promises.

[…]

Indeed, adventure and a healthy competitive spirit drove most of the athletes who left for the Games excited to participate. If they were aware of the international boycott movement, their excitement overwhelmed any trepidation they felt towards the competition and even afterwards many retained strong positive feelings towards Germany and the Germans.

Simone Schaller Kirin was an American hurdler who remembered the boycott debate. She recalled: ‘There was controversy in 1936 as to whether they would even send a team over because there was so much talk of war in Germany and overseas. We really didn’t know […] and it was quite controversial at the time’.⁶³

If they were aware of the boycott movement, and not all were, ambivalence to it was probably the most common response. Gordon B. Adam, an American rower, responded that ‘We, as athletes, or at least on my part, didn’t think much about the political aspects.’⁶⁴

Only a few of the athletes seemed to think deeply about whether their participation amounted to support for [Fascism]. The few athletes that addressed this issue explicitly arrived at it after community pressure, and none of the athletes interviewed experienced any explicitly negative interactions with German athletes or fans during the competition.

The American basketballer Frank Lubin remembered that ‘Everybody was warning us about going to Nazi Germany,’ he said, ‘but we didn’t think anything about that. Everything was so beautifully arranged. We could see nothing except the flags’.⁶⁵

The antisemitism, so troubling to boycott advocates, with its very real consequences for German sportsmen, barely surfaced in these interviews. Of course, [Berlin] attempted to keep its more pernicious policies invisible. All the same, a few athletes, including Lubin, remember seeing overt signs of anti‐Jewish sentiment. Lubin saw anti‐Jewish signs in stores after the Games.⁶⁶

Sportsmen and women around the world responded in similar ways to the Games. Canadian sprinters Tom Ritchie and Bill Christie, who attended the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, would have ‘gone to Berlin if given half the chance’ and in fact tried to join the Canadian team headed to Berlin, hurrying to Paris to meet them before their train left.⁶⁷ While the decision to travel to Berlin was easy for many, even for those with qualms, the prestige of the Olympics generally outweighed any political concerns.

In fact, élite athletes’ testimonials highlight that for many athletes, even those aware of the boycott movement, neither participation in the Berlin Games nor boycott were obvious solutions. Jewish participation in the Berlin Games presents particularly thorny questions. How should we think about Helene Mayer, the German–Jewish fencer, who competed for [the Third Reich] and even gave a Hitler salute on the medal podium? She later resettled in the United States and defended her participation saying it was necessary to save her family from persecution.⁶⁸

The existence of many Jewish athletes at the Games suggests the multiplicity of possibilities. As Marty Glickman later said, at the opening of an exhibit about the Games at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he did not take Hitler seriously before the Games: ‘I thought of Adolf Hitler as here today, gone tomorrow.’⁶⁹ He also did not feel much pressure to boycott the Games. ‘Not one organization, not my rabbi, not my Jewish friends, not one member of any organization […] nobody said, Marty, “don’t go,” including my folks.’⁷⁰

(Emphasis added. Other upsetting findings I omitted from this excerpt only to keep it at a manageable length.)

---

Click here for other events that happened today (August 1).

1878: Konstantinos I. Logothetopoulos, director of the Axis’s collaborationist government in Greece, was born.
1931: Shigeru Honjo became the commanding officer of the Imperial Kwantung Army in northeastern China.
1932: Meir Kahane, Hebrew neofascist, was unfortunately born.
1933: The Third Reich executed the antifascist activists Bruno Tesch, Walter Möller, Karl Wolff and August Lütgens in Altona.
1940: Goering told Heydrich to get ready for Operation Sea Lion. The S.S. Security Police and the S.D. (Security Service) were to ‘commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and combat effectively the numerous important organizations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany.’
1943: The Axis survived mostly unscathed as the Yankee airforce failed to destroy Romanian oil fields through Operation Tidal Wave.
1944: The Warsaw Uprising against the Axis occupation broke out in Poland.
1946: Moscow executed leaders of the so‐called ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for their collaboration with the Axis.
1967: Richard Johann Kuhn, fascist biochemist, expired.

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, page 46:

By 1943, the losses on the Eastern front resulted in [the Fascist bourgeoisie] deciding to implement a programme of forced recruitment of labour from France to compensate for their lack of manpower in [Axis] industry. This measure would have unintended detrimental effects on the [Axis] war effort.

The Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), started in February 1943, was the organisation set up by the Vichy government to organise the dispatch of forced labour from France to [the Third Reich]. Some 600,000 French workers were sent to [the Third Reich] in 1943 and 1944. Another 200,000 managed to evade the round‐up and these young men formed the basis for the massive increase in the rural resistance.

This round‐up and deportation to what was essentially [neo]slave labour, initially enforced by the French Police and Gendarmerie and later aided by French fascist paramilitaries, such as the Milice and Parti populaire français, (PPF, French Popular Party) as well as the [Wehrmacht], was massively unpopular and may be seen as an important turning point in alienating French public opinion from the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain.

There was a severe shortage of labour in the country as a million and a half French soldiers were still being held in [Axis] POW camps. The réfractaires, as those fleeing the STO were called, were sheltered in rural areas in return for their labour on farms and it was a natural step to supporting them as they took to the hills and forests when the Vichy authorities came looking for them. In turn it was logical for these réfractaires to arm themselves against the forces of repression. They then quickly turned from defence to attack, from being the hunted to the hunters.

In some ways, the existence of the rural resistance can be seen as a form of large scale collective action, a form of community civil disobedience.⁹⁰ The [Axis] authorities certainly saw the situation as a rural revolt and treated the peasants in the villages with extreme brutality. There was a general policy of burning villages and massacring civilians in areas of strong Maquis activity in an attempt to terrorise the base of support of the guerrilla bands.

This growth of a rural guerrilla movement was also an opportunity for the hard‐pressed urban terrorist networks to send at least some of their fighters into the hills to train and lead these groups of militarily inexperienced young men.

(Emphasis added.)

---

Click here for events that happened today (July 31).

1884: Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1887: Hans Freyer, head of the German Institute for Culture in Budapest from 1938 to 1944, was unfortunately born.
1932: The NSDAP won more than 38% of the vote in German elections.
1941: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Axis official Hermann Göring ordered SS General Reinhard Heydrich to ‘submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish question.’ Meanwhile, the Battle of Smolensk concluded with the Third Reich capturing about 300,000 Red Army prisoners.
1945: Pierre Laval, the fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrendered to the Allies in Austria.
1980: Ernst Pascual Jordan, Fascist theoretical and mathematical physicist, expired.