All the evils of Nazism

Every so often, a film is released that absolutely must be seen in a cinema. Nuremberg is one such film. Set for release in November 2025, the story of the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the Nazi defeat in the Second World War has been told before in previous film and television dramatizations, but not like this.

The story centres on Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek, a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the mental fitness of Nazi leaders imprisoned at Nuremberg. Kelley becomes entangled in a psychological duel with Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second-in-command, who proves to be disturbingly charismatic and manipulative. As Kelley interviews the prisoners, he begins to question the nature of evil, the limits of justice, and his own moral compass.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29567915/

Gullibility?

Former Australian Senator, Corey Bernardi, weighs into the controversy of New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet, wearing a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party 20 years ago. Bernardi claims that Perrottet's critics are hypocrites for attacking Perrottet, but ignoring the alleged neo-Nazis in the Azov battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian military currently fighting against the Russians in the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Even if we concede that nothing is ever black and white in war, one would hope that Bernardi is not an apologist for Russia's Putin regime, or that he is condoning Putin's unjust attempts to annexe Ukraine. In any case, other sources that have a higher level understanding of the complexities of this situation than Bernardi, such as Monash University scholar, Alasdair McCallum, state that the Azov regiment simply cannot be credibly describe as Nazi or neo-Nazi. It is depoliticised. Nor is there widespread neo-Nazism or anti-Semitism in Ukraine. This disproves Russia's claim, a prominent theme in its propaganda, that its invasion was necessary to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. On the other hand, as Dmitry Kozhurin of Radio Free Europe has proven, there are actual neo-Nazis fighting on the Russian side, such as the paramilitary Rusich group, and other extremist militia groups. 

Social media may give you access to lots of information, but on the downside it creates too many armchair experts commenting on issues that they don't understand properly, but they weigh in on them anyway for reasons known only to themselves. 

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russias-long-history-of-neo-nazis

https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/19/1384992/much-azov-about-nothing-how-the-ukrainian-neo-nazis-canard-fooled-the-world

https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-neo-nazis-fighting-ukraine/31871760.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-ukraine-invasion-slows-antisemitism-seeps-into-russian-media-landscape/

Ignorance is definitely not bliss

A new survey by the Gandel Foundation, in partnership with Deakin University, has found that one quarter of Australians and nearly a third of Millennials had little or no knowledge of the Holocaust. 

Other key findings were that:

• Over 70% know nothing about Australia’s own connections to the Holocaust;
• However, there is overwhelming agreement among Australians (88%) that “we can learn lessons for today from what happened in the Holocaust”;
• 78% of Australians believe that Holocaust museums and memorials are valuable; and
• Two-thirds (66%) believe it should be compulsory for schools to teach about the Holocaust in schools.

To address this, the report recommended the introduction of a consistent approach to Holocaust studies in schools across Australia with proper and accredited teacher training; the need for resources that explore Australia’s Holocaust connections; the development of strategies to drive engagement with Holocaust museums; challenging antisemitic stereotypes through educational programs, enabling students to hear Holocaust survivor testimonies, ongoing research and more.

One hopes that history, and history education, is still valued in Western society. 

https://gandelfoundation.org.au/2022/01/gandel-holocaust-knowledge-and-awareness-in-australia-survey/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gandel-holocaust-knowledge-and-awareness-in-australia-survey

It belongs in a museum

This is a contentious issue. An auction house in Queensland, Australia, is selling Nazi memorabilia, including a signed photograph of German dictator, Adolf Hitler, a propaganda children's book, and SS artifacts. A company representative sought to justify the auction as a legitimate business activity, but there is the very real danger that these items may fall into the hands of neo-Nazis, as is the opinion of a Jewish community group spokesperson quoted in the article. 

Rather than sell them to make money, arguably these items should be donated to Holocaust museum. This will allow them to be displayed to inform and educate society about recent history, and not be used as a conversation piece for a private collector, or for more nefarious purposes. 

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-690328

Justice deferred and denied

Just over 80 years since the start of the Second World War, Germany has still not fully come to terms with its Nazi past. The documentary podcast, Germany: Justice and Memory, produced by the BBC, examines these issues. Although many prominent Nazi officials were convicted of war crimes, thousands of them never faced justice. Germany used millions of forced laborers during the war, and many of those who survived never received compensation. Some of the corporations that used these laborers never paid out any compensation. It makes for sobering listening.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zy24g

Fake history

Firstly, this post is not intended to attack the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), our national broadcaster. You can get that from other outlets. Today their news website ran with a story about a couple of former neo-Nazis, Justin and Lisa Beulah, who have now renounced their former lives. They are now a respectable, mainstream Christian couple. For that I am glad.

However, talking about her past, Lisa claims that one of the reasons that she became interested in Nazism was that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler "was a Christian." The story does not correct Beulah's claims. 

My problem with this is that the reader may think, "There you go, Hitler was a Christian. Look at how evil Hitler was. Think of how many people he killed. If that's what Christians are like, there's no way that I'd ever want to be one."

As I have written here before, Hitler was no follower of Jesus. He payed lip service to Christianity, because it was good for him politically. As Tim O'Neill has observed:

"Overall, the evidence indicates that Hitler was a manipulative politician who could pay careful lip-service to Christian ideas where and when it suited him. He was clearly a theist, but claims he was a Christian do not stack up and depend mainly on pre-1933 public statements and writings and some isolated later statements...which are either rhetorical or flatly duplicitous. Hitler was not a pagan and was not an atheist. But he was not a Christian and was definitely not a Catholic."

The truth is that he despised Christianity, and all that it stood for. I sincerely hope that the Beulahs realise this.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/nazism-and-the-racial-corruption-of-religion/10097168

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/10/26/was-hitler-a-christian-an-atheist-or-neither/

https://historyforatheists.com/2019/05/the-great-myths-7-hitlers-pope/

https://roscoeland.blogspot.com/2015/11/knockout-punch.html

https://roscoeland.blogspot.com/2018/04/provocation.html

By Deutsche Bundespost - scanned by NobbiP, Public Domain, Link

Justice served

Back in 2000, David Irving, the Dane Cook of historians, lost a libel case against Penguin Books and the American historian, Deborah Lipstadt. Irving claimed that Lipstadt defamed him in her book, Denying the Holocaust. Instead, the British High Court of Justice found that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, a racist, and an anti-Semite.

I was completely unaware of this until last week, but in 2016 a film was released based on the Irving trial, Denial, starring Rachel Weisz as Deborah Lipstadt, and Timothy Spall as David Irving. I missed it was screened on free to air television last week. Fortunately my local public library had a DVD copy available for loan. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_cBooks_Ltd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(2016_film)

By Source, Fair use, Link

Date night movie

Somehow I didn't know about this movie until today. Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley star in Operation Finale, based on the true story of the manhunt, capture, and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key Nazi officials involved in the Final Solution. Eichmann will be played by Kingsley. It speaks to his acting talent and versatility that he has previously played victims of the Holocaust, such as Simon Wiesenthal (Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story), Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Whole Story), and Itzhak Stern (Schindler's List).

There have been other films made about Eichmann, It will be interesting to see how this film handles its subject matter.

By their fruits

I just finished listening to The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D'Souza. If you are a student of history, politics, and competing worldviews, the book is worth reading, despite its provocative title.

As a foreign outsider, I cannot offer informed comment on the some of the information he presents, such as the academic question of whether Nazism is to be classified as a extreme left or extreme right ideology. However, I was astounded to learn that the Nuremberg race laws were partially based on the Jim Crow laws of the American South, Nazi eugenics programs being partially modeled on those in some American states, the idea for the Nazi genocides came from that which was perpetrated on Native Americans, and that the Democrats, who in the present time position themselves as the progressives, were historically the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. There was what D'Souza terms as "two way traffic" between Nazism and the American left.

I will deal with the portions of this book that I am informed about. Atheists have often claimed that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, and that the Nazi movement was a Christian one. These claims do not stand up to historical scrutiny. D'Souza's earlier work has dealt with this question, and he addresses it again in this book.

D'Souza writes:

"Hitler's Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer's private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great "scourges" of history, and said of the Germans, "Let's be the only people who are immunized against this disease." He promised that "through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity." In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.

Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler's leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany."

Here we have definitive statements from Hitler and other top ranking Nazis, clearly stating their contempt for Christianity and Christian ethics. To them, it was a disease that had to be eradicated. There is no way that they were Christians, not even in the broadest sense of the term. It is time that this fiction was stopped.

History is important

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. As the generation that survived the Holocaust passes away, it is important to keep alive their memory, and the memory of all of its victims.

Pure evil

Adolf Eichmann was one of the key organisers of the Nazi Holocaust. After the end of the Second World War, he eventually made his way to Argentina, where he lived under an assumed name. He was tracked down by Mossad agents, who captured him near his home, and eventually secretly put on a flight to Israel. He was put on trial in 1961. On December 15 of that year, he was sentenced to death after being found guilty by an Israeli court of 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership of an outlawed organisation.

Eichmann went to the gallows showing no remorse for his crimes. I don't understand how anyone can do such evil deeds, and not feel any guilt about them. As I have written on this blog before, as much as I hate to say it, some people are irredeemably evil, and Eichmann was one of them.


By Israel Government Press Office - Israel National Photo Collection, Public Domain, Link

Rechtschreibprüfung

My mobile phone provider recently introduced unmetered online streaming of selected content from the National Geographic Channel, which I'm happy about. I have become an avid viewer of Nazi Megastructures, which looks at architecture and industrial design in Nazi Germany.

Season 4, episode 5 is about Hitler's propaganda machine, which was largely run by Joseph Goebbels. I took a picture of my phone to show a spelling error on the menu screen. Propaganda has been misspelled as "propoganda." How embarrassing for everyone concerned.

Taking a stand

I've previously written about Catholic and Protestant churches' complicated relationship with the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. It is well known that the Vatican signed an agreement with the Nazis in 1933, the controversial Reichskonkordat. It is also well known that a significant number of both clergy and laity were either sympathetic to the Nazis, or capitulated to them.

On the other hand, many others openly opposed them, and it seems that Pope Pius XII was among them. In his new book, Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, author Mark Riebling uses documentary evidence to claim that Pope Pius XII opposed and plotted against Adolf Hitler.

It sounds like a book worth reading. I'll definitely look out for it. Unlike some other bloggers, I'm not intellectually lazy, and won't write about books I have no intention of reading.

https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/06/16/pius-xii-part-one/

Knockout punch?

This is supposed to be a "gotcha" meme, one of the favoured weapons in the arsenal of internet atheists. These internet atheists are fond of claiming that Adolf Hitler was a Christian. At the time he said this, Hitler would not take power for four and a half years. One can look at both his private and public statements, and find both pro and anti-Christian rhetoric coming from the same mouth.

To his distorted mind, true Christianity was corrupted by the apostle Paul, and Jesus Christ was not Jewish, but Aryan. Hitler sounded sympathetic to Christianity and courted churches out of political expediency. But had Nazi Germany won the Second World War, he would have eliminated the churches altogether.

The fact of the matter is that the atheist claim that Hitler was a Christian does not stand up to historical scrutiny, as any reputable scholar will affirm. Their work is a far more reliable source of information than a selective quote in a meme.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler

Narr April

Sometimes amusing April Fool's Day pranks aside, it was also on this day in 1924 that Adolf Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison for his role in the Munich beer hall putsch of November 1923. After a failed attempt to seize the government of Bavaria by force, Hitler was tried and convicted of treason. He only served 9 months of his sentence, and it was during this time that he dictated his political biography, Mein Kampf. You cannot help but wonder how history might have turned out if Hitler had actually served his full sentence. He might never have come to power, and the Second World War might never have happened.

http://www.history.com/topics/beer-hall-putsch

Evil versus evil

I love Australia, and I count myself blessed to be living here. Sadly, just as it is in other parts of the Western world, Neo-Nazism is on the rise here. Blood and Honour is one such group. Taking its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, it is using the recent upsurge in anti-Islamist sentiment to embark on a recruitment drive.

When I saw this sticker affixed to a roadside safety barrier, I discovered that this group is active in my area. They organise underground skinhead music events and give their members combat training under their affiliated Combat 18 movement. The 18 in its name comes from the initials of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A and H are the first and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet.

Knowing that this group is active and very likely running clandestine events in Melbourne makes me sick in the stomach. We have one set of extremists preparing to take on another set. Perhaps they envision one day battling Islamists on the streets of Melbourne. Whether it is white supremacist groups or Islamism, evil comes in many forms. We live in dangerous times.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/the-prowhite-gangs-spreading-race-hate-across-australia/story-fni0fee2-1227082897992

Why not?

Without a doubt it is one of the most horrible books ever written. It is the rantings of a deranged maniac. I feel repulsed even looking at it. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has been banned from publication in Germany since 1945. In 2015 its copyright and ban will expire. German politicians are debating whether or not its publication should be permitted from 2016.

Munich's Centre for Contemporary History plans to publish an annotated critical edition of the book. While this is understandably a very sensitive issue for victims of the Nazi regime, their descendants, and the German people in general, a critical edition seems to me to be a great idea.

Mein Kampf is a historical document that should inform part of the collective memory of Germany's past, and needs to be studied, engaged with, and shown for the work of evil that it is.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mein-kampf-returns-german-ministers-prepare-to-lift-ban-on-publication-of-adolf-hitlers-controversial-manifesto-9562903.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/opinion/should-germans-read-mein-kampf.html?_r=0

The sceptical Christian

At home I have a pile of books stacked on my coffee table, and this was the last one I read; Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler. Its authors, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, are accomplished in their respective fields of journalism, military history, and documentary film making, so they've gone out on a limb to risk their professional credibility with this book. Mainstream historical scholarship has long accepted as an undeniable fact that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945. As the allied powers closed in on the ruins of Berlin, Hitler took refuge in his Fuhrerbunker.

There he hastily married his long time mistress Eva Braun, dictated his last will and testament, said farewell to a remnant of his closest acolytes, and then retreated to an adjoining room. He placed a cyanide capsule in his mouth and shot himself. Eva Braun sat beside him and poisoned herself. Afterwards their bodies were removed and burned outside. A few days later, Nazi Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended.

Nazism was crushed, but thousands of Nazis, aided and abetted by sympathetic governments, and even elements of the Vatican, used forged travel documents to escape justice and flee overseas, to Australia, the United States, and most notably South America. The truth is that a body double masquerading as Hitler was the one who died in Berlin, so Dunstan and Williams claim that Hitler himself escaped Germany and lived out the remainder of his days in a remote German enclave in Argentina, dying in 1962, fathering two daughters who are alive today.

Anticipating the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States government covertly instituted Operation Paperclip, a secret program that allowed them to access German military technology by recruiting German scientists and engineers, who were granted the right to immigrate to the United States in return for their expertise. Dunstan and Williams claim that allowing Hitler to escape was a secret part of this deal.

To back up these sensational claims, the authors produce reams of previously classified documents, and interviews with purported eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Hitler alive in Argentina. For the reader to accept their claims, Dunstan and Williams need to explain why the eyewitness accounts of Hitler's suicide, given by those occupants of the Fuhrerbunker who survived the war, including Erna Flegel, Traudl Junge, and Rochus Misch, and those who testified under oath that they saw his dead body, are unreliable. In his book Selling Hitler, Robert Harris refers to the well known report into Hitler's death by Hugh Trevor-Roper, which contained statements from Erich Kempa, who provided the gasoline to burn Hitler's body, and the guard Hermann Karnau, who witnessed the funeral pyre.  Dunstan and Williams fail to do this in their book, or even mention them in passing. I cannot accept that all of these people lied or were duped.

If Hitler and Eva Braun had two daughters, why didn't Dunstan and Williams attempt to track them down, or provide some documentary evidence of their existence? They also neglect to mention that Hitler did have nephews living in the United States, some of whom are alive today, and may or may not have made a pact to never marry so that the family line will die out with them.

They also claim that Martin Bormann was the one who organized Hitler's escape and refuge in Argentina. Bormann was also the main liaison between Hitler and the Argentinian government, even closely associating with President Juan Peron. Again, while it is true that Bormann was missing and unaccounted for at the end of the war, his remains were found at a Berlin building site and positively identified in 1998.    

Operation Paperclip is a fact of history, as is the fact that Nazi war criminals escaped to South America and other parts of the world after the war, and some of them evaded justice for the rest of their lives. On the basis of this book, I do not believe that Hitler was amongst them. He died by his own hand as a sickly, paranoid and thoroughly evil man in Berlin in 1945, with the blood of millions of people on his hands.